Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  A third appeared to be some sort of monastery erected in rock halfway up a sleeping volcano. Inside the stone abode were the mummified remains of some of the priests. The tops of their skulls had been sawn off and flowers grew out of the dusty gardens of their brains. Their chests were hollowed out where hearts had been removed and hummingbirds nested there.

  At last the army neared Temictlazolli. We passed fields of corn twenty feet tall. It was black beneath the shadows of the mountains. The ears were each as long as a grown man’s forearm. The smell was sweet, almost nauseatingly so.

  I paused to pick an ear of the corn for examination. The kernels were black as beads of jet, of black jade, of midnight obsidian glass. I guessed it must be something from the nearby volcano that nurtured the corn into this color and caused it to grow so tall.

  ««—»»

  The pilot announced the descent into Mexico City.

  “When does it get to the part we want?” asked Dr. Singer, seeing many pages left they hadn’t yet reviewed. It wasn’t that this didn’t fascinate him but he hoped for a tie-in with what they had found on Mt. Koshtan.

  “Yes, that is back here,” replied Godard as he thumbed to a place toward the end of the manuscript, marked with a napkin. He forgave the younger man’s impatience, understanding that what lay at stake was no less than their entire careers.

  ««—»»

  The interpreter said, “They think you look like well-fed maggots.”

  Referring to our white skins, no doubt. This was a far cry from having natives mistake us for gods.

  I was familiar with Tlazolteotl-Ixcuiana, a goddess sometimes depicted wearing human skin flayed from a living victim. She was associated with the spring season and with fertility rites similar to those abominable rituals done in the name of renewal for Xipe Totec. The goddess I now saw before me was carved all from black stone and appeared to be garlanded in plump, sculpted loops of intestines.

  It made sense with what I had witnessed the last several weeks. Outwardly this town was as the other Aztec cities we had seen, beautiful and sparkling. In Tenochtitlan we smelled blood, blood everywhere. Here there was a taint of something even more sinister—-if it is possible to be darker and more evil than gore. We had arrived in time for the beginning of the harvest season. Victims were first encased in boxes with just their heads emerging, kept all in darkness, only pine torches at the entrance. They were stuffed with meat and sweetbreads for a fortnight to fatten, sitting in their own piling excreta which permeated their flesh with a septic odor. I could smell them even at the opposite end of the town.

  Taking us as guests to the sacred place, we passed a shocking variation of the skull rack. There only the lower halves of torsos were displayed, legless, impaled through just above the pubes and out the rectum where the sphincters had prolapsed.

  And then that lovely Indian girl I had been so taken with… She who I had nearly managed to baptise. She was their ritual “queen,” brought out as the priests chanted, “Izca! Tla xihuallauh tezzohuaz tonatiuh tlazolli!”

  “Behold! Come forth to be stained from filth!”

  The Indians drank a mixture of pure cocoa, the preserved excrement of the first priest to eat from last year’s corn harvest, and a snake herb called coaxiuth. They called this concoction coatl chocolatl: snake chocolate. They offered this to us and a very few of the men were curious enough or stupid enough to try it. The snake herb was a powerful hallucinogen.

  I almost did not recognize the girl. She wore the fouled skins of the victims who had that morning been taken from their boxes and offered on that hideous dark altar. She bent to don the necklaces of their impacted bowels, feces smeared upon her lips and cheeks in the most obscene of rouges. She led a parade out to the fields where she was butchered, hacked into tiny pieces and strewn among the soil to fertilize the corn as the priests sang, “Tla xihuallauh, yayauhqui-Cihuatl. Otihuallauh nonan-Tlazolli!”

  “Come now, Dark-Woman. Welcome Filthy Mother!”

  We were sick at heart. The soldiers were ready to strike the entire population down. Not that this would be extreme for them, for they often massacred inhabitants. I had seen Spaniards with trophies of severed arms and legs from children in their hands, guts set as victors’ laurel wreaths on their heads or around their throats. But how could I compare their hypocrisy with this new horror?

  This was by far the most disgusting thing we had viewed since reaching the shores of this country. I began to understand why even the Aztecs abhored the rituals of these people, these outcasts from their own group.

  But then those who had drunk the snake chocolate began to shriek, plunging their bodies together in the vilest of orgies—what the Inquisitors of Holy Mother Church reported as done during witches’ sabbats. Those soldiers who had drunk with them stripped off their armor and clothes to join the indecent mob. The others began to draw out their swords, faces grimacing, eyes blazing with indignation and bloodlust.

  And then a shadow came out of the corn fields. It began to take the shape of a naked woman with flesh the color of smoke. She wore a veil across her face. The ground began to move beneath our feet—not as with the tremors of an earthquake but with a liquid sliding as if it were no longer solid earth but changing to another, horrible, element.

  Mother of God, I turned away. I ran and did not look back.

  ««—»»

  Godard and Singer boarded a small plane in Mexico City which flew them to San Inmundo. There they hired a driver to take them to the site where the American chemical plant was building its new factory. The car bumped along bad roads, a plastic statue of the madonna swinging from the rearview mirror.

  Dr. Godard said, “I discovered more than one reference to a goddess of filth in the Aztec religion. One is as Tlazolteotl. She is identified by a band of raw cotton on her headpiece and a dark spot around her nose and mouth. People who were guilty of having committed adultery, or who were what the Aztecs referred to as loose-haired prostitutes and who hadn’t been caught in their sin, could escape punishment by making a public confession to this goddess. But there was a rule of only one confession to a customer. If they did it again they could be executed.”

  “I take it hookers who kept their hair up were okay,” Jim joked.

  “You never know.” Louis smiled. “Another reference referred to four goddesses of love and filth. The singular for them is, incidentally, Tlazolteotl—same as the name given the goddess I just spoke of. Perhaps she was a later composite of the four deities.”

  Jim nodded. “Streamlined. Like some Christians lump all the variations of ancient demons into a single manifestation of the devil.”

  The driver kept looking at them in the rearview. Perhaps he understood sufficient English to be troubled by their conversation. It was a hot day yet the windows were rolled up, doubtless in deference to what might have been the finer sensibilities of these two tourists. With his weight problem, Jim tended to sweat buckets and he did now. But he still realized the windows being closed had to be a blessing, for through those windows both men could see squalor, garbage and waste everywhere. Pigs and dogs nosed into piles of every sort of steaming refuse, their own messes thick in the gutter. There was little proper sanitation here; the citizens were too poor and the government made no attempt to take care of them. It looked just like the worst areas of Mexico City where American factories built because they could get away with dumping their toxic by-products where they pleased, not to be concerned with being fined or with public outrage.

  Louis could do nothing about this, so he simply continued with the conversation. “Precisely. The names of these four goddesses are Cuaton, Caxxoch, Tlahui and Xapel. I do find it interesting how love and filth are combined under one banner. It’s unusual, isn’t it?”

  Jim laughed, a little nervously, while also trying not to stare out the windows. He’d seen miserable living conditions before, in other countries where his field of research had taken him. “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen some men’s
magazines and stag films that did a fair job of putting the two concepts together.”

  The car drove through a dirty bazaar, vendors to either side of the street. There was one with bowls of a turgid, red chili sauce for sale, the vessels carved out of dark volcanic stone. It reminded Jim of the bowls the Aztecs had used to catch the blood of sacrificial victims. Here, too, brimming with bright red pulp. Another had a rack from which butchered chickens swung. He thought of the markets of Tenochtitlan selling human flesh, limbs jangling like far-East wind chimes. But the Spanish reports all agreed that the Aztecs had such clean cities, not like the filthy capitals of Europe at the time. Father Estrera even said that Temictlazolli appeared lovely and well-ordered…at least at first.

  The car slowed to a stop as a group of nuns crossed the avenue from one corner to the next where there was a small, lopsided church. It looked as if it had been made of mud (or coatl chocolatl) and then melted. Seeing the nuns, then seeing the black-frocked priest in the doorway, caused Jim to shudder uncontrollably for a moment.

  “Are you all right?” Louis asked him.

  The shaking stopped and he nodded without speaking. Yet he mopped his face with his tie. Normally he never wore a tie to go to an excavation site, but he knew they were going to be dealing with officials and he didn’t want to seem like a hippie.

  Children chased one another around an Excusado, a public toilet, the only one they had seen since arriving in San Inmundo. It had overflowed and the kids ran through the raw sewage with their bare feet. A pitted stone fountain splashed an unappetizing yellow water. A man strolled by with a fistful of greasy balloons of grinning devils and tentacled octopi. Jim noticed a booth selling tiny silver replicas of body parts. He asked the driver about it.

  “You choose one matching the area of your body which is diseased. You pin it to the skirt of The Virgin at the church and this—with prayers—will restore this member to good health,” the man explained. Pretty good English at that.

  “Yeah?” Jim wondered aloud. He said, half-joking, “Think they have one for fat?”

  The car left the marketplace. After a few more blocks, the driver told them, “The plant site is just there.”

  They could see the chain link fence which had been built around it, ten feet tall. A few metal sheds were up and bulldozers sat silent. The work had been stopped because of the finding of the altar. Had anything else been unearthed?

  Suddenly the driver yelled and braked to a sharp stop which threw both doctors forward.

  “What is it?” Godard asked, rubbing his knees from where he’d collided with the back of the seat in front of him.

  But the driver didn’t reply. He opened his door and jumped out, his body shaking from head to foot, eyes popping. He genuflected.

  “Look at that,” Jim said as he pointed to the swinging statue above the dashboard.

  It had begun to bleed a black liquid from its backside. Both docs wrinkled their noses.

  The driver took off running back the other way. Leaving them and the car.

  “It is odd,” Godard commented, standing up as much as he could and leaning across the seat. He reached out his hand and touched the viscous fluid leaking from the plastic madonna. He sniffed it, rubbed it between his fingers. “Merde!”

  He withdrew a handkerchief from a coat pocket and wiped his fingers clean.

  “I’ll refrain from asking,” Jim said as the older man simply nodded with a wry face.

  “Shall we see if our foreman is here as promised?” Louis suggested. “The odds should be in our favor for something going as planned. If the science concerning the ratio of probability and non-probability can have any meaning.”

  They got out of the car. Jim noticed as soon as his feet were on the ground that he felt strange. The old sensation coming back about something down in the earth. It vibrated into his leg bones. He reached down and picked up a handful of soil. For a split second he thought he saw the silhouettes of giant black corn on the other side of the fence.

  It grew deep, deep into the earth, with roots in that proverbial underground network. Near hell? Or was this place actually hell?

  Louis had stopped in his tracks, understanding that the younger doc was having one of his—what did Louis consider them to be?—‘Epiphanies’.

  “Feel something?” Godard asked him.

  Jim nodded. “Yeah, a lot like on Koshtan.”

  Louis smiled. “Well then, this must be the place.”

  The two men walked up to a gate.

  To their surprise, it was no foreman who met them but a pair of armed soldiers.

  “No entrada,” one of the soldiers told them, brandishing his rifle.

  The other pointed to a sign on the gate.

  “What does it say?” Jim wanted to know.

  Louis sighed. “My guess would be from the few words I understand that it says the property has been confiscated by the Mexican government. Merde! C’est la vie!”

  “Maybe the driver left the keys,” Jim remarked hopefully as he turned around.

  The two men peered into the front seat. The dark moisture now spewed from the statue, so much it could not possibly originate from such a small object. Yet there it was. It streamed down the dashboard and puddled on the floor and the front seat. It splashed the windshield. It stank even though the windows to the car were rolled up.

  Dr. Godard stepped back. “I for one will walk, mon ami. Care to join me?”

  ««—»»

  The Zuni tribe had a brotherhood called the Ne’wekwe who performed a ritual dance during which they both drank urine and consumed excrement. These substances were believed to contain a healing magic. The men were also thought courageous for doing this and the tribe heaped praise on whichever man got the most down with the greatest show of enthusiasm.

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 7

  SUBWAY TUNNELS,

  1991

  Myrtle thought she’d had it for a moment there. It was because it was Christmas and a bunch of drunks had been singing (if you could call that singing) carols as they passed around a couple bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 some generous yet misguided soul with a sudden urge to give a bit of charity had laid on them. She smelled the sour tang of putrified grape juice, like some potable from a church intended for mass that a mischievous choir boy has pissed into.

  If this be their sacramental drink, what are they using for the communion wafer?

  One of them made a joke. Apparently he was an old bugger who’d served in The War. (Vietnam? somebody asked.) (Naw, the war! Before long-haired hippie draft-dodgers and troops sent to save some businessman’s portfolio, he grumbled. We knew what we were fightin’ for!)

  Number Two.

  But back to the joke. They used to serve this chipped beef gravy on toast in the mess hall. Called it S.O.S. if they were being polite. Called it Shit On A Shingle when they were feeling bolder.

  They passed around some cartons of take-out they’d found in a dumpster. Egg Foo Yung and spring rolls so frosty and old the stuff was as hard as the communal wafer and smelled of the dirty diaper which had lain next to the cartons in the trash.

  They had rejoined in singing, and it had something to do with the religious sentiment and the way it floated unevenly down through the underground that made her strain to think what it reminded her of. It made her feel sort of sad and simultaneously comforted.

  Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angels’ voices!

  This bunch didn’t really sound much like angels or any kind of chorus other than that which might bay at the moon after a romp of mutual tail-chasing at the city dump. But it might have been that very gruff quality—unpolished and with dust inside the throat—that touched her.

  She kept in the darkness, feeling her way along the wall, getting as close as she dared so she could see them.

  Yeah, Myrtle knew these guys. They had attacked her only six weeks ago. They ha
d raped her while the thunder of the trains drowned out her screams. They had taken turns with her on her back and on her stomach and forced into a position of prayer. (Fall on your knees!) She’d bled out her cunt so much they joked she’d started her period. And she’d got diarrhea so bad she’d had to stuff toilet paper in her rectum for a week. The old man hadn’t even been able to get it up, no matter how much he made her suck. So he’d used a foreleg cut from a dead dog. He’d also commanded her, “Howl, little bitch! Howl like a mutt!”

  Now they saw her standing there, watching them sing Christmas songs. Myrtle thought for sure she was in for it, never should have done anything but run the other way.

  But nobody rose to go after her. They didn’t even really turn their heads toward her. She just saw their faces as they stared down, eyes flickering a bit to the side. They’d stopped caroling and wiped their mouths, saying nothing, not even to one another.

  One by one, they scrabbled to get onto their knees and began to crawl away, the opposite direction from her. Hands and knees down the tunnel, leaving the food and the wine. There was so much rubbish on the ground: rocks and broken glass and used needles. Were they performing some kind of penance?

  “Atonement is where you choose to have it,” she said to herself, softly, trying not to allow her words to echo. “But it’s a performance art, impermanent and without any guarantee of salvation. No, redemption comes only after forgiveness. And who do I forgive? Not them, not anyone.”

  And she drew upon the wall, lines sometimes not sure because of the rumbling of the trains.