Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  He could barely raise his head. He couldn’t look at her because they had caked fecal matter across both of his eyes, thick as mud plasters.

  “She won’t help you, you bastard. She’s Saint Aureola.”

  His head jerked up at the sound of this name. He wriggled and whimpered, trying to get free. The nails in his wrists and ankles tore, blood spraying.

  “No, she isn’t,” someone else murmured, coming from the other direction, the tunnel’s opposite end.

  The Shit Detail raised their heads a few inches to see who this was. Dorien did not, for she felt the identity. If she’d been the old Dorien, her skin would have crawled. But she was the new, so she only waited for this creature to join them.

  Myrtle grinned. Ah, someone else who’d transformed, who’d discovered her secret self. Why, what pals they would be, reading each other’s diaries and painting each other’s nails. Yeah, sure.

  “We know she’s Aureola. She was seen performing miracles at the university,” one of the Detail argued.

  All of them stood up defiantly from their kneeling positions.

  Myrtle threw her head back and let out a howl matching in decibels and vibration a train which thundered down a nearby track. Then she gestured to the cement wall where one rather inept cartoon had been scribbed. More began to rise to the surface from underneath a coat of paint. She gestured again and a skeletal female in one of the drawings poured forth a stream of vomit from its mouth, out of the wall. Pinky curds splashed down.

  Myrtle folded her arms and stared at Dorien, as if expecting her to show some proof of divinity. Dorien just gazed at her through those sunglasses.

  “Hmmph,” Myrtle scoffed. Then she strolled up to the man on the cross. “Father Malvezzi, thanks for keeping our appointment. I guess you’re pretty impressed with what I said you might want to see.”

  He shivered, mumbled in Latin, reacted loosely some more to the forced enema.

  “You ought to be grateful you’ve been made a martyr. Isn’t that the highest occupation to which you could aspire? Why, you might even end up being given sainthood. You’ll love the perks that come with that,” Myrtle teased. But then she grew tired of the joke and grew more serious. “You should have stayed in Rome, old man. Shouldn’t have tried to interfere with that document of lies. The world doesn’t care anyway, not anymore. The Catholic Church is the butt of so many half-assed secular comedians and is losing faithful so fast, not even a computer could keep count. What did you hope to accomplish?”

  He worked his mouth as if it hurt too much to answer. But he was determined to reply. “Nothing solidifies faith in God like proof of evil’s existence.”

  “You don’t have proof of shit,” Myrtle snapped.

  “Yes, I do. You’re here right now, aren’t you?”

  Myrtle snarled, ran up to him, and dug her claws into Malvezzi’s belly. She practically climbed in, strong as a tigress, ripping through flesh and muscle and into the abdomen. She jerked out quivering loops of entrails and dragged them to Dorien, looping them around her throat. They turned into necklaces of poisonous watersnakes, hissing and snapping. They bit Dorien in the face and scalp and breasts.

  The Shit Detail cried in unison, “Ahhh!”

  Someone added, “Saints be praised!”

  A tiny part of Dorien wanted to scream. She’d always hated snakes. She felt each nauseating sting, smelled venom, but only reached up with a simple caress. The snakes turned into pretty scarab beetles which fell to the ground and crawled away. The snakebites blazed, bruised and swelled, then faded to nothing.

  “How did she do that?” she heard the Detail asking each other in subdued voices.

  “Kisses don’t leave scars,” she told them.

  Myrtle laughed. “Goddess of shit or Saint of Crapulence—who is the stronger?”

  Why even bother going by the old name? She had never been reincarnated. She’d come out of the catacombs after centuries of waiting. She’d sucked up Louis Godard’s lifeforce as he died and she sailed over. Flesh again, she found herself in a new Rome far away—one with as much diversity and corruption as the Rome from the empire. But the transformation was a shock (what transformation worth a damn wasn’t?) and she’d forgotten who she was for a while.

  “Get her!” one of The Shit Detail goaded. “Get the pretender!”

  They howled their support, except for one who shuffled to the side and pressed a back to the wall.

  Aureola, named for gold—now, wasn’t that better than Myrtle, named for a street?—bent forward and pulled up her skirt. She took a deep breath and then ejected a foul black acidic sea of fecal chum. It spattered the walls and pocked them, sizzling into one of the Detail, melting his mask and black T-shirt, burning him horribly. He fell, screaming, trying to roll the burn away into the filth on the ground. No one tried to help him, standing very still to witness these miracles, frozen at attention.

  The stuff struck the priest but he’d died already. It hit Dorien full force but then just absorbed into her body like rainwater slipping into the grass.

  Aureola glowered. “Don’t you want to counter with something? Show your powers?”

  “I’ll get my turn,” Dorien replied softly.

  “We’ll see,” Aureola retorted. She spun around toward the pictures on the wall.

  “Like my artwork?” she asked the goddess.

  “I’d be impressed if you were a monkey,” Dorien said.

  Aureola howled again and the Detail clapped their hands over their ears in pain. Blood trickled from the ears of one of them, blooming like red roses through the stocking mask on either side of the head. Surprisingly, this person didn’t fall down.

  “Oh, thank you, Lady. Thank you for this stigmata,” the injured one babbled.

  Aureola shouted at the pictures, “Out! Out! Out!”

  The horrors so crudely drawn began to creep from the wall, thickening as they dropped to the floor, horned Babylons and skeleton bitches and torsos and shit-imps and monster dogs. A couple limped toward Malvezzi’s corpse and the burned Detail member, bending to tear off cooked or dark-marinated pieces to eat. The burned man shrieked unintelligible prayers, kicked his legs, gurgled and gargled as his windpipe was severed. But most attacked Dorien. The Shit Detail howled and applauded, Aureola looking smug as Dorien now resembled a victim out of Hieronymous Bosch. They scratched and bit, tearing out clumps of her hair, mouthfuls of skin, scraping down to bone. A creature part dog/part man with a dick practically to its knees rammed into her from behind. She bent forward from their combined weight, not even trying to shake them off.

  I want to scream. It hurts. Why can’t I fight? Dignity was fine for the other incarnations; they never had to deal with anything like this.

  But there was a stoic calmness overriding the torment, keeping her cool and strong. Goddesses did not cry out. Even deities working their will through physical shape never forgot who they were. Immutably eternal, beyond the comprehension of hagiolaters and their upstarts hags.

  Then suddenly she brought up her hand and removed her glasses. Some of the Detail heard her croon, “Gateway…threshold…Aralu calls you home.”

  A shaft of crooked darkness appeared. The things looked up, startled, then grinned. They scampered toward it, delight on their half-formed faces.

  “No, get back here!” Aureola commanded.

  But they didn’t listen. Each leapt through the gateway, black static snapping when they vanished. Even the two feeding on the priest and the burned man raced for the opening.

  “Damn you…you’re supposed to be mine. You ungrateful shitters,” the saint cursed. The part dog, part man monster loped toward the threshold, enormous wet cock swinging like a censor, and she cried to it piteously, “Frater! Frater, not you, too…”

  It never looked back.

  She faced Dorien grimly, furious but out of ideas. Her features contorted with hatred.

  “My turn,” Dorien stated simply, the wounds she’d received starting to close an
d heal, but not nearly as fast as the snakebites had.

  “Hey, I’ve been dead before. Didn’t stop me,” Aureola spat.

  “Everything that is or ever was grew out of death. Doesn’t make you special, child,” Dorien told her sadly. “I won’t destroy you. Instead, be as you have always been, a scavenger, the servant to the wasteland.”

  Aureola screamed, fell, and tried to curl up in a fetal position, drawing her knees to her chest. Her followers watched and started to cry as she grew very soft, shape twisting, the scrawny form puffing out, bloating.

  “Is she becoming an angel?” somebody asked.

  Wings were unfurling from the back but the feathers were matted with filth and overrun with vermin. What she really resembled was a cross between the old harpy of mythology and a common, meaty-headed buzzard. This staggered up on bloody, taloned feet, squawked at the assembled faithful, then flew off down the tunnel.

  Dorien turned to The Shit Detail. They could see her eyes now, how these spun inward, turning, turning like watery drains. They couldn’t look away.

  “I am the gateway. The threshold to Aralu,” she said.

  The shaft of darkness began revolving, too, like a black tornado. It sucked them in, its gravity so strong it pulled blood right through their skin, eyes out of sockets, and organs out of every unraveling orifice.

  Dorien felt the wetness on her face. Touched it and found it was red. Not tears, after all. No, she didn’t shed tears for those she sent to Aralu.

  She put her sunglasses back on. The gateway closed, leaving the tunnel too humid, close. She turned to the only member of The Shit Detail not to enter Aralu.

  “Please, don’t,” this one chattered as she pulled off her stocking mask. “It’s me, Dorie.”

  Something in Dorien remembered her sister. She’d thought she hated Annet after finding out she’d been feeding dog meat to their dying father. Not because Dorien had loved the rotten old man but because it was a horrible thing to do. And because Annet had tried to drag her into this disgusting cult. She’d done unspeakable things to helpless men, women and children.

  What did Dorien feel now?

  Nothing.

  “No, you are not meant for Aralu,” she said to Annet. “You…you’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

  How did she know this? She smelled it. If she’d been told a few months ago that Annet still hadn’t slept with a man, she wouldn’t have believed it. It had been pretty funny that Dorien was a virgin leaving her teens—before Gavin, that is—and Annet was five years older than she was. (Well, Gavin managed to find quite a few. Maybe he’d been able to smell them, too.)

  Annet brightened as if this gave her hope. “Oh, yeah. I’ve been good, Dorie. I’ve kept myself pure…”

  The goddess shook her head. “Pure…virginity doesn’t necessarily denote purity. But there are other levels. So many other levels.”

  Dorien pointed down the tunnel and Annet stumbled off, glad not to be sucked apart and away like the others.

  ««—»»

  The graveyards and morgues were being guarded now. It was harder for Rose to find a meal. But she’d taken to scouring the parks, the places under overpasses, and the docks for some desperate homeless person who had died of the August heat, or from starvation, or from a drug overdose. Maybe they’d been murdered. Didn’t matter to her.

  Tonight she searched the subway tunnels. Jason went with her, not willing to see her attacked. She might have been a match for Michael in Cairo, but if she were beset by a gang of twenty skinheads? He might hate her but she was still a valuable commodity, and until he found a way to cash in—and soon—he’d have to protect her. He also wanted to make sure she didn’t run off with somebody offering to take her to California.

  Off to Hollywood. Now there was a city of the dead.

  Right now, Rose had been shit out of luck. It made Jason think of a guy walking a bitch dog that wasn’t happy with any of the places she sniffed out and refused to do her business. Until a guy wanted to pick the dog up and squeeze until the business came out and they were done.

  “I could make this real easy,” he told her. “Just pick one for chrissakes. I’ll kill it for you. You won’t have to get your pristine little hands dirty.”

  She stared at him for a moment and then walked on, nose in the air—yeah to find the odor of death, but also to show how much she detested him.

  He pictured in his mind picking her up, squeezing her like a toothpaste tube with brittle bones, the business coming out smelling of corruption all minty fresh.

  He hunched as Rose checked out a bundle of rotten rags. There was a little stink of carrion there. But it turned out the fellow had about nine or ten dead rats in a bag. Jason cracked his knuckles and muttered, “Nietzsche said, ‘To upset—that meaneth with him to prove. To drive mad—that meaneth with him to convince. And blood is counted by him as the best of all arguments.’”

  There was a young woman walking down the tunnel, her very slender frame silhouetted by the scant light. Jason began to smile. He felt it stretch across his face like a waking lion. She was all alone, running as if she’d just had a bad fright.

  She was about to have another.

  Yum.

  ««—»»

  Annet didn’t even see the big man until he grabbed her. She swung her body in defensive manuevers, The Shit Detail having made sure their people knew martial arts. But he just twisted her foot when she tried to kick him and snapped her wrist when she attempted to strike out. He then tore off her black T-shirt and flung her to the ground, hard enough it knocked out every ounce of her breath.

  And then this woman was getting between them. Strange woman, freckled as if she’d been caught in a dust storm. When what light there was struck these just right, they turned a dark orange, as of some medieval red plague.

  It made her think of her late father, with his burn spots turning him into a leopard.

  ««—»»

  “Rose! What are you doing? Get out of the fuckin’ way,” Jason demanded.

  The ghoul sniffed the air as she ignored him. “You are a houri,” she murmured, then helped the young woman to stand.

  Rose flicked her hand, almost an imperceptible gesture. A patch of air shimmered, changed slightly. Then suddenly Jason realized he was seeing the infernal paradise the dead Iraqi’s third eye had shown him. Where virgins were deflowered, then mutilated to suit the master male.

  His jaw dropped. Rose was the one he’d seen there! She’d been his djinn all along! Or had he been wrong and it was ghouls who served in that place?

  He also happened to notice that there were horizons. This wasn’t the location he’d seen as a child, through the closet wall, eyeball of No Man speaking to him from the other side.

  Rose took the woman by the arm, firmly yet not unkindly. They stepped into the infernal paradise, and sight of it—and them—disappeared.

  “Damn you!” Jason cursed. “You had it all along and you wouldn’t show me? Wouldn’t take me?”

  But if it wasn’t the same place with no-horizons, how many such could there be? Was there one for every Superman, every true Beast? Charles Fort spoke of the dark spaces; they might be endless realms.

  Jason had seen Melanicus only last night. Did this mean he would soon find his own dark space where he might “do as he wilt” forever?

  ««—»»

  Waste is a word derived from vastus, the Latin for “unoccupied” or “desolate.” A similar root word in Sanskrit means “wanting” or “deficient.”

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 30

  Jim wasn’t feeling great but he had been released from the hospital.

  God! Talk about undergoing the primitive. As soon as a nurse saw what he was trying to pass, they had him in surgery. Used to be such a worm came out under its own power and according to its own timetable. But they drugged it, zapped it, and pulled it out of his intes
tines and rectum as if he’d only swallowed a thread.

  “Positively amazing,” the doctor had told him after it was over. “By the way, you might find your insides a bit loose for a while. At least we didn’t see too much damage.”

  Jim sighed, feeling very weak and sore. He shifted his sitting position, wishing they’d just let him stand. “I feel like I just survived one of my students’ most popular curses.”

  The doctor cocked his head. “Oh? What would that be?”

  “May you reap the full benefits of the e-coli burger at Fussy’s Grill,” Jim replied with only half a smile.

  The doctor chuckled. “By which I take it eat shit and die?”

  “You take it right.”

  “And you, sir, take it easy. And thank you for the article I will now write for the medical journals.”

  Jim didn’t go home. He went straight to his office. He’d been trying to reach Myrtle since yesterday afternoon. Where was she? It wasn’t like her not to have been back to check on him or to have at least paged him. Now more than ever he wanted to know about that document the priest had sent him.

  He walked through the building. Several of the other profs’ secretaries waved.

  “You seen Myrtle?” he asked them.

  “Not today. How are you feeling? We saw the paramedics take you away yesterday.”

  “Fine. The worm turned.” He managed not to scowl. Although he did wince every time he was asked. All he wanted to do was put it behind him.

  Ouch.

  The office was dark. He switched on the light, sat down at Myrtle’s desk, went through the Rolodex to find the lab’s telephone number.

  “Document? We never received any document, Dr. Singer,” he was told.

  He argued with them a while. They checked and double-checked. Nope.

  He saw a notation on her blotter. sewersybil

  It made his skin scrawl. He hadn’t seen that for a while, not since he’d taken her out of the subway tunnels a decade ago.