“I think you do. To be blunt, your vicious scissors are the property of Hell.”
“They belonged to my great aunt and now they belong to me.”
“I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of the situation. The matter is not open to negotiation or delay. Those shears contain renegade spirits and demons, escapees who must be returned to their confinement.”
“The cardinal said they had the authority to be here. They’re not ready to leave here. And if their past conduct is any indication, you too are in grave danger of being cut to ribbons by them.”
“The cardinal was misinformed. Let me reiterate in the strongest possible terms that you need to turn over the shears.”
“Fine. Have it your way. They’re in the box on the mantle. Good luck lifting the box or opening it.”
The two men, or whatever it was that looked and talked like men, entered the house and went into the living room. They didn’t try to handle the box. They stood there, just staring in its direction.
I could see the box starting to vibrate the same way it had done before. But this time, it had an eldritch glow to it, a green luminescence that slowly got brighter. Then the lid popped open and the shears flew out of the box, making a beeline toward their would-be jailors. They would have sliced through the one closest to them but he, or it, threw up a whirling shield of eldritch light that deflected them into the wall. For a moment, I thought that they had escaped captivity and were zooming to parts unknown.
That was not the case. They came shooting through the ceiling but were again deflected by a light shield, once more penetrating the wall and disappearing.
This time they immediately came back for another pass and then another and another with increasing velocity until they were shooting in as rapidly as they had when they initially turned Father Joe into a human pincushion.
Now the men in black were no longer men nor clothed. They went commando, revealing themselves to be two-headed, four-armed reptiles brandishing swords made from the same arcane metal as the shears. Sometimes they would deflect the shears with their light fields, at others with their swords, and at others striking their own blows as the shears whizzed past.
At first, the tableau seemed like a program in a video game. I kept waiting for them to get on a blower and call for back up, and maybe they would have, had those damnable scissors given them a chance.
As the nightmare continued to unfold, the speed of combat far surpassed mortal abilities to either perform such tactics or even see them. The whole thing became a blur.
The combat seemed interminable. I was crouched in a corner, afraid to move for fear of being gutted by the shears as they zoomed in and out on the attack or hacked by the swords swinging wildly to block and stop them.
I thought, something’s got to give. But it hit me that these sword-brandishing demons, together with the allied ghosts, specters and spirits inhabiting the shears, didn’t have my sense of earthly time, or for that matter, any time at all. This battle could go on for centuries with no end in sight. So, rather than waiting for a decisive outcome, I tried to leave.
Before I could, something happened: The shears zipped in for what looked like another attack. But they stopped short, vibrated a bit, and discharged a mist of sorts that separated, then individually coalesced into the very witches and demons that were haunting the shears. Reinforcements in the form of a small army brandishing burning swords and spears. The fire, however, was not of this earth because it burned in all the colors of the rainbow as if it had been harvested from every kind of star in the firmament: white, yellow, orange, red, blue, green, brown and black.
It ticked me off because I assumed the fire would ignite what was left of my house and leave it a heap of burning cinders when all was said and done. But it didn’t. Whatever physics caused it to ignite and burn did not hold sway in this dimension.
When they swung the swords at the demon cops, the swords made physical contact and the flames burned that reptile flesh. But when the swords swung into the wall or the carpet or furniture, they passed harmlessly through like ghosts.
At one point, I got caught in the crossfire and the swords swept through me. I felt nothing, not so much as a tickle or tingle.
As if things weren’t crazy enough, a news crew entered the house and began recording the battle. I kept waiting for them to get clobbered by flying debris or a sinewy, sword-wielding demonic arm.
Instead, the spirit army took advantage of the situation, possessed the news crew, and then ran out the door, shameless diabolical opportunists that they were.
I wanted to ponder the weirdness of the whole thing, but I knew that was a luxury. I needed to flee. I thought about my wife and kids. I didn’t want to be dismembered. More than that, I wanted to see them at least one more time if today were to be my last.
I started crawling toward the front door. In that supernatural melee, none of the demons, ghosts, spirits or specters gave me a second look. I stayed low, stopped and changed direction as the need arose, and after a few timeless minutes, slithered out the front door to face a boisterous incredulous crowd of news persons and gawkers.
At that moment, I didn’t feel like being debriefed by anyone. I just wanted to see my family. I ran to the neighbor’s house, headed for the back, and then started cutting through yards and hopping fences. I expected someone to give chase, but no one did, presumably because whatever was still going on at my abode was holding the attention of the crowd gathered there.
I called my wife. I gave her the Readers Digest version. As I did, I felt something nudging my other hand. It was warm and metallic and gently vibrating. I froze and looked at my hand. It was the haunted scissors trying to wriggle into my grip.
I opened my hand and held them. I wanted to throw them down and run. But something inside me refused that impulse. I kept walking, lost in a fog of indecision, those vicious devil scissors accompanying me like a faithful dog.
It made even more sense now than it did before. After all, my Great Aunt Clarissa had them before me, and I have no doubt they were a bequest from one of my long dead ancestors, probably Mother Leeds herself who birthed that abomination known as the Jersey Devil. I suppose a normal person would have been repulsed, perhaps even crying out to God for salvation.
But I didn’t need saving. In my heart, I knew that my vicious little metal friend would take care of me. How? My blood had mingled with the blood of all those witches and demons the very first time I handled those scissors and cut myself, sending my blood into that Menger sponge to mingle with theirs. That’s how they know me and consider me a friend, since I am of the House of Mother Leeds, one of the accursed ones, most unclean, and I suspect a Jersey Devil sans hooves and horns and wings. But that may yet change, and if it does, then who, or rather what, was I to argue against such a metamorphosis?
Epilogue
Scissors in hand, I wandered the neighborhood. Just ahead of me I saw what appeared to be a small group of people leaving a residence, each one carrying a thick book and dressed in their Sunday best. Jehovah’s Witnesses!
I threw the scissors onto a lawn and ran through yard after yard toward my house. As I did, I heard the bloodcurdling screams, the cries for “Help!” There was nothing I could do but save myself.
I got to my house and found it flattened as if struck by a tornado. I called the insurance company and told my agent the house had been destroyed by an Act of God. You and I, however, know that it was an Act of Devil.
THE END
THE ARCHEUS
By C. C. Parker
Slipping inside the froth Lucian looked into the reddened sky: burning wasteland above the horizon of a vast sagging cloud which held all the moistures of those who’d fallen off the edge of recent memory. Lucian, Disciple of Keteb, scraping his flesh into a steaming bath, evacuating layers into the salt brine.
Diseased meat—impossible dreamer. Poisoned by delicate matters as civilization plodded ahead with no vision but his own to prevent him from slipping off i
nto that bath for good. Brine of Unreason. He thought it a good title for a poem if only he wrote. His art, instead, was poisoning his mind, while his body paid dearly for his daily consummations. Fusing with the universe until every molecule burned.
What is he doing to himself? Learning nothing from his experiments save that his threshold of pain is profound. Touching the silent blade of a dragon’s scale as it rends fierce judgment from his mind with brutal strength. When Lucian goes out into the real world, it is with the tendency of a cannibal, and those who pass by are seen as meat.
Cloud of moistness hanging above, following him into the streets. Burning everywhere he goes: the memory of a place that is so fucking close, yet unbearably distant. No matter how many baths he took or terrors faced, did he get close to arriving at the answer.
Dismal wave of nausea overcoming him as he entered a grocery store. Lucian needed a bottle so bad he could taste it.
Winding through the bustling space with the deftness of a ballet dancer. Lucian, hiding within the shadows of his own plaintive, stricken gait, where others seemed to avoid the cloud he was bathed in. Scent of an Outsider emanating from his pores like a rotting carcass. Most treating him like a leper from the time of Christ, he gloried, thinking fondly of those spirits that trailed behind him down the liquor aisle.
“Lucian?” Came a voice, a girl from high school. Tamara Snow. How he didn’t get out of this town after getting sick was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. Besides, he’d need to stay away from her or she would be stricken too. But holy fuck did she smell good! And she had a purity in her ability to connect without the judgments or remorseful politeness he was used to. Lucian knew that if he ever started a cult that he could, with great confidence, make her his eternal bride.
“Hello Tammy,” he stammered with the same awkwardness that followed him through his ‘formative’ years. He wanted to show her the near-but-far place, but decided she didn’t have the strength for it. Very few could keep the sediment down—where a Heathen Christ went to drown his sorrows. Turning the lepers against his own people to cast a vision of Hell on Earth.
Lucian, wishing he were back in his room...
Instead, gazing at her through the Eyes of Keteb. One in his heart of which to see the world as it truly is: grotesque, rampaging Ego. Her eyes were on him, too, but with a softness that frightened him. She could never be his bride if she could not turn her back on the earthly dross that, to her, seemed incorruptible. The fact he already knew this about her told him something.
He moved on...
* * *
White, sulphuric heaven burns up, leaving them stranded on the material plane. Lucian witnessed this in a dream with the clearness of his waking self when a boy. Dreaming most of his childhood away, sickly and looking for clues; it isn’t until he finds the wellspring behind his house that the eternal connection is made. Magisterial solvent in the Citadel of the Archeus, where everything he believed to be true was proven wrong: lessons of a waking world that would never sleep if given the choice.
What does tomorrow bring? That is what they all want to know. Lucian kept it inside, but felt an urge to prove them wrong. Abstracting nature into the ovoid shape that it is in order to become the seed: vessel of inordinate, timeless perfection that coordinates all movements according to itself...
Everything retching out of him at once: blood, hernia, numb feeling, endless cans of Nalley Chili. His body is a temple destroyed by wasted years. Washing the taste out with a mouthful of tequila until it burns away and quells the fog in his mind. Silence. Lucian smiled, knowing that he was an afterthought to those jokers that ran away with time. Nor did they know to what depths a body may go in its desperation for life while the cloud dragged him along for the benefit of all.
Didn’t they know that he was a killer? When he came out of that wellspring all those years ago, his ideas changed. A pact with nature that would eventually corrupt his magnetism in the world like a thing died and come back. A monster wearing human clothes, oozing preternatural apathy, bordering on the utterly vacant.
* * *
Sinking into another vat of bilge water that he imagined to be the essence of stars. Smoking a joint as the gray lather of discarded skins mounted tiny riptides against him. Grunting out a fart that turned into a purple mess rising up from between his legs as he felt his insides tightened with a violent jerk...
Another hallucination to take him away from the pain. Anything. Vanishing, celestial breeders leaving their final, confused droplets of liminal consciousness that still retained their affectation towards the sun. While he has faced the coldness inside like all dying things do, there was a radiant passage to the Inverse Cradle. Above all things that have risen over the horizon of his illusion there was the idea He could control the device that gave him life.
Only the solution was too devious. Even for He, who sold out the world...
Lucian thought of a malefic Christ who is more like a power broker. One who need control every facet of the waking world even though the outcome was obligatory. A great feasting on all organic life was on the horizon beneath a cloud of sulphuric longing where ghosts of every age clung to the ephemerality of stated changelessness.
Intellectually behind, yet spiritually ahead. Still, it was all the baths that made him fearless in a void like this. The skins had to come off just like the nerves had to be stripped from their pink stations. Beating himself against the wall of his room where a stain had grown: bits of rotting, clinging meat, gathering flies, shedding larvae to the floor like pustulent tears.
I must go out there and make the most of it, he thought bleakly. Or I will surely take the funeral pill & fade...
* * *
Red Kingdom. Bloody war. All is crimson where he sits. Bursting open like a cranial flower where piles of victims come to fruition. Any who summoned Keteb in a desperate attempt to understand the value of plague, as lepers marched along the road of the Holy Cross in an insane pledge for forgiveness as promised by their lord and savior (in visions). Still, if it hadn’t been for His rancid breath, they’d not have known it was Him.
Lucian sobbed with this knowledge. Even as his stripped body wilted in the last of the salt brine—empty bottle of tequila balanced on his lower lip—world violently spinning as he clung to its wet sides. Submerging in debt of other men as his vision left his body and moved along the same dripping corridor that led through the fog of his mind: toward a resonating halo of inverse qualities, salient and beaming. Clothed in crimson garb as corridors faded into that citadel of fire penetrating the sky.
Lucian entered with head bowed. Shrouded, cold look he gave those who dwelt here for aeons. They watched with sullenness and dead misgivings. They’d watched groveling fools come and go, and this would be no different. Still, he did not bear the sickness of an asp whilst inside that breathing fire...
Stay away from your cold body as it lays on the slab. Lucian could hear muffled cries coming from somewhere. Equilateral dissonance as a cloud burst abandoning him to the desert and other dying lands. Wandering across, he came to a haunted loon. Madness from being alone out here for so long with stars breathing their dust into his lungs. And you, suffocating on another dream, choking on it...
Hyperventilating wildly. Holding back the urge to release his bowels into the brine, but so far gone it was impossible. Chunks of intestine blowing out his rectum as he felt the crimson curtain closing. For once in his life, Lucian was not afraid to remove the mask entirely and breath soot into the citadel once again. Knowing the demonic nature that hosted the disease, he also understood it to be the most critical element in regards to a decisive transmigration. Even as its temporary vessel was boiled inside the cauldron until it was moist again. Fumes clouding up windows and mirrors of that dingy space: nothing but the effluvium of its meat substance, molding over...
* * *
Nobody had checked on him for several weeks. When Jan, Lucian’s landlady, saw his mail piling up and didn’t receive next m
onths rent, she pounded on his door. What Lucian did in his spare time was his business, but not paying on time forced her to flex her muscles.
Immediately struck by the odor and surprised tenants hadn’t complained. Okay, she thought to herself, it is probably just a dead cat. Still, she couldn’t remember him owning any pets. Letting herself inside, trying not to gag, instead breathing through her mouth, swallowing gutfuls of that pungent, saline air like whale corpses gave off when she stumbled on them on long, meandering beach hikes of her youth.
Buckling to her knees as she clawed her way to the bathroom. Following a moist stain on the ceiling, which blackened the closer she got. You should just call the cops, Jan, and a coroner, but curiosity got the best of her. While somewhere in that fire-bladed citadel there survived an inhuman vision in the form of one who rose from the brine of truth to become an acolyte of nature: who journeyed across a tired expanse to reach the summit of a liberating prophecy. Here it was only a bloated, gray sludge of a mortal wretch for her to find: he who plied demarcations while chewing on edible stones—poisoned from within as nature intends, oozing out until there is nothing left...
Suddenly Jan felt sorry for him. She couldn’t remember him ever seeming cruel or inhuman to anyone. Sobbing uncontrollably as she tried pushing the door shut but couldn’t due to that blackened, fungal stain covered in milky polyps. They grew on meat follicles and were responsible for the living rot that grew over everything, even the hallway if she didn’t act soon. Yet the world more-than-likely deserves it, she thought, from a remote, holocaustic part of her mind where she did not linger often or for too long:
Leprous world of doomed miracles and increasingly dry seasons. Interior furnace, curdling awareness in the final primal dusk of a broken awakening. Such an infectious plague is on us, she thought, reaching up to drain some of that gray milk into her mouth: waiting for the right moment to expunge her deepest regrets. I have to go, she thought, before it’s too late. Call the cops. Get help. Paramedic. Starting to sink. Nature’s reservoir. Isle of Keteb. That is where broken bodies go: exhumation of souls, with the strength to carry on, unlimited grief to bear its weight over a vast desert. In the blinding calefaction of a newly risen sun where all horizons bleed into one another: Archeus mounts her dusty bones with the fecundity of spring...
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