Tom Piccirilli - A Lower Deep

Self said, Quit playing and lay this little creep to waste.

I kind of like him.

No, you don't.

I could feel my past loosening and rising in me once again, floating to the surface from the bottomless mire of my own forgotten myths. Marcus did not think of God or vision. He didn't even care for the ladies anymore, or his brood. He had something he wanted more desperately than his own soul, and he wouldn't stop until he got it. I'd been there once myself and knew it would only lead to a route of bliss, treachery, and heartbreak. If this kid wasn't already going to fry in hell, he would've been headed there now on a bullet train, embracing each flame in perfect passion.

Marcus's eyes went from pale blue to septic yellow, narrowing in triumph as he swam in the murky depths of my soul.

The hail in our hair slowly melted and left sprinkles of blood on our faces and clothes. He loved the dead and he even loved my dead. His psychic manipulation grew stronger, the spike piercing as he dug in and rutted around. His will parted the layers of my guilt and panic and anguish, pressing deeper but without any pain. He had the touch, I had to give him that. He flipped the pages of every book he found in all the many rooms of my mind. Snatches of songs and the grumbling of my first car's engine made him turn and wander through garages and backyards, watching the church tower and the insane asylum in the distance. He read the names off headstones and pressed his finger into the chiseled letters, feeling the near-electrical smoothness of the polished stone. The kid knew his way around a charnel house of the heart, stroking the drenched walls and stained floors of my life.

Danielle was first on the slab, lying directly beside my mother. They lay dressed in white, absolutely pure and lovely even while surrounded by the bone dust and rusted blades. He picked up scraps of my past from the tables and shelves: candles and chalk, grimoires, mason jars, gris-gris pouches, solar wheels, amulets, the fat fingers of a thief turned into a hand of glory, knotted aguilette cords, my athame, and all the substance and material of our kind. The salamanders ran past his feet throwing fire, but nothing ever burned here.

He walked among rows and rows of the slain, peeking under sheets and trying to commit faces to memory, but they kept changing even as he stared. That always happened. They all became Danielle or my mother.

Marcus's smile finally stopped squirming. "They're so beautiful."

"Yes," I told him, "they are."

"And you did this?"

"More or less."

He bent forward to brush his lips against the cheek of my lost love. He tilted his head back and enjoyed her fragrance, letting a small laugh roll in the back of his throat before stooping over her again. He sniffed softly, murmuring words of tenderness and devotion as the tip of his tongue jutted to take a taste of flesh, and Danielle's eyes opened.

She grinned a mouthful of blood and reached out with animal swiftness, not quite cackling but, Christ, it was close, hugging him to her, despising. My mother rose from a dozen different directions and immediately flung herself onto his back, screaming out my failures and crimes. Then more of the dead broke free from the darkness, overturning furniture and knocking aside the shelves of books and diagrams. My obliterated coven crept from each corner as Marcus cried out and tried to run. They each grabbed a piece of him and held on, as they did to me and forever would, nails and teeth like barbs twisting deep into muscles and tendons. Danielle pointed, accusing as she always did in my nightmares-those long thin fingers stretching, denouncing me or only reaching out for help-hyperextended as the joints in her fingers popped one after the other, elbow and wrist cracking, and still she pointed at my heart.

Marcus kept struggling to get out, trying to escape from something that can never be escaped. It wasn't until he spun completely around now that he saw I'd closed and barred the charnel house door. His jaw dropped to his chest when he realized he was trapped.

"No," he groaned as they covered him, writhing and punishing. "You can't… wait!"

Hotfoot Johnson fought to get free as Marcus tottered a few steps in the street, gurgling like an irritated baby. He finally managed to gulp enough air to let out a scream. It came from the recesses of his soul, and when it finally ran out he kept shrieking without sound. His mouth opened wider and wider until I could hear the hinges of his jaw creaking, but still nothing came out. His women twirled about him, hugging and tugging at his wrists.

He seized his head with both hands, trying to squeeze my fear and faults out of his brain, just as someone came up from behind and brought a stick down on the back of his skull.

Marcus floundered and dropped onto his face, rolled over twice, and lay still. The jackdaw broke from Self's grip and flew to its master, where it sat on his chest making weeping sounds.

Fane drifted from the shadows, his bloodshot eyes appearing more tired than bitter. He stood holding one of his pine splints in his fist. It was too light and thin to have actually hurt Marcus if the kid hadn't already been collapsing.

I could tell that Fane badly missed his robes, scapular, tunic, and cowl. He wore a black wrap usually seen only on Muslim women. The scent of heavy oils and pine preceded him by twenty feet as he limped toward me.

"You could've beaten that boy easily," he said. "Why didn't you?"

"Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answers to, Fane, or I'll let you inside my head too."

He was smart enough to be scared by that.

The distant noise of a Harley back-ending a flatbed trailer and the shrieks and breaking glass followed as we turned and walked out of the alley. Man, did that get old fast. I wondered if it made him a better or worse penitent for having been dead on the operating table those twelve minutes after his accident. His victims didn't trail him, so perhaps he had found some redemption in purgatory.

"I've been to the Givat Ram campus of HebrewUniversity," he said, "and I spent time at the Shrine of the Book to look at the Dead Sea Scrolls. I spent much of the morning at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial."

"You're a regular tourist."

"They're evacuating visitors. You can feel the city about to tear itself to shreds, but I needed to stay."

"Why?" I asked.

He still drew strength from the weakness in his legs, hobbling fast to keep up the pace and enjoying the agony it brought. "I wanted to see and learn all I could while I was here in the Holy Land. My intent was to discover something that might help."

"Did you find out anything useful?"

"No," he said while the motorcycle trapped in his former life echoed behind us. I thought perhaps he'd found God again, but not yet his soul. Maybe there was still time. "Nothing that might help in the coming battle." He rankled his nose at me. "You need a bath."

"I've had a bad day."

He nodded at that and we didn't say anything for a time as we walked. The hail had ended. Self glanced about moodily, and once I caught him looking into his own palm. I stopped at a shop and got him some cookies, which he ate noisily. He offered one to Fane, and Fane took it and held on to it but didn't take a bite. He said, "I was visited by John this morning."

That stopped me. "In a dream?"

"I don't really know. Possibly. I felt awake and I was standing, but I often am in my dreams."

Pane had plenty of his own Freudian traumas to deal with, and I couldn't be certain if the abbot had returned or if Fane's subconscious was merely boiling over with hidden meaning.

"What did he say?"

"He said that the first angel has been loosed. The other six will soon follow. And Michael remains chained."