Falling Idols

by Brian Hodge

  They came while I slept — the fourth morning, maybe the fifth. They were there with the dawn, and who knows how many hours before that, slender and solid against the morning mists, watching as I rolled upright in my dew-soaked blanket. When I rubbed my eyes and blinked, they didn’t vanish. Part of me feared they would. Part of me feared they wouldn’t.

  As I leaned back against the stone, she came forward and went to her knees beside me, looking not a day older than she had more than twenty years before. Her light brown skin was still smoothly translucent. Her gaze was tender at first, and though it didn’t change of itself, it grew more unnerving when she did not blink — like being regarded by the consummate patience of a serpent.

  She leaned in, the tip of her nose cool at my throat as she sniffed deeply. Her lips were warm against mine; their soft press set mine to trembling. Her breath was sweet, and the edge of one sharp tooth bit down to open a tiny cut on my lip. She sucked at it as if it were a split berry, and I thought without fear that next I would die. But she only raised my hands to nuzzle the pale inner wrists, their blue tracery of veins, then pushed them gently back to my lap, and I understood that she must’ve known all along what I was, what I was to become.

  “It’s nice to look into your eyes again,” she said, as if but a week had passed since she’d done so, “and not closed in sleep.”

  Since coming to the stone I’d imagined and rehearsed this moment countless times, and she’d never said this. Never dressed in black and grays, pants and a thick sweater, clothes I might’ve seen on any city street and not thought twice about. She’d never glanced back at the other two, who stood eyeing each other with impatience, while the taller of them idly scraped something from the bottom of her shoe. She’d never simply stood up and taken me by the hand, pulled me to my feet, to leave me surprised at how much smaller she looked now that I’d grown to adulthood.

  “He stinks,” said the taller Sister. From the feral arrogance in her face, I took her to be the flesh-eater. “I can smell him from here.”

  “You’ve smelt worse,” said the third. “Eaten it, too.”

  As I’d rehearsed this they’d never bickered, and my erstwhile angel — Maia, the others called her — had never led me away from the stone like a bewildered child.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Back down to the road. Then back home to Dublin,” Maia said.

  “You … you drove?”

  The flesh-eater, her leather jacket disconcertingly modern, burst into mocking laughter. “Oh Jesus, another goddess hunter,” she sighed. “What was he expecting? We’d take him by the hand and fly into the woods?”

  The third one, the sperm-eater by default, slid closer to me in a colorful gypsy swirl of skirts. “Try not to be so baroque,” she said. “It really sets Lilah off, anymore.”

  V. Sanguis sanctus

  They were not goddesses, but if they’d been around as long as they were supposed to have been, inspiring legends that had driven men like my uncle to murder, then as goddesses they at least must’ve posed. They were beautiful and they were three, and undoubtedly could be both generous and terrible. They could’ve been anything to anyone — goddesses, succubi, temptresses, avengers — and at one time or another probably had been. They might’ve gone through lands and ages, exploiting extant myths of triune women, leaving others in their wake: Egyptian Hathors, Greek Gorgons, Roman Fates, Norse Norns.

  And now they lived in Dublin in a gabled stone house that had been standing for centuries, secluded today behind security fences and a vast lawn patrolled by mastiffs — not what I’d expected. But I accepted the fact of them the same way I accepted visions of a blaspheming Christ, and ancient stones that drank stigmatic blood, then sang a summons that only immortal women could hear. All these I accepted as proof that Shakespeare had been right: there was more in Heaven and Earth than I’d ever dreamt of. What I found hardest to believe was that I could have any part to play in it.

  They took me in without explaining themselves. I was fed and allowed to bathe, given fresh clothes. Otherwise, the Sisters of the Trinity lived as privileged aristocrats, doing whatever they pleased, whenever it pleased them.

  Lilah, the flesh-eater, aloof and most often found in dark leathers, had the least to do with me, and seemed to tolerate me as she might a stray dog taken in that she didn’t care to pet.

  The sperm-eater was Salíce, and while she was much less apt to pretend I didn’t exist, most of her attentions took the form of taunts, teasing me with innuendo and glimpses of her body, as if it were something I might see but never experience. After I’d been there a few days, though, she thrust a crystal goblet in my hand. “Fill it,” she demanded, then pursed her lips as my eyes widened. “Well — do what you can.”

  I managed in private, to fantasies of Maia.

  I’d loved her all my life, I realized — a love for every age and need. I’d first loved her with childish adoration, and then for her divine wisdom. I later loved her extraordinary beauty as I matured into its spell. Loved her as an ideal that no mortal woman could live up to. I’d begun loving her as proof that the merciful God I’d been raised to worship existed, and now, finally, as further evidence that he didn’t.

  My devotion was reciprocated, and the time we spent together lovers’ time. But while I shared her bed and body, I tried not to delude myself that it meant the same thing to Maia as it did me. Millions of people may love their dogs, but none regard them as equals. I kept alive the cut on the side of my lip, where she’d bitten me that first morning, the pain tiny and exquisite. But her teeth never returned to the spot, or sought any other.

  “Why not?” I asked one bright afternoon. Now I understood why Aztecs had allowed their hearts to be cut out, and islanders went willingly into live volcanoes. “Is there something wrong with my blood?”

  “Is that all you think you are to me?” Maia looked at me with such intuitive depth it felt as if she could take in my whole life between eyeblinks. “I can get blood anywhere.”

  “I didn’t say you had to take it all.”

  “Yours is special. It shouldn’t be wasted.”

  When I suggested they must be reserving me for something, she only smiled, with mystery and allure. We were out walking, had gotten far from home by this time of day, Maia showing me some of the mundane, everyday sights of Dublin. Her arm looped in mine, she steered me down a side street, more purpose in her stride now than before. When we were across the street from a brick building that looked like a school, we sat atop a low wall. Before long the doors opened to release a flood of young boys in their uniforms — dark blue short pants and pullover sweaters, with pale blue shirts and red ties. We watched them swarm away, and one in particular she seemed to track, until he was lost from sight.

  “I had children once … but they were killed by soldiers,” she said, as if the grief still came unexpectedly sometimes. “Life is cheap enough now but it was even cheaper then. Before I could have any more, things happened to me, and then … I couldn’t. So I just watch strangers, children whose names I never know. I’ll pick one out, pretend he or she is mine, and it goes on like that for a year, maybe two. And then I go to another school and pick out a new one, because I’ve noticed the other’s looking older, and I don’t want to know what becomes of him. Or her. It’s easier to imagine a good future than to deal with the truth, watch all that bright potential start to dim.”

  “Then obviously I’m an exception.”

  “Exception. Oh, you’re that, all right.” When she touched my leg I could feel the thrilling heat of her. “I was following you that day. Like I always did. I’d first noticed you six, seven months before. Such a pious little thing — it was the most adorable trait. Like little American boys growing up wanting to be cowboys, before they find out the world doesn’t have cattle drives anymore. I wanted to save you from yourself, if I could. And then the bomb almost took care of it for me.”

  I’d never once imagined our history preda
ting that day.

  “You were standing there between your friends’ bodies. Too shocked to cry. I wish I could tell you I steered the bricks away from you in midair, but something like that’s a bit beyond me. I think I was as surprised as you that you were okay. But I couldn’t walk away without touching you. And then … then I saw your knee.”

  Across the street, the flood of schoolboys had been reduced to a trickle: the laggards, the stragglers, the delinquents.

  “Sometimes — and it is rare,” Maia went on, “I can taste more than life in someone’s blood. I can taste all the truth of that person. Lilah’s the same way. The blood and the flesh of a special or gifted person are full of images. Take them in and we can learn things they might not even know about themselves.” Her eyes locked on mine, clear and hard. “If you think the rite of Holy Communion is only two thousand years old, you’re a few thousand short.

  “When I licked the blood from your knee that day, I knew you were either going to be a saint or a butcher.”

  I thought at first she meant working in a meat shop. Then I realized what sort of butcher she meant.

  “From one to the other, that’s quite a jump,” I said.

  Maia shook her head. “They’re closer than you think. There’s always been a certain type of man, if he can’t save a soul, he’s willing to settle for exterminating it. Your Church has attracted more than its share. And I tasted that potential in you.”

  She’d kept track of me ever since, she admitted, always knew where to find me when she felt like watching me sleep. And while it disturbed her to see me hand my life over to the Church, she was patient enough to let it run its course without interfering, knowing all along that it wouldn’t last.

  “What made you so sure?”

  “You were too raw and open for it to last forever. There’s no faith in anything so strong it can’t be shattered by one moment’s glimpse of something it doesn’t allow for. And I knew someday you were bound to see one of them … and it’d leave its mark on you.”

  I looked at my wrists. Maia was right. There, in the flesh, over the veins…

  Weeks had passed, yet there was still a mark where that tormented Christ had grabbed me with his handful of shattered bones. Since he’d pierced the skin and his blood had mingled with my own, a transfused message that I was to carry inside until, perhaps, I found someone able to read it.

  His commission: Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.

  With one fingertip, Maia touched the healing split on my lip. “I’ve tasted you before,” she said, “and I’ve tasted you after. So I know the difference, Patrick. He’s in there. You still carry him. We can use that.”

  VI. Haereticae pravitatis

  I didn’t know what she was waiting for, one day being as good as another to bleed. I was used to it. I wondered how much Maia would require, and if it made a difference to her where it came from, wrists or throat. Wondered if she alone would be involved, or Lilah too, or maybe all three of them, opening me like a heretical gospel written in flesh and blood and semen. It was Lilah I feared most, because if she were involved, I could only be read once.

  Still, I never considered running.

  They indulged their appetites, neither flaunting them nor hiding them from me. Only Lilah’s necessitated fatality, and as I came to understand their habits, they didn’t always feed together, but when they did it was usually at her instigation. Most often, Lilah or Salíce would disappear for a few hours, some nights both of them, coming home after they’d coaxed some man into joining them. As huntresses, they had an easy time of it.

  “After more than two and a half millennia,” Lilah told me one morning, when she was in especially good humour, “I can personally vouch that one thing about men has stayed exactly the same, and always will.” She grinned, relishing the predictability of my gender. “Every one of you thinks you’re virile enough to handle more than one woman at a time … and you’re soooo embarrassingly eager for your chance to prove it.”

  I’d never seen the room where the Sisters took them. It was always locked, like the room where Bluebeard kept dead wives. Nor did I see the men themselves; didn’t want to. But on those nights when I knew one would be coming, I’d sit nearby in the dark and listen to his laughter, his ignorance-fueled anticipation. I’d hear the latching of the door. Then it would go on for some time. Often the men grew vocal in their passion, bellowing like love-struck bulls. The Sisters would laugh and squeal. Eventually I’d hear a sudden snap, or worse, a thick ripping. The overwhelmed voice would screech louder still, but I never could discern any clear division between ecstasy and agony, even after their cries degenerated into whimpers and moans that never lasted very long.

  The final cracking open of the bones was the worst.

  One morning after they’d fed, Salíce found me huddled before the hearth and a blazing fire. I was disheveled from having been up all night, and clutched a blanket around my shoulders because I couldn’t seem to get warm.

  “Awww, look, he’s … he’s shivering,” Salíce announced to an otherwise empty room. “He misses home, I’ll bet.”

  I wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t turn around to look at her. Maia and Lilah would still be upstairs sleeping it off. Maia wouldn’t let me see her for the next several hours after she’d gorged, but I found that easy to live with.

  “Well, he was a noisy one, even by the usual standards, I’ll admit that much.” Behind me, she was coming closer. “Tendons and ligaments like steel bands, Lilah said. What a snap those made.”

  I could feel her directly behind me, warmer than the fire, and I jumped when she bent down to snake her arms around me in an unexpected hug. Patronizing, I first thought, but when she kissed me atop the head I wondered if instead she wasn’t trying, in her way, to tell me that she wouldn’t bite.

  “Nobody forces you to listen, you know,” she said. “There’re plenty of places in this house where you wouldn’t hear a thing.”

  I nodded. Salíce didn’t need to tell me this, though, just as I shouldn’t have had to tell her that listening to them feed was the best way of putting my future in perspective.

  “You’re worried about the divination? That’s all?” She almost sounded amused. “Forget about Lilah, why don’t you. So she looks at you like a kidney pie. The thing to remember about Lilah is, if it wasn’t for scaring people, she wouldn’t have any fun at all.”

  Salíce told me to wait right there, that she really shouldn’t show this to me, but so what. She disappeared into an adjacent room that overlooked the back lawn. It was full of tall windows and sunlight, locked file cabinets and computers. When she came back she handed me a small news clipping.

  “It was a bigger story in Italy,” she said, “but I’m assuming you don’t read Italian.”

  It was dated the previous week, about a theft from the church of a small village seventy-some kilometers north of Rome. During the night, someone had smashed a spherical crystal reliquary and stolen the relic inside, which wasn’t identified, only described as dating from the earliest years of Church history.

  “Our friend Julius had this done. He lives in Capua, with a beautiful castrato boy named Giovanni. He used to throw the best parties, until Vanni deafened him with a pair of nails, so they’re pretty sure he’s dying now … but I think he wanted it that way, because he still loves Vanni after what that little eunuch did.” She rolled her eyes. “They want to grow old together.”

  Since I didn’t know who or what she was talking about, I read the article again. It still struck me as an incomplete puzzle. “I don’t understand what this has to do with me, or Maia, or—”

  “Don’t you get it? The relic — it’s for the divination. Lilah can’t bother you with those lovely white teeth of hers if she’s got them busy on something else, now, can she?”

  Ghouls already; now body thieves? Asked what the relic was, Salíce just laughed and told me to be patient, adding only that if it was genuine it could prove
to be quite illuminating. Pour my tainted stigmatic’s blood into the mix, and it might be their best opportunity yet for stealing the secrets of Heaven and Hell.

  “I’d’ve thought you already knew them,” I said.

  “You think because we’ve lived a long time we hold privileged information?” She shook her head. “There’s some older than we are, and they’re no better off. We’ve all got our ideas, but there’s too much we can never agree on.

  “At Julius’s last party, two years ago, we managed to summon down and imprison an Ophanim. We thought we might get some answers out of it. But it was already insane. And wasn’t flesh and blood like Maia and Lilah are used to. So we raped it and sent it back, out of spite, and that was the end of it. We didn’t learn anything that most of us hadn’t already suspected.

  “But you,” she said, with a faint smile. “We’re thinking we might learn more from you than even one of Heaven’s inmates. We don’t even have to summon you down — you’re already here. And all you have to do is bleed.”

  *

  When she learned how much Salíce had told me, Maia wouldn’t speak to her for two days. After it got to be too much to contain, they shouted at each other for half an hour.

  “You didn’t have any right!” Maia cried. “I should’ve been the one to tell him those things.”

  “Then what you were waiting for?” Salíce asked. “Until he got too old and decrepit to run away from you?”

  I listened to them argue as I listened to them feed: out of sight and out of reach.

  “The problem with you, Maia, is that there’s still a part of you that refuses to admit you’re not like the rest of them, and never can be again. Aren’t you ever going to accept that? Ever?”

  “Because I’m not strictly human anymore, that means I can’t still be humane?” Maia’s voice then turned bitter, accusing. “Of course, you do have to possess that quality before you can slough it off.”

  “Inhumane — me? They always thank me when I feed on them. What I take they’re already swimming in to begin with. They can’t wait to give it away. You can’t make any such claim, so don’t you even try.” Salíce groaned with exasperation. “My god, you still think you can fall in love, don’t you? You pick them out when they’re children and you dream about what might’ve been, and on the rare occasion you meet up with one again when he’s grown, you think if you put on enough of a front you’ll both forget what you are.”