by Matt Cardin
That was the end. An electronic voice asked me whether I wanted to save or delete the messages, but I just stood there. My eyes were open and my mind awake, but the mental sight of the picture taking shape in my soul had begun to obscure the hard physical reality of the room around me. The outline was becoming clear. The pieces were malformed. Thousands of sickly, pulsating shapes with serrated edges and pale pincers had locked together to form a long figure with a handle to grasp and sharp teeth for fitting into a lock.
There had never been any real question about whether I would attend the meeting at Mitch’s house. I had known when he first invited me that I couldn’t refuse, and he had known it, too. To run from this unfolding reality would be to run from the possibility of ever reestablishing a connection with all those unnamed spiritual treasures that I had always regarded, even in the midst of my nihilism, as making life worth living. Or at least they made it bearable enough to get out of bed each morning. Through a kind of lateral logic that made no sense to my rational brain, I realized that my psychic survival was bound up with the Sick Seekers and their crazy, dangerous theology. I would go to Mitch’s house, I told myself, and would discover what they did at their worship services, and I would return safely to share my knowledge with Dr. Baumann and expose the cult for what it was. Along the way, maybe I would become a whole person again.
Despite my newfound resolve, I did place a bandage over my left cheek after I dressed, and I did wonder as I walked out the front door just how deeply the mark reached inward into my body, and whether its fingers might touch the latches of any other doors that I had locked and then forgotten.
7
And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time.
—2 Thessalonians 2:6
Mitch’s house was different in the darkness. Gray clouds choked the sky as I pulled into his driveway at five minutes till seven, with only a ragged gap here and there allowing a flicker of starlight to shine through. Dusk had come early, and the house looked vaguely humanlike with its red-lipped porch for a mouth and yellow glowing dormer windows for eyes. The windows drew my attention as I parked behind several other cars that were already lined up. From the look of it, those upper rooms would be used for something tonight, for I saw moving shadows through the glass.
I walked up the porch steps without hesitation, carrying my briefcase even though it felt useless, and rapped on the metal frame of the screen door. Through the screen I saw several people standing or sitting in Mitch’s living room. They were all elderly. One of them, an old man dressed in a gray sweat suit and brown slippers, was seated on the couch with an aluminum walker parked beside him. He looked at me through the wire mesh barrier and smiled broadly with a closed mouth.
Then Mitch approached from somewhere and opened the door for me. His smile was rather sardonic, as if to say that he had known all along I would show up. I refused to meet his eyes but nodded my head in greeting. He seemed satisfied with this and stepped aside to let me enter.
He introduced me to everyone right away. Of course he didn’t speak. He merely pointed to them one by one as they told me their names and the nature of their diseases, in what felt like a customary ritual. There was Maggie, an old woman whose eyes were completely obscured by milky white cataracts. There was Alice, another old woman with hands shriveled and twisted into eagle-like claws from rheumatoid arthritis. There was Sherman, an old man with a brain tumor. There was Doyle, the old man seated on the couch beside the walker. He suffered from testicular cancer, and he smiled that broad-lipped smile the whole time I looked at him. The others, all elderly and liver-spotted, crowded forward to tell me of their various ailments. Together they chanted a litany of sickness and suffering, but their voices were happy and their eyes bright. Their faces were all shining with eager anticipation of something to come, and I silently renewed my resolve to keep my guard up.
I counted ten people, including Mitch, and then I began to wonder where the other two were. He had said there were twelve, hadn’t he?
“There’s the last one,” said Maggie. I don’t know how she knew where to point in her blindness, but she directed a bony finger through the wall of aged bodies gathered before me, and my jaw dropped nearly to my chest as the people parted to reveal Lindy standing near the doorway to the kitchen with a shy grin on her fair-skinned face. She said she was suffering from uterine cancer and had only been a member of the body for two weeks.
No, I thought, this isn’t right. This can’t be right. My eyes felt hot, and the bandage on my cheek was suffocating me. My knees were turning to water. Nobody had asked about the bandage yet, but they had all been looking at it with a piercing interest in their eyes. Now Lindy was there, one of the last people in the world I had expected or wanted to see, and she was staring at the bandage as if she saw through it and wanted to kiss what was on the other side.
Not Lindy. She couldn’t be a part of this. She was too pure. And it would mean that I had been manipulated from the beginning. Mitch wouldn’t have had to suffer any kind of “spell.” He and Lindy might have planned his trip to the hospital together, so that he would arrive when Peg was on duty, and she would tell Bobby about the incident, and he would tell me. One of the other members of the body might have driven Mitch there and then slipped out on cue. Then all they would have had to do was wait for me to show up on Mitch’s doorstep thinking that I was paying him an unexpected visit.
But why? What possible reason could they have for tricking me into coming out there and meeting him?
A blurry wave rippled across my field of vision. Suddenly, I was unsure whether I was standing there in Mitch’s living room or still hanging in the timeless darkness of my recent dream. My briefcase slipped from my fingers and dropped to the worn carpet with a thump. I felt a tingling start up in my face again. It swelled rapidly to an itching but then held off, refusing to surge into the agony I had known once in a distant past that was separated from me by less than forty-eight hours. The feeling rippled like an electric centipede down to my chest, and further, into my groin, where it became a ball of prickling energy that was somehow wrapped up in the cool embrace of a deep cistern that even now was continuing to receive bucket after bucket of fresh, dark water from a steadily turning wheel.
When the diseased old people gathered around me and touched me with their vile hands, I tried to resist but found that I was mute and helpless. Even the voice of my own thoughts was unable to articulate a clear refusal. I was dumb as an infant.
They led me to the staircase, which was old and wooden, and then up the stairs to a trapdoor, which I saw was suspended open by a rope and two iron counterweights shaped like the weights of a grandfather clock. Brittle hands clothed with papery skin pawed and caressed me, carried me forward, lifted me. I was not walking, I was being borne along by a tidal swell of aging flesh.
The upper floor had no partitions or dividing walls. It was a single large room that reached to the outer walls of the house. Everything was of brown wood like the staircase, and the ceiling was low. Two bare bulbs with pull cords were suspended from the ceiling and doing a poor job of illuminating the corners. Two four-paned windows on the far wall peered out over the front yard, which may as well have been a million miles and a lifetime away.
The worshippers whispered around me and sat me down near a corner. My awareness was the blank surface of a black sea as they peeled off me one by one, moving in a hushed silence toward other positions, lining the outer walls until everyone was seated in a rough circle. Maggie was positioned across from me. Even in the blankness of my thoughts, I could not escape the impression that her blind eyes with their milky growths were regarding me with compassion. Lindy was seated several feet away on my left, swaying and humming to herself.
Then Mitch began to speak. He was to my right, and his voice was the voice of the God.
“The body is a blocked wish. The body is not different from the soul.” It was the sound of all foulness and cor
ruption, a voice too horrible to be real, and yet it kept speaking as I swayed like a drunken man and looked around for a way to escape.
“The body is meant to rot. The soul is meant to rot. Sickness of the body and soul is the doorway to your bliss. You have tried and failed to make peace with the body. You have tried and failed to find the truth of your soul. Peace with the body and truth in the soul are illusions. You are good for nothing but to rot.”
They were all swaying now, moving like serpents in a circle. I would not have thought their wasted old bodies capable of such supple motion. Doyle looked as if he were about to twist the upper half of his body away from the lower. His walker rested beside him, forgotten in the fray.
The God’s voice continued to issue from Mitch’s throat. “Give up your disease. Give it to me, and I will take it from you and leave you with blissful nothing.”
Maggie was still staring at me. Her eyes were too bright to be blind. Even from across the room, I saw what might have been an army of misshapen crabs chittering behind them. Something connected within me, some nascent circuit of realization, and suddenly I knew with undeniable certainty that it was the God looking out at me from behind that milky stare. She had become the vessel for His sight, and her eyes were now His.
Alice sat next to her with clawed arthritic hands moving in serpentine patterns. They slithered in the air and then came to point at me with eight fingers and two thumbs. Their motion mimicked something. It looked as if she were caressing my face from across the room. The same blossoming realization continued to expand: her hands were the hands of the God. She had become a vessel for the God of foulness. I looked up and saw her eyes closed and her head thrown back in ecstasy.
The others were all beginning to manifest the God in various ways. They twisted and flopped and beat the floor. They hummed and moaned and wailed while Mitch continued to speak of the body as a disease, and disease as a new kind of health. Sherman, the old man with the brain tumor, sat stiff-backed with his arms spread out like a music conductor. The motions of his hands caused waves of activity across the room. It was almost as if he were a puppeteer, and I knew that he was the brain of the God, manifesting itself through a tumor implanted in his own brain like a rotten plum.
Then Lindy and Doyle began to crawl across the floor toward each other. They were tearing their clothes off. Oh, God. The thought struck me with a desperate absurdity, for the God I was referring to had no place in that room. Within a moment’s time, an old man with testicular cancer had begun to copulate with a young woman suffering from cancer of the uterus. I could not bear to watch, and yet I could not rip my eyes away from them.
My face was burning and itching and swelling and suffocating beneath its bandage. Sherman waved his hand at me, and against my conscious will my own hand shot up and ripped away the gauze and tape, baring my secret horror to the assembled appendages of the God while a flabby old man and a soft young woman coupled on the floor in the midst of us.
It was as if scales fell from my eyes. With my mark exposed, I could see what I had been unable to see before: a presence like oily smoke floating near the ceiling. It churned softly with a strangely organic motion, dropping down flickering tendrils to caress the assembled worshipers.
No, it did not caress them, it entered them through the various means of access they had brought with them in the form of their diseases. It drove black spikes into Maggie’s eyes. It wound like a leprous fog around Alice’s shriveled hands and sank in through her pores to animate her fingers with that caressing motion that was still directed at me. It formed a seething funnel like a miniature cyclone above Sherman’s head and poured into his skull in an ever-shifting plume. When I looked to my right, I saw it entering Mitch’s mouth with every inhalation and exiting as grotesquely shaped puffs that trembled in sympathetic vibration to the words he spoke.
Lindy and Doyle were still locked in a coital embrace. He was on his back and she sat astride him, and I felt my gorge rise. The cloud swirled above them and formed a vortex like an open mouth. A single tongue of greasy blackness lolled out and fell down to brush over their writhing bodies. Then it snaked between them to caress the point of their union.
The thought came in a flash: what would be the issue of a woman with a diseased womb, impregnated by a man with diseased testes, formed by the power of a God of foulness, nurtured by the collective worship of a group of ailing fanatics? What exactly would be the shape of a God whose nature was foulness and corruption? What would be the appearance of the God of rottenness made incarnate?
These thoughts were cut off by the phenomenon that had been steadily growing in my face. In the midst of the nightmare that was taking shape around me, I had been feeling a growing pressure in my cheek. Now it swelled suddenly to bursting. My head was tugged violently to one side as if gravity itself were pulling me toward the center of the circle, or as if a hook were lodged in my cheek and someone were reeling me in. I looked up to see the tendril of the God reaching down toward me, sinking into the diseased skin of my face, then reaching even further down inside, searching out the whole branching network of a cancer that had metastasized throughout my body with impossible rapidity. The God already possessed eyes and hands. He had a brain and a body. He was organizing the separate parts and forming Himself through the union of the two who were even now finishing up before me. What more was wanting?
The God needed a face.
At the moment I realized it, Mitch began to speak again next to me.
“Our Father in chaos. And His brother, the all-in-one, the gate and the key. Hear Me, and give Me form so that I may reclaim this world of putrid flesh for Our own, that I may sweep away its illusions to reveal Our reality burning bright behind the veil of matter.” As the God spoke, the worshippers wailed, and their sound became a component of the Voice.
“I am the procession of your union in separateness,” the God proclaimed to His counterparts in infinity. “Now give me a name and a form to be Our presence in this world. It is I who ask You this—I, Our selves manifested in flesh!”
Then the God spoke His own name. It was not true speech, not the production of any type of vocal equipment, human or otherwise. It was not even a sound, in the normal meaning of the word. It was an actual animate thing, the aural embodiment of the essence of the God Himself, the living Word of Corruption. And it was a palpable horror.
At the sound of it, my face ripped loose from my skull. It flew off like a ragged rubber mask, flapped upward toward the seething purplish abyss of the ceiling like a blood-drenched bird, and disappeared into the maw of the God. Something in me died as it disappeared. And then an avalanche of disease begin to rumble up and pour forth from every orifice of my body. Blood and bone spewed from my eyes. My organs dissolved into jellied lumps and erupted from my mouth. And yet somehow I was still conscious through it all. Somehow, I still saw.
The others around me were coming unbound as well. The tendrils trailing from the ceiling were tearing them apart, wrenching themselves out of pale fat bodies and taking lumps of disease with them. Leathery black coils like the length of a whip were withdrawing from the tender point of contact between Lindy and Sherman, and it was as if a nest of fishhooks were drawing up a monster catch from the depths of a putrid ocean. The things squirming on the ends of those hooks were rotten and full of teeth, dripping with a blackish ichor, and mewling like kittens. They smelled like a sewer. I saw them drawn into the greedy black cloud, and it seemed that its edges expanded slightly, as if it were growing from the nourishment it received. It pushed against the shuddering walls, bulging out between attic boards, swelling the house like a human head with its cranium about to burst.
And then I returned to myself and found that I was lying on the floor in a rubbery pile like an empty body suit. The others around me were wilting, too, like peach-colored balloons. Nothing remained of them but the cast-off shells of their human flesh. The God had taken back what belonged to Him and left the remnant to rot.
Sherman and Lindy had pulled away from each other. She lay on her back before me in a totally immodest pose with her empty flesh collapsing in on itself, exposing in a horrid display those parts of her that I had once thought (was it only a few short days ago?) that I would enjoy coaxing her into exposing under different circumstances.
Next to me, Mitch was the only one still standing. He had stopped speaking but his breath still emitted a steady scrape like the sound of a saw rasping in the distance. He turned his eyes to the ceiling, where the swirling black mass was already receding into the impossible abyss whence it had come, and I saw him reach up to probe his throat gently in an attitude of affection. Then he turned his gaze down upon me and opened his mouth to speak.
What came out were not sounds, but written words. They issued from his lips like trails of black butterflies and stayed suspended against a smooth white background that shimmered up from somewhere to become a paper surface. I recognized them. “The God gives you a choice,” they said. “First He gives you a taste of the bliss He’s offering you. Then He shows you what it’s going to cost you to accept it.” Mitch’s eyes looked deeply into mine. Then he bent at the knees and sat down in a ratty old recliner that appeared behind him from out of nowhere.
8
They’re here already! You’re next!
—Miles Bennell
I was sitting on Mitch’s sofa with a notebook in my hands. He sat in the recliner before me, waiting. Two box fans purred in the living room windows with the shades pulled down to the tops of them. The atmosphere was stuffy, and the backs of my legs had sweated through to the sofa.
I blinked and looked around. An empty glass rested on the floor beside Mitch’s chair. The faint scrapings of insect noises filtered through the walls from outside and mingled with the sound of his breathing. When I looked back up at him, he was staring at me with shiny-bright silver dollar eyes.
