by Jack Yeovil
This was part of the story of the Moon Woman. His father had told him many times of the lucky brave whom the Goddess selected as her lover, and of the many heroic deeds he would later perform.
He wanted her—not just physically, his entire spirit wanted to join with this unearthly creature—and yet he was afraid. When her cool fingers touched him, he stiffened, and shrank away, feeling the stone wall behind his back.
She was not offended by hjs reluctance, and slipped easily into the narrow cot, pressing the length of her body against his.
Underneath her hair, she wore nothing.
She kissed him on the lips, passing a little of her cool to him. She wasn't even wearing her eyepatch. His eyes open as they kissed, he found himself looking past her fluttering eyelids, first at her clear, green right eye, alive and intelligent, then at the blue crystal facet of her optic burner, dead and deadly. He shut his eyes, and she sucked his tongue into her mouth. Her hands moved up and down his body, tracing the lines of old sandfighting scars, probing the untidiness under his right lung where his ribs had been broken and set out of true.
He touched her, smoothing her flesh. Krokodil felt different from Jesse. He could no longer feel the machinery inside her, as if it had been digested, truly becoming one with her living tissue and bone. Her skin felt silky and cool like a beautiful snake's, and her muscle tone was superb, no longer that of a soldier but of an athlete, a dancer.
With Jesse, lovemaking had been often hurried, rough. She hadn't known her newfound strength, and often left him bruised or even bleeding. They had found pleasure in sex, but no true union. Had their son been born, his spirit would have been divided against itself, the product of two people too wrapped up in themselves to care fully for each other. Now, with Krokodil, it was different. She was confident enough to take him slowly, to caress and cajole him, to prolong their climaxes. Hawk couldn't think of himself as he moved together with her. The memories that came to him were of her; no, they were hers. She was leaking her past into him, just as she was sipping his spirit…
Jessamyn, Jazzbeaux, Jesse, Frankenstein's Daughter. He loved all the fragments of the person she was still becoming…
…if only, he wondered, he could love Krokodil.
When it was over, they lay awake in each other's arms, their bodies too charged and relaxed for sleep, and Hawk's fugitive spirit returned, plunging him back into himself.
They didn't move. The moonlight fell on their bodies, dappling them as if with a skin disease.
Hating himself for it. Hawk wondered if he was being rewarded, consoled or persuaded.
The moon set, and daylight inched into the room.
"Tonight," she said to him. "It will come. Hawk-That-Settles, you must help me get ready for it."
VI
The Inner Circle sat around the table, nervously waiting. Elder Beach was doodling on a notepad, crosses, goats, and skulls with Josephite hats. Roger Duroc stood by the door as Nguyen Seth walked around the room, taking a full, slow circuit of the table. He seemed to pause momentarily behind each Elder, and to a man they tensed as if expecting a killing blow.
"Brothers," said Seth, assuming his seat. "I have gathered you here to demonstrate that the Path of Joseph is never smooth."
The Elders mumbled in collective agreement. Seth smiled, and adjusted his mirrorshades. He still seemed bleached from his spell in the tank, and the mirrorholes made his face look like a grinning skull.
"We must make sacrifices if our Great Work is to be achieved."
Someone said "amen," and other people nodded.
"Blood sacrifices."
This was nothing new.
Seth signalled to Duroc, and he stepped forward.
"Please take any belongings you have left on the table off," he said.
Beach picked up his pad. Elder Hawkins, the financial comptroller of the church, shifted his briefcase. The table was covered with a stiff circle of linoleum. Duroc rolled it up, and took it away.
The table beneath was inset with a series of shallow channels, all feeding into a central funnel.
Everyone looked at the hole in the middle of the table. Suspended in the air by no apparent means was an irregular lump of crystal. It spun slowly, silvery chips in its core catching the light.
Duroc dimmed the lights. The Inner Circle were enraptured by the crystal.
"This is a simple tool for the focusing of our spiritual energies," Seth said. "It is not especially elaborate. I did not foresee that such a great effort on our part would be necessary until some time nearer the fulfilment of our purpose, but M. Duroc has done his best with the materials at hand."
Nobody turned to look at Duroc. He knew this was where the spooky stuff began again.
The crystal rose a little, floating a few inches above the level of the table. It pulsed now, seeming to change its solid form as it spun, faster and faster.
"I would ask you to concentrate your prayers on the Cynosure."
Beach was sweating, but could not take his eyes away from the crystal. The others mainly seemed hypnotized, completely lost in the Cynosure's spell.
There was a blot of darkness in the centre of the Cynosure now, an absence of matter.
"Roger," Seth said. "Bring it to me."
Duroc took the dagger out of his pocket. It was old, and he had no idea what its culture of origin could have been. The handle had once been covered in carved designs, but many hands had worn these away to suggestive shapes. The blade was long, thin and honed to perfection. Carefully, Duroc gave the instrument to Seth. The Elder held it up, catching the light along its silvered edge.
With his left hand, Seth unfastened the tags on his kimono and bared his chest. The Inner Circle observed with interest, and just a touch of dread.
Duroc's hand settled on the butt of the revolver slung in the small of his back, under his coat. He had orders not to allow anyone to break the circle.
"Brothers, I beseech your blessings upon the endeavour of this day."
The chorused "amen" was ragged, unenthusiastic.
Seth stood up, allowing his robe to fall open. He touched the point of the dagger to a spot an inch above his knotted navel, and eased the tip inside him. His jaw was set, and he contained a groan as he slipped the metal into his flesh.
Elder Curran put a hand over his mouth to contain his disgust.
Inch by inch, Nguyen Seth fed the dagger into his body. No blood flowed from the wound. Seth's shoulders heaved as he probed the inside of his stomach, and he choked back yelps of pain.
Elder Javna tried to stand up, but Duroc placed a hand on his shoulder, gently forcing him back into his seat.
Seth gave out a cry and put out his hands to steady himself against the table. The dagger shook, and slowly slid out of the wound, as if pushed by something inside the man's vitals.
He grabbed the handle, and shifted the blade in the hole, enlarging it. A light came from inside him, a violet-white light. He withdrew the dagger and dropped it. His stomach was heaving now, the slit pulsating as something inside tried to be born.
With his fingers, he peeled the lips of the aperture away, and the light shot out. It moved fast, and struck the Cynosure. There was a flash and everyone covered their eyes. Blinking, Duroc looked at the crystal. The darkness at its heart was replaced with the light from inside Seth, and the light was rhythmically pounding like a beating heart.
Seth was chanting now, in a language Duroc had heard before but could not identify. He spoke the words of a ritual that was old when continents were young.
As he chanted, some of the Elders joined in, infiltrating newer prayers into his rite. The words didn't matter, just the feelings. Seth massaged his wound, smoothing it shut, and it seemed to shrink, to pucker into a second navel.
Yellow fluid was leaking from the corner of his mouth as he continued to speak the words of power.
Elder Wiggs had his hands locked together in traditional prayer, and his eyes jammed shut. Nothing he could do could make this go away.<
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Apart from the ceremony, Duroc was awed by its beauty. He tried to look away from the Cynosure, but was incapable of heeding any distraction. The crystal was expanding now, almost like an egg swelled to the point of bursting by a hatchling.
Hawkins screamed, his cry lost in the rising chant. Many voices were issuing from Seth's mouth now, a choir lodged in his throat. Hawkins grabbed his chest and struggled in his seat. The man had a history of angina, Duroc knew. He was having a seizure. Perhaps a fatal seizure. Nobody made a move to help him. He spasmed. kicking the tablelegs, his hands twitching on the table, fingertips scrabbling at the channels.
Seth held out the dagger, and passed it to the Elder on his right hand, Curran. The handsome man, a former televangelist, examined it as if it were a fine cigar, but had no idea what to do with it. Duroc stepped in and showed him, pulling Curran's sleeve away from his wrist, and tracing a line along the artery from hand's heel to the inside of the elbow.
He had once explained it in a lecture to the Violent Tendency on avoiding torture. "Find something sharp, and bare your arm. Remember, across—for the hospital. Along—for the morgue."
Poking his tongue out with concentration, Curran stuck the dagger into his wrist, and pulled it down. He was inexpert, but he severed the artery. Blood gushed, and fell onto the table. His hand fell, and the wrist continued to pump out blood. The red trickle flowed into the channel, and towards the Cynosure.
Wiggs picked up the knife, crossed himself, and struck down with such force that he nearly severed his left hand. He smiled as if relieved, and his blood joined Curran's.
"No," said the next Elder, half-rising. Duroc thumb-jabbed him in the back of the neck, forced his head down onto the table, and slit his throat. The channels were thick with blood now.
Seth's chanting was a deafening thunder now.
"Joseph is merciful," said Elder Javna, surgically opening his wrist, "Joseph is…"
Next was Hawkins. Duroc put the dagger in his leaping hand, but he couldn't get a proper grip on it. Duroc made as if to take the knife himself, but suddenly the Elder found his last strength. He took the blade, and thrust it at his burning heart. Duroc heard metal scrape bone. After a brief and bloody frenzy, Hawkins fell forwards. He must have been the first of the Inner Circle to die.
Most of them didn't have to be prompted. Those who hesitated, shut their eyes and did the deed after a touch from Duroc.
Beach was the last. He opened his throat with resignation, knowing he had no choice. Duroc took the dagger from him, and wiped it off with a handkerchief.
Seth's chant slowed to a whisper.
The twelve Elders of Joseph slowly emptied, their flowing blood picking out intricate patterns in the shallow bowl of the table. The Cynosure was splattered red, and still pulsed.
Then, it imploded, shrinking to a red dot with an audible pop as air rushed into the vacuum where the crystal had been. Electrical discharges crackled, and the dead and dying men writhed, cries wrung from their throats. Beach stood up, a bib of blood standing out on his black vest. He half-turned and collapsed, as if the life were suddenly whipped out of him.
There was a smell of ozone in the air. Duroc saw Elder Curran's plump face shrink onto his skull in an instant, all the moisture sucked somehow out of his corpse.
The red dot shot up into the air like a firefly, and exploded. Nguyen Seth finished his rite, and sat down, exhausted, among his dead followers.
Duroc saw the dot whizzing up into the vaulted arches of the Tabernacle. The central chamber was a hundred and twenty feet high, and the light was careening off the ceiling.
There was a great wind. Hawkins' briefcase came open, and a storm of papers circled like a tornado.
Duroc suddenly felt tired, as if all his strength were being sapped in a single draught. He sank to his knees, his head swimming, and held fast to one of the chairs. A great weight seemed to fall upon him, pushing him downwards.
The floor was covered in sticky blood.
He tried to raise his head, to look up, but couldn't.
Above him, floating under the domes of the Tabernacle was something vast, unearthly and hungry. It had forced itself through into the world with Nguyen Seth, and nourished itself on the lives of the Elders of Joseph.
Duroc was surrounded by hanging tentacles, as if an unimaginably huge jellyfish were hovering above him. The tendrils brushed him, but did no harm. He felt almost lulled by the contact. The sensations they brought were entirely new, beyond pleasure or pain. It would be easy to sit here forever under this shower, exploring the new feelings.
Then the tentacles were gone.
"Roger," said Seth. "Permit me to present to you one of the Dark Ones whom we serve."
Duroc forced himself to look up at the enormous, amorphous entity that hung above them. It was beautiful, it was terrible. He had been expecting an angel, a demon or a monster, but this was none of those. This was a prodigy, an anomaly. He wasn't sure it actually existed. Its surface rippled as if it were a liquid, or a turbulent gas contained in a molecule-thin balloon of living matter. It had eyes, faces, mouths, hands, but they were like nothing Duroc had seen on any earthly creature. Inside it somewhere, organs pumped and pulsed and squirted. It had a smell, a taste, a sound.
For the first time since leaving the seminary, Roger Duroc felt like worshipping something.
The Jibbenainosay descended. No, it expanded downwards, extruding thick feelers with tips like clawed mouths. One slunk towards Duroc, but his raised hand warded it away, and it fastened instead on the dead head of Elder Hawkins.
Other tentacles came for the other corpses. Some burrowed through the black cloth covering the backs of men who had fallen face-forward onto the table, some attached to hands, some to shoulders, some to stomachs. One clasped Beach by the face, and dug through his head, swelling his neck as it latched onto the inside of his chest.
"It needs flesh, Roger," said Seth.
"Why have you brought it here?"
The Elder took off his dark glasses. His eyes gleamed.
"The Krokodil must die."
VII.
Krokodil needed him now. She used up three days' water cleaning herself off, and asked him to cut her hair. Using a stiletto she gave him, he did his best to shear away her black tent, and then she tied what was left up in a knot. She looked a little like some of the women on the Reservation. She found her eyepatch, and slipped it on. Then she dressed in clean clothes, and sat cross-legged in the courtyard. Hawk-That-Settles sensed her nervousness, her uncertainty. If this was the Sixth Level of Spirituality, he was glad to remain comparatively unenlightened. For a moment, she was the old Jesse, then she was the coldblooded reptile woman again. The song was drawing to its close. In some old movie he had seen, there was an Indian who got up every morning, looked around, and said "this is a good day to die." He had thought that absurd. He had a bottle of tequila left, but he just poured it out and watched it seep into the sand.
"Gentlemen, I'm afraid this is all completely beyond me. My background is purely in the military uses of satellite technology."
"Mr President, this is completely beyond all of us. It's an anomaly we can't explain, like the business with the Sea of Tranquillity last year."
"Run the stats by me again, General Pendarves."
"Well, one of our geostationary spy satellites was knocked off course last year by an electrical failure. Its orbit has been deteriorating ever since, and we expect it to burn up sometime in late 1999. We have not been able to control it, but we have still been able to get data from its sensors."
"So we've been peeking in backyards?"
"More or less. Until recently, we've just been able to track a few wolves and trappers in the Canadian wastes. But three weeks ago, we had another kink in the course, and the damn thing ended up over Utah."
"Deseret, General. Deseret. We renamed it, remember? It was a plank of the election platform."
"Yes sir, Deseret. Since it's only notionally Uni
ted States territory, we saw no harm in taking a look. Some of the reports that have been creeping back have been disturbing."
"I have every confidence in Nguyen Seth, gentlemen. He is a true example of the pioneer spirit that has made this country great."
"Yes, yes, yes…but there are things going on in Salt Lake that we have no explanations for. Mr Fenin has been monitoring them."
"There have been disturbances."
"What, earthquakes? Typhoons?"
"Maybe, Mr President. But along with that they have an assortment of phenomena we have no handle on. Mr Fenin is from our ESP division."
"Mr Fenin?"
"Mr President."
"We turned the data over to him."
"And…?"
"And I have a few precedents for this, but nothing that makes sense. There's an immense power source of some sort in Salt Lake City, apparently in the depths of the Josephite Tabernacle itself."
"But the Josephites are back-to-the-Iand types, surely. They're not tekkies. They wouldn't set up a nuclear power plant, would they?"
"Not that kind of power, sir. Non-physical power. We haven't really got a name for it. Psychic force, spiritual energy, call it what you will."
"The United States of America does not recognize ghosties and ghoulies, Mr Fenin. And I can't recall authorizing any expenditure for a department of magical crackpots!"
"Sir, if you'll recall, the Soviets are very advanced in this field. The previous administration felt there was a psychic gap. President Heston appointed James Earl Carter to head the Commission."
"Balloon juice, gentlemen. I won't hear any of this."
"But, Mr President, there is every possibility of some cataclysmic force being unleashed…"
"That is abject nonsense, and you are aware of it. I believe it might be time to relieve you of your command, General."
"Mr President…"
"I'll hear no more of this. Mr Fenin, good day. General Pendarves, you will report to this office tomorrow for reassignment. The issue is closed. Ghosts…pah!"
Dr Ottokar Proctor saw the Indian cutting the woman's hair, and kept out of their way. Afterwards, he went into the cell, and gathered up the hair. It was soft, and smelled sweet. He wanted it.