by Joseph Fink
“It might be useful,” Mark said through a lot of sweat and strain as he eased his broken machine from the van. “I haven’t found a situation where it has been useful, so this might be the one. Anyway, if Luisa gets to bring her potatoes.”
“You brought your potatoes?” Nilanjana shouted at Luisa.
“No,” Luisa said. Her arms were full of potatoes. “Well, yes. I should if he gets to bring his machine. I’m just trying to help.”
Nilanjana decided that her time could be better spent talking to anyone else.
“All good on the ritual?” she said.
“I think so,” Darryl said. “None of us know what we’re doing, so there’s a bit of winging it here.” He looked around. “Is Carlos definitely not coming? I would have thought a brilliant scientist would want to see our very scientific deity-summoning ceremony.” Behind him, Stephanie poured hot milk into a tray and then scattered teeth over the milk.
“Joking.” He grinned and took Nilanjana’s hand, spinning her toward him in an embrace.
“Funny,” Nilanjana said. It wasn’t funny, but it was cute, which was just as good in that moment. She didn’t kiss him, but instead smelled him. In all the chaos around them, his smell reminded her of their time together in her bed, and so of being safe and in a pocket of darkness that belonged to her, within the sprawling darkness of the world. She spun herself away from him.
“All right,” she said. “We got the hot milk and teeth tray going, let’s get this ritual started.”
“First,” Stephanie said, “we put these on.” She handed out fox masks. The fox masks had realistically detailed features. There was fluid dripping from some of them. “The fox represents a lot of things to our Congregation. Its meaning is ambiguous and often debated.”
“It represents community,” said Darryl.
“I think it represents our relationship with the natural world,” said Jamillah.
“Personally,” Stephanie said, “I think our founding prophet Kevin just loved foxes.”
Mark sniffed his mask and made a face.
“What are these made out of?” Nilanjana asked.
“Oh, these are all humanely and ethically made by scooping all the head stuff out of a fox until only the skin is left. It’s harmless to the animal, since we kill them first so they can no longer experience pain or suffering at all.”
Stephanie pulled the fox mask over her face. The tiny face of the fox, stretched and transplanted onto the size of the human head, was grotesque.
“And we all have to wear these?” Luisa asked.
“Only if you want the Invocation to work and for us all to not have wasted our time out here,” said Jamillah, struggling to pull her own mask on.
Nilanjana put the mask over her head, feeling it, slimy, inching down her face. She held her breath at first, but finally had to take in the smell, which was sudden and fresh. On the positive side, the tiny eyeholes were narrow slits, which made the horrifyingly misshapen fox faces everyone else was wearing difficult to see.
“Now,” said Stephanie, “we delicately move the tray of milk onto this altar. CAREFULLY PLEASE. Thank you. Really don’t want to spill that. Now we all sway.”
“Sway?” said Nilanjana.
“It makes prayers feel more sincere,” said Darryl. “See, kind of like this.” He gently rocked himself back and forth, and Nilanjana copied him. The movement, the axis of earth and sky back and forth, back and forth, did in fact make everything feel more sincere. Like something important was about to happen, even if she was skeptical that that was actually true. Mark was still struggling to get his mask on.
Stephanie took out a huge square yellow hat from her bag.
“I stole this from Pastor Munn’s office,” she said. “Snuck back in through the window. I don’t even know if it’s necessary, but I felt like we could use all the help we could get.” She put it on, picked up the book, and started to read from it. Or, not read, mumble. She mumbled to herself. The rest of them swayed. The milk steamed in the sun. This went on for some time. Nilanjana was starting to get tired and hot. It didn’t help when Stephanie shouted, “Jump.”
“What?” said Mark, his mask half on and half off his face.
“Everyone jump up and down,” she said. “Quickly, the ritual is almost done.”
They all jumped, sweating into the insides of the fox skins, until the liquid from the fox and the liquid from their sweat smeared thick and horrible on their faces.
“Now smile!” said Stephanie. Nilanjana smiled, more of a grimace as the fox ooze slipped through her teeth and onto her tongue with an acidic tang. “More teeth! Big smiles! Joyful!” Nilanjana tried to feel joyful, but no one had taught her how to do it.
“Pull your lips back. Expose your teeth,” explained Jamillah.
Nilanjana looked at Darryl jumping next to her. At least they were doing this silly thing together. And that didn’t make her feel joyful, but it kept her from feeling miserable.
“Okay, stop,” said Stephanie. “That’s it. That should be it.”
All of them panting with the exertion, they stopped and waited for whatever it was that was going to happen. But all that happened was the wind chasing the sand in circles, and helicopters buzzing in the sky, and a man in the distance wearing a tattered barber’s outfit clipping away at a cactus with scissors. Nothing that hadn’t been there when they arrived.
“I don’t understand,” said Darryl. “This should work.”
Stephanie flipped through The Book of Devouring. She shook her head.
“Everything seems to be right. Maybe we need to wait longer?”
And so they did, fox masks heavy and pungent over their faces. Luisa tossed a potato from one hand to the other and hummed. Mark, as usual, fiddled with his machine.
Nilanjana looked at the tray covered in warm milk and teeth. Oh no, she thought. Because she could feel it starting to bug her. The teeth had been scattered so that they happened to mostly bunch up on one side of the tray. It didn’t mean anything necessarily, although it could mean something. Anything could mean something to someone. But it looked uneven. It was out of place. She wished she could nudge some of the teeth to the other side of the tray, but Stephanie had been adamant about how powerful and dangerous the centerpiece of the ritual was.
Maybe she could tilt the tray slightly. Just to get some of the teeth to the other side. Then it would be more even. It would be no more helpful than before, but it would look neater.
No, she couldn’t do that. Manually altering the teeth would be wrong. She sighed. The teeth would be uneven. That was just what the teeth would be and she would learn to cope with that, as she had learned to cope with everything else that she had encountered in her life.
She tilted the tray. The milk pooled on one side but the teeth stuck to the surface and didn’t move. She jiggled the tray a little bit.
Stephanie noticed. “No!” she shouted.
“Nilanjana, put the tray down,” Jamillah said. “We can’t mess up the ritual. We don’t know what it will do.”
“She’s always like this,” Luisa said. “She’ll never win even one prize.”
“I’m not messing it up,” Nilanjana said, more convinced than ever by their annoying warnings that the whole thing was a harmless hoax. “I just . . . the teeth could be neater.”
She jiggled the tray again and some of the teeth slid down to where the milk had pooled. She set the tray down. It wasn’t even, but the teeth were scattered across the entire surface now.
“See? It looks better now.” It didn’t, but she didn’t want to admit that.
“Please don’t touch any of the Invocation materials,” Stephanie said. “This is all already beyond my training. We can’t risk messing it up.”
“I didn’t mess anything up,” Nilanjana said, and as she said that, a thin dribble of milk dripped from the tray onto the sand.
“The milk!” Darryl ran forward with a tissue, but Jamillah was running forward with her drill,
hoping it would be helpful, and Stephanie was trying to lift the tray up out of the sand, and, in the collision of the three of them, the tray flipped over completely. Milk and teeth plopped onto the sand.
“Well . . .” Stephanie searched for what a member of the clergy would say here, what kind of religious quotation or bit of wisdom would fit this moment, and settled on “ . . .well shit.”
“Oh no,” Luisa said. “The unscientific ritual will go from not working to still not working.”
“We don’t know what will happen,” Stephanie said.
“Stephanie’s right,” Jamillah said. “See? Now the teeth are shaking. That can’t be good.”
The teeth were indeed shaking, like popcorn that’s about to pop. The milk steamed on the hot sand.
“That’s weird,” said Nilanjana.
“Yes, see, it’s weird,” Jamillah said, her power drill growling in agreement. “Teeth don’t usually do that, I don’t think.”
The teeth bounced up and down. But there was something more. Nilanjana wasn’t noticing something bigger, and she tried to understand what that was.
“Should we try the ritual again?” Jamillah said, pulling her mask off.
“I don’t know if we can now that the Teethmilk has spilled,” Stephanie said, her mask coming off too. “It takes hours to consecrate that.”
“Uh, guys?” Nilanjana said. She realized what she had been missing. “Those teeth aren’t shaking.”
“It’s okay that you feel bad about spilling the milk,” Jamillah said. “But you can’t deny the consequences.”
“Correlation does not indicate causation,” said Luisa.
“But it suggests the possibility of causation,” said Mark. Luisa glared at him. “What? It’s true.”
“Nilanjana’s right. Feel,” Darryl said. “The teeth aren’t shaking. The ground is.”
Faintly at first, and then more and more, the ground was shaking, like there was a running motor just beneath it.
“Is this supposed to happen?” said Darryl.
“I don’t know,” Stephanie said. “The book was a little hazy on how the ritual ends.”
There was a whirring sound, then a sucking sound. The ground grew hot. The damp stain of the milk was disappearing into the sand. One by one, the bouncing teeth also popped into the sand until there was no sign of anything having spilled there.
“Scientifically speaking,” Mark said, “that was pretty weird.”
Then, a few feet in front of them, the ground dropped, like an elevator with cut wires, leaving a pulsing glowing blackness. They scrambled backward. The shaking was getting stronger. Nilanjana strained to see into the hole without falling in. It was bottomless. Or no, there was a bottom. She didn’t know how she hadn’t seen it before. A definite bottom. In fact, the hole didn’t even look that deep. Maybe fifty feet. Or no, thirty. Or. She realized simultaneously that the bottom was getting closer and that it wasn’t the bottom of the hole.
“Back,” she shouted. “Get back!” as the head of a giant centipede rose from the earth. Its antennae swayed high into the air. Its eyes were vast, empty blanks.
Stephanie fell to her knees and began to sob, although whether this was because she was seeing her God or because her God was a horrifying monster rising from the ground she would not have been able to say.
33
The centipede rose up and up, twisting as it went, and landed with a wide splash of sand. There was a loud clatter from its legs, appendages rubbing against each other, causing a sound like high-pitched thunder that tweaked Nilanjana’s stomach and spine.
“My God,” Darryl said, and then realized the literality of what he was saying, but didn’t know what to replace it with, so said nothing more, just watched as what had always been a point of faith became a physical thing that smelled of mud and tree bark.
Stephanie and Jamillah were on their knees, praying. Mark stood completely still, horrified by what he was looking at, but awestruck by it at the same time. Luisa joined Stephanie and Jamillah in praying, figuring that if this was the way the world was going, she should go along with it.
Useless, Nilanjana thought. But she also couldn’t deny the immensity of what they were looking at, and so she allowed herself a moment to absorb the size of the thing, the way its body rolled as it moved, horrifyingly but beautifully, and the hypnotic power of hundreds of giant legs churning in unison. Then, the moment over, she went to the van and began preparing what she hoped would put an end to its threat.
The object of their attention did not seem to care about all the tiny creatures reacting to it. Its antennae, rising up to vanishing points in the sky, waggled, and it rooted around the sand, taking stock of the new area it had found itself in. Nothing about its behavior suggested it was about to devour anyone, for ritual cleansing reasons or otherwise.
“This will just take a few minutes,” Nilanjana said, double-checking that everything was working with the device. She only had time to make one, and had no backup plan if it failed. “Everyone just keep their eye on it and try not to get close.”
But Stephanie was already rising.
“Thank you, Nilanjana, but that is unnecessary.” She had an ecstatic glow to her face, the transcendence of having her beliefs verified in a concrete, enormous manner. “We just have to do the next part of the ritual.”
“What? No,” said Nilanjana, checking that all the wires on her device were connected correctly. “Don’t do that. Don’t do anything. Keep praying. I’ll be ready in a moment.”
“Stephanie, really?” Darryl said, unsure. “Do you think it might help?”
“It won’t help,” said Mark.
“It might help,” said Jamillah.
“It will solve everything,” said Stephanie, with perfect certainty. “I didn’t understand what the rest of the ritual was for. Why did it keep going after the Summoning? But now I understand. It was made for this moment.” She pulled the fox face over her face, hefted up the book, and began bellowing.
“DEVOURER. GREAT DEVOURER. THE SMILING GOD,” and so on. The text was repetitive, but Stephanie kept careful track with her finger so that she wouldn’t accidentally get the order wrong. She started jumping up and down again, higher than before, tall leaps, with dull thuds on the ground in between.
“This is ridiculous,” said Luisa, disappointed in all of them.
The creature slowly turned its enormous face toward Stephanie, drawn perhaps by the power of the ritual, or maybe by the fact that she was shouting and jumping up and down.
“It’s working,” said Jamillah. “Look, it’s coming this way.”
The centipede’s eyes were black monuments that absorbed the glare of the sun off the hillsides. Its face lowered to the ground and its mouth unhinged horribly. It started to scoop up the sand as it approached Stephanie, shoveling up tons of earth as it devoured its way toward her.
“Or . . . uh,” said Jamillah.
Stephanie wasn’t certain this was supposed to happen, but she had no idea what was supposed to happen, and so, failing any other plan, she continued the ritual, confident with one part of herself that it would all work out fine, but also with another part of herself terrified and wanting to flee.
“Run!” said Darryl. But she wouldn’t. She was trapped in the ritual by panic. “We have to get it away from her.”
“I still need a couple minutes with this,” said Nilanjana. “Otherwise we can’t be sure it’ll work.”
Mark stepped forward and patted his machine.
“If only we had a way to distract its attention away from her, right?” He smiled proudly. “I knew this would come in handy.”
He pulled the switch and there was a deafening bang, followed by a blinding flash. The centipede took no notice.
“Damn,” he said. “It still isn’t working. It’s supposed to be a flash and then a bang. It won’t be useful backward like this.”
He opened up the machine, poking at the mechanics.
“I just do
n’t understand. I’ve tried everything.”
Jamillah had been pulling at Stephanie, trying to get her to stop, to run, but the noise from Mark’s machine had drawn her over.
“I see the problem,” she said.
“What?” said Mark. “No, of course you don’t. I am a highly trained scientist.”
The centipede was closing in on Stephanie. The sun disappeared behind its body. This broke her trance and she started running, but the wriggling monster outlegged her by at least a hundred to two.
“Okay, man, but look,” Jamillah knelt down and took her power drill to the machine, drilling through one of the panels. Mark gasped but was too shocked to stop her.
“It’s overheating,” she said. “That’s why you’re getting the failure like that. If you just vented it a bit, you’d fix the problem.” She drilled more holes.
The sand fell away behind Stephanie, dropping into the cavern of the thing’s mouth. Ten feet behind her. Six feet behind her. It was like a treadmill now, her feet slipping against the current of sand.
“See, now this should work if we . . .” Jamillah said and pulled the switch. There was a blinding flash, and then a deafening bang. The centipede turned away from Stephanie and toward the powerful light and sound, moving faster and charging at them.
“You fixed it. You fixed it!” said Mark. He hugged Jamillah. “But also it’s coming for us. It’s coming for us!”
It was coming for them. There had been nothing more to Mark’s plan than the immediate need to distract the centipede from Stephanie, and now he had only succeeded in making him and Jamillah the next targets.
“Hold on for one more minute,” Nilanjana said. “I’m almost ready.”
The centipede ate up the distance between it and the two screaming humans in a few hungry gulps. They ran, but were no more successful than Stephanie. Jamillah slipped and was caught in the wash of sand moving toward the creature’s mouth. Which was when a single, lopsided missile soared through the air and bonked off one of the centipede’s eyes. The creature stopped to find the source of the attack, and Jamillah was able to regain her feet and continue running. Another thrown object, a large russet potato, made direct contact between the enormous eyes.