by D. J. Butler
Mike limped up the hardwood floor along what had once been a central aisle among the pews. The walls below the mezzanine and under the windows, he now saw, were hung with long curtains like tapestries. It was hard to see very well in this light, and the tapestries looked faded, but the images he could make out woven into their fabric were weird and old. Angels fought with dragons; serpents threatened a throne sitting on top of a cloud; angels were chained and thrown into a pit.
Thud.
Mike heard something and jumped. He looked around, not sure what it had been. The entire band was ahead of him, but the noise had come from his left. He looked and saw nothing moving. Rats in the walls, maybe. He shook off an involuntary shiver and continued looking around.
The ceiling overhead was carved and painted, and the cloudy throne was there, too, surrounded by twelve images that Mike at first assumed were the Zodiac. Then he actually managed to make out a few of the faded, unlit signs and saw a ship … another was a deer … a third was a tree branch, and then Mike shook his head. He didn’t believe in the Zodiac any more than he believed in the lottery, but he was pretty sure those signs weren’t in it. He wrote it off as one more oddity in an already very odd night, and focused back on where he was going.
At the front of the pews and to one side, a platform, like a pulpit with its own stairs, stood astride two steps that climbed to a low dais in front; the pulpit had been gnawed to a misshapen stump. An iron candlestick lay knocked to the ground before the pulpit, its seven arms carved like flowering branches. Beside it were the two shattered halves of a table.
Beyond the pulpit, there was a human body. He was an old man in a dark blue suit, with gray hair and beard, his feet and shoulder jammed against something that forced his knees and head into the air. He was pinned onto the lid of a big wooden chest with what looked like a wooden stake, pushed all the way through his torso and into the wooden container beneath. Death was always ugly, and Mike had seen his share, but he’d never seen it this ugly, or weird. He couldn’t see blood anywhere, despite the gaping hole in the man’s body. The chest underneath him had two sphinxes carved into its lid, facing left and right away from each other.
The old guy was still moving, though not very much. He muttered something inaudible, just a gasp through twitching lips—
and his skin bubbled. It crawled, and jumped and wiggled like it was loose over the body it covered, and something small, a thousand small somethings, were crawling all over underneath it.
“Jeez.” Mike stopped just inside the gnawed-down pulpit and stared. “Vampire?”
“Worse,” Twitch shook her head. “Rabbi.”
“Is he alive?” Eddie asked. The five of them stood around the man, several steps back.
Adrian set down the can and whipped a clear glass lens from his suit pocket. He squinted through it at the man in the suit. “No,” he said. “But he isn’t dead, either.”
“Will he talk to us?” Eddie asked. The guitarist held his shotgun at the ready and kept looking around the mezzanine.
“Sure he will,” Adrian said. He put away the lens, unscrewed the cap of the gas can and began to back around the man on the chest, pouring a trickle of gasoline on the floor as he went. The petroleum stink snapped Mike out of his reverie.
“How did you lose the last bass player?” he asked. “Speaking of … you know … all the crazy stuff I’ve seen tonight.”
Jim walked away from the circle of conversation. He kicked over large boards in the shattered wreckage of the pews and looked around and behind things and generally searched.
“We didn’t lose him, big boy,” Twitch said. “We know right where he is.”
“He died.” Eddie’s wandering eye snapped spastically in its socket and he closed both his eyes briefly, taking a deep breath.
Mike gulped and tightened his grip on the pistol. “Drug overdose?” he asked hopefully.
Eddie shook his head. “Impaled on his own bass.”
“Stand back or get gas on your shoes,” Adrian warned. “I need a perfect circle.”
“Or what?” Eddie asked. “You might fall asleep?” Jim put a restraining hand on Eddie’s shoulder.
“No pressure, Adrian,” Twitch said soothingly.
Mike stepped back and watched Adrian finish his circle, then light it with a matchbook he extracted from his pocket. Flames rose from the circle of gas, and when Adrian waved his hand over them, they rose even higher.
“Anyone know the rabbi’s name?” Adrian asked.
“Feldman,” Eddie supplied the answer.
“No true name? Not even a first name, that’s it, just Feldman?”
Eddie looked at Jim, who was poking around the ruined stump of the pulpit. The singer shrugged and nodded.
“That’s it,” Eddie said. “No sweat, for a man of your talent.”
“Makes you feel better about the tambourine, though, don’t it?” Twitch asked Eddie. There was a mischievous glint in the drummer’s eye. “The whole incident with the bass, that is. I mean, when was the last time you heard of a tambourine player murdered with his own instrument?”
“A tambourine could be sharpened,” Eddie said sourly.
“Murdered?” Mike asked.
“Of course,” Eddie snapped. “What kind of idiot would it take to impale himself on a bass guitar?”
“If there were such an idiot,” Twitch observed, “he’d surely be a member of this band.”
“What’s the Left Hand?” Mike asked again.
“Don’t worry about it,” Eddie said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“It’s easy,” Twitch said. “At the Judgment, everyone gets sorted. They’re either on the Right Hand of God—that’s really, really good—or they’re on His Left. That’s terrible. And people who have the Left Hand on them already in life, why, they’re damned. All this, of course, pertaining to humans, and other folk who are judged.”
Mike strained to listen to Twitch’s voice, trying to fathom his (her?) sex so hard, he almost missed the words Twitch said. “Are you—” he asked, about to guess a woman, but then he caught the significance of some of Twitch’s words. “Do you mean I’m damned?” He knew that he was damned, had known it his entire adult life, but it wasn’t anyone else’s business and he wondered how Jim could possibly see that. “And do you mean some people aren’t judged at all?” he asked. “What does that mean? And why would Jim want to rescue me just because I’m … because I have the Left Hand on me? What is he, like a priest?”
“Jim has a grudge,” Eddie said.
Jim kicked the candlestick, hard; it banged loudly against the floor.
“Against what?” Mike gripped the pistol in his hand, the sheer solidity of the gun an antidote to all the insanity he was seeing and hearing around him. He could feel the weight of his various charms and holy symbols at his sternum, too, but got very little comfort from that. “Against damned people? Against saved people?”
“Against Hell,” Twitch said. “Eddie told you. We’re sticking it to His Lowness.”
“Shut up,” Adrian growled. “I don’t jabber at you when you’re trying to find the groove, do I? Do unto others, well, you know.” The short man straightened his tie, and then waved both hands over the circle of flame, fluttering the fingers of one hand while clenching his other in a fist. “Per Osiridem te invoco, o Feldman, ad nos veni!”
The twitching increased. Mike thought he could see individual mites under Rabbi Feldman’s skin, like rapidly migrating blisters. He arched his back, pushing off the chest with his heels and shoulder blades, and lifting his body on the spike that pinned him.
“What’s wrong with him?” Mike whispered to Eddie, who stood closest to him. “Is that a disease?”
“Shush,” Eddie said.
“More like an infestation,” Twitch whispered back. She picked up the gas can and held it ready, but ready for what, Mike didn’t know.
“Careful,” he suggested. “We don’t want to burn the place down.”
“Not yet,” Twitch agreed.
“Veni ad nos!” Adrian repeated. He was making the same arm and finger gestures, but they were getting faster and faster and he looked frustrated. “Tavo lanu, Rabbi Feldman, bashem hakodesh!”
Feldman’s arms twitched and his legs trembled, like a breakdancer with only one move, and not a very good one. The wooden spike kept him pinned, but his mouth opened and shut fiercely now, so hard Mike could hear his teeth click.
Adrian wiped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. Mike did the same, in sympathy, but the cracked brown leather of his jacket smeared the sweat around rather than wiping any of it off.
“Veni!” the wizard shouted. Veins stood out in his temples and in his wrists, like dancing snakes, and his face was bright red. “Veni per Yahweh Sabaoth! Per Yahweh Sabaoth Luciferemque te jubeo, veni!”
He stamped his feet and the circle of flames raced skyward with a huge BOOM!—
And then Adrian crumpled to the floor, and the flames snuffed out.
“Huevos,” Mike said, though he wasn’t sure why. The dying of Adrian’s magical fires made the room, if anything, slightly more normal.
“Did you hear that?” Twitch asked. She set down the can and started walking across the room, turning her head this way and that as she went. The horse’s tail protruding from the seat of her black leather outfit swished as she walked, and Mike couldn’t help watching it for a few seconds, until he remembered that he wasn’t one hundred percent sure Twitch was a woman.
Mike jerked his gaze away.
Then he remembered the thud he had heard earlier.
“You mean the explosion?” he called to her (he hoped). “I think they heard that in Dallas.” She ignored him, peering behind pews and turning over stray boards to look underneath them. “Could be rats!”
Jim returned to the group around the rabbi. He and Eddie stood over the body of the Rabbi Feldman, who continued to writhe spastically. Mike joined them. There was a bad smell about the body that he recognized, though he couldn’t immediately place it, and its mouth seemed to be full of something black. Like caviar, he thought. Someone had stuffed the rabbi with moving caviar.
That stank of rotting meat.
“What’s with Twitch?” Mike asked. “She thinks she heard something.”
“Horses have great hearing,” Eddie said dismissively. “You’re right, she probably heard a rat.”
So she was female, then. Mike shot a guilt-free glance at Twitch’s tail again. Then he realized what Eddie had said.
“Wait a minute,” he tried to rewind the conversation. “Horses?”
The guitarist ignored him and talked to Jim in low, urgent tones. “Are you sure the name isn’t just a coincidence?” Eddie asked him. “For all I know, Dudael is the Hopi word for Chlamydia.” He looked around at the shattered synagogue. “Though Heaven knows it looks the part,” he said.
The big singer took the rabbi’s right hand in his own and turned it palm-up. The old man had a tattoo on his right wrist, bright and black like he’d gotten it recently, and shaped like a candlestick with seven branches. Jim and Eddie exchanged a look.
“We don’t have much time,” Eddie said. “If that Baal Zavuv found this place before, it’s sure as hell on its way here now.”
“Let’s just leave,” Mike suggested.
“Do something useful,” Eddie snapped. “Wake up Adrian, maybe.”
Mike had just enough booze in him not to take offense. “What kind of thing are you looking for, Jim?” he asked as he crouched over Adrian’s unconscious body and slapped the other man in the face. “Maybe I can help.”
“Jim’s not going to talk to you,” Eddie reminded Mike through gritted teeth. “And we’re not looking for a thing, we’re looking for a place.”
“Well, did we find it, then?” Mike pressed.
“Over here!” Twitch shouted from halfway across the room. She was poking open the trapdoor of something that looked like an oversized mail slot, built right into the wall. It was about where Mike had heard the noise earlier, he thought.
Jim immediately ran to join her, and Eddie followed at a walk, shotgun at the ready. “What is that, the genizah?” he shouted.
“What’s a genizah?” Mike asked, his head spinning. “And is it more or less dangerous than a Baal Zavuv?”
“It’s a cabinet,” Eddie said as he broke into a jog, “full of books that are too old to use and too holy to throw away.” He called back to Mike over his shoulder, without looking. “Get Adrian up! We need Feldman to show us the way forward!”
Mike went back to the scene of the failed summoning, scratching his head at what to do. Adrian snored gently, so he started by pinching the sorcerer’s nose and twisting it sharply clockwise—no effect. He thought of Twitch, and how the drummer had awoken the wizard earlier.
“Come on, big boy,” he said awkwardly. “It’s just you and me, and everything is hunky-dory.” His own words made him feel uncomfortable. He rapped Adrian on the forehead with his knuckle. “Everything is nice and easy, no pressure. Let’s have a picnic.” Mike cleared his throat and looked around to be sure no one was watching him. The thought that he might see Chuy made him a little nervous, but he guessed that he had enough liquor in him to hold the apparition at bay for the moment. He hoped he did.
The rabbi’s twitches were getting more extreme. He flopped around like a live fish on a hot sidewalk, and Mike frowned. What was that black stuff bubbling up between the old man’s teeth?
And why had Twitch picked up the gas can earlier? What was it she had said … that the rabbi was infested?
Mike stood up and stretched to get a better look at Rabbi Feldman. The substance bubbling inside his mouth was beginning to well up past his lips and spill down onto his throat, and onto the chest on which he lay. It was black as tar, but was formed into discrete globes. Just like caviar, Mike thought, not that he’d eaten much caviar himself, other than what he’d stolen from weddings he’d played at. Only each of the bubbles was quivering, and as they fell and hit the floor, they continued to shake and roll around.
And the rabbi stank of rotting meat.
Just like the Baal Zavuv.
“Guys?” he called it. “This doesn’t look very good.”
There was no answer. He looked over at Jim, Eddie and Twitch, and saw that they were helping a person—someone really small—a skinny little kid, actually, crawl out of a hole they’d smashed in the wall.
He kicked Adrian. “Wake up!” he barked.
Nothing.
How would he light the gas, if he had to? He remembered Adrian’s book of matches, pushed the pistol into the back of his belt and got down again to shove his hands into Adrian’s pockets until he found it. GOLDEN DAWN MOTEL, read the scratched and faded lettering on the little black book, or maybe it was GOLDEN SANDS, he couldn’t be sure, AMARILLO. It smelled like ammonia and the cardboard was fraying, but if the Golden Dawn gave guests matches with their name on it, Mike had stayed in places that were worse.
“Guys?” he called again, and stood up to look at Feldman.
The rabbi’s face was covered in a black foam of the jiggling little bubbles. Bubbles were squeezing up around the spike in his chest, too. One of them had bobbled its way down one leg of the rabbi’s trousers and quivered beside his ankle, like a tiny little blob of sphinx poop. Mike stooped to look at it.
“Cagado,” he muttered.
Inside the bubble, behind a black film that swirled like oil on a puddle, he could clearly see a fly. It was as big as a horsefly and its mandibles glittered like metal.
He kicked Adrian again, really hard this time, and in the stomach.
“Oomph!” Adrian bellowed, and woke up. He curled reflexively, wrapping himself around Mike’s foot and tripping him. Mike fell backward—
hit the floor—
and banged the back of his head against the gas can.
“No!” he gasped, scrabbling at the can with both hands—
as it s
lowly tipped over—
and Mike missed, the can hit the ground and the gas sloshed out. On the hardwood floor it puddled under the sphinx chest and the rabbi’s body.
“What are you doing?” Adrian grunted, and clambered to his feet. His eyes widened. “Hey!”
Mike followed Adrian’s eyes from where he lay on the floor, and saw that Rabbi Feldman’s body was covered in black foam. No, he realized, it wasn’t foam anymore. It was a cloud, coalescing and rising off the body.
A cloud of flies.
“Carajo!” Mike yelped. He grabbed the book of matches and fumbled to pull one of them out. The back of his ears felt wet and he wondered if he’d cut his head in the fall. He’d have to check later.
“Per Isidem …” Adrian intoned, and then staggered back, sucking in oxygen like he’d emerged from long minutes underwater. “Per Isidem …” His eyes rolled back into his head and he struggled not to swoon.
“Help!” Mike shouted, snapped one of the matches into flame—
“Don’t!” he heard Eddie yell—
and he tossed the match over his head.
Whoosh!
“Aaagh!” Mike roared in sudden agony and rolled away from the sudden explosion of light and heat behind him. His shoulders and upper back were on fire—literally. He stumbled like a one-legged sprinter past Adrian, who waggled his fingers over his head and tried again to get out a spell.
Water … he thought. His back and the back of his head burned.
No, a tapestry … he lurched around, trying to find the nearest wall hanging.
The room exploded into whizzing particles of light, and with a sinking feeling in his heart and stomach, Mike realized that he hadn’t stopped the flies, he’d only lit them on fire. Now they raced about the room in all directions, shining with flame and trailing smoke that stank of sulfur, rotting meat and gasoline. They flew zigzag like dandelion spores of light, or like Leonids unconstrained by gravity, racing out in all directions from Rabbi Feldman’s funeral pyre.
“Hold still!” Mike wasn’t sure who was shouting.