Cautiously maneuvering the vessel out of Romel Bay, and through the central waters of Mersa Matruh, I headed straight out into the middle of some of the bluest ocean I’d ever seen. To the west the sun was setting, splashing down into the Mediterranean in a spectacular wash of yellows, oranges, and reds. I threw off my sunglasses and steered toward it –– wanting to absorb every blinding color –– and held the engine at full throttle until the sun was two hours below the horizon and the moon hung high and bright in the sky. Finally I killed the engine and let the sponge boat drift. Sitting down on the deck, I realized how short of breath I’d become and, again, how terribly weak, so I rested for long while with my back against an empty sponge container. The time didn’t matter anymore. I had taken my last reading of the midnight moon on the hotel roof in New Cairo City. Eyeing my rucksack shoved up against the base of the captain’s chair, I crawled on all fours toward it and removed the coffin box. Setting it on the deck, I knelt before it and removed the corporalabe. The coagulated blood from my eye still held the site rule in place, marking the declination of the moon at 42-degrees. I clenched my jaw and bravely rotated the outer ring so that the 42-degree mark aligned with the Roman numeral XII at due north on the mater. Retrieving a pad and pen from the pocket of the rucksack, I removed my gloves and wrote down 42°, then 21’ which was the aligned number for the minutes on the fixed ring within the outer ring. Next, I found the calendar date of the moon reading etched on the center ring and rotated it so that the tick mark for January 17 was in alignment with the XII, 42°, and 21’. The fixed ring of numbers outside the calendar date ring now gave me the latitude in seconds, so I wrote that number on the pad next: 38”. The calendar date of 17 represented the decimal seconds, so I wrote that down and then finally the zodiac date it was fixed to on the centermost ring. It was Aquarius 8: my astrological sign and birthday. At that moment a cold wind blew over the sponge boat and cut through me to the bone. I’d been right in the hotel bathroom, I did know that latitude –– 42° 21’ 38.1708” North –– it was Beacon Hill, Boston, Pinckney Road. My home. For some reason I reached up and turned on the radio tied to the back of the captain’s chair, as if that would help warm me. Cued to an oldies station out of Crete, the music box resonated Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire”.
Sitting back on my heals, I turned the corporalabe to the longitude side and rotated the rete, positioning the moon pointer within the ecliptic atop the altitude line of 42-degrees that was etched onto the plate beneath: now the outer fixed ring gave me the master degree of 71-West. I wrote that down on the pad and then followed it with the altitude degree of 42 broken down as 04’ (minutes) and 02” (seconds). I didn’t need to calculate the decimal seconds. There was no more doubting that the corporalabe had chosen my home in Boston as the residence of Spitfoot’s next victim.
“Me,” I muttered, and lay back on the deck with the corporalabe on my chest.
Gazing up at the stars, I remembered a night very much like this, when the corporalabe had led me into deep water off the Florida Keys. It had seemed ridiculous that Splitfoot would find his victim on the ocean, but then I saw a cruise liner in the distance. I double-checked my position on the sailboat’s GPS, but the ship never came any closer. So I simply laid down on the deck, drifted, and looked up at the stars. Back then, however, I had chuckled and then laughed outright, thinking maybe the corporalabe had led me to a mermaid now swimming just beneath me; one who was also an Aquarius but born on the 2nd, according to my calculations. As it turned out, a few days later the corporalabe again proved its uncanny accuracy. The nightly news ran a report about the Florida International University underwater research facility, aptly named Aquarius, and its recent acquisition of a new member who had just celebrated her birthday on the ocean floor, on the evening of February second: the night I’d been floating aimlessly on the waves above her. This was my great fish story that I could tell no one.
The big one that got away, I thought now. If only it could be me.
Punctuating the wish, something moved deep inside me and I felt a twinge of nausea. I hugged my groin, but an electric warmth soon flooded my body and I felt a peace I hadn’t even dreamt of in what seemed like a million years. I felt a sense of being complete, and knew that if I was going to die at last, it was right that it should be where my mother had slipped into death next to me in my bed, igniting everything that has led to this moment adrift in the Mediterranean. As the sponge boat continued to pass serenely through the night, the first lines of “The Age of Aquarius” drifted from the oldies station, like the coiling smoke of a slowly burning incense. I thought it funny for a moment –– how the irony never seems to stop –– and I almost let slip a long lost smile, but then I merely closed my eyes and let the water rolling against the hull drowned out the music. I was going home.
4
By morning, the stars and moon had been replaced by a blanket of gray-blue sky that turned a bloody purple as the sun punched through the eastern horizon. Still fatigued, I studied the GPS and saw that during the night the current had brought the sponge boat to within 100 miles of Crete. Following this lead, I started the engine, hit the throttle, and never looked back in the direction of Mersa Mutrah. The sponge captain wouldn’t miss his vessel for two more days.
Before noon I’d reached the southern coast of Crete, and grounded the boat on a barren stretch of beach near Sidonia, then walked to the town center and caught a cross-country bus to Heraklion International Airport on the northern coast. I was feeling terribly ill again, and was suffering random chills. I was also sick of my clandestine, super-spy, B-sploitation treks around the world and decided to throw caution to the wind and take a commercial airliner the rest of the way back to Massachusetts. I was traveling under my own name and passport anyway. I was unshaven, eye-patched, scarred, sun- and blood-burned and, in spite of my efforts in the air terminal restroom, still smelled more like a wharf than a fresh sea breeze. If the police wanted me, I decided death-by-cop would be far more timely and overdue than any awaiting me in Boston. But now, nearly 19 hours later, here I was –– Heraklion to Munich to Logan International.
This is the eleventh hour, I thought, hugging the rucksack to my chest and shivering in the late January, Boston air. I felt like I was looking through a dreamscape and out onto a memory long forgotten –– a time-warn postcard fallen from an old book pulled from a shelf –– as I watched the endless string of taxis and shuttles and limos and SUVs coming and going at the slushy curb. It was snowing. Just like the night I left home so long ago.
–––––––––––––––
I closed the taxi door and the vehicle sped away, its tires growling through the salted ice, and leaving me standing alone on Pinckney Street. For countless minutes I just stared at the three-story brownstone. There were a few scattered lights on –– one in the upper bay window; my bedroom –– but of course no one was home. The bi-weekly housekeepers saw that bulbs were replaced and timers remained set and working.
Without fanfare, I finally stepped off the curb and walked across the street and up the slippery steps to the high front door. I’m sure I inserted my key and unlocked it –– opened and shut it –– but all I remember is taking one step toward it and then standing at the base of the arching staircase leading to the brownstone’s upper floors. The house was utterly silent. With no memory of climbing the stairs, I turned and peered into the library on the first floor. Nothing had changed; the housekeepers always dusted and maintained the furniture, so there was no need to transform the chairs, sofas, and fixtures into white-sheeted ghosts. My presence was the only domesticity that had ever made this home into a haunted house.
So I floated room to room, anticipating that some horror greater than myself would challenge my existence, as my embolus and notes-on-flesh had implied and the corporalabe had confirmed. I found nothing. Not even a hint of threat other than my accelerating illness. I was woozy with fever, exuding an icy, muculent sweat, and nauseous to the point o
f pumping my own stomach. It felt like a can of worms had burst open within my guts.
Finding myself in my old room, I laid down on the bed still draped in the linens my mother had past away on. Rolling onto my side I imagined her there, looking at me with the placidity of a porcelain doll. Tears filled my eyes and I reached out to touch her cheek. So cold. I ran the tip of my finger along the serene, flat-line smile of her lips...but her eyes ignited and her mouth opened wide. With bared teeth, she bit down hard between the first and second knuckle of my index finger. I cried out and she vanished, replaced with a spray of blood on the pillow and my trembling left hand hovering above it. Grasping the lacerated digit, I held it in my mouth and sucked down to quell the blood as I staggered to the bathroom sink. Attacking the faucet, I yanked the lever and let the cold-water gush over my whole hand.
I hung my head, breathing hard, and tried to fathom how a vision could do this to me –– but quickly realized it was coming from within, as a sharp pain and popping sound emanated at the tip of my finger. Grunting and tweaking, I recoiled from the water, clenched my hand, and gripped my wrist to steady the quivering appendage. Daring to re-extend my finger, I saw that the nail and flesh beneath had cracked open, meeting the bite wound and creating a fissure that ran up the digit to the second knuckle. I could see a sliver of bone peeking through. And I could see what looked like words. Grimacing against the pain, I took hold of my finger and used the thumb of my right hand to pull back the flesh and further expose the bone. The message was obscured by more blood. Gritting my teeth, I held the wound under the faucet and watched through tearing eyes as the fissure became a sluice of pink water that finally cleared enough to reveal the new message scratched into the bone:
Heal Thyself
“What kind of fucking joke is this?” I screamed at myself in the mirror. “What!”
My lips were caked with blood and my mouth was still oily with the gore I’d sucked from my finger. Releasing the split digit, I splashed water onto my face and into my mouth with both hands, then gripped the edge of the counter and spat frantically into the sink until I began to gag. I worked my tongue against my palate and scraped it against my top front teeth, but I couldn’t be rid of the stringy sensation of hair in my mouth.
Thrush, I thought, my delusional mind latching onto the possibility that my illness had brought on the oral disease.
I wiped my eyes and stuck out my tongue, attempting to observe in the mirror if any ulcers had formed. There were none, only letters in lesions scored vertically in the muscle. Using the first finger and thumb of each hand, I pinched down on either side of my tongue and pulled and pulled until I could see that the last letter of the word repeated until it vanished down into the darkness of my throat: RELEASSSSSSSS
I stood frozen, just staring into the mirror at the message –– RELEASSSSSS –– but soon started wheezing. I’d pulled my tongue so far up into my throat I was asphyxiating. Falling forward, I released the muscle and it sprung back into my throat triggering a gag reflex I couldn’t control. I erupted into a coughing frenzy until the nausea that had been worming my innards exploded. I convulsed and a geyser of vomit spewed from my mouth into the sink. I shuddered violently as I puked again and again and again...until something came up and out and splashed in the sink. Something that I could only describe as a sheath of scaly, translucent flesh. And on this flesh was scrawled one word: CH’I
This finale to the recent trilogy of notes-to-self played out in my mind and I now knew what had to be done.
Heal thyself. Release ch’i: the corporeal life energy, Shakti, coiled at my Sacrum. And breathe me in.
–––––––––––––––
After moving the large settee, I laid my bare bedroom mattress on the floor of the library and pushed the head of it up against the wall. I chose the library because I didn’t want to do this in my bedroom, where Mother had died.
Finding a roll of painter’s plastic in the basement utility closet, I now unfurled it over the mattress and cut it to length. Next I positioned the reading lights that had been at either end of the settee up against opposite edges of the mattress, and aimed them downward until the light bounced blindingly off the plastic. Having collected pillows from every bed in the house, I propped them up against the wall, and arranged them in a deliberate slope that mimicked a gently angled hospital bed. I then attached the video camera to the tripod, started it recording, and adjusted the lens so the viewer framed the lower bulk of the pillows. Rolling the library flatscreen near to the head of the makeshift operating theater, I connected it to the camera’s video monitor line, and turned it on. I was nearly ready.
Stripping naked, I doused my abdomen, groin, and crotch with antibacterial solution. Then I did the same with my hands and arms –– from wrist to shoulder –– and pulled on rubber gloves. I laid out my university surgical instruments on a sterilized cloth at the right edge of the mattress, easily in reach. Splitfoot had never used such precision implements, always opting for whatever crude cutting tools his victims had available: kitchen or hunting or box knives, pocketknives or razor blades, anything.
Already having prepared my regional anesthetic, a Marcaine and clonidine cocktail, I placed the loaded hypodermic in the silver tray with the 3.5-inch spinal needle.
This is going to hurt, I thought, as I moved the tray near the edge of the mattress closest to the flatscreen, and laid face down on the pillows. Turning my head, I took the needle from the tray with my right hand and probed my lower back with my left, favoring my middle finger over my bandaged and mutilated first. Locating my lumbar vertebrae, I found the L2 vertebra, then utilized the flatscreen to position the needle in a soft region approximately two inches below. I took a large breath and pushed the needle deep between my vertebrae, then attached the hypodermic as quickly as I could and forced in the anesthetic.
Sputtering with pain, I removed the needle and tossed it away. Rolling onto my back, I position myself on the pillows so that my abdomen and pelvic region were visible on the flatscreen. Then I waited for my lower body to go completely numb.
During that endless half hour, I thought one thing repeatedly: I should’ve been called the Zodiac Killer, not that misguided punk who claimed a handful of random lives in San Francisco back in the day.
The corporalabe had finalized all of Splitfoot’s victims based on their astrological sign; their latitude and longitude may have been accurate, but the coordinates were incidental.
Not for me though, I suddenly realized, sensing the spinal injection taking deep effect –– I could no longer move my legs or feet. The corporalabe, and all it’s unfounded absurdities and atypical uniqueness, had been engineered for one purpose only: so that I would ultimately locate my displaced self and fall headlong into this moment in time.
Sluggish but coherent, I chose a scalpel for my primary incision. Focusing on the flatscreen monitor, I placed the blade against the midpoint of my abdomen and forced the tip into the flesh, slicing down to the navel, then around the umbilicus and further down, nearly to my pubic region. I chose a second scalpel and incised all of the tissues beneath: fatty, muscle, and fascia. My work was good; the bleeding was minimal. Even so, I was feeling dangerously lightheaded and approaching shock. I had to be quick and end this madness.
Still viewing the monitor, I placed the fingertips of my left hand at the incision curving around my navel. Then I placed the fingertips of my right hand at the incision rising vertically above my navel. As if an incantation, I muttered the notes-to-self that had come to me in succession: “I am here. Shakti, Sacrum. Breathe me in. Heal thyself. Release ch’i.”
With that, I dug into myself and pulled the flesh apart exposing my intestines. Digging in deeper, I spread the innards and viewed my lower spine just above the sacrum bone of the pelvis. And that’s when I heard it. A hissing. Sibilance. And then I saw it: the head of a black serpent rising, unspooling from the depths of my root chakra. It was Shakti, Kundalini, my corporeal life f
orce ascending. I watched it on the monitor as it coiled around my spine, slithering upward, electrifying my core. I gasped with a sensation I shouldn’t be capable of feeling in this state of anesthesia.
But then the serpent turned its head, peering straight into camera, leering directly at me. For an endless moment everything seemed to fall silent and go still. And I just looked into the demon’s eyes, knowing that the Devil I had once called had arrived at last. Like a vampire that must be invited across a victim’s threshold to take control, I had to literally open myself up and release this creature into my home.
What have I done? I asked myself one last time.
The serpent answered promptly with an acerbic sssssssst! And launched itself forward, uncoiling from my spine and landing with a wet splat on the plastic between my legs. Slithering forward, I watched paralyzed as it shed its old skin, leaving it for me to incinerate in a crucible and breathe in its curative vapors. After all, the demon had been a part of me.
Cozying up against my left leg, the serpent reared up and looked back, directly into my eyes. It seemed to grin with success and every joke it had played out. Except one.
Journals of Horror: Found Fiction Page 27