Deus Irae

“Just for tonight.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “Kiss me?”

“Sure.”

And she leaned forward, and he managed to turn his head so that she did not hurt him. Then she withdrew, without—thank god!—undue noise.

She was, he estimated, around twenty-four years old, and, despite her wide shoulders and her fat-girded waist, was possessed of a face not unlike one of Rubens’s cherubs.

After she had gone, he rested awhile, then raised the mirror once again. The blood was still coming, so he blotted it—several times—as he studied the wound.Good! he decided. The first cut had gone deep. Now, if he’d the guts…

He took up the knife and positioned it above the black line. Something inside him—down at that animal level where most fears are born—cried out, but he managed to ignore it for the single instant necessary to make the second cut.

Then both mirror and knife fell upon the bed and he grasped the shirt to his face. He blacked out then. No lights. No crown. Nothing.

How long it took him to come around, he did not know. But he pulled the shirt from his face, winced, licked his lips.

Finally, he raised the mirror and regarded himself.

Yes, he had succeeded in parenthesizing the thing. The first step had been completed. Now he would have to do some digging.

And he did. Each time the blade struck against the protruding piece of metal, his head felt like the inside of a cathedral bell, and it was minutes before he could proceed again. He kept mopping the blood and tears and sweat from his face.

Then it was there.

He had finally exposed a sufficient edge so that his fingernails might gain purchase. Biting his tongue now, as he had bitten his lower lip clean through, he took hold very gently, tightened his grip carefully, and pulled with all his strength.

When he awakened and was able to raise the mirror once again, it stood out a quarter of an inch from his head.

He moistened the shirt with his saliva in order to clean his face.

Again, the slow approach and the spasmodic tug. Again, the blackness.

After the fifth time, he lay there with a two-inch thorn of metal fallen from his right hand upon the bed, and his face was a sweating, bleeding, crying mask with a hole in the left side of it, and he slept a sleep without dreams—in fact, beneath that ruddy surface there seemed a certain layer of peace, though it could have been a trick of the lights through the mess.

She tiptoed in with the exaggerated care of a child, and raised both hands to her mouth and bit the knuckles because she knew that she was not supposed to bother him and she felt that if she cried she would.

But, it was like Halloween—like a mask, that he was wearing. She saw the shirt fallen to the floor. He was so wet…

“Daddy…” she whispered, and laid it across his face, pressing lightly, lightly, with fingertips like spiders’ legs, until it absorbed all, all, all of that which covered him like mud or swarming insects.

Later, she pulled it away, because she had been cut, many times, and she knew that such things dry and stick and hurt to pull away.

He looked cleaner then, though still somewhat altered, and she clutched it to her and took it back with her, back to the old room, because it was his, because he had given her toys and chocolate and because she wanted something of his which he would not want anymore—not when it was that dirty.

Later, much later, when she looked at it, fully unrolled, spread out upon her bed, she was delighted to see that it bore a perfect likeness of his face, traced in the juices of his own body, lying there flat, dark now, conforming in every detail to his countenance…

Save for the eyes—which, strangely, seemed horizontal—just slots—as though they viewed straight across the surface of the world, as if the world were flat and his gaze traveled on without end, forever.

She did not like the way it showed his eyes, so she folded it up and took it back and hid it away at the bottom of her toy box, forgetting it forever after.

This time, for some reason, she remembered not to drop the lid, but closed it carefully.

Six

Here! The scrabbling man on hands and knees in the drainage ditch. Dark eyes seeking an opening. An X of canvas belts upon his back. Above him the lightnings, upon him the rain. And about the next bending of his way, he watches/they watch/it watches, for he/they/it—it—knows that he is coming with a pain in his head. And it glances into the place where the storm meets the earth and the mud is born, wipes splashes from its coat, sniffs the air, sees the man’s head and shoulders pass the turning point, withdraws.

The man finds the opened sewer and crawls within.

After twenty feet he flicked on his hand torch and shone it upon the ceiling. He stood then on the walkway beside the slop and leaned his back against the wall. Mopping his brow on his khaki sleeve, he shook droplets from his hair and dried his hands on his trousers.

For a moment, he grimaced. Then, dipping into a shoulder-pack, he withdrew a tube of tablets, gulped one. The thunders echoed about him in that place and he cursed, clutching his temples. But it came again and again, and he fell to his knees, sobbing.

The level of the slop in the center ditch began to rise. Observing it in the light of his torch, he rose to his feet and staggered further inward until he came to something resembling a platform. The smell of refuse was more powerful here, but there was space to sit down with his back to the wall, so he did. He switched off the torch.

After a time, the pill began to take effect and hesighed.

See how feeble it is that has come among me.

He unsnapped his holster and thumbed down the safety catch on his revolver.

It has heard me and knows fear.

Then, between the rumbles of thunder there was only silence. He sat there for perhaps an hour, then drifted into a light sleep.

That which awakened him might have been sound. If so, it had been too soft to have registered consciously.

It is awake. How is it that it can hear me? Tell me. How is it that it can hear me?

“I can hear you,” he said, “and I’m armed,” his mind automatically falling to the weapon at his side and his finger finding its trigger.

(Image of a pistol and feeling of derision as eight men fall before it clicks upon an empty chamber.)

With his left hand he turned on the torch once more. As he swept it about, several opallike sparkles occurred in a corner.

Food! he thought. I’ll need something before I make it back to the bunker! They’ll do.

You will not eat me.

“Who are you?” he asked.

You think of me as rats. You think of a thing known as The Air Force Survival Handbook, where it explains that if you cut off one of my heads—which is where the poison is—you must then slit open the ventral side and continue the cuts to extend the length of each leg. Subsequent to this, the skin can be peeled off, the bellyopened and emptied, the backbone split and both halves roasted on sharpened sticks over a small fire.

“That is essentially correct,” he said, then. “You say that you are ‘rats’? I do not understand. The plural—that’s what I don’t understand.”

I am all of us.

He continued to stare at the eyes located about twenty-five feet from him.

Iknow now how you hear me. There is pain, pain in you. This, somehow,