Blameless in Abaddon (49 page)

Mark my words, Martin Candle. Before your life is done, you'll get another chance at this . . .

Panting and wheezing, a CNN videographer appeared: a barrel-chested man in a white matador's shirt and black beret. A portable TV camera lay athwart his shoulder. Rooting himself to the raft, he zoomed in on the Man Who Would Kill God.

With an ear-splitting shriek Martin stumbled toward the seam that joined the main pipe to aeration dome number one. A cyan river roiled within the viaduct, leukocytes hurtling themselves against the Plexiglas like fruit bats crashing into a picture window. Here was the place to strike, he thought—this spot, yes. He lifted his weapon aloft.

“‘O Earth cover not my blood . . .'!”

He brought the ax down hard. The blade glanced off the Plexiglas; golden sparks peppered his cheeks. He attacked his target a second time, more passionately than before. The pipe held firm.

“Try again!” yelled the videographer, twisting the focus ring.

Once more Martin raised the ax. He summoned all his strength.

“‘. . . and let my cry for justice find no rest'!”

He struck. The vein split. A geyser of O-positive blood shot skyward, turning instantly from dark blue to bright red as it hit the radiant Dutch air.

He continued the assault: an easy job now—
chop, chop, chop
, and a hundred shards of polymer pinwheeled away, leaving the seam in ruins, the Defendant's essence gushing through the breach. Hot steam rose from the liberated plasma. The vapors smelled like burnt molasses. With tsunami strength the blood splashed against Martin; it drenched him head to toe, knocking him sideways and forcing him to replant his feet. The fluid was relentless, unstaunchable, gallon upon gallon spilling across the raft, tumbling over the sides, and soaking the befuddled troops as they climbed out of the surf. And still he chopped, striking a blow for Corinne, a blow for Brandon, for Norma Bedloe, Billy Jenkins, Duncan Elder, Louis Brady, Mona Drake, and the plaster-cast boy from Pompeii,
chop, chop, chop
, fashioning a flood with the very ax that had enabled Noah to flee the Deluge. The waters of Scheveningen Harbor turned red.

“Terrific stuff!” cried the videographer, shaking the blood from his arms.

As the hemorrhage eddied around Martin, engulfing his thighs and warming his hips, he noticed something odd. The blood was alive . . . sentient, conscious, a creature unto itself, like some amoeboid monster from a fifties sci-fi movie. Crawling willfully out of the surf, it metamorphosed into a wave as awesome as the one that had ravaged Japan's northeast coast in 1896, People's Exhibit B-72. The videographer pivoted, focusing on the wave. He grinned with glee. He trembled with delight. The blood hit the dikes and broke, rushing over the levees and flowing down Strandweg and the thoroughfares beyond—Gevers Deijnootweg, Schokkerweg, Jacob Pronkstraat—sweeping away bicyclists, motor-scooterists, and pedestrians in a scene that recalled the 1642 rebel attack on the Yangtze river dams in episode four of
Havoc
, a seminal act of terrorism that had inundated Kaifeng.

“Spectacular!” shouted the videographer, zooming in.

The longer Martin stared at the cataract, the more obvious the explanation became. For nearly three years this blood had inhabited holy neurons. For over a thousand days it had fed the thoughts of a failing Providence. Of
course
it had acquired a mind of its own.

Within minutes the whole of Scheveningen stood transformed. Red streets, red lanes, red parks, red plazas.

A frightening truth seized Martin's soul. The blood wanted him. Its resolve was absolute. Already a strand of clotted plasma had sinuated from the breach and encircled his waist like a tentacle. He laughed maniacally, running his tongue around his sticky lips.

“No!” he cried as the slimy plasma lifted him off the ground and the ax fell from his hands.

“Jesus!” whooped the videographer. “Jesus, that's beautiful!”

The blood drew Martin into the pipe, a pungent place, empty but for a shallow creek roiling along the bottom. His ears rang with the booming of the pump. His nostrils twitched with the burnt-molasses odor. For an instant he thought of the eighteenth-century Parisians vacating the Place de la Revolution to escape the guillotine's stench. As the blood swept him into aeration dome number one, he pressed his palms against its walls, tacky with drying plasma. He tried cursing God aloud, but the syllables lodged in his throat, and suddenly he was moving, blood borne, his free will evaporating and his consciousness dissolving as the glutinous serpent carried him toward the dark core of his Creator's unbeating heart.

S
ECONDS AFTER
C
ANDLE STORMED OUT
of the courtroom, Schonspigel picked up my Elias Howe sewing machine and, by way of editorializing on Torvald's ridiculous and wrongheaded verdict, hurled the device at my television set. The picture tube imploded in a shower of glass. There was something profoundly satisfying about Schonspigel's action, though it made a mess and left us incommunicado. An entire day passed before word of the divine hemorrhage reached my shop.

We experienced the symptoms before knowing the cause. They were subtle at first. When I went to make a new nylon tent for the Idea of the Gran Circo Norte-Americano (the previous one had caught fire during the matinee of December 17, 1961, and incinerated three hundred Brazilian children, People's Exhibit D-20), my fingers grew so palsied I couldn't thread the needle. When Funkeldune attempted to roast the Jehovic archetype of witchfinder Heinrich Kramer for lunch—let the punishment fit the crime, I always say—the oven refused to stay lit. Eventually it became clear a major disaster was upon us, the worst since the great coma. On Sunday morning Belphegor took his fishing pole down to the Hiddekel, returning posthaste with the information that the river had disappeared. A few hours later Schonspigel set off for Jerusalem, where he planned to spend the day eating Cheese Doodles and watching crucifixions, and the instant he caught sight of Golgotha the entire mound of skulls dissolved before his eyes. Finally, come dusk, my dinosaur neighbors from across the mudflat turned up dead in the backyard.

It was Augustine who told us what had happened. “Did you hear the news?” he screamed, rushing into the shop like a man taking refuge from a blizzard. “He pulled the plug!” Elaborating, the bishop explained that Candle, maddened by the verdict, had gone on a rampage, attacking the Lockheed 7000 with Noah's ax. The liberated plasma had flooded the town, staining it a hideous maroon and causing damages estimated at sixty-five million guilders. “An ocean of blood!” cried Augustine, at which instant I noticed all his teeth had fallen out. “I looked at my television set and I said, ‘Even John the Divine never beheld such an apocalypse!'”

 

Gradually, spasmodically, the light seeped back into Martin's brain. He opened his eyes. He was supine, he realized—and scared. Already he could sense the crab at work, flexing its claws and working its jaw. Bit by bit, his trip through the heart came back to him. The thundering systoles, the emphatic diastoles, the warm blood carrying him forward like a log in a sluice. Moaning, he slid his hand into his pants pocket. His grateful fingers touched plastic. He pulled the bottle free.

Rotating his head side to side, he studied the great vault of the Defendant's brain, His neurons twinkling feebly in the ashen sky. The solar archetype had lost its grandeur; it looked less like the sun than like a red light in a bordello. To Martin's right rested the ruins of Noah's ark, piled against the riverbank in a mass of frazzled hemp and fractured timber. To his left: the ancient mariner himself—his remains, rather, the Idea of Noah's Corpse. Martin tried to stand. Pain detonated in his shoulders and sacrum. He sank back, opened the bottle, and ate five Roxanols.

The mud was soft and cool. How long the river had been absent he couldn't say; he knew only that it was gone, forever fused with the sanguineous flood he'd loosed upon the harbor. Again he attempted to rise, inch by painful inch, until at last he stood erect. He coughed. Hans De Groot was coming for him—of this he was certain. He could almost hear the clangs and jangles of the police captain's key collection. Martin's second sojourn in The Hague, he knew, would be quite unlike his first: he pictured himself standing before the judges' bench, this time as the defendant, on trial for the Crime of the Millennium.

A squadron of vultures soared past the sun, darkening the divine cranium. He turned and hobbled east. The farther he advanced along the riverbed, the drier it grew, eventually becoming an arroyo so desolate it might have been a gully on the moon. Imagined footfalls dogged his steps. Ghostly voices assailed his psyche.

The tribunal finds you, Martin Candle, guilty as charged . . .

Rounding a bend, he came upon an unexpected scene, outre even by the norms of intracranial travel. A naked Saint Augustine sat atop the corpse of Behemoth, which in turn lay sprawled across the carcass of Leviathan. Death had bloated both monsters, turning them into zeppelins of putrescence. Augustine had no eyes. His dormant briar pipe dangled between bare gums.

“‘Who can open the doors of his face?'” Martin muttered, eulogizing Leviathan in the words of Job's biographer. “‘Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.'”

“Candle?” inquired the bishop, his articulation compromised by his toothlessness. “Martin Candle?”

“Hello, Your Grace.” He stole a glance at Augustine's unclothed crotch. The organ that had inspired the saint's groundbreaking meditations on concupiscence was among the largest a man could hope to receive. “I was afraid I'd never see you again.”

“It's certain I'll never see
you
again.” Augustine gestured toward the hollow sockets in his skull. “You and your infernal ax.”

“There's no telling where a man's free will might lead him,” Martin replied dryly. He shifted his gaze back to the monsters. Leviathan wanted for a throat. Behemoth had been eviscerated, his intestines lying before him in a great ropy pile. “I'm sorry about your eyes.”

Augustine pulled his horn-rimmed glasses out from behind Behemoth's ear, angrily broke them in two, and tossed the pieces aside. “They're certain to give you the chair for this, and I don't mean the Thomas Aquinas Chair in Medieval Philosophy at Princeton.” He raised his right eyebrow independently of the left. “I have a message for you . . . a communiqué from beyond oblivion. No doubt you remember those two opinionated hominids, Adrian and Evangeline. Before they died—”

“Desiccated. Arid apes.”

“—they said to tell you, quote, ‘We really thought we'd cracked the ontological defense, so we sent you our answer. We're sorry it had to arrive encoded. We're even sorrier it failed. You're an upright man, Martin Candle.' Unquote.”

Drawing Patricia's scarf from his pocket, Martin interposed it between his nose and the odor of the rotting flesh. “What happened to your pets?”

“They quarreled over the question of God's psychic integrity. Behemoth argued that our Creator must be bipolar, otherwise He would've had no motivation for bringing the universe into being. Leviathan held that a bipolar Supreme Being is metaphysically unstable, hence not ‘supreme' at all. They came to blows.” Augustine poked Behemoth's hide with the bowl of his pipe. “Have you ever been tempted to suck on the ears of an immense hippopotamus?”

“Not really, no.”

“I have known such urges. Did you ever want to mash a sea dragon's scale with a pestle, stick it in your pipe, and smoke it?”

“Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist.”

“I tried that once.”

“And . . .?”

“It didn't help.”

Martin faced upriver, toward a horizon that among its other virtues probably lay beyond the radius of the monsters' stench. “You'll forgive me if I don't stick around.” Stepping away, he limped west. “Your pets have started to turn.”

“Good-bye, Martin Candle. Fare thee well. I must confess something, though. I never really liked you.”

 

At dusk the landscape grew familiar, the territory Augustine had termed the Country of Dung. Empty soup cans, broken beer bottles, and discarded automobile tires cluttered the riverbed. Gasping, sweating, Martin fought his way to the crest of the levee. A lone, molting vulture wheeled across the sky, its feathers drifting down like black snow.

He headed north. Within an hour he reached the place where four months earlier he'd come face-to-face with his alter ego. At the base of the dung heap, sandwiched between the Magnavox TV and a discarded Whirlpool clothes dryer, rose a pietà of surpassing strangeness. Dressed in a white lace wedding gown, the Idea of Corinne sat on Job's lap, his right arm curled around her neck. Three bluebottle flies circled above her face. A smile lay frozen on her lips. She was as motionless as Behemoth.

“Hello,” said Martin, surveying Job's abode. The dung heap had degenerated. Rust had reduced the smaller appliances—toasters, blenders, coffeemakers—to fragments of cancroid metal. The pile of disposable diapers was now a shapeless plastic mass.

“We saw the whole show,” said Job, glancing toward the TV. He still wore his shredded Crash Test Dummies T-shirt and ratty red bathing trunks. “Trial, verdict, hemorrhage, everything.” The lesions on his chest had dried up—not because they were healing, Martin realized, but because the divine cranium itself was drying up. “You were an able prosecutor. I couldn't have done better myself. You look terrible.”

“I know,” said Martin, uncertain whether Job was referring to his crooked physique or his bloody suit.

“Pulling the plug . . . tell me how it felt. Like justice, perhaps?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“Then . . . how?”

“More like revenge.”