Its small mouth opened and closed upon air, its eyes staring at the spherical world as he squeezes it. It felt slick and slimy, and as it paddled its small fins at him, he felt a series of small stings run along his palms.
(I don’t believe it)
Believe it, she said, but she said it without being near him. All it takes is your belief, your faith. Let yourself go, let it take over, let it move you.
(Move me? Where?)
To the Other side.
(Heaven?)
Come over and find out.
To Diana crouched down on the far bank, looking down into the water. Flowers seemed to blossom from her silky hair. The sunlight created a halo behind her. “Come to this side, Van, come on!” she shouted gaily.
He glanced down into the rushing waters, and saw another face there, beneath the surface.
A face that might have been a young Latina girl of sixteen whose dark hair streamed behind her in the distorting current. The water turned red as it passed over her, and her left eye was red, as were her lips, red as a rose, red as blood. All was red.
“Lourdes?” he asked, holding the wriggling silver fish high. “Lourdes? That you? You okay?”
She opened her mouth in a scream, and several small flat worms spiraled out of her mouth, dispersing in the bloody water.
He glanced over at Diana, but something was wrong with her. Her skin moved across her features like heat. Emeralds seemed to shine along her arms and shoulders in the intense sun which felt warmer by the second. An unfelt wind whipped her hair back, until it looked as if Diana were going to be blown away, yet the air was calm where Van stood in the water.
Lourdes came up from the river, like a mermaid, like a dream, and wrapped her wet arms over his shoulders, closed her eyes, pressed her lips to his. His mouth opened at her tongue’s insistence, and he tasted the warm water and their tongues flicked over and under each other. Her flesh was sweet and firm, and her breasts pressed against him, making his manhood swell.
Manhood.
For that’s what he was now, a man, it was his manhood growing, and Lourdes the Bitch was bringing it all out for him, the slut was making him do this to her—
* * *
2
* * *
He knows he’s in some kind of fabric of unreality, of dream without the comfort of sleep, even as he raises the knife up. Night, October, the woods, Diana, hunting, Lourdes, BITCH—
It all comes to him.
The summer day rips apart like a paper screen, and the dark woods return, the freezing night, and the knife in his hand. Moonlight and blood splash against each other across the fragrant skin of her, of Lourdes, of the girl who has flowers of crimson through her hair and down her neck.
* * *
3
* * *
“And up,” Van gasps, and DOWN! The blade goes in—ooh, with a SUCKING SOUND—am I the only one who hears it? THE SUCKING SOUND OF KNIFE IN BREAST AND OUT IT COMES, UP AND DOWN AND ALL AROUND—
The night, the moon, he no longer feels like Van Crawfish, loser of the cosmos, the chill is under his skin, others look out from his eyes...he is more than just the son of a lobsterman and a nurse with fat ankles. The look on her face in the moonglow. The look. Eyes still so lovely and dark. I can see why my baby brother fucks you. I can see why now. I couldn’t before. You’re something you’re a piece of work and a piece of ass and you have really pretty lips that curl around your WHITE WHITE WHITE teeth when you scream only I’m a-gonna cut that scream outta you through your lungs Lourdes, Lourdes Maria Castillo bitch. You’re really Russian right? Lourdes Castillobitch. Ho ha ha ha. Mmm listen to that knifey go cutting—lovely lovely music of squish and squash and gush and spurt—
She fights like a girl, hee hee ho—she raises her hands because she doesn’t understand what he’s doing or even why he’s doing it, but the knife knows.
THE KNIFE ALWAYS KNOWS.
Rule of thumb: the knife has a mind of its own and is in fact pulling the levers in his hands. OFFICER I DIDN’T MEAN TO PLUNGE IT INTO HER FOURTEEN TIMES BUT SHE GOT IN THE WAY OF MY KNIFE. SHE PUSHED AGAINST IT OVER AND OVER. I TRIED TO PULL BACK, BUT SHE KEPT COMING AT ME WITH HER SKIN.
Up and down and all around, the knife slices and dices and flays and makes the mushy stuff come out.
Can’t scream no more Lourdes Maria Castillobitch, can’t scream, and I bet right now your eyes are going pink with blood and you’re not even feelin’ NOTHIN’ because you can only get cut so many times before it’s just like a summer day in the park and NOTHIN’ can touch your pretty pretty skin—
He looks back in the dark as he holds the wet body of the girl against himself and wonders why Diana isn’t joining in.
What he sees behind him makes his hair turn white, and he knows it’s turning white because he can feel it, he can feel the girl’s blood all over him and how his skin is wrinkling and how his hair turns thin and white in just a moment, in the moonlight, in October.
* * *
4
* * *
Holy Mother of Jesus! What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why is my hand doing this, bringing this knife under her skin, making her bleed, making her hurt?
The other voice that bore like a worm through the rotting fruit of his brain told him,
You’re making love to her.
She feels so damn good! She feels so HOT, writhing with your touch, with your THING going INTO her, IN and OUT and IN and OUT! Her whole body is PUSSY! It’s all PUSSY!
Again, the lightning flash of a summer’s day with the crushing sunlight, all around the river, as Van’s manhood rose up to meet her, to dip inside of her river, to fathom what mystery Lourdes held, inside her, deep within her, so deep it was almost like crawling up inside her womb. The river water splashed across his face, chilly, and it gave him goosebumps. He looked up at the sun as he drove into her, and thought he saw great birds flying there, so huge and massive they could not possibly be what he thought they were, their wingspans so enormous and broad—
Then the fabric tore, the hymen of the dream, and behind it, the woods, the blood, the knife, and the girl.
* * *
5
* * *
Van felt his pecker grow huge, a mastodon pecker, so big and thick, but not even that—it was his skin moving outward, his flesh taking over hers as he pressed himself against her body.
Lourdes was beautiful in the red light, her eyes were glowing with lust, her hands swept over his back and buttocks as she drew him into her...into the red light...his flesh melding with hers, washed with the crimson moisture...
The knife was no longer a knife in his hand, it was a tool of the ultimate love, and he brought it to her and she accepted it like a flower in her hair. He gave her red poppies for her hair, and then the poppies sprouted along her neck, and shoulders. Her breasts became a garden, her belly a wild row of poppies blossoming.
“I love you,” he whispered, tasting the opium that spilled from the prolapsing flowers, their petals curving and turning and spilling. He lapped at her for the sweetness of the drug, and still more flowers bloomed rapidly along her body.
Her breathing became faint, and she made a series of little moans as he held her, his face pressed to her neck.
No wonder Stony loves you so much, you are so beautiful, you are so desirable, he thought as he rubbed her face along her shoulders tasting the copper opium.
Chapter Eighteen
IN THE NIGHT
* * *
1
* * *
At night, along the sliver of coastline that is Stonehaven, the few lights of the village snuff out before ten, leaving the flash and spin of the lighthouse at Land’s End to sweep the gently tossing waters of the Sound. The mist of October moves like fine motes of dust in an old room, across the moonlit waters, until finally even the amber moon’s sheen dulls. Across the bay, on one of the three sister islands called Avalon, a richly modest two-story clapboard, an enclave made to lo
ok like a weathered Cape Cod summer home, glowed with its many lights flicking into high beam against the encroaching dark. By midnight, the temperature on the island had dropped to forty-two degrees. The seagulls all perched along the rooftops of the three houses, and down on the paved driveway, the refuse of cracked clamshells and crabs, dropped from great heights by the ambitious birds.
Alan Fairclough, his expression taut, stepped out among the lights of his courtyard. Raising a small pistol, he fired at the birds. The gunshot echoed, and the gulls scattered into the darkness beyond the white lights. The three houses, interconnected with breezeways between them, had been his since his purchase of the island and all that was within it years ago from the widow of Spencer Lewis. Lewis had been a curious sort, a collector of rare religious artifacts, an obsession not unlike Fairclough’s own. He kept the Coptic crosses and iconography in the smallest of the three houses, and lived completely alone in the largest. His goal in life had always been majestic isolation, although he hadn’t truly felt it before. He felt this even here, in these comparably modest digs from the palaces and manor houses of his youth. It was not mere aloneness, but a feeling that he participated in something greater, something more magnificent than any man had ever touched...
It was a warmth, a heat, he couldn’t explain. The grace he felt illuminated his flesh, opened the pathways of his mind...
He was more than just a man now.
He was a creature of history.
He was the engager of the future.
The midwife of a change in humanity, a ripple in evolution.
* * *
2
* * *
He had enjoyed his life on the island, punctuated occasionally by the arrival of a willing sacrifice to his pleasures, a youth bought and paid for to take punches to the stomach and face; a young woman or two who could be tied up and made to commit unspeakable acts. Alan Fairclough had grown bored with it all over the years, for the fire that was in his blood often thirsted for darker and more profound pains and eroticisms. He’d gone from punching and molesting, to more transcendent practices, the breaking of spirits and wills, the numbness that set in that was beyond pain. He winced sometimes thinking of what he had done to them, how he’d disfigured them, how one of them had—
Had—
Made him do something terrible to him. Something terrible that Alan Fairclough didn’t even like to conjure up, the image that pulsed in his brain.
The boy was a runaway who had lived on the streets of New York City for four years, living an existence in darkness and squalor. Pete Atkins, the Crowns’ butler, had found him through one of his diligent searches for Fairclough’s subjects. Atkins had called Fairclough that morning. “I caught one, sir. Young. Needy. Willing. Shall I send him up?”
It had been like ordering groceries.
But Fairclough’s divine depravity had grown and festered like constantly torn scabs over juicy wounds. “Yes,” he’d said to the butler. “Tonight, if that’s possible.”
And then, several hours later, the Crowns’ boatman had arrived on the island with a tall lanky eighteen-year-old. His hair was long, his face, gaunt.
“You look like me when I was your age,” Fairclough had said. “Just like me. You are all alone. You feel life has nothing to offer. You don’t know where to turn.”
The boy looked at him, hard jewels in his eyes. “Fuck off. Where’s the money?”
After payment had been made, Alan took him into the Dark Room.
“Why the hell you call it a dark room?”
A flicker of a smile across Alan Fairclough’s face. “It’s where I develop.”
Sometimes, he could blank out his memory of what happened in the Dark Room since he’d set it up, but other times the images came at him like flashes of a strobe light.
In the Dark Room, the other Alan Fairclough came out.
Not the man of God, or the man of the Devil.
What came out was the true Alan Fairclough, the one beneath the skin.
The one that got high from the feeling a razor gave him as he brushed a young man’s back with it.
The one that waited until they begged to be killed, until they looked through the streaming blood on their faces and asked that he push the slender spike into their heart.
The one who never satisfied this request.
Until the runaway boy who had just become a man, and within six hours, lay on the drainage floor of Alan Fairclough’s Dark Room.
Fairclough pressed his face against his throat, feeling the last of the young man’s life pour from him. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he cooed, “just sleep, just sleep.”
When he’d risen from this, he went to the bathroom to shower off the blood. He was still in his fever, caught between an erotic dream of flesh torn by pincers, and fire escaping from the slashes of epidermal armor. There, in the mirror, he saw it.
He saw the thing of his dreams, the creature of red fire, its skull consumed in the burning.
Me.
I am the Devil.
Not just a true believer in the Faith of the Almighty Creation.
I am the Archfiend of that Creation.
I am the Abyss.
I am the Betrayer.
The ritual of it all rejuvenated him. It was all in the ritual, that’s what priests had always known, that was what all great religious men had known. Even the Holy Sisters of Maupassane, they had guarded it with ritual, they had held it with ritual until they no longer existed. But the ritual existed, still. The ritual would outlast all. The ritual was what brought the power to mankind. “Hallelujah!” he’d shouted, reaching up to wipe the blood across his face and smear it like jelly across his face until his features were obliterated. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Praise Him all creatures here below, Praise Him above, ye heavenly host! Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!” His cries echoed and carried out into the night, and as the young man breathed his final breath, Alan Fairclough was certain that he had gone on to the true heaven. Then, the old words came to him, the words of magic and truth, as they always did when the ritual of blood had begun, “pari nue sathath yog alaai tekeli tekeli li-aluana—”
When Diana had come to him the following morning, she held him in her arms while he wept and she had whispered, “It’s going to be soon, my love. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. We’ll open the door together.”
* * *
3
* * *
The lights in the courtyard between his compound’s houses were as bright as day, which was how he liked it. The night bothered him now. The night no longer held warm dreams, but a vague terror for him that there was something Other out there...another Alan Fairclough perhaps whom this one would not want to meet. The low roofs were bathed in flat white light that even the fine mist could not cloud.
Fairclough held up his The Anubis Mysteries, a translation from the Coptic, reading the passages again, eager for what was to come.
* * *
4
* * *
“The fire from heaven is upon the earth once in a generation. It has been known by many names, and before there were names, it was known by its radiance. When the first man walked upon this earth, it burst forth from the Mind of Ra and traveled like an flaming arrow across the body of the earth. It parched the Nile, and blackened Isis’ beauty. At the heart of its flame, the secret of the gods’ powers, and man and woman both were struck as by lightning with its touch. It comes with the dying of the crops and the season of the barren land...”
He compared this with the Gnostic Gospel of the Betrayer:
As we sat together, my beloved master turned to me and kissed me lightly on the cheek. I said unto him, “Why, Lord, do you touch me so?”
And Jeshua ben-Joseph saith, “Jude, you are closer than my brother to me. We were born of the same moment, and made of the same fire. Yahweh gives us this fire from the touch of his finger, and it cuts like a burning sword into your heart, and mine.”
“The divine fire is too much in you,” Jeshua said. “In the miracles and healings, what was within me awoke something within you. You have been too close to me. You will betray me.”
“What is the nature of this divine fire?” I asked of him.
“It is that which darkens the sun. When Adam walked in the Garden, it came like a flaming sword from the archangel, to separate man from paradise. The Angel of Death possesses its radiance, and it is said that a man dying sees it but once and then sees no more. But it is within us now. Within you, within me. Its nature is to turn against itself.”
I wondered at his words, and when the meal was done I said thrice, “You are most wondrous in your supreme countenance, oh Lord.”
Jeshua turned to me and nodded. “It is in your nature now. Do what you must do.”
* * *
5
* * *
Then, Alan closed the two books. All his life he had searched for this, all his life had been drawing him towards this place, this village, and these people.
Finally, the manuscript he’d purchased at great expense at private auction three years previous.
THE DEVIL’S OWN, THE PROFANE HISTORY OF THE ARCHFIEND AND ALL HIS WORKS, by Cagliostro, recopied in 1923 by Aleister Crowley
* * *
6
* * *
...It was in Paris that I first heard of the nuns of Maupassane. These Holy Sisters had lived in the catacombs of this city from the time of the Dauphin, but were expelled by the church for harboring various perversions among them. Several of the sisters were bound together and set afire in the Chambre Argent, but most managed to escape. Devout to the Holy Word of God and to Jesus, they were hid by good folk in the countryside of Bretagne, and then managed to resurrect their small order in a series of caves once inhabited by the earliest people of Gaul.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 17