The fear burned up his oxygen and he started sucking down deep breaths, making tiny froggie croaks. I liked the sound. I kept bending his wrist backwards until it snapped and took the blade from his broken hand and drove it into his ear.
He had just enough time left to whimper, "You—" with such surprise that I actually smiled.
After the first kidnapping threat, Joey had shown me how to use my hands when I was a kid.
I pulled him up until we were nose to nose, his eyes swirling with his final terrors as I gave him my death gaze.
"I'm not such a good boy," I said and watched Bone die. His chilly blood splashed against my chest but didn't cool any of my freshly ignited rage.
I got on the phone and called the Rossi mansion. After some nasty browbeating and curses from her three brothers, Carl finally picked up.
"Carla, baby," I said. "Marry me!"
A few seconds of silence where it could have gone either way, and then, "Oh, Tommy, honey bunch!"
"I'll leave all the arrangements to you. Anything you want."
"How about we hold the ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral?" she said. I could hear the delicacy easing into her voice. The sweetness, the softness. "Or St. Mary the Virgin? Or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine? You love the upper west side."
"How about Rome?"
"Rome!"
"We've always wanted to go and never made the time before. We can start the honeymoon right after the wedding."
"Oh, Tommy!" she cried.
After all these years, I was finally feeling good.
The Pope was on the phone trying to get Cheechio Fasulli to push the button on Emperor Mitsomosho. Sounded like Cheech wanted at least a hundred g's and the Pope wasn't going above twenty-five. He looked up, took off the big hat, wiped sweat from his gray brow and said, "You ready to whack that little guy yet? He knows kung fu. It won't be as easy as you might expect."
I handed him my grandfather's painting Jesus Wrestles the Mafia to Feed the Homeless and started walking away without a word.
"Hey, I'm talkin' to you!"
"Listen, old man," I said. "I'm trying to be understanding. You've got a rat in your ranks who's running this place in circles."
"There are no rats in my house, kid!"
"Check again or I'll bring in my own exterminator."
"Threatening me proves that you've got about as much brains as JFK's corpse!"
"Just hang that thing in Saint Peter's Basilica." I was already slightly annoyed that most of Donato D'Angelo Bramante's architecture had been razed in order to bring in the glass and metal of the modern age. "Up front where everybody can see it."
"It smells funny. How much is it worth?"
"It cost me a lot."
"I like it then," he said.
"And I need you to do me a favor this Sunday. I'm getting married, and I want you to preside."
"You got nerve, kid!"
"I'll make it worth your while."
I left the Palace, stood on Vatican Hill and stared at the surrounding medieval and Renaissance walls of the enclave. 44 hectares (109 acres). The smallest independent country in the world, Vatican City was established in 1929 under terms of the Lateran Treaty, superseded in 1984 by a new concordat, which also recognized the full sovereignty of the Holy See jurisdiction of the pope.
I couldn't shut him out anymore so I let his data course through me, the way most people had to listen to their grandfather's war tales over and over, boring endless stories about his youth, the days before H-boxes, how he once met Frank Sinatra's clone in Atlantic City.
I could feel the history of Rome lap at my feet. The Papal Palace had more than 1000 rooms and housed government offices of the Roman Catholic church, libraries, and the Sistine Chapel, with its great ceiling frescoes painted by Michelangelo. The museums were outstanding and included the Gregorian Museum of Egyptian Art; the Gregorian Museum of Etruscan Art; the Pio Clementino Museum, with a superlative collection of antiquities; and the Vatican Pinacoteca, with representative works by Italian masters.
Carla was off shopping on the Piazza di Spagna. Ganooch, Dante and Joey Fresco sat in their wheelchairs, grinning wildly. Barabbas heeled to me and panted in the heat and refused to move. I lifted him into my arms and his jowls flapped against my neck.
The buzz in my mind was strong enough to stagger me as I walked down the steps, but I was getting used to it.
"Okay, boys, you had enough of these art galleries and museums yet? Ready to go back to the hotel now?"
But no, they weren't. Jerusalem, as reported at Queen Alia Airport, Jordan, 84°F, Sunny, UV Index: 0 Minimal. Wind: Calm. Dew Point: 32°F. Humidity: 93% Visibility: 4.3 miles Pressure: 30.15 inches and steady.
"Okay," I said. "On the second leg of the honeymoon, all right?"
Ganooch wanted to paint the Garden of Gethsemane in the breaking streams of a sanguine dawn, Dante needed to visit the grove and pray through the night, and Joey had heard that their olive oil was the best, but he wanted to find out for himself.
Introduction for "Jonah Arose"
by Christopher Golden
The idea behind FOUR DARK NIGHTS was simple enough: four different writers would each craft a novella whose only requirement would be that its main action take place in a single night. I think all four of the authors--Douglas Clegg, Bentley Little, Tom Piccirilli, and I--stretched the rule quite a bit, in large part because what horror is so often about is not merely the fright of the moment, but the haunting echoes of the past.
“Jonah Arose" Tom Piccirilli's masterfully unsettling contribution to FOUR DARK NIGHTS, is the perfect example of that. With its twisted imagery and the same Bradbury-meets-Barker sensibility that informs his wonderful novel A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN, "Jonah Arose" is a tale that will give you some haunting echoes of your own.
--Christopher Golden, author of WILDWOOD ROAD and THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN
Jonah Arose
for Dick Laymon
1
The flood was upon us, and I wanted to go with it.
I watched the Works for three days of freezing Manhattan rain, lingering inside a storm that wouldn't die down. Arching rivers flowed in the streets and draped off the vaulted roofs, splashing, white-capped in the vicious wind. Whenever I looked at my soaked, prune-ish fingers I thought of the pickled punks floating in their yellow liquids, tiny fetal hands clasped in prayer.
Fishboy Lenny was having a hell of a time in the roiling gutter, bobbing and swimming in torrents of rainwater. Corpses of bloated rats rolled by, sweeping down toward the docks. Addicts and the homeless shivered themselves to pieces, begging pocket change from stonewall citizens and wet, heartless hookers. The downpour didn't stop the whores. If anything, it drove them out into the saturated night. They paraded through the subways and pushed across the avenue, all tits and rabbit fur and shining red umbrellas. They slogged up to taxis at traffic lights, crawled into the backs of vans, and hung at the entrance of the Works hoping to entice the curious passer-by.
Starving dogs tore each other apart in the alleys, just another fragment of the drenched tableau. Blood ran but washed away immediately, leaving no impression of life or death behind. It was nothing new. Jolly Nell couldn't take the street noise and started singing the poisoned violets scene Poveri Fiori from Act IV of Adriana Lecouvreur. I'd never realized before that she could really belt out the high notes when she put everything into it.
Male prostitutes in baseball caps or cowboy hats leaned back against the bricks, posing beneath lamp lights, thumbs hooked in their jeans as the slow-moving traffic eased by like oil Christ, they'd all watched too many movies but none of the right ones. Frizzy heads bobbed in the laps of anemic businessmen, and the world kept kicking.
I could feel the energy gathering around us, swirling, black and degenerate. The stink of displacement, of aberration, became stronger as I kept watch. I knew it was going to be bad. Any sharp noise drew my attention in the constant patter, gurgle and spray of rain.
Juba unfolded himself from where he knelt, unwinding those unholy limbs further and further until they looked as if they would never stop. Even on his knees he's taller than most men, and when he stands he towers above all normality. Anybody looking out a second-story window would be almost eye-level with him. He wavered in the air, each elongated bone and tendon showing through the thin tissue of his nutmeg flesh. His oblong head appeared poorly crafted, lopsided to the left where his shoulder was hunched. He was a tad over eight feet tall, but Nell could easily pick him up and carry him across the midway, even tossing him in the air and juggling him a bit. It had once been part of the act and drew delighted yowls from the children.
He was also an anatomical wonder. When Juba sucked in his stomach you could see his backbone thrusting through. For a quarter you could touch it. Ladies would squeal and make disgusted faces, and dream about what this freak would be like in bed, with everything so long.
His heart was perfectly defined, and you could watch the muscle beating. I'd witnessed the pounding of his anger, remorse and desire. He remained a soft-spoken godly man, but I still didn't know which god.
"Is something going to happen?" Juba asked. Even his voice was thin, a sparse whisper.
"Yes," I said. "You feel it too?"
"I can tell by your face."
"Oh."
"And I know you're never mistaken about things like this."
"We all have our talents."
Jolly Nell, forever the enthusiastic optimist, said, "Perhaps nothing bad will come, this one time."
How I loved her for that. For her willingness to offer me a chance to be wrong about the arrival of misery.
But I wasn't, and Nell understood that. She'd always been the caregiver, the brace over which the rest of us could sag or slump. Her mother had sold her to McKenna's Carnival when she was seven years old and already topping one-sixty. Falling into her arms was like being embraced by all your loves and fears at once, the power in them something natural, intense and dominant. She snapped two of my ribs in a rough clench a while back, but I needed that hug worse than anything else at the time, even while the shards of bone ground together in my lungs. I spit blood for days.
Now, at five-one, she broke seven hundred pounds easy, but never seemed to have trouble with her ankles or shins or lower back the way some of the other Jollies had. Nell moved with the consistency and gravity of the setting moon. She affected us like a tidal force.
My fingers began to tremble and the burning in my guts grew worse. It happened like this, from time to time, when the hammer was about to drop. My breath came in bites and my eyes flitted wildly, scanning the cars racing by in the seeping darkness, headlights smeared upon the slick blackness.
Nell hugged me, but my ribs hadn't completely healed yet and I grunted in pain, quivering at her touch. She said, "None of this is your fault. It's all right. It's going to be fine."
Hertzburg let out a belly full of ferocious laughter. It went on longer than it should have, there in the storm. Thunder snarled above. Finally he noted Nell's expression and stopped. "I'm sorry, but your idealism during our current circumstances astounds me at this point."
"It shouldn't," she told him.
"No, I suppose not. Some of us can clear away death as easily as finishing off a roasted pig."
"Oh, well, isn't that cute?"
"For others it gets tangled in our curls."
Jolly Nell planted herself, fists on her colossal hips. "Face up to it, you're enjoying yourself. You're having a terrific time."
"Do we have any choice?"
"That's enough," I said.
"Of course it is. Let's hold our vigil and observe further."
Hertzburg didn't brush his soaked hair out of his eyes. It hung dripping across his nose and cheeks, in the corners of his mouth, down those powerful arms and between his thick fingers. Though billed as the Wild Man, he'd never been good at appearing feral. He had too much pride for that. McKenna used to go nuts when Hertzburg wore his reading glasses in the sideshow, playing chess against himself, discussing Nietzsche with the rubes, reciting Baudelaire and Goethe. Anything to break character. Even with his large muscles corded and covered in fuzz, wearing a Tarzan outfit with big leopard spots on it, he was the definition of poise.
Stoned teens in the audience would sometimes try to test him in an effort to impress their pimply girlfriends, swinging bicycle chains or tossing lit matchbooks. Their ugly, harassing chortling would float through camp and the rest of us would know what was coming. Hertzburg never lost his composure. Not when he'd grabbed the rube kids by their throats, not when they were trying to knife him, and not even while the cops shackled him and the parents shrieked. He videotaped his performances so he could later prove he always acted in self-defense.
The street lights seemed to dim for an instant, showing the contours of shadows in the sheets of rain. It appeared almost like fire falling upon us. I doubled over and went to my knees.
Herzburg said, "Guess this is it."
A Jeep Cherokee with bad brake lining tried to run the red, way too late. The engine roared as the gears slipped. Everybody on the street stopped what they were doing in order to watch. A yellow cab pulled out and cut it off, sending the Jeep into a wicked skid, snaking and spinning now. Nell covered her eyes but Juba leaned forward off the curb as if he might pluck out the driver with one hand.
Brake lights cast a sanguine hue against the rain. The Jeep straightened an instant before it smashed into a teenage crackhead, tires screeching and sputtering in the puddles. The girl had on a yellow slicker and it made her a good target. She'd just taken down an entire bachelor party in the back of a limo and still had the loose cash in her hand. The Jeep veered and swerved again as she rolled up the grille, bounced off the hood into the windshield, and flipped over the top.
Her arms went out wide as if trying to go with it and fly for a little while. She appeared to have caught an updraft and the edges of her slicker flapped. Her hair dipped and flung aloft. The whole scene had a brutal sense of ballet to it.
Her body bowed hideously, staying up there for a time as if grooving to '70s tunes–"Dream Weaver," maybe "Thunder island" or "Crocodile Rock," and then she came crashing down on the curb. Bills fluttered past, crisp twenties. It looked like she'd made an even hundred for the whole party. The back of her skull parted easily, flopping open on the cement. Fishboy Lenny swam up the gutter and peered closely at her, making his noises of distress and want. "Fweep, mweee, fwssshhh."
Without so much as a crack in the windshield, the Jeep gunned it and kept going straight through the next intersection. The three guys in the limo popped out of the moon roof and glanced down at the dead whore, grinning with slick teeth. They'd put it to her, giving her a last lay to take to hell. They should've just strangled her with their Italian ties. Their high-pitched dingo laughter sounded deranged but genuine as they pulled away. They were in a mood now and would probably smack around some deaf-mutes on the way home just to keep the high going.
Blurs of black motion began to swarm up and down the avenue. The street folk were on the girl then, nabbing her shoes and money and vials of crack. They danced after the cash, pirouetting in the wind, skipping past parked cars. Nobody wanted the slicker but they hauled her corpse backward right out of her strained white thong. Fishboy Lenny watched it all with his usual wide-eyed innocence, twin nostril slashes on his nose less face quivering as he mewled.
Jolly Nell asked, "Shouldn't we help?"
Juba the living skeleton said, "We can do nothing, Nell, she's already dead. Look–"
"They're taking her..."
"It's to be expected."
"My God, and her..."
"They live off carrion. It's their way."
"Don't watch," I said from the shadows, watching.
Fishboy Lenny swam from drainpipe to drainpipe as the sewers whirled and burped, his small flippers already spattered with red. I'd worked alongside him for several years and s
till didn't know a thing about his past, or even if he had one. He was found treading water in the tank of the high dive act one morning and immediately became part of McKenna's Carnival.
On occasion he would mimic words well enough to sound as if he was actually speaking, but they were only strung together, incoherent sentences. It made you wonder what went on behind those wide eyes, and just what that mind might reveal.
The rumors about the Works had made it from New York down to the southern carny circuit. They were as different and preposterous as the gaffs and ballyhoo on any midway.
Like you used to have to screw on camera to get inside, or cut open your wrist and bleed in front of your children, or quote passages in Greek from the Book of Revelation. It sounded stupid enough to be true and had all probably happened at one point or another. There was an air of East Village artistry about it, a performance piece set in motion that hadn't let up with enough resistance to slow it down yet. I wondered about that.
It had the worked up promotion of an Andy Warhol-type Factory alliance, where the artisans and contrivers gathered to film themselves shitting and sleeping and then presented it as art to anybody senseless enough to fall for it. Word was now that if you went inside looking for a leather-death 'trix to whip the hide off your ass, you could find her easy enough. She'd be courteous and sweet and spit in your face only when you asked her to, and the salted ends of her cat-o'-nine-tails would help to heal the welts up quickly. You wanted some home-stomped wine or Cuban cigars, a bestiality porno or a discussion group on nineteenth-century literature, or if you needed some guy to show you how to break your own thumbs to get out of high-tinsel steel cuffs, then you could just waltz right in, pick what you required and then backtrack out again.
But if you went with the intention of finding anything more, maybe looking for poetry to be carved into your heart, the agony of legend or a slap-down with God, seeking redemption or erasure of a dead past, then you joined with something more looming and immense along the way. Until you carelessly grew into reckless myth and couldn't make it in the regular world anymore.
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