Hound of Eden Omnibus

by James Osiris Baldwin

  I thought back to the boardwalk. “So you killed Yuri and Frank. And what about the other guy?”

  “Frank’s brother? He was the one who found the Fruit.” She said the word like it had a capital, like a title. “But he forgot where it was by the time I finally spoke to him. They do that, the norms—they forget. It’s a defense, you see? If the unworthy behold the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they forget where it is.”

  “I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I was going to have him kill you,” she said. “But then I finally got to touch you. Skin to skin. And I realized, Alexi—you’re the real deal, better than Vincent. A true Wise Virgin. Do you have any idea how rare that is? A fully fledged mage with a clean cock?”

  My face flushed with heat before I could stop it, and she laughed with delight.

  “Strip.” She dropped her chin slightly, her eyes locked with mine.

  My mouth opened and then closed. I sputtered. “What!?”

  She motioned slightly with the barrel of the gun, the black void at the tip never wavering below the neck. “I want to get a proper look at you. Strip. Make it slow.”

  The flush spread down my neck, and I bared my teeth, like a cornered animal. I was sick of being violated. “No.”

  I had no time to react before Jana fired. The bang caused my vision to white out and my mouth to sear with sensory overload. The air bowed with pressure. I was sure I’d been hit, but my heart continued to rush slickly in my chest while the bullet graze on my cheek began to bleed.

  “I said strip.” Jana’s voice was cold.

  “Where did... you learn to shoot like that?” I had to distract her while I searched for the out. I wasn’t certain I could bring my hands up to start on my shirt collar buttons, but I was certain that I wanted to live. With shaking, fumbling fingers, I started on my clothes.

  “I used to go hunting with my pa,” Jana said languidly. “A real long time ago.”

  “You’re... from the South?” I loosened one button and then the next, unable to stop my trembling. No one, nobody, had seen me like this. She was watching me hungrily, like food that hadn’t died. Her nipples were hard. They stood out against the fabric of her dress.

  “Tennessee.”

  I reached the last button on my shirt and let it drop behind me. My skin prickled with gooseflesh. “Why—”

  “Shut up.” She snapped, and her finger tensed. “No talking. Only time I want your mouth open is when there’s something going in and out of it.”

  A tremor passed through my spine. I uncomfortably, unhappily stripped my undershirt up over my head. It brought an approving sound from Jana.

  “That’s it.” Her voice had dropped, low and heated. “You’re so shy. I never thought I’d see a shy Vor v Zakone.”

  I wasn’t a Vor v Zakone, but she didn’t look like she was receptive to being corrected. Haltingly, I forced my hands towards my belt, and when they reached it, they shook uncontrollably.

  “You ain’t ever shown anyone your little man before?” Jana’s mouth spread in a crooked, lewd smile.

  “No.” I tried to pull the buckle out, but my hands were wooden. Jana twitched the gun warningly, and I somehow managed to undo it. My teeth chattered until I wired my jaws tight. “And I never want to.”

  “Oh, I know. I know, honey. And that’s exactly why I need to see.” She licked her lip and let her tongue linger, dark red on orange. “You’re perfect. So pale.”

  I glared at her in hot defiance as I toed my shoes off. My cheek bled freely, and I licked at the corner of my mouth. The blood was a sweet iron tang. It felt effervescent on my tongue, crackling with some kind of subtle force.

  Of course. Blood.

  “I always wanted to see something like this.” Jana gestured to my forgotten fly. “An honest Wise Virgin. You’re the real deal. You can’t imagine how I had to contort my magic to stop Rob from killing you on the boardwalk. That DOG wanted you so badly.”

  My legs felt like blocks as I stiffly stepped out of my trousers, moving slightly to the side and awkwardly bumping my knee into the corner of the bed.

  Jana laughed, but I said nothing, jaw working. My skin crawled. The air felt wet and tacky.

  “Socks first. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a naked man in socks.”

  The only barrier between my body and her eyes after that were my trunks and my gloves. I had to face it: I had faced worse than this. As my focus grew, the mind-chatter went from turbulent terror to still apprehension, and I pulled off one sock, and then the other, standing in her room on bare, soft white feet. My throat was tight, aching sharply. The bullet graze on my cheek burned cold, but Jana’s intensity was daring me to try something. I knew through the pain in my gut and chest that I wouldn’t be able to get the word of power out before she pulled the trigger in my face.

  “And the gloves.” Under other circumstances, her tone would have been teasing, flirtatious. It wasn’t. She was soaking me up with her eyes, consuming my fear and loathing. But I couldn’t do it.

  “Please,” I said. “No.”

  Jana lifted the gun and raised her eyebrows. “Gloves or your ear.”

  I would not fail this. My eyes and face burned red as I shakily pulled the gloves off, one at a time, and threw them angrily on the covers. It brought a soft sound from Jana. I growled back at her, mouth and nose full of the taste of blood. I felt like how I had in the bathtub, helpless and furious, and I stared at the tip of the pistol as I stripped the last off, ticcing, wincing as the waistband rasped over my soft fingertips. Without the protective second skin, my tongue rippled with the texture and the accompanying color.

  “Uncircumcised? Look at you, all covered up,” Jana exclaimed, chest expanding as she breathed deeply. Was she smelling me? She adjusted the gun, and it trembled slightly. Not enough.

  I said nothing, clenching my trunks in one white-knuckled fist.

  “Perfect,” she said. With my gloves off, my body was a live antenna: I could hear every movement of fabric, every shift of her thighs, every small, wet sound made behind her teeth. My vision contracted. If she touched me, I was either going to break her arm or throw up on her before I died. Or both.

  Jana didn’t touch me. Instead, she reached into her collar and pulled free a long chain, like the one she had worn in her office. This one wasn’t silver: it was copper, with a drop pendant emblazoned with another Goetic seal, the seal of Ashtaroth. “Just perfect. And now comes the best part, Alexi—the part where you don’t have to think anymore.”

  And now, now came whatever magic she had planned. I sighted down at her, pupils drawn to points, and lifted my chin as I sucked in a breath through narrowed nostrils. Chet.

  “I’ll brand you tonight, train you up. We’ll find the Fruit, and then we’ll go to Chicago together.” She sucked her lip under her teeth and bit it until red welled up around her tooth. “I know people there that will take the time to break you in just right. Not like Frank—he couldn’t even get it up.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Yuri again, black tears streaming down his cheeks as he split from the inside. There was nothing worse than what Jana and her people, whoever they were, were going to do to me. My arm snapped out: I hurled the wad of cloth in my hand as I threw myself to the side. As I tumbled, I saw Jana track me with the experience of a hunter.

  The certainty of death bore down like a mantle.

  “CHET!” I roared as I hit the ground, drowned out by gunshot.

  Hot pain seared through my knee: I shouted wordlessly as something cracked above my head. Jana screamed in agony.

  Deafened, disoriented, I scrambled up to see Jana’s eyes huge with shock. The front of her dress bloomed scarlet past her clutching hand, but she was already aiming again. I dove down beside the bed and ripped the sheets off, flinging them at her as she fired again and again. A bullet clipped my arm: I heard another tear through the material of her mattress as she spun around after me, tripped, and toppled ov
er my naked chest with a harsh, bestial sound.

  “Whore,” Jana rasped, her gaze wandering over my face. “You’re… just a… whore. Like all of them. Amma… Vmm Mmm… emet...gis…”

  I fought out from under her dead weight in a panic and scrambled back in a crab crawl that landed me on my ass when I hit the dresser and bounced. I dragged up the sheets, covered myself, and scrubbed her blood from my chest. It clung stickily to my bare skin, and I ticced, spasming through face and fingers. Shaking, I staggered to my feet.

  Jana’s mouth was still working, her eyes hooded and dark. Whatever magic she was trying to work, she couldn’t get the words past each wet, sucking breath. She was still looking at me when her head finally flopped lifelessly to the side. Blood welled across the carpet from under her weight, saturating the floor, her clothing, threatening to pool around my feet.

  I barely made it into her en suite in time. I stumbled to my knees and threw up, retching until I garbled. That was it: the last straw. I couldn’t do this. I punched the wall ahead of me. There was no strength in it. I could feel the clothes floating on my naked skin, my hands squirming in the gloves, and there was a second’s pause before my heaving started again, every muscle in my body rebelling at the mingled, sickening smell of lilies and blood.

  Through it all, I knew there was something I had to do, but I coughed and choked until nothing was left. Only once I stopped being sick did I remember, hazily, what’d I’d come here for in the first place. Vincent. And GOD help me, the police. The police would be here any minute.

  Panic urged me to my feet. Vincent. My mouth was burning, a sensation barely relieved by cold water from the tap. Before I left the bathroom, I swilled and spat until I could no longer taste anything in my mouth.

  “I did it,” I rasped. “Kutkha. Magic.”

  The wraithlike weight of my Neshamah coiled around me in reply, a consoling and weighted presence. It didn’t help much. I felt... dirty. Touched by filth. Jana hadn’t gotten what she wanted, but I felt no triumph at having bested her. My stomach trembled again, but nothing was left to vomit up. I rubbed my hands on my thighs, composed what was left of me, and got back to my feet.

  There was a stairwell down to a basement in the sparkling clean kitchen, a plain door with peeling magenta paint and a matte-black circle which contained the eye and cross symbol I had seen in my dream. The air inside the next room was fetid, tropically humid, and smelled powerfully of living plants and rotten meat. I fumbled at the wall inside for a light switch, and flipped it up. Three blue lights flickered on overhead, and then rows of grow lights illuminating a veritable jungle of plants. Marijuana, Angel’s Trumpets, swamp lilies. The scent of decay was powerful, and there were cages about: heavy, roughly welded iron cages big enough for a man. A goat bleated in alarm as my footsteps scuffled on the concrete.

  “Let me out of here, you crazy bitch! Hey!” a reedy man’s voice cried out from somewhere deep inside.

  I pushed on past the cage with the goat. The cage stacked on top of it had another one, dead, its tongue lolling from its rotting mouth. The pair of cages sat by a shoddily made door. I stopped in the entrance to assess the interior, my hair and clothing plastered to my body with sweat.

  The small room beyond was lit by studio lamps, the floor almost wholly taken up with a Goetic summoning circle. The primary figure—the circle and triangle—were lovingly drawn on the whitewashed floor with thick permanent marker, half-filled in with chalk. A thin, unshaven, unkempt man was bound off to one side in a stress position, tied with ropes to a thick bamboo rods that held him like a rack. He was shorter than me, which is saying something – only around five feet tall.

  “Who... The fuck are you?” Vincent was gray with shock, shaking, his hair a wet and bloodied mess. His skin had been carved with symbols from chest to beltline.

  “Later.” I went to him, dropped to my knees, and sawed at the ropes with my knife. “I’ll get you out of here.”

  “Oh. Wonderful.” Vincent grinned, and then his eyes glazed over and he fainted, sagging like a doll against his bondage.

  I freed him, laid him out, and looked over his injuries. Other than some deep bruises and the carvings, he looked to be sound: just dehydrated, shocked, and exhausted. I left him on his side and searched around the room. There were no tools in here. Some instinct drove me back out into the greenhouse area. Somewhere in here, I would find answers. Somewhere in here was the heart.

  In the farthest reaches of the basement was a plain wooden trapdoor set unobtrusively into the floor. It opened up into a small square cellar that smelled powerfully of incense and formaldehyde. My nose wrinkled as I dropped down the ladder leading in, looking from one thing to the next. The first thing I saw was her altar—or at least, what I supposed was an altar. It was a square black cube table with nothing on it. An eye and cross symbol had been painted on the wall overhead, and I was fairly certain it was rendered in old blood.

  Two of the four walls had bookshelves. One actually did hold books: the other carried a collection of skulls. I counted several humans, three cats, a dog, rabbit, and a deer. They had been glazed with amber, a hazed crust of sap over the bone that stained it red.

  The fourth wall was home to Jana’s desk. Unlike the altar, it was stacked with immaculately clean notebooks. Each one was bound in white leather. Aware that the cops were likely to turn up within minutes, I took an edgy seat and freed the oldest and newest books from the stack. Jana’s older book, dated five years ago, was full of strikingly beautiful cursive. It was mostly an herbal, interspersed with a variety of notes on summoning, conjuration, and tool creation. Her latest grimoire, by contrast, was a chaotic mess. The writing was quick and scratchy, frenetically rendered in block paragraphs which barely linked together. A number of pages had been dedicated to sigil design. The rest, as I turned each page, was full of increasingly bizarre, fractured drawings. An entire page full of mouths with rows and rows of fanged teeth. Bizarre, hulking creatures formed by negative space in otherwise solid pages of ink. There was a short list of what looked like book titles: Phitonis Harmonia, The Wayfarer’s Rite (Listen), and Ars Phitomatrica.

  I re-read them, head swimming. As I had with the sigil used to summon… whatever had helped Jana do her dirty work, I felt I could, should know these things. Ars Phitomatrica. The title was powerfully familiar.

  Towards the end of the notebook, I settled on the page which had the design of the solar sigil I’d entombed in my freezer. There was only one word of notation for the sigil itself: Puslicker. She had written below it: “To find the champion of the Fruit, we need the Puslickers. They say Manellis have it. Where where WHERE?”

  The Fruit of Knowledge, the Fruit of the Tree? I frowned, skimming the rest of her notes. She had not written anything else about the Fruit, but I found the tipping point of her madness in an entry dated roughly eighteen months ago—December 23, 1989. The entry was full of photos that spilled out when I opened the page. Jana at her graduation, Jana with her friends. Everyone's faces had been cut out, except for her own. I turned back a page, and then another, through lines of grief-stricken, guilt-ridden writing. She had experienced Shevirah when she and her best friend had been in a car accident. She had awoken in a cold white hospital with Hyperion—her Neshamah, I could guess—whispering in her ears. She had murdered her friend.

  “She went crazy after she underwent Shevirah?” I spoke aloud, voice high and tight.

  “It would seem so.” Kutkha was subdued.

  "She lost her mind. This thing, Hyperion—that thing is insane. Are there things that can drive a Neshamah insane?”

  For a moment, Kutkha did not reply. He rustled uncomfortably. “There are. But I do not wish to speak of it.”

  “Wait, no. You don’t get to flake on me, you shit. Yuri said you were injured.” I had figured he was lying and hadn’t really given it much thought, but now? I opened another book which bulged slightly in the middle. A wave of crushed bees fell out of it onto the desktop, a
nd I dropped it reflexively. "This could have happened to me."

  “It is true...” Kutkha sighed. "That I bear a scar."

  "So no wonder I was on the magical short bus. What caused this injury, wiseass?”

  “You did,” Kutkha said.

  The answer caught me flat-footed. “Me? How?”

  Kutkha did not reply. His withdrawal from me was as palpable as his contact.

  Uncomfortably, I turned my attention instead to the notes Jana had left on the table. I knew I had to go: it was dangerous to be down here. Jana had gone from journaling properly in her books to keeping her thoughts on scraps, the newest left on the top.

  “Frank Nacari no knowledge after retrieval. Brother, Robert Nacari, in charge of storage. Rob protected by ward: scry to find out WWHWW.” Beneath it, she had noted in a far more rushed notation: “Puslickers confirm. L says Fruit is local/nearby, secure V.M. to find. V.M. knows/knows who knows.”

  L? Lev? I rifled through the stack of loose paper, my pulse trapped under my tongue. Other than vague references to L, an acronym turned up, over and over again. TVS. I could find no explanation.

  Frowning, I turned my attention to Jana’s desk drawers. I pushed aside bones and trinkets and dug out a small silver box emblazoned with a unicorn skull. Curiously, I opened it, and when I saw what lay inside, my lips parted in confusion.

  Set into a velvet depression was the necklace Jana had worn on our first meeting, the silver teardrop pendant. Beside it was a small glass vial bound in copper wire. It was half-full of silver fluid that seethed and swirled. I touched it and jumped, startled, as it pulsed against my fingertip. Hesitantly, I picked it up.

  “Oh…” Kutkha breathed in a hushed, reverent voice. “Oh, my Ruach. This... is Phi.”

  Kutkha’s mirror analogy finally made more sense. I could see my reflection in the tiny vial, a miniature, undistorted rendering of my face that split and reformed like an unearthly mirror maze, reflecting many small Alexis under the light. It looked like mercury, but when I held the flask to the light, I saw the fluid crawling and evaporating, dripping upwards to the pool and reforming back into the mass. “It’s stunning.”