by Jesse Jordan
J 1—1
A 1—1
M 4—4
E 5—5
S 1—3
12—14
L 3—3
O 6—7
V 4—6
I 9—1
E 5—5
27—22
S 1—3
A 1—1
L 3—3
L 3—3
E 5—5
Y 7—1
20—16
“Usually in arithmancy you’re going to reduce these to a single-digit number. But what if we didn’t do that? What if we added them all together?” The scratch of pen on paper. How many times had that been the most comforting sound in the world to James?
12+14+27+22+20+16 = 111
“And then we multiply that by the number of sums we’ve added together . . .”
James realized what he was doing the second before he wrote the number. “No.”
666
“The Number of the Beast,” Adam said as a shiver rolled through him.53
James shook his head.
“Oh, there’s more. Let’s look at isopsephy, shall we?”
“Pleeeaaaassssse, I don’t know what you guys are talking about. This doesn’t . . . I don’t know why my name does that, but—”
Adam tore off the top sheet, revealing fresh white paper. “Isopsephy is an alphanumeric system of great mystery and majesty, coming from the Greeks. For this one, we don’t even need your whole name. We need only . . .”
S
A
L
L
E
Y
“The value of S is two hundred. A is one, L is thirty twice, and Y is four hundred.” He scribbled the equation in a long line, and James knew he couldn’t hold it any longer. His stomach and esophagus contracted as one, but it was only a thin orange stream that splurted out onto his chest and lap.
200+1+30+30+5+400 = 666
“You see?” Adam shouted, leaping away from the chair. He tore off that sheet as well, tossing it above his head and letting it fall. “Can you see the truth?”
“I’m not . . . anyone. I haven’t done anything!”
And now I’m gonna die.
“But the real evidence is in English gematria. English gematria is our true line to God’s plan. I can tell you that. Simple. Perfect.” He scribbled an off-balance six on the paper and held it up to James. “Six! Six is the key. A is six, B is twelve, C is eighteen, and on and on. M is seventy-eight, R is 108, Y is 150. You see?”
Adam hunched over his clipboard and wrote and wrote and wrote. For the first time, James began to notice the pain in his wrists and ankles. The plastic straps were chafing the skin even as they squeezed and restricted the blood flow. Again his gaze swept the room for Dink. He looked at the pile of clothing, the area around the table. Nothing.
Adam stepped up to James and held the clipboard out at arm’s length, so that this was facing James:
J = 60
A = 6
M = 78
E = 30
S = 114
288
L = 72
O = 90
V = 132
I = 54
E = 30
378
S = 114
A = 6
L = 72
L = 72
E = 30
Y = 150
444
“Look at that last number, Antichrist. It may be the most holy number there is. I admit, it gave us pause when we found it. The number 444 is the sum of the words Gospel and Cross . . . and Jesus. Did you hear that? Jesus!” Adam resumed his pacing, though now the steps were closer together, the shoulders tighter. James thought he looked like a cat ready to pounce on the brain stem of a mouse.
“But then,” Adam said, “the Truth was revealed to us. Of course you would have the same numeric value as Jesus. Are you not his nemesis, his archenemy? You are his mirror image, dark where he is light and empty where he is whole. It only makes sense that you should have the same number.” James saw Adam check his reaction out of the corner of his eye. On the whole, Adam seemed to be very pleased with the way this was going.
“It’s like with Voldemort,” Paul said. “He and Harry Potter have like the same everything. Even their wands, they have Phoenix feather cores, and they’re the only ones that—”
“Paul!”
The room was silent as Adam stared at the pudgy man. James was sure he could feel Old Fish-and-Vinegar behind him staring as well.
“Sorry,” Paul said, again searching for his favorite part of the floor.
Adam shook his head and looked around before finding James again. “Right, uh, 444, the mirror image of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus, 444. Salley, 444. Christ. Antichrist. Do you still deny it?”
“Yes.” James had no more energy to shout it. “Yes,” he said again.
“Oh, but we’re not finished.” Adam’s smile and focus were Viagra-level back. He stomped over to James. “Look at the other two numbers. First, James equals 288. Now, 288 gives us nothing, but when we divide it by the holy number three, we find—”
“Wait. You can’t just do that! If it gives you nothing, then that’s an argument in my favor.”
“The holy number divines Truth. It is a litmus by which any number must be tested. When you divide 288 by three you get ninety-six, which is a semiperfect number and a multiple of six. Six!”
“What’s a semiperfect number?”
“Moooooving on! The numeric value of Lovie is 378. Again, that gives us nothing. When we divide by three, we get 126—which is nothing—buuuuuut, when we divide by three once again we get forty-two—an evil number.”
“That’s not . . . you can’t just keep . . .”
“In Revelation it says that the Beast will hold dominion over the Earth for forty-two months. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“No!” James said, feeling something other than terror at last. You can’t let them do this. “It’s not a coincidence, because you’re just making stuff up! This is all bullshit! This—” James barely noticed the nod. The knife, on the other hand, he noticed the second it touched his throat.
“As I was saying, forty-two is a very, very interesting number. It’s a wicked number. There are, of course, the Jews. They have their so-called forty-two-lettered god.” And then, almost to himself, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you actually turned out to be him. Wouldn’t the heebs be surprised to find out—?”
“Jackie Robinson.”
They all turned to Paul.
“What?” Old Fish-and-Vinegar said.
“Jackie Robinson was number forty-two,” Paul said as he attempted to polish the floor with his shoe.
Adam stormed over to Paul and slapped the attaché out of his hands. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“You were . . . Things that’re forty-two.”
“Evil things, Paul. Wicked things. You can’t . . . That was actually really racist.”
“It was,” Old Fish-and-Vinegar said.
“You know, Paul, just go outside.”
“But—”
“No, just go.”
Paul walked slowly, and James was almost positive he heard the sniffle-suck of tears as the pudgy man let the heavy door close behind him.
Adam turned to James. “I just want you to know that we don’t condone . . . Anything Paul may have said was his own . . . I actually have a lot of black friends.”
James was unsure of the correct response, so he just nodded.
Adam resumed his position before James, but he seemed uncertain. His eyes ranged about as if he’d forgotten where he left off. He stepped to the table and shuffled through the pages from Paul’s attaché. “Okay,” Adam said, wheeling once more to James, his old energy again animating his face. “Let’s try this. I want you to answer each one of my questions yes or no. Can you do that?”
James nodded again.
“Okay. Are you thirsty?”
“Is my hair blond?”
“Yes.”
“Is today Sunday?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Is your name James?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“Yes.”
“Do you live in Stone Grove?”
“Yes.”
“Are you the Antichrist?”
“No.”
“Come on!”
Adam marched off behind the table. He stood there, hands on his hips, chewing his bottom lip, and stared at James. Finally he let out a deep sigh and looked over at Old Fish-and-Vinegar. “Peter should have been here by now. He’s bringing the holy water and the strappado. I’m going to go call him. You watch this beast—and do not move that knife. Remember how cunning he is, brother.” Then Adam turned to address James. “If you say a word to him while I am away, he will kill you. Do you understand?”
James nodded and Adam turned hard on his heel and headed in the opposite direction, disappearing through a small back door. Old Fish-and-Vinegar came around to the front of the chair, standing so that he was straddling James’s legs, his right hand reaching across his body and holding the knife against the side of James’s neck.
There was no mistaking the truth in his eyes: this man wanted to do it. He wanted James to say something. Had there been anything left in James’s bladder, it would have left.
It was then, at the very moment that James felt his insides give up, that he saw Dink’s tiny hand appear, rising as he summited the back and clambered onto the shoulder of Old Fish-and-Vinegar, who, in his intense neckular focus, didn’t notice the homunculus at all.
That was when Dink did it. He took one step backward, coiling down like a sprinter, and then charged the head. When he reached Old Fish-and-Vinegar’s neck, he leapt up and out, landing with a wet sccchhhhluunk in the big man’s ear. James felt the knife tense against his neck for an instant, but nothing more, as Dink burrowed into the ear, his little legs kicking frantically. Old Fish-and-Vinegar locked up, his eyes big white orbs of confused terror, and then Dink’s feet were gone.
For a moment, nothing at all happened.
Then the knife came away from James’s neck. The big man’s arm moved in broad, herky-jerky jumps, like a marionette’s. He stepped back in long strides, without bending his knees. Then he bent over at the waist, ass in the air, and reached his right arm out straight, so that the tip of the knife inched toward James’s wrist. The dull eyes stared at him, the pupils still and fully dilated.
“What are you doing?” James whispered.
The mouth flopped open. “Taaaaaahhhhhh.”
“What?”
“Tahh . . . terhhhh . . . truhhh . . . Trusssssst meeeeeee.”
James closed his eyes as the blade shook and flicked near his wrist. A moment later his muscles rejoiced at their freedom, the arm flexing up even as blood rushed back into his hand, filling it with little needles. James opened his eyes and saw that the wobbly thing that had been Old Fish-and-Vinegar was holding the knife out, handle-first. James took it and cut free of his other restraints, and then he was up and stumbling toward the door, the big man’s hand dragging him along. James broke free for a second and ran to the table to retrieve his phone before hurrying back to the side of Dink’s puppet. When they reached the door, James was shoved to the wall behind it as New Dink/Old Fish-and-Vinegar pulled it open and leaned out to the cluster of suited men standing around Paul, pestering him for details. James watched through the hinge space between door and wall. He could tell just by the flourish of Paul’s arm as he recounted the story that he was already hard at work rewriting his role in this day.
“It’sssssss time,” New Dink-and-Vinegar said. “Ever . . . everyone oot back.”
They practically crushed him in the stampede. James caught the door just before it took him upside the head. Paul paused, squinting at New Dink-and-Vinegar.
“You okay, Donny?”
For a moment the big man didn’t say or do a thing, and James wondered if somehow he was broken or frozen or something. But then he lurched forward so that his head almost hit Paul’s, burrowing into his personal space. “Go.”
And Paul did. He was at the back door a second later, and then the big man’s hands were searching for James again, pulling him outside and pushing him toward the Escalade. He herded James up in through the passenger door and followed him. Then he pointed at the keys. “Go.”
James started to protest. Driver’s ed had not gone well. He was scared and watched the ground directly in front of the car instead of looking out ahead, and when he felt it drift a little to the left or right, he panicked. Then James looked up at the warehouse door standing open and realized that more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life, he did not want to see someone come out of there. Whatever that meant, he was not going to be right here when someone emerged.
The engine cleared its throat and growled. James pressed hard on the brake—C’mon, you can do this—and felt the engine lurch as the vehicle slipped into reverse; then he turned to look out the back window, took his foot off the brake, and slammed it on the gas.
James and the man stood in an undeveloped tract a half mile outside of town as the sinking sun and a light drizzle melted the too-hot day into heavy redness. The entire stretch where they stood was supposed to be townhouses a couple years ago, but it’d all stopped. Investors gone, loans gone, developers gone, workers gone. Mostly it was just paved dirt and a few wooden skeletons. Kids came out here to have bonfires and drink cases of Busch.
At this particular moment, James was sitting on a decorative boulder and New Dink-and-Vinegar was standing in a roughly three-foot-deep grave. James had been trying to talk to him for the last thirty minutes, trying to get information from Dink or Old Fish-and-Vinegar. But Dink said to wait until they were done. That was twenty-five minutes ago. Since then he hadn’t said a word.
The trip had been a terror that should never be recounted. James was utterly lost for at least twenty minutes. He sped, then went too slow. At stop signs, he idled through or slammed on the brakes or sometimes missed them altogether. The SUV had drifted as he tried to read a street sign and scraped three parked cars. Eventually he’d managed to figure out that they were pretty much straight west, and then it was just a matter of staying on Washington Avenue without drawing any attention. It did not help when New Dink-and-Vinegar began to convulse in the passenger seat.
The big man tossed the shovel out of the grave and lay down. James watched as the man’s head began to shake and blood ran out of his nose like in that video he’d seen on the Internet of that politician in the ’80s who shot himself at his press conference. Then, like a child gushed from a water-park slide, Dink burst from the opposite ear of Old Fish-and-Vinegar, feetfirst and riding a wave of blood.
Dink climbed from the grave soaking wet, and the dirt stuck to him and turned dark. “You mind covering him up?” he said.
“I thought . . . I was hoping he could tell me more about . . .”
“He can’t tell you anything, kid. He can never tell anybody anything ever again.”
The thought filled James with a long, cold dread. His eyelids twitched in hard syncopation despite his efforts to stop them. He didn’t want Dink to see, so he gathered up the shovel and began loading the soil back into the ground.
You hated him. James threw the first three shovelfuls of dirt on Old Fish-and-Vinegar’s face. He wanted to murder you. He was . . . James shoveled faster. He wanted the man gone. Hidden and gone and gone.
Dink climbed up James’s leg as soon as the last dirt was in the grave. “Wipe off the shovel and throw it in the woods there by the automobile.”
James did as he was told. Dink climbed to his shoulder, and James turned away from the setting sun and began to walk home. His shadow before him was twenty feet tall and darker than mud.
“I’m going to stay with you here, kid.”
James turned
to see the homunculus sitting on his shoulder looking back at him.
Dink nodded as if it was settled and then looked off ahead. “They’ll be scared now. I understand you’re freaked out, but you’re actually much safer now. They’re not a muscle operation; they’re a sneak-and-peek operation. Now that they know that we know—and they lost one of theirs—they’re going to be mighty wary. Plus, I’ll be here now. All the time, kid.”
James walked along the street as North America turned away from the sun. The rain came suddenly, falling fast in fat, warm drops, and he turned his head up to it, listening to the sounds of the rain pelting the leaves and asphalt, the sound of far-off traffic and his own breath. In and out and in and out.
“It’ll be okay, kid.”
James tried to take in what Dink said, but nothing could get past Old Fish-and-Vinegar in his shallow grave, the way the dirt clung to the rivers of blood on his mouth and chin. It felt as if James was processing the moment over and over again.
He stopped walking. “I need to see Ezra. I need to talk to him.”
“Okay, we’ll find him.”
“Where?”
“Where do you usually find him?”
“I don’t. He usually—”
And that was when James heard the familiar squeak-squeak, growing louder with each oscillation.