A disembodied wail answered. “I can’t. It’s not for you.”
Jason grabbed it and crushed it in his fist. It plopped wetly like a ripe grape. He’d tried to rescue this kid (this fragment of a kid) once, when he’d been only a boy himself. A split second in his past when he might have taken another road, possessed by an avatar spirit which decided to move on. He heard a scream, compressed into the narrowest of nanoseconds. He tasted the smear on his palm. Yes, it did indeed taste like ocular stickum. Somehow he’d expected meringue, or a mystic version of gummi bears, or the kind of Elmer’s glue school children fastened glitter to construction paper with.
Jason chuckled. “Sorry, No Man. Guess my patience didn’t get past the gate.”
Then he wondered if this had been real or if he’d ingested anything hallucinatory in that muzan-e. Some herbs used to be employed for creating ink and some of them had strange properties. One formerly common in older inks was the pokeberry which was also a poison. It failed to frighten Jason, who had done so many drugs and poisons in his life for recreation and enlightenment, that his system had quite a tolerance. He might visualize some, but he probably wouldn’t die.
The door to the house below opened. Cops came out, swinging around with weapons ready. The rain was sheets of black and silver. It began to hail: frozen ice the size of oranges and apples. Then oranges and apples really were falling from the clouds. And then jasmine flowers. Then origami fashioned to look like dolls’ heads. Then swords of varying sizes. Then entrails and eels.
Jason had all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. The cops couldn’t see him. They were going back in, back down, descending the stairs like trolls headed for hellish mines.
««—»»
And then there is the story taking place in the 11th Century B.C. about the Philistines ripping off the Ark of the Covenant from the Hebrews. They were struck with a mighty plague that, according to The First Book Of Samuel, caused them to be smitten with emerods “in their secret parts.”
The Philistines had attempted to get rid of the toxic ark by sending it to somebody else, but people would shudder, squat, and grunt “No thank you.” As a matter of fact, everyplace they took the Ark to try to unload it—Ashdod, Gath, and finally Ekron—the population became immediately afflicted. So they started making overtures to the Hebrews to get it back.
The Hebrews smirked at one another and said, “Okay, but we want a trespass offering. It’s ours all right but we expect you to pay us for the trouble. You’ll give us five golden emerods and five golden mice.”
(Five golden mice! Four latrines, three ritual baths, two soothing balms, and a roll of papyrus in an emrod tree!)
Now, here’s the hotly contested part. There are varying theories about what emerods were. Some learned folk have said the mice and emerods were rats and the buboes which erupt during bubonic plague. Not bothering to mention that mice seldom act as plague carriers. But another school of thought insists the emerods were actually hemorrhoids. Severe dyssentery can cause very painful rhoids. A couple of these scientists point to the mice as being another thing entirely. Perhaps the rodents had destroyed someone’s crops and the two pestilences got mistakenly linked.
And here’s the weirdest of the learned notions. That the Philistines were into sodomy. (And some of those wicked buggerers have been known to use live mice in rites not likely to produce a better mousetrap.) The plague God smote them with produced dyssentery which inflamed the rhoids common to those who are frequently plunged. Oh, those funny Hebrews, expecting these thieves to not only return the stolen ark but to memorialize their embarrassing suffering in gold. Wink wink, nudge, nudge.
—Sacred Sepsis
Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer
— | — | —
Chapter 28
Myrtle watched Dr. Singer as he thrashed on the bed in the ER. They were going to do X-rays. They had sent for a nurse to fix him on an IV, keeping him on fluids and supplying a pain killer.
He’d become quite delirious. He was screaming and emitting the strangest farts anyone there had ever heard. She really felt very sorry for him. It had been bound to happen eventually. She’d known this all along. It had only been done for his own good. He’d been kind to her, as no one had ever been. Selfless. And Myrtle had just decided to give him a present. That was, oh, 1994?
Couldn’t last forever though.
The ER was backed up. A new strain of flu produced downright ghastly cases of dyssentery. It was running through (you’ll excuse the expression) the local grade schools which had just opened again. And food handlers, who were too low-rung on the professional totem pole to have sick pay, were passing the germs on down through undercooked hamburger patties and ice cream cones, the latter particularly popular as it was late August. There had been a run-amuck shooter in the park nearby and the doctors on the trauma team were looking at five vics with shotgun wounds—as well as the perp himself leaking from four police 38’s. A lightweight plane had crashed onto a highway; that was another eleven injured. And a postman had been badly mangled by a jaguar some exotic dancer had just introduced into her act at a strip club. The sad thing was that he’d only entered the club to deliver the mail.
“It’s okay, boss,” Myrtle said to him, getting close enough her voice would not carry beyond the cloth screens which hung between the separate beds. “Most people survive. You will survive.”
He probably couldn’t hear her. His head shook back and forth, sweat big as coins on his face. He thrust the sheet off him and struggled onto his side and groaned, moaned as noises liquid and slippery sang from his insides.
They had taken off his clothes and put him in a gown. One of those backless things. Myrtle could clearly see his pale, perspiring, clenching butt. She wanted to reach out and pat it affectionately.
There at the anus, she saw the tiny head. It was already emerging. Maybe this wouldn’t take him several days of agony. But, of course, it still had to completely come out. Aureum Incretum, having reached maturity, needed to leave its host to reproduce.
She’d come by this one when it was only a baby. Down in the tunnels, its parent having crawled out of a grubby immigrant goat-fucker from somewhere in the Gobi Desert. She’d understood it would make Dr. Singer thin. He wanted to be thin. She knew that.
Who didn’t want to be thin? It made him seem so much younger, losing all that weight. As if he’d found the little boy who’d been hiding inside him.
“You’ll be okay in just a little while. A dog that swallows a fuzzy curler hurts a lot worse when it’s passing the bristles. But after it’s come out, the relief is so great it’s like you just met God.”
Myrtle smiled sweetly and left.
««—»»
Down in the tunnels. Myrtle didn’t know what she was doing there. She thought it was because she’d seen that woman riding upon the crest of sewage spewing out of the Science Building where the floor had cracked open. And this happening so soon after the document came. It had been a few weeks in-between, that was all.
She’d never sent it to the lab. She’d always done every job Dr. Singer gave her, but Myrtle couldn’t bring herself to let go of that document. She’d hidden it in her apartment. And every time Jim asked if the lab had called yet, she’d lied.
She’d eavesdropped on the conversation between that priest and her employer. They used an old intercom system in his office; it had been no big deal years ago for her to rig it so she could listen in on anything she wanted. And after she was satisfied that Singer was where she’d hoped he would be in the stages of passing the goldworm, she’d left the ER and gone home to fetch the document.
She’d read it on the cab ride to the subway entrance on Myrtle Avenue. She’d felt strange, both frightened and energized. And once she’d taken the steps down, she’d gone to the ladies room and burned it, flushing the manuscript cinders. There was no way she was going to let the rest of the world see that. They would only know the story from the epistle Aure
ola’s followers had written, that which the professor had published in Sacred Sepsis.
And as for what she’d tell him about the ancient Vatican dossier on Aureola? She’d think of something. Maybe she’d say that the lab decreed it a fake. It was what he wanted to hear anyway. Or she could tell him the courier responsible for delivering it had lost it. No, no, couldn’t do that. He was waiting on word from the lab. She’d told him the lab had it.
It was better to leave it as a fake. Then he wouldn’t care what happened to it.
Perhaps Myrtle would never have to explain it at all.
The tunnel was as horrible as she remembered. Vagrants and druggies turned in their filth to stare at her, well-dressed as she was now. She expected to be assaulted at any moment. Robbed, stripped and plucked, sodomized and fucked.
Let ’em try. She’d learned martial arts at a night course given at the college. She was a black belt. And what were they but pathetic throwaways with more stink than brains?
A couple of piggish guys were weaving back and forth on the balls of their feet, eyeing her, trying to get themselves up for it. One had puke in his beard, and the other had a large yellow stain on his fly and down one pant’s leg. She felt a smile spread across her face like a curl in hot butter. She told them, “Try it. I’ll kill you. And that’s no bullshit.”
They sneered but shuffled a few paces backward, maintaining their distance.
Myrtle found the wall she’d done her art work on before Dr. Singer rescued her and brought her into the light. But could it be the same place? Where were her pictures?
It had all been painted over with dull cement paint. Some snotty art critics were responsible, no doubt, with the Guggenheim up their asses. It hurt to find them destroyed.
Myrtle had never been one to have dreams. She’d heard others talk about or rave during theirs when she’d lived down here. She’d since read books and seen movies where dreams seemed so important to the human psyche in particular and to the designs of hopes/fears/fate and myths in general. Yet Myrtle was dreamless. Nothing in nightmares to give her a clue as to her origins.
So her drawings had, for her, taken the place of those missing dreams. Here were the symbols she saw in her mind, not that she understood them but at least this way they were categorized in a kind of cartoonish journal that she could review, telling herself, “Well, there’s this and this and that and that. Now what does it mean?”
Gone. Each perplexing bit of ego and id. The jumble which had confused her until she got it out upon the wall where somehow it then soothed.
There were a lot of weird images in her head right now. How’s about one more, for old time’s sake? For whatever it might be worth. Or for zero.
Snapping open her purse, Myrtle dug down through the tissues and dry cleaning stubs and cosmetic flotsam to find a pen. She began to draw.
««—»»
Ring!
“Hello?”
“Is this Father Malvezzi?”
“It is.”
“Hi, I’m Dr. Singer’s secretary, Myrtle Ave? We met earlier today…”
“Ah, yes! How is he doing?”
“Not so good right now. But he asked me to call you. It seems he’s come across some information on that cult. Something really astonishing he thinks you should see as soon as possible. Can you come?”
“Actually tonight and most of tomorrow I will be at the city’s archdiocese. But tomorrow night…?”
“That would be fine.”
And Myrtle gave him directions.
— | — | —
Chapter 29
She had to be someplace. It was essential she hurry. Why didn’t she simply manifest there? Maybe twitch her nose like some sixties TV witch and transport herself. She’d been doing stuff like this, hadn’t she? Ending up places without the usual journey, finding herself moved and changed.
Folks with multiple personalities did that. thought they had skipped the standard rules of mass and location, when it was really just that another of their selves was responsible.
Was this Dorien’s problem? Was this goddess of shit a matter of alternate ego? And what did it say for deep seated dysfunctions that some part of her would claim that as an alternate ego?
She almost wished this were true. Then she could check herself into a mental facility and get treatment. Get placed into a nice cotton batting compartment with somebody to bathe her and feed her cookies with sprinkles and sparkly drugs. But this wasn’t to be so easy.
She’d found herself away from the college where the sewer had erupted. Hours had passed. It might not even be the same day anymore. Dorien was in her car and driving very fast, to the limits of an old Volkswagen. She was near the East River. As a matter of fact, she was on a dock. Wasn’t there a bridge around here someplace? A helpful, big bridge which assisted many travelers across?
Yes, it was out that way, a quarter of a mile maybe. But she wasn’t going to end up on it.
She was going into the drink.
Too late Dorien hit the brake. The car took a header off the end of the pier. It seemed to sail down gracefully, seconds like epochs in which she’d been a transmigrating soul. Her life—her lives—flashed before her etched in surreal sepia colors.
When it hit the water, she expected to submerge right away. The dark, vile water would be her grave.
But, no. The car landed upright and bobbed like some kid’s toy.
Yeah, a Volkswagen. And it struck her funny that the only piece-of-shit car the goddess of shit would be in would be the kind that floated.
Dorien crawled out of the window and swam to shore. She realized she might actually be able to walk to land, since what was the East River but sewage and swill? It might bear her regally as the mess from the Science Building had. But for some reason, she struck out with arms and legs working. Clinging to this as a last act of her human self.
From then on Dorien might be gone forever.
As if Dorien Warmer had always been only the split from the ego, the false personality. Now the real one would take over for good.
««—»»
She’d walked for an hour or so after climbing out of the river. It was night now but still hot. Her clothes and hair had dried. She didn’t stink from the water and nothing nasty clung to her. Being the goddess of shit, she might have thought things would be otherwise, that she would be gowned in a satiny sheathe of all that she represented.
(Venus is the goddess of love and sex but she’s never shown covered in cum, is she?)
Dorien saw the Myrtle Avenue entrance to the subway and descended. She didn’t plan to take a train. She could smell where she was going.
She entered a ladies room. This was not her final destination. And she had no reason to go there, so why had she?
To look into a mirror. Because Dorien was still in there, even if she’d thought she’d be gone, erased. The goddess persona must not have quite kicked her out yet.
Or maybe she couldn’t kick Dorien out. Because it wasn’t that the goddess was a separate entity. No multiple personalities, remember? In this time, she was Dorien Warmer. She’d been born as Dorien and, even when she changed and realized her eternal self, she would still be Dorien as long as she was in this incarnation.
Dorien recalled the dreams she had, of other women in other times who had turned out to be the goddess. They felt they were no longer themselves. But obviously they’d had the wherewithal at the backs of their minds to think this, so they had to be themselves, after all. Simply expanded, purpose understood, shattering as that was. Mind-bending. Scary. All of a sudden your body doesn’t need food anymore and it doesn’t shit, doesn’t get sick. You’ve walked away from your family, your life. You’re doing these freaky supernatural things, holding the key to a gateway to the beyond and punishing sinners. You don’t feel anything like the girl you were or the woman you had become and every impulse felt totally alien. Sure, why wouldn’t you think you were gone and another had replaced you?
In
the mirror, she opened her mouth. No more teeth. In their place tiny little orchids had grown. Interesting that this didn’t muffle or distort her speech. Did make her breath quite nice, she supposed.
Sunglasses up, afraid to take them down to see the eyes. That was another thing… A big thing. A very major change. Not human.
(And orchids for teeth was?)
She’d always been a bit chubby. But now? It all looked solid, strong. It had to be, to walk a path between worlds. And what a path!
“I’m me,” she said to her reflection. “For whatever that’s worth. Dorien Warmer, shit goddess.”
Wasting time. She turned around and left, hunting beyond the platform for the trains. There were tunnels and there were tunnels. She climbed down where no one who would give a rat’s ass might see her. Walked not far, turned. No tracks that way. Piles of rubbish, cardboard boxes which smelled like homeless homes. But currently empty. The inhabitants had scurried.
Down farther, people.
Most of them had dog in their bowels.
The Shit Detail had a captive. They had made a sort of cross with pieces of lumber and nailed a naked man to it. Propped him up against a wall. He was praying feverishly as the black-clad, dark-masked freaks shoved a drugstore pre-packaged enema up his rectum and gave him a good dousing.
“Look! It’s Aureola,” one of them cried with elation when they spotted Dorien approaching them.
They immediately hit the ground on their knees, faces groveling the filthy floor where they deserved to be.
“Welcome, Saint Aureola. I saw you at a college yesterday. Bless us!”
“We still do your work. See?”
“We’ve kept ourselves purged as you have preached. We are your empty vessels.”
“Please,” their victim said hoarsely, “call the police…”
Dread in the Beast Page 29
