by Brian Hodge
Father Bill goes peacefully, but cannot help but notice two things as he is roughly ushered out of the room and into the festering tunnel. A tiny droplet of blood, as shiny as a ruby, has formed in the corner of the old renegade cleric’s sagging left eye, and the inky mildew along the seams of the back wall of the interrogation chamber, has started, as though unbound by the laws of physics, to drip upward.
7.
Hell breaks its bonds at precisely midnight that evening. Alone in his cell of leprous limestone walls and bare-steel cot, Father Bill senses the malodorous presence rising all around him, flooding the labyrinth. Like a ship in a sudden, unexpected riptide, the tendons of that vast maze begin to creak.
At 12:01:59, Central European Standard Time, the iron-barred door to Father Bill’s cell suddenly, abruptly, spontaneously swings open.
The bars bang into the opposing wall with the clang of a clarion bell – a church bell – and Father Bill has no choice. He slips into the corridor, and he discovers that the length of the moldering stone tunnel, as far as he can see in either direction, is silent and still. Fifty feet away, a single hooded lamp begins swinging as if on invisible currents, the flashing, sweeping dances of yellow light illuminating the body of the archbishop sprawled on the floor, its neck wrenched at an alarming angle. The color of the cleric’s face is wormy gray with death, his eyes frosted with early rigor mortis.
Father Bill starts to back away when the body begins twitching.
This is neither the neuromuscular twitch of a corpse, nor the spasm of the living. Something has high-jacked the archbishop’s corpse, and now the flaccid, enrobed body jerks up to its knees, as though yanked into a praying position by the unseen puppeteer. “You should have listened,” the voice of the lesser demon hisses out of the slack mouth, the eyes of the archbishop as black as pitch. “You should have struck the bargain.”
“What’s happening, Malefar?” Father Bill is still backing away, until his lower back strikes the intersecting tunnels behind him.
“Something I neglected to mention,” the demon’s voice announces, and starts to explain, but is cut off summarily as a higher demon takes control of the lower.
Father Bill is momentarily paralyzed, as he watches the transformation, about which he has only heard folk tales and rumors among the Instrumentum’s demonologists. In the dim light, Malefar is possessed in stages, the ragged, animated corpse of the archbishop convulsing, then flopping down on all fours, its tendons buckling, its thighs and hocks bowing outward like the haunches of a dog. The wattled neck contorts and bends upward, and the cleric’s head elongates with a sickening wet crunch, until its dripping, oozing nasal cavity has bulged into a simulacrum of a large canine with pointed incisors, and inside these very teeth there appears a second set of teeth, like the embryonic bicuspids of a prehistoric fish. “THE INFERIOR SPIRIT… IS NO LONGER… AVAILABLE,” a new voice rumbles, a voice born of oily subterranean channels and primeval pistons firing deep within antediluvian cylinders.
Father Bill finds his legs, and whirls toward the sole egress available to him.
The tributary running under the Tiber River, connecting the outskirts with the Piazza di Ottaviano.
8.
For nearly a mile, stumbling through absolute darkness, Father Bill manages to keep moving, banging off the walls, feeling for a way out, the sound of the abomination close behind him, its deformed feet padding on the stone floor, the wet guttural engine of its voice repeating ancient Sumerian incantations that echo maddeningly through the passageways, and certainly, at this point, a lesser man would lose the moorings of his sanity, but Father Bill is not a lesser man, Father Bill is a fighter, Father Bill is the last good man, and he somehow fixes his sights on the ambient light ahead of him, growing like a pink bruise under the roots and stalactites of the ancient river, and as he draws nearer and nearer, he realizes it’s a ladder protruding down from a manhole shaft – an oxidized remnant of World-War II era civil defense – and without pause, as he approaches the ladder, he leaps up to the lowest rung, just as the monstrous desecration of flesh behind him catches up with him and pounces up at his dangling legs and sinks its jagged mutant teeth into the exposed meat of Father’s Bill’s left calf, and the pain shrieks up his tendons as he pulls himself up with every last shred of strength, crying out — “SAINT MICHAEL PROTECT US!” — and somehow, somehow, somehow, Father Bill manages to scurry up the rest of the moldy iron treads, shimmying up a narrow channel too small for the beast, climbing and climbing for what seems like an eternity but is only a few moments of white hot agony, the blood making Father Bill’s foothold slip every few rungs, until finally, finally, the American bursts through a rotting enclosure, and all at once he gasps and tastes the delicious cool nectar of the night.
9.
The last few kilometers of Father William Buonaserra’s frantic flight across the outskirts of Rome, across the scorched patchwork of industrial parks and boarded marketplaces stretching in cinder-strewn sediments over ancient viaducts, is a hallucinatory coda, a final act, a summing-up of his life in service to some higher purpose that he has never fully understood. A rabid dog chases him. The animal hisses at him in a voice as cold and brittle as tensile steel: “The letters are more than letters. You should have seen that – they hold the future in them.”
“WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?!” His voice in shreds, his wounded leg throbbing, the gashes in his flesh leaving a leech trail of blood like ribbons of India ink in the moonlit darkness, his brain swimming with terror, his system already shutting down from blood-loss and shock and trauma, he fights the impulse to lie down and die. He keeps going, and in rhythm with his wounded strides, he utters sacred words from very old texts: “Accursed spirits… we enjoin you under God’s penalty… cease to deceive human beings… cease to offer them the poison of eternal perdition… go spirit… give way to Christ!”
A moment later, Father Bill hurls past a beggar lying in the shadows near the Via Urbano bridge. The slumbering derelict addresses the priest as a sleepwalker might address someone in a fragmented dream: “The rituals are useless, Padre — the battle lines have vanished – the symbols on the boy are the future now – the new dominion.”
“MORE LIES! – ALL OF IT!” Father Bill stumbles on broken glass and tumbles down the littered bank of the Tiber, landing on the fossilized promenade of oily cracked stone, near the water, where the boots of Centurions once pounded. Tears well in his eyes.
Then he sees through his bleary vision the devil’s secret revealed in a puddle — a tiny oil slick forming on a shelf of slate – the cuneiform AAAGTCTGAC AGAATTACCT TAATAACAT appearing in blood and scum on the rock, the letters metamorphosing, melting and reshaping themselves, as the immense shadowy presence looms in the darkness behind the fallen priest.
“Our Father who art – who – who art in —” Father Bill freezes up when he sees the beast, visible now in the watery reflection on the rock – a ghastly giant in the form of a human-hybrid bat, with massive leathery wings, and a face carved out of mortified flesh – swooping down upon the priest like a black wave breaking. The priest weeps then, a single tear tracking down his face in that last instant of lucidity. He cries not for the imminent loss of his own soul. Nor does he sob for the impending doom awaiting the earthly realm. On the contrary, Father Bill weeps for the end of a great and long era – an era marked by many battles between Church and kingdom of darkness – which has now died with a whimper of homogeneity. Good and evil are no longer opposite poles. Love, hate, truth, lies… all gray areas now… the devil’s plan all along.
And at the precise moment the monstrous avatar lands on the priest, with talons protracted, giant black thorns penetrating the American’s soul, Father Bill sees in his last conscious moment the letters on the rock twisting into a moebius strip of chemical symbols for proteins, nucleotides, adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, which Father Bill, in his fading consciousness, remembers from his undergraduate biology classes at Loyola. The lett
ers represent a very special variant of the human genome – a delicate strand of DNA from hell – which flows into the priest, and seeds his soul, and almost instantly, silently, a dark flower blooming in an unholy amniocentesis, the new combination of proteins begin to form a new hybrid being. And the darkness plumes and grows and radiates upward and outward until it covers the moon.
10.
Most of Rome is quiet at 4:00 in the morning, save for the red light district, way out on the Ostia, where the puttana sit on lawn chairs in front of torch-lit sheds, and the night breezes waft fishy musk across the tops of swaying olive trees, and an anonymous American priest appears out of the shadows on the edge of the tree line, licking his lips, eager to spread his new gospel to the first willing vessel.
III. KINK
“Desire is poison at lunch and wormwood at dinner; your bed is a stone, friendship is hateful and your fancy is always fixed on one thing.”
— Pietro Aretino
(letter to Count di San Secundo)
NECROTICA
I.
The package arrived on Thursday.
Drew Taubman found it in the vestibule, on a table, behind a spray of junk mail and bills. The tiny box was wrapped discreetly in butcher paper and twine. Drew picked it up and judged its weight. It felt no heavier than a carton of kitchen matches. Something rattled inside. Arms rashing with goose bumps, Drew carried the thing upstairs and down the second floor corridor like a child at Christmas.
He reached the door to 211 and fumbled through his keys. His hands were slick. His temples were doing the drum track to a Funkadelic song. He felt nauseous with excitement. The feeling reminded Drew of puberty. The days of raging hormones. His stash of D-cup magazines. The 8-pagers in the sock drawer. The mad sweaty stroking under blankets, late at night, while the radio played Elvis’ Burning Love. Hunka hunka burning love. To this day Drew still enjoyed regular sessions of self-abuse; it beat the hell out of valium.
He got the front door open and went inside the refurbished loft. Vaulted ceiling, lots of light, exposed brick, it was the finest space Chicago had to offer; but at the moment Drew was oblivious to it. He paced around the living room for several minutes, clutching the package like an idiot, before going over to the phone and calling Laura at the office. She answered on the third ring. “Art department.”
“I got it.”
“Drew?”
“I got the thing.”
“Disease? Chinese Algebra? What the hell are we talking about?”
Drew sighed. “The thing — the sex thing!”
A dash of pregnant silence. Drew grinned. They had been husband and wife for nearly twelve years now and Drew still enjoyed being married to this woman. He was convinced that a major reason was their mutual appetite for kink. Whips and chains. Toys. You name it, they shared it. Unfortunately, their compatibility didn’t extend very far beyond the bedroom. Laura, on the one hand, was a gorgeous, anal-retentive Michigan Avenue executive with three degrees. Compulsively neat, socially gifted, she was one of those rare republicans with taste. Drew, on the other hand, was a bohemian hamster. Pony tailed with a scraggly goatee and droopy eyes, he looked like a refugee from a methadone clinic. He had dropped out of film school when he was twenty-five to write the Great American Screenplay and had spent the next ten years trying to finish the third act. For bread and butter he had turned to freelance writing. Corporate training programs on the agony and ecstasy of injection molding: Drew was a whore. The only good part was that he could work at home. He could listen to heavy metal and write in his underwear and abuse himself any time he fancied a quick gander at a porno tape or a flesh mag.
He could also keep dreaming up exotic sexual games to keep his marriage keen.
“Pray tell,” Laura finally said. Her voice had changed ever so slightly from that officious corporate drone to something throatier.
“When do you get off?” Drew asked her, his smile widening.
“You tell me.”
“Come home.”
Another beat of silence as Laura thought of the proper retort. “I hope I do just that.”
Drew hung up the phone, grinning, his palms going pleasantly clammy.
II.
At the end of the day Laura left the Leo Burnett file spread across her desk in disarray. She didn’t even pause to rinse out her coffee cup. She merely scooped up her attaché and headed for the elevator. Blonde mane tossing. Stiletto tipped heels tommy-gunning on the marble.
This wasn’t like her at all.
Drew’s unexpected midday phone call was the culprit. For years Laura had been playing the sex games. Dressing up. Playing mommy. Doing all the toys. At first it was fun and exciting; it would get her extremely hot. But somewhere along the way the passion had dried up. It wasn’t exactly Drew’s fault. For years, he had been a sweetheart in bed. Very adept at getting her off. Willing to try anything to please her. Sure, he occasionally got carried away with the porno. The sordid little fantasies. The raunchy books and tapes. But that stuff had never bothered Laura. It was Drew’s recent attention lapse that was worrying her more than anything else. It seemed as though he was becoming more and more self absorbed, frustrated with his stalled screenplay and stalled career. He was concentrating more on the games than on Laura. In fact, in recent weeks, it had gotten so bad that Drew was having trouble keeping it up for more than a few minutes before popping off. It was as though Laura was not even there anymore.
Hopefully the contents of Drew’s little package would change all that.
On the way home Laura took a short cut through Wicker Park. A grey autumn drizzle was falling. The sky was the color of wet concrete. Her BMW rattled over potholes, past clutches of homeless people pedaling issues of StreetWise, through wisps of vapor belching from the perforated pavement. But Laura didn’t notice any of it. She was too busy feeling the tingle at the base of her spine. The lining of her Kimali blouse against her nipples. The sweet buzz in her ears.
For the first time in months she was actually getting horny.
It took her ten minutes to reach her block. She pulled the car into the alley behind her building and parked in her regular spot by the dumpster. She went up the back steps. She found Drew in the kitchen with an apron wrapped around his jeans. His hair was freshly washed, his linen shirt open to the waist. He smelled of Pierre Cardin and basil leaves.
Laura wrapped her arms around him and shoved her knee beneath his apron. “Smells wonderful—”
“They’re pesto raviolis,” he said, kissing her neck. “Made ’em from scratch.”
“I wasn’t talking about the food.”
He smiled and shoved her away. “Milady must wait for her dessert.”
Laura pinched his ass and went into the bedroom to change out of her business garb.
Dinner was served next to the bay window that over-looked Lincoln Park. Drew served an appetizer of mussels steamed in merlot and garlic. Then, the raviolis with fresh asparagus and sun-dried tomatoes. They drank an entire bottle of Beaujolais and watched the gunmetal horizon turn to orange chiffon as the city lights winked on.
By 9:00 o’clock they could wait no longer.
“Post time… “ Drew whispered and took her hand.
On the way to the bedroom Laura shed her kimono and exposed her new Cerruti bustier. The black lace top barely covered her breasts and the bottom cherished her mons with a cameo of pearls. It made her wet just to see Drew’s gaze play across it as they stumbled into the bedroom. Their lips locked. Laura found the bed with her shin and pulled him on top of her. His hands and tongue journeyed down her collarbone. He urged off the Cerruti with his teeth. Laura felt her nerve endings sing. She reached down and peeled off his shirt, his jeans, his briefs.
Drew was as hard as the theory of relativity. “One last detail,” he whispered.
He went across the room, penis bobbing, and found the black jewel box on his dresser, next to his watch and change. He opened the box and pulled out its contents. Wrapped
in bubble pack, the tiny object looked like some kind of electronic component from Radio Shack. Something for a Heath Kit radio set maybe. Laura remembered reading about it over Drew’s shoulder last Spring, right around the time his ejaculations were beginning to hasten. It had appeared in the back pages of Wet Magazine, buried amidst the notices for Extra Strength Spanish Fly, Life-size Inflatable Love Dolls and the Amputees Hot Line. Do you want to prolong every last moment of ecstasy? Do you want marathon erections? Then, search no further. The key to ecstacy is here! Introducing The Prolong Spider Clip!
“Jesus — that’s it, huh?” Laura gawked at the device as Drew returned, unwrapping it. In the dim light it looked like a tiny plastic tarantula on a pendant chain of wires.
“Works on galvanic skin response,” Drew explained. He squeezed it shut a couple of times. Its tiny legs snapped like the jagged teeth of a turtle. He propped his left foot on the edge of the bed and clipped the spider on his big toe. “Senses when I’m about to come and gives me a little pinch.”
“A little pinch?”
“Just enough to stop me from squirting.”
“So you last longer.”
“Something like that… “
She thought about it for a moment and finally said, “Time for a demonstration —” She laced her fingers around his neck and pulled him on top of her. He moaned and entered her and started doing the dirty boogie.
They screwed every which way.
From the missionary position they moved into canine territory, then around the world, in every position known to man or beast, shifting speeds on a dime, shifting angles to drain the euphoria dry. Laura had not felt this way in years. Her body was filmed in a sheen of sweat and desire. She ground herself against his root, sucked him into her, danced on him, wept dumb baby talk into his ears, lapped at every inch of him. The best part was Drew. He kept it up like a trooper, every few seconds yelping sharply. Somewhere in the recesses of her stunned awareness, Laura surmised it was the twinge of the boner machine on his toe.