Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  Dorien somehow made her legs work to carry her outside. She still dribbled virgin blood, warm in the crotch of her panties. The stinking night rushed to cling to her damp body. She understood she was just as defiled as the darkness.

  ««—»»

  Saint Francis of Assisi was reported to roll naked in filth. When he would do this he would cry out a welcome to Sister Death.

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 2

  MT. KOSHTAN,

  ZAGROS MOUNTAINS

  1965

  Dr. Singer raised his chin, massaging the muscles in his neck, gazing up at the blue Persian sky where the sun had steadily been beating down on his head since dawn. He’d been too excited to put on a sensible hat, to even consider sunstroke as he carefully dusted earth from crackling bare bone. The air itself was icy cold as the expedition was thousands of feet above sea level. The Zagros range always had snow dusting its bleak tops. A man could freeze while still suffering a burn on his scalp.

  The wind came up from a dead stillness. It seemed to suck all the air away toward some void he couldn’t see. He briefly gasped for breath. It was easy to be short of breath up this high. One day, he scolded himself, he really ought to give up cigarettes. At least if he considered climbing cloud-covered peaks for the rest of his life. Eddies. Whirlwinds. Brown shapes dancing observed only from the corner of the eye, never straight on. If he let himself, he might hear gourd rattles, bells, flutes in such a teasing wind. The rustle of tassles on caparisoned animals gracefully crossing some ghostly meridian. The murmurs of captured women destined for a slave market. Oh, further back. Clash of metallic armor, the discordant cry of an ancient trumpet, not very different from the skraw of a buzzard overhead.

  They had chosen this spot to begin digging for many reasons. Theories about decisive history, yes, there must be that. Some solid data to suggest here when so many others who were reinforced with myth and tradition insisted there. But Dr. Godard knew that Jim had sensations: of killing plains, death on a scale so monumental it left a psychic impression practically as concrete as a field of broken tombstones. Time skewed a bit, so that everytime he woke up there he felt dislocated, the way the body played tricks upon the mind just prior to passing out. The borders had a vigor to them, energy slightly electric, raising the hair on the head and along the arms. Even tugging at the hair between the legs, tickling his balls. When Dr. Singer felt that in a place, he knew there was something hidden he was intended to find. Waiting for him. Calling from the wind, flashing reviews of spirits passed nearby: sometimes dancing/sometimes bent and broken in dying mode/sometimes merely still and staring. He inhaled. Sandalwood. Pimienta negra molida. Rose. Lime. Mint. But that was faint. What else did he smell? It wrinkled his nose, rankled his midwestern sensibilities.

  “Sir, sir!”

  He looked up, the wind and its spectral natives and even the disturbing odor vanished. Moments of such locational phenomena were rare enough. He decided not to give in to being annoyed at the disturbance. After all, he knew he wasn’t alone here. And the vision, moderate as it had been, might only have been announcing that the occult (read at its strictest definition: being “hidden”) was about to be glimpsed. He grinned as Hassan came running to the edge of the dig. “Yes, here I am. What is it?”

  “Dr. Godard say hurry,” the youth declared, sputtering at the hole Jim Singer sat in. The boy’s breath smelled of goat cheese and the bitter coffee the locals preferred. It took so long to make coffee at the dig, in the mornings. At this height among the skies, it took forever for water to get hot, even though it came to a boil fast. “He has found something he say is unusual.”

  Early yesterday Jim might have expected a chariot, or part of one anyway. Or possibly even a snarling bronze lion, like the ones used as standard weights at the royal treasury in Susa. Perhaps even a cache of gold darics, the coin from King Darius’ realm of the fifth century B.C. If it hadn’t been for what they dug up only ten or so hours before, that is.

  The expedition hadn’t made much headway at this location, in a scientifically unpopular attempt to forge a link with Mt. Koshtan and the ancient Royal Road which had run for 1,600 miles in the old Persian civilization. Everyone in the archeological community had laughed when Louis Godard and his young protégé proposed this mountain as a remote place where Darius had taken on the Scythians. The skeptics had pointed out that this was a long way from the Black Sea and Thrace, which had been the locational spearhead of Darius’ offensive against the horse culture nomads. But the Frenchman and his American associate couldn’t be dismissed, and indeed had been heartened by last night’s unearthing of approximately one hundred skulls which had their tops removed and edges sanded. Something in the soil served to keep them from turning to dust. The Scythians were infamous for using the skulls of their battle-slain enemies as drinking vessels.

  Jim sensed death here. Godard agreed, having seen the younger man’s insight work on previous occasions, including when Jim had only been a student of his at the university. Much of reactionary theory must derive from inspiration. And the twenty-two-year-old (a rather tender age at which to have a doctorate degree) suffered a strong sense of frisson when near an authentic site of not only important history but bloody history. Death could have, and probably had happened, just about everywhere, but sometimes an event or events were so powerful that an imprint was left. Not really a haunting but a recording: the way that lightning sometimes etched glass, and atom bombs going off could leave a shadowy umbra upon a wall to mark where someone had been and then had been disintegrated. If this intuition sometimes made for rogue science, so be it.

  The men had been ecstatic, had danced a jig together that left Hassan puzzled. Had the thin atmosphere driven them mad? But closer inspection had suggested that these bones were far too old. Possibly as many as twenty or thirty thousand years older than what they were looking for. Carbon dating would back this up. The expedition had found a verifiably ancient site all right, but it was a prehistoric one. Not Darius, not the Scythians. Not even young Persia in the time of Babylon or even the first of the bloody pyramids in Egypt. Back before silk, before linen. Before the wheel. Long before the Bronze Age and into the Stone.

  This was not necessarily bad news. Millions of people had lived and died in the Paleolithic eras but only a few hundred of them had ever been dug up. Bones didn’t always fossilize; sometimes they disintegrated and became part of the dust the singing wind cast into your eyes or lay far down as silt in the strata of the decomposed of ages. To find evidence of a community that old in this location was still a career-maker.

  Many great discoveries had been made while the industrious were busy seeking something else. A lot of earth-shaking finds had been accidents.

  Just look at the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  Jim was so intent on what he was doing that it hadn’t even occurred to him that Louis Godard had left to find a rock to piss behind several hours ago. Well, they’d both had a mite more than usual to drink last night. Each had brought spirits—not the wind-borne kind. Godard had carried brandy up the mountain and Jim Singer had packed Scotch. They’d been celebrating. Up this high, a man didn’t ignore the pressure of his bladder. Like the water for coffee, it boiled long before it got hot.

  Jim followed the boy up out of the dig, asking, “What is it, Hassan? More skulls? Or tools?”

  “No, sir. Dr. Godard find a cave,” the boy replied, quick bare feet beginning a steep climb into the tumble of jagged rocks.

  “Really! Here?” Jim exclaimed, having visions of a Middle Eastern Lascaux. The colleges would do better than accept them now; they would make them gods. “Has he been inside enough to see if there are paintings?”

  “No painting, just dead,” the boy answered, hissing the words under his breath as if in awe. As if this sort of thing was not what he’d signed on for.

  The opening was a crevice, barely perceivable
behind a limestone outcropping shaped like a battlement of stone axes. The two wriggled into it, the boy snapping on a flashlight once within. But after getting through it, the cave quickly flared out, easily tall enough to stand up in, getting larger a hundred feet or so later. It was the kind of cave an entire community might have lived in. Or might have employed as a holy vault.

  Louis was crouched with another flashlight over three figures, skeletons, laid out side by side next to a natural shaft into the bedrock. His eyes were bright blue, the color of lapis lazuli that the goddess Ishtar kept sacred. “Remember what Koshtan means in Persian?” he asked as Jim and the boy came up.

  “Yes, it means kill,” Jim replied, frowning as he looked down at the ritually arrayed remains.

  “Curious,” Louis stated, reaching down but not quite touching the first one. “What do you make of this?”

  Jim knelt down, shorts crinkling stiffly, bare knees in the dirt. The well-preserved skeleton was female, belonging to a young woman in her late teens perhaps, on its back, the skull with jaws agape, remarkably whole for twenty to thirty millennia (providing these were to be included with the skulls they’d discovered outside)—as indeed every one of the three figures was in perfect condition. A clay phallus, shaped like a spherical sausage, was inserted into the mouth cavity, apparently applied with so much force that it had shattered most of the front teeth, and had been lodged into what would have been the woman’s throat. In addition, there were smaller phallus statues in the eye sockets and a particularly large one—almost half a meter, a good foot and a half by standard American measurements—inserted into the pelvis. The leg bones indicated a splayed position of about three feet apart.

  “And then this.” Louis indicated the skeleton in the middle. Of another female, much younger than the first. A child of perhaps seven or eight. The jaws were also agape and the cavity filled with seeds that had fossilized in the arid environment. At least a hundred similarly dried primitive cherries lay scattered close to the bones, some fallen through the ribcage.

  “And last but not least, this fellow,” said Dr. Godard.

  The third skeleton was male, at least twenty flint spear points among the bones. But the most curious—and ghastly—thing about it was the second skull imbedded in its abdomen.

  “Ritual sacifice,” Jim muttered, scratching the dark whiskers on his chin. “Sex, harvest and war. I will guess that this man had an enemy’s head stuck inside him before or, well that is to say, after he was speared. Interesting how the killers found so many spear points expendable, isn’t it? A necessity for their hunting and self-defense, this must have been a very important ritual to give up something so precious.”

  Godard smiled even as the boy standing behind them shivered.

  “And the seeds, I suppose she must have choked to death on them, poor child, even as the other one might have on the phallus. Although I suppose the older female might have bled to death internally from the larger, vaginally inserted one. Unless she was alive when they put the ones through her eyes and thus into her brain pan. Brutal way to go in any case, I must say.”

  Jim leaned very close to the child’s skeleton, examining the minute fossils of the cherries. Why, he could almost smell them. Sweet. The wind shifted direction, howled through the cave’s opening, ehoed along the bends and turns of the chamber in the rock, sounding not unlike the faint weeping of a child.

  “Judging from the placement of these, I’d guess our little harvest girl had these fruits sewn into her flesh. I’ve never seen anything like any of this. It’s quite exciting. To have evidence of this kind of ritual murder so long ago. It by far beats any of the nasty things we know of the Scythians doing.”

  (And it was hard to beat those Scythians. They had been masters of both dramaturgical and oblique violence. Ah, that was the way to secure one’s reputation forever in history.)

  “And the way they’re lined up. Obviously a single offering, although multi-purpose in intent,” Jim agreed.

  Hassan was horrified, not only seeing the grisly scenario depicted there but also hearing how enthusiastic the professors were about finding it. Shouldn’t someone say a prayer? Or do something to ward off whatever evil spirits might inhabit this place? (Is this what hissed in the wind? Angry at being disturbed without blood offered to placate?) Why would such things be done to someone if not to ward off demons?

  The boy had sensed things ever since arriving at this spot on the mountain. Ever since the two men had pronounced, “This is definitely the place.” He’d glimpsed movement to the side, djinn who disappeared when he’d turn his head to try to see them straight on. He’d heard the most primitive music. He’d smelled the bittersweetness of death and what died to decay even within death. Hassan couldn’t believe the doctors didn’t perceive what he did, or—if they did—they approached it with foolish curiosity instead of more appropriate, self-preservational terror. Now he inched away from the men, a bit at a time, thinking he might easily leave the cave altogether without them noticing, so focused on the skeletons were they. He could slip outside, get his horse, be halfway down the mountain before they realized he’d abandoned them. They didn’t really need him anyway. What use did two crazy foreigners have for a sane guide?

  Hassan wasn’t watching where he backed up. Howling, he fell into the shaft in the rock.

  “Hassan!” Jim cried out as both doctors jumped up. One tiny bone in the skeleton of the little girl moved a fraction of an inch, disturbed by dust moved from the toe of a boot. A single petrified cherry rolled like a marble.

  They hurried over, Jim throwing the beam of his flashlight into the pit.

  The boy had hit bottom at only about four feet down and didn’t appear to be injured. But he was screaming at what he’d landed beside. There was the back of a skull visibly emerging from the rock. A partially submerged skeleton was on its stomach, arms and legs evidently once bound together behind with a single thong: ulnas, femurs, tibias and fibulas sticking up like a fistful of breadsticks. Except this rock was a very different color from the limestone.

  Godard carefully dropped into the pit. Singer had always been overweight and he would likely have trouble getting out. But the Frenchman was athletic—even if he was quite a bit shorter (and older) than his colleague. He helped Hassan climb back out. But he stayed in, examining the remains.

  “How do you suppose it became enmeshed in the bedrock?” asked Jim, running his hand through his longish hair to push it back from his eyes. He had the strangest—the strongest—sense of place and electricity he’d ever had before. And it actually frightened him, almost as much as it seemed to compel him.

  “Oh, this isn’t rock,” the older doctor mumbled, feeling just a bit queasy, despite his usually detached perspective.

  Jim Singer tilted his head, rubbed his hands briskly up and down his arms. He felt dizzy, getting the sense that the shaft for the pit really went down much farther, miles maybe. Into a vast underground network. Well, it couldn’t really be miles. It only felt that way, because that way came a sense of…not hell, no. Although hell was close by it, perhaps as close as a single layer of gauze or a waterfall. Yes, he thought he heard a waterfall…

  Jim thought perhaps he’d better step back from the edge before he fell into the pit himself. “What is it then?”

  If the others had been sacrificed to primitive deities of sex, harvest and war, then what possible personification of power would require a woman be trussed up and pressed down to suffocate in… For what even vaguely logical purpose?

  Perhaps it was the beam of the flashlight but the Frenchman could have sworn he was seeing a womanly shadow flow across the stone. The corner of his eye, naturally. “It’s fossilized shit, actually,” Godard replied, suddenly wanting very much to get out of there.

  ««—»»

  Buddhist doctrine esteems what is called “the foul sense”. The student is enlightened while in the act of meditating upon decaying corpses. Through this act, the student will understand t
he process of birth and rebirth, realizing that what is pure and what is impure is interchanged.

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 3

  SUBWAY TUNNELS,

  1990

  She woke up, hearing the rumbling on the other side of a wall. Parts of these tunnels had been begun and never finished; they started and then ended without tracks being laid or stations being erected. Vagrants lived here. Sometimes babies were born and grew up and died—without ever once seeing sunlight.

  She’d seen a sign back there. So she must have been at the last platform. Perhaps she’d arrived at the platform on one of the trains. The sign said Myrtle Ave. To her, it wasn’t quite like a map with an X on it, saying you are here. It was more like a signpost in a dream, identifying the dreamer. This is you.

  But she never dreamed. Did she?

  “I am Myrtle Ave.” She said it several times to fix it in her head. “I am Myrtle Ave. I am Myrtle Ave.”

  It was as good a name as any.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been there. Well, she’d just left that platform and the sign which gave her what she’d call herself from now on. But before that platform? She wasn’t blind or too pale so she knew she couldn’t have been down there since birth. She could see in what illumination there was where she now stood, seeping around a corner from whence the rumbling came, that her skin was slightly dusky. It was soft and smooth. She must be young.

  What was she doing there?

  (No place to go.)

  Where was her family?