Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  She lifted me and danced with me, over me, under me, around me, and laughed the entire time.

  When dawn broke, she vanished with the darkness but didn’t take any of the pain away.

  I laid in bed, sick for the next two hours, until Tommy came to my door to check on me. I put on my game face and pretended I was fine, took a quick shower and made my rounds across the house the way I did every morning.

  The troops fell in line but they could all tell I wasn’t as sharp as usual. Every time I passed a mirrored surface I saw the agony alive just beneath my drawn features and ashen skin. My belly was broiling like the fiery sword of St. Michael had skewered me.

  I had a late lunch with Gina. She asked if I’d go visit her father’s grave with her and I said yes. I drove her out to the cemetery and when I bent to pray I grunted in pain and almost let out a yowl.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I said, “Heartburn.”

  On the way back home we hit a red light and I turned and stared at the side of her lovely face and thought she would make a wonderful wife and mother someday. Whether she took over the family business or fled from it, she would be more like Frankie than she’d probably ever know. She’d be able to do things that would stagger another person, and she’d still have the love of the neighborhood and the church and her children.

  I dropped her off at the estate, parked, and walked over to the convent. Before I’d taken two steps through the front door, Sister Maeve was on the phone. I waited for the inevitable. A minute later I heard Mother Superior’s footsteps ricocheting all around the place like wild gunshots.

  She rounded the corner and the look on her face actually made me wince. She said, “Your visit the other day disturbed Sister Abigail greatly. She hasn’t been very lucid since.”

  I knew that if I was burning then so was my mother.

  I said, “My mother was greatly disturbed long before the other day.”

  “You always did have a mouth on you.”

  “I need to see her again.”

  “Absolutely not. The fevers are back. She’s worse now than she has been in years.”

  I didn’t like the idea of bulling my way into a convent and running roughshod over a bunch of nuns, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t do it.

  “People are dying,” I said.

  “People are always dying around you.”

  “True enough. But this is different. This is—” I hunted for a way to finish my sentence without sounding deranged or foolish.

  “You’re not groping for the word evil surely?” Mother Superior said.

  “I was going to say supernatural or occult.”

  She actually scoffed. She squared her shoulders. She was a powerful lady. I remembered the damage she could do with a yardstick. She held her chin up proudly. Most priests and nuns I’d met had chosen the cloistered life out of tradition and cultural legacy rather than any true spiritual calling. They were as down to earth as anyone else. Mother Superior more than most. She taught Physics. She was, at heart, as much a scientist as anything else.

  But she also knew, in her heart, that the otherworldly truly did exist. She’d seen it. She’d been visited by it. She’d lived with it as it existed inside of my own mother. Sister Abigail scared the hell out of everybody.

  I left her there and took the stairs two at a time until I hit the fourth-floor landing. This time, the two young nuns were seated on either side of my mother’s door. They looked harried and frightened. I knew it was going to be bad then.

  “La Strega,” my mother said, her habit drenched with sweat, her gaze a million miles off.

  More talk of witches.

  “Who is it? Who’s doing this to us?”

  “Your father always did like blondes. Your grandfather too. It’s in your blood. You can’t help yourself. She’s going to drink you alive.”

  “Ma, try to hold on. Try to help me.”

  She took my hand and pressed it over her lips. She kissed my hand. She cried across my knuckles. I tried to be stone but the pain made me spasm and squirm. I almost dropped to the floor. I held on and she held me. She folded my fingers so that I was cupping her tears. She touched me on the wrist and whispered, “Infection.”

  Then she passed out.

  I did too, for maybe a minute. I awoke trembling and cold. My mother’s brow was unfurrowed and she seemed almost content for the moment. I carried her to her bed again. I glanced around in a fog. I stared at the saints and martyrs and knew that God himself had His eyes on me. I hadn’t done a full rosary since I was thirteen. I did one now, reciting the Hail Mary over and over, and then emphasizing the Lord’s Prayer every tenth prayer.

  The answer was here, right in front of me, but I was too stupid to see it. I wasn’t going to figure anything out. I wasn’t going to be able to survive the demon indefinitely. This wasn’t going to end well. Because of my lack of insight I wasn’t going to be able to keep my promise and protect la famiglia.

  Again, the maddening love of my deepest desire came to me in the night, blonde and sensual, voluptuous and glamorous, and with it arrived the heat from a billion viewings of her movies, all the male leering and ogling of her posters and centerfolds. I was the vessel for all the haunted, lonely men from around the world through the last six decades. My father’s fantasies of Jayne were as much a part of me now as they ever were of him. I was a red-blooded American male who yearned for perfection, and my goddess brought it to me in the wolf’s hour of the bleakest night.

  “I’m yours,” she said.

  I burned and rolled out of bed and onto the throw rug and hid myself up against the floorboards, her flesh on me no different than licking flames. Smoke choked my lungs. I opened my mouth to speak and steam escaped.

  I groaned. I snarled. I gnashed my teeth as the goddess set upon me. She tore at me like a ravenous animal, a voracious lover, her fangs and claws as ancient as the stone dagger that Abraham raised above Isaac’s throat. The goddess fell on top of me, tittering and snorting like a beast.

  “I’m yours,” she repeated. “I exist for you and you alone. Take me. You’re on fire for me. I love you."

  A part of me almost wanted to believe it.

  I turned my face away and nearly wept.

  Right after dawn, as my flesh began to cool, Gina visited my room, undid her robe and slid into bed with me. I hadn’t slept a second and felt like I never would again. My brain was still boiling. My flesh stung as if ten thousand wasps had set on me. The jostling of the mattress made me stifle a moan. I let out an angry growl.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She brought her lips to my back and jerked away as if in pain. She laid her hand flat between my shoulders and said, “You’re burning up. Are you sick?”

  “I think I caught the bug.”

  She didn’t know what to do next. She didn’t want to catch a virus but didn’t want to be left alone. It was wrong of me to play against her feelings, what little she actually had for me, but it was pointless to try to make love to her after being visited by the goddess.

  “Maybe you should go back to your room,” I told her. “I don’t want you to catch what I have.”

  “I need to be held,” she said. “Will you do that for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you any closer to finding who murdered my father?”

  “I already told you that I’d let you know and let you watch.”

  I wrapped my arms around her and agony roared through my chest. My hands were so weak I couldn’t even give her a valid hug. My muscles were nearly useless. We spooned and I pressed my lips to the back of her neck and tried to feel the old lust and want that I used to have for her. But there was nothing there. She gripped my hands and forced me to tighten my embrace. She sighed. After a while she let out a bitter little laugh and fell asleep.

  Two days later I took the subway into Manhattan and made my way through the West Village. There was an
actual magic store bookended between a computer shop and an Iranian restaurant. It didn’t sell magic tricks like disappearing ink or top hats with bunnies, but instead was a place where you could actually find items for rituals of witchcraft. It was called The Weird Sisters.

  I hadn’t finished high school or attended college but I still got the reference. The three witches in Macbeth were called the Weird Sisters. It might be my best shot at getting some answers or making sense out of my mother’s warnings.

  I stepped into the shop and a faint stink assailed me. I knew it well. It was the unmistakable smell of decomposition.

  The store was packed with shelves stuffed with jars, bottles, and other containers filled with the likes of foxfire, salamander glands, dried mistletoe, salt, incense, goofer dust (graveyard), goofer dust (crematorium), dried doves’ blood, owl liver, bats’ wings, rooster hearts, red peppers. I wondered if they threw it around or made stew with it.

  There were ceremonial daggers, chalices, and candles of every color on display. I looked for eye of newt but didn’t see it anywhere. I wondered if any of this was real. I thought if it was then animal activists would be down here protesting the place night and day. I wondered if I was just on another wrong trail. I thought about my enemy out there holding a glass jar with a hopping black bug that was Cole Portman’s immortal soul.

  Other shelves contained reference materials, maps of haunted towns, houses, and castles. I picked up a book called Witches and Witchcraft and paged through it. Leaning against a case full of different-colored chalks that aided you in drawing pentagrams and circles of protection, I read about scrying mirrors, divination, the power of names, drawing down the moon, numerology, the Sabbat, how a person’s true name has power over him, and how witches sometimes danced around a lightning-struck dead coven tree.

  Again I thought of an image that had filled my mind the day of my mother’s attack. A tree with blood splashing on it.

  I kept reading and came across an article on succubi, demons in female shape that prey on men, raised by powerful sorcery.

  A young woman of maybe twenty-five, who looked more girl next door than anyone who worked in a shop that sold rooster hearts and crematorium dust, appeared. She said, “I’m sorry if I kept you waiting. I didn’t hear you come in. I was in the back room. Can I help you?”

  I wondered what happened in the back room. I put the book back and said, “I have no idea. It depends, I suppose. Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”

  It made her smile. It was a pretty smile that reached her eyes. “You’ve never been in a store like ours before.”

  “No.”

  “How did you find us?”

  I had worked my way through most of the street informants and then started aiming myself at the Haitian influx that had suddenly populated the fringes of Bed-Stuy. I asked about voodoo dolls and zombies, and most of the dealers and thieves looked at me like I was insane. But one didn’t. One started babbling and praying to Baron Samedi. He told me of shacks in Port-Au-Prince where you could buy potions to kill from afar or make someone love you. It struck a chord. We were in the greatest city on the face of the earth. Surely someone sold such things in Manhattan.

  I ignored her question, glanced around, and thought of New York real estate. I imagined just how much of this stuff the owner had to push every day just to make the rent. How many hundreds or even thousands of urbanites were sitting around right now drawing circles of protection around themselves in fifth-floor walk-ups.

  “My name’s Kendra,” she said.

  “Names have power.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  She had green eyes flecked with gold, blonde hair fixed into a bouncing pony tail. She was a cheerleader type. I could imagine her on the sidelines doing kicks and clapping as the QB sprinted toward the end zone. But her clothing wrecked the girl-next-door image. She wore a wrap covered with the Weird Sisters logo, three witches with their backs to a boiling cauldron. One a crone, one a kind of buxomly mother figure, and the last a seductive teen. On her blouse were ancient symbols, inscriptions in Latin, and verses from the Bible. Her leggings were black with bright white star constellations and signs of the zodiac.

  “How about making a man age fifty years almost overnight?” I asked. “Which one of these books will show me how to do that?”

  It made Kendra’s face close up like a fist. “No one’s ever asked before.”

  “What about stealing a soul? Where can I learn how to poach a man’s shadow, his soul, and stick it in a jar and watch it writhe in torment?”

  She set her lips and her expression shifted to sadness, interest, and futility. “I can’t help you with anything like that. The things we sell are mostly for wiccan rites, pagan beliefs that are in keeping with the harmony of the earth.”

  The frustration and anger had welled in me. I hadn’t slept in days. I was weak and my resolve was waning. “Who can send the world’s most perfect woman to love a man to death? Does that take some salamander glands or doves’ blood?”

  She glanced around but we were alone in the store. She stepped in closer to me, her eyes growing more serious. The dimples faded. Her chin came up.

  “Something’s happened to you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She looked deep into my face and saw something there that put a real fear into her. “You were talking about yourself. You’re the one who’s afflicted.”

  I nodded.

  “You admit it easily. A lot of people can’t. Their rationale refuses to accept such possibilities. They think they’re imagining things or going crazy. But you, you believe.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve had some past experience with the occult.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that so I didn’t say anything. I nodded again.

  “The world’s most perfect woman loving a man to death isn’t a woman at all,” Kendra said. “You must realize that. It’s a succubus. A demonic entity that drains the life from its intended victim. I can see the stress and strain in your features. You’ve been trying to fight it, haven’t you?” Before I could answer she continued. “Good. You’re strong, very strong. You still have a little time left.”

  “What’s the best way I can use that time?” I asked. “How do I find whoever is doing this to me?” I ran my hands over the spines of the books. “Do you know of anyone who is capable of this kind of thing?”

  I sounded almost whiny. The sickness was throwing me off balance. I knew better than most people that anyone was capable of almost anything. Looking at me, could this girl guess what I did for a living?

  “The question is, do you know anyone with that capacity?” Kendra said. “Who hates you that much?”

  “It’s a long list.”

  “It’s a short one, a very short one. You have to understand that there’s a balance,” she explained. “Where there’s grace, there’s depravity. Where there’s salvation, there’s Satan. Most of the practitioners will use these rituals and elements for peaceful and serene reasons. But some will use them for evil means. There’s no way to tell who will do what. Whatever is in their hearts will lead them to taking positive energy and bending it toward ill. The tools aren’t bad in and of themselves, but a corrupt intention will use them to an immoral end.”

  "Have you met anyone here like that? Anyone who could do the things I mentioned?”

  “Everyone has the capacity. You don’t have to raise a demon. All you have to do is hate enough and focus enough and a demon will find you. The devil always knows your heart.”

  Now that felt very true to me.

  “So what can I do?” I asked.

  “There are prayers and spells of protection.”

  “Care to whip up a few?”

  She rubbed the back of her hand against her nose. It was a cute nose. She sort of smiled again, trying to remain amiable despite the heaviness of our discussion. I wondered what had diverted her into working in a shop like this when she should be at some booth on
Coney Island letting the boys ogle and flirt with her and buy her cotton candy. Because of my own lost childhood I had romanticized notions of the world where pretty girls like this were concerned. I hoped I hadn’t brought a curse to her front step.

  She said, “Maybe I can help.”

  “I can pay you.”

  “Don’t taint my efforts. Let my willingness be pure.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned and moved up the aisle toward the back of the store, her ponytail swaying. I thought if I had grown up next door to her or someone like her my life would have taken a very different course. But that was probably nothing more than wishful thinking.

  I took another book off the shelf and continued reading, learning about how pagan rites could be either white—right-handed, clockwise, righteous, and graceful—or black—left-handed, widdershins or counter-clockwise, flying in the face of the natural order of the world.

  The electronic bell signaled that someone had stepped into the store.

  I’d made another mistake and left myself out in the open, too close to the front entrance. In the center of the aisle there was nowhere for me to run as Chaz Argento walked up with two soldiers who already had their weapons drawn. I’d never seen either of them before, which told me Chaz had farmed out for hard hitters loyal only to him and not to the Ganucci family. He was making his play.

  I shut the book, put it back on the shelf, and our eyes met. Chaz let out a slow humorless smile.

  He gestured for one of his legbreakers to search the store. The muscle-bound, no-neck thug stalked off and I thought I had to move now, while they were split up. I wasn’t packing a gun but I had my knife. As a rule you didn’t throw blades, but I was good enough that I could hit the remaining soldier’s barrel chest. The knife wouldn’t kill him, but it would hurt and scare him, and the blood would spook Chaz. I might just have enough of a diversion so that I could wade in and do some real damage.

  Except it didn’t happen. Kendra had already been on her way back to me and was only a few feet up the next aisle. The thug returned with her three seconds later, one huge hand clamping her shoulder.