by Vox Day
That wasn’t so bad, Jami thought to herself as they drove past the tree-covered houses on Lake Owasso. Most of the homes here had been built a long time ago, and although a few had been knocked down and replaced by bigger houses with twelve-foot ceilings, three-car garages, and funky barn-style roofs, there was still a faded Sixties feeling to the neighborhood. Even the trees looked shaggy and a little bit run-down.
Alice Taylor was the name of the woman, who, according to Mr. Powell, really had been possessed, although, thank goodness, the demon had apparently left her before they arrived. No head-spinning, no vomit, just bad, brightly-colored modern art. Mrs. Taylor lived with her husband in one of the new houses on the lake; the inside was all modern and stark, and it almost didn’t feel like anyone real actually lived there. Jami didn’t like the house, or the woman. She got the feeling that Mrs. Taylor was normally a total bitch, although it was hard not to feel sorry for her today. The woman was totally embarrassed by what had happened to her the night before, she was more than a little freaked out, which was understandable, of course, and seemed to feel personally responsible for Father Keane’s death.
But Mrs. Taylor seemed to feel a lot better after Mr. Powell talked to her for a while, and although she burst into tears after Pastor Glen prayed over her, it was a good, things-are-better-now type of cry. Before they all left, Jami helped Mrs. Taylor make coffee for the men in the Taylor’s huge, Corian-countered kitchen and learned that the woman had two daughters not much older than her, both of whom were off at some college named saint something-or-other somewhere on the East Coast. Mrs. Taylor seemed to think Jami should know the name of the school, but she didn’t. Saint Jennifer, maybe? No, that wasn’t it.
Hearing about the woman’s daughters made the whole possession thing feel even stranger to Jami. Did it just happen like that? How could it happen to someone who was, if not particularly pleasant, pretty much on the normal side? Mrs. Taylor wasn’t a devil-worshipper or a closet Satanist, heck, she’d been at church that night after all. Maybe Mr. Powell was wrong, and she hadn’t been possessed at all. Wasn’t it possible that she’d just had, like, a temporary nervous breakdown?
Jami turned to Christopher, who hadn’t said much during the two hours they’d spent at the Taylors, and hadn’t spoken at all since they’d left. He was driving with his eyes locked on the road ahead of him, totally focused on the winding curves in a way that made Jami think he wasn’t seeing anything at all.
“So, what do you think?” she asked him. “Do you think Mr. Powell is right?”
“Hmmm?” Christopher made an noise without even opening his mouth.
“I said, did you think Mr. Powell is right?”
“Who?” Christopher glanced at her and raised his eyebrows. “Right?”
Jami groaned. He just never listened. Sometimes his inattention made her furious, but right now it was just irritating, like a blister on the side of your foot.
“Mr. Powell,” she repeated loudly and slowly. “Do you think that he is right in saying that Mrs. Taylor was possessed?”
“Oh, definitely,” Christopher told her, coming to a stop and flicking on his turn signal. “There’s no question about it.”
How could he be so sure? Was it just a boy thing, or what?
“I don’t see how you can just say that.” Jami looked out the window, and the cars passing on the other side of the road reaffirmed her sense of the natural. “I mean, you weren’t there, after all, and even if everything she says is true, there’s an explanation for all of it. I mean, yeah, there’s maybe some weird coincidences, but that could be all it is, a coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences,” Christopher replied lightly.
He grinned at her, and his grin faded when he saw she didn’t get his joke.
“No coincidences… Call of Cthulhu… never mind.”
“Thool? Oh, geek humor, right, always very funny, not!”
Christopher snorted.
“Not? I think that went out about, what, twenty years ago?”
“Oh, and you’re going to tell me about what’s in and what’s not, Mister I-don’t-like-girls-as-much-as-geekazoid-freak-toys?”
She accused him in a fairly nasty tone of voice, but she pinched him to show she didn’t really mean it. He responded by pretending she’d seriously hurt him and swerved the Explorer to make her scream.
“Knock it off, Chris! I’ll tell Dad if you don’t cut it out!”
“You will not,” he argued, although he quit messing with the steering wheel and straightened the vehicle out. “Who would drive you everywhere?”
“I’ll have my permit in five months,” she shot back. Then she realized he still hadn’t answered her question. “And anyhow, you still haven’t said how you know she was possessed.”
“Oh, that,” Christopher nodded thoughtfully, and he bit his upper lip. “Well, it’s pretty simple, but I guess there’s no reason you would have caught it. I know Ed and Pastor Glen didn’t. They couldn’t have understood the significance.”
“What?”
“Well, did you notice when Ed was asking her if there was anything she could remember, and she said she had the sense that she was only watching what was happening, that her body was being controlled kind of like a puppet?”
“Oh yeah.” Jami wrinkled her nose and shivered. Mrs. Taylor’s description of the experience was pretty creepy. “He asked her if she’d picked up any feeling of a name or, like, a person at the time.”
Her brother nodded, and guided the Explorer onto Highway 96.
“Persona was what he said, but yeah—”
“And she said Melissa, or Millicent, something like that. She said it was almost as if whatever it was wanted her to know.”
“I think she did want her to know.” Christopher gave her a serious look. “And her name isn’t Melissa, it’s Melusine. I know her.”
Jami didn’t know how to respond to her brother’s statement. You KNOW her? Her, as in, the demon? She replayed the sentence in her mind. Yeah, that was where the pronouns went.
“Let me get this straight,” she asked for confirmation, making sure she hadn’t misunderstood what he’d just said. “You’re saying it was some kind of girl-demon that possessed Mrs. Taylor, and you know her?”
“Yep,” Christopher said, biting his lip again. “Afraid so. That’s why I think their job here is probably done for now, the Fallen, that is. If they wanted to kill more preachers, more Christians, they’d never have let her leave her name with Mrs. Taylor. She’s still pissed at me, I’ll bet, so she told Mrs. Taylor in order to rub it in my face. God used you to save Pastor Walters, but they still knocked off three of their four targets. I’ll bet they were never after us. She knew Mariel wouldn’t let her get away with using that pickup driver to wipe us out.”
Jami stared out the window, as a bizarre thought captured her imagination. She, Christopher said, she. She. He said it in the same way that her friends talked about their ex-boyfriends, with capital letters you could distinctly hear. And there was another thing, seemingly insignificant, until now. She and Holli had set Christopher up with April Evenson a few weeks ago, and they’d both been amused when April reported that their brother was a good kisser. Natural talent, must run in the family, they’d joked, since Christopher wasn’t exactly known for being the Don Juan of the tenth grade. Now, she wondered, just who had been giving him lessons?
“Christopher?” she asked suspiciously. “There’s a lot you haven’t told us about what happened to you on Ahura Azdha, isn’t there.”
“Mm hmm.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
There was a long silence which hung uncomfortably between the two of them. Finally, Jami could resist no longer, and gave into the temptation. She had to know.
“Christopher?”
“Yeah?”
“Was she pretty?”
Jami watched closely as Christopher looked at her. Her brother wa
s obviously taken off guard by the question, and Jami was surprised at the depth of the emotion she saw in his eyes. There was a confusing swirl of torment, guilt, hatred, and hunger all intertwined, and despite her burning curiosity about this mysterious fallen angel, she started to wish she hadn’t asked about her. It bothered her to know she’d upset him, and it worried her to think that her brother might actually have some kind of feelings for what was, after all, a force of incarnate evil.
“You have no idea,” he finally admitted, confirming her fears.
Chapter 13
Akkadian Psycho
Ninety-nine out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in the prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident, but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
—William Torrey Harris, The Philosophy of Education
Rousseau was a moron, Brien concluded as he finally gave up trying to make any sense of the dead French dude’s philosophy. What was up with this whole ‘children as noble savages’ thing anyhow? The guy had clearly never had kids of his own, and he’d certainly never seen what life was like in an American high school. Lord of the fucking flies! The question was, why was it necessary to write a report on anything written by such an obvious idiot?
Brien shook his head, watching from the safety of an out-of-the-way beanbag chair as one oversized sophomore wearing a letter jacket adorned with one lousy patch, football, of course, shoved a scrawny little ninth-grader into the big wooden card catalogue. The ninth-grader’s shoulder struck the corner squarely, and hard, and his spectacled face screwed up with pain. The kid was learning, though, because he didn’t cry out, or worse, try to say anything back to his attacker. He simply gathered himself and walked away, rubbing at his injured shoulder.
Okay, Jean-Jacques had the savage part right, it was just the nobility that was missing. Beelzebub was definitely more like it, that, or maybe Darwin and his survival of the fittest. But if intelligence was what made man superior to the other animals, why was it that size and strength were the only things that determined who the fittest were here? That wasn’t quite right, he corrected himself, you can’t forget looks and popularity. Unfortunately, he’d pretty much missed out on all four, damn the luck.
Where was Tessa right now, he wondered. It was fifth hour, so she must be in gym class. He’d thought of changing his schedule around at the beginning of the year, in order to get into that class, but that would have meant losing two straight lunch periods in a row, and besides, Derek wouldn’t have liked it either. It would have been nice to get to see her wearing shorts every day, then again, considering how he managed to embarrass himself about once a week in gym, it was probably for the best that he hadn’t made the switch.
He saw Derek enter the library from the far side of the room, and even from here, he could sense his friend’s excitement. I wonder what’s up with him? He took the opportunity to stretch as he stood up, and waved his hands to draw Derek’s attention. The black-haired boy’s eyes lighted up as he recognized Brien, and he half-walked, half-ran across the large room, drawing a nasty glare from one of the elderly librarians.
“Dude, you’ve got to see this!” he whispered excitedly as he pushed an orange paper folder into Brien’s hands. “I can’t believe it—it’s so cool!”
Brien looked down at the unmarked folder, then back at Derek.
“Does this have anything to do with that stuff that came out of your printer? I thought it was just random gibberish. It didn’t make any sense, you said so yourself!”
Derek’s dark eyes danced as he smiled mysteriously.
“Maybe, maybe. Just look at it and see for yourself. Then tell me what you think.”
To the cities of the country … I went down. The city of Perria and the city of Sitivarya, its strongholds, together with twenty-two cities which depended upon it, I threw down, dug up and burned with fire. Exceeding fear over them I cast. To the cities of the Parthians he went. The cities of Bustu, Sala-khamanu and Cini-khamanu, fortified towns, together with twenty-three cities which depended upon them I captured. Their fighting-men I slew. Their spoil I carried off. To the country of Zimri I went down. Exceeding fear … overwhelmed them. Their cities they abandoned. To inaccessible mountains they ascended. Two hundred and fifty of their cities I threw down, dug up and burned with fire.
Brien looked up from the page of what he assumed had to be some kind of translation.
“Well, it’s always nice to hear that somebody enjoys his job. Who is this guy? Attila the Hun?”
Derek yawned and rubbed at his face, and for the first time today, Brien realized that his friend was short on sleep. His eyes were blood-shot, his hair didn’t appear to have been washed, and under his Georgetown sweatshirt was the light blue Astrosmash t-shirt he’d been wearing the day before.
“No, he’s a little earlier than that,” he yawned again. “Akkadian psycho, you might say.”
“Ha ha, very funny,” Brien said, recognizing the reference to one of Derek’s favorite books.
“No, I’m serious. That stuff that printed out, it wasn’t gibberish, it was Akkadian.”
“Shut up, it was not.”
Brien wasn’t exactly sure what Akkadian was, some old African or Arabic language, he thought, but whatever it was, it couldn’t have used the letters he’d seen on those pages yesterday because any ancient language would have been around a long time before the modern alphabet appeared.
“That’s bullshit, it can’t be that old! I saw it, and it used our alphabet.”
“No, it’s just that the text was romanized,” Derek insisted. “Updated so we could read it. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”
“You? How would you know, you don’t know jack about languages. You practically failed Spanish!”
“Yeah, well, last night I was looking at it, and I was thinking it reminded me of the Sumerian in the Necronomicon—”
Brien held up his hand.
“Wait up. The Necronomicon? The big scary book from Lovecraft’s stories? It’s fiction, dude.”
“I don’t know, someone must have made one up later, you know, inspired by the stories, or maybe Lovecraft didn’t invent it after all. Either way, I’ve seen spells that are supposed to be taken from it on the Web. That doesn’t matter, though, that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say is, the words looked familiar, okay, so I checked out this Sumerian language site that’s run by the University of Chicago. It turns out, there’s this, like, family of languages which includes Babylonian and Akkadian, as well as Sumerian. They’re all from the Mid-East, in the area that used to be Assyria and Babylon.”
Brien looked down at the words. They were harsh and intense, and, he had to admit, full of an implacable attitude that was kind of scary, even when seen from the safety of a couple thousand years later.
“It was pretty obvious that the language was Akkadian once I compared them all,” Derek continued. “And the web site had a link to this professor at the U, so I blew off everything this morning and called the guy, then drove down to Dinkytown to meet him.”
Derek grinned. “He was really curious where I’d gotten this from, but I didn’t tell him because he wouldn’t have believed me anyways. But the thing is, I was right, and it was Akkadian. Not only that, but he even told me where the text came from!”
Brien wanted to be skeptical, but he was finding it hard in the face of Derek’s enthusiasm and what appeared to be actual evidence.
“Yeah?”
“The Black Obilisk,” Derek informed him proudly. “It’s this huge piece of marble that archeologists found in Iraq, and took to the British museum. And somebody carved these words in stone almost three thousand years ago to record the deeds of this King Shalmaneser. Shalmaneser Two, to be exact. He was kind of like a prehistoric Hitler, or something. Total badass.”
“Yeah, he sounds like he kicked some butt all right.” Brien assumed a th
eatrical pose. “And then I threw down this city and I burned that one—”
“Punk motherfucker!” Derek punched his palm emphatically. “He was pretty harsh, from what the professor had to say. Used to leave big piles of skulls outside the cities and stuff. But here’s what’s really interesting. According to the professor, the first eight pages were taken right from the Obilisk, but the last four pages weren’t. He didn’t recognize what other source they were from right away, so he couldn’t give me a translation, but he said he’d translate it today himself if he couldn’t find a matching source. He said he’d email it to me as soon as he had it.”
Hmmm. That was interesting. Brien wondered where he could get a copy of this Obilisk thing. Certainly not in this library, which didn’t carry much besides Stephen King and Harry Potter. It looked as if the Obilisk was a little monotonous to make very good reading, but he found the historical connection to be fascinating, and he was extremely curious about anything that might provide a clue to yesterday’s computer weirdness. Could this have been some new kind of fancy virus put together by a hacker on an Assyrian kick? Maybe, but if that was the case, then how had the guy programmed that trick with the speakers? A printout could be delayed, that was no mystery, but was it really possible for a computer shutdown to trigger the printer like that? Brien didn’t know.
“Can I get a copy of this?” Brien raised the orange folder. “I’m thinking maybe your machine’s got a virus, and reading this might help me figure out what the guy who wrote it was thinking.” Brien had written a few viruses himself, but he’d never let them loose from his machine. They’d all been very basic, though, and this, if it was really a virus, was really something else!
“It’s yours,” Derek patted his backpack. “I’ve got another copy in here, and I’ll email you whatever that professor sends me when I get it. So, anyhow, where do you want to get lunch?”
