“Demon Teak would be better—you know, alphabetical,” Basil says with a smile. “Hey, I like the idea. I’m just glad to see you’ve discovered your confidence.”
“So? Let’s do it. Let’s build something together, you and me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I can’t stay here much longer. Clock’s ticking.”
“By ‘here’, you mean Beak? Or ‘here,’ meaning above the ground?”
“Both, most likely.”
“But you hate it down below. It’s all you talk about.”
“Love. Hate. Two sides of the same coin. I belong beneath the earth, Herbert. Besides, I believe I’ve begun to wear out my welcome.”
Basil’s thoughts return to the prior night. He thinks of Edna’s two buffoons, Carl and Paul, showing up at his back door with murder on their minds. If the men had had a full brain between them, the situation might have ended in tragedy. Instead, Carl left in peace, and Paul wound up spending the night as an unwilling houseguest. Basil delivered Paul to the doorstep of Crows Gorge United Methodist Church—Edna’s church—early this morning. As his noisemaker pulled away, he saw Paul thrashing on the church’s front lawn, bound, gagged and furious.
Basil can laugh about the late-night incursion now, but the incident at the strip club he nearly destroyed is a different story. He half-expected to see Officer Pierce waiting for him at the office first thing this morning, ready to haul him off to a windowless cell. Steve, the bouncer, must have survived his injuries. Basil had to give the man credit for taking his lumps. Then there’s Divinity, the big-bottomed, redheaded stripper. He hopes she’s all right, too, having recovered from what he did—or almost did. He’ll have to drop by Cheeky’s later and apologize for his overenthusiasm, and for almost doing something very, very stupid. He easily could have killed them both, after all. Maybe he’ll stop somewhere on the way home and pick up a box of cookies or some other gesture of his regret and hand-deliver the goods along with an apologetic note.
“Forget people like Edna Babych,” Herbert says. “There’s always going to be an asshole eager to make your life difficult. You should stay. You seem happy here.”
“Happy as anyone can be in a world ruled by human men.”
“So stay. Screw Edna. Screw Bulcavage and his shitty agency.” He drops his voice. “We’ll go off and do our own thing. You and me.”
“That’s a good dream, Herbert.”
“‘Do what you want, where you want.’ That’s the advice you gave me.”
“And it’s still fine advice. You should follow it.”
This is as good a time as any to uncork this bottle.
“You don’t belong here,” he tells Herbert. “There’s nothing wrong with a place like Beak—I’m thrilled to have come here, in all honesty, and to have met you—but you can’t be yourself here. You stay here, you’ll die having pretended your whole life away.”
Herbert’s spine stiffens.
“Answer me this,” Basil says. “Why do you live alone?”
“I live with my father.”
“By choice?”
“Mostly. Dementia has taken most of him by now. He’s from Beak originally. A few years ago, early into the decline, he kept talking about his childhood, about growing up here. I thought maybe being here would help him.”
“Did he live with you in Des Moines?”
“Back then he was still living in the house where I grew up. With my mom.”
“Mom’s gone?”
Herbert nods.
“So you lived alone there too.”
Herbert nods again.
“It’s tough,” Basil adds.
“What is?”
“Sharing your life with someone.”
“I wouldn’t know. Haven’t quite figured out the formula yet.”
“Hopefully when your father dies you’ll start living your life the way you should.”
Herbert says nothing, seeming to hope the conversation will sprout wings and turn into something else, leading them elsewhere.
“I’ve seen glimmers of the man who lives within you,” Basil says. “Anyone can hide from the truth for a time, but they can’t keep it down forever. You’re no different. Secrets have a way of crawling out of whatever box they’ve been locked inside. You should love the person you want to love. You wouldn’t be hurting anyone.”
“Depends on who you ask.”
“You’re a good man, Herbert, a good person. You’ll never tell me, but I know something happened to you. You can let the bad things destroy you, or you can turn them into something else. It’s your choice. But I’ll tell you this: You’re a kind, gentle man who deserves to be happy.”
“You can see that in me?”
“Anyone who’s paying attention can. From the minute I met you, I knew something had broken you somewhere along the way. If you’re not broken, you’re not living. You’ll be fine. Mourn whatever you lost, but don’t take the blame. Remember, but move forward. Move on.”
Herbert seems shaken.
“You look like you want to punch me,” Basil says.
“Let’s just finish this blasted campaign and call it a day. I’m suddenly exhausted.”
They stare at the screen, studying each of the design’s elements, looking for loops they haven’t yet connected.
“I like it,” Basil says. “Let’s print it and leave it down on Bulcavage’s desk. Let him tell us everything we screwed up so we can start over from scratch tomorrow. He can choke on his own advice, for all I care.” In a ridiculously high-pitched tone, he mocks, “‘Even if the client hates what you give them, at least they know you’re putting in billable hours.’”
“I don’t know,” Herbert says. He studies the screen and points to a quiet space in the northwest corner of the screen. “I like what we have, but I still think we’re missing an important piece.”
“No shit. Isn’t everyone?”
* * *
Edna Babych brings both palms to her forehead, trying to soothe the pain splitting her skull. Her hands creep into her hairline and grab as much hair as they can gather. Her whole body shakes with rage. She eyes the crucifix on her desk, which she has not kissed in days, and wants to say something dirty.
She simply cannot understand why her god has suddenly gone silent.
“Why have you forsaken me, Lord?” she begs. “Tell me what I must do to drive this damned thing back to the darkness.”
The demon—Basil, they call it. Her archenemy. She cannot fathom how others don’t see its presence here as anything but the gravest of threats, one that will surely kill them all, if not in a rolling ball of ash and flame then slowly, like bone cancer, taking one piece after the next until nothing remains but a hollow, useless shell.
When the demon first slithered through a crack in the earth, fully prepared to reduce everything in its path to rubble, Beak fell silent—and this she cannot forgive. Instead of the townsfolk voicing their outrage and dissent, they met the demon’s arrival with indifference, even open-armed acceptance. Not her. From the moment she heard the news, she committed herself to driving the SOB back to the world of lust and shadow, in accordance with the Lord’s will.
She still remembers the feeling of vomit rising in her throat, the taste of it on her tongue. She was working as a cashier at the Bag ‘N Save in nearby Pasturelands when one of her co-workers mentioned, so casually, “Have you heard about what’s going on over in Beak?” That’s when Jesus whispered in her ear, told her to devote all of her energy—every breath—to using her church as the Lord’s machine gun. Holy bullets, the voice told her, hungry for the taste of demon flesh. When she walked into her pastor’s office, reciting parts of verses from the Book of Revelation and offering to take the fight directly to “The Beast,” she hadn’t even changed out of her work clothes. She was still wearing her Bag ‘N Save apron and slightly wrinkled collared shirt with a milky stain on the front, the result of a miscue while spooning t
he remnants of her seven a.m. strawberry yogurt into her mouth.
“Let’s just wait and see,” Pastor Greg told her. “We don’t even know if it’s true.”
“Jesus told me we have no time to ‘wait and see,’” she said, her spindly fingers making annoyed quote marks in the air. “We have to organize now.”
“Funny. I must not have gotten the message.”
“Big surprise. We can’t let the enemy establish a nest and leave his poison puddles for any of God’s children dumb enough to lap them up.”
“Now, Edna—”
“Don’t ‘Now, Edna’ me. We must do something about this unholy brute right flipping now, before it’s too late. Before there’s nothing left to save. Now do your job and let’s assemble a group of the willing to ship this goat-headed villain out of town on a rail.”
Her words to Pastor Greg took on increasing virulence. “You’re a worthless, toothless weakling of a man—a phony-baloney prophet with no spine for the Lord’s work,” she told him on Day Two of her tirade, and the hectoring worsened from there. “War!” she cried on Day Three. At one point she not so subtly suggested she saw him ogling the rear ends of some of Beak’s most athletic middle school boys, though she admitted he couldn’t take all of the blame for his sin because the demon probably had its mitts in him by now, pulling the strings.
It took Edna only five days to convince do-nothing Pastor Greg to put Beak in his rearview. She quickly stepped in to assume the pulpit.
Things went well for a short while. The protests. The electricity, the excitement coursing through the congregation during her fiery sermons. Everyone rallying around a common cause, rallying around her, galvanized by her divinely inspired words. Then that loud-mouthed attorney who works in the same building as the demon started sticking her big Jew nose where it didn’t belong—like they always did—and dragged the spineless crumb bum of a cop, Pierce, into the mix along with her.
As far as she’s concerned, those two traitors to Christ both deserve to burn in a soup of hot lava. Now everyone’s all worried about getting in trouble, about hurting someone’s feelings, about spending a night in jail. She knows better. Better to suffer now, in this world, than to burn forever as retribution for not taking a stand against some evil thing casting a shadow on the church’s doorstep. She’s noticed too many empty seats during her sermons the past few days. She feels her power slipping.
“Help me understand, Lord, if you understand.” She takes a breath and screams at the ceiling. “Are you seeing what’s happening here? This is your battle to lose, so tell me what the flippity-flap I need to do!”
Her stomach groans. She hasn’t eaten a morsel in days, and she won’t until she figures out how to solve the problem the Lord has placed in front of her.
“God’s love is my bread,” she reminds herself. “God’s love is my bread.”
The door cracks open. It’s Ned Lavender, the church’s mealy-mouthed music director.
“Everything okay in here, Miss Babych?”
“Just fine, Neddy. Now leave the minister to do God’s work.” He opens his mouth as if to say something else but says nothing and retreats from the doorway. The lock clicks behind him.
Maybe the Lord is testing her, she thinks. She admits this would make perfect sense, considering the many tests he’s asked her to endure over the course of her nearly fifty years: lost parents, lost siblings, lost jobs, Crohn’s, the curse of men. It’s a miracle she still has love in her heart for him, if for no one else.
Finally, she reaches the decision she’s been dancing around for days. If Beak has given up on the cause, to rid the town of this scourge, she’ll take matters into her own hands, because she can’t let this thing subsist any longer on the blessed soil God created for the children he loves so dearly. Any method for achieving her goal is acceptable, regardless of the consequences. The line between right and wrong no longer exists. Arson, mob violence, murder—all seem perfectly suitable paths to the same place: salvation. The only question is which path to choose, as she’s not even sure if this damned abomination—she refuses to call it by name—can be killed.
Carl and Paul certainly couldn’t get the job done. Carl hasn’t answered his phone, so there’s no telling what horrors he had to suffer in the demon’s lair. Either that, or he’s a victim of the demon’s brainwashing. And Paul, what an indignity, being hogtied and left on the church’s front stoop, with a handwritten sign, “Free to a Good Home,” stapled to his forehead.
“Another thumb in God’s all-seeing eye,” she whispers.
If the demon cannot be killed, she’s confident she can at least maim it enough to send it limping off to someplace other than here.
She imagines digging a pit just outside the door of the office building where the abomination works and filling the pit with holy water, borrowed from the Catholics—much like her trusty crucifix. The beast would trip into the blessed hole, and she would just sit back and watch the water melt its flesh like a hot blade on butter. Then she considers the logistics of having to acquire so much holy water—a hundred gallons easy, she figures, maybe two hundred—and that could turn some heads, meaning someone in charge might catch wind of how she took the helm of Crows Gorge United Methodist Church. She couldn’t let that happen.
Maybe hydrofluoric acid or gasoline would work better, she thinks. Either would be easy enough to procure.
Other options spring to mind. Cutting the brakes on the SOB’s motorcycle. Taking a torch to the office building where it works or the leper colony of an apartment complex where it sleeps, if it sleeps. Hiring a sniper to take roost atop one of the buildings along Second Street and waiting until its loud-mouthed motorcycle rumbles past, and then pulling the trigger once the bastard’s horny-toad skull fills the crosshairs.
God willing.
Voices fill the hallway just beyond the office’s flimsy door, pulling her from her reverie. As the voices grow louder and more animated, she rises from her seat to remind whoever the heck is out there that they’re in God’s house, so if it’s not too much trouble, please keep the flipping volume down to a dull flipping roar. She yanks open the door and sees Ned talking with a bald-headed bear of a man with two black eyes, wearing a neck brace and using crutches to support his weight. Beside him stands a tall, buxom redhead who looks like she’s been crying.
Ned turns to Edna and says, smiling, “You’re going to want to hear this.”
* * *
Kamala’s eyes home in on a spot in the ink-black corner, the same darkened space on the far wall that has held her gaze for the duration of this ordeal. It’s the only view she has, bent at the waist over the stone slab, arms extended and held taut to the floor, wrists bound with leathers slick with her own sweat. Her chin bleeds from the ceaseless friction, the skin worn away, bone against rock.
How many, she wonders. How many goons so far have worked to ruin her with their worst? Ancient history, she tells herself. The more important question: How much more of this will she have to endure?
Again and again, the stabbing …
The unbroken rhythm …
An oversaturated sponge …
The warm flesh of her belly and breasts has thawed the cool rock beneath her, and the ragged bonds have sunk their teeth into the tender flesh of her wrists and pasterns. The wounds on her back have scabbed over. Her lower half has gone numb, though she imagines the backs of her thighs glazed, her hooves in sticky puddles, glued to the floor. Her stomach feels poisoned, wondering if the semen has somehow leached into her gut.
How many more can there possibly be?
A flood of warmth fills her as another finishes his task with a pitiful whimper. She prays for this one to have been the last, but then another steps up and enters here, thrusting even more violently than the last.
“Forgive the barnacles, deary,” says the demon as he mounts her. His pelvis bounces off the cushion of her rear end. “Can’t scrub them off. Here’s hoping your cunny can do the job for me.�
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She recognizes the old demon’s cackle—the father of her dearly departed Kindness, the gentle demon she witnessed being pulled limb from limb by Lubos’s heavies—but doesn’t dare conjure the image of a face: neither her ill-fated lover’s, nor that of his progenitor, now joyfully defiling her.
Kill me. “Kill me,” she whispers.
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” he says. He’s huffing now, digging his claws into the meat of her bleeding hips. “I’m almost done.”
The thrusting slows—another gush of warmth—and the old demon pulls out, then slips wordlessly out of the chamber.
Another steps up to fill her.
Moments later, another.
And yet another behind him.
To each one she repeats her plea.
“Kill me.”
The realist in her knows her words have no effect, as none will show mercy. And even if one does, she knows those in line behind him will gladly abuse her corpse.
Lubos calls to her from the entrance to the Room of Contrition. “Save some energy for the troglodytes,” he tells her.
She hears movement. Her bald chin grinds against the stone as she struggles to turn her head. A thick-bodied demon with a milky eye—one of the Nameless—approaches Lubos and begs for an audience.
“Kneel,” Lubos tells him.
The demon does as he is told.
“An update on the excavation, liege. At your instruction, we’ve widened the mouths of three tunnels to the surface. Two have collapsed. We may need an additional route to accommodate the girth of your war party.”
“Do as you see fit,” Lubos says. “However many you think we’ll need.”
The demon with the milky eye drops his head toward the floor and offers an upturned palm. Lubos drags two of his talons lightly across the demon’s callused skin, from the wrist to the fingertips, adding, “Praise, praise.”
Kamala credits Lubos for his ambition, his knack for manufacturing fantasies her imagination fails to show her. He aims to unleash every brute and then lead his army to the surface, all to spill blood and sate his lust for war. Such a force would cause endless havoc in the world of men, especially with the kraken Cthaal at the fore, though she cannot fathom how he plans to tame such a vicious beast.
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