Blood and Blasphemy

by Gerri R. Gray

  He thought of putting Ilil on the observation chair after he was dead. He thought of kissing his brow and his ragged lips. He thought of stroking his hair and then turning out the basement light; as though the story were finished now and he had done nothing less natural than to lay the poor boy down in a warm bed; than to put the child to sleep after such a long day.

  THE END

  THE ALTAR BOY FROM HELL

  By Carlton Herzog

  The moment I clawed my way out my mother’s uterine prison, and nearly choked on that slimy rope, I knew life was not for me. Clearly the unborn need more information about what's waiting for them. I say give them a life advisory scrolling down the placental wall. It need not be fancy. Just give the kid enough data to make an informed decision as to whether he should let himself be born or not. That way, he could either proceed with the birth or return to the ectoplasmic waiting room until an opening more to his liking arose.

  My first memory right out of the box was of trying to bite the doctor’s stethoscope like it was part of his anatomy. But since I had no teeth, the best I could do was gum it. I was helpless as any other Lamb of God.

  Only I wasn’t a lamb on the inside. Far from it. I was as feral and vulpine, as wild and cunning, as any rough beast. I just needed time to grow and sharpen into the thing I am today, the wolf that freely wends his way in the fluffy, non-threatening colors of a clueless flock.

  I learned early on that life is theater and to get what you want out of it, you need to be an arch thespian, donning and discarding character masks as situations demand. That is not as diabolical as it sounds. After all, the cuttlefish can completely change the texture and color of its skin to blend seamlessly into its environment—to ambush prey and hide from predators. Deception and trickery are what life is all about, whether you wear pants or sport a tail.

  So really, when all is said and done, I am merely answering the rough call of my ancestors to brute and sport and do as I please while pretending to be that most civilized of creatures, the apple of God’s eye, the apex of creation, a faithful servant of God.

  Like any animal, I am spontaneously violent. I don’t know why. My first episode came when I pushed my younger disabled brother off our second-floor balcony. He broke his neck and fractured his skull. I restrained my jubilation as my parents bought my account: he was spastic, caught his braces on a chair, stumbled and fell. I gave little to no thought as to my motive beyond his cutting my parental attention time in half, and that kind of evil would never do.

  After that, I realized that my heart was truly black. Even at the tender age of 14, I recognized the need to throw people off my scent. So I volunteered to be an altar boy at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. There were other boys ahead of me, and they made the mistake of teasing me for my golden locks and blue eyes, going so far as to call me a little girl. Naturally, a frontal assault was out of the question. But opportunity has a way of presenting itself to those prepared to seize it.

  On Palm Sunday, I was given the job of carrying the thurible, a metal censer suspended from chains, in which incense is burned during worship. My job was simple: walk and swing the thurible while the other boys walked behind me.

  I spent a week planning my attack, repeatedly going over the details and even practicing my swing with a softball taped to ropes.

  When Sunday arrived, I pretended to trip mid-aisle, and as I did, I swung the thurible in a terrible arc behind me so that the hard-spiked metal censer, so alive with burning incense, clipped the heads of my three main tormentors; then, pendulum-like, swung back and hit them again. A three-bank shot that would have done Minnesota Fats proud.

  I apologized profusely and helped the injured boys to their feet as their open skulls spilled blood onto the blood red carpet. An accident, of course, wholly unintended, an unfortunate slip by a novice altar boy who now seeks God’s forgiveness and mercy. Oh yeah. I only wish I had killed them the way I killed my brother. Maybe next time.

  Over the next year, I performed my altar boy duties admirably and was often commended as the thurible incident faded into distant memory. But even as my reputation waxed angelic, my hatred for the congregation, including my dim-witted parents, grew exponentially. If I thought for a moment that I could have wiped them all from the face of the earth with a bomb or a machine gun and gotten away with it, I would have done so in a heartbeat.

  I tired to figure out the source of enmity, some purely rational explanation rooted in psychology, but couldn’t settle on anything other than I had come out wrong, a bad seed, a faulty, misbehaving, hateful human being that should have been recalled by the factory, but somehow slipped past a lackadaisical quality control.

  I briefly entertained the notion that I was the Anti-Christ, but since I didn’t believe in God, it made zero sense to believe in His contrary, the Devil. Besides, humanity was doing a fine job on the evil front, so deflecting blame to an external diabolical agency seemed redundant and wishy-washy. The Devil was as unnecessary as God.

  I concluded that I should embrace who I was and just murder as the spirit of darkness moved me. And I did. Jimmy Rogers, school bully, was giving me grief about my being a little kiss-ass altar boy. I played along, told him Jesus wants us to love our enemies, gave him a friendly hug, spun him around, and then pushed him into an oncoming city bus.

  I wish somebody had put it on YouTube, but I’m glad they didn’t. The bus dragged him some forty feet. By the time his body slid free, limp and lifeless, he was deader than a doornail. If somebody had videoed my homicidal pirouette, my alibi of his having slipped would have been shot. But I had the luck of the hell-spawn going for me, as well as a sterling all churched up reputation, so nothing came of it. I shed many a crocodile tear at that lout’s funeral, a closed casket affair since what was left of him wasn’t much to look at, even after the mortician fixed him up. So sad.

  Mind you, it wasn’t all blood and blasphemy on Sunday. On Tuesday, when Father Mike went out on his rounds, I would bang boots and swig booze with Sister Mary Margaret in the cramped confession booth. There was something about her robes and wimple that drove me wild. Probably that I was corrupting her, even though she was turned on by believing that she was corrupting me.

  I made it a point to keep her happy so I could use her missionary connections to import exotic animals. I was studying chemistry and had developed a keen interest in venoms and poisons. I could get poisons such as arsenic, selenium, nightshade and oleander locally, and I knew how to culture botulin from animal feces and guts.

  But that seemed pedestrian. I wanted to be different, even unique in my homicidal mischief. So, I was beside myself with glee when the shipment of cone snails arrived on my doorstep, alive. They came from Florida and were a solid nine inches long with harpoon shaped stingers carrying a payload of paralytic toxin like that of the puffer fish and blue ring octopus. The first place I put them was in my history teacher’s mailbox. It was a March Saturday. Overcast with a slight nip in the air.

  Mr. Roebling, a bachelor, had gone out to run errands. I waited for the mailman to drop in the letters. When I was sure nobody was looking, I, disguised as a food delivery person, dropped my deadly cargo into his mailbox. I came back that night and retrieved my secret assassin’s helpers.

  On Monday, Roebling was a no show. On Tuesday, we learned that he had died of respiratory failure from an unknown cause. I celebrated with a poke of Sister Margaret and a bottle of sacramental wine.

  A week or so later, it struck me that I was meant for bigger things, angel of death sized things. Funnel spiders, box jellyfish, and assassin caterpillar surprises had been fun, but they merely wet my whistle.

  I started with the sacrificial wine I dispensed on Sundays—one-part LSD, one-part ecstasy, one-part Fentanyl. Since that dispensation occurred well into the service, the effects didn’t manifest until after the benediction as the church emptied. The congregation got loud, happy, and clumsy. The real damage came when they jumped in their cars and started drivi
ng into one another. It was like a crazy Christian demolition derby. They were having the time of their stuffed shirt lives, even when a few of them got run over. I caught it on all on video with a hidden body cam.

  The questions came and went. The official line was that somebody had spiked the punch sometime in the night. A few began to connect the dots to my exotic venom murders but not in any meaningful follow-the-evidence way. It was more like they just wanted to sound like they knew something when they didn’t know squat.

  None of that mattered. I intended to load the sacramental bread and wine with botulin and watch the lot of them drop. But there was a bump in the road.

  Cardinal Mullins wanted to meet me. Something about all the good reports he had been getting. Neither the parish priest nor any of the nuns knew anything about those good reports.

  I showed up on Saturday to meet with him. He had a predator’s face—narrow and vulpine with an aquiline nose. I took him for a con man and a pedophile, but he proved to be much more than that.

  We met in private. He didn’t waste any time getting to the point of his visit.

  “You’re quite a character, you are. Tell me, do you keep track of your kills? Got a jar somewhere with slips of paper on it hidden somewhere in your house?”

  “I don’t know; what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t be coy, kid. The word is out on you. Twenty confirmed and you’re only what, sixteen? Color me impressed.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I work for the Devil and he knows everything. He sent me here to slow your roll player.”

  I became flushed and started to twitch.

  “Nothing to be nervous about. Here’s the deal: The Devil has his own chapel in every church. Why? Because whatever good God thinks he’s doing, we’re undoing, but in subtle, crafty insidious ways. But then you come along and start making a lot of waves. From where I sit, your decision to poison an entire congregation is going to call unnecessary attention to our work. I can tell you right now, some brain-dead Devil-worshipping club that couldn’t do an evil act on its best day will be blamed, and the real Devil—my Master—will look like a cheap, petty murderer.

  “Our entire program rests on the premise that nobody believes in him. True evil doesn’t leave a footprint or cast a shadow. It gets people to be the instruments of their own destruction. We want them to drink the poison, knowing full well that it’s poison. To do that, we need spin, we need good public relations, we need evil to be good and good to be evil. Your little sideshow, born of your goofy little ego, just gets in the way. We’re trying to create a magic kingdom of horror and you want to do little chickenshit episodes of Dexter.”

  I didn’t like his condescending tone. I didn’t like him. If he were the Devil’s emissary, then the Devil and I were fated to be adversaries, not fast friends. And I certainly wasn’t going to be his toady.

  I asked the cardinal, “What do you get out of this deal?”

  “I never die. Sure, my body may expire, but my mind will simply transmigrate to the blank slate of a newborn’s mind, where I will start a new life with all the knowledge gained from the old, and that cycle will continue as long as the earth spins, unless I opt for reassignment to Hell, where I will be royalty.

  “And I can do whatever I like without fear of punishment. I like young boys, and while the other priests have been getting caught with their pants down, so to speak, my Master makes sure I never get caught. You can have the same deal. You’re very young, so you could be pope someday if you play your cards right.”

  I had no intention of going along with the cardinal but played along so I could buy some time and formulate a plan. That didn’t take long. I told him I needed some fresh air to think about his proposal. I went outside and spotted his rental car. I went around behind the church where I had stashed the botulin, jimmied his trunk, and stuck it in there, ensuring to wipe it of my prints.

  I went back inside and read him the riot act:

  “I don’t like your coming here and raining on my parade. I don’t work for you or your so-called Master. This is my show, the Damian Scott Show, and there’s only room for one host and that’s me. Anything less would be an intolerable evil, an affront to my very existence, and the Nation of One for which I stand. Tell your Master when you see him, and you’ll be seeing him here in a minute or so, that Damian, the self-made Devil rules here, and that lesser devils such as himself, need to find other worlds to corrupt and diddle.”

  Then I stabbed him in the eye with the letter opener, pulled it out, and jammed it into his throat. Next, I pulled off his robes and yanked his boxers down past his knees, the idea being to convince everyone that my claim he exposed himself and tried to molest me was supported by visual evidence. Naturally, I would claim that he had been doing this to altar boys for years and had never been caught. And more importantly, that he intended to poison the congregation with some mysterious toxin he carried in his rental car—something about trying to create hysteria about the Devil to spike attendance in the churches under his jurisdiction.

  The police and the community accepted my explanation without question. I was lauded as both a victim and a hero for ridding the church of the cardinal’s foul, perverse influence. Even the mayor got in the act and handed me the key to the city along with a ten-thousand-dollar check.

  I suppose I do live the cardinal’s advice about making evil seem good. But it’s old advice, musty and dated. After all, Shakespeare wrote a long time ago, “The Devil hath the power to assume a pleasing shape.” On that I can agree. But Shakespeare also wrote that “the Devil is a gentleman,” a statement that certainly requires some modification. In my case, the Devil is an altar boy. From Hell. And while I’m not sure I believe in the Devil, he most certainly believes in me.

  THE END

  BORN AGAIN FOREVER

  By Wolfgang Potterhouse

  North Pole Cold

  By the time my anger had grown to consume me, he was already dead. I would have killed him myself for what he did to me.

  I am quite positive that he would kill me too, if he could (this fact contains an immeasurable quantity of irony). Unfortunately for him, what God has done cannot be undone, so I guess he can’t quite free his hands for the task. At least, he can’t do it himself. He has, as a point of fact, attempted to have me murdered repeatedly, and it has only been very recently that he seems to have backed off or given up. I suppose that the materialism and greed that are the true “American way” have finally showed him the irreversible nature of the global elements I have put into motion.

  Over centuries and centuries, he has put many men on the job of finding and killing me. Men who were paid, coerced, and forced into missions that were laughably and pathetically out of their level of competence. The majority of these men I killed myself (I indulged myself all through the Dark Ages). A spate of them I enslaved and humiliated (the Renaissance!), and an unlucky few I “turned.” Indeed, I have some of them with me now. Well, maybe not with me per se, but they are around here somewhere.

  Writers throughout time have stated that revenge turns on its owner, and that too much focus on revenge makes one’s own wounds rot. I have read that “revenge is a dish best served cold,” and I have served mine ice cold. North Pole cold.

  I have done some bad things in the name of survival and revenge, some truly horrific things that are beyond the capacity of most mortal minds, but still I sleep like a baby. The fact that I was a baby some 2,050 years ago is irrelevant.

  My revenge has been in play for many hundreds of years.

  They Don’t Care

  It’s funny what people will believe in. They believe in “the sanctity of marriage,” yet they lie, cheat, and treat each other like cattle. They believe in love, fate and karma (except when no one else is looking).

  People ostensibly believe in God, yet they live the most abhorrent lives—making incredibly selfish decisions, embracing hate and violence, and disrespecting themselves, each
other, and this planet at every opportunity.

  Only children believe in Santa Claus, and in a way, he’s quite real.

  And although people talk, write, and now make movies about vampires, no one really believes in them. I can personally attest to the fact that they don’t care if you believe in them or not.

  The devil is not real. Man is the closest thing to evil in this world or the next.

  I know God is real. I know because I have known the man. I have heard him speak and seen him perform miracles. His impact on everyone around him was undeniably profound. I counted him as my kind, sweet, and generous friend until he used me.

  He used me and abandoned me.

  Perhaps I should stop rambling and tell the story.

  Lazarus

  My name is Lazarus of Bethany. Long ago I was an olive farmer, running an orchard my parents and their parents had owned. My sisters, Mary and Martha, lived and worked with me, and we had simple lives. They were husbandless, I was wifeless, and there were no children. We were neither rich nor poor, and we did not have interests and aspirations outside of the harvest, our Jewish faith, our small collection of books, and our time spent painting the beautiful landscapes around us. That would change after I met Jesus.

  I grew up just outside of Jerusalem, and I was one of the first followers of Jesus Christ. One beautiful spring day, I went with my sisters to see him speak. He wore simple robes and was not particularly handsome or clean, but we could feel love in his words and his tone. It sounds overly simple, but the man was the Son of God. To be around him was emotionally jarring, but in a warm, uplifting, positive way. When he looked at me, I believed. Everyone who met him believed.

  He talked about love and peace, faith and scripture, and the blessings that come from leading a simple and humble life. My sisters and I were overcome with emotion and we held each other and wept while he was speaking. He stood on a hill in our orchard while he calmly shared his message. The rest of us sat in the sunshine, and afterward his close followers invited anyone interested in meeting Jesus to come to a nearby stone barn for a more personal discussion. It was cool in the barn, and there were small amounts of dried fish, bread, and water. He personally went around shaking hands, embracing people, and serving the food himself, which shocked me. He served my sisters and me and then sat down with us.