Father shook his head, “Sorry, son, no.”
“Brother Gibbons, how are my folks? I haven’t seen them since I… came here, about, what, a couple years ago…?”
“They left the church after you disappeared. Everyone agreed you ran away, and it was nobody’s fault, but it broke their faith. They left the church and moved out of state, I’ve no idea where.”
Caleb reached out to Brother Joshua, asked, “Would you like to pray together, Brother?”
Joshua snorted, spat on the ground, something like a laugh escaping his cracked lips. “Shit, dude, get over it, already. She told us the truth about your church.”
Caleb jumped. “But the Lost Gospel—”
“The scrolls were written in Milwaukee in 1973 by a defrocked minister named Jubal Gibbons. He told my folks he translated them from scrolls he smuggled out of the Holy Land, but he made it all up while he was in a loony bin. My mom answered his ad in the back of a magazine. She was batshit crazy, too.”
Caleb wanted to slap the man, but he looked to Father. “He’s lying, isn’t he, Father? Tell him the truth!”
Father shook his head fiercely. “God spoke to me, in my flesh… but I’ve failed Him…”
“But the church is real,” Caleb snapped.
“Jesus, kid. There is no goddamned church. Your Dad started the church, but he blew it. He never even got a building, and my folks were just about the last suckers left in his flock.”
Caleb remembered a few holiday gatherings with strangers Father called Brother and Sister, but nothing after he was of school age, after Mom went away and became dead to them. Church was every day, every hour, at home with Father. “No, but… I thought, after Mom left, we got exiled…”
“It’s all a big scam, kid. Your Father was just too dumb to get rich off it. But now it’s cool, because you’re here.”
“God is going to save us, isn’t he, Father?”
Father just kept shaking his head.
“We’ve been sowing the Word our whole lives, Father! What has He ever done for us?”
The door opened and white light stabbed down into the scarlet dark. Caleb recoiled from the painful brightness, but the eyeless slaves dropped their tools and came away from the great work. They stampeded past, changing course only to avoid the fire. Caleb clung to the wall to escape being trampled. There were at least two dozen of them.
“Who are they, Father?” he asked, but he knew the answer. Magazine hustlers, candy peddlers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, handymen, gardeners, door-to-door salesmen in the blackened rags of their varied trades. Men who made such pests of themselves, that their vanishing only inspired relief.
They pressed against the wall beneath the elevated door, and Caleb could make out a silhouette at the heart of the light. She stood there and basked in their worship as they gloried in the feel of the fresh air that spilled into their dank domain, rife with her ambrosial perfume.
Caleb pinched his nose shut. She secreted some kind of poison that bewitched their minds. It was what had burned his hand. Perhaps he was allergic to it. It didn’t seem to affect him like it did the others.
She waved an arm, and rain fell in the basement. Caleb heard sprinklers gurgle and hiss in the ceiling, felt water drizzle on his face and gratefully washed himself, taking great gulps until his belly ached.
The water shut off too soon, and the crowd pressed closer still beneath the doorway. They raised their hands up, and she stepped down on them. They knelt and bore her tread on their backs until she reached the ground. Now Caleb saw her, and had to look away, because he still could not believe his eyes.
He looked back as they set her down and crowded against her on all sides. They pressed close with faces and hands outstretched as if she radiated life-giving sunlight.
Whatever he’d seen upstairs, now she looked much older. She was a hag, fat and stooped over a medicine ball gut, draped in a frayed black bathrobe and rubber rain boots. Old and wrinkled she was, but not frail, even Caleb could tell that. Thick flab drooped off heavy bones and gnarly muscle as she lewdly gyrated and set the blind crowd to baying and barking as if they could, somehow, see her.
She carried a covered tin pail and a long, serrated steak knife. The knife shook in her hand, but not from palsy. In her bright, tiny eyes, Caleb saw hideous eagerness, as she looked through the mob right at him.
“Why didn’t she cut out my eyes, Father?”
His father shook and dripped rain on him. “You have to see it, son. You’ve never had—never sinned with a woman, so it won’t work on you. Somebody has to see Her, I think. Oh God, help me, I can’t…”
Father tore away from Caleb and joined the throng kneeling before the crone. She looked around like she was deciding which chicken to kill for dinner. “The Goddess is pleased with what you have wrought. The image is almost completed, but the age of desire cannot be won without sacrifice. One of you must open the door with your blood.”
The mob murmured to itself, but Caleb backed away, calling to his father.
“Who among you is false in his love for the Goddess?”
“No! No!” they shouted, but she lashed out, slashing one across his scalp and braining another with the bucket.
“Don’t hide him! I let him come among you as a test, to see who loves me most. You must find him and bring him, you who truly love the Goddess.”
Hands closed on Caleb, hauled him up over their heads. Somewhere, Father fought, but his words were garbled. He seemed to be shouting, “Show them, Lord! Show the boy!”
Caleb was dropped, kicking and screaming, into the open space before the Goddess. They forced him to kneel, slammed his forehead into the mud, which was fine, he didn’t want to look, but then he did.
She was almost bald, with a nylon stocking stretched over her liver-spotted cranium to hold the few remaining tufts of rusty white hair in place. She smiled at him. She hadn’t even put her teeth in, before coming down to accept their worship.
“Yes, your love for the Goddess is false,” she lisped. “Your defiance is offensive to Her sight.”
“Let us kill him!” they cried, “we’re so hungry…”
The Goddess laughed. “Oh, the goddess loves you, but She loves to be loved, most of all. Her love is impossible to resist. I would not spill the blood of a heathen in this sacred place, so he must be made to love me. Pray for him, pray for him to love me, and save you all for the age of desire to come!”
They prayed for Caleb to love her, so she would kill him. They prayed for her to let them have his flesh. They prayed until he screamed to drown them out, a wordless howl that made the hag gnash her gums at him as she saw through him.
Light poured out of her skin, so much light he had to turn away, but some irresistible magnet pulled him back to her; that scent, that light, filling him with golden power, and he would do anything to put it into Her divine body, to give it back a thousandfold, to give everything, even his life.
He saw her again as she wanted to be seen, young and ripe and lovely, and rejoiced in his rebirth. “I love you,” he crowed, and fell back to abasing himself in the mud. “I love you.”
“No, not yet, sweetheart, but you will,” she said, and handed him the knife.
“Now go and find me the one who loves me least, and offer him up to me. I read your silly fake Bible, too, so I know you know how to do it.”
Caleb rose and took the knife from her hand, twitching at a feathery touch at his wrist. He turned on the crowd, and almost instantly saw himself about to do it. He reached out with the knife to stab at the nearest worshipper, but stayed his hand. It was Father.
The mob drew back around them and began, slowly, but with great force, to pound the muddy ground.
“Go on, son,” he said. “Do it. I want you to.”
Caleb hugged the knife. “No, Father, I can’t…”
“You have to, son. It’s the only way.”
“The only way to what, Father? You want me to…”
&n
bsp; The knife cut Father’s thumb to the bone, but he tugged it, jabbed his chest with it. “Do you remember the face of God, son?”
“Father, I won’t hurt you…” he said, but he remembered.
It was his earliest memory. The night his father saw it in a dream after fasting for a week. The drawings, the paintings, the carvings, the cutting, the commitment. Three months in a foster home until his father got out, totally cured, coming into his bedroom and hacking the face into the lampshade so it projected on the ceiling and far wall, and the beating when he said it looked like a monster, Father roaring, “He is your God! He is the Word Made Flesh, the Lord of Hosts, and He sleeps in you!”
Father, eyeless, stared up at him. The shiny scars of the image on his chest glinted in the firelight like the unconnected dots of a surgeon’s coloring book. “Take the knife and call Him, Caleb. Like I showed you. Do it.”
Someone shoved Caleb and he fell down on one knee. Father lunged onto the knife, then arced back as reflex kicked in. He thrashed in the mud with the knife up to its hilt in his belly. The mob closed in behind Caleb, drumming on his back.
Father clasped the knife and wrenched it out of Caleb’s hands. Caleb fought to get it back, but only cut himself on it. The crowd pressed him down, their screams crushing his father’s prayer.
“Lord, look to your servant, and awaken in this, thy unworthiest vessel! Lord, make me Your own!” Father coughed a gout of blood in Caleb’s face.
The crowd sprang back as if from an electric shock, then began to pound the ground again. Caleb climbed off his father and wiped the gore from his eyes.
Father lay on his back, crushed into the mud, his hands working the knife deep into his abdomen. Caleb was revolted, shocked beyond breath, but he bore witness.
Jubal Gibbons was nearly finished completing the image of his God, worked in the transient medium of his own flesh. The knife had cored out grievous circular holes in his pectoral muscles, and the spirals of radiant fury spilling out of them, converging upon the third eye over the sternum and the heart. His hands shook and nearly failed as they completed the seppuku slash of the wide, downturned mouth in the floor of his modest potbelly. Until the last foamy freshet of lung-blood splashed out of his mouth and jetted from the eyes cored out of his chest, Father prayed, “Awaken in me, Lord, make a miracle, Lord… teach my son to love you…”
The Goddess was displeased. She laid into the prone worshippers with the pail, spilling stew onto some so that others attacked them to lick it off. “Come here, boy,” she growled, but Caleb didn’t look at her. She had no power over him so long as he didn’t look, didn’t breathe…
“Come here, Caleb,” she said. “You’re a man, now. The Goddess has something to show you—”
Caleb turned to look at Father, who was quite dead. His arms lay out to the sides. The knife stood upright out of the corner of his drooling abdominal grin.
Caleb wanted to tear out his own eyes, but for what his father had said, just before he died. Knowing the Lost Gospel was an insane lie, he’d given his life for his faith, not to escape this hell, but to save his son’s soul, to awaken God—
The hag raised the hem of her bathrobe up over her hips. A stench like mothballs and old flypaper soured the air. Caleb looked at his father and prayed.
Deep in the heart-blood mandala bored into Father’s chest, a red eye opened.
The Goddess came closer. Caleb gagged on her rancid perfume, but he was so choked up with love and rage, that he was quite beyond her power.
“Here is your offering, children! The Goddess is well-pleased. Now, feast!”
They closed in on Father and began to tear at him. Caleb tried to break in, but he was clubbed and thrown away.
The mob exploded and broke apart, bodies flung and broken against the walls. Father stood as if he’d been yanked upright by a noose.
One worshipper tried to strike him with his fist, but Father’s yawned abdominal cavity gnashed jagged ribcage teeth and bit off his arm at the elbow.
Father moved through the crowd on puppeteer’s strings, arms pistoning to hammer down anyone who got in his way, or to feed them to the mouth. As he waded through the slaughter, Father soaked up horrendous blows, shrugged off men who tackled and stabbed him, and advanced, step by step, on the Goddess.
In his mutilated chest, the lower pair of eyes rolled and flashed in their settings of dead flesh, while the third bored straight ahead into the infinite, beholding all futures, all secrets. White light blazed out of the eyeholes like a radioactive jack-o-lantern. Scalding blood bubbled out of its nose slits as it snorted in scornful, Mosaic rage. The gaping, saturnine mouth quivered and sprayed sizzling gore and offal in a frustrated attempt to speak. Caleb sank to his knees and prayed silently as it lumbered past him.
The Goddess backed up to cling to the bas-relief idol carved into the wall. A weeping throng of worshippers struggled to lift her up, but her illusion faltered, and their strength was sapped. She tumbled on them and lay prone at Father’s feet.
She screamed curses at him, but the lips of God spoke in the First Tongue, and though none understood it, all fell still. The mouth dropped open wide, and blobs of inflammable bile roared out and smashed her flat. The blind mob backed away as the hag writhed in a cocoon of napalm, leaving a snail-trail of ash and burning fat, mewling like a litter of kittens.
Father lurched away across the basement to the door, which still stood open, spilling heavenly sunlight into the dark. Tripping on his own intestines, he collapsed against the cinderblock wall, beckoning to Caleb, and pointed up.
The divine light of the eyes in his chest had gone dim, and the mouth was only a fatal wound like what samurais gave themselves when they royally goofed up. No strings held him up, anymore.
Caleb pushed through the motionless crowd and stepped into the cradle his father made with his hands. Shaking, Father hoisted Caleb up over his head and within reach of the threshold. Caleb caught it and wedged his elbow against the door, was almost vaulted head over feet into the kitchen as his father threw him.
He turned and reached down for Father’s hand, but Jubal Gibbons backed away into the pool of sunlight. As his knees buckled and he sank to the floor, his bowels spilled out and coiled around his hands, which steepled at his belly. “Thank you, Lord…”
One by one, the heathens fell down before his corpse and bowed in worship.
Caleb went to find a phone, numbly wandering among mountains of old tabloids. He felt itchy all over, as if something crawled under his skin.
Looking around, he noticed another rash on his arm where Father had touched him. Angry red sores swelled and spread down the length of his forearm, bursting open to bear witness and speak in tongues. He tore off his shirt and scratched. The Word was alive in him, and needed no knife to let it out.
Stumbling out the front door into pounding sunlight, and birds exploded from the trees and swirled over his head like leaves in a hurricane, their flitting bodies defining a shifting but unmistakable face. The shoals of clouds masking the sun knitted into a beetling tri-ocular brow that bore down on him and pinned him to the earth until the Word lifted him up and sent him flying into the street.
He could not find the breath to scream or to pray, but the eyes and mouth of the Word opened all over him, and sounded a call to worship that shattered every window, knocked down every door.
Gone and forgotten was the time of humble begging, when he would plead with them to accept the god that slept in his flesh as their savior. Now, it was their turn to beg…
It wasn’t in the nature of the place for anyone who worked at The Tender Trap Adult Books & Video to notice what went on in the #9 coin-op video booth. Real human contact was not what anyone came there for, and those who lurked and groped themselves in the booths were the most painfully shy customers, like ghosts sure to vanish under a good strong stare.
Violet was a quick study, having learned early in life the connection between constant vigilance and not gettin
g hit, but she had her own problems. It was only when those problems began to fade into the background that she noticed that many patrons who used the #9 booth simply never came out.
The Tender Trap was the last growth industry on J Street, the embattled border where urban renewal had surrendered to sleaze, and the stately Gaslamp District degenerated into seedy downtown.
Violet came in on the bus from Riverside. Wade would be gone a week, maybe a month, and when he returned, tearful and pleading if he remembered what he’d done at all, she had planned to be set up in a new town with her own home, job and life. She had run away before and always came back to the trailer park within a day or two, so this start had gone better than most.
She found no room at the Salvation Army Women’s Shelter, which was packed with wives worse off than her and crawling with children. Wandering the streets, weighing the relative merits of going back to wait for Wade or sleep on the street, she found the Tender Trap.
When Violet walked in a month ago, drawn by the Help Wanted sign, one of her eyes was still too swollen to see out of. She looked like what she was, but while waiting to speak to the manager, she caught a shoplifter stuffing EZ-Whip cartridges in his pants, and was hired on the spot. The rest had come with it—a room above the store to sleep in and a few people to talk to, and money to save for something better—and she began to feel safe.
Then she began to notice #9.
The booths were a relic from the pre-home video era, when porno theaters and hookers thrived on the local sailor traffic. While all kinds of perverts came into the store, only a few virtually invisible types still used the booths. The homeless who begged on the Boulevard all day and night came in to jack off as a kind of conjugal coffee break. Illegal aliens, filthy and shaking from exhaustion, often had to be chased out because they tried to catch a nap in them. Then there were the businessmen, the upright solid citizen types whose wives would never tolerate such filth in their homes.
They were as broad a cross-section of masculine humanity as could be found in the city, but once they came in the door, they adopted uniform customs, darting past her roost at the elevated cash register to duck into the back of the store, stopping only to get quarters from the change machine. They stayed inside for a few minutes or an hour, then darted out just as quickly, while Lupe, a hunchbacked Latina crone who sat on a stool at the end of the row of booths, cleaned up the dregs of their ardor with paper towels and 409.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 8