Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (12 page)

He did not awaken, so much as he was born again.

Into Hell.

Dark, itchy heat, smoke and nausea, like he was shrouded in burning jute. His first thought was,
God, we failed you and we died, and we deserve this...

Hands pawed at him, lifted him up and touched his face. Something wrapped around his head was slowly unwound. The blackness took on layers of red. “Oh, God, look to your servant,” he cried out.

“He can’t hear you,” a voice croaked, spit and rot-breath in his face. “He isn’t here.” And Caleb knew he really must be in Hell, for the voice was his father’s.

Father hovered over him, head cocked pitifully to listen to his son’s breathing. Broken, bloody hands fumbled up and down Caleb’s body. He was blindfolded like Caleb, but two bloody asterisks stained the burlap where his eyes should have been. So none of it was a dream.

It
was
Hell, only smaller.

He lay on a hot earthen floor, against a mold-encrusted cinderblock wall. In the center of the room, a pit had been dug and filled with glowing coals, and it was by this murky red light that he saw. The opposite wall stood only fifty feet or so away. To his left, fifteen feet above the floor, a door was set into the wall, and brackets from a staircase that had been destroyed to make this ordinary suburban basement into a dungeon.

Caleb looked at the other wall.

A gang of men worked there. Draped in rags and coated with soot, they groaned like the damned. He heard grinding and chipping, and low, rhythmic grunts of torturous toil and sighs of unrequited lust. The men swarmed over the wall like ants dismantling a corpse, and at first Caleb thought they were digging a tunnel. They had no proper tools, only jagged bits of rock and their own fingers.

It was an image of her. From floor to ceiling, they had carved a lovingly detailed idol out of the gray-green stone beneath the house. She stared down on them with the same knowing half-smile with which she had first bewitched Caleb and his father. They had painted her hair red with their own blood, and her eyes gleamed with inlaid quartz crystals and shards of green glass.

The work was very close to completion, and doubly impressive when Caleb observed that the artisans had not an eye between them. She was the last thing they saw before they blinded themselves, and her image lingered in their hearts and spilled out into the walls of their prison, now a temple.

But of course, like the blind men describing the elephant, they had gotten it all wrong. Her nose was a pair of jutting breasts, their succulent tenderness painfully apparent even in the brittle stone. Worse still was the mouth, the smile rendered vertically and smeared liberally with layers of dried blood and hair. Though it bore only incidental resemblance to a mouth, yet it had teeth—row upon row of polished bones jammed between the rosette layers of obscenely exaggerated lips.

“How long have we been here, Father?”

“I don’t know, son. Maybe a few hours, maybe a day… but eternity awaits.”

“But we’re going to get out, right? She’s just a whore—and we can pray for a miracle.”

“We don’t deserve one, son.”

The quavering in his father’s voice provoked him to shout. “Why? We have the Word. We have only to call on Him, and awaken Him from His slumber in our unworthy flesh, and He will lighten our burdens.”

Father swatted the verses out of the air like a noisome odor. “We have failed the Word.”

“But you believed, Father, and I believe. What about us?”

“I believed with all my heart, son, but… I was powerless…”

“But God spoke to you, Dad! He chose you! This is—it has to be a test.”

“We failed, son. This is punishment. I’ll hear no more—”

“What about the Church, Father? They’ll come looking for us, won’t they?” But Caleb knew the answer, and regretted rubbing sand in the old wound. “I mean, even though we’re not really members, anymore—”

“We weren’t cast out, son. The church dissolved. There were never more than twelve of us, anyway, and most of them up and left before you were born. Those stupid damned teenage boys I told you about, they were the last.”

Two slaves turned their eyeless heads toward Father and limped closer. One of them whispered, “Hey, Brother Gibbons, is that you?”

“Who wants to know?” Father demanded.

“Josh Heslop, sir, I was a member of your church, with my mom and stepfather? I used to go around door to door, preaching all that shit you told us? I wanted to thank you, sir, for showing me the way—to Her, I mean. I never would have found my true calling if not for you, and it’s so cool that you’re here, too…”

The young man stood a head taller than Father, and had a beard like a hermit, wraparound shades and matted dreadlocks down to his ass. Beneath years of soot and filth, Caleb made out the rags of black polyester slacks and white Perma-Prest shirt.

Father squirmed and squeezed his temples, scratching under his blood-rusted blindfold. “Joshua Heslop… you and that other boy…”

“Danny Collier. He’s here, too, but he made Her mad, and he’s ashamed of himself, right now.” Josh shook his head in pity. “Hey, do you have anything to eat?”

Father shook his head, “Sorry, son, no.”

“Brother Gibbons, how are my folks? I haven’t seen them since I… came here, about, what, a couple years ago…?”

“They left the church after you disappeared. Everyone agreed you ran away, and it was nobody’s fault, but it broke their faith. They left the church and moved out of state, I’ve no idea where.”

Caleb reached out to Brother Joshua, asked, “Would you like to pray together, Brother?”

Joshua snorted, spat on the ground, something like a laugh escaping his cracked lips. “Shit, dude, get over it, already. She told us the truth about your church.”

Caleb jumped. “But the Lost Gospel—”

“The scrolls were written in Milwaukee in 1973 by a defrocked minister named Jubal Gibbons. He told my folks he translated them from scrolls he smuggled out of the Holy Land, but he made it all up while he was in a loony bin. My mom answered his ad in the back of a magazine. She was batshit crazy, too.”

Caleb wanted to slap the man, but he looked to Father. “He’s lying, isn’t he, Father? Tell him the truth!”

Father shook his head fiercely. “God spoke to me, in my flesh… but I’ve failed Him…”

“But the church is real,” Caleb snapped.

“Jesus, kid. There
is
no goddamned church. Your Dad started the church, but he blew it. He never even got a building, and my folks were just about the last suckers left in his flock.”

Caleb remembered a few holiday gatherings with strangers Father called Brother and Sister, but nothing after he was of school age, after Mom went away and became dead to them. Church was every day, every hour, at home with Father. “No, but… I thought, after Mom left, we got exiled…”

“It’s all a big scam, kid. Your Father was just too dumb to get rich off it. But now it’s cool, because you’re here.”

“God is going to save us, isn’t he, Father?”

Father just kept shaking his head.

“We’ve been sowing the Word our whole lives, Father! What has He ever done for us?”

The door opened and white light stabbed down into the scarlet dark. Caleb recoiled from the painful brightness, but the eyeless slaves dropped their tools and came away from the great work. They stampeded past, changing course only to avoid the fire. Caleb clung to the wall to escape being trampled. There were at least two dozen of them.

“Who are they, Father?” he asked, but he knew the answer. Magazine hustlers, candy peddlers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, handymen, gardeners, door-to-door salesmen in the blackened rags of their varied trades. Men who made such pests of themselves, that their vanishing only inspired relief.

They pressed against the wall beneath the elevated door, and Caleb could make out a silhouette at the heart of the light. She stood there and basked in their worship as they gloried in the feel of the fresh air that spilled into their dank domain, rife with her ambrosial perfume.

Caleb pinched his nose shut. She secreted some kind of poison that bewitched their minds. It was what had burned his hand. Perhaps he was allergic to it. It didn’t seem to affect him like it did the others.

She waved an arm, and rain fell in the basement. Caleb heard sprinklers gurgle and hiss in the ceiling, felt water drizzle on his face and gratefully washed himself, taking great gulps until his belly ached.

The water shut off too soon, and the crowd pressed closer still beneath the doorway. They raised their hands up, and she stepped down on them. They knelt and bore her tread on their backs until she reached the ground. Now Caleb saw her, and had to look away, because he still could not believe his eyes.

He looked back as they set her down and crowded against her on all sides. They pressed close with faces and hands outstretched as if she radiated life-giving sunlight.

Whatever he’d seen upstairs, now she looked much older. She was a hag, fat and stooped over a medicine ball gut, draped in a frayed black bathrobe and rubber rain boots. Old and wrinkled she was, but not frail, even Caleb could tell that. Thick flab drooped off heavy bones and gnarly muscle as she lewdly gyrated and set the blind crowd to baying and barking as if they could, somehow, see her.

She carried a covered tin pail and a long, serrated steak knife. The knife shook in her hand, but not from palsy. In her bright, tiny eyes, Caleb saw hideous eagerness, as she looked through the mob right at him.

“Why didn’t she cut out my eyes, Father?”

His father shook and dripped rain on him. “You have to see it, son. You’ve never had—never sinned with a woman, so it won’t work on you. Somebody has to see Her, I think. Oh God, help me, I can’t…”

Father tore away from Caleb and joined the throng kneeling before the crone. She looked around like she was deciding which chicken to kill for dinner. “The Goddess is pleased with what you have wrought. The image is almost completed, but the age of desire cannot be won without sacrifice. One of you must open the door with your blood.”

The mob murmured to itself, but Caleb backed away, calling to his father.

“Who among you is false in his love for the Goddess?”

“No! No!” they shouted, but she lashed out, slashing one across his scalp and braining another with the bucket.

“Don’t hide him! I let him come among you as a test, to see who loves me most. You must find him and bring him, you who truly love the Goddess.”

Hands closed on Caleb, hauled him up over their heads. Somewhere, Father fought, but his words were garbled. He seemed to be shouting, “Show them, Lord! Show the boy!”

Caleb was dropped, kicking and screaming, into the open space before the Goddess. They forced him to kneel, slammed his forehead into the mud, which was fine, he didn’t want to look, but then he did.

She was almost bald, with a nylon stocking stretched over her liver-spotted cranium to hold the few remaining tufts of rusty white hair in place. She smiled at him. She hadn’t even put her teeth in, before coming down to accept their worship.

“Yes, your love for the Goddess is false,” she lisped. “Your defiance is offensive to Her sight.”

“Let us kill him!” they cried, “we’re so hungry…”

The Goddess laughed. “Oh, the goddess loves you, but She loves to be loved, most of all. Her love is impossible to resist. I would not spill the blood of a heathen in this sacred place, so he must be made to love me. Pray for him, pray for him to love me, and save you all for the age of desire to come!”

They prayed for Caleb to love her, so she would kill him. They prayed for her to let them have his flesh. They prayed until he screamed to drown them out, a wordless howl that made the hag gnash her gums at him as she saw through him.

Light poured out of her skin, so much light he had to turn away, but some irresistible magnet pulled him back to her; that scent, that light, filling him with golden power, and he would do anything to put it into Her divine body, to give it back a thousandfold, to give everything, even his life.

He saw her again as she wanted to be seen, young and ripe and lovely, and rejoiced in his rebirth. “I love you,” he crowed, and fell back to abasing himself in the mud. “I love you.”

“No, not yet, sweetheart, but you will,” she said, and handed him the knife.

“Now go and find me the one who loves me least, and offer him up to me. I read your silly fake Bible, too, so I know you know how to do it.”

Caleb rose and took the knife from her hand, twitching at a feathery touch at his wrist. He turned on the crowd, and almost instantly saw himself about to do it. He reached out with the knife to stab at the nearest worshipper, but stayed his hand. It was Father.

The mob drew back around them and began, slowly, but with great force, to pound the muddy ground.

“Go on, son,” he said. “Do it. I want you to.”

Caleb hugged the knife. “No, Father, I can’t…”

“You have to, son. It’s the only way.”

“The only way to what, Father? You want me to…”