by Harvey Click
A pretty sentiment, thought the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv. But while one of us hunts day after day braving the dangers of the dark alleys, another one of us sprawls in the opulent east wing enjoying the comely slaves who massage his body with expensive scented oils.
We are all limbs of the same body, thought the Cypher who once was Theophilus Perry.
Some limbs do more work than others, thought the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv. With the point of his knife he pried a digger-sucker out of his leg before it found an artery to raise a family in. Ugly little things. He grasped the tied mouth of the squirming hunt bag and dragged it down the hallway.
It’s too dangerous outside, he thought. We won’t go out again. Suppose an enemy captured one of us.
We’d send other selves to slay our enemy, thought the Cypher who once was Theophilus Perry. None may prevail against the many that we are.
Some of our more corpulent selves might hesitate to leave the comfort of their perfumed chambers to rescue our less fortunate self, thought the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv.
We’re all expendable, thought the Cypher who once was Theophilus Perry. We’re all humble neurons in the One Great Mind.
The selves who work and sweat are considered more expendable than the selves who lie in lazy luxury, thought the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv. No, hunting is too dangerous. We won’t go out again.
He dragged the heavy bag down the hallway lit by flickering dung-lamps until he came to the Cypher who once was Linda Hall. She was gazing wistfully out the window at the cold purple sun hanging low in the seething sky.
We’ll miss going out, thought the Cypher who once was Theophilus Perry. We’ll miss the thrill of the twisted alleys, the furtive whispers of cutthroats and teethers lurking in the reeking shadows.
Our slaves will bring cutthroats and teethers to us, thought the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv. And all of them will become Cypher, except for the ones we give to Zyx. And in time and times to come all the damned filth of hell will be Cypher, and we shall come and go as we please.
And all the damned filth of earth as well, thought the Cypher who once was Theophilus Perry. Soon we’ll be the one on earth named Kat, and soon thereafter we’ll be many others.
Not Kat, thought the Cypher who once was Aleister Crowley. He sat in the far north wing of the pleasure palace tending the sixty-four spectreholes arranged in a paradoxical polyhedron. Kat has destroyed herself, he thought, but that’s of little importance. Soon our earthside doorway shall be finished, and insects named Kat or Ryver won’t matter.
A fever wasp landed on the windowsill, and the Cypher who once was Linda Hall caught it and swallowed it. Its toxin was hard on the stomach, but it bolstered resistance to seeping pox. She watched the cold purple sun shoot its last poisonous rays across the battle ruins outside. She thought of another sun warming her skin as she sat in a hot tub in a dream-world long ago where someone named Mark Burton had loved her. She thought of fresh breeze and bright clouds.
There is the real pleasure palace, she thought. All of earth.
Yes, and soon it shall be ours, thought the Cypher who once was Aleister Crowley. Already five spectrons of our earthside doorway have been captured, and through the flickering holes we can glimpse paradise.
Zyx grows hungry while we gaze at paradise, thought the Cypher who once was Linda Hall. We mustn’t keep it waiting.
True, thought the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv. He stared at her slim ass as she gazed out the window, and he thought it would be nice to enjoy an intimate hour with this interesting new self. But first Zyx had to be fed.
He dragged the squirming hunt bag to the end of the hallway and unlocked the thick iron door. He took a dung-lamp from the wall and descended the stone stairs into the dark cavern where blood bats hung upside-down from the ceiling. He didn’t like Deep Hole. It always made him feel like a frightened boy who’d strayed too far from home.
Shadows from the smoking dung-lamp groped the moist air as he dragged the heavy bag past stalagmites gleaming with slime. The slime thickened and his terror deepened as he drew closer to Soft Place.
Terror is the essence of religious awe, he thought, the terrible sense of something greater than ourselves. But what shall be greater than Cypher?
Sharp teeth pricked his neck. He let go of the bag and caught the blood bat in his fist. Tiny eyes glowed red in the lamp light, and fangs flashed white in a snarl. He pressed the rodent’s mouth against his arm because its anesthetic venom usually gave him a few minutes’ relief from the terrors of Deep Hole, but tonight the numb chill spreading up his arm to his head didn’t seem to help. When the bat was done drinking, he threw it into the air.
Now you can be Cypher too, he thought as it flapped away. We’ll fly through darkness on your wings, taste sweet blood through your tongue, and spread our word through the communion of your fangs. Soon all things in hell and earth shall be Cypher.
But what shall Cypher be? he wondered as he grasped the bag and continued on his way. Are we still truly Cypher any more than we’re truly Luke the Shiv or Linda Hall? Are we losing ourselves to gain the worlds?
A steady drizzle of worms dripped from the stalactites above Soft Place, and he saw that the steaming slime pool had grown since yesterday. It grew every day, turning rock into mucus and mucus into worms. Soon all of Deep Hole will be Soft Place, he thought. Then our pleasure palace will sink into slime and be eaten by worms to amuse the Lord of Worms, and he will be greater than Cypher.
The pool looked tranquil, just a few bubbles simmering, but the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv shivered with dread. How deep is bottomless? he wondered. How old is eternal? How hungry is a hole that punctures the universe?
He untied the mouth of the hunt bag and reached in carefully because there was a teether in there. He pulled out a plump bruised baby and dangled it by one pink leg until the worm pool churned with hunger and Zyx erupted from the slime. A tentacle wrenched the squalling infant out of his hand and into the huge maw of slashing teeth, and a wave of worms splashed up as the monstrous face slid back beneath the surface. Soft Place boiled red and belched nauseous gas.
The Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv reached into his bag and pulled out a scrawny little old woman, her filthy burlap dress ripped to tatters. The teether had already sucked one of the eyes from her head and had chewed off her nose and some of her fingers. Age had devoured the rest of her almost as thoroughly, but she’d still be good eating. It wasn’t meat that Zyx craved, it was the soul.
The hag’s toothless mouth gaped with senile horror as he hurled her into the frenzied jaws, and her rotten bones snapped like a bundle of twigs.
Only one morsel left. He kicked the bag to stun the teether and pulled out the groggy dwarf by his greasy hair, which was longer than the little man’s body. Like all teethers he was less than three feet tall, his growth stunted because his mother had been addicted to brain-viper venom. The birth defects were harder on the mothers than their babies, who generally chewed their way out of the womb. This one looked young, but there was no telling how long he had dwelled in Afterworld or how many times he’d died and been reincarnated, his soul unable to escape this no-exit cul-de-sac where space curved in on itself like a perpetually shrinking balloon.
Soft Place roiled with hunger. How long can we harness this appetite and appease it with tidbits? wondered the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv. Has it begun to devour us already? Shall we soon call ourselves the Zyx who once was Cypher?
Bat venom had done nothing to chill his fear. He wanted to clutch his memories close like precious heirlooms before they were gnawed away. He rummaged through the many years of his many lives back to the beginning, long before he was called Cypher, and he almost forgot where he was until the little man that he held by the hair regained consciousness and kicked his groin.
“Do you know who I am?” the Cypher who once was someone else asked the teether.
“You’re a poxy fag
got corpse-fucker with bad breath,” the dwarf said. He snapped razor teeth like castanets, but couldn’t get a hold of any flesh.
“In the beginning I was called Simon Magus. The word simony comes from my name.”
“Slimon Maggot,” the teether said. “You’re a stinking baboon turd squirming with maggots.”
“I’ve done things you couldn’t dream of, little man. I walked with the apostles and learned secrets of heaven and earth from the one called Peter. I discovered the formula of Longevity on the island Patmos, where John wrote his apocalypse of the end of time. I lived on through many treatments and walked the earth through pestilence and wars and plagues. I toppled kings and set toadies on their thrones. I helped Alaric marshal the Visigoths against Rome. I studied alchemy with Zosimus of Panopolis, and our philosophers’ stone rendered dull lead to gleaming gold. I was Merlin to Arthur. I traveled to forbidden cities of unknown lands, where ebony natives worshipped me and gave their virgin daughters for my pleasure. I conjured firestorms that blazed and rumbled like thunder off the shores of Italy to confound the Ostrogoths, and in the scorching sands of Syria—”
His voice was strangled silent when a tentacle suddenly wrapped itself around his throat. Soft Place exploded with teeth as jaws bursting out of slime cut the Cypher who once was Luke the Shiv into bloody morsels that now were Zyx. Another tentacle snatched up the snarling teether and yet another caught a shrieking blood bat from the air.
Zyx was hungry.
***
Cypher was doing the work now, and Letha was free to drift in fathom-five. Seasons shifted as shapeless years passed forward and back. Now she was a little girl walking in the woods behind the house in Massachusetts. A cold autumn wind shivered through the deep-purple leaves and made them flutter like spectral doorways leading to an enchanted future.
Father was hidden somewhere in the tall trees, hard, knotty, and thick. “My little princess is growing up,” he said, or maybe it was the wind that spoke as it sent its icy hand up her dress and lifted it above her waist.
“Mommy says you can’t touch me there,” Letha said, but the wind wasn’t her father, it was Cypher, his tongue thrust deep inside her brain, licking her most intimate folds and planting another spectron there like a purple blister so he could grope her deeper still.
She passed through the trees to a frozen blue wasteland called fathom-six. Here her breath made fog-phantoms in the air, and the breath-fog cracked into hoarfrost crystals that sparkled as they fell into the blue-white snow. Father was long dead, and even death hadn’t shown him this frigid, cheerless wisdom.
But someone would live again once seven spinning devils were captured. Her son would walk again, yes he would.
She dreamed of a handsome young man swimming back to her past the crackling blue icebergs. She would wait at the frozen shore and rescue him from the frosty water, and soon she too would have a body as young as his. Their love would be written in books.
And if Cypher didn’t bring Garrick back to life, she would end this game.
“I can still kick you out,” she said. “It’s still my mind.”
“Of course it is,” Cypher said. “But watch now as we capture the seventh jewel. Behold and have faith, I shall make your son walk again. 3a + (X2 + 2ZX + Z2 + Y2)i . . .”
A great purple fire burned cold on the tundra as the seventh spectron was captured. Thick black smoke fouled the frozen air.
“ . . . 4a2 - 4a (X - Z)2 + Y2 . . .”
Letha realized the equation was an incantation. Cypher was unlocking some sort of genie and planting it in her brain.
“ . . . + X2 - 2ZX + Y2 + Z2 = ZYX.”
“Hold your horses,” she said. “You’re trying to send Zyx through me, and I won’t allow it.”
“No, not Zyx,” Cypher said. “Merely a feeble-minded slave that will revive your son. Isn’t this what you wished for?”
“I don’t know,” Letha said. She felt thick cold fingers of foul genie smoke fumbling through the tender crannies of her toadstool brain. “You better tell me what the hell this damn thing is,” she said.
“Atoms of dust animated by pneuma, the word of life that Yahweh breathed into Adam according to the ancient myth, and there’s truth enough in the story,” he said. “Without this vital spark the universe would be flames and barren rock, but Cypher decrees the potent word that makes stones walk and even ashes speak . . .”
As his words droned on, Letha realized they were part of the incantation.
“A thimbleful of pneuma captured in a bottle of rat dung and dead flies and vulture dust and desiccated wizard’s semen festers into a creature summoned and enslaved by the sound of my voice because Cypher’s word gives shape and form.
Rodent turd and hair of fly,
buzzard bone and beetle eye,
magus sperm parched mummy dry,
dead shall live and quick shall die.
Go forth, uncouth and stupid thing, and may your bad breath make dead bones breathe.”
A thick fist of cold black smoke burst through Letha and thrust its way up through the trapdoor to the chamber where Garrick lay. There it coalesced into something so hideous that she wanted to claw the spectreholes out of her brain and send it back to hell. But this was what she had wished for.
“It looks like an incubus,” she said.
“It is,” Cypher replied.
“An incubus doesn’t bring life, it brings nightmares,” she said.
“There are some who call life a nightmare,” Cypher said. “But you hang on to it at any cost, don’t you?”
The creature lay on top of Garrick and thrust its tongue into his mouth.
***
One of the straps that bound Mary to her cot was pressing against her full bladder. It seemed absurd to worry about soiled sheets in this chamber of horrors, but potty-training runs deep. The guard dozed in an armchair across the room. He was still wearing one of Letha’s dresses, no doubt a great honor. His snoring was echoed by flies buzzing a few feet away from Mary’s gurney as they feasted on Garrick’s seeping face. Then a new sound joined in, a dry mumble in the distance like a dozen parched throats whispering together. The lamps jutting from the wall dimmed as the muttering hummed louder. It seemed to be coming from the cellar.
Mary turned her head and saw a pillar of darkness swirling up through the trapdoor. Darker than dark, it was like a negative image of the will-o’-the-wisp she had once seen in a snake-infested swamp. It swayed and spun slowly, making the air cold and brittle. Her eardrums rang, and a dusty breeze stinking of dry shit rustled her hair.
The air suddenly snapped like a blown fuse, black lightning flashed, and the darkness folded in on itself. A creature stepped out of the chaos and looked around the room.
Hunched like a vulture, it stood seven or eight feet tall on bandy legs that looked too thin to support its weight. Coarse black hairs spiked its iridescent blue skin and stuck out like quills on a narrow rat face with red insect eyes glaring beneath ridged beetle brows. Its skinny torso was corrugated with ropy knots of muscle, and huge bony talons hung from its stick-thin arms. Transparent fly-wings rustled on its knobby back and shook dust from the sharp peaks of its shoulders like black dandruff.
It stared around the room and muttered in a dry mummy voice.
Mary was too frightened to scream, but it noticed her anyway and tiptoed toward her with an oddly graceful step like a ballroom dancer. Mumbling soft insect words, it leaned down and gazed at her with blank red eyes. A sharp black tongue poked out between hairy lips and licked her throat.
“Mmm,” it said.
It began to caress a long thin penis barbed like a harpoon. Mary shrank into herself, eyes open staring as if seeing could somehow save her, while it rubbed its sticky groin against her chin. Spiked hairs scraped her skin, and acid drool dripped on her face.
The thing moaned and shivered, fly wings fluttering like fans, and a thick stream of rotten egg yolk spurted from its penis.
“Aaah,”
it said, and its voice was like a dry dust of old wet dreams.
No longer interested in Mary, it tiptoed past her to Garrick’s bed and lay on top of him. Garrick’s chest heaved as the long tongue snaked into his mouth and the barbed penis slid beneath his hospital gown.
Potty training went only so far, and Mary’s sheets were soaked. She tried to tell herself she wasn’t really hearing those noises over there, that choking wheeze, those belching grunts, that wet gurgling.
***
Its job finished, the incubus returned through the trapdoor and melted into ectoplasmic goo.
“Now you’ve given birth to him twice,” Cypher told Letha. “Go to him and behold the miracle and have faith in your lord.”
She knew that going to Garrick meant surrendering complete control to Cypher, but he was in control already and she could hear her son crying helplessly. He needed his mommy.
The disciple who was supposed to be guarding the Indian girl dozed in his chair. Letha inhabited his body and made him walk to Garrick’s bed and sit and hold the thing that lay there choking and crying.
This thing is my boy, she told herself. This is the son I love.
But it was hard to believe this could be anyone’s son, this putrescent weeping monstrosity spewing yellow vomit onto her dress. Milky pus oozed from his sores, and she heard his bowels empty into the bed sheets with a gust of foul gas. His seeping eyes darted and stared as if they could see, but there didn’t seem to be anything human behind them.
She told herself that he was like a baby again, and it was natural for babies to vomit and dirty their diapers. He was probably hungry. She pulled the strap of her dress off the disciple’s shoulder, bared one of his breasts, and held Garrick’s rotting face to the nipple. It wasn’t very plump, but it would have to do until she had her new body.
“And if that handsome mouth don’t grin, Momma’s gonna give you a suit of skin,” she sang.