Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  “Actually—if you are—then you’re the one who’s screwed. Gavin Parrish is HIV positive. He’s giving it to every girl he can sweet talk onto that mattress. Get tested,” Neela advised, rubbing a bruise which bloomed on her knee.

  Dorien’s jaw dropped. “I don’t believe you,” she said slowly.

  “You’d better,” Neela replied, not unkindly. “He gave it to me. He might not have it himself yet, but he can sure pass it on. I slept with him a year ago. Look at me now.”

  Dorien did believe her, realizing at last what the skin problem really was. And she felt terrible for having spoken to this unfortunate woman the way she had. For having pushed her down! See? Dorien was just as bad as everybody else in this stinking city.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Neela sincerely. “Don’t take this the wrong way either. Are you sure it came from Gavin Parrish?”

  Because naturally she didn’t want it to be that way, turning a bad experience into attempted murder—what might someday actually be her murder for it. It was like being told the creep had jerked off in her mouth and she’d swallowed semen thick with cyanide.

  Neela nodded her head. She folded her hands which Dorien noticed were in soft little cotton gloves, the sort a jeweler might wear. “I’m afraid so. He’s the only man I’ve been with. Nobody before and no one since. I wish I hadn’t had to be the one to tell you. But you had to know, right?”

  Dorien reached out and took one of the gloved hands in her own. She very gently shook it, not wanting to hurt this girl—especially not anymore than she already had—just in case the gloves disguised bandaged lesions. Did the gloved hand feel slightly damp? She wanted to wipe her own on her jeans but didn’t. Dorien had already been enough of an asshole.

  Were her own hands wet right now? Yes… Would she soon be wearing gloves like these, her flesh gone from smelling of funereal orchids to smelling like the funeral itself? “Thanks,” Dorien said, words choking in her throat. “How’s your knee? I’m sorry. I do appreciate what it must have taken for you to approach a total stranger and reveal this. I suppose it sort of makes us sisters, doesn’t it?”

  Neela smiled. “Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s getting to be a pretty big sisterhood.”

  ««—»»

  In the country of Ireland, farmers used to heap their manure just outside their door so they could keep an eye on it. It was considered to be so valuable (as both a fertilizer and a fertility symbol) that neighbors would steal it. On May Eve when it was believed the race of faeries was out to party and perhaps do mischief to the race of humans, farmers would stick a talisman twig from the holy rowan tree upright in the noxious pile to ward them off.

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 6

  1975

  Jim Singer indulged in self-pity. He’d fallen into a rut. Once the wunderkind of archaeology, thought by many academics to be destined for great things—for finding great things, that is—he’d been relegated to the back burner as a proponent of pop science. Make that poop science.

  At the moment he sat correcting papers in his office, sipping bitter coffee, smoking a chain of cigarettes, disgusted with his students. He’d tested them the afternoon before and had asked in essay question #3 about the preparation of the dead in Egypt. Far too many had answered that tanna leaves were used as fundamental for eternity!

  Their reference? Mummy movies.

  Was it his fault because he’d rather be on a dig somewhere than dying of chalk dust-in-the-crack-of-the-ass boredom, trapped in a classroom in hell (in a podunk school in Iowa where the sciences were extra credit courses only and most kids were agriculture majors), full of fools who believed that the pyramids were signposts for an alien landing strip?

  Their reference? Von Daniken books.

  Ten years had passed since he and Dr. Godard had written of their discovery on Mt. Koshtan. Ten years gone since the part about the sacrifice in excrement had been deleted by the editorial staff of every prestigious archaeological journal. Ten years lost to him since so-called colleagues insisted the sacrifice was merely some clutz who’d suffered an accident in a prehistoric toilet, making sophomoric jokes about the elevation of latrine casualty to godlike pretension.

  He recalled something he’d overheard at a conference in Boston that still left his ears burning.

  “Two Egyptologists discovered an unopened tomb and once they got it open they found a pile of fresh shit inside. The first one said to the second, “Dr. Singer, do you think a cat crept into the crypt and crapped and crept out again?” To which the second one replied, “No, Dr. Godard, I do believe it was the pup popped into the pit and pooped and then popped out.”

  Never mind that twenty-one skeletons had been found in the manmade sanitation shaft which descended more than sixty feet into bedrock.

  (Not a vast underground network as the one he’d been sure he sensed as he’d stood that day at the edge of the pit. But he’d never really expected to find such a thing, not Hell but near…)

  The consensus was, “We don’t really need archaeology to become publicly synonymous with scientific poop scooping.”

  Classrooms were full of girls in black silk and leather, dreamy eyed over the concept of dead men returning with undying love to rescue their equally-dead damsels.

  Point of reference being Im-ho-tep and Dr. Phibes.

  Hadn’t yet to sit in the dirt under a hot sun and/or a bitingly freezing sideways wind until they lathered with sweat that rolled salt into their chapped flesh, wrinkling them prematurely so they resembled the preserved dead only a very small percentage of masters of this science would ever be lucky enough to unearth. The pit squatting alone caused lumbar spasms until they shuffled like old geezers by the time they were thirty. (A twinge caused Jim to shift uncomfortably in his chair. He put a hand to his lower back and groaned. One would think that working at digs would make a man fit, but he had never shed that baby fat. Now it was the bloom of a downright paunch and this aggravated his back even more.)

  There were always one or two serious students in every semester or so. But they still came in with unrealistic expectations. Most archaeologists never found anything earth-shaking or career-making. (And if they did, the earth might make it known it didn’t care to be shaken by that, thank you.)

  When the docs were in Persia, it hadn’t really been that many years since Jack Paar got into trouble for saying “water closet” on TV. Nobody wanted to know that the ancients on Mt. Koshtan had pushed their sacrifices face down to suffocate in feces. Yet Jim had been fascinated. What could be the religious significance? Or, if these were merely executions for a crime, then what transgression would mandate this sort of punishment?

  The other remains discovered there—in astounding shape considering their age, as most bones decomposed after only a few centuries—had all been traceable to rituals based upon standard cyclic, Stone Age religious beliefs. Sex, harvest and war. It happened to be what motivated modern killings as well, the harvest equating nowadays with acquisitions of wealth, the war being the same old same old international pastime or based upon personal vendetta, and the sex…well, that was identical in any language/any era. The violence with which it was accomplished was so de rigueur and par for the course that it barely managed to be a footnote.

  This was what Jim had always wanted to do, an adult’s search for meaningful and symbolic treasures in the Cracker Jacks. But he wouldn’t get that in the classroom. He was convinced there were no nuggets of wisdom—ancient or otherwise—to be found in the skulls of his students. And without being permitted to discuss his own experiences in the field, what he had to offer them was next to nothing…somebody else’s artifacts. Old news. Blah blah. A kid playing in a sandbox stood a better chance of unearthing the past than he did now.

  This idea brought on a memory, of Jim as a small boy, with his family on a trip to—where? Some Civil War site. Gettysburg? Shiloh? (Probably Gettysb
urg, since he’d grown up in Philadelphia. It would have been a state’s history kind of vacation.) He’d been sitting on the bare ground as his parents spread a blanket for a picnic on a former battlefield, opening containers of biscuits and fried chicken where minie balls had flowered in organs and cannon shot had blown off arms and legs. He’d started to touch the earth, then to pick up dirt by the handfuls and sift it through his fingers. He’d sensed something in this substance. It ran pictures like a movie through his head. It frightened him as he imagined he saw that dirt he funneled through his palms turning from brown to dark red and from cold dry to a hot wet. He winced, almost hearing screams. Blue and gray shadows lay around him, many very still, others convulsing—gutshot, stench in the—air?—of black shit. And him standing somewhere, close, very close, seeing many of these guys were just kids, a few years older than he was. He wanted to be able to put his hands in their wounds and pluck out the lead, gently replacing the loops of viscera until they seemed mostly normal again.

  Instead, as he reached out, he started to poke his fingers into the ground, digging. And found a greening brass button with an eagle emblazoned on it.

  “Let’s eat, boy!” his father had called out.

  Jim had stood up and gone somberly to the feast set upon the blanket in the grass. His mother had already made up a plate for him and held it out, smiling.

  “We can’t,” Jim had told them, backing away from the food, suddenly sick. “We can’t eat on top of the dead.”

  But Jim had recovered from this notion. He’d come to see that everywhere a man might take a mouthful of bread was over a spot where the dead were. The entire earth was filled with death. The land was stratified with layer upon layer of decayed life. The grain which had been grown to make the bread had nurtured in a soil of dead things; it was blessed with them or tainted by them—depending on point of view and degree of suggestibility.

  As he grumbled over marking an unsatisfactory grade on the fourteenth test paper in a row—wondering if he allowed his unhappiness to color how he measured the answers to essay questions and deciding that he was, but that power lay invested in every disappointed academician as a perk of being one of those who taught because they couldn’t do—the phone rang. He stared at it balefully, sipping his coffee which tasted more like the ink in his pen, grinding his last cigarette out on the corner of the test paper, wondering if it might be Dean York calling to tell him the board had decided not to grant him tenure. After the seventh ring he answered.

  “Jim?” came a familiar voice with a strong hint of accent. “Is this Dr. Singer?”

  “Yes,” Jim replied, surprised. “Louis?”

  “The very same! I have received a communication about an unusual object which has been unearthed. Would you be up for an impromptu sabbatical to Mexico?”

  Perhaps his thinking about his intuition at certain sites had been a psychic flash that his old colleague was about to contact him. (Uh oh, pseudo-science, pseudo-hoodoo?) Well, damn it, why not? Jim listened to the pitch and agreed to fly out at once to Texas to meet Dr. Godard. For the first time in a decade he felt excitement. What was more, he felt purpose. This might validate everything. The dean could screw his tenure. Singer would have his pick of colleges.

  ««—»»

  “A man came to see me,” Louis told Jim when they met at Love Field Airport. In his fifties now, Dr. Godard had aged well despite the career disappointments. Jim positively envied the spring in the other man’s step. “He works for a chemical company in the process of building a factory in a place called San Inmundo. It’s about a hundred miles or so from Mexico City. While digging foundation they discovered an apparent Aztec shrine.”

  Jim’s eyebrows went up seeing the mischievous gleam in Louis’ faded blue pupils. “Apparent?”

  “Well, the assumption had it that the shrine was comprised of hewn black basalt. But it turned out to be baked-to-brick hardness fecal material.”

  Jim bit his lip, then said, “I’ve never heard of that with the Aztecs.”

  “Nor have I,” agreed Dr. Godard. “Nor has anyone else.”

  “Who else knows?” Dr. Singer asked.

  Louis shrugged. “Frankly, I’m not sure. The man said that the company was trying to keep it quiet so the government of Mexico wouldn’t confiscate the property for study. So much has been stolen from them, who can blame them? It’s their heritage. It’s a shameful thing when archaeologists act no better than the conquistadors.”

  “How are we going to get in?”

  “Our man’s a foreman at the site. He’ll be expecting us.” Godard already had tickets waiting for them for the flight to Mexico City. There would be no time to rest or see any of Dallas. They did want to jump on this before the chance evaporated.

  “Is this all?” Jim wanted to know. “Have you seen anything to back up what he says?”

  Louis chuckled. “He gave me…a relative term, gave. Rather he sold me a manuscript, written by a priest traveling with Cortés. I made a copy which we are taking along, translated into English by a friend of mine at the university. I’ll show it to you on the flight down.”

  “And the original?”

  “Is in my safe at home.”

  ««—»»

  In 1519 I, Father Osvaldo Encarnacion Estrera, had seen the altars of Tenochtitlan, witnessed the harvesting of the red cactus fruit offered to strange gods to hold back even stranger beasts of the twilight. I had seen the bodies of victims thrown down the bloody steps of the temples, pulled away so that their flesh could be used to prepare dishes which the priests would eat. Sometimes the killing would go on all day and into the night, depending on which holy festival was being celebrated and which god was being honored.

  I had gasped and genuflected at arms and legs sold as meat in the market place, swinging from tethers like the separate pieces of far-East wind chimes. Nearby would be baskets of tomatoes and peppers. Next to bundles of brightly colored feathers from green quetzal and blue cotinga, drums made from the shells of enormous Atlantean turtles, and ornate jewelry created out of silver set with brilliantly sky blue turquoise. I had observed people dancing half-naked in the street, bedecked as fiercely-plumaged birds or sinuous as serpents. I had tried not to judge for that is God’s right alone. I only tried to understand their beliefs, savage and incomprehensible as they were. I learned quite a lot about their rituals of carnage and renewal, the meaning of life and destiny after death. I came to accept that there was more to this religion than the superficially macabre. It contained a thoughtful inner essence of sacred rebirth and the journey of the spirit, as well as a profound and ceaseless struggle to keep the demonic world from destroying the world of light, similar to my own Catholic tenets. Not that their methods of attempting to achieve this didn’t completely horrify me, because they certainly did. I had trouble—as indeed any Christian would—reconciling such wholesale slaughter with a battle to defeat chaos. And surrounding tribes hated the Aztecs, since a major source of sacrificial victims were those captured by the Aztecs during war. These other Indians said the Aztecs were arrogant and vicious, and many joined Cortés to defeat them forever.

  Tenochtitlan, a city more beautiful than all the best cities in Europe combined, was brought down in 1521—mostly with siege and starvation and smallpox. The Aztecs committed atrocities but what might I call what I saw Spaniards do? Plunder and rapine. Killing men, women and children together, sacrifices to greed and Jesus. And then they would come to me and confess—to much less than I had seen them do with my own eyes! I had to bless them for this was my function. And then I wept, burdened until some days I did not think I could stand up. The beautiful city was torn down.

  All the gold within became the property of Spain.

  But where had all that gold come from?

  We Spanish heard rumors, of a mine in a valley amid the mountains to the west. Near a city called Temictlazolli, which was made up of those who had fled Tenochtitlan because their own theology was considered heretica
l. The Aztec refugees I talked to—through my interpreter, of course—shuddered when interviewed about this heresy. All they would say was that these followers of schism performed the vilest, most unspeakable of rites. No matter the coercion or persuasion, they would reveal no more.

  I was troubled by this. What could be so awful that even the Aztecs would shun it? I could not imagine.

  ««—»»

  “I researched the name of this place. Temictlazolli is a combination of words, not unusual for the Nahuatl. Temictl is the word for dream and tlazolli means filth. It is ‘the filthy city,’” Godard explained on board their flight.

  “Who would name a city that?” asked Jim as he read from the translated copy of Estrera’s manuscript, set open on a tray in Godard’s lap.

  “Well, actually ‘San Inmundo’ means approximately the same thing, which may or may not speak volumes of what the Spanish who named it were thinking. All I know is that I could not find Temictlazolli on any map of that period, nor any later. Nor is it mentioned in the Codex Mendoza nor upon any other manuscripts of Aztec writings.”

  The two men shared a look.

  “Please don’t let this be a hoax,” Jim said, crossing his fingers.

  ««—»»

  In 1522, Cortés sent part of the army to investigate the possible gold mine. I accompanied them. We saw many terrible sights as we crossed the mountains. Near one snowy peak there was a village beside a narrow, deep lake so cold that on some nights when the moon was full it appeared to turn white. Birds the colors of rainbow frost drank there. The fish caught were like ice and if you dropped one against a rock, it would shatter. The people had a most unusual method of sacrifice. They placed the victims inside small handsewn nets and then squeezed until their intestines burst out. Another place employed an idea I had seen the Aztecs use. Victims were decapitated, rods inserted through the mouths to exit the back of the skulls. Then the heads were displayed upon a rack until they rotted and fell apart. It seemed an inappropriate place to see thousands of butterflies, gemstone wings like hands folded in prayer and riding upon the backs of jaguars.