“Miss Hawthorne?” Robin asked, penetrating her fog. “You realize they probably have their hook in Detective Poe. He’s ending up like Calia and my son.”
The phone rang.
“Don’t answer it,” Robin advised.
But she had to. Eddie… Or at least Tom, calling to say he’d found Eddie.
She put the phone to her ear:
“…she’s so beautiful. My goddess of the sexy, witchy moon. Skin like milk. Fair as a Biblical angel, a Renaissance muse, a Victorian spirit… one of Saladin’s brides. I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea.” Voices, repeating, playing back what Eddie said to Claire during the last call made to X-IS-THE-DARK. Voices, not Eddie’s. Soft and many… grating… gutteral… smooth… laughing and crying. “She shakes her head and that hair falls away from her neck. I’ll bet I could put my hands around it and make her stick her tongue back out.”
“Hello!” Renae screamed into the receiver.
“Bite it off.”
Renae moaned. “Who is this?”
“Fucking you from across the room, making her dance……… Goooooood, baby, underground buried alive worldly weight, stick a nice bare wire up her ass, she’ll dance fast, jerks, shivers like she’s cum a thousand times. Lenora… with new cunts carved everywhere for the beastmen to fuck her in, and Renae lifting her arm like a scythe summoning the wolves, do it to her, baby, brimstone bride, it’s what she wanted… what I wanted you to do. Shedu soared miles upon the twitching limbs and the faces of these gifts of life to death… eyeballed straight down the waste of spiritual purity, faceless little girls, XXX, X cunt and white flies and snow, Pirsya Profana…”
Renae discovered she’d said it along with them. Well, she knew the words, didn’t she? But it wasn’t really her speaking, only somebody maneuvering her like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Robin grabbed the phone and hung it up. She waved her hand in front of Renae’s face. “Look at me. I told you. They’re turning the game around on you. Don’t let them. And what was that you just said at the end? Pirsya Profana?”
“My mother,” Renae explained, confused, wrung out. “Profana was her maiden name. She’s been dead for a few years.”
“Yeah,” Robin said, shrugging self-consciously, “I know the name. Didn’t until recently. Through papers Calia left behind. Calia did artwork for Profana’s stories. The detectives asked me about her before, but then I didn’t know.”
“I beg your pardon?” Renae frowned, puzzled. “My mother wasn’t a writer.”
Now it was Robin’s turn to appear puzzled. “Uhh, yes, she was.”
“I think I’d’ve known,” Renae retorted. God, but she had such a headache.
“Honey, look it up on the Internet.”
The two adjourned to the computer. Renae invoked a search engine and typed in PIRSYA PROFANA.
Several references came up. Renae scanned the list, experiencing faintness and nausea by turns.
The first site:
Priestess Pirsya Profana, and the mysteries of the Mugivitum, coming to Rome from the Far East during the reign of Emperor Caracalla. She was rumored to have been the spiritual advisor to the emperor’s mother.
Next site:
An 11th century nun in France, real name Pirsya Profana, originally from a family in Byzantium who converted to the Church of Rome. She became Mother Superior Columbe des Agnes at the convent Coucher Auprès du Ciel. An antiquities scholar, she began writing treatises on the ancient mother goddess. She’d discovered and explored a cave near the Loire River. Numerous nuns were accused with her of heresy after word leaked out that they were acting as confessors to priests from a nearby monastery at Nantes. They’d been seen dancing with snakes. Investigation showed they’d painted the inside of their chapel with X’s and O’s, and other symbols from pre-Christian goddess worship. All were burned alive or hanged (or both) at the castle of Larmes near Tours. They were marched out, many grievously mutilated from torture, some weeping, others laughing as they met their fate.
Renae felt the nurse watching her.
But she wouldn’t turn away from the screen as she punched up other references: a Pirsya Profana in the 12th century in the Holy Land during the Crusades. A Pirsya Profana in London during the Black Plague of the 14th century, condemned with other whores who’d spread the disease—without suffering it. An original Typhoid Mary. Another Pirsya Profana who, again a Catholic Mother Superior, visited the Báthory estates in Hungary in the 16th century.
No mention of the American Revolution or Captain Walch.
“Here’s where they talk about the writer,” Robin said, tapping the screen.
Renae skipped to the link. It showed a photograph.
Her mother.
Below it, her mother’s full name, Pirsya Profana Hawthorne and credits. Small press publications mostly. The bio included her murder by her husband and that she was survived by a daughter.
Robin whispered, “You look like her.”
Renae shuddered. She’d never noticed a resemblance while growing up. The young saw their elders as old. And even if her mother had only been in her thirties when she was butchered, to somebody about sixteen this seemed creakin’ old.
She saw the resemblance now. Pirsya’s picture was a relatively young one. She’d probably only been in her mid-twenties when it was taken.
Renae shook her head. It couldn’t be the same woman the other sites were about. An impossible coincidence.
Just insane little bits of history.
…and what did they add up to? That’s what her father’d muttered. All the little bits and what do they mean?
No, he’d been saying, All the pretty bits… He’d also said, Death and the ancient game. Uses an X ’cause she can’t sign her name! Season of the witch…
Renae remembered with a grisly flash: nudie mags torn up, pegged on bone splinters. Other books, too, the pages too scattered to see anything but a word here, a word there. Magical words? Words of damnation?
Her mother’s writing, shredded by her father as surely as he’d shredded Pirsya.
Now Renae read a sample of Pirsya’s work:
Gods like a fist, like a penis, like a cunt. Stroking along the kinked inches of the rectum, performing bloody rites between white pillars of cellulite and the lipped threshold of pain, a steely sewer snake in stop-start thrust down the throat. Eels, panthers, cockroaches of gods in oily slink and scuttle through black water minds, jungle ids, drain pipe psyches. Two thorny blue roses for balls scented as the funeral wreath, tombstone cock, shovels for hands, massive jaw the mechanism for lowering us into the grave of its mother’s holy bowels.
Will we be buried alive? Yes, right where we began.
Renae’s head spun. She scrolled to the page’s end. More photographs. Their old apartment in Nubbing Cove, her parent’s bedroom, festooned with severed funk. A partial skull on the dresser in her bedroom, blood and brains on the mirror until the glass was obliterated.
Renae jumped from her chair with a sickening wail. She ran up the stairs to the loft. Crossed the bedroom floor and lunged at the mirror above the dresser. She screamed, scratching at the glass, trying to wipe it clean, scooping imaginary fistfuls of gore, coughing and choking as she smelled rotting flesh and fat maggots.
Trying to get at a reflection hiding beneath.
Robin chased up, sobbing, “I’m sorry! I’d no idea. Are you okay? Of course you’re not!” She grabbed Renae around the waist as the young woman hysterically pounded the mirror until it cracked, shattered, glass crunching into her fists as she continued to beat, cuts blossoming blood on her knuckles. Blood ran down the fractured mirror, obscuring much of it for real. But Renae finally saw something, pieces of a pale woman in shards of glass, fault lines in scarlet.
As petite as the nurse was, she managed to wrestle the younger woman to the floor. Robin sat on her, pinning her down as Renae howled in terror, eyes wide and going bloodshot.
“Honey, it’s okay. It
was years ago. No one here’s going to hurt you. Don’t make me have to call the guys in white coats. What good’ll that do anybody?”
Renae seemed to hear this. On some level she saw herself in a mindless slump against a mental ward wall, being slogged up onto the shock treatment table, wasting her life away staring into haunted space. She never wanted to be there again.
“Eddie, where are you?” she murmured, then stopped struggling and simply wept.
“We’ll find him, baby,” Robin promised her, using hands she’d employed to hold Renae to now tenderly stroke her face. “We’ll just go find him.”
– | – | –
Chapter 26
Tom hummed Mysterioso as he checked into the courthouse to see Thelonious Spunk. Great piece of music, a keyboard’s animal, crouched in improvisation. A metamorphosing jewel in the crown of percussive bop.
It really bugged him that this killer chose T.S. Monk’s name to corrupt. Now it would always be at the back of his mind when he heard his favorite jazz. Listening at the air, walking the baseline, architectural hammering kicks in, and bam! He’d think of XXX/OOO.
Tom bit his tongue, swallowing the tune so he could concentrate. They ushered her into the interview room, nice as pie, with no restraints?
“She’s behaved for two weeks,” the staff shrink explained. “She’s cooperating. We’ve dropped the strongest drugs and the leg-irons. She’s not my definition of sane, but neither is she dangerous at this point.”
Tom gawped at the prisoner, who seemed bleary. “No drugs?”
“I didn’t say that. We’re using a light sedative.”
Tom studied her, wondering if she faked being under the influence. He knew a person could get used to meds until they had no effect.
“What can I do for you, Detective Larson?” she asked, smiling.
“How are you faring since you can’t call X-IS-THE-DARK anymore?” He searched the killer’s placid face for a response to the phone service’s name.
“Fine, thanks. I don’t need to call Justine. She calls me,” Spunk replied, docile as a teddy bear. Just a regular guy-who-used-to-have-breasts.
Tom hid his excitement. This was his hunch. “How’s that? There’s no phone in your cell.”
She shrugged. “They take me to it. I sit and wait a few seconds. Justine calls.”
Tom’d read the file. Calia Abrams asked for the phone every day, ostensibly to talk to her legal team. But she never made a call. Nor was a call ever listed as coming in to her, even though the guard swore the phone rang and she’d pick it up, speaking for a few minutes.
“How long have you been talking to Justine?” Tom asked.
“I made the first call on Valentine’s Day,” the murderer replied with a fond sigh. “That’s when I began to work on the second volume.”
“A little more than six weeks before you abducted Judith David,” Tom pointed out. “How often did you call this Justine or any other X-IS-THE-DARK operator?”
Calia winked. “I only ever used Justine. She’s an unctuous bitch but, for all her protests, she’s got to have it. She was who answered whenever I called—after I started on the sequel. Because Profana was killed by her husband. Well, time-wise, that was after she was killed that I did the work for the first. Then all I did was read what she sent me and let the prose guide me. But then—her old man—and I had to talk to someone if I thought about another necrOmania seXualis. That was, at first, a couple times a week. Then four or five. And I always called to tell Justine whenever I hired a new model for the shots. She’d get the messages to Profana.”
“How could Justine get messages to Profana if she was dead? And you say she was already dead yet you received her work, from her? And her old man…? I’m confused,” Tom said truthfully. Shit, what a nutjob.
“I haven’t received any of her writing for the sequel.” Calia bowed her head and closed her eyes. “I’ve been replaced. I’m not her white hound anymore.”
Tom leaned forward. Was she crying?
The cellphone on Tom’s hip beeped a few notes from Criss-Cross, another of Monk’s numbers.
White hound?
“Is that for me?” Calia asked, depression suddenly lifted. “Please, I’ll bet that’s Justine. It’s for me, isn’t it?”
Tom answered, nervous it might actually be who the killer expected. Shit. Then what? “Yeah?”
Tom held the cell out to Calia, letting her hear the dial tone.
“Whoever it was hung up,” he said.
««—»»
They gave him a shot that night but it didn’t take. Never did anymore. Just before that he’d asked for his phone privilege. He’d waited and waited, but Justine never called. Had it been her on the cop’s cell phone? Did she hang up when the detective spoke? Oh please… would she ever call again?
In the Thesaurus Rex, the mondo unabridged, under words listed for indication: symbol, symptom, and signal were synonyms.
No more hug and kiss. No more X and O for Thelonious Spunk as he was no longer useful.
What had he done wrong?
It had been his own idea—his decision—to create a sequel to necrOmania seXualis. He’d hoped it would cause Pirsya Profana to contact him again, to stroke the head of her white hound, to redeem and avenge him in darkness traded for blood. This was weakness, selfishness of his own device. Pirsya had already progressed to the next step and… he might’ve ruined everything in his attempt to get her back. Not that Justine bothered to tell him Pirsya was pissed off at him. She just listened and listened and sobbed.
Was this so? Thelonious knew the spreading of this fear was part of Profana’s final commitment. But how did dead people make commitments? The detective had looked at him like he was sitting at both ends of the seesaw.
But those who heard the idea, this ‘spiritual mania as an evil plague’, scoffed at it. They couldn’t grasp the theory that it was actually as if you’d tasted the forbidden fruit from The Tree Of Knowledge. Such sudden infusion of massive wisdom came with passions and rages long before the introduction of serenity.
These fools, the cops who brought him in, the media, the masses, they all believed he’d abandoned his womanly incarnation as Calia, to then slaughter others of her gender out of hatred for females. He’d had to give up being Calia to emerge as the white hound, to serve Pirsya and, indeed, all the cause which only on its surface appeared misogynistic.
If only they could’ve read necrOmania seXualis, perhaps their third eyes would have opened.
Through the cell bars, nuns filed down the corridor. They didn’t look at him or genuflect their cabal. They didn’t cross their arms over their breasts or blow him embracing shadows. They just went past, skirts rustling like hissing serpents. Then they were gone.
He grasped the bars of his cell. He was stuck, no way to offer up more sacrifices.
“Can’t I?” he asked himself.
What consisted of the best sacrifice if not of the self? It must be final. After that, you were no more. The universe of your specific gifts hit empty.
Spunk thought of himself as male… Yet, I still possess a womb. I am the androgyne creator!
He reached down, hand snaking under the waistband of the prison-issue trousers, fisting knuckles up, pushing between his legs. Rough against his thighs, it didn’t arouse him. Thelonious had long ago clipped out what remained of the totem to a power history held over women. Right after Calia had been gang-raped and her totem, her clitoris, had been irreparably mutilated.
The fist went in as he doubled over with sandpapery cramps. He went as high as internal works allowed. He couldn’t afford the proper hormone treatments. The most he’d ever received were some steroids that thickened his muscles, hard if not bulging. Since his arrest, he hadn’t gotten those either. A few days ago he suffered his first menstrual cycle since the rape, two years ago.
This meant he had eggs.
He’d haul these out. They would be his sacrifice. He’d be neither a producer down there n
or would anything die in that place. He’d be neither womb nor tomb. It’s what the vagina meant in the cyclical goddess, the hole for borning and burying. Life and death in the same circle.
Just like time. Which was why it made no sense to the cops when he tried to explain the first book, the second book, and Pirsya being dead.
He managed to open his fist, grasping at insides, clawing, tearing. Warmth trickled down his wrist, then gouted. He understood as the steady stream became an iron flood that something was dying down there after all.
A phone rang in the guard’s office.
“Someone get that!” he cried. Then strength ebbed away, tidally scarlet, and the most he managed was a whisper. “I think that may be for me.”
««—»»
Around in Tom Larson’s head, Mysterioso. Humming it, whistling it, tapping his teeth to sharply-memorized rhythms. Made him wonder if a man who hummed tunes all the time, did it to escape a world he felt trapped in, unhappy with job or daily-nightly grind. He slipped somewhere, permeated with violet haze, the chinkle of glasses with ice and the tickling of ivory/ebony keys. Yet wasn’t ivory a kind of bone and ebony the color of the shadow’s center?
Coming into Nubbing Cove, Tom tried not to breathe. The pollution wall was noxious. It didn’t stink like smog in the rest of the city. This was more like sewage from throwing shit into gutters, garbage and dead animals rotting in piles, the reek of bodies burning with ancient spices… wood, coal, peat smoldering.
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