“Go back!” Galen shouted.
Some of the silverlegs had followed them into the corridor.
Galen fired a flare over the heads of the hunters to help scatter the spiders and they made it back around the corner.
“This way.” Galen led them, flare gun in hand.
They came to a river in the next chamber. Beyond it there were no silverlegs. The river was ten feet wide. Galen sprinted forward and leapt it, even with Kyle on his shoulders. The hunters jumped into the water, some too tired to even keep their rifles over their heads.
“Keep your weapons dry,” Aaron ordered.
Those that could, obeyed. Galen dragged the hunters out of the river as they made it to the far side. Many stayed on their knees.
“Come on,” Galen told them. “The place is thick with devils. There will be no safety at the river.”
Arturus managed to follow him through the passages. Sometimes he and the hunters were moving on all fours. He could not guess at how long they traveled. If Galen told him it was five minutes, he would have believed it. He would also have believed it had been five days.
Eventually Galen led them to some steps. Arturus could no longer walk, so he crawled up the stairs. The room Galen had taken them too was cold, with a single entrance and a ceiling that was only five feet tall. The hunters followed in, leaving behind them a trail of blood and water.
I should crawl to the corner. Make space for the others.
Arturus passed out.
When he awoke, Galen was gone.
“Where’s Galen?” Arturus asked.
Aaron was the only one that stirred. “He’s out. We left a trail. He’s gone to mop it up.”
Arturus took stock of the hunters. Some had taken off their shoes and boots. Their feet were horribly swollen. It appeared that none of them could walk. Kyle’s legs might have to be amputated. Patrick’s breathing was quick and tortured. He might not live. None of them looked ready for a fight.
One dyitzu and we might all be doomed.
Consciousness came and went. He fought to keep it, because he wanted to stand guard. Galen would be proud of that. Eventually he managed to sit, feeling the cold stone against his shirtless back. He heard footsteps. They were booted, which was a good sign. He didn’t know what he’d do if it was a Carrion man. Surrender, perhaps?
“Galen,” the voice reported.
“Turi.”
His father entered and grunted.
He’s proud that I was able to keep watch. He probably doesn’t know that I was asleep for most of it.
Galen looked across the room at the wounded hunters.
“We can’t move,” Arturus said.
Galen nodded.
“We’re going to be late,” Arturus said.
“They will seal the entrance, certainly, before we have a chance to return.”
Arturus’ gaze fell to his own boots. He saw silver needles sticking out of them in many places.
They’re going to wall us in. We’ll be buried in the Carrion.
“Rick will be sad,” Arturus said.
Galen nodded. “Get some sleep, Turi. You need to heal.”
Arturus imagined Rick’s face. He imagined Rick all alone in the battery room. Cooking breakfast by himself. His brow would be furrowed. He would cut the hound liver quickly, and fiercely, as if that would somehow help him vent his anger. He would talk to himself and sleep poorly. He would become surly and snappy, except there wouldn’t be anyone there for him to snap at.
If we never come back. . .
Rick would cry. The thought hurt Arturus like the needles in his feet never could.
I’ll come home, Rick. Just wait. It’ll be like that time when Galen was missing for a year. You’ll see.
He heard some noise in the corner and looked over to Aaron. The hunter had stirred. He had something in his hands. It looked like braided hair.
He’s a good leader.
He thought of Alice. That was probably her hair. He imagined her too, in the hovel with the dreamcatcher. She, also, would be waiting for them to return. He felt a sharp pang in his throat. No, she would be waiting for Aaron to return. He hoped that the dreamcatcher could stop all the nightmares she might have for them.
It’s just a symbol, silly.
He remembered how the beads would rattle when someone knocked on her door blanket. He remembered her smile.
But the last thing that he thought of before he drifted off was Ellen. Of how warm his cheek had felt when she had kissed it. Of how angry she had been when she threw the knowledge fruit at him. Of how she had thought that he must be the black knight, since he was in Hell.
The black knight looked better anyway.
And then sleep took him.
From the Book of the Infidels, Gehennic Law: The Golden Net
In all of Olympus there was no goddess more beautiful than Aphrodite. She was married, however, to the hideous and deformed hunchback Hephaestus. Though Hephaestus was the most skilled craftsmen in all of Gaia, Aphrodite was not always satisfied with his love. Soon she sought another. She was the epitome of femininity, and was thus drawn to Ares, who was excellent at all things masculine.
Aphrodite’s mother-in-law, Hera, became angered at the mistreatment of her son Hephaestus, so she told the Craftsmen God that his wife had not been faithful. Furious, the hunchbacked God then forged a golden net so strong that it had the power to ensnare even a divinity. He laid it on his own bed, and, when Ares came to his wife, he sprung his trap. He then hung the unfaithful pair in the Agora of Olympus for all to see.”
Zeus and Apollo came upon them in the morning, seeing also that all the other gods were staring at the trapped pair.
“Look at Ares there,” Apollo said, “naked, helpless and trapped in that golden net with Aphrodite.”
“I know,” Almighty Zeus replied while admiring Aphrodite’s form. “That lucky bastard.”
“Men often find the whys of the Universe to be opaque: If God is Love, why Polio? But I’ve found that the greatest of our philosophical questions are not difficult at all. They only appeared so, since we had always supposed that it was we who were the answer.”
—Endymion
“Don’t shit where you eat.”
—Ares
Benson, where’s he gone?
Carlisle’s wound bled freely. It had sapped his strength, and he had fallen—so now he crawled.
I have been dying for years.
His mind, unguarded, began remembering truths he had long denied.
He collapsed completely.
It hadn’t always been this way. He hadn’t always been damned. He used to have angels over his head. He remembered lying like this next to Anna McNamara in an Alabama cornfield. They weren’t married, and she needed to stay a virgin, so he sodomized her. He didn’t know what he was doing, not really. He was just a kid. No one had ever sat him down and told him in Bible school what sodomy was.
Except he knew.
He knew damn well he shouldn’t have been doing it. He didn’t even need the Good Book to tell him that. And it wasn’t like he stopped it there.
Stay awake. The Infidel is close behind me. I must keep going.
He caught his breath, shook his head to clear his memories and conscience, and then continued to crawl.
He looked back and saw his trail, left like a slug behind him, stretching back the five thousand or so feet to where he had first fallen, to where the Infidel had stabbed him.
Impossible.
“Can you hear me?” The woman’s voice was deep and sultry, the accent unrecognizable. “Can you hear me?”
Anna?
He meant to call it off with Anna McNamara, but he was going to make sure he did it the right way. He invited her over to his father’s farm and took her for a walk, right by that cornfield where he’d penetrated her and dirtied his manhood. He told her his mind, then. He told her exactly what God wanted for them.
She understood.
She to
ld him how right he was, how strong he was. How she wished she could fight the sins of the flesh like he could. He was going to teach her. He was going to help save her soul. He meant to. He really did.
That time he took her in the cunt.
She bled a muddy river, just like the one he was bleeding now.
He clutched at the stone as he tried to drag himself forward. He felt the grain of the stone slide beneath his slick fingertips.
No, Anna. You did it to yourself. You shouldn’t have tricked me into fucking you.
The Infidel was coming. Of course the Infidel was coming. Carlisle hadn’t stabbed himself in the side. But it was a woman, a shade, who approached instead. She stood over him for a few moments before finally kneeling next to him. She reached out and touched his shoulder. He found her touch comforting.
“I need you to remember for me, Carlisle.” The low feminine voice invaded his dreams. “I need for you to let me know what happened. Nod if you can hear me.”
He’d betrayed himself back then, and he knew it. Any fool could see that. It wasn’t too long before all the fools did. He was a fornicator. His father was furious when he found out. The man beat Carlisle’s ass good, too, wailing on him long through the night.
“My boy wants to knock some girl up, that’s fine,” his father said. “He wants to knock some girl up and sit down. That shit ain’t happening.”
Carlisle saw their eyes on him at church. Saw how the mothers hovered near their daughters when he was close. Saw how Meghan Thomson, the pretty little thing from his youth group, looked at him as if he was some kind of trash. Good girls wouldn’t talk to him anymore. Only the sluts wanted anything to do with him.
Sluts like Anna McNamara, and she wanted him something fierce. She called him all the time. Saying she was sorry. Saying that they would wait until they got married to do it again. But he knew what that slut wanted. He wasn’t falling for that shit again.
You can’t ever get that back, Joe Carlisle. Once you give that away to some no good whore you can’t ever give it to your wife. You can be a born again Christian, but there ain’t no such thing as a born again virgin. You do it once, and you’re a fornicator. A good for nothing, dirty-ass-motherfuckin’-fornicator.
Fornicator? Was that even a bad thing?
He hadn’t cared, right? Fuck them. He didn’t need them. He needed Jesus. He prayed all night. He prayed all day. He came to Pastor Burnak and laid it all out for him, stripping his soul as bare as babe at baptism. He didn’t hold no punches. He was a sinner. He was fallen. He was of the flesh. But oh my, sweet Lord on high, Jesus Christ, he was going to get better. He was going to reform. He was going to pray and repent. He was going to give God his whole heart and beg his righteous forgiveness.
But it wasn’t like everyone else could see that. They couldn’t know that he’d been the receptacle of divine mercy.
To them he was still a fornicator.
He’d halfway made it to redemption when Anna came to him. She’d been missing her period, she said. She’d been to the doctors, she said. It was dangerous for her to have the child, she said. They were going to give her an abortion.
An abortion?
She was going to go inside that body of hers to her godless womb and destroy that poor innocent soul that lay helpless within her? That kid hadn’t asked for its father to sin. Abortion? Hell no. Not if he had anything to say about it. If God hadn’t wanted that child to be born, he wouldn’t have had that child made. It was a sin to kill. She was going to be a murderer. If she died with that baby, then she died. That’s the way God wanted it, right? The doctors, they knew all about science and evolution and all that bullshit, but they didn’t have a God damn clue about the important things. About how God had a plan for them all. About how He was going to take care of Anna McNamara if she trusted Him. About how this world was nothing. This world was shit. Hell, they were all nothing. They might as well all be good for nothing, dirty-ass-motherfuckin’-fornicators. They had all fallen. Didn’t those doctors know that?
“They can be real book smart,” his preacher told him, “but they don’t have no common sense.”
Abortion? Abortion! You sinful no good slut. How dare you? She was going to have that child. She’d convinced him to do that dirty deed as surely as Eve had convinced Adam. She’d made him the object of hate and teasing at Lewis County High. He was through with sinning. They weren’t going to be murderers. He’d given himself to Jesus-motherfuckin’-Christ, didn’t she know? She was going to have that baby. She sure as hell was. She was going to have it just like God wanted her to.
They kept her at his father’s farm because Anna’s mother hadn’t wanted to hear any of it. She wanted to follow the doctor’s advice. She was just like them doctors. She knew a shit ton of shit but didn’t know a goddamned thing about common sense. Eternity was forever, motherfucker. Even a good for nothing fornicator knew that. She’d sent the police, but the Lewis county police department knew better. They weren’t going to take part of killing no baby.
They’d done the right thing. He knew that. They’d made the good choice. Even she knew it by the end. He knew she did. She didn’t regret it one bit. Not even as she was screaming on the operating table while the blood gushed out from between her legs in muddy rivers. Not even as the doctors swarmed all over her, trying to save her life. He’d seen the baby that came out of her, all three pounds of dead and soulless flesh.
He’d done the right thing, right? He’d followed the Bible, right? Them doctors didn’t know shit.
He could look into the eyes of Anna’s mother. He wasn’t wrong. He hadn’t killed her daughter. It was just Anna’s time to go. God had taken her. Better her daughter’s life than her daughter’s soul, right?
He could say that. He could go home and sleep at night.
Sure he could.
He wasn’t going to Hell, because Jesus owned his soul. He didn’t have anything to worry about. He’d read the Good Book.
Except he had gone to Hell.
He hadn’t paid enough attention, he knew now. He’d missed the couple of things that you could not do. He didn’t know what they were then, but he’d found out after he died.
“You can’t deny Christ,” Maab had told him. “After you’ve accepted Him, you can’t let Him go, or he’s gone forever. You can’t write blasphemy, either. Do it and you are forever damned.”
Says so, right in the God damned Book.
He’d known it, or should have known it. It was his fault for not paying enough attention in Sunday school.
He’d broken both rules with a single sentence that he’d doodled in his senior year English book while studying on the porch by his father’s cornfield.
Does God exist?
But for all the bullshit that field in Alabama had held for him it had everything that he wanted now. After all, he hadn’t stabbed himself in the God damned side.
He’d vowed it would be different in Hell. He wouldn’t be godless here. He’d do right, finally.
He couldn’t let himself die. Not again. Not when Maab had given him a task. Had given him someone to rescue. He only hoped the Infidel hadn’t gotten to the rest of Maab’s men, too.
Nod if you can hear me.
He’d fallen unconscious, he realized. He felt his own cold blood on his cheek. He nodded.
“Maab?” he asked weakly.
“My name is Lilith, Carlisle. I’m here to help you.”
She was circling him slowly, step by step. He fought to keep looking at her, but lifting his head from the endless pools of his own blood was too much for him.
“Christ, too,” he mumbled into the muddy liquid. “He was stabbed in the side.”
“Yes he was, my sweet.”
“I can’t stand.”
“Yes you can, my sweet. You need to come to me. Can’t you hear me singing?”
“The boy,” Carlisle said. “I need to save the boy.”
“Come find me, Carlisle.”
“How
?”
“This place isn’t real, remember. You died again. We’re in the same room, but we’re not close enough yet. Listen to me. Listen to me sing.”
I’ve heard this song.
Carlisle pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the blood that trailed out of his side.
I’ve known this song! I heard it on the wind! The boy’s mother! The song of angels!
He followed the music.
“I hate waiting,” Ellen said.
She sat alone with Rick, staring down at her plate. She felt guilty for not eating her helping of the dyitzu meat. Rick had seared it on the battery powered hotplates and added a powdered spice he said came from ground down hound bones. It had been garnished with hungerleaves and soaked in knowledge fruit vinegar. Her devilwheat meal had been sweetened with honey and spiced with some powder that was unknown to her. It tasted spectacular, it really did.
She just wasn’t hungry.
Her eyes wandered across the table to Rick.
His wooden spoon was working his own devilwheat meal, but there were long pauses between his bites. Most of his meat was untouched. He had cut some of it into peculiarly small pieces.
“It’s worse this time,” he said.
It must be worse for him. I barely know them. Galen and Turi are his entire life.
“Because they’re in the Carrion?”
“Morbid girl, why would you ask me such questions?”
She looked back down at her plate. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said shortly. “Yes. It’s worse because they’re in the Carrion. Turi would tell you that I don’t sleep well when Galen’s gone. Even when it’s just for a couple of days. Even when Hell is all but empty of devils. It’s stupid of me to worry about things I can’t control.”
He let his spoon go. It clattered against the marble plate, its head still buried in the meal.
Ellen smiled. “Galen told you that it was stupid to worry, didn’t he?”
Rick laughed and leaned back in his chair. “How did you know?”
“Sounds like him, not you,” she said. “And because he told me the same thing.”
Even Hell Has Knights (Hellsong) Page 29
