It was then that he almost tripped over something that cried out and scuttled away. He looked down and saw an Arab child in rags, its eyes wide and frightened and its body reduced to the merest house of bone. The elbows looked as sharp as daggers and the knees were flat pads on rails of legs. Naughton decided the child was male and that he had probably fallen and been injured in the rush of the crowd. As he looked closer he saw a metal collar around the child’s neck, attached to a chain that let out about three feet of slack, then joined to a metal spike driven firmly into the sand. The child seemed on the verge of hysteria; he cringed, holding up his hands for mercy from the man towering over him.
Naughton stepped back a few paces, realizing with a curious and alien sense of power that, if he had so desired, he could have crushed the child with one well-placed slam of his boot.
The great clamor of the bell stopped so abruptly that the sudden silence made Naughton’s ears ring. The assembly was quieted; figures lay prone on the ground or kneeled in deference to the glowering statue. Naughton, breaking out in a sweat of absolute fear, looked around for Musallim, but the man had been sucked into the maelstrom. It was not so much the man Naughton sought as the safety of his revolver. Now, standing amid the sour smells of sweat and anticipation, Naughton again felt compelled to seek the eyes of the idol. Its gaze rooted him to the spot. He heard a roar in his head like someone shouting at him from a great distance and he said, No no this cannot be!
He was awed by the utter power of the figure as it stood triumphant over the child. How strong and firm it was, he thought. It was the master of them all. When they’d all died and their flesh had decayed back to the dust it would still be there, haughty and sure, in its stone body that had worn the coats of countless ages. He was suddenly ashamed of his frailty. He wanted to fall to his knees and hide his face, but he could not. He trembled, caught between the statue and the mob and unable to turn his back on either.
Naughton was aware of a new sound. The wind had risen to a high-pitched wail that ripped past the great tent. Around him the walls were beaten by the fists of those who had not found room inside. The tent shuddered and rippled. Ropes and support beams groaned. Naughton thought for an instant that the entire enclosure and all in it would be ravaged by the force of the gathering sandstorm.
From behind him, at the rear of the mass, someone screamed brokenly, a strangling sound. Naughton turned to look over the assembly but he couldn’t see back as far as the source of the sound. He thought another fight had broken out. And then a Bedouin very near him cried out and put his hands over his ears, throwing himself to the ground and rolling amid the other bodies.
Naughton stood as if in a trance, the sweat beading on his face and dripping softly to his collar.
He watched as the throes began to spread. The wealthy Kuwaitis and Bedouin beggars alike took up the same moan, the same terrible cry of hatred. Scattered fights erupted. Naughton saw the gleam of bloodlust in their eyes as they sprang at each other’s throats. He drew back against the statue, feeling somehow protected by its bulk. When the men and women struggled to their feet and attacked each other without hesitation the screaming, moaning din rose and rose until Naughton thought he was going mad. The noise pounded at his temples and he cringed, unable to protect himself.
He saw men ripping the clothes from women and then copulating with them in the churned sand. Women threw their skirts over their heads and spread their legs for anyone who would take them. Gradually the fighting altered itself into an endless series of private sexual combats, but here and there new fights began over partners. Naughton saw men and women wildly hammering each other with no shame nor guilt; women used brutally and then thrown aside for the next pair of ready thighs. He was sickened but could not turn away; it was beyond his power to turn away. A copulating pair rolled against him and he stepped back out of their way. Someone, a Bedouin, screamed something in his ear and leaped for him. He wrestled away from the man and saw the Bedouin dragged down into a heap of struggling bodies. He moved back to get away from sweating nude figures plastered with sand and as he did he stumbled again over the child. He said, “Goddammit!” and kicked out blindly, hearing a grunt as his boot struck flesh. A hollow-eyed woman with gray decaying teeth groped at his crotch. He swung out at her, his stomach reeling, and caught her solidly beneath the chin. Another woman clutched at his back, her nails raking open his shirt while her teeth tore at his ear. Naughton cursed and pushed her off, his chest heaving and blood dripping down from his ravaged earlobe. A gaunt man in stained robes kicked at his groin, but Naughton caught the man’s ankle and heaved him backward onto a stuporous nude couple.
He had no time to think; the blood boiled in his brain. Goddamn them, he said. Goddamn all of them to hell. They were going to kill both themselves and him too; that was it. This would go on until they were all dead. He heard pistol shots and wondered if he could find Musalhm. He could hardly breathe for the awful stink. He was choking. Goddamn them, he said. They’re trying to kill me. He stumbled against two Bedouins embroiled in a knife fight; one of the men bled from a long gash across his chest and his weak eyes mirrored the loss of blood. The draining man saw Naughton and, turning toward him with a foul curse, lifted his arm to strike with his weapon. At once his opponent took advantage; his arm flashed as he drove his weapon into the small of the wounded man’s back.
Naughton picked up the fallen man’s knife and backed away as the victor approached like a dark juggernaut. Naughton screamed, “Get away!” but his voice was lost in the raging din. He saw murder in the eyes of the other man. Someone behind Naughton shrieked loudly into his ear, and as he spun around to strike he tripped over a body and fell heavily, at the same time tearing the knife back and forth with newfound strength to save his own life.
And then the moaning ceased.
Those fighting in bloody sand stared as if someone had abruptly startled them from their anger. The copulating bodies slowed their sexual throes. Naughton saw Musallim standing halfway across the tent, the gun still in his hand. Their eyes met.
Naughton trembled in rage and confusion. His arms and chest were sticky and warm, but he was only dimly aware that he had bitten into his lower Up. He felt feverish, on the verge of collapse. As the sweet smell of blood reached him he dropped the knife and, like a wounded animal, pressed his face against the wet sand.
He had slashed the throat of the child.
With a cry Naughton pushed at the slack body and dragged himself through the sand. The child’s eyes were open above its horrible mauled throat; they stared blankly at Naughton and the wound made him think the child was laughing through blood-caked lips. Naughton dragged over bodies that sought to touch him, to clutch at his drawn face and tear strips from his tattered shirt. He hid his face from them and cringed at the kiss of crawling hands.
And then the sound grew even louder, they were calling the name over and over. He felt as if he were encased in a vault with fleshy walls. He reached out and touched a woman’s bare thigh. She sucked eagerly at his mouth. Around him they lifted their arms to the ceiling and the name Baal Baal Baal whirled about his head. When he took a breath it was the breath of Baal. When he clutched at slippery flesh it was the flesh of Baal. When he kissed a pair of straining lips they were the lips of Baal.
Sweat filled his eyes. His vision became cloudily dreamlike. He suddenly felt elated and free, caressed intimately by a woman—or more than one woman—he had never even seen before. The smell of blood had seemed to heighten his general sensory awareness. He ripped at the remnants of his shirt, suddenly wishing to be rid of it, and a woman bit like a wild thing at his stomach. The voices around him reached a fever pitch and he let the fever take him. The name throbbed within him. It had already filled his mouth before he could speak. He said, “Baal.”
Through his blurred eyes he saw men moving among the assembly. One of them he seemed to recognize though he couldn’t remember from where. The multitude shrieked in a frenzy. He tried to
rise up but was too weak; he remained where he was, his head down. And then someone took his arm and began to pull him steadily to his feet. The grip was tight and strong. Naughton could feel nails biting into his flesh. He tried to see who it was but he could not; the man towered over him like the bulbous-organed statue.
A finger touched his forehead.
He felt a sensation like a mild electric shock course through him; it set him on fire and made the blood tingle. He opened his mouth to cry out in an ecstatic agony as his blood turned to liquid fire. Then the man released him and was gone in the crush of the assembly.
Someone else moved beside him and held him as his knees sagged. He looked across and through the mist could make out the placid, drained face of Musallim. His chest was marked with the paths of riotous fingernails and his headdress had been torn away. Naughton blinked. On the man’s forehead, directly between his eyes, was a small red mark that looked like some sort of stain. No, Naughton told himself, no stain. No stain. A fingerprint. A fingerprint.
When he reached out to touch it with grasping empty fingers his knees finally buckled.
Chapter 15
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WHILE HE WAS PACKING Virga came across the copy of Time magazine that had arrived in the mail some days before. He had read it cover to cover, concentrating on the article that had first attracted his interest. Now he took the magazine and walked through the gray-carpeted hallway into his study. He switched on the lights and sat at his desk to reread the article because in the space of a few days it had become more meaningful than he could have imagined.
It was under the heading Religion. Two words, in the magazine’s bold typeface, began the article: The Messiah? There was a picture of ragged men and women huddled around a fire, leering and gesturing toward the camera. And another picture, enlarged and very grainy, showed a figure standing on the balcony of a great turreted palace. The caption read “Baal.”
Virga reached for a pipe from the rack on his desk and lit it thoughtfully. The article contained a piecemeal picture of the swarm of people who had flooded into Kuwait and gathered at a religious shrine erected in the desert. The correspondent had evidently been able to work only with secondhand sources and thus the philosophy of the “Baalism movement” was not clear; the article indicated that “Baalism” sought to reinstate individual power. But the primary figure, this mysterious man who called himself Baal, granted no interviews and gave out no public relations material. Kuwait City and its surrounding desert villages, said the article, “are on the verge of an uncontained religious hysteria due to the very presence of this man, whom some recognize as the living Muhammad, the chosen one, the Messiah.” Virga closed the magazine and pushed it across the desk.
He sat motionless. This was certainly a madman who had taken the name of an ancient Canaanite god of sexuality and sacrifice. But why? For what purpose? The worship of Baal, some fifteen hundred years before Christ, involved extravagant and loathsome orgies, child sacrifice, and the transformation of the temple into a house of sodomy and prostitution. It was unbelievable to Virga that any sane man should hope to identify himself with a figure whom Jehovah had ordered banished from the land of Canaan. Under the worship of Baal, primarily a god of fertility, Canaan became a marketplace of flesh and savagery; Virga knew that archaeologists who dug the ruined Canaanite cities at Hazor and Megiddo found abominations shocking to a modern world: skeletons of infants stuffed into rude earthen jars for sacrificial burial, idols with warriorlike features and hugely exaggerated sexual organs. There were other times and places, as well, in which the name Baal had surfaced: about three thousand years before Christ he was the “storm-god” of the Amorites; in the sixteenth century, having fallen from grace by the hand of Jehovah so long before, he preferred to cast his lot with the darker fates and was identified by demonologist Jean Wier as a demon prince with three heads: of a man, a toad, and a cat.
And this man, this “Baal,” was the one whom Naughton had gone to find.
Judith Naughton had telephoned Virga one afternoon at his office.
“I was wondering,” she said calmly, “if you had heard anything from Donald in the last week or so?”
“No, I haven’t,” said Virga. “I expected him to be back by now. He isn’t?”
“No.”
Virga waited for her to say something more. When she didn’t he said, uncomfortably, “Well, he’s probably all wrapped up in his project. You know how we so-called men of learning act like children when we’re working. We lose all sense of time. By the way, wasn’t Timmy’s birthday last week? What is he now? Seven?”
“Yes. Seven. Donald bought him a present before he left.”
“Oh. Anyway, I really expected to hear more from Donald by now. I received a few letters, just general information on how he was progressing. But nothing in the last three weeks. Actually I need him back to give me an idea of the content of his courses for next semester. Any notion when he’s returning?”
“No,” she said. Virga heard her suddenly choke.
“Judith?” he asked. “Is anything wrong?”
And when he met her at lunch the following afternoon he noticed her trembling hands and the swollen pouches beneath her eyes. He ordered a drink for her and said, “Now. You haven’t told me what the problem is. Here I am doing my best to cheer you and you won’t give me an inch.” He smiled gently. “I don’t understand the modern woman. I suppose I should give up trying.”
She returned his smile, awkwardly, and Virga saw that she was extremely disturbed. He leaned forward slightly and said, “I’d like to help you if I can.”
Judith looked into her drink; Virga knew she was deliberately avoiding his gaze. She toyed with the stem of the glass and said, “I did receive a letter from Donald. A week or so ago. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t know whom to talk to. I thought maybe it was some kind of joke or something; I don’t know what I thought.” She reached into her handbag. The letter was folded and refolded and bore the stains of a long journey. She slid it across the table to Virga. “Here,” she said.
He opened the envelope and carefully unfolded a piece of tattered paper. There was only one word on it, scribbled in an almost illegible handwriting. The word Goodbye.
Virga said, “This isn’t Donald’s handwriting. He didn’t send this.”
“Yes,” she said. “I recognize the handwriting except it’s distorted and hurried.” She put a hand to her face. “I don’t know what I’ve done.” She began to tremble and caught back a sob.
“Did he tell you where he was staying?”
“Yes. I called them but they told me he’d left all his clothes and suitcases and just…gone.” She looked up, suddenly pleading with him. “We never had any trouble. Honestly. Just, you know, arguments over little things. But never anything to make him just decide to leave me with no warning. This is not like him…” She dropped her eyes, ashamed at having dragged him into this. “What am I going to do?”
Virga sat with his hands folded beneath his chin. The Time magazine lay on the desk beside him. Judith’s eyes, lost and hopeless, had forced his decision. He had discussed with Dr. Landon the possibilities of his assuming the duties of department head for a week or so; he had made his airline connections and hotel reservations in advance.
Judith had been correct; such an action was not in line with Naughton’s cool, restrained character. And Virga remembered the handwriting, like the mad scratching of an animal’s claw on paper. And now this…this madman who called himself Baal and who was perhaps responsible, directly or indirectly, for Naughton’s letter. He felt the heat of challenge course through his blood. A madman, a false messiah who had encouraged thousands to pay homage to him there on the desert. A man of reason and intelligence suddenly throwing away with a scrawled word his wife, his work, his life. Was there a connection? Virga stood up, filled with new resolve, and went back to his bedroom to finish packing.
On the following day Virga was fly
ing into the rising sun in a TWA Boeing bound for Lisbon, still hours away. From there would be a connection to Cairo, then across the jutting triangle of Saudi Arabia to Kuwait. He drank two scotches and tried to concentrate on The God-Myths, a book he had brought along, to sharpen his recall of the pre-Christ Canaan fertility rites and the significance of the warrior-god Baal. Baal, as he’d remembered from his own education on pre-Christ cults, was vanquished from the land by Jehovah, in that period of history called Yahweh. From that time the people of Yahweh grew to despise the memory of Baal.
It interested Virga how the god Baal had become the demon Baal. Perhaps it was only man’s memory, reacting to the vile orgies and sacrifices of children performed in Baal’s temple; perhaps it was the memory of Yahweh’s destruction of Canaan, passed down from mouth to mouth over tribal campfires and finally depicted in Joshua in the Old Testament. But a question haunted him: was Baal only a myth? If Jehovah was a true entity, as Virga believed, then what about the minor gods, like Baal and Seth, Mot and Mithras? But in any event, this man had taken the name Baal for a purpose and Virga was intrigued to find out why.
He was unprepared for the pandemonium at Kuwait’s International Airport. Bone-weary and afflicted with jet lag, he took his suitcases and hailed a taxi to get away as soon as possible from the crush of journalists with their cameras and sound rigs. On the highway into the city the sun shimmered in hot waves that rolled and broke across the barren flats. He had visited the Middle East many times before and was well-versed in both customs and language; he found always that the land looked either very old or very new, either ravaged by time or just awakening from a sleep that had spanned the centuries. He reached into his coat and from a tube spread a balm over his forehead and the bridge of his nose to prevent sunburn. The highway seemed congested with all manner of vehicles from limousine on down, and Virga saw scattered accidents here and there. On each side of the highway wrecked and abandoned car hulks had been set afire. In the distance the towers of the city undulated in the heat and, south of them, smoke rose up to the sky in a thousand dark banners. Virga knew it was the encampment Naughton had described.
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