Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  One man’s manna…

  These dead didn’t drop from heaven. And whatever had been done to them to put them in such a state wasn’t from any celestial program/pogrom: sin-punishing or otherwise.

  Jason envied the raw ferocity in the damage he’d seen while using sharp elbows to force his way through any crowd gathered around one of these chunks. Even the teeth—dislodged and jumbled within pulp, many crushed to enamel powder—provided no clues save for the occasional inscribed signet ring—badly scratched from shards of bone, the steel balljoint some surgeon recognized as his own work, the part of a wallet sieved through a gloop of rotting stew that made it possible to guess that these gumbo delecti had been:

  Thomas the pedantic pervert and glue-gun pederast;

  Mae the chloroform-toting vampire wannabee, gourmet of the menstrual cocktail;

  Rondi of the custom-made forceps—tonsils, tongues and peach-rind clitorises in his pockets, harvested from drunks and drug addicts unconscious on dung heaps. Not anyone he’d actually have to overpower.

  If they’d not been ID’d as murder victims (or some kind of victims), Jason would’ve figured they had gone where the others had. To the fuck-pandemic paradise. But he guessed that they had not survived because they couldn’t make the cut. To be almost Supermen wasn’t sufficient. Such a place—and the woman who guarded it—would have no patience with weakness. It would do precisely as the corpses appeared to have suffered; it would masticate every inch and then hawk them out.

  So Jason was unafraid. What did he have to fear? He was no mere child-snatching or drunk-rolling freak, only able to prey upon the helpless. Although he didn’t turn aside practice opportunities when they availed themselves.

  What was it Sartre said?

  “The man who confesses that he is evil has exchanged his disturbing ‘freedom from evil’ for an inanimate character of evil; he is evil…he is what he is.”

  Jason felt sorry for those illiterate, uncultured punks. To not have read the philosophies was to never know the comfort of the buzz words for a violent cogito.

  “I am evil,” he confessed aloud to the old lady he wanted to impale upon the carcass hook. In his eruptive baritone to the young mother wheeling her pram. In hot spittle flecked with lunch’s kidney tarts at the man of the pussy facial hair.

  “I have also chosen to be terrifying,” he added with a phlegm sputter and a steel bridgework rattle in his jaws, forehead popping a throbbing vein. It was a paraphrase of Sartre, putting the third person in a more emotive first.

  “De-fuckin’-mentia, buddy,” the bearded man guffawed. Obviously not a local.

  Jason threw a hard left into the middle of the man’s face. He felt the nose bone split like a line of walnut shells, knuckles sinking in with a satisfying squelch.

  “Thank you very much,” Jason replied as the fellow crumpled to the sidewalk, the jug-teratoid mommie and the shar-pei granny both pissing their bloomers.

  Through the window of the dry cleaners next door Jason could see a clerk grabbing a phone to dial 911. The owner hastily snatched it away, saying, “My God, no! I’ve been in business here fourteen years. You wanna get me burned out?”

  Jason smiled, passed by, then stopped in his tracks. He’d seen someone enter a bar, wearing swinging raven fringe. There was a red-headed man leering from a hardware store, red not only in his hair but comprising his entire head. A kid peddled past on a bike, his boombox playing, “I am the god of hellfire…!” Then he saw the sleep place, beds of all kinds. A mattress in the window had two dead hippies on its tie-dyed sheets; they were nothing more than swill and sump.

  Jason held his breath and looked around. There, up on the corner where the street folded through a short alley which ran behind a beat poetry/coffee club cum soul food restaurant. Blank verse, caffeine jitters, greasy gestalt, no more cum for animas in aspic. It was the blonde with the sunglasses.

  At least, it was some blonde wearing sunglasses. It was August. There were millions of those.

  But this one drew his stare as he panted, wanting to scratch an itch spreading down to that chained dog in his jeans. He didn’t need to see her in severe Moslem garb. He didn’t need the fragrance of patchouli. He didn’t need to be pursuing her through ancient crypts which smelled of thousands of years of corruption.

  Damn, but she had a beautiful mouth. He moved closer, a venal Icarus, wax wings melting because he flew too close to the perfect orifice. Words slipped out of it, spoken to him? He hadn’t heard them clearly, only the purr of a cat, the metallic thrumble of golden gongs, the gurgle-music of a slowly spinning waterspout.

  Her skin glistened as if there had been a thundershower when he wasn’t looking. Her face was pale—obviously she wasn’t the outdoor type, nor was she into tanning salons. Her cheekbones were high, tapering plains to a bone china teacup of a chin. Her long blonde hair clung to her body like wet rainforest leaves and vines.

  Jason really wanted to see those eyes. A woman like that—her eyes could suck you in. Even more than the maelstrom mouth or simoon sump of vortex vagina.

  He’d actually gouged a chick’s eye out once. Then tried to fuck the socket. Couldn’t get more than his tip in. An exercise in hot frustration and bone-limited ecstasy.

  But this wasn’t somebody he would be fucking. This was an entity. His previous self, Crowley, had summoned her. He believed this.

  “Show me the place,” he demanded as he came close to her.

  She didn’t even ask him, “what place?” That would be a waste of time and fate. This meeting had been pre-arranged. He felt an enormous rush, every second of each preceding incarnation leading up to this moment. Fuck you, Rose. Didn’t need you after all. Keep your cored-out, strung-up, licey/crabby/sand flea-bitten houris.

  She nodded and whispered, “Aralu.”

  And there it was! In front of him, rising up from the sidewalk in a shaft of haze no more than four-foot square. And yet he could see deep into it. It had no horizons, just rocks/cliffs/slabs and steeples of stone. No point in perspective where land and sky drew a line in eternity’s sand, each daring the other to cross.

  He saw Simone, Boreolo, Everson. He even saw Big Garth. But they weren’t masters. They were sufferers, crawling on their bellies, being put through their own paces. There was the red-headed man; everywhere were red-headed men. (Others must have seen this place in the past—without entering. It must have been where the idea came from that devils were red.) One of them trotted up to the porthole, smiling and waving at Jason. Then he spun around, bent over, and wiggled his ass. There, plugging the anus was the tip and about four inches of an enormous black penis. The demon reached back and yanked it out, showing veins and shreds dangling from the base of it. A gout of dark blood shot out behind it. And then other things began to rush out as well. A torrid river of matter that made Jason step back, pressing against a dingy wall behind a Chinese herb shop, the Dumpster nearby reeking of ripe ginger root and bull testicles. He leaned away, even though none of it overflowed the boundaries of the threshold.

  Streaming out of the red-headed torturer came lumps of tissue. Things with pumping arteries and outside giblets of sudsy pink organs. Little animals so twisted they might have been any or all of a dozen different species. Miniature malformed people, blind, inside-out in part, membranous pasty flesh in sticky goldfish fins making them appear to be liquifying as they swam out of him. Shadowy horrors of living disembodied heads gargling piss and monster turds with opal eyes. Terra cotta statues and bronze bracelets, a Renaissance tapestry unfurling in unspeakable filth, a Raggedy Ann doll with so many holes stabbed into it that black water hissed through, crucifixes bent into swirls like Celtic knotwork, Boreolo’s specialized tattoo needles, the highly rococo skeleton key from Everson’s cage of bones. A scalp with a samurai’s tightly oiled queue hanging from it and a severed hand with the tattoo of a Willendorf Venus on it, headless, limbless. Part of a boot of curiously wrinkled leather, like scrotum skin or fetal tissue. But it was no l
onger red. The feculent waters had stained it ebon.

  Jason’s beast actually felt dread. But not for his friends. Only for the illusion he might have dragged around with him all his life. He dreaded having wasted himself on a lie. Damn that No Man kid. He was glad he’d crushed him when he had the chance.

  “This isn’t right…” he stammered. “This place, I’m supposed to be a god there.”

  “God is dead,” she told him. “Or haven’t you heard?”

  Jason breathed hard, feeling light-headed. Was there no special El Dorado for fuckers like him? Or were there just places where the shit got flushed? He hated it but he was almost whimpering as he insisted, “Then this isn’t my gate. There has to be another. Mine.”

  She nodded. “Yes, there is another place where you have been and shall again be the tormentor of the weak.”

  He gusted a sigh of relief. He knew it!

  Jason grabbed her and lifted her into the air. “Then show me it,” he told her, tired of being played with. “Take me there or I’ll shake you apart.”

  And he did begin shaking her, raging, desperate. Her body felt loose as if it had no skeleton, as if it were full of wet sand or wilted flowers.

  A man came from the other end of the alley and tackled him. Some skinny old guy.

  ««—»»

  Jim had seen everything in the gateway. Enough to know she was not Aureola. She’d been who he’d first thought she was, having felt her presence on Mt. Koshtan and in San Inmundo and even in the catacombs. She was real. The goddess of shit. He was thrilled and terrified.

  But then this monster of a guy attacked her. Not that he could really hurt her, could he?

  Jim wouldn’t wait to find out. He rushed to defend her. Too bad he wasn’t much of a fighter.

  The man dropped the woman as Jim knocked him to the ground. Then he stood up and started kicking the professor. Jim couldn’t even get two seconds to try to protect himself, to go fetal with his arms over his head. He felt a size thirteen boot crash through his ribs. Then the man fell onto his knees and grabbed him by the hair, seething into his face, spitting foam and mucous at him. “If thus spake Zarathustra were spoken thusly, what thus would be the Zarathustrian speak?”

  Huh? The man was killing him and asking him a riddle? Jim tried to move his arms and legs, to swim away from this guy. The woman must surely have escaped by now. Or had gone wherever such a goddess would go—not to the nearest phone to get help but to the past or the future or a crack in distant rocks.

  The man growled, “Well, thusly I’ll tell thee of a spike of Zarathustrian speak as it was spoken to me!”

  Jim felt as he had after the cave-in, when the force of it had blown him right out into the field. He knew he had some broken bones but he couldn’t tell exactly where because every neuron in his body screamed at once. And it did no good to try to wriggle away or cry for help or try to assess his injuries. His chances of survival were nil as he read the murder—no, the annihilation—in this man’s eyes.

  The guy continued mouthing at him, spouting nonsense. No! Spouting Nietzsche (so Jim knew he must be hallucinating this), “And this was what was spoken to me. ‘Many die too late and a few die too early. The doctrine still sounds strange: die at the right time!’”

  And then the beast laughed like this was the wittiest remark ever to punctuate a senseless killing with. He brought his fist down square into Jim’s chest, right over the heart. It sounded like a hammer on a cheap anvil.

  ««—»»

  Jason nodded, satisfied, feeling the tremors pass through the old guy’s body. The fool was not quite dead but it wouldn’t be long. He’d have seconds—maybe even a couple minutes—to reflect on having interrupted an amazing event.

  He looked up. The blonde was still there. She’d stood back up and was watching him.

  “I want my place,” he told her, bugging out his eyes, flexing his fingers. “You say I have been and shall be. Give it to me.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Yes. Mine isn’t the only reincarnation from the sewer.”

  She slipped down her glasses. No whites or pupils or tiny inside corner tear ducts. Only. Spinning. Dark. Water.

  ««—»»

  Dorien opened the lost place.

  The beast looked in and cried in delight, “My own procession of the damned!”

  He eagerly plunged through the steaming gateway. His entrance created a pull. Dorien didn’t try to fight it too much. She knew she would have to enter. But before she did, she grabbed the dying professor’s hand and squeezed it hard.

  ««—»»

  “The sleek Brazilian jaguar

  Does not in its arboreal gloom

  Distil so rank a feline smell

  As Grishkin in a drawing room.

  And even the Abstract Entities

  Circumambulate her charm;

  But our lot crawls between dry ribs

  To keep our metaphysics warm.”

  —T.S. Eliot

  quoted in Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 31

  Lights flashed on, motion-detection triggered, like tall contact-seeking lightning.

  Dorien was in the underground where the lost cluttered the walkways, going out and down for miles, for light years maybe.

  (Dark Years.)

  They moved a little, like children turning within wombs inside comatose mothers. They moved like very old people, those with Alzheimers who awake in wheelchairs or beds in homes for throwaways, not knowing who they are and too frail to do more than shudder.

  She’d managed to pull the professor with her. He wasn’t far away. But he wasn’t moving, even a little. He lay there very still, face down. He must have died anyway. Maybe no one could get there unless they died first—unless they were killed. Dorien couldn’t really tell if he might be only alive and badly hurt, because down here she had no special power.

  Tears on her face. Yes, she always wept in this place. For the lost. And she cried, too, because this man had tried to help her—even if she hadn’t needed it—and he’d been murdered for it.

  Dorien knew she was also crying because she’d thought somehow that he was going to be able to help. It was why she’d grabbed his hand. She couldn’t help these poor children of hers, so she’d hoped he would. Not that she had any basis for thinking it. Goddesses apparently weren’t without their faults. Not omniscient, that much was certain.

  She heard the rumbling of the drain auger, ratchety echo ricocheting off the feculent graffiti that stained the walls.

  “Give thy place to me, O Jesus; thine aeon is passed.”

  “Not the height, it is the declivity that is terrible! The declivity, where the gaze shooteth downwards, and the hand graspeth upwards.”

  “some like it shot

  and some like it hung

  and some like it in the twat

  nine months young.”

  “Self-executioner!

  crammed between two nothings.”

  “‘existence’ is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won’t stay damned…salvation only precedes damnation.”

  When Dorien saw the plumber coming and could see who he was now, even beneath the unspeakable filth, even swaddled in his stench-mask and rain poncho…she understood who had written the things on the walls. Words from Aleister Crowley, Frederich Neitzsche, e.e.cummings, Charles Fort. Nothing ever of his own, only quotes from others. He went by the name of Jason in his most recent life.

  When had he done these? He’d only just come in ahead of her, hadn’t he? Or was time totally fucked up here and he’d been in this place for a long while already?

  She saw “the snake” in his pants, emerging from the fly, metal jerking savage whirligig as he approached some teenaged kid who was lying next to Dr. Singer. The kid groaned and tried to sidewind herself away but couldn’t move more than an inch or two.

  Jason giggled beneath his mask, bloo
dshot eyes ogling the girl as he knelt and reached down to roll her over, then to pull up her skirt. He kept repeating, “Do what I wilt…do what I wilt…oh fuck it, do what I will.”

  This was when the professor suddenly came up on his side, threw his arms around the plumber’s legs, and pushed him off the walkway. There was a nasty splash and a cry of outrage. Jason had submerged but quickly bobbed back up. His mask had come off and he sputtered waste material.

  “Old man, I’m gonna grind you out next.”

  He swam to the edge of the walk and began to climb up.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Jim growled, jumping to his feet, kicking out to strike the plumber under the chin, actually lifting him another half a foot before the man went back into the sewage. “I’ve already had one worm up my ass.”

  Jason began to swim powerfully down the conduit, trying to reach a ladder at the intersection of two tunnels. Singer saw where he was going and began running that direction, sprinting over the bodies of the lost upon the walk. He mumbled and muttered apologies every time he stepped on a hand or accidentally kicked somebody as he stumbled trying to hurry. And as he passed them, they called out plaintively, “Don’t leave us!”

  ««—»»

  Jim wasn’t even taking time to ponder what place this might be. He’d seen that monstrous excuse for a dick, heard its jarring vibration. It dripped blood and flesh and other things he didn’t even want to think about. And he wasn’t going to let this freak out of the water to demonstrate its uses. He made for that intersection where he saw an enormous wheel, like some kind of metal gate valve. Surely what it was, a control for a valve. Would he be strong enough to turn it? He wasn’t in that great a shape anymore, was he? (Was he, in fact, dead? That would really be pretty lousy shape.) He was an old guy, no longer fit from working at sites anymore. (Actually, he’d been fat for so long, he wasn’t sure he’d ever been fit. And when he’d thought he’d finally been in great condition, it turned out he’d only lost weight because Myrtle had slipped some kind of tapeworm into him.) He had carpal tunnel syndrome from doing the teaching and writing stint for so long.