“He is a thing now,” she says, and, “how do you forgive a thing?”
You say, “I don’t know. You don’t, I guess.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head and looking at the guns. She stands and walks to the window. The clock on the nightstand says 11:54 p.m., the time you were born. She says, “Oh my god! There he is…” and she’s laughing and crying. You grab the rifle and move to her side. Looking out the window you see a lot of people prowling the street. You hold Jim’s gun, stand in his apartment—his payment for what he tore from you and everyone else. You squint as a man below looks up. It’s Jim. His face is too white in the murk. You hand the rifle to the whore and unlock the window and push it up. The night outside is cool and soft and it seeps into the room and caresses both of you. You look at the clock, look at Jim down there, remembering what he did and somewhere in the distance, like the sound of coming thunder, hear goblins running wild.
The whore begs, “That’s him,” and jams her finger at a man. You work the bolt on the rifle and flip the safety. You can’t miss from here. People laugh below. Jim is still watching you. You think, Give me a second…
The whore’s husband has his arm around another woman’s waist; they’re walking away from you. You sight on the middle of his back and let out a breath slowly as you draw slack from the trigger…
November 11th
…THE ALARM BEEPS AND you squeeze off a shot too soon. It takes the man high in the shoulder, paints half the girl’s face like a rose as they both stumble.
The whore says, “You didn’t get him good enough!”
You think, Give me a second… as shadows dart about in the street and cars blare their horns and people stop to stare at the strange couple dancing on the sidewalk. They look around, the husband holding his shoulder, face scrunched up in pain, the girl clinging to his arm and trying to pull him away. You put a bullet in his chest and he hits concrete but you can’t hear anything now because your ears are ringing and Jim is down there pointing at the apartment window, ratting you out after all the times you covered for him. You draw a bead on his chest and fire lights the sky and he drops out of sight as a car speeds past.
The whore cries, “There he is! You missed him!” But the man she’s pointing at is not Jim, so you think she means you missed her husband, though you were certain you’d dropped him. But there he is, looking up at you, horror carved into his features because he sees his wife with another man. And you pull the trigger and put him down. But Jim is hiding in a phone booth across the street and he thinks you can’t see him, thinks you don’t remember how he showed you his masterpiece, how he used bits of your wife’s viscera to paint unicorns on your son’s bare chest, how he whispered to him, “It’s okay. It was an accident, but this will make it better, watch…”
You pull the trigger and work the bolt and bodies are piling up as sirens scream and cars jam the street below, no one knowing whether to go back or forward—just as stuck as you—and the whore flickers because at this point you don’t really need her anymore. Your wife’s hand strokes your neck and she whispers of blood and love while goblins, who look so much like your son, dance in your periphery vision.
PASCAL’S WAGER
by Wrath James White
Spectral flames flashed about the room, casting horrible shadows that moved independently of the light as if animated. The twisted silhouettes of tortured, malformed creatures limped and convulsed in the fiery twilight, shrieking and roaring as fire ran down the walls and long finger-like tendrils of electricity crackled in the air like lightning. Ghostly figures whirled around the room in a mad frenzy, hurling their ethereal bodies against the walls and knocking books and artifacts off the dressers.
More of the bizarre apparitions crowded their way into Jamie’s bedroom as he rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to focus on the chaos raging all around him. Dark abominable creatures growled, screamed, and shouted in unknown languages. At least Jamie tried to pretend that he didn’t understand them, but he could make out enough of the gibberish to be afraid. All of them were calling out for Jamie’s soul. Jamie shuddered and prayed, sweat bulleting down his face, his body shivering, a scream trapped in his throat.
Fire belched from the floor and engulfed the room in smoke and ash. The sudden, stifling heat seared the air in his lungs and boiled the tears in Jamie’s eyes. A voice like the roar of thunder buffeted his eardrums and shook the room, rattling his skull and threatening to shatter his mind like a pane of glass in a hurricane. Jamie clamped his hands over his ears and screamed as loud as his scalded lungs would permit him.
The flames died away suddenly as if they had never been, leaving only the cold night air blowing through cracks in the locked windows and shut doors. The caustic stench of burning souls still lingered in the air, tickling the hairs in Jamie’s nostrils with the scent of hell.
Jamie knew he had welcomed many horrible things into his life with his compulsion, but he could not stop. He had no choice. He had to be sure.
Doors slammed and mirrors and windows cracked. The floors and walls heaved as if they were breathing and undulated like a snake gorged with a fresh kill. The shadows in the room grew denser. Jamie could feel hot breath on his face as they moved in closer. He felt hands all over him, tugging at his skin, trying to claw their way through his flesh to get at his soul. Many voices shouted in his face at once, cursing and spitting at him as they dragged him from bed.
Every night these ghostly assaults worsened. The Gods were getting angry. It was time to begin his morning rituals.
JAMIE FLOGGED HIMSELF IN a delirious rapture as he simultaneously dug his jagged nails into the goat’s thigh, wrestling the muscle free of the sinews and ligaments that held it. A warm arterial spray spurted into his mouth, gagging him as he bit into the animal’s jugular with his blunt little teeth, ripping the still twitching and spasming muscle from the animal’s bones as it moaned and yelped.
He continued lashing himself with the cat-o’-nine tails, praying and chanting fanatically in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. The knotted leather barbed with bits of bone flayed open his skin and gouged deep into his back muscles, ripping out small chunks of meat and hurling them into the air. The pain was terrible. Luckily, flagellation was not a part of his daily rituals. At best, it was a bi-weekly thing.
Jamie collapsed as the pain washed over him. His stomach roiled and bile scalded the back of his throat. The room spun and began to blur as he fought to hold onto consciousness and fend off the waves of nausea. Jamie turned his eyes heavenward, imagining how Jesus must have felt as he was lashed by Roman soldiers on his way to be crucified.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Jamie’s back was a bloody ruin when he finally laid down the blood-drenched flail and picked up the sacrificial knife. He was panting heavily and dizzy from pain and exertion when he cut open the goat’s belly and dug his fingers into the animal’s steaming entrails, tearing out its guts in ragged handfuls. After all this time, the oily texture of the fat worm-like intestines slipping through his fingers was still revolting to him.
Finally, Jamie removed the goat’s still beating heart, held it above his head, mumbled a long litany of prayers honoring nearly a dozen different deities and then bit into the heart, stilling it.
He ate one entire ventricle, struggling to keep it down as his stomach tried to reject it, then divided the rest of the heart up between four different altars. The intestines he placed on the crude little altar by his bedside. The head he placed atop a particularly dark and terrible looking shrine that was tucked in the closet. Next, he began draining the animal’s blood and dividing it up into bowls which he placed on different altars in the bedroom, living room, and kitchen. Even the animal’s eyes and genitalia were laid at the feet of one of the myriad statues and icons decorating Jamie’s apartment.
After the goat had been completely gutted, he placed part of it in the freezer and the rest in the garbage. He’d learned with difficulty that the garbage disposal
could not handle large bones. Jamie went back to the cages and removed a chicken. In a gentle reverent voice, he chanted prayers in Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Hindu, Spanish, and Yoruba before ripping the chicken’s throat out with his teeth, cutting off its feet and head, ripping out its entrails, and splattering its blood on the walls and floor.
The chicken blood decorated seven other altars by the time he was done. It helped, he found, to combine rituals. Otherwise, his morning prayers would take forever. Even now, he had to start before the sun rose in order to finish them all before work. Next, Jamie removed a rabbit, then a dove, then two more chickens, and then a lamb. The apartment was a slaughterhouse before The Gods Jamie worshipped were finally satiated.
Blood splattered the room in every direction and rained down the walls like red teardrops. The plastic tarp covering the floor now held the expanding puddle in which Jamie knelt, knees splashing in the tacky effluence. The animals Jamie had sacrificed to one God or another littered the tarp around him. Birds, butterflies, rabbits, sheep, and goat, some vivisected, some disemboweled or beheaded, and some immolated. Warm entrails, heads, limbs, and bowls of blood decorated the innumerable altars and icons crowding the candle-lit apartment.
The bloodiest part of his morning ritual over, Jamie stared at the ceiling, trying to see through it to the sky above and through that to The Gods in heaven as he pierced himself with needles and inhaled incense while kneeling on a mat and praying to the east. He still had many more rituals to go, many more gods to pay homage to before he could begin his day. To some, he offered fruit. For some, a simple candle and incense sufficed. For others, he burned money or special herbs. For some, he wrote prayers on the walls, or he scrawled them on paper and burned them. For others, he gave sacrifice. To them all, he pledged his eternal, unfailing devotion.
He recited prayers from The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Koran, The Torah, The Tao Te Ching, The I Ching, The Dhammapada, The Adi Granth, The Bhagavad Ghita, The Vedas, and The Avesta. He chanted spells and incantations from ancient grimoires and from fading xerox copies of hieroglyphics chiseled into temple walls and written on ancient scrolls. He had to make sure he had all his bases covered. Any of them could have been the true religion, any of the hundreds of deities could have been the right one, the one that would assure him a place in paradise when he died. Since he could not be sure which one it was, it was best to be safe and believe in them all.
Religious tomes cluttered the apartment in dusty heaps, filling the air with a musty newspaper smell. Candles of varying sizes and description flickered in almost every corner along with incense and herbs that, mixed with the dank mildewed stench of aging books and the funky animal smells of fur, excrement, blood, and organs, made the air almost unbreathable. A miasma of fragrant smoke and ash lingered in each room, a perpetual fog. Tikis, totems, statues and other icons, effigies, and symbols hung from the walls and sat atop every surface that would support them, representing over one thousand different religious sects.
Candles cast their flickering shadows across walls graffitied with prayers, spells, and other symbols of worship. The apartment was a shrine to mankind’s entire religious history.
Darkening pools of red stained the warped hardwood floors in every room and many of the prayers and symbols written on the walls were drawn in the same brown-red blood.
Dozens of animals raged, screeched, barked, and hissed in their cages. The smell of death was driving them mad. Each morning, a company that bred animals for experimentation brought him fresh shipments of creatures that he promptly slaughtered while praying without relent to one God after another. Cartons of rabbits, monkeys, snakes, and birds, cages of sheep and goats, hit his doorstep each morning and by the following morning those same cages and cartons would be empty. His trash can was full of their mutilated remains. His garbage stank like an abattoir.
Jamie stepped into the shower to wash the morning’s sacrifice from his hands, face, and hair. Blood spiraled down the drain as he scrubbed his skin and hair. He could feel the tension in his muscles relax slightly as he washed away his sins. As distasteful as they were, the sacrifices always made Jamie feel better. They quieted the demons within as well as those haunting the shadows around him. Jamie winced as he washed one of the numerous bleeding sores on his body and noticed with dismay that the melanoma was spreading. If the prayers were working, he couldn’t tell.
Jamie dressed quickly and walked past the cages of animals doomed to be executed that very evening into the room where he kept his “other” sacrifices, the ones plucked from street corners or stolen from emergency rooms. He paused briefly, staring at the locked door and listening to the muffled weeping within. He continued past.
Downstairs, below his apartment, was the occult shop he owned with his family. Jamie had worked there since he dropped out of college. He hurried around, tidying up and turning on lights, trying to eradicate every shadow in the room. But there were always places for shadows to hide.
He turned the sign around so that it showed “open,” unlocked the door, then plopped down behind the counter in front of his laptop to begin his research.
He punched in “Human Sacrifice and Religion” and his mind reeled as pages and pages of links sprang up on the screen, each one a different religion requiring its adherents to murder and mutilate in the name of its God, gods, Goddess, goddesses, saints, demons, angels, and/or devils.
“What do I do?” he gasped, staring at the screen in astonishment, overwhelmed by the enormity of his predicament.
He thought about limiting his religious mania to only modern religions or only the major ones, but he was smart enough to know that just because an idea or ideology had fallen out of popularity didn’t make it any less true. Truth was not a matter of popular opinion. Presidents, movie stars, and rock stars were the results of popular opinion, and he was seldom impressed with the tastes and wisdom of the masses. Most people, he knew, were idiots, terrified of truth, happier with pretty lies no matter who they had to hurt to maintain them.
“So, I am back where I started. Who is right?”
The bell on the door rang, announcing the arrival of a customer and startling Jamie out of his meditations.
The girl who shuffled in past the rows of love potions, power candles, and voodoo dolls had that look about her that told Jamie she was on the run from something or someone. Her eyes kept sweeping the floor, nervously shifting left to right and never once looking up at any of the spells, amulets, and potions lining the shelves. Her clothes were ill fitted, as if she had recently lost a lot of weight, yet she was far from emaciated. She was even plump in spots—all the right spots—thighs, hips, ass, breasts, the type of woman Jamie had always been attracted to before the disease robbed him of his desire. Even her shoes looked too big, slapping the tile floor as she shuffled up one aisle and down the other, looking at nothing. She was dressed inappropriately for the weather which wasn’t unusual. Most of the women in the neighborhood were strippers or whores who were accustomed to ignoring the frigid temperature in order to attract customers. She was not a shopper. She had come in to the store to hide.
Jamie slid out from behind the desk, leaving his computer in search mode, listing one religion after another and each demanded human blood to appease its Gods. He sidled up beside the young girl and smiled.
“Can I help you with something?”
“Do you have anything to ward off evil?”
“Lots of things. Evil spirits or evil people?”
“People. The worst kind of people.” The girl’s eyes glanced towards the store window as if she were expecting an attack from that direction.
“Who’s after you?”
The girl’s eyes rose to look up at Jamie. She stared at the rashes and lesions on his face and then back into his eyes.
“Are you sick or something?”
“AIDS. I’ll probably be dead by the end of the year. Now, you tell me your story. Drugs? Prostitution? Ran away from home?”
�
��All of the above. Except, I didn’t run away in the usual sense. I’m nineteen. My parents aren’t exactly going to be calling out the FBI, and yesterday was my first night as a prostitute and my last. Some guy tried to kill me. He threatened to cut my tits off if I didn’t let him fuck me in the ass. I ran and now my pimp is after me. I just met him, too.”
Jamie saw a quick, furtive movement out of the corner of his eye and turned in time to see something dark and ill-formed, the shadow of some grotesquely deformed thing, detach itself from the darkness behind one of the massive bookshelves lining the walls and dart across the room to join the other shadows behind the closet door. His pulse quickened. He didn’t know what these things were. Demons his rituals had summoned? Messengers of the many Gods he worshipped? Some of the lesser Gods themselves? He knew what they wanted, and he knew they were getting impatient.
“Well, I’ve got an apartment upstairs if you need a place to stay. You don’t have to worry about me trying to fuck you or anything. All the medications I’m on have left me with very little libido.”
His smile trembled as it spread across his face. He hoped she would attribute the bizarre expression to his disease and not the fear steadily increasing within him as more shadows flitted about the room on the edge of his peripheral vision.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s a blessing really. Could you really see me trying to get laid, looking the way I do? I don’t need that kind of frustration and I wouldn’t want to accidentally get someone else sick. Believe it or not, I used to be a really good-looking guy.”
A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous Page 18