Incubi

Chapter 35

Aorista, Father! I am the aorist! Once more the great beautiful black bird descended, higher into the depths than ever. It felt sublime and bright in the magnificent, chaotic darkness, a black aura singing into the whisper of providence. It heard…glorious things. Portents and validities far beyond the total of all the knowledge of the world. These were the Father’s whispers.

The bird sailed effortless over the chasms, each earthwork like a channel of steaming blood bubbling red as lava, and the thick smoke of baking fat the sweetest attar to the pitlike nostrils of its beak. Below, the ushers travailed, dividing twitching faces with stubby, nimble fingers, sloughing hot skin off the backs of the beautiful, unreeling entrails from plundered bellies in scarlet bliss. Aorista! thought the bird. Aorista!

Now it perched and watched, flexing its sleek black wings. Such honor to sit here, in the lap of truth. You have honored me, drifted the whisper. So behold now all that awaits.

Yes! Aorista!

Only then, in the darkled vision, did the great bird realize the place of its perch: the very shoulder of the Father.

Go.

— and so it did, soaring back through the apsis of the tenebrae, past the castellated crests of onyx and ebon.

Back—

Aorist, Father!

— back—

Father of the Earth!

— and back, over the darkness of a thousand endless truths.

Baalzephon!

Back to the gift that lay warm in wait.

Hail!

Back to the blessed error of the world.

* * *

Veronica sensed the descent of motion. Her head bobbed with each step down. She was being carried to some low place.

When she opened her eyes she saw darkness tinted by dancing candlelight. A cloaked figure stepped away. Her carrier, too, wore the same garb; they looked like monks. Veronica tried to move, yet her limbs did not answer the command of her brain. She felt sluggish, drugged.

Her vision seemed to lag before her; she was naked in the arms of the sack-clothed monk. Where was she? And what was that, below her on the floor?

I’m not dead, she realized. And she remembered. The savaged body in the kiosk. Gilles and Marzen attacking her. She remembered the German’s big hand squeezing the consciousness out of her like water out of a sponge. They were madmen, all of them, but they hadn’t killed her. Instead, they’d saved her for something.

What? What are they going to do with me?

And what had Gilles said earlier? Something about offerings?

Her cloaked bearer stopped. The flickering candlelight blurred her vision. All she could see were smears, suggestions of solid shapes submerged in dark. She squinted, tried to blink away the myopic tatters. What stood before her looked like a primitive chancel, a risen stone altar laid across stone plinths, and sided by iron candelabra. A crude red triangle had been drawn on the wall, where a cross might hang. On the center of the altar were a small jar and what appeared to be a black…

Knife, she realized in drugged terror. It’s a knife.

Her carrier stopped beside the second cloaked figure. The candles sizzled slightly. They were black and crudely fashioned, releasing an oily fetor to the damp air. Veronica felt drenched in her own sweat, tremoring.

Then another figure entered the chancel.

Veronica stared.

The third figure faced the altar, murmuring something like an incantation. He’s praying, she thought. It reminded her of her childhood. Church. The minister standing with his back to the congregation as he spoke the offertory and raised the sacraments. But this figure was no minister, and it was not bread and wine that he raised.

It was the black knife.

It’s Khoronos, Veronica realized.

“Pater terrae,” he whispered, though the whisper rang like a metal bell in the dank, underground church. “Accept these meager gifts so that we may remain worthy in your sight.”

“World without end,” incarnated the two others.

“To you we give our faith forever.”

“Accept our gifts. Sanctify us and keep us safe…”

Khoronos turned, his hooded faced diced by candlelight. His hands clasped the earthen jar to his chest.

“Welcome, Veronica,” he whispered very softly.

His cassock came unsashed.

Veronica screamed.

No penis could be seen between Khoronos’ legs. There was only a severed stump peeking out above the testicles.

* * *

“What should I do?”

Craig was starting to get addled. He poured two Windex shooters for a pair of dolts with glasses, then came back to her. “How can I tell you what to do if you don’t tell me what’s going on?”

“You’d never believe me,” Faye muttered.

“Whatever he’s off doing, don’t worry about it.”

How could she not worry? Jack was alone, against uncertain odds. “I’ll call his partner, Randy.”

“Jack can take care of himself,” Craig said. He had three taps running and was mixing drinks at the same time, somehow without spilling a drop. “That’s your problem, Faye. You never have faith in anyone.”

The statement slapped her in her face. “How the hell do you know!” she objected loudly enough to turn a few heads.

“I’m a barkeep, Faye. Barkeeps know everything.” He grinned, lit a Marlboro. “How can you expect to have faith in people when you don’t even have faith in yourself?”

Faye stared through the brazen comment. But was he right? Why couldn’t she just leave things be? Jack had to know what he was doing better than she did.

Craig was jockeying; the bar was full now, standing room only. Lots of rowdy regulars, and lots of couples. A row of girls sat up at the bar, to fawn over Craig, and right next to Faye was a guy in a white shirt writing something on a bar napkin. Suddenly he looked at her. Faye recognized the shattered look in his eyes. It was the same look she’d seen in Jack’s eyes the first night she met him. It was the same look she’d seen in her own for a year. Broken pieces. “My girlfriend broke up with me tonight,” the guy drunkenly lamented. “I was going to marry her.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Faye offered.

The broken pieces glimmered. “I still love her,” he said.

Eventually two friends took him out of the bar; he was clearly too drunk to drive. But he left the napkin he’d been writing on. Faye glanced at it. It’s a poem, she realized.

It read: My gut feels empty, my heart is black. I’d do anything to have you back. So shall it be — you’ve cut the tether, but my love for you goes on forever.

Faye could reckon this, despite the bad verse. For a year, her heart felt black, her gut felt like a bottomless