Scarlet Dream

by James Axler

  Her other children were finding their own escape routes, Tiamat felt. The Annunaki legacy would live on. Even now her most prized son, Enlil, was plucking at the seeds that would become a new Tiamat, that she too might be reborn.

  Lilitu’s blood seeped into the living deck of the spaceship womb, and Tiamat saw—or, more accurately, sensed—the terrible damage that had been done to her child. Lilitu’s hand was missing, and a gaping rent had been opened between her breasts. Her shell, her body, was ruined. The Annunaki could grow new forms and alter them like a snake sloughing its skin or a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, moving from chrysalis state to a new and better shape. Each of the Annunaki had been hidden as a hybrid, a form that had simply burst open when Tiamat commanded it, revealing their beautiful actuality within, like an oyster revealing a pearl. But there were many forms for the immortals, and each one needed to be grown.

  As her walls shook, dying in the heavens high above the Earth, Tiamat absorbed the essence of her daughter and engaged the birthing sequence, piping the command through her veins to an escape pod hidden in her belly.

  The burning had started within Tiamat by then, the final purging of her own system by fire that would result in her death. She felt the burn surging through her, and if the mother of all the gods can truly be capable of cursing, she cursed then, cursed that even immortal things occasionally ran out of time. As fire ripped through her, blossoming across the heavens like a beautiful orange flower, Tiamat launched the escape pod with Lilitu’s essence within it, activating the rebirth sequencers therein. And then Tiamat exploded, pale ectoplasmic waves shimmering out along the curving lines of the vessel, a pallid borealis fanning slowly out until it formed a mile-wide shimmering across the firmament.

  Within the escape pod, the rebirth sequencer struggled to make sense of the hurried data flow it had been given. Lilitu’s corpse sprawled unmoving in the astrogator’s chair, the chair’s tendrils trying to make contact with the dead goddess in their presence. The rebirth sequencer scanned her and understood it was to create a dead thing, one that was new and yet that was like the old Lilitu.

  The escape pod was no more Tiamat than a single leaf is the tree that it fell from. It merely understood that it had been a part of the spaceship womb, and that its job now was to do what Tiamat could not, to re-create this beautiful goddess that lay in its midst. The data of Lilitu’s life flowed through the escape pod’s circuits, and it seemed there was too much information. How could this be the life of just one person? This Lilith, Lilu, Lilitu. This first wife of Adam and this snake in the Garden of Eden. This Queen of Sheba who seduced King Solomon. This Baroness Beausoleil. How could all of this be just one person? How could all these aspects fit into just one creature?

  The escape pod made a decision as the flames from Tiamat’s pyre scorched its rear, frying the circuitry that powered its own logic centers, fragmenting the data it had been given to safeguard. Rocketing through space, hidden in the shadow of the dark side of the Moon, the escape pod began to carve a new body for Lilitu, a body that would be split into many parts.

  Chapter 17

  There is no shame in crying. Even for a god or goddess, whose comprehension is so much more than that of a mere mortal, there is no shame in crying.

  It had hurt, she admitted. It had been excruciating. And yes, she had cried, for even she was only but a god.

  Once, she had been called Lilitu, and perhaps she remembered that at some deeply buried level the way one remembers the passion one must have once felt for a lover long departed, the way that emotion sometimes returns in dreams.

  The escape pod had followed Tiamat’s commands, had given the goddess a new body via the chalice of rebirth. But the information had been jumbled, confused, and the whole package had become fragmented when Tiamat’s explosion had rocked the escape pod.

  They used to say that the stars in the sky were the gods themselves, each one representing another member of the infinite pantheon that watched over the planet Earth. If that was the case, then a whole galaxy of new stars must have been born that day nine months ago when Lilitu had died and been re-formed.

  First Body had been the most dominant. She had been everything that Lilitu was, only messy and jumbled, every aspect of her personality entangled with the death of Tiamat. In some primal way, First Body remembered dying, although the details—the battle with Kane, the blast from her sister as the mothership rocked around her—were all forgotten. The single most frightening thing for an immortal is to discover that death can happen, even to them. Mortals—humans—no matter how much they run from and hide from it, were able to accept death. Some even philosophized that death was the one thing that made life worth living, for without its promise one would just go on aimlessly forever.

  All the aspects of death were wrought across the new form that had been conjured as First Body, the black-hearted id that knew no boundaries, had no concept of morality. And so the First Body had emerged from the smoking wreckage of the crash-landed escape pod, lusting only for death.

  They had landed in the bayou, close to where Lilitu had once made her home when she had assumed the form of Baroness Beausoleil. The escape pod had intended to take Lilitu—whatever she now was—home, but the damage it had taken when Tiamat had blown up in its proximity had been too great. It had not had the energy or stability to reach its intended destination.

  First Body stood amid the smoldering wreckage, shards of the hull and great chunks of the interior strewed across the swampland, smart metal forming and re-forming as it sank into the waters of the bayou. The navigator’s chair, the responsive technology that painted pictures inside its sitter’s mind, lay in a heap amid the burned leaves of a fern, its base missing. First Body reached for it, but found her legs could not carry her. Instead she stumbled and fell, sinking into the moist soil that the bulk of the escape pod rested upon.

  After a while, a man approached through the mist, First Body saw. A portly man, with dark skin and a gap-toothed smile, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt and kneelength cargo pants that left his glistening calves exposed. He was using a walking cane to help him through the boggy soil and as he came closer First Body saw that he was sweating profusely, thick beads of perspiration running down his lined face like miniature rivers.

  When he reached the astrogator’s chair, the fat man halted, studying it from a few paces before jabbing at it with his cane, muttering something at it. First Body looked at the man, watching from her hiding place amid the shadows of the escape pod’s wreckage. As she watched, her malformed body like something pulled from a grave, she became conscious of movements coming from deep within the ruined starcraft, more bodies being formed by the struggling tech hidden in its depths.

  Standing out in the open, the man turned, peering around the clearing and seeing more of the wreckage of the escape pod until he noticed the large hunk that lay camouflaged among the trees. He whistled as he took it all in. “Anyone in there?” he asked, his voice deep like the low rumble of distant thunder.

  Warily, the corpulent man took another step toward the wrecked spaceship. Then First Body stepped out into the open the way a baby fawn lurches its first steps, her flesh dark as if it had been charred. She was tall, a towering frame of near-fleshless bones, her spindly limbs like those of a bird.

  “I know you,” the man said, much to First Body’s astonishment. “Ezili Coeur Noir. My sweetheart. Ma chérie.”

  First Body looked at the man, her yellow lizard’s eyes narrowed as she assessed this fat fool. He bowed in front of her, not an easy thing for a man carrying so much weight and yet he did so gracefully, kneeling in the wet marsh as he exposed his neck to the visitor.

  First Body knew who she was then, knew her role on Earth. The man had called her Ezili Coeur Noir, not a goddess but a loa, a voodoo spirit. It was a form Lilitu had assumed before now and it was not a gigantic leap for her to assume this personality once again; the information was buried deep within her, among the jumble of traits sh
e had been infused with during her botched rebirth. All the gods and spirits and idols of Earth are the same gods and spirits and idols, just hiding behind different names, wearing different forms.

  “You will help us,” she instructed the large man, her voice like dried leaves. She reconsidered the statement, trying to feel how many personalities she was now. “You will help me,” she amended.

  Still kneeling, the portly man looked up and offered a gap-toothed smile that seemed to engulf the whole width of his impressive, bucketlike jaw. “My name is Hurbon,” he said, “and I am yours to command, my mistress.”

  With Hurbon’s help, First Body took the astrogator’s chair away from the wreckage, knowing its abilities were precious. The chair contained star maps, and promised the only true way for her to find her way home. Hurbon, it transpired, was a voodoo priest, governing a small following out here in the middle of the Louisiana swampland. He took the chair willingly, hiding it away from prying eyes and nourishing it with blood at regular intervals as his mistress instructed. It was a living thing and it required protein now that true interaction was denied it. Unused, the chair would die unless it was provided with food in the form of blood.

  In her newborn weakness, First Body herself had been drawn deeper into the swampland, hiding like a wounded animal, covering herself in the shadows as she tried to amass her strength. The technology that had been used to create her, an Annunaki chalice of rebirth, had somehow become imbedded in her during the crash landing. It wasn’t visible; the physical chalice pit was not actually a part of her. But at a deeper level, the submolecular level, something of its programming had been hard-wired into her DNA during the escape pod’s desperate attempt to create new forms, new shapes. First Body, now branding herself as Ezili Coeur Noir, harbored within her a whole strain of rogue DNA operating as a chalice of rebirth. She could feel it calling to her, like some strange motherly instinct yearning for children.

  So she sat there in the dense swamp and reached out with one of her spindly hands. Already the hand had blackened, the skin there drying and becoming hard like leather, an armored sheath within which her body hid. Even then, she looked like a dead thing, her physicality had adopted the dried-out look of a husk, a walking corpse. Without a mirror, the irony was lost on her as she reached out, the chalice-of-rebirth technology deep inside her yearning to bring things to life.

  There were things under the soil. She felt them somewhere deep in the back of her brain, in the part of the brain that knows things by instinct alone, the part that remembers up isn’t down and down isn’t up. Seeds had scattered from the ferns and the trees, and had been buried in the earth by the animals, the insects and the elements that moved in cyclic patterns around the swamp. Placing one long-fingered hand against the moist earth, Ezili Coeur Noir clawed at the soil, delving deeper and deeper as she searched for the seeds. In her mind’s eye, they glowed, like the bones of an X-ray. It was the way she saw, not an aside or an overlay to her vision, but simply the way her vision was now, altered by the unfinished business of her own birth. It saw things beyond the simple limitations of solids and liquids; it saw through and into the ground and the plants around her, the life bubbling all around.

  When her hand made contact, Ezili Coeur Noir had let out a gasp. It had been an ugly thing, spouting from her dried-up throat through cracked, pencil-thin lips, the sound of a man choking on his own vomit. The seed beneath the soil seemed to throb with energy it could barely contain.

  I want to live, the seed cried out. I want to live and to feel the touch of the golden sun.

  Ezili Coeur Noir felt the thing inside her, the chalice of rebirth, reach into the seed. It sent the signal for the seed to begin growing, overwhelmed it with pleasure until the seed began to sprout, tiny green shoots bursting from its hard shell.

  Even then, First Body had not truly embraced her nature, had not truly understood—or at least reasoned—what it was to be Ezili Coeur Noir. She remembered from the first time, and yet she had forgotten, had dismissed the broken, malformed memory of her other lives.

  Thus, it had come as a surprise to her, the queen of all things dead, that the seed had grown from green to brown to dead in a matter of seconds. In less than a minute, a new fern stood where the seed had been pulled from the soil, its spines brown and drooping, a carpet of dead leaves around its base. Ezili Coeur Noir looked at this thing she had grown, this dead fern, with wonderment, her lizard-slit eyes wide with astonishment. And slowly the smile had formed on her terrible face. She had grown a dead thing and the knowledge pleased her.

  Her eyes, which saw the things hidden in the soil, which saw the layers of history on which she rested, searched for more things to grow and to corrupt. And for a while she had amused herself, growing new things, dead things, making things that should live into things that would only ever be dead.

  Could a thing that had never lived truly be dead? she wondered. Must a thing first be alive to then embrace death?

  Whatever the rules of the universe were, Ezili Coeur Noir knew she could change them. That mastery of death began by having no life, by expunging the concept of life, eradicating life from history. And so her dark plan began to take shape.

  For a while Ezili Coeur Noir had toyed with the things of the ground, had tested the extent of her abilities, witnessed them grow with each passing day. At that stage, she had yet to experiment with animals, with sentient things, amusing herself only with the plants of the Earth. But as the months passed, she began to feel the call of blood, the need to feel its warmth upon her desiccated flesh, in the same way she had instructed Papa Hurbon to bathe the living chair.

  And so when Ezili Coeur Noir was feeling strong enough, she had returned to Papa Hurbon’s voodoo temple and begun testing the limits of human beings, finding herself drawn more and more toward death and dying. She showed Hurbon how to see visions from the chair, how to make them dance in front of his eyes as if real. In return, she had demanded blood, pouring it on her body and on the chair.

  She appeared at dawn one morning, as the sun was just nudging over the immutable line of the horizon, mist clinging low to the ground. Papa Hurbon lay asleep in his magnificent four-poster bed, perhaps not snoring loudly enough to wake the dead but certainly loudly enough to at least attract them to his home. Silks decorated the ceiling of Hurbon’s room, their soft colors, purples and pinks, fluttering in the breeze like clouds that had been dyed and somehow penned indoors. Beside Hurbon two women lay asleep on the bed, sisters, the eldest just seventeen. The corpulent voodoo priest had exhausted them; Hurbon was, as he frequently admitted, a man of discerning taste and no little energy. He woke with a start, straight from asleep to wakefulness with such abruptness that there seemed no transition. Something had woken him, some primal instinct.

  Hurbon rolled the teenager—pretty with youth if not in looks—from his chest and reached out to the side of the bed, where he kept his trinkets and fetishes. There were several fith-faths there, popularly known as voodoo dolls, poppets that were believed to trap the spirit, to guide the will. Hurbon grabbed one, pulling it close to his chest as he sat up in bed. The doll was plain, just a simple rag thing in the form of a human being, shaped by wax and sawdust.

  There was a woman standing at the foot of Hurbon’s bed, her face in shadow. She was tall, her skin shadow dark on her emaciated frame. He knew her straight away.

  “Mademoiselle Ezili Coeur Noir,” Hurbon said, his voice coming out as an astonished whisper. “You look more beautiful than ever.”

  In the darkness, Hurbon saw her yellow eyes flash, the brief appearance of her brown teeth as she granted him just the slightest smile. Blessed, Hurbon had done something foolish then, something he would regret months later, when his sadistic mistress had returned for her final visit. He had placed the poppet aside, that little doll of wax and dust, believing himself safe in the presence of this beautiful loa spirit of death.

  Ezili Coeur Noir spoke then, her voice distant but forceful, like d
eath itself. “Wake your people,” she said. “I have need.”

  Hurbon leaped from the bed, tossing the covers aside and calling to the devotees who had slept with him. As the two girls groaned themselves awake, Hurbon wrapped himself in his silk dressing gown and waddled from his bedchamber, his voice loud as he roused everyone who had slept in the temple after the preceding night’s ceremony. Hurbon’s temple welcomed all comers—it was as much a flophouse as a temple, and his followers a mish-mash of the lost and the lonely. So long as he had a steady supply of willing believers in the path, Hurbon didn’t care.

  Alone in the bedchamber, the two sisters brushed their hands through their messy hair, wondering what was going on. “What’s crawled up his ass?” Nina asked, her voice still slurred with sleep.

  Beside Nina on the bed, her sister, Nadia, started to answer but her words stopped as she became aware of the other presence in the room.

  “What is it?” Nina asked, reaching for her lipstick amid the trinkets and junk that Hurbon kept beside his bed.

  Nadia continued to look into the shadows, her eyes so wide she could have been high on an old stash of their father’s jolt. Nina pouted, applying lipstick without needing a mirror, and peered to where her sister was looking. There, standing in the darkness of the bedchamber, she saw the naked figure of a woman, thin as a bird, watching them with eyes the yellow of sickness.

  “Who the fuck are—?”

  Ezili Coeur Noir did not let the girl finish her sentence. “You will be the first to honor me,” she promised in a dry voice drained of all emotion.

  Nina shied away from the end of the bed, at a loss for words and suddenly very terrified. Beside her, Nadia began to vomit.

  GOOD AS HIS WORD, Papa Hurbon had roused his followers. They didn’t follow him, he reminded himself; he was merely their guide on the path. They were tired and confused, but they gathered in the djévo room where newcomers were initiated into the faith. Ezili Coeur Noir rested on a wooden chair, watching from the shadows; she could be seen, but she seemed to fade into the background as Hurbon’s initiates danced and sang and drank. The sounds of drums echoed through the whole of the temple, and could be heard for miles around, attracting new followers even as the celebrants danced themselves giddy and let the spirits ride them, almost sixty people, young and old, dancing maniacally to the beats of the drum, the crashing of the bell. There was food, too, cooked meats and bowls of stew and rice, arranged on a side table and constantly refilled, everyone taking turns to help with the cooking. A roasted sheep lay spread out on a silver platter, a cleaver beside it for anyone who wanted to carve themselves off a hunk of its richly spiced meat.