Little horn, p.27
Little Horn, page 27
“You fucking BITCH!” he screamed at her. “Don’t you get it? I was right! I was right all along! I did this! My dreams were right!” He shifted his knife to an overhand grip, lifting it above his head, and stepped towards Nazneen—
“Who said they were your dreams, insect?”
The voice was strange. Clear but muffled, as if speaking through cloth, yet oddly buzzy and muted as well, a bad microphone in an echo chamber. Slowly, Annie sat up, one hand holding her breathing-tube in place. The other came up to her mask, flattening itself against the rough surface. . .
. . . and slid it off. The brown-yellow oval dripped clear, viscous fluid to the floor. Silently, without fuss, Annie set it aside.
Brendan had never really known what was supposed to make someone beautiful. What he felt for Naz was mostly about who she was, her smell and voice, her movements; he’d never even really seen her whole face or body, not truly. But Annie’s unmasked face seemed to blaze, so brightly he wanted to cover his eyes. Her skin was smooth and perfect, lips full and blushed with health, and her wide eyes shone a brilliant amber-gold, irises no colour he’d ever seen on any real person before, ever.
This was beyond beauty. Beyond human.
The King’s knife fell to the floor with a clatter. A second later, he sank to the floor himself, falling onto his knees. His hands lifted, empty and imploring.
“Yes,” he hissed. “It was you, all along. Lend me your mask. Please. I just want to—I need to see.”
Annie smiled. With a flickering movement, she plucked the tracheotomy tube from her throat and flung it away; the tissue rippled in its wake, sealing up.
“Why?” she asked. “You already have one of your own.”
For one final second of incomprehension, the King goggled at her. And then a sharp hiss split the air; smoke curled up, with a foul, acrid stink. The King’s hands flew to his face, ripping and tearing, but the mask-tissue was moving, sealing itself to his flesh beneath even as it crawled and spread like spilled sewage, covering him over.
He screamed, and screamed again, lunging to his feet and twisting around, only the force of his shrieks keeping the tissue from sealing over his mouth. Arms windmilling, he staggered towards Heather and the baby, smoke billowing around him and the sizzle of his dissolving flesh growing ever louder.
Without warning, a massive roar drowned all other noise. The building shook. The ceiling broke apart like an invisible wrecking ball had torn through it, and the walls fell away to either side. Cold night air crashed down upon them; wind extinguished the candles in a gust. The King fell with a thud, hard enough to break his screams for a moment; beyond him, the lights of Toronto flickered and went out, drowning the city in the dark. Sirens and screams came floating over the water, until the King’s voice rose over them in fresh peals of anguish.
Revulsion seized Brendan like something utterly alien, something beyond either instinct or decision—like he was staring at some rotten, pulpy, slug-like thing whose mere existence brought his gorge boiling up. He grabbed the King’s stunner pistol from where he’d dropped it, rolled upright, and tackled the other man, hammering at his skull with the pistol butt; and even as they toppled over together, Naz had joined the scrum, driving the man’s fallen knife into his waist beneath the armour over and over again, then above the armour through his neck, choking off his screams in bloody gurgles.
Her mask split and cracked and fell away as blood spurted over it, as transfigured as Annie’s had been, a thing of wild chaos and storm to Annie’s eerie serenity. She dropped the knife, plunged her hands into the dying man’s blood and wiped it over Brendan’s mouth; it burned like liquid fire, making him ravenous and horny all at once. Without transition they were embracing, kissing, smearing the blood all over each other’s faces as the body of the King crumpled and shrivelled between them, and Brendan soon realized it didn’t seem at all strange that they were laughing too. Laughing like they were going to piss themselves.
“Good,” said Annie. She had risen to her feet, taking her baby from Heather’s arms; it nursed at her breast as Heather, also unmasked, clung to one of her legs in a storm of blissful weeping. “All new ages begin with sacrifice. This. . . was worthy.” She looked up at the stars. “It is time.”
Time? Brendan mouthed.
He looked at Nazneen, but her grin was too wide for fear. They watched Retta crawl over and press her unmasked face to the floor at Annie’s feet. Something stirred dimly in Brendan’s mind at that—some hard-to-recall doubt, a faint feeling of wrongness—but it passed.
He was here, with Naz; with her, as he’d never dared dream he could be. That was worth a bent knee, or two.
“The tide turns,” said Annie. “The true face of the world revealed. All will admire it under their proper stars, at last.” Her voice rose to a cry. “Unmask! Unmask!”
She lifted one arm high, and the earth’s rumble echoed up through the night. Staring up at the field of stars, Brendan’s mouth fell open. The sky was rippling. Around every star grew a web of black cracks, like ice fracturing over black water, or dead dry skin peeling; through them leaked something like black-purple ink, or boiling tar. The screams echoing from the extinguished city took on a slow, awful resonance, maddened choir singers reaching for impossible chords, a harmony beyond.
Brendan looked at Naz. She kissed him, then took his hand and put it to her stomach. “Unmask,” she whispered.
His guts gave an awful lurch; whether joy or terror, he could not have even begun to guess.
But I wear no mask, he thought.
“Beloved men, recognize what the truth is: this world is in haste and it is drawing near the end—therefore the longer it is, the worse it will get in the world. And it needs must thus become very much worse as a result of the people’s sins prior to the Advent of Antichrist, and then indeed it will be terrible and cruel throughout the world.”
—Archbishop Wulfstan’s “Sermo Lupi”
to the English, 1014.
This whole business, it all started right about when I burned my church down. Not one I went to or ministered at—I mean the one built around me, raised by my very own personal worshippers, so they could do their sacrificial reverence to me in private. Might’ve done it earlier if I’d only known that was an option, but one way or the other I’d definitely had enough by that point, eighteen damn years’ worth of it. Frankly, cousin, you’d only known these people the same way I did, I do believe you probably would’ve done it too.
So, picture this, if you can: I’m up on the podium, enthroned in front of a shrine of bones with a Hand of Glory on either side of me, my head already sweaty-aching under a crown made from ten different kinds of horns that bites into my scalp so it doesn’t start to tip askew. Got me wearing a black goat-skin robe, uncured, rough and stinking; got a reversed cross in pig’s blood drawn on my forehead, so thick it draws flies that sting and cluster ’tween my brows, buzzing like a bad light-socket. Twenty naked fools already down on their knees inside the hexfoil, knocking their heads on the ground and scratching themselves hard enough to open wounds—thirteen still robed and masked likewise with their backs turned to the wrangle and a dagger in either hand, supposedly poised to guard us all against incursion. And then, to top it all off, out come the reverend and his sister-wives with a bag of live-caught feral cats and a brace of three foot skewers.
Preaching from Jubilees like always, chanting away as the blind and swinging mass of cats growls and hisses against each other, getting ready to make them scream. Telling them dirt-faced fools how lawlessness increased on the Earth and all flesh corrupted its way, alike men and cattle and beasts and birds and everything that walks on the Earth, all of them corrupted their ways and their orders, and they began to devour each other, and every imagination of the thoughts of all men was thus evil continually. Continually, continually, continually.
And didn’t that make ’em all writhe and moan, cousin, just like the words were stuffed with fentanyl cured in crack, or what have-you. . . well, didn’t it? What do you think?
Yeah, that’s right.
They say good people have a light around them, and that’s true. It licks and laps, sweet like dripping honey, almost edible. But then there’s the others, lurching around, all driven by their own little seeds of darkness, their slime-mold souls—their flesh spored like fungus, turning from within. And I grew up amongst the latter, living symbol of that black angel-sized hole they all claimed to yearn to throw themselves down into. Constantly being told how special I was, how the ruin I instinctively sowed around me had to be nurtured with deliberation, whipped up high like a fire fed by cruelty and filth. How without me to do it before, none of this ridiculous gothic shit they spent their time caught up in would be anything but simple human perversion; the same old lust, hate and murder cops have been cleaning up after since a hundred years before the last millennium’s turn.
They found my mother under a pile of trash after the seven-year cyclone went by, that particularly strange one, a swirling mass of live insects and fire, caught-up animals cooking and bleeding out, rotten garbage of every sort. Rivers burst their banks as it passed by; graves gave up their fruit, the dust and bones of ages past spread miles wide, human ash forming fulgurites with each red lightning strike. The moon eclipsed the sun, turning it blue-black, and fields scored in its wake became fallow. All these omens: surely, my birth couldn’t fail to be something special, considering my mother was a virgin when the winds came for her. Or so the reverend always claimed.
She was comatose when they pulled her out and dead by the time they cut me from her womb, nine months later, but that didn’t matter, supposedly; just a vessel, the reverend used to say, a necessary step along the low road to the low god. Said God being whoever sowed the seed of me inside her, thus making me harbinger of a long-awaited uprising against the cruel archon who made this awful world, condemning us to live encased in dumb meat until it finally rots enough to fall back off. To set us free.
I’ve heard this shit all my life, cousin—same as you, probably. It never gets more likely, but it sure does get wearing.
That tide of stupid whispers, wet with drool, all ready for the show. All flesh, all flesh, corrupting its way; all flesh, all flesh, corrupting its way—and then the first cat gets dragged out by its scruff, and I’m just done. Done with all of this stupid shit, forever.
So: “Put that down,” I tell the sister-wife nearest me, my voice so seldom used she barely looks like she recognizes it, a grating, dusty thing. Adding, as she hesitates: “I said, DOWN.”
“Now, Little Horn,” the reverend calls me, placatingly. But I can feel it in me now, coming up through me, the way he always taught me it would; the true speech, a desert wind blowing straight back from Megiddo, wrathful-raw and rank. That it would be there when I reached for it, when I finally wanted to reach for it. He just never thought he’d be the thing to make me want to, I guess. I mean, why would he?
But: “That’s not my name,” is all I say, by way of reply, and I shut my eyes. Find that door inside my mind, the red one; open it, recognize what’s crouching there, in the dark behind. Let it recognize me, in turn. Then open wide myself, everywhere at once, and tell it to come on out.
And I light that whole fucking place on fire.
The cats got out okay, in case you’re wondering. Nobody else, though; I made damn sure of that before I walked away, stepping out of the fire seemingly unburnt, yet still hot enough on the outside, my first few footprints came down all smoking and gooey on the road’s asphalt, till my skin cooled enough to draw dust. I was naked by that time, of course, but smeared all over in ash and other debris, which probably made me seem clothed from a distance. Still, someone did slow down to take a gander after a while, which is when I figured out I’d forgotten about that dumb fucking crown of horns.
You know how it is, cousin: Antichrist’s a position, not a person. There’s hundreds of us around might fill that particular slot, we only knew we had the right to try for it. But most of us don’t, no more than most of the normal sheep-folk surrounding us know their own selves what they’re capable of, under truly special circumstances.
So, we wander about instead, hunger-driven—collide and tangle, vaguely aware of each other in proximity like tigers huffing each other on the wind, similarly carrion-breathed, and aroused to heat by the scent of it. Enjoy each other’s company a while, in season, though like as not we won’t cleave together more than a shortish spell; we tend to breed true only with normal humans. . . if you can call your regular range of devout Satanists “normal.”
Wandered down along a road a while, then, enjoying my solitude, for all I didn’t expect to be alone for long, ’cause we never are. People move towards us like iron filings towards a magnet, drunk with praise—fall in love with us and want to do things for us, and you can’t convince them otherwise, not even if you try. But they always destroy themselves for us, over us, or self-destruct if you refuse their tribute. And if you let yourself get angry with them, they’ll be attacked, or have an accident, or commit suicide.
You have to accept their worship, or you’ll be alone, the reverend always said, but to do so is to know you’re a seeder with no driver sowing death everywhere you go, even unto the end of the world. Just a (semi-)human payload, continually moving towards Armageddon.
(I always know where to shoot. I always know where to go. Which way to step so the bullet hits whoever’s standing next to me. I always know where the fight will be, and I walk through it, unscathed. I am a weapon, made for nothing but final war.)
(Fire and blood, bitches.)
So, when this nice young man got out of his car and took some steps towards me, calling out worriedly: “Lady, you okay? Anything I can do for you, lady?” I simply smiled.
I’m no lady, son, I might have said, if I’d wanted to. Not a ma’am, not a missus, not a miz. Just a bad thought, the kind that hurts to think. A scream walking ’round on two legs, searching for yet another mouth to fill.
I was hot, though, that’s true enough—hotter than even I like to be. And my head hurt.
“God wants you kept safe,” he told me, practically panting with the prospect of doing some good, ‘long as it wouldn’t cost him too much. “I can drive you wherever easy enough, you need me to. No trouble.”
I nodded, smiling wider yet. “The God you mean’s a fly on a dead dog’s eye,” I replied, mildly. “But go on and do whatever makes you happy, I suppose.”
A mild, surprised frown. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, I doubt even I can do that.”
Here he shook his head just a bit, eyes slightly aflutter, sure he couldn’t possibly have heard what he just did. Then stepped back and opened the door for me.
“Climb in,” he told me, and I did. We pulled away, Carrie Underwood blasting.
“Bet you just love this song, don’t you?” I asked. “‘Jesus Take the Wheel’. . . sounds kinda dangerous, to me.”
“Uh huh,” he agreed, nodding, then sniffed. “Oh wow, that’s some kinda stinky—what is that, you think, exactly?”
“That’d be me, I’m afraid.”
“We should do something about that—get you some normal clothes, wash off that stuff. Get rid of the whatever it is on your head too.”
“Probably, yeah.”
Gave him a sly look, then, pupils sliding horizontal, yellow-flaring in the dimming sun.
“Think your girlfriend just might wear the same size as me?” I asked him. And smiled.
A few hours later, just as twilight became full sodium-glare night, I let that boy drop me off in front of an all-night roadside diner called Meg’s Big Bite, dolled up in pink from head to toe, like Devil-baby Barbie. Meg like Megiddo, I found myself thinking; there was a coincidence, or maybe not. Since oh so very little is, in our lives.
When I walked in to find you already there, therefore, that’s why I maybe wasn’t as surprised as I otherwise might have been.
Saw you sitting there and knew immediately what you were to me, cousin—what we were, to each other. Felt the hair at the back of my neck first stiffen a bit, then sleek back down again once you looked up and shook your head, just a bit.
“Like some coffee?” you asked. “I ordered us a pot.”
And: “Hm, could be,” I replied. “Gotta be better than goat’s-blood brewed with moonshine, one way or the other.”
“Shit, I hope so,” you said, eyebrows hiking. “Sit on down.”
We examined each other for a minute or two, staring across the red-checked plastic tablecloth. You were taller than me, probably older—had olive-tinted skin and hair the same vaguely reddish shade as mine, drawn back in a mass of braiding on one side, shaved almost to the scalp on the other. Your eyes were heavy-lidded, lashes thick-dark as mascara above and below but the same basic colour as mine too, that sly light yellow-brown from some angles, molten gold from others. Hazel, I’ve heard it called, but that’s just the sheep lying to ’emselves, trying to boil it down anyway they can into something recognizable.
Plus, those same slitted pupils, too: slant and weird, oval on occasion, never fully round. A pair of black moons floating in an alien sky.
“Some call me the Nail,” you said, “on the Internet, anyway. And they call you Little Horn down at that hillbilly Left Hand Path honky-stomp of yours or used to.”
“Yeah, and some call me Kiss My Ass, ’specially when I’ve just laid the hellfire down on ’em,” I told you, voice finally smoke-free, but no less gravelly. “So, who the fuck are you really when you’re at home, or even when you ain’t?”
“Beata Callander, nice to meet you. Am I your first fellow antichrist?”
“. . . Pretty much.”
“Hm, me too, or almost. Interesting, huh?”
