The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  He reached for his shirt pocket and extracted a red and blue envelope, folded in half. He unfolded it and withdrew the single sheet of paper from within, which he also unfolded and presented to Jojo. Scrawled there in hastily written capital letters were just two short sentences:

  get rid of it. i will not tell you again.

  There was no date and no signature.

  “It frightened him,” Jojo said.

  “I should say so.

  “Why? What did he know about it?”

  “I wrote him back, lied and said I threw it in the Arkansas River. Only then did he tell me what it is, or what he thought it was. He called it Lucifer’s Sigil.”

  “Lucifer? You mean like the Devil?”

  “Not exactly, no. Of course, that’s the typical connection you would make—it’s what I thought, too. Here I was with the sigil in one hand and my friend’s letter in the other, thinking ‘Good God, I’ve stumbled onto something Satanic!’ But no, it’s nothing quite that prosaic.

  “You see, Mr. Walker, Lucifer is a bastardized word that comes from the Latin phrase lucern ferre, which means light-bearer.”

  “Seems the opposite of what most folks would say about the Devil,” Jojo surmised.

  “It hasn’t anything to do with that. It has to do with Venus.”

  “The goddess?”

  “No, the planet. Upon seeing it in the dawn sky it was called the Morning Star, or lucern ferre, the Light Bearer. In Greek it’s called Heōsphoros. There are myths associated with it, deities that personify the heavenly bodies and all that. Venus always captured the imaginations of the ancients because it is brighter than any of the stars, particularly when it takes the form of the Morning Star.”

  “I feel like I oughta be taking notes, Professor,” Jojo said as he got another cigarette going. He wished he had something to Irish up the unpleasant instant coffee in front of him. “Maybe some of this claptrap might start to make a little sense if I did.”

  “Just listen,” Shannon commanded. “The appearance of the Morning Star isn’t an everyday occurrence; it only happens once every couple of years. Well, every five hundred and eighty four days, to be precise. On one day in every cycle it overtakes the Earth, becoming brightly visible at dawn—lucern ferre. The morning of Lucifer, if you like.”

  “No, I don’t like, Shannon,” Jojo growled. “I don’t like at all. All I’m getting from you is an astronomy lesson when what I want to know is what the hell is going on my town, goddamnit!”

  Reverend Shannon smiled sadly and placed his hands on the table, palms down.

  “You’re not a very patient man, Mr. Walker,” he said.

  “And for Chrissakes, call me Jojo, will you?”

  Shannon smiled thinly.

  “Do you know what a sigil is?”

  “Tell me,” Jojo said with a sigh.

  “It’s a symbol, obviously,” Shannon said, touching the object again. “More than one symbol, really—an ordered series of symbols. It’s a sort of code, or message, that translates to a particular magical purpose for the bearer. Medieval grimoires are full of them, as it happens: Liber Razielis Archangeli, Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh . . .”

  Jojo’s eyes shifted to the leather book. Noticing the look, the reverend nodded. “Like that one, yes,” he said. “That, Jojo, is the Lemegton. The Lesser Key of Solomon.”

  “Where did you get it? Oh, wait . . .”

  “Yes, you know. It was in the ground, in the cellar.”

  “With the sigil.”

  “Right. I figured out fairly quickly that the sigil was going to tell me something that was in that book, but which couldn’t be read without it. Think of it like the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring.”

  Jojo chuckled. “Or the Captain Midnight pocket decoder, huh?”

  “Basically, yes. You see, Lucifer’s Sigil works like a map, but you have to know how to read it or it’s pointless.”

  “And this book tells you how to do that?”

  “Consider it a symbiotic relationship of sorts.”

  Jojo wrinkled his nose.

  “For the purposes of our discussion, one cannot be understood without the other.” The reverend drew in a deep breath and held it in his chest for a moment. When he exhaled, he gave Jojo a serious look and said, “I sense you might not believe a word I’m telling you. Magic isn’t exactly something you can accept on face value.”

  “If this was yesterday I’d think you’re a lunatic, rev. Today, I’m a lunatic, too.”

  “All right then, have a look at this.”

  Reverend Shannon dragged the volume toward him and gingerly opened it up.

  “What we have here is little more than a collection of conjurations, in the middle of which is a list of the seventy-two chief spirits, or demons. They’re broken into rank and seals, each subdivision associated with a particular planet. . . .”

  “Planet,” Jojo interjected. “Venus.”

  “Right. Naturally, it can’t be too easy, and the entities associated with Venus just so happen to belong to the longest list.” He found the pages containing the lists and ran a fingertip down to the line he wanted. “Twenty-three of them—more than a third of the whole list. They’re sealed with copper and summoned by sandalwood. These are the infernal dukes, according to the text.

  “I spent months going through them, cross-referencing with all the conjurations, sitting amidst piles of Latin and Greek and Hebrew texts that fill my little library now. Here’s what I figured out: the spirit that concerns us is called Focalor. As far as the Lemegton is concerned, Focalor seems more or less indistinct from most of the other demons, but it’s the name that I hit upon. The name is an anagram for rofocal, which refers to Lucifuge Rofocale, one of the Hell’s three arch-demons. The name means ‘he who flees from the light.’”

  “The Light-Bearer and the Light-Fleer,” Jojo muttered.

  “Eternally opposing forces, sure. Like a pair of magnets with different polarizations, except that’s science, and this is magic.”

  “So you thought it might be a good idea to bring them together.”

  “According to the sigils and their explanations in the book, Focalor’s element is water and his direction in North. There is a stream in the woods back there, back behind the church. I went there—”

  “—on the Morning Star,” Jojo said.

  “Yes. Venus was radiant at dawn, Jojo. I pointed the sigil north, across the stream, and recited the incantation for the summoning of Focalor.”

  “You went into the woods to summon a devil?”

  “No, not at all—you’re not listening to me. When I started all this, I thought it was about devils, too. I fell into it to prove to myself that there wasn’t any such thing as the Devil. No Hell, no Heaven. I wanted to justify my complete loss of faith. But that isn’t what this is about. This isn’t theology, Jojo; it’s magic. Magic operates on an entirely separate set of rules, it’s all about symbolism and ciphers.”

  Nodding, Jojo sat back in his chair. “In other words, you can’t just say, ‘Hey magic, make a rabbit come out of this empty hat.’ You have to say ‘abracadabra’ or it doesn’t work.”

  “Now you’re getting it. None of this has anything to do with demonology, or theology, or faith of any kind. This is sorcery, Jojo, plain and simple. My original intent was wiped away, no longer pertinent. But by then . . .”

  “So what happened, rev? What did you do out there?”

  “I conducted the result of my research. I went at the right time, to the right place. I arranged the sigil and read the conjuration aloud. I do invoke and conjure thee, O Spirit Focalor, and so forth.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Absolutely nothing happened. The text says if the spirit doesn’t come, to repeat the invocation, and to recite others as prescribed. I did all of that, but like I said .
. .”

  “. . . magic never means what it says.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Except something did happen, didn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t have known it then, but yes, of course. And hell, maybe a devil did come through. After all, that’s when Barker Davis came to town.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Fucking Mortimer,” Sheriff Ernie Rich grouched as he stomped on the accelerator and sped away from the town centre. “Pardon my Polish, ladies,” he added a moment after.

  “He was at the show,” Margie said quietly, almost apologetically, from the backseat. “The midnight picture show. He was there with us.”

  “I’d wager every one of those crazies back there saw it either tonight or last night,” Theodora put in. “Maybe the Legion of Decency is onto something with these sex pictures. They really do warp minds.”

  “Hell’s bells,” Rich spat. “That dumb sumbitch Mortimer was crazy before he saw that picture. I don’t reckon I ever rode with him driving when he didn’t deliberately run down a possum.”

  “Then the show made him worse?” Margie asked.

  “The show made him dead, if that’s what done it,” Rich said. “Came pounding at my door in the middle of the night, screaming his fool head off about his dead mama. Said some right nasty things that ain’t fit to repeat, but I let him in to talk it through. I expect that makes me a fool, too.”

  “Did you . . . did you kill him, Mr. Rich?” Charles wanted to know.

  “Yeah, Charles. I killed him, all right. But not before the bastard took to shooting up my living room with his sidearm. He came to put a bullet in my head—my own deputy! And he said there were more like him coming, that folks like him were going to have folks like us underground before a week was over and done. That’s how come I jumped in my car and got to patrolling. Couldn’t take the chance, you know.”

  “We’re awful glad you did, Sheriff,” Theodora said. “You really saved our hides back there.”

  “If I was to go and let people get killed by loonies in the streets, I’d have to go look for another job come election time. Folks tend to take a dim view of sheriffs who sleep through things like that.”

  He offered a sardonic smile, which Theodora returned.

  “I don’t understand,” Charles said, looking to Margie beside him. “Didn’t you and Mrs. Cavanaugh see that same picture too?”

  “There was no ‘same’ picture,” Theodora countered. “Not from what I can tell. Mine was all about my past, my personal history.”

  “Mine was about my daddy,” Margie said.

  “Damnit,” Rich groused. “I sure as hell wish I knew what was going on around here.”

  “Hopefully that’s what we’re going to find out at the Shannon place,” Theodora said.

  Margie lowered her head and shrank into herself. She loved her father the way a daughter should, despite the claims insinuated by the midnight picture show. Still, she was being forced to confront a distance between them that had begun with her puberty and only widened ever since. She was pressed to admit that she hardly knew the man anymore, and to her that meant anything was possible. It was just as possible that the picture, or dream, or psychic attack if that’s what it was, was lying to her. She could not imagine where those images came from, whether from her own mind or some kind of hypnosis performed by the stranger who brought all this misery to her home, but whatever the source, she had to know the truth behind them.

  Rich tore off the smooth macadam and the police car jounced on the bumpy dirt road stretching endlessly away from the centre of town. It occurred to Theodora, as she peered farther down the road than the headlamps illuminated, that she had no idea how far the road went. It could have run clear to the ocean for all she knew, and she’d have believed it. Then again, Theodora had never actually seen the ocean except for scenes in films, and those were just films. Maybe the road abruptly ended someplace down the way, just stopped and dropped off into nothingness, pure dark, empty space. The end of the world.

  She thought it would be just as well.

  “What’s your stake in this mess, Charles?” the sheriff piped up, shattering the women’s respective reveries.

  “I just want to see my friend’s all right. I guess I only got the one, so it’s important.”

  “You mean the reverend?”

  “No, sir. I mean Jojo Walker.”

  Ernie Rich gave a long, low groan.

  “I should’ve known he was mixed up in this shit,” he said.

  Jim Shannon rose and went over to the window to push it shut. He rubbed his hands against his arms and shivered.

  “Cold in July,” he said. “That’s something new.”

  “What is he?” Jojo asked sharply.

  “Who, Davis? I don’t know, exactly. Just a man, would be my guess, but a man with access to extraordinary power.”

  “The projectionist at the Palace, this young kid, he told us the midnight show was just some old silent footage of a corny sideshow magician.”

  “Hang on,” Shannon said, shaking his head. “What midnight show?”

  “After the picture, that sex show, Davis has this midnight picture going. Strictly invite only, though who knows how they chose the invitees. He’s got this fake nurse with him, a hot little number, and she’s the one passes out the tickets.”

  “And you’ve seen this picture?”

  “I’m just about the only one in town who hasn’t. Davis summoned me to his office—well, Russ Cavanaugh’s office—before the picture started. But the kid says it’s nothing, just a guy in a ratty tux doing lame old card tricks.”

  “You’ve spoken to him!” Shannon exclaimed, leaning excitedly over the table at Jojo.

  “Sure. Most regular looking guy in the world. Kind of short, bad skin. Funny old haircut.”

  “I’ve seen him. I was at the theatre tonight myself.”

  “To see the picture?”

  Shannon laughed. “No, to picket it. It didn’t work out so well—Davis appeared at the window and he . . . God, I don’t know how to explain what he did.”

  “I think I know,” Jojo said, scratching his shaggy cheek. “He got into your head, made you see things, nightmare versions of the way you see the world.”

  “I—yes. Yes, that’s exactly what happened. How did you—?”

  “Are you sure you haven’t got any booze around here?”

  “No . . . well, there’s the wine for worship, but . . .”

  “Get it. I want to tell you a story. And when that’s done, we’re going to finish this.”

  The reverend scurried away to the cupboard, fumbled through clanging tins and clinking glass until he found the bottle, half-filled with blood red liquid. He snatched a couple of water glasses from the kitchen and brought the lot back to the table, where he filled both glasses. Shannon swallowed his own in two massive gulps and immediately refilled his glass.

  “I have a disease called Ambras Syndrome, or hypertrichosis. A little less flattering, some folks call it Werewolf Syndrome. There isn’t much too it—I just grow too much hair, everywhere but the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. I’ve been shaving my face and hands two or three times a day since I was a teenager. That’s how come I’ve got so many scars, though I guess you can’t see them now.

  “Anyhow,” Jojo went on, slurping at the too-sweet sacramental wine, “I don’t really remember much about my early childhood. The disease is supposed to be hereditary, which means my old man probably had it too, but I don’t know a thing about my old man. My mother threw herself into the river when I was a kid. I grew up in a house full of retarded kids run by a nasty old woman named Parsons. I ran away when I was fourteen, thinking if I got to a big city I could find a cure. There isn’t a cure. I came back home and learned to shave and when Mrs. Parsons finally croaked, I p
retended like I was a normal guy and ended up getting a gig as the sheriff’s deputy.”

  Shannon slowed to sipping and watched Jojo over the edge of his glass.

  “There’s a point to this,” Jojo said, reading the other man’s face. “Up until a few hours ago, I never remembered where I was or what was happening before I ended up at the Parsons place. Maybe a head-shrinker could suss it out, but the thing is it just wasn’t there—lost time. But Barker Davis found it, and worse than that he fucking showed it to me. I was a circus freak, reverend. Locked up in a cage in the Ten-in-One tent and called Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy. Folks dropped a dime in the barker’s hand to have a look, a shriek, a good laugh at my expense. That’s where I was between the time my mother went in the drink and whenever I ended up among all the headcases at old lady Parsons’ place.”

  “Then you remember now. You really remember.”

  “Oh, I remember, all right. I remember the filth and the whippings and sleeping in my own shit, and I also remember a magician there, a tall, pasty fella used to scare the shit out of me, and a nasty kid with a face like pumice stone who swept up when the rubes went home. Parted his hair right down the middle, that kid. Followed the magician around like a puppy and gave everyone else the evil eye.”

  “Barker Davis.”

  “Tim Davis in those days. One of those white trash bumpkins runs away with the circus when they came through town, you know? Then one day he was gone, ran back the other way. And now he’s here, showing me the worst parts of my life. Now what do you make of that, Reverend Shannon?”

  “He must have some connection to Litchfield, that’s what I make of it. Maybe he’s the one who buried the sigil and grimoire in my cellar.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And why now?”

  “I don’t know that either. But I think I may have brought him here.”

  “What, with your spell?” Jojo pronounced the last word with evident derision.

  “Like a homing beacon, maybe. All the details were right for him to come back.”