Gilded Christ
After about fifteen minutes of nude broiling, Andy’s scrotum was sticking to everything it touched and that was an uncomfortable feeling. He sat up quickly in bed, the sheet clinging like a drowning little girl to his back. He looked around the room with his brow furrowed and swatted the sheet down in disgust. He paced around the room making violent gestures with his hands at the air and murmuring oaths and expletives under his breath. Finally, he was fed up. He jerked open the door, sending the little golden crucifix flying and landing, inverted, under his window, the head of the Messiah chipped and bleeding. Andy stormed into the
bathroom and relieved himself. He turned to the shower stall and hopped in, blasting the
cold water onto his scorching back. He spun slowly, basking in the water as people
desperately wanting relief often do in showers. He water immediately unstuck his testicles
and shrunk his genitalia, thus is the case with males and cold water, but he didn’t
mind now. He wasn’t smoking anymore. He leaned against the wall opposite the shower
head and breathed deeply, remembering the tales of his grandparents after his mother died.
They told him about the long history of unexplained death in the family “He’s right, dearie,” his grandmother said, her voice slight, high-pitched, and frail. “We are prone to violent and inexplicable death, God save us.” She said the any and all sentences dealing with grave matters such as God and death and love with great reverence as if she were preaching.
“You’re mother’s death is a prime example,” he grandfather continued
with a hint of sadness in his voice, “Throughout the years, our family endured these
tragic events. One of us would leave and not return for a long while, then suddenly appear
on a relative’s doorstep mangled and broken. You’re mother was no
exception.” Andy had winced. He had found his mother only a week before at the bottom
of the stairs. She was cut up the middle from her
“She told us she had been studying the family for her next book and found this,”
his grandmother said, her voice grave as she pulled a golden crucifix out of her hand bag
and placed it lightly into his hands. Upon the cross-beam, there were the same ideograms,
some resembling alphabetic letters. Later, Andy would recognize those symbols as the
reciprocal of the ones engraved on his mothers head, on her cranium, in fact. He went to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the top and set it on the counter. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out orange juice and some ice from the freezer compartment. He mixed himself a screwdriver and plodded back up the stairs, stepping into the small pool of blood. It was dark and he thought he had spilled some of his drink and wiped it irritably on the next step. He ascended the stairs and went back into his room, not seeing the river of blood that was now flowing down the stairs. His door was directly across from the open window and the breeze continually pulled open the door, which didn’t quite meet the jam. He shut his door, placed a small plastic letter-opener between the door and the jam and pulled the shade on his window. He turned on the radio to the sounds of Rob Zombie. “Living dead girl....living dead girllll...,” he sang to himself as he walked to his computer and began typing the story his mother never got to write, the history of their family curse. He had heard all about it over time, and although he would have to cross-reference some of the facts with varying relations, he was determined to get her final work printed as a memorial. He did this more out of immediate boredom than any kind of remembrance, although he had loved his mother. The event, seeing his own mother naked and mutilated, desensitized him a bit. He began pounding away at the keyboard and an hour later, his screwdriver was gone and he was chewing at some ice when he door struggled against the the plastic envoy. Finally, the stop was defeated and it fell to the floor. Andy was up and had pushed the door shut under the slight resistance of the breeze. He reached down to grab the letter opener and got strong resistance on that too. He was able to overcome it, however, and he replaced the jam, pushing it extra hard. He stared at the door in a slightly drunken, very tired state of confusion. What the hell was pushing on the door, he thought. He was about to open it and find out when the shade behind him rustled and flapped. He turned around, suspecting the wind. He stood before his window shade trying clumsily to catch the end of the flap. His tired eyes wandered shut on him just before he would catch it, and to open the eyes demanded several rapid blinking motions. He took a step forward, hoping the shade would blow up against his body and stop so he could grab it. His foot smacked into something hard, cold, and wet. He slowly looked down, his brow wrinkled in befuddlement. On the ground was the crucifix his grandparents gave him. The head of the Savior was knocked off and the neck bleed. The palms bled and the feet bled and blood poured from His left side. His gilded heart and lungs lay on the floor beneath him as his inverted binding caused the stomach to fall into the wound, a large, pink sack of fluid bulging from the side. One of the floating ribs pressed into it as it slid through the body and down. It burst and acid and half-digested food oozed out, burning the flesh, exposing the bone. The shade had calmed as Andy stared in horror at the blasphemous relic he had stubbed his toe on. The shade began slowly to rise; Andy lifted his eyes, but not his face, to greet what was behind the screen. He stumbled back and lost his facilities as the shade reached the top and snapped off the braces, falling to the floor and breaking across the Messiah. Andy’s mouth was so far agape that spittle seeped from the corners of his mouth. In the window were faces. Horribly deformed and grotesque little faces. They were anthropomorphic, but disfigured beyond recognition. Many of them were rotting, some burning, some pulling skin off of themselves and offering it to Andy. They ripped and clawed at the screen, but were unable to get through. One grizzly little imp hammered the mesh with it’s deformed fists until a large claw came up behind it and plunged large, black talons into the beasts skull. This beast, like all the others, had it’s eyes sewn shut. But now the seams burst and the lids flew open; there was nothing behind them. Not the nothing that derives simply from the lack of something visible, but the nothing that derives from the lack of anything. Behind those eyes was a void, a vacuum that could not be filled. It was a direct gate to the Abyss, to Hell. The clawed hand raked back across the gray flesh as a translucent gray fluid oozed out of the cut and ran down the front of it’s face. An inhuman moan escaped the tiny, deformed mouth that seemed to fill Andy’s head and the air around him. It was deep and cold, it shook the air like heat. The claw continued to pull back on the head until the head toppled off. A face so human arose. It was that of a child, skin grayed by damnation, deformed and burnt by acid, it was a baby’s dead face. And this one, like none of the others had eyes. It hobbled up the the forefront of the screen, blinking intelligently. It casually raised one oversized claw in the air, its face neutral. Then it grinned a hideous, maniacal grin and all the beasts all at once opened their eyes, the human sinew thread snapping and flying into the screen. None of them had eyes, it was that same emptiness. Andy felt a large tug and all the blood seemed to drain from his head. His soul, it seemed, was being pulled out of him very slowly. Those empty sockets stared at him and the mouths howled in evil voices dark and ancient hymns which froze his blood. The cross started to shake, the nails holding Jesus’s body fell onto the floor, the sound they made was like that of a bomb exploding. The Christ-man’s body fell to the ground and began to burn, writhing in a small inferno and screaming in a man’s voice, full of sorrow, fear, and begging for mercy from the darkest soul in existence. The beast before him, the baby-demon, let fall his massive hand just as casually as he had raised it and they poured through he window like a water-fall of bodies, twisted and horrible. They rushed him and washed over his legs, biting and clawing, clawing and biting. With each bite and scratch, a part of his soul left and immense cold and mind-numbing pain went in. The bit through his skin, fat, muscle, and into his bone, tearing any tendons that dared get in his way. Some who could not reach his legs wandered off and destroyed other items. Andy kicked desperately, sending many little demons flying, but they simply poured over the seal. One demon was kicked directly at the baby-demon . That self-same claw rose into the air and dismembered the demonic body in one deft, angry swipe. The little hobgoblin hopped down from the pane with clumsy grace and darted, again like a toddler, sort of shuffling and waddling, across the floor and, standing on the balls of his malformed feet, opened it. The demons poured in. From all sides they came, tearing holes in the walls and in the ceiling. Where the wall was broke away, air rushed in, pulling books and papers and more of Andy’s soul. Where the ceiling was removed, a dark, ominous red light beamed through making everything look as though it were coated in blood. Deep, evil laughter echoed through Andy’s bedroom as blood fountains spurted up through the floor and splattered on what remained of the ceiling. The burning body of the gilded Christ was whisked away into the wall by that vacuum as more and more hellions filled his room. They were stacking now, stepping on top of each other to maul him and slowly tear him apart. He was stumbling, fighting desperately for balance. In the books, he thought, people go insane in situations like these. But such was not his luck.That demon that led the assault was grinning now, standing on his bed with a human heart in one hand and his mother’s green eyes in the other. He held them out in offering, but they burned up as Andy actually reached for them. The demon toddled over to his radio and turned it up. Metallica was on, he recognized the tune. They bit his knee caps now, tearing at all the sensitive parts there. He was hyperventilating and could not scream. They were too heavy and he wavered, one of them bit his Achilles tendon and it was all over. He buckled on that foot, then another bit his hamstring, and he kneeled. They gashed his face and chest, they tore chunks from his throat and he was on his back, they were on top of him. Now they were so lusting for blood that what they mauled didn’t matter. They tore at flesh, living or damned, pale or gray, and the blood flew. He felt no pain now, except for the slow sucking of his soul from his body. His eyes were gone and his nose was shredded. His lips and cheek had been torn away and his jaw was exposed. His hair came out in great chunks and claws probed his left ear. But he could still hear from his right. He felt now a creature tear into his chest like a dog into the earth digging for a bone. His ribs were peeled open like a tine can and his heart burst. His last remaining thoughts were focused on what he knew of the world, what he could take with him to comfort him in hell. "Its just the creature under your bead Her favorite song. August 1999 HofP |