Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  He called her apartment. The message she usually had on her answering machine was a friendly enough can’t come to the phone right now, leave your name and number and I promise…

  Now all he heard was a darkly whispered, “Sewersybil.” S’s stressed until sibilant. It made his butt cheeks clench, thinking of the worm snaking in his colon.

  Had his feral child reverted?

  ««—»»

  Jim went to the tunnel where he’d found Myrtle years ago. It hadn’t been easy climbing down from a proper platform, going away from the tracks toward darkness and stench, pretending he hadn’t just had fifty feet of thin, living ribbon unraveled from his ass.

  Something dove at his head before he’d even gone ten feet. He ducked and threw his arms up to protect himself. He saw this really weird bird—or was it a bird? It screeched and swooped at him again, flapping very close, staring at him.

  For a moment Jim thought he’d gone insane. The face was too human, nothing like a bird or a bat or any other bug-chewed flying creature with more flea-shit than down in the feathers.

  He thought the face reminded him of Myrtle. Thing from a nightmare, from some Baudelaire-esque delirium rash found in an opium pipe or green Absinthe bottle or malaria-tainted pussy.

  “Myrtle?” he whispered, hardly able to form the words, as if his lips had suddenly frozen. No, bullshit. (Yeah, it looks like her…!)

  It screeched loud enough to feel like a very long needle in both ears, skreed mournfully and long, beating its wings together until a cloud of greasy dust and ricey lice-sheddings plumed. As he started sneezing, it flew off down the tunnel.

  He stood there a moment, watching it go, wondering if he ought to have stayed in the hospital for another day or two. Wonders and prodigies: this was what he’d seen lately. Visions which belonged in cave paintings or upon the scruffy murals in plebeian catacombs.

  “I’m a sick, sick man,” he told himself.

  Where was everybody? The last time he’d been down here there were vagrants everywhere, sleeping or shooting up or rushing from an assortment of things, a few staring at terrible things he was glad he couldn’t see. Nobody now.

  Last time there had been folks from the world above-ground, from the light, traipsing past Myrtle’s pictures, sipping bottled water or imported beer, making sure they didn’t touch anything.

  Where were they? The pictures, that is. He couldn’t recall exactly where they’d been. He hoped he was in the right tunnel. Jim walked slowly in the dark, hand following the wall.

  Then he found the beginning of where Myrtle had started drawing. Hey, her cartoons were gone, sort of. Only vague outlines remained, as if an attempt had been made to erase them. The things she’d written on them were still there. So were squiggles representing water, tracks, anything inanimate.

  He almost stepped on the first body before he even realized there were two corpses. He jumped back from the burned one on the ground. It looked like the hungry homeless had been at it. He’d heard stories of cannibalism down here. He’d always just assumed it was an urban myth. Actually, the teeth marks didn’t look like they came from a human bite. Maybe stray dogs then.

  He’d also heard about kids dousing some poor guy with gasoline and then setting him alight. That one wasn’t just urban legend.

  The second body hung from the crude cross.

  “Malvezzi,” Jim said, not even realizing he was practically shouting it in surprise. “What the hell.”

  The Shit Detail. Yes, there was the ubiquitous quote written on the wall behind him in blood and shit. From Nietzsche, “Exhausted I see thee, by poisonous flies; bleeding I see thee, and torn at a hundred spots…”

  Had Jim used it in the book? Yes. Not that it had anything to do with sewage, but not everything in the book had a scatalogical term or meaning. Some merely dealt with death or darkness, a connection he’d been trying to make with waste. Now he wasn’t sure he even knew what that connection was.

  He hung his head, feeling responsible. How could he fail to feel this way? There were idiots out there who were treating Sacred Sepsis as if it were The Book Of Genesis. As if everything he’d added around the Epistle Of Saint Aureola were just that—an adjunct and servant-word to her message, auxiliary and subordinate in meaning and function to her story.

  The priest had been disembowelled. Jim felt a flashback again to the time at historical Gettysburg, as a child, wanting to help the soldiers by putting their insides back where they belonged. And of the time the catacombs caved in and he’d wanted to save Louis.

  Movement caught his eye, down the tunnel. A blonde wearing sunglasses, even though it was dark down there.

  The woman from the flood in the Science Building!

  Jim straightened up, took a deep breath. She was here. Maybe she was Aureola. Did she have anything to do with Malvezzi’s murder?

  Jim was sure she had. But, if she was Aureola, then she also had something to do with Louis’ death.

  He knew he couldn’t just let her go on and on. He’d been partly responsible for letting her out and for drumming up business for her. She’d died before. Maybe she could die again.

  Maybe Jim could kill her.

  ««—»»

  Jason was unafraid as he strutted down a street in Sheol’s Ditch, feeling relieved now that Rose was gone. He hadn’t realized what a stone she’d become around his neck. He flashed a grin into the windows of tawdry storefronts he passed, the muscles in his bare arms rippling even more in sun-warped glass, the barrel of his chest and the monster bulge in the crotch of his jeans creating an almost scarily-deformed silhouette. No one in their right mind would fuck with him. No one in their right mind ever had.

  That gang of cranked-up losers who’d mocked him last week, then tried to take him on, hardly qualified as of-sound-minds. He’d made scarlet- and bowel-brown smears of them across the gray cement and soot walls of The Ditch. He’d dragged each one, bones shattered and pert near dead, to a different block of the two centuries old neighborhood. Then he wiped them creamin’, bleedin’, and shittin’ across the local landmarks. Not erudite, no, but anything else would have been mere sophistry. His thoughts may have been raw existentialism but his actions more clearly cut a path for the pragmatic provocateur.

  At any rate, it was done so everyone would know about it and so none could harbor a doubt. That to fuck with Jason Cave was to suffer a severe breach in good judgement and to have few prospects for a decent life expectancy. They had forgotten for a while, when he was off fighting in the war. Then as he’d traveled through Southeast Asia, South America, the entire of Africa, head-tripping on the varying cultural opinions of life and death, groin-tripping on exotic toys which caused out-of-body reactions based upon reflex and auto-suggestion. Making the most of the learning experience which was this—and every—incarnation. When he’d returned with his wife a year ago, he’d had to teach the home crowd all over. It was a lesson he meted out at regular intervals, to make certain no one forgot again.

  A month ago, there had been that one undercover cop who’d owned a couple black belts himself. The narc had been as hard-muscled and swift as some Vin Diesel cum The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin cum 3D Incredible Hulk. But Jason had hung that pretty dude…bound and turkey-trussed…by his testicles from a lampost on the corner of Rilke and Buber Streets. Of course, the tender sacs weren’t really designed to take all the weight of a couple hundred pounds. No more cum for the narc. With screams that were audible all the way to the dog races, the narc slowly tore free of his hefty pair, pieces of mottled scrotum flapping down like the tatters of an exploded zeppelin’s balloon shell.

  (“Oh the humanity!” croaked some sarcastic kid, who’d been observing this from his mother’s stoop. Until she started slapping the crap out of him and pulled him inside.)

  (She’d spat at her son. “That’s Jason Cave’s handiwork, you stupid li’l bastard! For chrissakes, you want somebody to know you saw and say you’re a witness? Get us both reamed, yo
u retard?”)

  Six months ago there had been this girl, about thirteen or fourteen…

  He was glad Rose hadn’t been with him then—or she might have taken her for a houri—damn it. Still pissed him off when he thought about it.

  …but stacked like Christmas. Cinnamon nipples and sharp cider twang cunt, the flesh of her belly soft as a butter pie crust. Some uptown lawyer decided to sue Jason on her comatose behalf when the D.A. said there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. Mr. Acker’s rectum had been tight before the cock but not after both upwardly mobile numchucks. His pale lips had evidentally never known the flavor of blood, excrement and sour sebacious gland seepings.

  But all this was irrelevant. Jason had lately been thinking of good old days. When the streets had belonged to him and his colleagues. So many had vanished lately. And at first there had been rumors about the various mobs deciding to eliminate these basically unaffiliated, self-employed entrepreneur “rogues” from the shark pool. Some had suggested a secret government sting with a license to practice extreme prejudice. Others had even thought these radicals were being taken out by The Shit Detail. Hell, a few months ago, it had been theorized that Jason and his extremist cronies were The Shit Detail. Even he’d wondered if some of the more enlightened ones might be involved, considering the sayings which were left with the victims.

  But he’d heard a woman had been nearby where several had been seen last. And this excited him. He hoped he would run into her. And if he did, would he recognize her?

  Now being blonde didn’t seem to fit in with the woman he’d followed into Cairo’s cemetery. Yet she’d been heavily veiled, so he didn’t know.

  Most of them—Simone; Boreolo; Everson, the Vigilante of Love; even Big Garth—had believed in that place that Jason had actually seen. (They had all heard his story. From anybody else, they might have jeered.) The subject invariably arose whenever enough of them were assembled and drunk, drugged, sexed up. And wistful for the mythical place where they would be undisputed masters over souls and atoms in the fabled hematoma circus. Where they could on a whim recycle their slaves down to the rictus-pokers and rice worm-lickers and decomp-sop bucket wallowers until liquid was all that remained. Then they would ferment that.

  She must be the djinn or ghoul or angel of such a place. Perhaps he’d called her up once, while messing around with paraphernalia from his earlier self: Crowley. He’d summoned her and not put her back properly. Maybe she’d been waiting for him, seeking him all this time. Maybe the stars had to be right again and had just become so.

  Now here she was and it was the others who were benefiting from his magick, being led to the gate he’d longed to find open again.

  This was what happened to Garth; Jason believed it. Garth had prepared to leave the house ahead of the police. Naturally he wanted to eliminate any witnesses against him, so he’d killed the geishas first. Trailed blood down the hallway, entered the gate while dropping the netsuke, vanished.

  She must still be around. Surely she wouldn’t go without finding Jason first. Her ultimate goal was to find him and take him to his world, where he would be God. Crowley had summoned her but she’d not taken him then. No, in that incarnation he hadn’t been ready.

  Jason knew the people on the street were watching him, trying to pretend they weren’t. They wondered if he’d be next. Actually he was the last one left, out of the Supermen. They couldn’t wait to get rid of him. And they must be curious as to whether or not he was shaking in his shoes. Because, of course, all their pea brains could conceive of was some mundane, mortal hit squad. At the most, the religious ones might think Satan was claiming his own.

  So Jason Cave had to be scared, right? Waiting for IT to get him.

  But these fools didn’t get it. Just as they had never understood him. What he symbolized, what he meant.

  Most regular people couldn’t understand the obsession with violence. Couldn’t relate to simple adrenalin rush and complex emotional need. This was from a different realm indeed, the drive to be immersed in every level of a disparate biology, especially in its decline. Artificial or not, personal or not, it represented a release for the extra nth of emotion which such entities were bursting with—even if they might appear cold or without feeling or believe themselves to be empty.

  No, this wasn’t emptiness. It was surplus.

  There was nothing vacant about a person with so much spleen and too many vividly visceral dreams to hold in. This was the ultra survivor, not necessarily of corporeal self but of ego. The super poet of bones, juggling with inexhaustible concepts of mortal philisophy that most “normal” citizens were too cowardly to consider.

  Be afraid? Of it? Idiots. He’d seen Melanicus. He’d stood not ten feet from the police in the driving rain on the roof and they hadn’t seen him, protected by that cloak of invisibility provided by magickal Nature for her Superman.

  Now Jason flashed a meat-chomping smile at his image and said out loud to himself, “One does not find dread in the beast.”

  People overheard and, smelling the rank cow-innard iron on his breath, cringed away.

  In a sudden fit of expounding, he quoted from Thus Spake Zarathustra, shouting at them, “Would that there came preachers of quick death!”

  He bowed comically, first to the cowering rubes on the sidewalk and then to his rippled reflection in a thrift shop window, his head mirrored above a solemn, headless mannikin sporting a used, cheap black suit. It made him look like a preacher. Or an undertaker.

  Jason chuckled. Yeah, if it could be possible to be an existential thug, then he guessed he was that. He’d contemplated for years the perverse nature of himself and others, even as he was in the act of committing outrage. Questioning his ephemeral motives for it as he felt someone’s ribcage compress beneath the sole of a really supernal kick. Analyzing his feelings as he rammed a part of his anatomy (or a symbol for it: i.e. a bottle, broom handle, length of PVC pipe or rusty rebar) into a fleshy receptacle for his tormented euphoria. One had to question in order to learn. Jung had said, “I for my part prefer the precious gift of doubt, for the reason that it does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken.”

  Jason’s mantra was simpler. “Too full?”

  Share the overflow.

  Fill others.

  The normals all thought, “Go away, mutant. This earth isn’t for you.”

  Yet it was. In each raped increment of savage human history it was his. It had proved itself in every iota of man-unkind’s brutal carnality to precisely belong to individuals just such as he. Man was indeed a mutation of the genus which had preceded it: increased cunning and dexterity providing the impetus to form it into a superbeast, a planetary dominant species.

  The trouble with those regular folk was that they forgot they were animals, super animals but of a predatory mammality just the same. Jason didn’t forget it, not for one second. Never.

  He leered sideways at people going the other direction down the walk. Spotted several who filled him to brimming with impulses. An old lady he wanted to hang from a hook in the ceiling back at his apartment. To measure how long it would take gravity and pain to cascade those wrinkles to the floor. A young mother with milk-swollen mammaries he wanted to fuck between the breasts until cream gouted from both of them, until he could catch hers in the lips of his downturned face and her upturned one would drown in his. A too-handsome man of blue-black hair and beard so groomed and oiled it resembled a female pube. Jason wanted to gorge himself on pages from a Mapplethorpe portrait book, then crouch over the man’s staked out body, shitting onto the wired-open jaws, listening to the dandy’s wail of eating art.

  Full! So full! Jason enjoyed his passion drooling from the corners of his mouth, sweating from his armpits, straining at the crotch of his jeans like a dog on a chain.

  Damn, this was not emptiness. That feral carnivorous grin ogling back at him from his window reflections possessed nothing of the void. There was no tabula rasa there pleading to be writt
en with redemption.

  Nature deplored a vacuum and this was why She created beings like him. Like Big Garth, Boreolo, Everson, Simone.

  He would show these vomit curds a thing or two. He was buzzin’, out to prove something. Hot-wired. In preparation to walking The Ditch today to teach a few Supermanic lessons and to search for his mystery woman, Jason had himself a bong party. He’d first smoked some hashish, partly to honor Rose…even if she had betrayed him…and because it was through a mainly Mohammedan city that he’d first seen ‘she’ whom he believed to be the opener of the gate. (The Moslem troups of centuries past had faith after using hashish that they were invincible in battle. But this wasn’t why Jason had used it. There was no dread in his Beast.)

  Secondly, he’d smoked some crack, since he was looking for the crack in reality, where he’d step through to exchange his status as Superman for one as Superpower.

  And, lastly, thinking of she who had dissolved into black, rich matter there in the dead’s city, Jason had smoked some real shit, excreted by his ghoul or djinn or angel wife under the dark of the moon. Which, at that phase, resembled nothing less than a fecal pearl in a sky some demon or lord (Melanicus?) had defecated broken glass into. Such night had erupted in the smoke he’d drawn inside himself.

  It hadn’t been long since he’d consumed the muzan-e. He was so wired he knew folks probably saw blue teeth and sparks when he grinned. They were the real empty ones, without an honest erection or juicily lubed-up pud among them. Blank groins, hollow hammers, dreamless impotent nadas.

  Big Garth, Boreolo, Everson, Simone had vanished. But a few bodies had been found. In such abominable condition that at first the fact that they were bodies had nearly been missed. For flesh, features, the proper arrangement of limbs (bonsai not being a consideration here)…the reality that they were or had been arms and legs…were so distorted, these might have been organic but alien lumps of tissue, fallen from the sky in the identical manner in which torrents of frogs, stones and twisted ganglia had been recorded by Charles Fort as dropping from heaven.