The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  Jojo gave a grunt at the sign and climbed the four creaking steps to the porch. Theodora came close behind.

  “No lights in there,” she observed.

  “Well, if he’s undoing his creation, I guess the light would be the last to go.”

  “How very ecumenical of you.”

  He snorted and grabbed the door handle. “Are you ready for this?”

  “I don’t even know what ‘this’ is.”

  “This, Theodora, is Little Big Horn.”

  She bunched her eyebrows into a tight knit and faintly smiled. “And I don’t reckon we’re the Indians, are we?”

  “Not by a damn sight, no.”

  “Glad we cleared that up, then. Open the door already, would you?”

  He did.

  A blast of freezing air rushed out of the church, slamming into them and eliciting cries of shock from both. The unlikely Chinook was many times colder than the impossible winter that befell the town before, so cold that it stung their skin badly and stabbed at Jojo’s wounds like daggers. Theodora jounced to the side, seeking protection behind the refuge of the open door. Jojo pressed on, his hands up to cover his face. A deafening, enraged roar shook out of the blast, a thousand voices in torment and dripping with hate. All of them belonged to Barker Davis.

  The blast lessened but the chill remained. Jojo stepped into the chapel, the floorboards groaning beneath his weight. When another roar sounded he braced for it, but this time is was nowhere close. From the porch Theodora shouted, “Look!”

  He turned to see a pillar of fire jet in the far distance in the general direction of town.

  “He’s in town?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t expect there’s any town left by now.”

  “Maybe we should wait, then. For Charles and Sheriff Rich, I mean.”

  A low, throaty chortle sounded from the back of the pitch black chapel: a response to Theodora’s suggestion. Jojo turned toward the awful laugh and peered into the chapel.

  “They won’t be joining you,” Barker Davis said, his movements noisy but invisible in the shadows. “No one will come. Litchfield is gone, all but this church, which will be the rib from which I remake the world.”

  “But why, goddamn it?” Theodora yelled into the darkness. “What do you get out of something like that? Or do you just get your kicks from torturing innocent people?”

  Davis laughed a steady, simmering laugh.

  “Innocent? Not hardly. Innocence died the last time a deity wiped the slate clean. And as for why—well, I’m perfectly flabbergasted that you should ask. Here I am a god, and gods reign indefinitely.”

  Scraping steps shambled across the floor, drawing nearer. Theodora backed against the door and Jojo assumed a fighting stance. Davis approached the dim greyness of the outside light and came into it, his black, skinless skull grinning permanently at them.

  Theodora gasped, covered her mouth with her hand. Jojo merely flashed a disgusted look at the walking corpse before him, all decked out in black tails, cummerbund and a sombre black bowtie. The corpse bowed slightly, extending skeletal hands out with gentlemanly flourish.

  Jojo said, “Black Harry.”

  “Abracadabra,” the dead magician rasped, a grey tongue, half eaten away, flopping behind rotten teeth.

  “You know something, Harry?” Jojo said, sneering. “I never much cottoned to you.”

  And with that, Jojo charged Black Harry and tackled him. A cloud of foul-smelling dust burst from the magician’s sleeves and collar. They fell into a heap, Jojo on top, and the skull leered up at him, wobbling as laughter continued to echo out of its gaping mouth. From floor level Jojo noticed the shape of a man lying still under the pews. He needed only a moment’s glance to tell who it was. And in that moment Black Harry Ashford started to mutter in a strained, sandpapery voice.

  “Lucifero, Ouyar, Chameron, Aliseon, Mandousin,” he intoned. “Premy, Oreit, Naydrus, Esmony, Eparineson, Estiot . . .”

  “Ah, for Christ’s sake,” Jojo grumbled. He pinned the corpse’s neck to the floor with one hand and landed a punch to its jaw with the other. The jaw crunched and jerked askew. Then the thing’s entire body spasmed and the jaw righted itself.

  “Dumosson, Danochar, Casmiel, Hayras,” it continued.

  “Knock it off!” Jojo shouted as he planted both his hands on either side of the skull. The bone was slimy with rot and earth. He dug his thumbs into the small holes at the bottom of the temporal plates and squeezed. Sutures cracked under the pressure. Jojo then wrenched his arms upward, defying the burning pain in his shoulder, and pulled with every ounce of strength available to him.

  The skull babbled even as the bones of its neck splintered and fractured.

  “Fabelleronthon, Sodirno, Peatham . . .”

  With an enormous groan, Jojo bared his teeth and pulled the head free of the body, severing the frail neck completely and silencing the putrid skull of Black Harry Ashford forever.

  He hefted the skull up like some primitive, cultic offering, his chest rising and falling with gasping breaths. The panting breaths soon turned to panting cackles, a breathless sniggering that would have seemed insane to anyone who failed to grasp the circumstances.

  “Is that all he had?” Jojo wheezed. “Is that all it took?”

  He heaved himself up, first on one knee and then to his feet, still grasping the skull. He regarded the grisly thing for a moment, a dead and empty thing, and then hurled it at the nearest wall—against which the skull shattered like a vase, splitting into countless shards that dropped harmlessly to the floor in a clattering rain.

  Next, Jojo returned his attention to the rest of Harry Ashford: the well-dressed headless corpse on the chapel floor. He raised his right foot over the cadaver’s trunk and brought it down hard and fast, destroying the rib cage in a crunching burst of broken bone and grave dust. Unsatisfied with this, Jojo continued to stomp on the body, crushing the delicate old bones underfoot with each crushing step. In no time at all, he found himself merely grinding up dust, contained in a tattered magician’s tuxedo.

  “It’s done,” Jojo whispered. “It’s finished.”

  He could not help but smile as he wiped the cold sweat from his brow. He straightened himself out, worked a kink out of his aching shoulder and turned back to the doorway. Theodora was not there. He called her name but received no answer. He went out to the porch, looked around the immediate environs of the church. He didn’t see her anywhere.

  Bewildered and not a little exhausted, he returned to the chapel and felt blindly along the wall for a light switch. It took some time and a fair amount of stumbling, but he found one and flipped it. A tacky fake chandelier with a dozen small bulbs made to look like candle flames flickered on above him. Its smoky yellow light glinted off a metallic object in the centre of the well-trodden aisle between the rows of pews. Jojo was astounded to discover it was Jim Shannon’s Lucifer sigil.

  “What in God’s Jesus-green earth . . . ?”

  Not two feet from the sigil the dead, paper white hand of Barker Davis sagged from beneath a pew. He saw the body when he was on top of Black Harry Ashford, and he knew then what it meant. Ashford abandoned the body, the young man who swept up the puke and popcorn and animal shit when he wasn’t hurling invective at the gypsy with the monkey or trying desperately to get into Minerva the Snake Woman’s pants. He’d grown old in it, waiting predatorily for his moment to strike and then, like the atrocity Minerva became at his behest, he had shed the skin of Barker Davis.

  The hand seemed to point lazily at the gleaming metal of the sigil, which darkened under the approach of Theodora, who appeared from among the pews and walked slowly, seductively toward him. Jojo froze, staring stupidly at her red smile and pinched eyebrows.

  “Come Lucifer, come,” she said in a deep voice.

  “What is this .
. .” he mumbled, knowing but not believing.

  “Come Lucifer, come,” Theodora repeated. And then again. And again.

  Jojo took several steps back, involuntarily shaking his head as the tears welled up in his eyes. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “You rotten, goddamned son of a bitch.”

  “All I ever wanted was a mad, mad world,” she said.

  “You had it. It already was. For Christ’s sakes there’s a World War on.”

  Even as he said it, Jojo doubted its veracity—was there really a war sweeping the globe, or was that just another one of Barker’s . . . of Ashford’s lies? He guessed he’d never know. He backed up all the way to the porch.

  “The fires were beautiful,” she said, floating her delicate hands to the buttons of her blouse, which she began to undo, one by one. “I thank you for that.”

  The blouse fell away like paper ash in a breeze, and her stiff wire brassiere followed it. Jojo looked away, embarrassed to see what she’d never have wanted him to see, not like this. As if noting his shame, she shook her shoulder to make the full breasts bounce. Jojo stumbled off the porch and tripped down the stairs, landing on one knee and grunting in pain. Theodora laughed and shimmied out of her skirt and slip and underwear.

  “I learned the magic, the real magic, and it’s wonderful. It’s life, you see, and it’s forever. But that’s all for me. Everything ought to be. That’s how power works. But for a god, power is wholly dependent upon penitents, and you abandoned me, Jojo Walker. You left me up there on my Holy Mountain all alone, shut out, forbidden to come into my own world.”

  “I didn’t do anything but live my shitty life,” he grumbled, rising clumsily to his feet. He saw the fullness of her nakedness now, a spectacle he knew he’d longed to see under different circumstances that he also knew would never come to pass, now.

  “It was not enough,” she reprimanded him, her face registering anger. “Ah, but I made mistakes. It was all marvellous in theory, on paper. Isn’t that what poor Trotsky learned, too? Only you won’t put a hatchet in my head, Dog-Boy. I’ll simply start over, just me and Theodora. This time it will be a goddess instead of a god. This time it will be terrible and gorgeous, a world powered by the dichotomy of pain and those who inflict it, madness and monsters. The Ten-in-One writ large. A lunatic matinee that never ends.”

  Jojo wiped the dirt on his hands across the fur of his torso and felt his head swim. His muscles screamed at him to stop, to give up and lie the hell down already, and his conscious mind agreed. It only stood to reason that resistance was a joke at this point, that he’d lost the fight. The war was over and the bad guys won. Besides, what would he do even if he did prevail? Where would he go? Where could he go?

  Either way—any way he sliced it—he lost.

  He clenched his fists and hung his head. Theodora tsked, smacking her lips with a noisy scolding.

  “Mercy me,” she said. “You know something? I believe I miscounted.”

  Not understanding and only vaguely caring, Jojo looked up at her, hating himself for registering how lovely her body looked in the moonlight. The body that wasn’t hers at all any longer.

  “I didn’t finish the incantation,” she said. “Silly me.”

  Raising her thin, white arms into the night, Theodora focused on the smoky grey clouds blocking the stars and sucked in a deep breath to shout, “Come Lucifer—come!”

  And in the next moment, Jojo knew without a doubt that the late Reverend Shannon had been wrong about the nature of Black Harry Ashford’s magic. Horribly, egregiously wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The skin at opposite sides of her hairline split and bled. Jagged nubs of bone press through. Horns. Of course, Jojo thought. Because the summoning was not symbolic at all, not as the reverend determined and believed. The black magic of Black Harry Ashford was as black as it came.

  Theodora’s breasts shrank like deflating balloons, the skin tightening against her chest as she jutted her shoulders forward and emitted a low, nasty growl. She jerked and hopped on one leg and then the other: a wicked Saint Vitus Dance. As she spread her lips impossibly wide and they tore at the corners like cooked beef to reveal sharpening, yellow teeth, Jojo thought back to all the friends and neighbours and old enemies and the uncharacteristic things they had done since Barker Davis came to town. He thought, The Devil made them do it.

  And as if telling him to shut up his silent thoughts, Theodora—or at least the creature she was rapidly becoming—screeched like an angry hawk. Her eyes were now bulging orbs the colour of custard, her nose collapsed and shrivelled up: a rotten scrap of leather with flaring holes on either side of it. Gone was the Widow Cavanaugh’s prior beauty, her melancholy elegance and sharp, stunning intelligence. Here before Jojo was a convulsing, shrieking thing straight out of Hell, a screaming demon, a dancing carcass with gnarled claws for hands and a face only a medieval painter’s worst fever dreams could conceive.

  The thing rolled its gummy yellow eyes and stuck out its crumpled chest while its hissed and bellowed. Disgusted and bereaved, Jojo closed his eyes as tears scored burrows through the dirt on his face. Theodora was effectively dead. Charles and his old boss Ernie Rich, too. Litchfield was ash and the show was almost over. Almost.

  The hissing demon stretched its maw open wide, displaying long, needle-thin teeth. Jojo did not back away. He did not move at all. Somewhere the calliope started up again, cranking out a tinkling tune. From beneath the shrill music, a murmur of voices rose. The demon screeched terribly and performed a jerky pirouette. Behind it the church creaked noisily; dust spilled out from between the boards that held the old structure together.

  Jojo looked over the simpering devil’s shoulder and watched impassively as the church shuddered and its walls cracked. The steeple split apart and tumbled from the roof in pieces. The porch collapsed and the entire building gave a great, juddering sigh before Jojo realized that it was expanding, growing. Turning blood red.

  The creature sniggered and swiped a clawed hand at him, missing his face by inches. The music grew louder, and so did the voices. By the time the church had fully transformed into Leroy Dunn’s barn, it was already filled with people who milled about in their best going-to-meeting clothes. At the centre, lit by a circle of lanterns swaying gently from the rafters, a boy and girl slow-danced to the delight of every onlooker.

  The devil hissed even as it grinned at Jojo, its yellow eyes wide and bulging. Jojo looked from the creature back to the kids dancing in the barn, the crowd giving them a wide berth. He recognized the girl first—Nancy Campbell, the girl who got knocked up and shuttled quickly out of town. The boy he knew, too—Eddie Campbell, who ran away to join the Army, never to be seen again. Both young people wore long, dour expressions as they moved in a slow circle, their movements awkward and stiff. Though they remained as young as ever, their haggard looks belied a weariness with life and the world that came with many more years than either Eddie or Nancy had between them.

  “Fine,” Jojo grunted. “I see them. What’s your point?”

  “Go inside,” the abomination hissed. “She is waiting for you.”

  Jojo glanced down at his shoes and heaved a sigh.

  He didn’t know who the devil was talking about, not specifically, but all the same he said quietly, “I love her.”

  “I know.”

  “I killed her, didn’t I?”

  “Yessss.”

  “All of them.”

  “Killed them, yessss. All of them.”

  “The whole fucking town.”

  “Your loves. Your ladiessss.”

  With a sniff and a groan, Jojo raised his head and peered into the barn, wondering who it was, which blameless soul he’d condemned to this harlequin hell. Beth, Sarah, Theodora? Or somebody else entirely? It could have been nearly anyone, he knew. He’d damned them all.

  “Go to her.”


  The music had become so piercing, so horribly loud that it sounded like an air raid siren. Jojo winced, then stepped forward, snagging his foot on something—Theodora, or what remained of her. Just skin, hair, and a dress. A shell shed by the demon who was now tittering with glee. Jojo squeezed his eyes shut and walked over the awful thing in the grass. He went to the barn and walked inside.

  People were chatting, but their voices were completely drowned out by the screaming siren. He cut through the throng, went to the centre of the hay-strewn dance floor where Eddie and Nancy continued to jerk about in awkward circles. The boy’s face was ashen, his eyes puffy and red. Shouting above the din of the calliope he said, “I tried to leave, Mr. Walker. I tried to get out. He wouldn’t let me. He wouldn’t let me leave.”

  Jojo said, “I know, son,” but he couldn’t even hear himself.

  The girl was still pregnant. Jojo could faintly make out small movements beneath the fabric of her dress—the forever unborn, illegitimate child just as imprisoned as the rest of them. Nancy grimaced. Still, they danced.

  Momentarily, a man with paper-white skin dressed in nothing but a loin cloth placed a bony hand on Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie immediately disengaged from Nancy and the skeletal man moved in to resume the dance. Jojo narrowed his eyes, thought, Hal White, the Human Skeleton. Eddie, meanwhile, took up with a chubby bearded woman. They kissed and spun around. Eddie said loudly, “I should be dead in France right now.” The bearded woman laughed.

  “I can’t get out,” he sobbed, his tears soaking the woman’s beard. “I can’t even leave just to get killed.”

  Nearby, Lion Jack hefted a massive barbell over his head and grinned madly. Betty Overturf watched him and swooned, nearly dropping the carafe of coffee in her hands. At Jojo’s feet a small brown monkey scampered, a dull maroon fez strapped to its head. A squat man with a greasy moustache scrambled after the monkey, muttering in some language Jojo didn’t understand. The calliope-siren had devolved into a strident ringing in his ears that made understanding all but impossible, anyway.