Black Goat Blues

by Levi Black

  And my fucking head is fucking killing me.

  Around me comes a rhythmic thrumming, like the air is moving back and forth slowly.

  Where is my coat?

  In my head I jerk around to look for it.

  My body rebels and I move as if I am suspended in syrup, and even the short motion brings another flash of pain.

  I go back to watching Ephraim.

  Satisfied with his work, he straightens and steps away, into the darkness. Beyond where he was is something I cannot make out as my eyes haven’t adjusted yet. Noises come from the dark. Metal noises. Ephraim returns holding a large metal grate. It’s round like the pit, big enough that I could lie on it like a bed and my feet would not hang off. Three pipes about as long as my forearm jut from the underside of it. At that size the thing must weigh well over a hundred pounds, but Ephraim carries it as if it weighs nothing. He drops it into the pit legs first, raising a storm of sparks and smoke.

  Dusting off his hands, he moves around the pit toward me. “Glad you’re awake. Charlie, wasn’t it?”

  I don’t answer.

  The Man in Black does. “That is what her friends call her.”

  “Well, I may not be a friend, but Charlie it is.”

  I swallow to speak. “Where’s my coat?”

  “Thought you might miss that old rag.” He moves away, growing dim in the shadows. After a moment I hear a click and a buzz and fluorescent lights flicker on overhead.

  Oh hell.

  What the actual fuck?

  The room is a nightmare full of nightmares and my brain cannot keep up with it all, can’t process it, just stutters around it like a man with his foot cut off trying to cross the street.

  Around me are stainless-steel appliances so common they immediately slide into my head in easily categorized slots.

  Refrigerator, stove, deep fryer, prep table, oven.

  I’m in a kitchen. An industrial kitchen. Like in a restaurant. Like the one at Mama Mia’s Pizzeria where I worked through college, not the same but close enough that I know it without much need to process it.

  The Man in Black stands upright to my left, hands chained above his head to a shackle-bolt embedded in the wooden rafters that hold up the roof.

  Ashtoreth sits in a chair of some kind, wrapped in something that looks very much like blue plastic wrap. She’s slumped forward, out cold.

  These things all scramble around in my brain, finding their spots because I can recognize them without thought, which is good because the rest of my mind boggles like a squeeze toy in the hand of a drunk child at the thing across the pit from me.

  I cannot close my eyes, can’t force the lids shut; I can only stare, trying to make sense of the thing chained to a steel rack that looks like a cross between a medieval torture rack and a gynecological exam table built in the depths of hell itself by some nightmare demon version of the Marquis de Sade. Blades and bars jut from it haphazardly and chains with hooks dangle from the edges where they have pulled free from the thing bound on its surface, their tips glistening black and red in the flickering hum of the overhead fluorescent.

  On the table is a massive creature made of horns and fur and breasts and hooves and eyes. She has a head that vaguely looks like a goat with a snout and muzzle and beard, topped by long spirals of chitin that form a crown of horn, the wicked points gleaming as high above her brow as a small child could stand. Her eyes, the ones on her face, not the ones that dot her black-furred body—those have no lids and lie bare and pale and iris-less in clusters like spider eggs—are squeezed shut into wrinkled pockets the size of my face and her lips pull back to reveal hard rows of yellow teeth that interlock together like the splintered ends of a tree struck by lightning. Her arms are pulled back, shackled to the rack, exposing a chest and torso double lined with swollen breasts that thrust out of the coarse fur that covers the rest of her body; their skin is thin, laced with throbbing varicose tubes of blood that make a lattice around each one and trace their way up to the peaks of chapped nipples, the skin there cracked and flaking with each breath she draws and releases. Viscous fluid runs from them in rivulets, pulsing out and trailing down the sloped sides to soak into the fur around her belly in widening glossy patches. It drips under her into a row of glass jars and is the not-quite-bone off-white colour of condensed milk. Multiple legs, triple jointed and capped with heavy hooves, run the side of her torso and each of them is also shackled and pulled back with chains to expose a vulva as long as my leg and pulsing as if being pumped full of air.

  My brain clicks, flipping switches into logic so I can function again.

  Shupnikkurat.

  Shub Niggurath.

  Great Mother.

  Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.

  As I stare, her stomach convulses and a shape rolls from one side of it to another under the stretched-too-thin skin and the impression from underneath is of horn and teeth and hooves. The movement draws out a cry from her that stabs into the meat of me, driving through my sternum to puncture my chest, and the hollow, mournful nature of that sound bangs against the inside of my ribs like the fists of something I don’t recognize trapped there and trying to pummel and thrash their way out of the cage that is my chest. She shudders and the cry drains away, falling down my body to the floor, and as it washes over me I begin to weep for the unborn children I never wanted.

  56

  “WHY ARE YOU crying, little girl?”

  The voice makes me turn toward Ephraim and the sight of him in the light fills me with a hot rage and it makes me stand to my feet. There is a chain wrapped around my ankle and locked in place. It trails from me to one of the steel tables where it is locked around the leg of it as well. Two legs chained to each other. “I’m not your goddamn ‘little girl.’”

  He’s covered by a wide apron that hangs from his neck, the dark cloth of it stitched or painted with symbols and sigils that make my eyes hurt more than the overhead lights. I’ve seen markings like them before tracing the hem of a robe worn by an evil high priest of some cult that had Cthulhu in a fish tank and cut pieces of him off to serve to customers in the sushi restaurant that sat above.

  Wait.

  Kitchen.

  Fire pit.

  Elder goddess in chains.

  Oh hell.

  “What is this place?”

  The Man in Black answers, “It is what you fear it is.”

  Ephraim laughs, a big belly laugh, making the apron shift, and I see that he has the shotgun that throws hellfire slung around his shoulders and chest.

  And he has Oathbreaker slid through the belt around his waist.

  “Black Oak Barbeque,” he says, “home of absolutely otherworldly brisket.”

  His teeth shine through his beard.

  I don’t take my eyes off Ephraim, not with him having two weapons, as I address the Man in Black. “What is it with people eating your kind?”

  He shrugs and it makes the shackles on his wrists clink. “Humanity has always sought to devour deity.”

  “He’s right,” Ephraim says. “Hell, the Catholics have been munching down on Jesus for two thousand years.” He spits into the pit in a long stream and it sizzles as it hits the coals. “Fuckin’ blasphemers.”

  “You do know you have a fertility goddess, a chaos god, and a love goddess right here, don’t you?”

  “So?”

  I shake my head. “Seems like you would be the blasphemer.”

  His bright eyes narrow. “You some kind of Bible-thumper?”

  “Yes, I thump the Bible every night and pray to sweet baby Jesus for the souls of my enemies.” The sarcasm drips from my mouth like poisoned honey.

  His face pinches closed and his voice is a snarl. “Mouthy little bitch.”

  I ignore the insult and answer him straight. “I know someone who is a believer.”

  “Her lover,” the Man in Black offers.

  “Thought that was you.”

  We both laugh and it feels
taffy-stretch strange to be in sync with Nyarlathotep.

  Ephraim looks at us sideways. “Where’s he at? He some kind of pussy to leave you to do the fighting?”

  “Don’t worry about him.”

  “I’m not. If he comes here after you I’ll just add him to the menu.”

  Does he mean that literally?

  Looking in his eyes, I am sure he does. “That’s cannibalism.”

  “And?” he asks. “What do you think your fate is?”

  I hadn’t thought about it, not like that.

  He smiles. “Yeah, darlin’, tomorrow when this place has a line of followers a half mile long you will be the appetizer for their main course. I think you’ll make a fine Brunswick stew.”

  The fact that he calls me darlin’ makes me flinch inside and echoes of words said long ago ricochet in my skull: It’s okay, darlin’; just stop struggling, darlin’; you’re going to hurt yourself; and finally, after he hit me so hard my jaw dislocated, This is happening, darlin’, so lay the fuck still and take it. I fight to keep it off my face as I clamp down on the fear goblin that word sets loose inside me, shunting it aside and focusing on the part I need here and now. My voice is strained in my ears, but the sentence I spit out is complete. “There’ll be that many people here tomorrow?”

  “Every day that ends in a y.”

  “You make a lot of money selling godflesh?”

  Ephraim laughs. “What good is it for a man to gain his soul and lose all the profit in the world?”

  “You run this by yourself?”

  “You sure are a curious kitten.” He scratches under the edge of his beard.

  “When’s the next time you’ll get to brag?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  I play the card. “You have enough ego to capture a fertility goddess. I figure you have enough ego to want to tell people about it.”

  He looks down at me and I see him contemplating.

  “I would listen to the tale,” the Man in Black says.

  Ephraim turns to him. “You don’t already know?”

  The Man in Black shrugs, making his chains sound against each other. “Obviously I am not omniscient.”

  Ephraim nods. “Point taken.”

  He shifts his position, settling in on himself, and I know we’re about to hear a story.

  57

  “THERE HAVE BEEN Montreaux in this holler since the Pilgrims.”

  Ephraim has reached under his apron and pulled out a pouch of some sort. He unzips it and a gnarled thing falls out into his hand. It takes a moment for me to recognize it as a pipe. I watch as he taps it against the inside of the pit and then blows on it. It’s made from some dark twisty chunk of wood and has a long stem. He pulls something from the pouch in four pinches, taking each bit from his fingertips and shoving it into the pipe, using the pad of his thumb to press it into place.

  Finally satisfied, he reaches into the pit again and comes out with a red-hot coal held between his fingers. He sticks the pipe in his mouth and the coal in the bowl of the pipe. His cheeks bellow in and out as he draws a deep lungful and holds it.

  He exhales a long stream of white smoke that stays low, separate from the light gray smoke rising from the pit. It sweeps over my face and immediately drops to the very bottom of my lungs. My mouth is full of a dank, sticky-sweet flavor.

  Cannabis.

  Weed.

  Mary, ju wanna?

  I recognize it from the period in my younger days, not long after that night, when I ran to the oblivion drugs had for me. Weed wasn’t strong enough to make me forget, but it was always at Thom’s house, being his chief source of income.

  He’d stay baked all day and sell weed to most of the folks who came to him and toss in a couple of joints if they were picking up something harder or pricier, telling them it was “for later, man, so you can mellow after you jolt.” Like he was the Hippie-Jesus-of-the-Blessed-Herb spreading the word of the THC god.

  Sweet Thom, so stoned he never realized I was only there for the drugs and was never going to put out. He never pressed the issue, never tried or even pushed me on it. Maybe I was so stoned I didn’t realize he knew that even that would have broken me.

  Huh.

  It all seems a little clearer to me now.

  I wonder—

  STOP!

  I crash that thought, short-circuiting it before the connection completes and my magick and the treacherous torc around my throat can kick and wish Thom to this place.

  Point is, I never did find a way to like the smell of it.

  Ephraim holds the pipe out toward me and grunts around a lungful of smoke. “Wanna hit it?”

  I shake my head.

  “More for me.”

  “You did not ask the rest of us,” the Man in Black says.

  “Humans only.” He takes a long pull off the pipe.

  And sits there, holding in the smoke.

  “Please tell me you don’t tell stories like a pothead,” I say. “You’re not going to talk in tiny, broken sentences between hits and ramble from some ‘time of the Pilgrims’ we don’t give a shit about and probably never get to the point.”

  He blows smoke between his teeth. “Heard a high story or two, have you?”

  “Never one that I gave a shit about.”

  Another hit. “You don’t want to know how we came to be?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Ephraim turns, shifting to face the Man in Black. “She’s ornery, ain’t she?”

  “You have no idea, human.”

  “That why she ain’t yours anymore?”

  “It is a long story.”

  “Speaking of…” He shifts back to me and hits the pipe again. He speaks and his voice is strained, pulled tight to talk and hold the smoke in his lungs. “The Montreaux family has a long history in the Old Country of seeking out his”—he tilts his head toward the Man in Black—“kind and securing power from them. When we came to the New World we found more of his kind that had been here already. Ancient gods who stalked this raw, primitive land, mostly the ones with an affinity for it. We took a few small ones, but once I found the spoor of that one.” He tilts his head toward the fertility goddess chained on the other side of the pit. Through the smoke she appears to be a mass of darkness decorated with spots of colour where the firelight gleams off wet eyes and hard horn. “I gathered the family and we hunted her down.”

  “How did you take such a prey?” the Man in Black asks.

  “We waited until her time was upon her and took her in the midst of birth, when she is her most vulnerable.”

  “Still a pack of rats trying to take a tiger.”

  “A pack of rats with both Le Grimoire d’Heliographe and Járngreipr.”

  The Man in Black grunts.

  “Those are bad, right?” I ask. If it makes the elder god of chaos grunt in surprise they must be.

  Ephraim chuckles. “Járngreipr, or ‘Iron Grippers’ if you translate, are the gloves that allowed Thor to wield Mjolnir.”

  “Wait.” I shake my head. “Thor, the god of thunder, is real?”

  “Was.”

  “Was?”

  “You think he hit some hard times, maybe divorced Sif, got behind on alimony, and started gambling and pawned off his magickal gloves that let him hold on to anything for a couple ounces of gold and a pint of cheap whiskey?” Ephraim’s eyes glitter with mockery. “He was killed and his gloves taken off his corpse before it cooled.”

  It pisses me off. “So that’s your smartass way of saying you killed a storm god?”

  He chuckles. “Not me personally.”

  “Okay, what’s the other thing you said?”

  “The Helhammer Grimoire is the forbidden text that taught us how to hold gods against their will.”

  “Did you pick that up at a flea market in Katmandu for a nickel?” I can be a smartass too.

  “My great-aunt Clarice strangled two popes to secure it for the family.”

  The Man in B
lack pipes up. “Stephen the Sixth and Leo the Fifth were at your hand?”

  Ephraim nods and pulls on his pipe. Nothing happens. He leans back and scoops up another coal and relights it.

  I have to ask. “Who are they?”

  “Two popes in succession; both died of strangulation. Stephen is best known for the Cadaver Synod,” Ephraim answers around his mouthful of smoke.

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “He exhumed the rotting corpse of his predecessor, Formosus, and put it on trial, forcing a new-minted deacon to channel the dead bishop for cross-examination.” He chuckles. “Nobody does necromancy like the Holy See.”

  “Popes doing death magick?”

  “All the time. If you think about it, the ceremony of Catholicism is a form of it. Revering a dead man, praying to him, seeking power and hope from him, looking for resurrection or security after death.”

  “Man, you got a real thing with Catholics, don’t you?”

  “They killed a lot of my family since the Inquisition.”

  “What does this have to do with necromancy?”

  “The point of necromancy is to beat death, own it, and make it your bitch.”

  I can see that. He makes a point. “When was this?”

  He hits the pipe and his eyes drift up as he tries to remember.

  “Leo died in the year 904,” the Man in Black supplies.

  “What was Leo known for?”

  “Mostly for being strangled to death.”

  “I think that would do it for a pope.”

  The Man in Black chuckles. “The early church fathers killed each other with frequency. Many of them died violently.”