Blood and Blasphemy

by Gerri R. Gray

  “Fuck that,” Walter said, raising his leg and shoving his foot underneath the knob. The door flew open, and there he was, ramming a redheaded man from behind. A burly man wearing only a utility belt had his cock rammed inside of Christ, creating some sort of fucktrain.

  Milton turned away at the unleashed smell, gagging in the hallway.

  “Party’s over,” Walter said. “Like it or not, you’ve got a job to do. You can keep running if you want, but you know they’ll just send the Apostles if I fail to bring you back. If they fail, then an Archangel. We gonna do this or what?”

  Christ sighed and unholstered himself from the redhead. He pushed back against the burly man, who forced him back down onto the side of the bed. With a simple flick of his wrist, the burly man flew against the wall and crashed through the sheetrock into the adjacent room, where a black man was having his cock orally polished by a twink with a chain around his neck.

  Christ looked around aimlessly until he found his white robe. He took his time slipping his arms through the sleeves, arranging the collar, but left it untied for his holiness to poke through and seemingly lead the way. Walter and Milton walked behind him outside the building and to the car. Briefly, Walter wondered how he knew where the car was parked, then realized exactly who he was thinking of.

  “Either of you boys got a cigarette?” Christ asked from the backseat.

  With shaky hands, Milton pulled the pack of Parliaments from his shirt pocket and handed them to him. “H-here you go.”

  Walter’s grip on the steering wheel tightened, his face tensed. Milton noticed, nudged him and shook his head. Walter scoffed, looking in the rearview mirror. “You’ve got some fucking nerve, you know that?”

  Christ put the cigarette in his mouth, snapped his fingers and it was lit. He didn’t respond, but stared out the window.

  “Stop,” Milton said under his breath.

  “No, I’m serious,” Walter said, braking for a red light. “People depend on you. The congregation has always ensured that enough blood is on hand for your fixes and you know damn well it’s there when you need it.” The light turned green and Walter took his foot off the brake. “No one in the congregation’s gonna tell you this, but they’re more afraid of you than ever. You let a lot of people down, and you’re the only one with enough power to reduce the horrible shit that goes on. That means this lies on you, and no one else.”

  Walter pulled through the iron gates and halfway up the roundabout, parallel with the main compound. Christ didn’t say a single word through the entire ride. Milton had called Chuck when they were ten minutes out, and he now stood on the steps in one of his perfectly pressed Italian designer suits with a wide, welcoming grin on his face.

  With the sun now beginning to rise, the four of them walked inside and down into the basement. “Your meal is this way,” Chuck said, opening a door. Walter didn’t notice, but Milton stayed outside of it. The seven pornographers were bound by their feet, hanging down head first above a large black cauldron. Their throats had been slit some time ago, obvious by the scabbing and coagulating neck wounds.

  Christ ran his hands through the collected blood, then his mouth began to open. Walter had never seen this part, assuming he simply lapped it up like a dog, or maybe sucked it through a straw. His mouth opened to a sickening capacity, with the back of his head covering the nape of his neck. The slimy, pulsing organ slithered out from within, heaving until it found the cauldron of blood.

  When the sucking sounds started, Walter turned and walked back out the door, wondering if God had abandoned them.

  THE END

  THE CURTAIN

  By B.T. Joy

  If Yannick hadn’t been here before he wouldn’t have known what they were.

  The countryside that surrounded them was French; anyone could have guessed that. Flaxen fields of barley tillering wheat ran as far as the eye could see and stopped only, perhaps, where the rough beach grass trimmed the boundaries of the Normandy coast. But they, themselves, the figures that stood among the level farmlands, were far harder for a stranger to the dream to identify.

  Trees, they appeared at first. Or, rather, blasted, dead stumps that dotted the otherwise empty plain like an extinct forest. Then—from the nearest of these broken pillars—the eye discerns a ruffling movement around the steady form and—suddenly— the dreamer realizes that each dark shape against the yellow crops is clothed in a furling black habit that trails along with the wind.

  The nuns, Yannick thought, and he looked with his dream-eyes at the plastery, cracked faces that hung like Venetian masks on the heads of each sideward leaning and colorlessly dressed body.

  Yannick hated them; hated them and needed them all at the same time.

  The shape closest to him in the sisterhood of shapes let a pale and blue veined hand slip from under her mantle and then it pointed, twist-fingered, towards the shambling relic of disordered stone that had been their home when they were alive and young.

  Yannick refused to look the way the wind was blowing: towards the convent that had stood on that spot when he was a boy—in his summery childhood—but that was now nothing but a mound of rocks. He focused instead on the long, indicatory arm and the spiny hand of stretched fingers that concluded it.

  In that hand the nun was still holding her crucifix and the silver chain and glass beads of the rosary wound around her digits and her wrist like a length of cheese-wire digging into the skin.

  As Yannick watched she tightened her grip on the awkward cruciform shape she held and with such vehemence that a dribbling run of blood fell from her palm and stained the blonde ground at her feet a darker color.

  Yannick was not shocked. He had seen all their blasphemies before. His blue eyes trailed up the line of the nun’s arm, not stopping at her hunched shoulder, and carrying on to her grinning, feral, parody of a face.

  The thing inside the nun winked at him and then her long, black tongue unfolded like a sexual invitation from the cavity of her mouth.

  She opened her throat to speak to him but the only sound that issued out was—

  The alarm! Stark and jarring and military in its directness.

  Yannick rolled over with a practiced precision and fingered the device until the noise stopped.

  He sat up on his elbow on the hard mattress in the center of the concrete room. The window behind his head had only then begun to turn a darker shade of blue with the oncoming night.

  He listened—cocking his head to one side like a predatory bird. His blue eyes shimmered lightly in the shadows as he took in all the auditory information he could; interpreted it and drew his conclusions about the other inhabitant of the house.

  His breath stilled a little when he first heard the low bass of the ruckus downstairs. The basement was well enough soundproofed so that only a particularly attentive ear could ever pick out the noise but Yannick had spent the last nine years training himself to detect even the slightest disturbance at even the most extreme thresholds of his senses and so, to him, any sound louder than a whisper was unnerving enough to cause him to go down and quiet it.

  Still though, he could never react in a spirit of panic or discord. It was what it wanted and he simply wouldn’t allow it.

  He calmed himself and blinked the still burning pictures of all those dead French nuns out of his memory. Then he pulled the blanket away from his still-dressed body and rose; limping off into the pit latrine to prepare.

  When inside the doorless cubicle that he used for the inevitable calls that nature made each day Yannick pushed his trousers down to his knees and touched his inner thigh with exploratory fingers.

  Blood. He pulled his hand back and looked at it. His palm and all his digits were smeared red.

  He saw the yellow fields again: the nun’s hand bleeding onto the wheat.

  He winced a little as, tenderly, he reached down again. He grabbed the buckle of the improvised cilice and slackened it only momentarily before dragging it shut again with another n
otch of tightness that drove the razorblades deeper into the flesh.

  There was another spurt of fresh bleeding across his wrist. He set his jaw and meditated on the pain. He imagined the Venerable Antonietta Meo; her tiny bones rife with life-eating osteosarcomas; the doctors applying a tourniquet to her leg before sawing it off; and, all the while, the six-year-old Saint maintaining a composure of prayer and gratitude to Christ.

  “Ad majorem Christi gloriam,” he muttered: For the greater glory of Christ.

  He left the contraption tightened around his thigh and pulled up his trousers; tightening too the belt around his waist.

  In the basement room downstairs the noise must have been getting out of hand because he could hear it almost clearly through the thickly insulated floor.

  He left the latrine and made his way—limping—toward the stairs.

  * * *

  The curtain ran on a straight runner across the ceiling and cut off a narrow strip of the room by the back wall. Behind it, as was often the case, there was such a filthy stream of caterwauling and profanity that it hurt Yannick’s soul to hear it.

  Today, Yannick could just about make out from the muffled protestations, that it was the Holy Trinity that was the target of the thing’s tirade of execration.

  On other days there would be diatribes given out to nearly every sacred thing. The testicles of John the Baptist, for some outlandish reason, were a particularly favored subject.

  The Popes of Rome lick the fat arse of Mammon, it would slobber. Jesus’ mouth and Saint John’s balls! The tongues of the nuns in the dusty, black cunt of the Mother of God!

  Of course, through the gag, Yannick could rarely catch enough for the offence to be total.

  He crossed now to the curtain and listened for a moment. Some diarrhetic drivel about a homosexual orgy between the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Nothing unique or even shocking.

  Yannick blinked. It would be disgusting if it weren’t so boring and predicable.

  It never said anything else. Just an on-running stream of the carnal conflated with the spiritual in all its mind-numbing permutations.

  Yannick put his hand on the small collection of switches on the wall by the curtain.

  He waited a moment. The thing had heard him enter and should have quieted on its own.

  He counted down in curse words.

  “Whore!” it screamed.

  “Five,” Yannick said.

  “Cunt! Motherfucker!”

  “Four... three...”

  “Come at me you cocksucker!”

  “Two,” he rested his thumb tiredly on the light fixture.

  “Fuck you!” it answered.

  “One,” Yannick flicked the switch and completed the circuit.

  A faint buzzing noise began behind the curtain; like a current running through metal. The once colorful language turned into an agonized scream and, in seconds, the smell of slightly burning skin and hair filled the entire basement.

  Yannick turned off the electrics for a moment; waited for silence; then cranked it on again.

  The screaming filled his eardrums and echoed across the naked soundproofing.

  He switched off for the second time and listened once more as the soft yelping from back there became only the sound of breath whistling between rotten teeth and as— slowly—even that sound gave way to peacefulness.

  He listened to the pattern of its inhalations and knew that it was either sleeping or faking sleep.

  In all the years he’d kept it there, behind the curtain, Yannick had never truly decided whether it slept or not. Its true self—Yannick knew—needed neither rest nor nourishment. But, then again, maybe while established in the host it did require the necessities of life to keep its vessel from giving out on it.

  Yannick thought of Gaga. He knew for a certainty they were hardy things. He frowned as he remembered her: strapped to the observation chair in the center of the basement and begging for water in that sickly-sweet voice she had affected in order to weaken his resolve.

  He remembered Ilil, the male one, growling like a rabid dog in his cage; so much in fact that Yannick had had to turn on the electric seven times on the night that Gaga died.

  In the end even Ilil—irreverent and smut-mouthed as he usually was—tried a subtler and more cunning tack. Yannick still remembered how saccharine and false it was; the servile and unconvincing tone he’d adopted.

  “Please, Yannick,” he’d mewled like a wounded puppy. “Please. Give her water.”

  * * *

  Success is never a virtue in itself.

  Over time, that had come to constitute one of Yannick’s deepest moral assumptions.

  After all, if success were the primary measure of the importance of one’s life then any intestinal parasite that slithers through shit and so feeds itself on blood would be the pinnacle of divine creation. Many who are wicked or vile succeed, but are they virtuous?

  Didn’t Judas himself succeed in betraying Christ and yet, with that very success, condemned and hung himself before the Passover had finished?

  Yannick strolled down the snowy sidewalk of Nägeligasse, past the squared-off neoclassical frontages that had been all the rage in Bern before Le Corbusier.

  Frontages, Yannick thought. Yes. Frontages.

  All elegance and je ne sais quoi to the eye; but inside, in its internal portions, where substance should reside: nothing but decadence leading to rot and excess as the harbinger of putrefaction.

  Yannick ducked into the arched doorway off the street and, with an appearance of boundless confidence, he just kept on going through the backdoor of the hotel.

  He corrected his limp as best he could. He’d even removed the cilice for this job and washed out his self-inflicted wounds with cool water. The pain of the mortification brought his soul closer to Christ; he knew that. But he knew equally that the Lord would grant him dispensation from his usual pain for long enough to do his work. After all, this business required that he travel as persona incognita, if you will, and nothing draws more attention, Yannick found, than a sudden spill of blood running down the trouser leg onto a freshly shampooed carpet in the lobby of a five-star hotel.

  Ad majorem Christi gloriam, he thought to himself as he walked. Ad majorem Christi gloriam.

  He could hardly believe how easy these little public subterfuges had become, with practice. Several times on his route to the staff room facilities that he’d scoped out on his previous visit he’d been spotted and eyed—though momentarily—by a few bellhops and even a manager. He’d smiled at them crisply and they—not knowing him for guest or colleague—had succumbed to the general hypnosis of his mannerisms and simply let him pass unmolested.

  He’d been forced to look around cautiously only once: when he’d forced the lock on the night cleaner’s locker and found, as he knew he would, her skeleton key pass lying there for use during her shift.

  He passed out of the staff room again, turning the pass like a trophy between his fingers; crossed the busy and quite palatial lobby and tucked himself in among the nine or so others who were now standing in the open elevator.

  “Floor, sir?” the red uniformed operator asked.

  “Ah.” Yannick smiled. “Twelve. Please.”

  The operator smiled back and thumbed the button with his white-gloved hand.

  The elevator began its smooth upward transit. Yannick stared expressionlessly at the ceiling for most of the time.

  Moments in, however, he felt the feeling of two warm, sticky, little eyes on his face.

  He became necessarily aware of the people round about him. Just like his hearing his sense of being watched at become ultra-sensitive and precise given the mortal danger any servant of the Cross might face.

  He scanned the faces around him quickly and noted that each one was staring only at the walls; then he looked down at the tiny, winter-blushed face that was staring up at him like he was a skeleton in a carnival ghost train.

  He smiled at the little girl. She
didn’t smile back.

  He winked at her and she stood bemused.

  He stole one last glance at the girl’s mother, whose hand she held in her own mittened hand. Then he decided he’d really nothing to lose.

  He stared back into the girl’s glistening eyes. There was a moment when he did nothing but smile politely. Then he bared his teeth; scrunched up his face into a plastery mask and stuck out his tongue as though in sexual frenzy.

  When he left the elevator on the twelfth floor no one aboard could understand why the little girl was breathless and crying.

  * * *

  Frontages, Yannick thought. Frontages.

  And behind the frontages: Devils, all of them.

  He thought of Gaga dying on the stirruped observation chair; crying for water; pretending to be only a girl, though he’d seen Ancitif prancing in her eyes and watched her chalky throat bulge with obscenities. A frontage!

  He thought of Ilil in the cage, behind the curtain, in the basement room, at the outskirts of Bern, screaming tirelessly about Saint John’s bollocks and then pretending to sleep like an inoffensive lamb. A frontage!

  Yannick even thought—and he hadn’t for years—about his summery childhood in the north of France. About the nuns who had brought him up. About dear Sister Camille and dear Sister Mariette. Their golden voices. Their sweet faces.

  Affront! he thought. Affront! A frontage!

  His thoughts—their passion—had nearly put his breath out of kilter and he did well to right it again. After all, where he was standing, in the wardrobe of Room 1208, any stray noise he made may have been picked up on and identified from the room at large.

  He steadied himself and stopped thinking about the past; that was done anyway and couldn’t be relived. Instead he tried to focus all his attention on the present, on the job at hand.

  He thought about Herr Grosh—that fat, entitled hog living off of the filth of a once proud banquet now gone to spoil.

  Yannick remembered the article in the Zeitung that had first alerted him to the German lawyer’s impending visit to Switzerland. He thought of Grosh being escorted around the decadent, meaningless installation art at the Kunsthalle and then dining on micro cuisine at Mille Sens; only to retire later to more private regions of the city and to engage there in his darker appetites.