James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“Binah!” I set off in hot pursuit, blood streaming down my arm. I made the mistake of bending down from the waist to scoop her up, and the deep tissue bruising I’d taken from the bullet made itself known. My gut cramped, and I slipped and fell on the now-wet tiles while Binah dashed under the bathroom sink.

For several long moments, I just lay there on my side in a pool of water and blood, staring at my shivering cat. My growing conviction that this GOD organism was actually out to get me was intensifying by the moment, and only grew stronger as I picked myself up and my familiar, sensing my intent, scrambled underneath the claw-foot bathtub and hissed.

After a good ten minutes of pursuit, I finally caught Binah up in a towel and immersed her while wrapped up. She wailed the whole way through, but she couldn’t claw me. With the towel as buffer, I washed her, rubbed her down, balmed her wounds, and used a safety razor to carefully lift the dirt-black scabs from her burns. The warm water revealed that some of them needed to be lanced, but doing that while she was wet was unwise. When she was clean, I drained the bath and let her scramble out, grimacing as she flung dirty water up into my face.

Someone rapped the bathroom door and twisted to look back, buckling when I straightened too fast and my entire back spasmed. “Who? What?”

“Hey, is everything all right in there?” Zane’s raspy voice was muffled behind the wood.

“No.” I replied sourly. The bathroom was trashed. Binah was hiding behind the sink again, washing her face with a paw. She radiated pure, unadulterated disdain.

Zane cracked the door open and peered inside to see me slumped on the edge of the bathtub, soaked, grimy and bloody. “Well… okay. This happened.”

“Cats don’t like baths.” I pulled the cuffs of my gloves higher up along my wrists. The claw wounds immediately began to itch, so I pushed them down again.

Zane sniffed, looked between me and the sulking cat, then back to me. “I could have told you that.”

I took up the drier of the two towels, and began to mop up the mud from the floor around the tub, grunting as a stab of pain shot through my chest on one side. The more time passed, the more I wondered if the first shot to the chest had actually broken one of my ribs. Rib fractures were like that… you sometimes didn’t feel them until they moved.

“Hey, Rex?”

I glanced up, and found Zane regarding me with an odd, piercing expression. “What?”

“Now that I can see you properly, I need you to tell me something,” Zane said. His voice was low and sonorous. “Tell me you didn’t know about the kids.”

I knelt back, the towel still bunched in my hand. “I didn’t know about the children or the videos. I swear on my sworn-brother’s grave.”

He held my gaze for a space, nostrils flaring, and for the first time, I glimpsed the animal he hinted at but never spoke of. It was in the eyes and the poise of the throat and legs. Under the intimidating, introverted exterior, Zane had the graceful intensity of an ambush predator.

“Good.” He eased down by inches. “You need a hand?”

I looked up at him, momentarily confused. When I was this tired, the default answer was ‘no, I already have hands’, but the metaphor sunk in after a moment’s reflection. “Yes. Help me clean, and I can start testing out gematria.”

“Roger that.” Zane got the towel, and bent to the task of cleaning. Binah slunk to the closed bathroom door and began to paw at it. “What’s gematria?”

“Gematria is where letters are assigned certain meanings and are associated with numbers, which also encode their own separate meanings. The gematric tables that occult magicians use to compose invocations is fundamentally based on an esoteric Judaic tradition of decoding hidden meanings in the Torah. It’s complex.”

“Complex is the right word.” To my great relief, he started on the hard to reach places, leaving the easier surfaces to me.

“In its most simplistic form, people think of gematria as being ‘Bible code’,” I continued. “The idea that combinations and patterns of words in the Bible – when turned into numbers – have hidden meanings.”

“Right.” Zane stood up, and looked across at me. “And there’s something like this in all those symbols drawn in Dru’s place?”

“Possibly. English Bible gematria is a bit of a thing on the… extreme Christian right.” I sat back down, distracted by the subject at hand. “Conspiracy theorists and apocalyptic types love to predict the end of the world with gematria, one of the reasons that a consulting priest is unlikely to make use of it in an investigation.”

“Right,” he said. “I follow you.”

I blinked a few times, and rubbed my hands on my knees. “You do?”

Zane paused in his labors, looking across at me. “Yeah. I’m pretty interested in that kind of thing. There’s a Lapaʻau in the family on mom’s side. Shaman-healers. I did some Buddhist temple study when I was over in Thailand… got a chance to speak to a couple of Yazidi elders and some Sufis when I was in Iraq. Besides that, I read a lot.”

I leaned forward in consternation. “So why on earth are you in a one-percenter biker gang?”

He cleared his throat, fighting back an embarrassed smile as he rubbed a hand over his scalp. “Weeders have to stick together. Birds of a feather and all that. Besides that, Jenner’s got a lot going for her. She’s been fighting the good fight for twenty or more lifetimes, you know? Revolutions, against the Nazis, in Vietnam.”

“What fight is that?”

“Well… against the Morphorde,” he said. His eyes were very Green, and very earnest.

We had no idea that there lay outside the shell of Eden an endless, hostile void. That the Mirror of the sky turned back something, that the sky was also a defense. Until the Mirror broke. I paused for a moment in shock, recalling the ritualistic words given to me in my dream. “The Morphord?”

He and his get fell upon the forest of the Mothers… they fell upon the meadows and the glades… and they murdered us…

“Yeah. It’s kind of what Weeders do.” Zane seemed to realize he had said too much, and an uncomfortable silence fell over us. After a few awkward minutes, he spoke again. “Anyway… you know… I’m probably really here for the motorcycles.”

“I’ve never ridden one,” I said. The moment had passed, and with it, the connection.

“Really? We need to fix that.” Zane stood, towering over me, and ventured a smile. “We could go for a ride if you want.”

There was a certain appeal to the idea, but as I mulled it over, I glanced at the surgery kit waiting for me beside the toilet. “Perhaps another day. I… really have to treat Binah’s injuries.”

“Sure thing. I should go catch up on some of my reading, speaking of that. Between training and club duty, I don’t get into books the way I used to anymore.”

Despite his words, he didn’t leave, and I didn’t insist. After a while, I cleared my throat. “So… what do you make of our find? The Wolf Grove address?”

“It feels unreal,” Zane replied. He crouched down on the balls of his feet, elbows resting on his knees. “I mean… why would they be buying drugs?”

“None of the children ever showed signs of addiction, or abuse?”

“I… no. I mean, normal bumps and bruises, you know.”

“Were they expressive? Happy?”

Zane thought for a moment, his green eyes darkening as he thought back. “A lot of them were really damaged and depressed because of what happened to them. It’s hard to say. I mean, they did normal kid stuff… ran around, played with toys. But they’d been rejected by their parents, most of them. The norm kids came from the usual messed up home situations that land someone in the system.”