Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  Jason did not even read it. He commenced immediately to eating it. He collapsed to that floor and had a seizure which must have lasted days. He woke up with beard stubble and soiled clothes, finding he’d scratched into his left arm the numbers 666 and into his right arm the numbers 777. He’d flown! He’d fucked gods! He’d laid waste to worlds cloaked as Melanicus!

  Interesting that when he shit the paper out, it wasn’t chewed anymore but whole again. It no longer was a brownish page from Crowley’s writings but a white page from The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort.

  Crowley is no more. I’m Jason Cave and my magic (sans ‘K’) is of an earthier nature.

  Each incarnation was intended to teach the wanderer something specific. Having learned it, you died, were reborn, and went onto the next item on your spiritual agenda. That didn’t mean he wasn’t still The Beast. He was every bit of that.

  Like Crowley, he found he couldn’t stay away long from Egypt. It had nothing to do with Osiris or Horus or even Thoth. (He was more of a Nietzschein anyway. Crowley had once said, “Nietzsche was to me almost an avatar of Thoth, the god of wisdom…” Jason simply turned it around, with Thoth almost being an avatar of Nietzsche.)

  It was the draw of the delta, extravagant with the Superman’s passions, and it was the desert, severe as the Superman’s justice. He loved the wonderful and horrible smells, the press of so many sweating—mortal—bodies, the availability of ancient pleasures.

  Jason kept returning, hoping to catch a glimpse of her again: the djinn or the disintegrater, marzipan demon or shit goddess. There were moments when he thought there she is… In a swirl of long black skirts, the flutter of a veil, a pair of surely magnificent eyes—or of eyes that seemed hidden behind mist.

  But it was never the one. It was always just some ordinary, mortal cunt destined to live a brief time and perish even quicker between visible horizons.

  It was while on his last journey to Cairo, walking about another of the Cities of the Dead after dark, whispering from Crowley again, “As I came through the desert, thus it was. As I came through the desert…”

  He saw his old army buddy, Michael Roheim. The man seethed, stalking swirls of dust, one eye cocked to the vision of his leviathan shadow cast against walls lining the cemetery street. He bore a weapon in his hands ready to purr, to speak to him, caressing its steel teeth and the mesh of its oracle in circuit.

  Jason heard him growl, “Catch me now, you burning chlorpromazine fuckers, needle dicks in the hands of starched harlot deities disguised as staff doctors…can’t fool me…no, I can see the dusty scorpions of desert goddesses behind your faces.”

  Jason smiled. He wasn’t afraid of Mike. But perhaps it was just as well the numbers 666 on his left arm were hidden under his sleeve.

  “Hey there, grunt,” he said just loud enough to be heard.

  The man turned, chainsaw at the ready. His eyes glittered in the moonlight like new pennies put upon the eyes of the drowned dead.

  “Cave?” Roheim muttered. “That you?”

  “Yeah. Where you been, you in such a state, boy?”

  Jason walked slowly toward him, no sudden moves. He was armed a damned sight better than a chainsaw. The lack of finesse wasn’t even the consideration. It was speed that mattered.

  Roheim chuckled, the sound deep, gutteral, scary. “You ever heard tales about Americans ending up in madhouses in this part of the world? Not the most up-to-date methods of treatment for prophets and archangels. I flipped out in a cabaret and cut a dancing girl into so much falafel. Fuck it, man, I knew she was Babylon, Ashtoreth, Lilith coming in moons from the white sands to seduce me. Michael, wielding a modern sword that sings on a string. They dragged me by my ankles through the filthy streets to the hospital. My barred window overlooked this boneburg.”

  Cool. Jason nodded, never losing his smile. “So how’d you get out?”

  “You recall all those candies we did in the service?”

  “Shit sure. You have an immunity to most of it now, right?”

  “Dude, I pretended to be out, then first chance I got I broke the back of some greasy orderly across my thigh, stabbed another through the eye with the needle intended for the archangel. Mmmmmm, the long white squirt arced through the air like a seminal sigh. I took back my chainsaw, slipped outside.”

  So he’d gone from believing he had angels protecting him to thinking he was one. Well, why the hell not, if Jason could be The Beast?

  “So what are you going to do here?” Jason asked, nice as you please. Voice even and soothing because Michael’s face kept twitching, contorting. And if it wasn’t the drugs the doctors had given him, then it must be stark raving madness.

  “I’m on the next Crusade against the heathen, brother Cave. The last Crusade.” And he stumbled off into the maze of ancient tombs.

  Jason shrugged and followed.

  They both eventually saw the woman in the—for want of a better word—alley between two rows of crypt buildings. She wore no headdress. Her hair and face were bare. Even at twenty feet away Jason could tell she had dark freckles that turned orange in the wisp of some squatter’s coal oil lamp. Her dress was of some translucent stuff, similar to strips of silken bandages, similar to veils worn by Salome seeking Baptist heads. These floated even though there was no breeze tonight.

  Roheim touched the string, making the saw speak to him again, Michael’s shining sword reeking of bar and chain oil.

  buzzzzzzzzz

  Jason gasped, recognizing his djinn. Should he rush forward to protect her? He could simply draw the gun from his pocket and shoot Roheim.

  But then he thought, I’ve been fooled so often. If she’s really my djinn then she will be able to take care of herself. If she’s not, then why can’t he just have her? And with that chainsaw just half her?

  So Jason stayed where he was, even slipping back a little into the shadows. He could watch from there.

  “Jezebel, Rahab, Sheba!” Michael cried as he repeated the names he heard his weapon speak to him. He leapt into the narrow alley with the chainsaw howling gutteral threats, links in jackal ratchet, the modern holy hatchet man.

  The freckled woman turned slowly, one slender arm up and out as if offering a handful of precious earth to him.

  Michael sliced down with the chainsaw, taking off hunks before she could even react. They came off in a cloud of misty skin, bone, and sanguine rain.

  Michael laughed with an insane chortle, waiting for her to fall. He stepped back and waved the chainsaw in the air in grisly triumph, licking the salt spray of her from his lips, savoring the moisture of it in the arid atmosphere.

  Yet her flavor was dry. It smacked his mouth in dessicated slivers. Before he could slash again, she spun on the ball of a dark-spotted foot, grabbing the weapon from his careless hands with the one arm left her. She plucked it from him easily as if he were but a naughty child with a dangerous toy. It still chugged along in its sacred voice that only Michael heard, gurgling its lean celestial hunger in an echo that filled the alley, sending rats and cats scurrying to seek Saracen holes to hide in. She took it and swung it toward his hips. But she was weakened as blood flew out of her wounds, and so the chainsaw only hacked about three quarters of the way through his right leg.

  She was injured (yet fighting grandly!). The spray of blood meant she must be human. Jason was tempted to help Roheim now, because the fellow had nearly been a Superman. But maybe almost really only counted with horseshoes and hand grenades (and chainsaws). He decided to stay still and continue watching.

  Both woman and archangel fell to the ground in an identical instant, in a hellish slow motion as if this were a race between single-celled creatures. If the earth shook when they struck, neither of them heard it: Michael because he was overcome by his own shakes and hearing a memory of tanks, jets, and missiles—the woman because she knew the earth as a serene and gentle vessel. She landed with her one arm reaching toward the street and the crumbling facades of tombs, and…y
es, outstretched with soil falling from her fingers.

  She staggered to her feet. Michael was still pumped from his religious zeal, his eyes wide, unable to believe she could stand at all after what he’d done to her…the roar still grinding pounds through the night…yes, the kind of flesh lightning it was…voices in thunder telling him to smite this one as he had the dancer with her stomach undulating in the bar…but her getting up getting up getting up…

  Jason held his breath. Because he couldn’t believe it either. She was getting up!

  Michael couldn’t rise but the alley woman did, wobbling, clutching the rag of her shoulder, gouting scarlet slipping in an oddly muddy pulp through her slender fingers. She poked at the white hasp of cut bone and grimaced. She blinked at the flattened place where the left breast had been, a hollow next to the swell of the right. She put her palm out as if to cup the missing curve, hefting an astral weight. It had left lines in varying shades of henna and tan, like the strata in some canyons.

  The woman faced the archangel, her legs widely spaced in a sailor’s gait to keep her steady, despite the massive trauma of the severed arm and tit. Her eyes were a wide sienna in which no debilitating shock was revealed. Her mouth was set in a small pout: no more, no less.

  “Why have you done this to me?” she asked Michael. “My people are no threat to the living, and the dead need no protection.”

  Jason heard her voice with its peculiar accent, sounding nothing like the way modern Egyptians pronounced English. It was similar to the way the oldest fellahin pronounced it, the ones who still relied upon the ancient tongue. He reckoned that Napoleon on his campaign through Egypt probably heard this accent when the ancient spirits of the old gods howled around his tent. And Richard the Lionhearted probably shivered as it sang through grains of sand as he tried to sleep before battle. Devils employed by Saladin might have spoken this way, chanting spells against the invaders.

  She stuck a finger down her throat and gagged. She doubled over and choked, the flat belly undulating beneath her gauzy dress, single breast fluttering like a fish’s gill. Something large began filling the slim tube of the neck.

  She stared at the archangel all the while, finger on the sickening trigger. She stared at him when he wouldn’t answer. She saw she was reflected in his vein-serrated pupils. He was in a state of marvel as well as sublime agony, the partially amputated leg jittering a dance as a nicked artery beat time with spurts.

  Finger down her throat and the abdomen jerking in the twist. Esophagus rolling, convulsing, the taste of a chalky unnatural bile. She pulled the finger out as the product came up. A clotty paste of gruel slithered across her tongue first and she spat it out—or tried to. The blockage in her throat made it hard to expectorate, especially since it held no true moisture. Spitting was an action which required some control and now she had none. She couldn’t breathe…felt her face turning blue with effort. Reflex and a fist, parched with strangulation. She punched herself in the stomach, grabbed her neck, gaseously belched trying to get it out of her. Withered threads of acid goop hung from her lips as her jaws popped as wide as they could go.

  Michael trembled and Jason damn near hyperventilated with ecstasy. Both men watched as the blob slowly squeezed out from between her lips. Hitting the air, it blossomed, fingers uncurling like the petals of a cactus rose. The wrist attached to it gesticulated sinuously as this slid out behind, trailing with a forearm. Dehydrated gobbets of slime the color of green shadows on blue bottle flies clung to the skin in a wicked cross between dusty spew and placenta. It caught between her front teeth in taffy strings stiff as blown glass. Nothing flowed cleanly like a river, red and watery and drenching. It flopped, loosely as empty locust husks.

  She made a horrible noise as the crook of the elbow jammed, like one wrong log in a floe. She hacked and sputtered, her eyes bulging. She grasped the vomited wrist and pulled, turning it, trying to work the obstruction free. While on the ground Michael shrank away as much as he could, trying to slither off on his backside—only his one good leg refused to help him and the other was worse than useless. If he could only reach the weapon, perhaps he could finish her. Perhaps he could do something.

  But the woman was between Michael and the voice of thunder. Even now the chainsaw sputtered in the wind-down, catching on itself the way a child’s breath hitches when it’s crying. It whimpered and stopped.

  Sulphuric sputum flew as she pulled the elbow out with a corky plop. The rest of the arm came smoothly free. Snot spattered the ground like balls of juiceless mercury. She slipped in the dust of her own blood and saliva while affixing the end of the upper arm with the wound into her shoulder.

  The pieces of flesh squirmed in a maggot waltz, merged the knitting atoms, crackled with electron firefly spin. There was a noise of meshing no louder than a buried murmur. She winked out a few burnt almond-colored tears which struck her cheeks with the noise of cymbals, her face screwed up in pain and concentration.

  And then she stuck the finger down her throat again, the delicately freckled hand clawing as the lump of unlevened flesh came up. She put this to the place where the breast had been, patting it, plumping it, fashioning a new one, twirling the thumb and index finger to form a hazelnut of a nipple. She stroked it and quivered as the new bud erected beneath her touch, massaging the unwounded one as if to compare them. The new hand strayed down the flat belly to the umbra triangle between her thighs.

  Jason marveled at how strangely beautiful she was…yes, weird with the freaky terra cotta hair in a mummified plait down her back…brown eyes the color of Jericho ruins…the gauze of that thin little dress that had so captured his attention earlier crisp as the caul seers are born with…the prenatal sac which wrapped a baby’s head…yes, what it surely was and not a real garment at all…extensions of patches of her skin transparently suspended from her shoulders and down her spine. It rustled like taffeta, like the wizened skin of a dappled fawn. If she danced in it, bells on her feet, surely all the cannibal demons summoned by perfumes and tambourines would bay.

  Jason thought of a fragment of a poem written by the Islamic poet Ma’arri in medieval times. “This world resembles a cadaver, and we around it dogs that bark; And he who eats from it is the loser; he who abstains takes the better part. And certain is a dawn disaster to him unwaylaid in the dark.”

  She stroked her new breast, thumbing the darkness between her legs. She gasped and a flood of shadowy matter streamed to the ground. Jason frowned, certain it was shit. Then she couldn’t be his djinn but the other one.

  The substance hit the ground in an arabesque pattern, titian with drought. Dirt, not shit. She had shed a motif of clay beneath herself.

  She examined the new arm. She said (whether to Michael Roheim or to herself, did it matter?), “It isn’t the same color as the other. It is a pallid pink and quite hairless. That will change with exposure to the carrion blanket. It will brown some when I lay back in the dirt.”

  She tilted her head with a birdlike satisfaction and patted the crackling seams around the replacements. She brushed off flecks of loose flesh that hadn’t quite melded. The gaping wounds were no more; not even the cracks bled. She flexed the fingers as she stepped closer to the injured man on the ground.

  He tried to twist away. “Cave? Man, help me here. Don’t let her get me… Cave? Are you still there?”

  Roheim tried to scream…not a brutish protest or an animal shriek of terror…his sour gasp was nearly silent…seeing now the soil between her toes, up the softly marble pillars of her legs, wedged in the womb as a nurturing moss but dry as an old brocade pillow in a tomb…even up both her nostrils like topaz plugs.

  It clung to her scalp in clods. Sprinkled her eye lashes. Stained the lacy patches in the skin that hung from her shoulders and spine.

  Jason made not a move to help him. He felt Michael’s eyes briefly on him, making his silhouette in a shadow. He felt the accusation of a man betrayed by another man in the face of the inhuman.

 
“God?” Roheim then switched tactics. “Jesus, help me!”

  Jason would surely have expected the madman to cry to heaven first, since he was supposed to be an archangel.

  The freckled woman knelt beside Romheim and stuck a finger into the geysering wound in his right leg…the same finger she’d put down her throat. He tried to reach up to shove her away, to keep her from touching him. His arms were heavy as millstones. She slipped the entirety of the new pale hand into the bloody crevice and smeared it with red juices.

  She shuddered and slung the gore away from her in surprise.

  “Wet!” she muttered in dismay.

  Michael screamed now, bellowing in fury and torment, seeing stars winking hotly all through the alley, even though few shone overhead in the slitted spot of sky visible between the tops of the vaults. His cry dwindled down to a grunt, weaker by the moment…powerless as his cold chainsaw, not speaking to him anymore, helpless as any tool of God among the unbelievers.

  “Don’t touch me! Unclean! Ghul!” Michael shouted, using the Arabic term for what he knew she must be.

  Jason’s jaw dropped. He shook his head, grinning. Why didn’t I think of that? Not a djinn but a ghoul!

  She shook her head and clods of earth came down from her hair, so much more dirt than it seemed it should hold. She’d come by it by burrowing into graves for her food. Romheim looked like he expected to be buried under an avalanche. He choked as soil slipped into his mouth and nostrils, gritting like a sandy glass into his eyes.

  “You have heard tales but they are not true,” she told him patiently as she sat next to him. “We do not attack the living. We only eat the dead.”

  She drew her knees up, grave-soiled toes carefully beyond reach of the enormous pool of his blood the nicked artery in his leg created. A sea…yes, a dead sea soon. Michael wept, waiting to hear her creep toward him. But, of course, he would never hear it.

  Jason waited. Once Michael was dead, she didn’t wait long. She ate so delicately! He thought of the way movies depicted zombies, as slobs in a buffet of guts. But, well, a ghoul wasn’t really a zombie. A zombie was the raised-up dead and she wasn’t dead, just from another species.