Nip ran around inside its mountainous skull, giving it the intoxicating taste of doom it craved. Its hands opened farther and my dad and I fell onto the hybrid's unyielding belly. We barreled over the side and took a fifteen-foot header to the cave floor. I tumbled hard and my father landed on top of me. A couple of ribs on my left side broke as my shoulder dislocated. I screamed and Dad went "Woooo!" The Nephilim gave a stony sneeze and Nip came flying free.
Lowly Grillot Holt and the plastic saints had Self pinned upon the rocks. Elijah too, from inside the infant, fiercely fought against him. I knew he was having difficulty grasping tightly to the baby when all he could feel were barbs of malice from it.
Hold on! I said.
Stop telling me that in these kinds of situations! You ain't helpful at all!
I shoved my father off me and lurched to my feet, feeling my left lung puncture. I grabbed his arm and pulled him along with me, afraid that he'd just start playing with the hybrid again.
Lowly Grillot Holt, bathed in the blood of his master and caught up in Uriel's zealotry, vaulted forward and managed to hook the infant's wrap in his talons. Self sank his fangs deep into Lowly Grillot Holt's throat, his tongue working inside the wound and gathering sustenance and power, sucking out the familiar's life, but it was already too late. Fane's and Catherine's daughter fell through the air. Only then, despite everything else, did the baby start to cry.
I dug in and sprinted toward them, listening to that single keening wail echoing around us. I watched the beautiful newborn bundle floating for an instant, as the nun had floated before spiraling to earth.
Eddie, showing no emotion, put his hands out, and the child almost landed safely in his arms. Almost.
Uriel's cloak flashed upward as he seized the girl, and held the baby over his head ready to hurl her down to the ground.
Gawain was close enough to clutch her, but he stood in his blind muteness, smiling in his pleasant manner, letting our world play out around him. Events, even matters like these, unfolded around him with equal value. Uriel closed his eyes in prayer and I shouted, "Don't!"
The baby's cry snapped in half and ended on a high note. A cloud of dust rose with my own scream.
Elijah's fury burst full-blown into the cavern and flew in delight at the covenant of being reborn. The heat of his lust blasted past me and blistered my cheeks. So much of his life and death had been focused on me and mine: his hatred, his desire for my love, his morbid suspicion and covetous nature. The energy wove around me as he sought out his new flesh, and it went roving toward the hybrid.
Covered with demon's ichor, Self sealed his mouth over the infant's. He was careful, so cautious in how he worked on her tiny dead form.
Save her!
I'm trying!
I went to my knees beside them and kept my hand on her tiny chest, holding in her ghost. Nip took Eddie's hand.
Don't stop, I ordered.
She's dead.
Keep at it.
He continued mouth-to-mouth resuscitation just as I'd been taught in the Boy Scouts. Her soul, already maimed by the force of Elijah's frenzy, fought to be liberated. It tried to find solace in a place that couldn't be called the afterlife, since she'd never lived.
It's not working.
Stop arguing with me!
I'm not! I'm just telling you!
I kept my burning hand on her cooling chest, the black crackling motes writhing around us. I could understand why she wouldn't want to live if this was a sample of what the world had to offer. Her flowing essence tried to drain through my fingers. Self breathed for her. Gawain took a step forward, drawn by purity.
My father—the lunatic murdered clown—had the respect not to laugh, though he smiled. Once he'd been proud of me, and himself, before his vanity kept him from bending his knee. He too had loved my Danielle, and talked of grandchildren. We'd planned for so long and had been so close to realizing our happiness.
This could have been my daughter if only I'd moved an inch to the right, awoken an hour earlier, not read a book, stayed a minute longer in confession, loved my woman a little more or perhaps a heartbeat less.
I was the Master Summoner, to the bone. If I could not invoke life, I could beckon hope.
The baby's fingers curled around mine.
"Praise be to God," Uriel said, and he sounded so sincere I wanted to break his spine. Self and I both dropped back gasping. The Nephilim's eyes flooded with Elijah, the empty windows of a vacant host suddenly welling with all his hatred.
Too fat from the richness of others' regrets, he had trouble sitting up. He had more occult might than ever before, but like a true newborn had virtually no control over himself.
His desire to kill me flared off him, superheating the cavern floor and turning the silicate to black glass. He still couldn't talk to me or express his love for Danielle, not with a Seraph tongue designed for timelessness. He remained trapped in his own way, and I couldn't help chuckling at that.
"Thy will be done, oh Lord," Uriel said. Elijah managed to turn over in his new form. His loathing and unending wrath were finally alive with him again. He roared with his rigid throat, crawled into the grotto, and allowed the waters to swallow him. He was still human enough to want to see Danielle raised on Oimelc, during the Feast of Lights, and Jebediah would promise him anything to ensure his service.
Elijah fell deeper and deeper into the muddy lake, giving me one last scornful leer before going to meet with his new coven to prepare for the second coming.
The baby cried and took in breath. Dad danced.
Gawain didn't come back with us through the dark. He sat in the dirt beside the body of Aaron, where the rock had been littered with playing cards and still glistened with the slithery viscera of Lowly Grillot Holt.
I kept staring at Uriel wondering if I should kill him, and do it with Aaron's sword. It might prove fitting. But it would be pointless. His role in these schemes and designs had finished playing out.
Instead I threw him down on Aaron's chest until his hands were covered with the blood of his brother.
Self had fun chasing down the plastic saints and stomping them flat.
Nip and Eddie still held hands. Eddie kept repeating, "I forget. I forget." The kid had been caught up in the maelstrom of confused men and even more confused gods, with his guts spilled out for everyone to poke through. I didn't know how to put him together again, but Nip and Abbot John would help.
I pulled the boy with no heart up from the murder hole, and Self followed cuddling the infant and singing French lullabies. My father stood at the pulpit and brayed like an animal or just a vicious sinner.
Abbot John had hanged himself in the chapel and swayed in the draft. He wasn't dead although he'd really been trying to kill himself this time. He just didn't have the affirmation for it.
I said, "Get off the rope, John. Your children need you. You'll like it in Cincinnati. Fane is going to show you how to sell shoes."
I helped him down from the noose and watched him shudder as he bowed in the pew. I handed him the jar with Eddie's heart and released the seven locks. He saw Uriel's wet hands.
When I told him the mount no longer had a reason to stand, he hissed with his ruined voice, "So now it begins."
I didn't want to hear a discourse on the conflicts of my life or his interpretation of events. My punctured lung grew worse until every breath rattled deep in my chest, exactly the same as when I'd arrived here seeking recovery. I slumped beside him into the pew and kicked up the kneeling rail.
"Meet him in the hills of Meggido," Abbot John whispered. "I saw it in a dream. Bring your armies."
"I have no armies. Neither does Jebediah. We're not the kings of the earth."
"Of course you are."
Of course we are, Self said. Jerusalem calls. And Golgotha.
It wasn't the truth—couldn't be the truth—but Jebediah believed it. Elijah and the new coven would reinforce his will and lend credence to his doctrine. He would not
turn back for the sake of his rationality, not even on behalf of the world.
He'd drawn me into this war, and neither of us could carry on until our purpose was proven to be righteous or false. I sat thinking about Palestine and Mount Carmel, the ancient highways where invaders passed into the high point of the valley, built up over periods by the destruction and rebuilding of cities.
Self practiced his Hebrew, sounding almost happy. HarMeggidon.
Har Meggidon.
The mountains of Meggido, where the kings of the earth would meet.
Armageddon.
Part Three
Myself Am Hell
Chapter Thirteen
Like all wars, this one began with sacrifice.
Here, in a land of grudges and blood, Abraham had set out to murder his child. According to the Jews, the boy's name is Isaac. To the Muslims, it is Ishmael.
Untold thousands have died over such devotion to minor details and metaphor. Explosive devices are hidden under seat cushions because of mispronunciations. Entire families are poisoned for square inches at the back of a shrine or church. The Palestinians and Israelis fought over lines drawn in the dirt. Symbolism leads to suicidal missions inside wired trucks and boats. Women are stabbed for singing praises to a different god on a crooked street in the wrong quarter.
Where there is sanctity, there is Satan.
It's an ancient adage that fits the wide range of awe-inspiring faith and petty madness that is Jerusalem. It was easy to get preachy here.
The pink-haired lady, Betty Verfenstein, put it another way when she saw that I was watching the Muslims spitting on the Jews in the narrow alleys and labyrinthine bazaars of the OldCity. The Jews were throwing rocks and everybody was screaming while the Israeli border guards hung back with their machine guns pointed down at the street.
"I couldn't care less what these fanatics do to each other," she said. "Except when I see children getting involved. They shouldn't have to grow up in this turmoil, all in the name of God. This isn't religion. I don't know what it is. I've never seen anything like it in my life." She planted her meaty fists on her thick hips and looked ready to outwrestle any of the squabbling well-dressed men. "All I'm sure of is that I wouldn't want any of them in my home during Passover."
There were dead children wrapped around her throat, the silver psychic cords twining and whipping about her. Four miscarriages with broad flat heads and trans, lucent, vein-packed skin, and her daughter, Theresa, who'd been murdered thirty-five years ago at the age of twenty.
Theresa had given me all the bitter details, seething in my ear on the plane. She'd been a sophomore at Yardale, cutting across the quad at night with her roommate on their way to a Phi Beta Kappa party, when the pine brush behind them suddenly came alive with arms and gray gloves. She still felt an intense loathing for her roommate, who ran off and left Theresa behind. Right there on one of the nation's safest campuses, in a spot surrounded by the windows to a hundred empty classrooms, she'd had her bowels carefully cut from her while her dead eyes watched each stroke of the fine blade and witnessed the slow and precise removal of her own internal organs. Still, all she saw were arms, and those unstoppable gray gloves.
Theresa wavered close, her teeth champed and white eyes wide now that she had finally come face-to-face with me.
My name had been carved in thin large letters into her chest, years before I was born.
"You all right?" Betty asked. "You look a little sick."
"I'm fine."
She kept her gaze on the fighting. The sorrow etched itself deeper into each heavy line of her face, and the nervous tension kept her talking. "Manny's back at the hotel with heartburn. I wanted to go to Ecuador, but no, he wants to come see where the Bible was born. Except the water here is as bad for him as it was in Mexico. You and Manny, you're both going to be up all night."
Theresa continued to glare. Her open abdominal cavity showed that the butcher had only taken certain organs: the liver, the lower intestine, and part of her lower esophageal tract. The dried tissues could be used for divination. It reminded me of Eddie as everyone in the mount pulled together in order to replace his heart and put him back together again.
I could imagine Theresa's killer back then, with his gray leather gloves still on, surrounded with the burnt embers of her flesh and using a scrying mirror to stare into the future and see me at this exact moment. Why else would he have carved my name, unless he wanted to see my reaction?
I mouthed, You'll pay for this. I focused on him as well as I could, turning against the years that led toward Theresa's death. My mind roamed widdershins—counter-clockwise—against the natural order of time. He watched me from the past. I could sense him there, grinning, so slick. He held his scrying mirror and looked deeply within it, staring, watching. He wanted a connection and he got it. I drew forth arcana and hid my glowing fists in my pockets. I recited a thricefold Assyrian hex and hurled a curse, feeling the tide flow against the very current of time. Thirty-five years ago it should've shattered the glass and sent the shards into the bastard's face, leaving him blind in at least one eye.
The miscarriages bobbed in front of us, snapping taut on the silver cords and then sluggishly wafting off. Theresa hissed and came at me with her fingernails poised to scratch my face to shreds. I didn't blame her. My second self unwound from my chest and stuck his chin out at her. Hey! Who the hell do you think you are making faces like that?
The wheel revolves. After haunting her mother for so long, the girl now realized she'd been tortured and killed only to become the smallest part of a cruel pattern designed to rattle me. And worst of all—it hadn't. Theresa sneered.
Don't look down your nose at me! Self screamed.
Relax.
She started it! Stuck-up dead bitches are the worst.
"Did I tell you on the plane?" Betty asked. "With Manny's high blood pressure he's a prime candidate for a stroke. He retired two years ago and instead of making model airplanes or putting ships in a bottle he's been dragging me all over the planet ever since. All truth be told, I liked Japan more. Them Japanese are more respectful of other folks than this. Except during the big one, of course.
She'd told me on the El Al flight over, while Gawain and my father sat one row behind us. I had spent weeks going through a hundred obscure incantations but I still couldn't figure out how to strip the harlequin costume and dye from Dad's body. I called up all manner of majiks until my hands were singed and unfeeling. Self licked at the painted white face and black lips for hours as my father tittered like a schoolgirl on her first date.
Finally, I'd had to use pancake and foundation to cover his clown face just so I could get him on board the plane from JFK to Tel Aviv. I hid his jester's cap under a ten-gallon cowboy hat that made him look like a ludicrous version of Hoss Cartwright. The stewardess tried to get him to put it in the overhead compartment. Eventually she realized her mistake when he started doing a jig in the aisle and instigated a food fight onboard with the kosher deli trays.
I hadn't known how I was going to get them past customs, but I needn't have worried. Gawain and my father simply walked past all the Israeli officials while my luggage was checked and rechecked and I was held in a tiny white room for hours until they finally let me go.
Betty and Manny Verfenstein had taken to my father for some reason, perhaps because they thought he was the victim of a stroke.
I could understand it. Betty was nearing seventy and was boisterous and forthcoming about her life. Theresa filled me in on the rest as she dangled from her mother's throat, my name a wide-open wound. The cord's pressure sometimes made Betty gasp with pain as memories lashed against her.
She was a plump woman with crows' feet stamped into every meaty angle of her features. She had buried her only daughter and the endless ache had worn down her faith but not her convictions. She had a defiant rough laugh that filled me with pleasant warmth. It drove Self bugshit on the plane and made him crawl into the overhead compartmen
ts, where he rifled the baggage.
Eventually the fracas ended. A girl limped away crying with two badly skinned knees, comforted by her mother. This kind of scene would be repeated several times a day. Small skirmishes, shoving matches, and screaming arguments were punctuated by other, more savage violence. The leaders of nations from around the world had been vainly trying to get these people to talk peace for years. It had not worked in five millennia, and it never would.
It was Good Friday.
Betty shook her head sadly, and her daughter and the miscarriages twined above, swept aside by the dangling cords and coiling together. "This has nothing to do with the Bible."
She was wrong. It had everything to do with a book that had toppled empires and forged ten thousand wars. The letter and law of its lessons. Contradictions and prophecies held too much consequence, no matter what you believed. That was all they had left of God, and all they could imagine.
"Hope your father is enjoying himself," she told me. Another person might have said it with an air of sympathy, sincere or not, but Betty Verfenstein only spoke what she meant. "I've got to get back to Manny. You take care."
Theresa swung down low one last time, my name shining in her gutted flesh. Her ribs had chips in them from where the blade had sunk deep. She glowered, hissing and despising me, as she deserved to do. Even the miscarriages scowled and gave me the malformed finger.
Self shouted, And you, you snooty chick, you're lucky I don't come up there and slap you around some.
I left the Old City of Jerusalem and wandered the hills for the rest of the afternoon. Despite the fervor, you could find peace here, alone in the dirt. There was no wind. I stared out over the countryside and felt a welcoming embrace of heat and epochs.
Even with all of time sewn into Self's soul I found that he was hurrying ahead of me.
Self gazed about the rocky spur of the Judaean hills and laughed, listening to the mania of the land. As expected, all of Jerusalem, full of hostility and passion, echoed his wild happiness.
A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds Page 11