A Lower Deep

by Tom Piccirilli

  "You've a narrow view of sacrifice."

  "No, I don't, John."

  My lost love Danielle had been an offering of many kinds to many forces. To my ardor. To the sins of my father. To the obsession of Elijah, and the egomania of Jebediah. To the virtue of her own soul. When she should have left my side at the covine tree and run for her life she'd instead chosen to say behind. In the moment of her death her integrity had been hacked to bits in the dying light of church fires, and each of us had stolen as many pieces of her as we could.

  Arcane energy leaked from my eyes and mouth and drifted around the room. Hexes formed under my tongue and I kept sucking them back down. Abbot John drew back and his shining head reflected flame.

  I said, "I know about loss."

  "My apologies."

  "If the angels wanted humanity, then they had to take everything that went along with that decision. They should have learned as much from Cain as from any other man. One of the earliest lessons of the world is that sometimes God doesn't accept our sacrifices."

  As a man who hanged himself every day, the thought terrified him. "We … we are all only instruments and follow the natural course of His will."

  He only heard what he wanted to hear. "Your recitations and metaphors have been puerile for twenty centuries, John, and this is a place of clarity. I made my oath succinctly, the least you can do is talk to me without such banal platitudes."

  He nodded once, and his face went blank like a knight's visor suddenly lowering. "It's only partly metaphor, the rest is up to you. I had a vision. She is to die here."

  "You don't have visions anymore."

  "I've dreamed a great deal lately." He frowned, not wanting to share something. "Some about you. Some about Archangel Michael."

  "I don't care about them."

  If he had a voice he'd be yelling, but his resolve could only eke out of him in a diminutive whine. "Cathy is to die. She carries Elijah. Jebediah has sent him to herald the resurrection of the messiah before-"

  "I know. It's my problem, you can't hold her responsible. I'll take care of it."

  The coarse chuckle from his strained voice sounded like a handful of gravel being tossed across the room. "Your vanity is boundless."

  "It's not conceit to know your enemy as well as I know mine." He wasn't afraid of the will of Jebediah. He'd taken in two descendants of Pierre DeLancre, and spent his life in a stone fortress reinforced by age and consecration. "What are you really afraid of?" I asked. "What stalks the mount?" He started to choke as if the rope were already tightening around his throat. "Tell me."

  "What is here hides on its own accord," he whispered. "Among us now and forever. You already know that."

  Self continued to slumber and I didn't know why. He never slept and even now just sort of drowsed with his eyes open. It made me nervous and my sweat dripped onto his forehead and slid into the corners of his mouth. He murmured in a language I'd never heard him speak before, and he kicked out occasionally as if running from me in his nightmares. Perhaps he was already preparing for the worst.

  "You're starting to sound like my father, John," I said It was the most awful insult I could offer.

  Abbot John, looking so pink and foolish, bowed his head before the weight of the irrevocable epochs of Armon. I knew he'd go to the noose early tonight, and without any prayers he'd hang himself until he came within sight of alluring Azreal's outstretched hand.

  The boy Eddie lay vivisected, his chest cavity opened wide.

  The flesh had been peeled back in layers and pinned to the bed with thick needles engraved with the holy names of God.

  All his major organs had been carefully removed and set aside in ancient pottery, each vessel of terra-cotta inscribed with Sumerian, Persian, and Babylonian phrases. His rib cage had been sawed in half and set aside upon the Seal of Solomon flawlessly drawn across the glistening black tile.

  Liver, heart, lungs, and stomach sack sat on display-healthy despite being extracted. The peristalsis of his intestinal tract kept pumping clean and potently. Eddie's eyes were open too.

  The monks couldn't have done this alone. Not without service, provision, and affirmation. They hadn't become so advanced in the medical applications of necromancy to complete a ceremony of this magnitude-doing this to the boy, raising his soul before it had time to leave this plane, and keeping his life force in stasis.

  Uriel kneeled in the Kinnions' room, chanting quietly before a small chantry platform of idolatry. He worked well with dolls. Porcelain figurines and wooden statuettes of saints immediately turned away and crossed themselves as I entered. Snow piled up outside on the sloping roofs, and burning paw prints of familiars, demons, and djinn formed circles around the colonnades. Shadows of furtive figures surged like children in between the columns.

  Aaron stood near the door, keeping watch, his sword lashed across his back. Lowly Grillot Holt kept shuffling cards and practicing his three-card monte. Nip sat in the darkest corner of the room, facing the wall, sobbing against stone.

  Self snapped fully awake with a start, kicking and yelping. He didn't recognize me for a moment and drew his claws back to rake off my lips. Then his nostrils quivered and he sniffed, smiled, and stretched until his vertebrae crackled.

  What's the matter with you? I asked.

  Me? Nothing. What's wrong with you?

  Aaron approached. His grimace described his honest confusion and helplessness. He hefted his sword and cradled it, hands fluttering because he knew there were seldom foes that could be cut. The monastery thrummed around us; the skeletons of two hundred angels who had become men were now only dust in the breeze. We breathed them in and could taste their insurrection.

  "This was simple poltergeist activity," I told him. "Most of the eidolons were snipped away before we even arrived on the mount. You should've been able to cure the boy with a mild charm. What happened?"

  "You should know more than us. You deal with the dead. He fell into a coma and soon died. We resuscitated him and thought it best to eviscerate."

  "You did this, Aaron?"

  "No, I haven't the ability. Uriel and some of the other friars and mendicant worked in tandem, as directed by Abbot John."

  "Can they actually cure him this way?"

  "Abbott John believes so."

  "I don't."

  He shook his head. "Neither do I." Finding nothing else to cut, he worked the blade across his thumb, finding resolve in his own angry flesh. The red droplets ran down his forearm but he couldn't bleed out his frustration that easily. "All that's keeping the boy alive is your oath." He gestured toward the beds. "We need your help. The mother won't let us near."

  Janice sat beside Eddie holding his hand, her eyes much more dead than his. Her cheeks were drained of so much color that I could see each of the burst capillaries in her face. She stared at the row of jars and seemed to be focusing on his heart, beating and still alive. She looked as close to the line of lunacy than I'd ever seen someone stand and-perhaps-not yet cross.

  Eddie said, "It's not so bad, Mom."

  Now that I saw her again, in my right mind, I could make out more clearly the fiber of her sins and guilt. Her life stood as open and empty as her son's body. I knew whose knuckles fit the indentations of matted scar tissue, who'd fathered her children, and who'd murdered her dogs.

  Cathy sat up in bed and stared at me over her swollen belly. She said, "I was getting worried, but you've recovered."

  "Yes." The honeysuckle caught in my throat but I managed to ask, "How are you feeling?"

  Self cackled savagely.

  "They're … they're taking good care of us." Her face twisted out of focus and became clouded, as if seen underwater. With a ripple it suddenly shifted into a guise containing too many emotions at once. She was terrified and in shock. Her smile seemed soldered to her face. She almost couldn't make her mouth muscles move enough to say, "Can you help my brother Eddie?"

  "Yes."

  "Will you?"

  "Ye
s, I promise."

  She reached over and stroked my face, and for a moment the contact felt electrical and made my cheeks flush. I could see the curse in her genetic alphabet, the corrupt arrangement of her doubly recessive genes. Children of incestuous relationships are occasionally polydactyl. The small nub of the extra finger they'd removed from her at birth scraped along my jawline. She glanced down at her belly and rubbed it with slow circular motions, the same way Elijah had begged Danielle to do to him.

  Cathy said, "My baby hates you."

  "I know."

  Janice snapped her chin up, as if taking the first breath of her life. "Of course it does." She waved me over and said, "Come here, I need to talk to you." The murder in her voice was as distinct as the palpitation of her son's heart in the jar. "Hold my boy's hand."

  I swallowed thickly. "He's going to be fine."

  She carried her own ghosts. Other versions of herself, mostly without the scar tissue. The same but also different women, some of them smiling and waving to me, some of them not making love to her own brother John. All her unborn lives flung themselves flapping over her shoulders like flayed hides or old clothes no longer worn. The fever had made me stupid. The poltergeists that had been strung across Eddie, all of them women, were other forms of Janice, clinging to her son in order to protect him. I never should have cut them free.

  Self sat on the headboard and crooned some hushed Sinatra tunes to the boy, swaying as if he were performing in front of thousands of teenage girls. Eddie beamed.

  What's going on here? I asked. He didn't want to stop singing, and I had to wait until he finished the chorus of "Strangers in the Night."

  You tell me. You made the promise.

  Help me to keep it.

  You can't keep it. You never could.

  He crept across to Catherine's bed and sniffed at her womb, then swept her hair from her eyes. I knew he could make one quick incision and give her a cesarean section if it became essential, or if he felt the need to steal the baby.

  Elijah's animosity, for once, slumbered too. Self dropped off the sheets and put a hand on Nip's shoulder and whispered in his ear. Nip nodded once and continued to weep. Lowly Grillot Holt approached them for a game of five-card draw and Self screamed, Stay out of my face, you little cheating bastard!

  Janice stared at me until my incompetence must've spilled across her feet. Her ghosts trusted me even if she didn't, and they urged me forward to comfort her. I waited until both Cathy and Eddie were asleep, listening to Uriel's murmurs and Self's wonderfully moving singing voice.

  Janice Kinnion said, "If you try to touch either of them, I'll kill you."

  "I won't touch your children."

  "They sent you here. He sent you here… my brother."

  "No, he didn't."

  "They want her dead. Are you gonna tell me you don't know that?"

  "No."

  "I came here for help and they've gutted my son and now they're trying to kill my daughter and what's inside her. And they keep pretending this is a home of God."

  Sadly, it was, and that proved to be the ugliest irony of all. "It's been a home to many things," I said. I sounded vague and misleading and wanted to nail my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

  She chose not to argue. "Can they do what they say? Can they make him whole again?"

  That was two different questions. "I don't

  know. They can probably heal his body."

  "What goes along with the rest of that?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "Come on, come on, out with it already!"

  Reason had its place here, but not as an eternal truth. Discord arose minute to minute, and belief broke its own back from the way men bent it to their own devices. There was always a price to be paid: for every midnight caress or kiss or hastily scrawled poem of infatuation, for each promise made and each disregarded. Greater affirmations had to be found at any cost.

  The wars of the Lord could not end in stalemate. Sacrifice was not purity, but it meant more than chicken's blood. There were those who would slay the lamb as sacrifice to God, and there were shepherds who would protect the lamb for either God or themselves or for no discernible reason.

  These walls were going to come down. The quandary of the mount made the rock itself lament.

  "Something here wants your kids," I said. "Why?"

  "I don't know."

  She whispered at herself, sounding so much like her brother. "I need to get them out."

  "It's too late to run."

  "Then I'll fight."

  "No!"

  "If you get in my way I'll kill you."

  The snow was on fire. Uriel's plastic saints glared and skipped along the chantry. I left the room and Self slid alongside me with a pair of aces under his tongue.

  At the far end of the hallway, the empty cowl of Fane peered back for a time before straying out of sight.

  Chapter Nine

  My mother came to me in the night, knowing I was weak. She sang to me the way she sang before the crucifixes cracked in my father's fists, back when the priests still came over for lemonade. I could feel the texture of her presence like the downy blankets of my childhood, when the apples fell in the corner of our backyard. I lay there and couldn't keep from panting like a sick dog. Self ran around the hemp mattress on all fours, yawping and sharpening his claws against one another.

  At the foot of the bed, a nun smiled timidly at me. She held up the hem of her robes, showing off the luscious angle of her legs. The great whore burned in her gaze, the harlot gilded her lips. She pulled off her headpiece and let it drop behind her. She winked and winked again, eyelid fluttering while the tic moved across each muscle of her face contorting her features. Tears hung off her chin. She swept forward, trying to throw her hips into it, giving it some Mae West, but she'd been in the nunnery for so long that she couldn't quite remember how to even try to seduce.

  Her hair had been shorn to a Joan of Arc pageboy bob, which somehow only accentuated her feminine qualities. She giggled to herself, the glow of moonlight catching her knees. Trails of blood dripped down her inner thighs and speckled the floor. She began to sway and the spatters widened into ugly omens. Those earthy sniggers became even more revolting, and finally they deepened until she didn't sound like a woman anymore. She glanced down to read the warnings in her own blood, and the struggle inside her became more clearly defined.

  Self had finally managed to win some money off Lowly Grillot Holt, and he held up a dollar bill. Take it off, baby!

  She drew her habit over her head and threw it swirling behind her. I saw that she had the marks of Jezebel on her, the dog bites and the painted face.

  Ooh la la!

  Self sauntered forward, quivering and clapping. His arousal drove a white-hot spike into my forehead, so that all my barricaded cravings and desires released at once into my veins. The blood lust had always fueled and intoxicated him, but never like this. My pulse ripped at my neck like pincers. I snorted loud as a horse.

  Nun ninnies! Mas garbanzos!

  Stop it!

  I held on to the back of my second self's head with one hand, and clasped the other over his mouth so he wouldn't lick away the portents. I tried to read them but the slate gulped down the blood. The nun crooked her finger at him and offered up her small, pointed breasts. I tightened my grip.

  If you're not going to take advantage of this situation, then I am!

  What's happening to you? I asked.

  I ain't no damn priest!

  Other figures flailed on the floor, wagging and heaving like a carpet of snakes as they fondled and masturbated. More hermits, sisters, and penitents drawn into the dream. Elijah's living hatred bulged in the room. The glamour had been cut loose. It latched on to them in their passive state of apatheia even while they sought gnosis, the knowledge of God. Anything could be corrupted.

  I spelled out fiery exorcistic rites in the air, but they did nothing except light the room further. Hands and faces were darkl
y bruised and red with welts, their backs and asses running from the cat-o'-nine-tails. Self broke free and dove away. I arched on the bed with every muscle inflamed. They giggled wildly, and so did he.

  And so did I.

  Orgy time!

  Thoughts of Caligula and the senators' wives packed my head, and the stench from the vomitoriums made me gag. I flung myself forward and tackled Self hard, pinned him down, and bit deeply into his shoulder.

  I took some of my blood back and his enraged screams brought me awake a little more. The women coiled around my ankles and knees, but they didn't want me or anything like me.

  You bit me, you sick bastard!

  Stop your crying.

  What're you, crazy?

  I had less control over him and he had much less control over himself. I held his eyelids wide open and looked inside him. What's gotten into you?

  Me? He mewled. What's gotten into you?

  What the hell are you doing?

  Hey, they're begging for it, you friggin' prude! Shit, I need stitches!

  Quit it!

  I dressed quickly, grabbed him by the arm, and tugged him from the room while he screeched. I fought not to scream when he sank his fangs into my wrist. My blood splashed against the black hallway walls as I marched outside into the gusting snow. I made it to the outer wall and yanked back the huge wooden plank of the main gate doors, and stared at the bronze bas-relief friezes while they roiled and surged like molten metal.

  It showed two new faces among the frothing others.

  Both of them blinked and calmly watched me sweat in the blizzard.

  "Gawain is coming," I said. "And he's with my father."

  Chapter Ten

  I waited for them all night in the storm.

  Moonlight ignited the swirling swells and billows of snow. There was no other watch. At some point, one of the acolytes came out and tried to place several thick woolen blankets over my shoulders. When he touched me the embers of arcana blew back into his face and he cried out in surprise as his teeth glimmered blue and orange. I stood freezing in the rising steam with the snowfall melting as soon as it hit me, the wind alive with flaming sigils. It was getting rough out. Self glowered at me but said nothing. My oath had taken its toll on him as well. The more I held my ground the farther we split apart. The wheels of the world turned out of sync, grinding and squealing and waiting for the grease of sacrifice.