Blood Samples

by Bonansinga, Jay

  6) The "ARTIST" agrees to embed a minimum of one (1) subliminal message every two minutes within the frames of the completed final print of the "PROPERTY" (***See Addendum/Table 4 for list of approved messages).

  7) The final release print of the "PROPERTY" shall be screened only in approved multiplexes owned by the "COMPANY" with a minimum of seventy-two (72) screens, and shall run continuously, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, with start times staggered every 15 minutes.

  8) The advertising/promotion budget for said release of the "PROPERTY" shall be no less than eighty-six trillion dollars ($86,000,000,000,000) and no more than... well, infinity.

  9) Further, upon the release of the home video version, the "street date" of the release shall be delayed for a minimum of 12 months (to a maximum of 3 years), during which time a blanket media campaign will profile the forthcoming release as a special "one-time-only" opportunity to "own Jesus" before "He" returns to "the Disney vaults" forever and ever. (Note: All prints and advertising will feature the tag line "He's baaaaack, and this time it's personal!")

  This Agreement, upon execution, shall be in full force and effect, and supersede all other agreements and contracts between the two parties (except that previous deal regarding an Oscar for BRAVEHEART... which is okay with Satan if Gibson wants to keep that one in place). The parties hereto indicate their agreement and acceptance of the forgoing by signing in human blood at the places provided below.

  ACCEPTED AND AGREED:

  ICON FILM PRODUCTIONS LMTD

  By: ____________________________

  Its: ____________________________

  ___________________________

  Mel Gibson

  WALT DISNEY COMPANY LMTD

  By: ___________________________

  Its:____________________________

  ___________________________

  "The Devil" - President/CEO – Kingdom of Darkness

  Gibson Deal Memo (cont.)

  ADDENDUM - TABLE 1

  APPROVED STORY SYNOPSIS

  "PASSION II: UNDEAD AND MAD AS HELL"

  After being tortured by psychotic Centurions, crucified and left for dead, the troubled yet sexy young carpenter, Jesus Christ, is sealed inside a moldering cave with nothing left but his wits, a peek-a-boo loin cloth, and some heavy duty mojo. Everybody thinks this is the end of Jesus…but this is only the beginning! Christ is risen, baby, and he's pissed off! The Prince of Peace becomes a hip, deadly zombie assassin with a taste for fast chariots, fast harlots, and faster revenge. And he's got the Big Man behind him! Hey Rome – put this in your temple and smoke it! Jesus is baaaaaack!!!

  ADDENDUM - TABLE 2

  SANCTIONED PRODUCT PLACEMENTS

  1. Las Vegas Visitors and Tourist Bureau

  2. Cheech Marin's Big Bootie Bongs and Hash Pipes

  3. Lee Press-On NailsTM

  4. Sammy Hagar's Cabo Wabo Resort and SpaTM

  5. Kalashnikov Fine Hand-Tooled Assault RiflesTM

  6. Philip Morris All-Natural Organic CigarettesTM

  7. Grand Theft Auto II for PlayStationTM

  8. Girls Gone Wild ProductionsTM

  9. National Association of Cosmetic Surgeons

  10. Carl Sagan's Easy Evolution for Children from Crown BooksTM

  11. Fredericks of HollywoodTM

  12. Branson, Missouri, Chamber of Commerce

  13. Chicken Ranch Brothels and SpasTM

  14. Binions Casinos

  15. 'E' Entertainment TelevisionTM

  16. World Wrestling Federation

  17. Hapscolme's Tractor Pulls and Demolition DerbiesTM

  18. Hostess Twinkies

  19. "Barely Legal" Volumes 1-23 Collector's DVDsTM

  20. Veal Producer's Association

  21. American Telemarketer's Association

  22. SpiceTM Pay-For-View Systems, Inc.

  23. Magic FingersTM Beds and Mattresses

  24. Fox Television, Inc.

  25. Tony Robbins Motivational WorkshopsTM

  ADDENDUM - TABLE 3

  APPROVED SONGS FOR SOUNDTRACK

  1. "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones (Mr. Richards owes Satan a favor)

  2. Anything by Black Sabbath

  3. "Pour Some Sugar on Me" by Def Leppard

  4. "Smell the Glove" by Spinal Tap

  5. "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred

  6. Anything by Prince (up until he converted to Christianity)

  7. "Cop Killah" by NWA

  8. "Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll" by Ian Dury and the Blockheads

  9. "My Big 10 Inch" by Aerosmith

  10. "Sex Machine" by James Brown

  11. "I Touch Myself" by The Divinyls

  12. "Like a Virgin" by Madonna (also on contract)

  13. "Titties and Beer" by Frank Zappa

  14. "Let's Get it On" Marvin Gaye

  15. "Son of a Preacher Man" by Bobbie Gentry

  16. "Belly of the Beast" by Anthrax

  17. "I wanna Rock" by Twisted Sister

  18. "Cherry Pie" by Warrant

  19. Anything by Iron Maiden

  20. "Dr. Feelgood" by Motley Crue

  21. "Talk Dirty to Me" by Poison

  22. "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC

  23. "Super Freak" by Rick James (also owes Lucifer a favor)

  24. "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns n Roses

  25. "Symphony of Destruction" by Megadeth

  ADDENDUM - TABLE 4

  APPROVED SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES

  1. "Hail Satan"

  2. "Relax, consume, shop – everything's going to be fine"

  3. "Drive SUVs"

  4. "Eat more carbs"

  5. "The Moral Majority is neither moral nor a majority – discuss amongst yourselves"

  6. "Billy Graham wears a thong"

  7. "Church is for Pussies"

  8. "Jerry Springer for President"

  9. "War is good"

  10. "O.J. was innocent"

  11. "Screw the poor"

  12. "Buy Enron stocks"

  13. "Sin Rocks!"

  14. "Ozzy Osborne is God"

  15. "Violence is sexy!"

  16. "A Mind is a Great Thing to Waste"

  17. "Greed is Good"

  18. "What Global Warming?"

  19. "Drugs are for Kids"

  20. "Shoot Now Think Later"

  21. "Play on the Highway"

  22. "Drive Faster"

  23. "Stop Calling Your Mother"

  24. "Reading is NOT fundamental"

  25. "Drop the Big One Now!"

  MOLE

  1.

  The last person you would expect to see brushing past the beaded doorway of the Jean-Baptiste de la Salle transient hotel on the corner of Bourbon and Dumaine is Father William Slavatore Buonaserra. Compact, dark, and brush-cut, with an Ivy League air about him, the priest wears the standard collar of the clergy under his London Fog, but he enters the squalid lobby with an almost military purpose, a purpose that speaks more of a highly specialized Jesuit than your average neighborhood pastor. He pauses for a moment in front of the deserted desk with his shiny black attaché at his side and his two good wing-tip shoes gleaming in the dim light, quickly scanning the dilapidated room for any sign of life. The place is vintage French Quarter, its Louis XIV settees and padded chaise lounges now shopworn and weary from years of panhandling and prostitution. The air hangs heavy with must. A ceiling fan squeaks. Father Bill reaches out and rings the bell on the counter, rings it hard, several times.

  "Hold ya horses," croaks a voice within the depths of a cluttered inner office. An ancient black man in a threadbare terrycloth robe shuffles out of the darkness. He holds a small video game in his gnarled, pecan-colored hands. "Help ya with somethin', Suh?"

  "Blake please."

  "What was that?"

  The priest sighs and enunciates the words with tense formality. "Here to see a Miss Blake. Cornelia Blake. Understand she's a resident?"

  The old man finally figures out what th
e priest is saying and looks up the name in a dog-eared register and then mumbles something about that nutty bitch needing a head-shrinker more than a priest.

  Father Bill follows the clerk through a battered metal security door and down a narrow reeking hallway bordered with more battered doors missing letters and slathered with faded graffiti. They reach the last door on the left and the geezer pounds on the scarred steel. "Cornelia! Man of the cloth here to save ya soul!"

  A mumbled reply from the depths of the room. "Let 'im in, Chauncy."

  The old man fishes on his key chain, finds the skeleton, unlatches the door, and walks away without another word. Father Bill goes in.

  The room – a long narrow studio – is a disaster area redolent of urine and burnt tar. The sparse furniture is painted black, the walls festooned with voodoo paraphernalia, inverted crosses, and Satanic bric-a-brac. There are peculiar details that strike the priest's awareness – seen and unseen – that he will remember later: a light bulb painted Rustoleum black, a broken trombone, something that was once alive floating in a fluid-filled jar on the bureau, an umbrella sprung inside-out in the corner like the corpse of a giant starfish, a sense of decay in the seams of the cabbage rose wallpaper. The single occupant lounges in the corner on a broken-down chaise, an emaciated, tattooed woman in black. She bites down on a small rubber hose, clenched in her stained incisors, and she mumbles as she gets the last drops of a fix into her skinny needle-tracked arm. "You got the scratch with ya?"

  Father Bill closes the door, walks over to the unmade bed, and drops an envelope on the blankets. "How long is this going to take?"

  "Never can tell," she purrs as she loosens the makeshift tourniquet, the hose uncoiling with a snap.

  "You mind if we get on with it?" He sets the attaché down in the center of the room and crosses his arms across his chest and waits. This is a first for him, and he's not too crazy about the prospects. Over the years, in the commission of his myriad duties for the church, he has presided over a grand total of twenty-seven exorcisms, some of them more successful than others, some of them obvious visitations by entities known to him, lower demons with patterns and signatures as recognizable as bank robbers, but he has yet to actually summon a specific entity by name. It has taken him months to find a back channel, a denizen of the dark foolhardy enough to serve as a vessel, a liaison.

  He watches the junkie as she languidly prepares for the black mass. She stashes the money in a drawer, finds a Mason jar of blood under the bed, and then drips a pentagram pattern across the floor in front her chair. She positions black candles here and there with ritualistic care, and she sprinkles herbs, and she breaks the neck of a dead sparrow, and she burns human hair, and she does a lot of hooey that Father Bill finds ridiculous and pathetic. Why do demons need to torment the innocent when there are so many imbeciles in the world who welcome the attention? The junkie gets comfortable and starts summoning the entity that goes by the name of Malefar.

  2.

  "Buonassserra I presume."

  The priest hops out of his chair, the newspaper tented over his midsection fluttering to the floor. It has taken over an hour to bring forth the unclean spirit — the girl sitting cross-legged on the floor in her circle of black candles — and now her head lolls forward, her black, stringy hair dangling across her features as the room is filled with the reek of rotting meat and an alien voice coming out of her. The priest raises the crucifix half-heartedly, a splinter of rage mixing with the repulsion. He knows he's breaking a sacred rule here – priests are not to address a lower demon directly under any circumstances – but this is not exactly "any" circumstance. "Let me guess. Malefar right?"

  "We got a winnerrrrrrr," the thing inside the drug-addict replies with relish. Then it says: "Okeeeee-dokeeee then…."

  The priest stares. "Okay so… all these messages you've been sending, the hemography, the child in Arkansas with the letters scourging his body. You got my attention. Now what the hell do you want?"

  The girl's head snaps up as though on a puppeteer's string. Her eyes are gone. Her lips curl back into a horrible twitching rictus, as the drone of a pipe organ comes out of her: "This is important, Padre, I will not regale you with this more than once."

  "So regale me already so that I can get the hell out of this place."

  The girl's head lolls again for a moment. "What I am about to tell you… I want you to know I'm putting my immortal soul at risk."

  Father Bill rolls his eyes. Another first – an unclean spirit coming clean. "I'll be honest with you, Malefar, I don't give two whits about your immortal soul."

  "AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH —!!" The force of the howling noise makes the junkie's neck bulge and contort with such alarming force it looks positively amphibious, the swelling of an over-inflated inner-tube, her body shuddering furiously. "You don't seem to understand what I'm offering, Holy Man – I'm offering you information! You need to know what those letters mean."

  The priest feels like giving him the raspberries. "How thoughtful. Information you're offering now. One problem though: I don't give a shit."

  A slow, hissing noise resembling laughter: "You will soon give more than a shit, Holy Man."

  "Stop wasting my time. There's nothing you could possibly offer me in the way of information – other than the fact that you're a miserable liar and I should take everything you say with a busload of salt. But that's just me."

  The demon inside the girl is silent for a moment, the girl's head lolling again. The voice that comes out of her then is softer, more contrite: "You have noticed the signs, the little boy in Arkansas, the apparition of Mary in the morgue, the statistics in your files, those spread-sheets that you keep in your ssssssssssssecret files, they don't lie. Do they? The numbers don't lie."

  Father Bill gives the demon a shrug. "Are you going to get to the point tonight or should I send out for beignets?"

  "I can help you… give you inside information… what they are planning in hell, it's all contained in the code. I can be your informant, Father. A simple bargain, a deal —"

  "No deals you pathetic foul-smelling —!" Father Bill catches himself, swallowing his emotion, tamping down his anger. Is this a dream? Is he dreaming? Hallucinating? He stares at the twitching, cadaverous shell of a girl on the floor, looking past her black-button eyes, looking into her empty soul at the shapeless thing lurking there. At last the priest adds in a softer voice: "Let me get this straight, what you're telling me is, you want to turn snitch."

  "In a manner of speaking yes."

  "You want to rat out the devil."

  A black smile creases the girl's reanimated face. "A somewhat imprecise way of putting it, diluted by the Catholic penchant for mixing metaphors, but yes, indeed, that is the case."

  The priest thinks it over, and thinks it over some more. After a long, long pause, a pause that brings to mind geological eras passing, glaciers forming and reforming, the priest tells the demon, "I'm going to have to get back to you on this."

  The girl collapses, and the odor goes away, and the room is filled with the sounds of a ticking clock and the girl snoring, and it's obvious the demon is gone.

  3.

  Over the next few weeks, the incident at the Jean-Baptiste de la Salle transient hotel fades in Father Bill's memory. The only trace of that evening that lingers – at least in the priest's mind, gnawing at him even now – is the proposition that a man of the cloth would consider an alliance with an unclean spirit. For nearly a month, the very idea of it lies in the pit of Father Bill's midbrain like a cyst, keeping him up at night, making even more aware of the shadow-spaces in the corners of every anonymous alley, every boarded storefront, every dark window. And for someone in Father's Bill's line of work, this added a layer of cognitive dissonance is an unwelcome distraction. He lives a monastic life — the life of a ghost — moving from assignment to assignment in his battered mobile home, with its nicotine-yellowed cabinets, dusty old Philco record changer, particle board
bookcases crowded with occult tomes and theological apocrypha, and peach crates stuffed with Stan Kenton albums. He has no regular friends, no living family, no dependents or responsibilities other than to serve the Sanctum Instrumentum.

  A secret unit of the Catholic church known only to a handful of functionaries at the Vatican, the S.I. (or Holy Instrument) is the sum total of Father Bill's entire raison 'd'être. Other than a few harmless vices – a taste for unfiltered cigarettes, old whiskey, and bebop jazz (especially Thelonious Monk, in whose music Father Bill believes God resides) – the priest lives and breathes solely for the unit, an arcane group whose purpose stems from a long and convoluted history. For years the Church has employed a group of clerics and specialists to investigate alleged miracles around the world – from weeping Madonna statues to the face of Christ manifesting itself in grilled cheese sandwiches – with varying degrees of success. Even the most rigorous of these investigators can fall prey to either the power of suggestion or mass hypnosis. And like a venerable old insurance company, the Church is obliged to conduct due diligence on all claims. This is where the Sanctum Instrumentum comes in. Agents of the shadowy SI – and there are only six in the world, Father Bill being the only one based in the U.S. – are charged with investigating the investigators.

  Which is precisely what Father Bill is doing — weeks after the events at the Jean-Baptiste de la Salle — when he begins to believe he's being followed.

  The realization hits him in stages, a little more each day, as he goes about his business. In Natchitoches, Louisiana, Father Bill is in a backwater settlement of tin shanties and kudzu-covered cabins, lurking in the cool blue shadows of the neighboring cypress grove, making notes in a his log book, keeping tabs on the visiting emissaries in their black frocks and wide-brimmed hats, as they poke and prod a ghostly reflection of Satan on the oily surface of rain-water caught in an upturned satellite dish, when a twig snaps in the darkness behind the priest. Footsteps, furtive footsteps, in the woods, thirty yards away, making Father Bill start, then whirl. There's nothing there, but Father Bill feels the presence shadowing him. He's been feeling it for days.