Pentacle - A Self Collection

by Tom Piccirilli

  "Amazing, but yeah, that's what happened. One minute we were talking about the prom, and the next, I don't know, it happened so fast, these obsessions swept over him. He changed so quickly. Got involved with the occult, all kinds of different Khem. My mother was a vitka who cast and read the runes, and she taught him at first. She thought it was kind of funny, but by the time she realized what was really happening, no one knew how to stop it."

  Ellie, in her barely audible voice, said, "Tell him about that night."

  "I'm telling him about everything." Self kissed Cyndy's throat, watching the pulsing of her carotid artery. "There was a serial killer stalking the Appalachians for months beforehand. More than twenty dead over a six month period. He called himself . . . ."

  I nodded. "The Pogrom. I remember reading about it."

  Pogrom? Self asked, still hanging on her. What's that mean?

  You don't know? How could he be learned in librettos and classical poetry but not know a synonym for genocide?

  "I'm not sure how it happened," Cyndy continued. "Whether Ship found the papyri and called the killer forth, or if the Pogrom had been wandering the earth and sought Ship out and then gave him the Coming Forth By Day. One way or another they met, and it cost Ship his mind. In one night they destroyed the town together. The Pogrom slaughtered our people in the dark and Shiphrah, with his soul twisting inside him, released the Beng. Except that back then they looked much different. More . . . dusty."

  "They're originally desert devils," I told her. "But like your people, they adapted as they wandered."

  Paul had a tight rein on everything inside him; the only outward show of emotion was a deepening of the crows' feet at the corners of his eyes. "And in the middle of all the murders sat . . . that Lord, that mother." The dead Beng, organs rotting in the air, shriveled and bubbled around us in the room. "It followed the Pogrom. We never saw it but you could hear it from one end of town to the other that night, breeding, screaming in labor for hours. After the Pogrom and Beng killed our neighbors, they took the corpses and set them out in the center of town, in front of the church, before the Lord of the Watchtower, as it sat there and . . . ." He couldn't quite finish but managed to keep the swelling of his hatred contained.

  ". . . and ate them," his sister whispered, even as her hand moved to the knife in her boot. "Ate our friends and families in the shadows, the running blood, while it gave birth."

  I swallowed. "To what?"

  Cyndy looked surprised, as if the answer was so clear, right in front of my eyes. "To other men and women. Born from flesh. No different from me or you or anybody else, really, when you think about it. That's the real insanity of Midnight Falls. Ship's new order is the same as always. Nearly a dozen of them were born that night before the dam gave and swept the rest under a billion gallons of lake." Eidolons cried and swam and clung to Claire's psychic mind like leeches. "And for the past year we've been hunting the ones that got away. They're mass murderers, maniacs, serial killers—like that thing took the darkest parts of our town and purified it in its offspring. You wouldn't believe how many of the famous killers over the past year have come from Midnight Falls. The garrotter in Houston. Child-killers in Fargo. The San Francisco headsman who only went after women six feet tall. You remember?"

  "Yes."

  "They're siblings born here from the flesh of our families. But we got them. Almost all of them."

  We sat for a while and mulled the facts over; Claire occasionally glanced at her palm, Ellie drawing and sheathing her blade repeatedly, slowly, until Paul stood and the light of the rising sun shone through the shattered window behind his shoulder. "And that's pretty much it."

  "Not quite," I said. "I want to know a few more things. Like who blew the dam? And were any of the townspeople still alive at the time?"

  What do you think? Self said, filled with glee, knowing that his love had an even darker heart. Why do you bother asking stuff like this?

  I want to know how resolved they are.

  Paul nearly grinned, like we were all in on an acerbic joke. "There's accusation in your tone. We blew the dam, of course. I worked the stone quarry since I was fifteen and know all there is about demolitions. And some of our friends were still alive down there with the Beng, rolled in their coils being crushed and stung and bled to death. We did our people a favor, the ones that didn't have all their intestines torn out yet, their wrists slit by the Pogrom to feed that thing. So screw you if you've got a problem with me putting my loved ones out of that unbearable misery. Our father was thankful, I'm sure. You weren't there." He hoisted a bag from where it lay under the table, opened it and showed me timing devices, C4 explosives, all sorts of underwater demolitions equipment. "And now we go back down and finish it once and for all."

  "It won't do any good."

  "Probably not, but we've got to try. You heard Shiphrah. This is that creature's birthing season."

  "One more question." I turned to Cyndy. "How did you three survive?"

  Self could feel the entirety of her grief as Cyn's cold sweat rose beneath the press of his skin. He stared into her eyes, losing himself there the way Claire lost herself in the Vermont winter, the way I'd folded inside Danielle. "Because of love, if you want to name it that. Ship called on us first that night, to give us a chance to help the Pogrom and join the Watchtower Lord's new order. He's Paul and Ellie's brother." Self stroked her mangled cheek and soon tears were threading down through the trenches of her scars. "For a second there I almost went with him. I was so close, listening to his sweet promises, sensing his strength and power in that kind of death Khem." Self kissed her tears away, damning me. "My mother nearly cut my head off with a butcher knife to stop me, though, thank God. Right before the Pogrom cut off hers."

  We were heading to the small cemetery with the iron posts surrounding certain graves. Claire remained silent. Her indefatigable talking jag on the bus seemed to have been laid five years by the wayside instead of only five hours. I actually missed her elbow in my ribs, the fun of her touch. Philip looked much more dead than before, sitting there in the jungle rot atop his own scattered bones. Great-grandma had gone. Self called out her name a few times but only the eidolons of Midnight Falls answered. The gypsies, at least in this instance, had been right to cage their graves. The murdered wanted more life.

  Sitting beside me in the back, Claire's hand dug into my knee. I said, stupidly enough, "How are you holding up?"

  "For years they called me nuts, and I'll tell you, on the wards I saw a lot of insane things, and not just in my head, but stuff nobody would ever even want to think about. But that was like a dress rehearsal to madness. Tonight . . . this morning, all of this has been the full Broadway show." She looked at her palms and said, "You saw something here, didn't you. Don't lie to me."

  "All right."

  "What did you see?"

  I showed her my palm. "The truth is that my hand reads I died ten years ago. So don't put faith or fate in your palm. Trust me, we'll get through this."

  "I'm not sure if I can believe you."

  The van pulled up to the graveyard. Cyndy started to get out and I said, "I've got to do this alone." I got out and moved across the cemetery, hexes so heavy that they dragged behind me. The Romany understood the power of iron, in this form. Kicking at the base of the post I loosened it a little in the dirt, then swung my full weight on it until I could heft it. The rail felt like a javelin.

  It won't be enough, Self told me.

  Even directly into its heart?

  Watchtower Lord has no heart.

  I bit the inside of my cheek and got back into the van. You playing semantics with me? Its brain then. Nerve center. Its nucleus.

  You won't find it. I'll have to show you.

  Terrific.

  Ten minutes later Cyndy said, "Here," pulling up to the edge of the man-made lake. The tops of the telephone poles jutted from the black waters like crumbling crucifixes. "This is where they were born. Down there. The Lord of the
Watchtower. Mama."

  Fillet of Fenny snake, Self said, quoting from one of the witch scenes in Macbeth, his favorite play. In the cauldron boil and bake?

  You're not funny.

  For a charm of pow'rful trouble. Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. I'm gonna scope the scene out. Watchtower Lord's probably holed up where all second-rate gods hide—somewhere in the church.

  Wait, we'll go together.

  Follow me.

  I told Claire, "Stay in the van no matter what."

  "No, I need to go with you."

  I took off my clothes and put on the scuba gear, checking the oxygen tank and air hoses. There had been a high school summer spent in Florida when I'd done virtually nothing but dived, and now I barely remembered to spit in the mask.

  Self crawled down my side and moved towards the lake. He dipped a toe in—brrrr—before entering the water. He turned back to Cyndy and gave her a small wave, as if she might see it, or at least sense someone saying see you later. She cast furtive glances at the darkness. He swam off in that strange way he has, claws of his feet and hands extended, furiously at work as though he were ripping up the surface.

  "Shiphrah will be down there," Ellie said. "And the Pogrom. And God knows how many others its given birth to that are already waiting."

  "Here, take this," Paul said, handing me the bag of explosives. He pulled out a charge with a timer.

  "I don't need it."

  "Take it anyway, just in case. Twist the switch and you've got three minutes."

  "Look, there really . . . " I began when suddenly my nose burned with the acrid odor of evil, moving at us like a dark wind, and I spun to face the Pogrom.

  In its purest form—without characteristic or parameter or definition, yet still in human guise—evil has a stench that goes beyond the olfactory sense and directly into the stink of the soul. The Pogrom stood like a man, with the features of a man, morning breeze tousling long blonde hair, dead men's clothes on its back, rosy glow on the cheeks; but it had never really been touched by humanity. Living qualities were missing, so it appeared more like a crazy puppet than anything, grinning there as it approached step by step. Still, it looked more human than Shiphrah. The Pogrom carried a sword that might have been held by the Pharaoh when driving Moses into the desert for the first time. It stared as if every ounce of poison in the world had been bottled inside its eyes. But the purity of evil—the one-sidedness of it—left the Pogrom so unbalanced that a simple charm would destroy it. It grunted and wavered with the sword reflecting sunlight onto the water. The counterspell that would unbind this destroyer was exactly four syllables long.

  I began to utter the word and Cyndy said, "No. Whatever you're about to do, don't." She pulled her gun, Ellie held the knife, and Paul already had his blade out. "This is for us. We deserve this."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. Go please. Take care of Mama and Shiphrah. Don't let it start all over again."

  I turned and stepped into the water with growls and gunshots erupting behind. Out in the lake, Self heard the noise and shrieked, Cyn! and started swimming back towards the shore. I commanded him to stop and he wavered, the force of our wills meeting again like so many times before. Blinded with migraine I shoved at him and he sheared me. We had a job to do. I held out. The bag of explosives was heavy on my shoulder. Watching his love fighting for her life, he cursed me with words that had been wiped from the earth a half million years ago, but finally backtracked into the lake and we dove beneath the black waters together.

  Beneath a waveless sea of Hell-Broth, here waited birth and death of a different kind in this shadowless, lightless land. Storefront mannequins gazed docilely as we passed, dresses turned to silt-encrusted rags. Self saw everything, and through his eyes I watched it all. We swam down main street, past the elementary school. Buses lay heaped on their sides against the gym doors. Bookbags and lunchboxes littered the ground, half-buried in sediment. Patios remained with their loveseats swinging in the subtle movement of the lake. Eidolons of Midnight Falls lived on. Some of them had died in their sleep, only to awaken awash in their own murders. Forgetting the water and more obvious destruction, it still managed to look almost like any other small town. Train tracks fled into the distance. Trees and cars lined the roads, and screen doors stood open as if in invitation, or a chance to trap.

  We came to the church: its windows were filled with webbed cracks, the cross at the top of the belfry breaking the surface of the lake by the barest inches, as if stretching for God's grace and helping hand.

  We swam inside and floated towards the rafters.

  The size of a sperm whale, the gigantic Lord of the Watchtower squatted there at the back of the pulpit, before rows of empty pews, taking up the entire altar area and crushing the statues of Christ and His mother. Bloated and distended, in the murky depths of church mire, it raised its face in my direction—wings folded back upon its leviathan form, a million writhing tentacles and feelers and palp like a living carpet of striking snakes. Its head was a nearly tissueless skull with bony protrusions with ridges and tines and ten thousand teeth—featureless except for the meaty, tremendous orifice rimmed with ugly red muscle and slime. Lord of the Watchtower and second-rate god. Mama.

  Shiphrah, seated on the Lord's back, let loose with a burst of audible laughter. He was fast, and his master even quicker. He clutched at my mouthpiece tugging it aside as I held my breath and tired to keep from screaming, the tentacles and tendrils wrapping around my legs dragging me down to that vaginal maw. It would consume me, and then bear me, so I'd be reborn to the new order in the purity of a human murderous form, like any other maniac or serial killer.

  Where's its heart? Where do I strike?

  I tried using the Hermes Trismegistus, a blending of the Egyptian God Thoth and the Greek Hermes. Portions of the twenty-seven excerpts from John Stoebaeus, the pagan scholar from the Fifth century, filled my hands, motes rising from my mouth along with the remaining air bubbles. The instructive sermons of Isis to Horus had some meaning here, but all the incantations skittered into a whirlpool above my head, white sparks pinging off my oxygen tank. My stomach knotted as I waited for an explosion.

  My mind darkened and I reached again for the oxygen; Shiphrah grinned and played games with me, pulling the air hose away and then pressing it towards my mouth.

  I drove the spear through his stomach and he gurgled his laughter, mouth erupting with brown Beng ichor. Self appeared behind him—the maw opened further as if dilating for our rebirth, the tendrils sucking at the welts on my legs as my blood trailed in the lake water. Self reached his claws through Shiphrah now, digging as he laughed, both of them cracking up hysterically. I kicked and heaved upwards in one last effort and managed to grab the hose and suck a few breaths before Ship tugged it away again. Self kept up his attack but didn't help, and I knew then he would let me die, and our war with each over and everything else would be over. Our souls and selves were overstuffed with our lost loves. I grabbed the timing device and twisted it, counting down the three minutes, realizing I'd be dead before the blast. Self continued flinging gouts of Ship's innards, tossing them down to Mama, feeding her as she reeled us in. I looked and saw a head crowning from the maw, pushed out as the Lord of the Watchtower suffered through its contractions, until a woman's smiling face peered back at me. She wriggled her shoulders, squirming out, trying to be free.

  Ripping into that formerly human flesh, Self finally found what he was looking for inside Shiphrah's shell: the papyri. Ship's laughter turned to a bubbling screech. He tried to swim away but Self held on even as Mama dragged us all in. I threw the bag of explosives forward. The back of my head burned with Self's cry, Stab the papyri! I brought the iron rail down from overhead, driving it directly through Ship, the papyri, the woman's smiling face, and into the Lord of the Watchtower's birth canal. The tentacles freed me and I swam for the church door, and had barely reached the sign on the front lawn that read ALL WELCOME when the explosion sent s
hock waves rippling through the lake like rapids and tumbled me insanely over in a swirling wash of blinding bubbles, backwards and upwards towards the surface like some dead fish.

  Paul sat at the edge of the lake nursing a nasty gash in his arm, pink spittle running from his mouth as he bit through his lips; beside him was Ellie, who held her knife in the water cleaning it, her face a shell-shocked mask of frozen horror. Claire still waited in the van, crying, and I knew that Vermont would never happen. With her freedom and her fantasies lost like that, she was, in effect, already dead. She'd check herself back into an asylum as soon as she could. Philip would never come home.

  Cyndy lay on her side entwined with the Pogrom, her gun still jammed in the crushed and exposed cartilage that was left of his throat, the sword jutting from between her breasts.

  Self gasped and snarled at me. You did this. I could have saved her.

  I'd seen him grin covered with someone else's skin, but now I felt the burden of his sorrow. Having risen from the lowest circles of hell, reaching out through the redemption of Purgatory, my Self hunkered down beside these human remains of a woman as if he might take a bite. I'd watched him jitterbug in the red rains of Satan, but I'd never seen this. Blood, for the first time, meant nothing to him. He kneeled beside Cyndy, staring into her open emerald eyes, his lips close to hers, and then he lifted her hand gently between his own.

  And wept.

  SORROW LAUGHED

  At Julia Tether's art opening, a shirtless waiter fluttered over, handed me a glass of champagne, struck a pose with his red nails extended, and shrieked, "Oh, so you're the one! The party's almost over, it's about time you arrived! Everyone's been dying to meet the dashing muse."

  I sipped and said, "What in the hell are you talking about?"

  He wriggled a finger at me, black suspenders cutting twin paths through his hairy chest, the pink bow tie slightly askew. "No need to be modest! You're nearly half the show, and the works are selling . . . no, no, they're melting off the walls. Mrs. Delaney bought the twelve-foot not a minute after she walked through the door, and the woman's been panting over it all night. Believe me, take her and make yourself happy. She's wealthy beyond dream."