Falling Idols

I looked for chunks eroded or hammered away, but the stone appeared complete. I shook my head, mystified.

“No crosses cut in later by the Christians. It wouldn’t take the chisel. Tried to smash the rock, they did, but it wore down their sledges instead. Tried to drag it to the sea, and the ropes snapped. So the legend goes, anyway. Like trying to pull God’s own tooth. Or the devil’s. If there’s a difference.” He shut his eyes, and the wind from the west swirled his graying hair. When he spoke again his voice was shaking. “Killed a boy here once. When I was young. Trying to call them up. I’d heard sometimes they’d answer the call of blood. Maybe I should’ve used my own instead. Maybe they’d’ve paid some mind to that.”

On the wind I could hear the pounding of the ocean, and as I tried to imagine my generous and profane uncle a murderer, it felt as if those distant waves had all along been eroding everything I thought I knew. I asked Brendan what he’d wanted with the Sisters.

“They didn’t take the name of the Trinity just because there happens to be three of them. Couldn’t tell you what it is, but it’s said there’s some tie to that other trinity you and I thought we were born to serve. Patrick, I … I wanted to know what they know. And there’s some say when they put their teeth to a man, the pleasure’s worth it. So what’s a few years sacrificed, to learning what’s been covered up by centuries of lies?”

“But what if,” I asked, “all they’d have to tell you is just another set of lies?”

“Then might be the pleasure makes up for that, too.” He took a step toward me and I flinched, as if he had a knife or garrote as he would’ve had for that boy whose blood hadn’t been enough. Brendan raised his empty hands, then looked at mine.

At my wrists.

“Maybe you’ve the chance I never had. Maybe they’ve a use for you they never had for me.”

And in the new morning, he left me there alone. I sat against the old pagan stone after I heard the faraway sound of his car.

The stone remembers, he’d once told me, and so do we.

Demon est Deus inversus, I’d been told by another. Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.

On this rock will I build my church, some scribe had written, putting words in the latter’s mouth.

The blood remembers.

Three days later my flesh remembered how to bleed.

And the stone how to drink.

*

Regardless of their orbits, planets are born, then mature and die, upon a single axis, and so the stone and those it honoured had always been to me, even before I knew it. Now that I was here, I circled the stone but wouldn’t leave it, couldn’t, because, as in space, there was nothing beyond but cold dark emptiness.

They came while I slept — the fourth morning, maybe the fifth. They were there with the dawn, and who knows how many hours before that, slender and solid against the morning mists, watching as I rolled upright in my dew-soaked blanket. When I rubbed my eyes and blinked, they didn’t vanish. Part of me feared they would. Part of me feared they wouldn’t.

As I leaned back against the stone, she came forward and went to her knees beside me, looking not a day older than she had more than twenty years before. Her light brown skin was still smoothly translucent. Her gaze was tender at first, and though it didn’t change of itself, it grew more unnerving when she did not blink — like being regarded by the consummate patience of a serpent.

She leaned in, the tip of her nose cool at my throat as she sniffed deeply. Her lips were warm against mine; their soft press set mine to trembling. Her breath was sweet, and the edge of one sharp tooth bit down to open a tiny cut on my lip. She sucked at it as if it were a split berry, and I thought without fear that next I would die. But she only raised my hands to nuzzle the pale inner wrists, their blue tracery of veins, then pushed them gently back to my lap, and I understood that she must’ve known all along what I was, what I was to become.

“It’s nice to look into your eyes again,” she said, as if but a week had passed since she’d done so, “and not closed in sleep.”

Since coming to the stone I’d imagined and rehearsed this moment countless times, and she’d never said this. Never dressed in black and grays, pants and a thick sweater, clothes I might’ve seen on any city street and not thought twice about. She’d never glanced back at the other two, who stood eyeing each other with impatience, while the taller of them idly scraped something from the bottom of her shoe. She’d never simply stood up and taken me by the hand, pulled me to my feet, to leave me surprised at how much smaller she looked now that I’d grown to adulthood.

“He stinks,” said the taller Sister. From the feral arrogance in her face, I took her to be the flesh-eater. “I can smell him from here.”

“You’ve smelt worse,” said the third. “Eaten it, too.”

As I’d rehearsed this they’d never bickered, and my erstwhile angel — Maia, the others called her — had never led me away from the stone like a bewildered child.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Back down to the road. Then back home to Dublin,” Maia said.

“You … you drove?”

The flesh-eater, her leather jacket disconcertingly modern, burst into mocking laughter. “Oh Jesus, another goddess hunter,” she sighed. “What was he expecting? We’d take him by the hand and fly into the woods?”

The third one, the sperm-eater by default, slid closer to me in a colorful gypsy swirl of skirts. “Try not to be so baroque,” she said. “It really sets Lilah off, anymore.”

V. Sanguis sanctus

They were not goddesses, but if they’d been around as long as they were supposed to have been, inspiring legends that had driven men like my uncle to murder, then as goddesses they at least must’ve posed. They were beautiful and they were three, and undoubtedly could be both generous and