Dominion

by Bentley Little

  And the others rushed him.

  He had no time to reload, no time to do anything. Ted was in front, and he leaped the bar and yanked the shotgun from his hand, and then others were hopping over the counter. He saw breasts and fists, pubic hair and penises. He went down, punched and poked, scratched and kicked, and he heard bottles being smashed, chairs being thrown. There was laughing and whooping, the smell of newly opened alcohol. Wine spilled onto his face.

  Above him, Ted grasped the shotgun like a golf club and lifted it over his shoulder, crying, “Fore!”

  Frank did not even have time to scream before the butt of the shotgun smashed in the side of his head.

  Pastor Robens cowered in his office, his back to the locked door, listening to what was going on in his church but afraid to confront it and put a stop to it, afraid even to look at the blasphemies that were being perfo under his roof.

  Under His roof.

  That was the most horrifying thing of all, the utter lackl of respect for God Almighty and His Son Jesus Christ.

  They had been there already when he’d returned fromi his nightly visit to the AIDS hospice. They’d broken intoj the church, had smashed one of the side windows to gets in, and they were dancing in the aisles, ten or fifteen of-j them, teenagers and young adults, some sort of horrible rap music blasting from a boombox that had been set up on the dais. There were wine bottles on the carpet, wine bottles in the hands of the dancers, and he’d stormed into, the church filled with rage and righteous indignation, screaming at them to leave immediately. He’d charged to the front of the church, turned off the boombox, whirled to face the revelers And he’d seen the statue.

  The statue of Christ, his statue of Christ, the one he had received from the Reverend Morris in Atlanta. It was lying on its side on the front pew, and it had been desecrated, a garish clown’s smile painted on the face with lipstick, an enormous clay phallus appended to the crotch.

  Standing on the pew next to the statue was a young woman with blond-and-black streaked hair. She was wearing a black see-through bra and a short black skirt, but the skirt was hiked up, and she had on no underwear. She was fingering herself, her hips swiveling in a slow, sensual motion.

  There was a topless girl in the midst of the now motionless dancers, a boy with an erection emerging from his open zipper. Two young men, fully clothed, were lying on the floor underneath the broken window, embracing.

  The lecture he’d intended to deliver died on his lips. He saw now that there was something hard and corrupt and vaguely threatening in the faces of these drunken teens, a knowing belligerence he had not noticed at first.

  His anger faded as he faced the trespassers, replaced by a growing fear.

  No one spoke.

  Smirking, the young woman on the pew moved to the left, straddled the desecrated statue.

  She spread open the lips of her vulva and peed.

  There were giggles and chuckles that echoed in the silent church, titters that turned into guffaws. The young people were all still staring at him, but in their faces was not the shame at being caught that he’d expected to see, not the guilty acknowledgment of their wrongdoing that he would have thought they’d exhibit, but condescension and a smug, intimidating contempt.

  A ponytailed boy swaggered up to the dais, held a bottle out. “Hey, dude, have some.”

  Pastor Robens wanted to smack the bottle out of the boy’s hand, wanted to grab him by the collar and shake some sense into him, but he stood meekly aside as the boy took a swig of the wine and turned on the boombox.

  The other youngsters started dancing again, passing around their bottles, whooping and hollering. The two young men on the floor were now partially undressed. Against the back wall a girl screamed as a boy began beating her breasts with his fists.

  Pastor Robens hurried into his office, shut the door, locked it.

  He heard a chorus of laughter from the partyers on the other side.

  The ironic thing was that he did want a drink. He had never wanted a drink more in his life. He was trembling, his heart pounding with fear.

  He had never encountered anything like this before. He had counseled troubled teens, had even worked for a while in a gang-counseling center in downtown San Francisco. But nothing he had ever experienced had prepared him for this. Emotionally troubled youth and violent fledgling criminals, those he could deal with. Those kids had specific recognizable problems. But that group out there … Something smashed against the door of this office, and he leaned against it, closing his eyes, offering a quick prayer to God that they wouldn’t get in.

  There was something wrong with them, something deep and fundamental that went beyond the surface problems caused by family or society or even mental instability, something that he sensed but could not see, something that he only partially understood.

  Evil.

  Yes, that was it exactly. Evil. These kids were evil. Evil not for what they were doing, not for what they were saying, but for what they were.

  He had intended to come in here and call the police, but as he pressed his back against the door, as he heard the revelry going on in his chapel, he realized that he was afraid to do so.

  There was a furious knocking on the door behind him, a powerful pounding he could feel in his bones.

  “I got a big prick for you, preacher!”

  He bit his lip, said nothing.

  He had been in here now for over two hours. He’d heard screams of pain, cries of pleasure, drunken laughter. There’d been things knocked over, items smashed, windows broken. And through it all, the music, that horribly repetitive rap music, blaring from the front of the church, covering the softer sounds, obscuring the louder ones, making everything chaotic and unintelligible and even more frightening.

  And then, all of a sudden … he heard them leave. The music stopped, the laughter faded, the cries died down, and they were walking, running, staggering, crawling outside. He heard the big doors open, heard the slurred conversations retreating. He wanted to peek through the curtains, through the window, to make sure that what he was hearing was actually occurring, to make sure that they were really leaving, but he was afraid to check, afraid even to move, and it was over an hour later when he finally got up the courage to open his office door and peek into his chapel to see the damage.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Penelope stood in the center of the meadow, screaming at her mothers as they bent over Dipn, smearing him with blood and fat from the gutted bodies of the policemen. Her mothers were obviously very drunk, but the intoxication seemed to flow in waves: they were crazy, frenzied and chaotically wild, one moment; sober, organized, and intensely serious the next. It seemed almost as though they were possessed.

  Possessed.

  Could that be what was going on here?

  Penelope didn’t think so. Whatever unnaturalness was at the root of all this, it was nothing new, nothing alien, nothing from the outside.

  It came from her mothers.

  “Leave him alone!” she screamed.

  Mother Janine looked over at her, laughed manically. “He’s got a nice dick here! Get it while it’s hot!”

  Mother Felice slapped her face.

  The others laughed. Mother Janine laughed too, but she reached out and grabbed a handful of the wine-stained tunic that Mother Felice was still wearing and ripped it off.

  Mother Sheila picked up a handful of blood and fat and threw it at Mother Felice.

  “Stop it!” Penelope screamed. She looked from one mother to another. She was scared and confused, and she wanted more than anything else to run, to escape, to get as far away from here as quickly as possible. But where would she run to? Where would she go? The police? That’s where she should go, she knew. Two policemen were dead and eviscerated, killed by her mothers. And! God knew how many other people they’d murdered.

  Her father.

  But she could not bring herself to turn traitor, to turn her mothers in.

&nb
sp; She wanted to stop them, maybe even wanted to kill them, but at the same time she wanted to protect them from anyone else who might try to intervene.

  Whatever happened, it had to stay within the family.

  Which meant that if someone was going to do something, it would have to be her.

  Her mothers were still playing in the blood, and all of her instincts were telling her to get out of here, to flee the meadow, to get back to lights, streets, buildings, cars, civilization, to save herself.

  Everything she’d ever learned, thought, or believed was telling her to get help. But she realized that she could not do that. Not to her mothers.

  Besides, she couldn’t leave Dion.

  Dion.

  He was screaming, fighting, struggling against the drunken women holding him down and smearing him with blood. As Mother Felice broke away from the others and started toward her across the meadow, she could see Mother Janine stroking his penis, massaging it with blood.

  He was hard.

  Penelope felt sickened. She walked toward Mother Felice. The two of them stopped less than a foot from each other. Her mother smiled, and there was both sadness and triumph in the look. “So now you know,” her mother said.

  “Know what?”

  “What we are. What you are.”

  She was even more confused than before. And more frightened. What she was?

  She suddenly realized that she was not as shocked by all of this as she should have been, not as disgusted as she would have expected to be. It was horrifying, yes, and obviously disgusting, but her reactions were intellectual, not emotional, a recognition of the response the scene would have provoked in other people, not the response that was actually evoked within her. She was reacting to this the way she thought she should react, not the way she really felt.

  The fear was definitely there, but it was not a physical fear, not a fear of what might happen to her. It was more a fear of recognition, a realization that these were her mothers and that she was their daughter, that she was one of them.

  Anger. That was her overriding emotion. Anger at what they were doing to Dion, at what they were putting him through. It was a focused anger, though, a localized anger, and she wondered if she would have reacted this way rf it had been someone else. Did she even give a damn about the dead policemen?

  No.

  It was only because it was Dion.

  She smelled the wine, smelled the blood, and the mingled scent appealed to her.

  She looked at her mother. “What are we?”

  “Maenads,” her mother said.

  Maenads. She knew the word. The madwomen who had worshiped Dionysus in Greek mythology. Women crazed with wine and sexual ecstacy, responsible for brutally killing Pentheus and ripping Orpheus limb from limb in a wild orgy of blood. Representatives of chaos in the otherwise orderly world of the Greek gods. The dark side of ancient religion.

  But maenads weren’t real. They were mythological figures. Fictional characters.

  Weren’t they?

  “We have always existed,” Mother Felice said gently, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. Penelope was acutely aware of the fact that her mother was naked, of the fact that the blood on her smelled sweet and fresh and good. “But people have forgotten us. They have forgotten the old gods.”

  “No one’s forgotten anything,” Penelope said. “They—”

  “They call it mythology.”

  Penelope said nothing.

  “These are not fairy stories or fantasies. This is not the way primitive people attempted to explain things they did not understand.” Her mother touched a finger to the blc between her breasts, lifted it to her mouth. “This is truth.”

  Behind her mother, Dion screamed, a piercing cry somehow metamorphosed into loud, sustained laughter.

  “What are you doing to him?” Penelope demanded.

  “Restoring Him.” Her mother’s voice was low, worshipful, filled with awe. “Calling Him back.”

  Penelope felt cold. “He?”

  “Dionysus.”

  Again, she was not surprised. She should have been., The idea that her mothers, were rubbing blood all over her ; boyfriend in order to turn him into a Greek god was not: something she could have come up with in a million 5 years. But the events here had taken on a life of their own, and things were flowing together, coalescing, in a way that seemed inevitable, almost natural, and she could only stand by and watch as they unfolded.

  “We worshiped Him in the old days,” her mother said. “There were no prophets or ministers then, but we served that function. We praised Him.

  And He rewarded us.” Again, she touched a finger to the blood, brought it to her mouth. “He gave us wine and sex and violence. He participated in our kills, in our celebrations, and everyone was happy.

  “The gods were our contemporaries in those days. It was not like Judaism or Christianity or any of these modern faiths. Our religion wasn’t made up of stories from the distant past. It was a living religion, and we coexisted with our gods. They took an interest in our lives. They came down from Olympus to be with us, to comingle with us.” Her voice faded, and behind her, Penelope heard Dion laughing.

  “Then why did your gods disappear?”

  “People stopped believing.”

  “So?”

  Mother Felice smiled gently at Penelope. “Remember when you were little and we took you to San Francisco to see Peter Pan! Remember that part where Tinker Bell was dying and the audience was supposed to shout that they believed in her? You were shouting for all you were worth. You wanted so badly to save her life.”

  Penelope nodded. “I remember.”

  “Well, gods are like Tinker Bell. They don’t need food for nourishment.

  They need belief. It’s what feeds them, what gives them power. Without it, they … they fade away.”

  It was so strange, Penelope thought. So insane. This rational conversation about the irrational, references to her childhood and popular culture used in an attempt to explain ancient evil.

  Ancient evil.

  Was that what mis was? It was a cliched phrase, a staple of bad horror novels and worse horror films, conjuring up images of vengeful Indian demons and cursed land. But it applied. The events her mother was talking about had taken place centuries ago. The religion to which her mothers subscribed predated Christianity by a thousand years.

  “The gods faded away, but we did not. Our survival, unlike theirs, did not depend on belief. We were flesh and blood. But we were also more than human. He had bestowed upon us a gift of divinity, and we continued our rituals, or celebrations, knowing that He would return to us eventually.

  “

  “The gods will be borne of men,’ ” she recited. ” ‘As they went so shall they come. To take again their rightful place on mighty Olympus.” “

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Mother Felice leaned forward until her face was next to Penelope’s.

  “What do you think happened to the old gods, the true gods? Do you think they just died? Do you mink they flew off into outer space? No. They were weakened by nonbelief but not killed. And Zeus, in His infinite wisdom, decreed that they should take shelter in the flesh of men.” She smiled, and there was blood on her teeth. Her left breast pressed against Penelope’s arm. ‘They hid within us. In our genes. In our chromosomes. In our cells. The other gods took refuge in Dionysus. And Dionysus took refuge in us. And we believed and continued to believe and they did not die. Instead, they were passed down from generation to generation, waiting to be born again.”

  “But Dion—”

  “His mother is a maenad too. She is one of us.”

  Penelope shook her head.

  Mother Felice grabbed her hand, pulled her toward the altar. Dion was standing now atop the raised rectangle, flanked by Mother Sheila and Mother Janine. He was coated with blood from head to toe, looking like a red statue, only the whites of his eyes and his teeth standing out against the darkness
. His erection was huge and quivering and looked bigger than she remembered.

  It looked good.

  Even coated with blood, it looked good.

  Especially coated with blood.

  No! She pushed that thought from her mind.

  Mother Margeaux passed a flagon to Mother Janine, who poured wine into Dion’s mouth. He spat it out, but she poured it again, and this time he swallowed.

  “Dion!” Penelope yelled.

  He did not seem to hear her, did not even acknowledge her.

  “Ours is the easiest god to resurrect,” Mother Felice explained.

  “Dionysus was half man already, the only half human god, and He will bring back the other gods of! Olympus.”

  “How come he’s in Dion? I though he was in you.”

  “He’s in all of us.”

  “At the same time?”

  “He’s in you.”

  “No.”

  “He’s in our genes.” She squeezed Penelope’s hand.; “We don’t just call each other ‘sister,’ your other mothers and I. We are sisters. We all had the same father, although our mothers were different. That is the way it has always; been. For generations it was believed that He could only be reborn if the son of a maenad mated with a human woman. It was thought He was in the sperm.

  “Until Mother Margeaux. She was the one who discovered that He was in the sperm and the egg. He could not I be brought back by the son of a maenad mating with aij normal woman. He could be reborn only through a maenad born of that son mating with a normal man.”

  Penelope was lost. Too much was happening too fast, and her mother’s crazy explanation sounded suspiciously like a convoluted math problem.

  What was spe saying? That she and Dion were related?

  Incest No. They couldn’t be. She could handle anything but that.

  Monsters and, old gods. Blood sacrifices and intergenerational breeding plans. All of it was acceptable.

  But she could not be related to Dion.

  “How old do you think I am?” Mother Felice asked.

  Penelope shook her head.

  “I was born in 1920.” She smiled. “We all were. Daughters of Harris, son of Elsmere.”