Falling Idols (17 page)

“What our priests had created, they finally got some control over, but they couldn’t get rid of it. I call it a demon, but it’s not like
you
think of demon. There’ve always been spirits, like unshaped clay, waiting to take whatever form someone with enough knowledge or devotion gives it, and that’s what the priests had done. But with the appetite they’d given it, and fed on the blood of four thousand warriors, it’d reached a degree of independence. Finally it consented to banishment, but only on condition of a sacrifice. It … it wanted flesh and blood from Sennacherib’s own lineage. Even then he got the priests to bargain with it. The thing didn’t care if what it received was a legitimate heir to the Assyrian throne. It was the flesh and blood alone that mattered.

“
They took my children, Patrick.
He sent soldiers into our tent and they took my beautiful babies and they fed them to that thing. It opened up their bellies and spread their insides out on the desert floor, and ate them piece … by … piece.”

Maia was silent for a long time, and I didn’t go to her as I might’ve. I wasn’t made to ease grief some 2700 years strong.

“Hezekiah was horrified by what he’d heard happened, and he eventually paid tribute — he ransomed the city, really — so our army went back home again. Except Sennacherib left us behind, Lilah and Salíce and me. Now that he’d killed my children he couldn’t trust us, so he made a gift of us to Hezekiah, to be his own concubines. Seems even he had heard of us, from spies he’d sent to Assyria.

“Even though we were betrayed by Sennacherib, we still didn’t have any love for the Israelites, or their god. So it was mostly a very antagonistic relationship we had with Hezekiah. But then one night, before he took us, he became very drunk, and we were amazed at what a state of terror he was in over their god. He talked to us, I think, because we were the only ones he could talk to, the only ones who didn’t share his religion.

“He was still haunted by the butchery of my babies. It wasn’t their deaths so much as the … the consumption of them that was so abhorrent to him. And this one night, drunk, with his guard down, he confessed that he couldn’t see any difference between that, and certain things their own god Yahweh had demanded.

“Then he mentioned some text he’d acquired from a Chaldean trader. He wouldn’t tell us what it said, specifically — he was too horrified to do that — but he hinted that it was written in angelic script, and that it couldn’t be burned, and that it had something to do with Yahweh and the blood sacrifice of a child.”

As Maia told me these things, they plucked at old misgivings I’d once chosen to ignore … like all those scriptures that plainly had God demanding that his chosen people lay waste to enemies down to the last innocent baby and ignorant animal.

Might these, too, have fed him, along with faith?

“When Hezekiah finally had us that night, something became very different about him. In spite of how drunk he was, he was inexhaustible. His erection had swollen to twice its usual size, and he kept after us long after it was raw. Hours, it must’ve been, and he still hadn’t released once. I don’t know if it was something in his eyes, or the way his throat ballooned out, as if his flesh couldn’t contain whatever was inside him, but we knew it wasn’t Hezekiah any longer. It was the Sacred Marriage, all over again … except this time, it was their god inside
him
.

“And when we realized this, Lilah and Salíce and I, that was when he orgasmed. His screaming was like a slaughtered pig’s. You can’t have any idea what that sounded like echoing down the palace corridors and back again. And his seed … it was like venom. He held us down and filled us with it, and there wasn’t any end to it, and it burned us from the inside out…”

When Maia went to the window, pressing her hands to the panes of leaded glass, we both gazed on the risen moon that watched over a land once filled with people who’d had no need of anything from the scorching deserts of Palestine. And I thought how right it was that she and her sisters had come to live amongst the Celts, and wait for that day when some magic in our blood might be turned to their advantage, if only to know the enemy a little better.

“And that was the seed of what we became,” she finished. “The punishment from their god for who we were. What we’d heard. He turned us into their idea of what we’d worshipped at home. Turned us into Liliths. And then he turned us away. Forever.”

VIII.
O magnum mysterium

Even before they came to Dublin for the divination, I’d begun collectively thinking of them as the Misbegotten.

They came from as near as across the Irish Sea; as far away as the other side of the world. They came, and they were not all the same. Some drank blood while others ate flesh; then there was Salíce. The one called Julius? Before his castrato deafened him, Maia told me, it was the resonances of extraordinary sounds that kept him young. I’d been told of an aborigine who’d been eating eyes since the British used Australia as a penal colony, claiming it kept his view into the Dreamtime clear. I’d been told of a Paris artist who could be nourished only with spinal fluid. They walked and talked like men and women, but only if you looked none too close. For one who knew better, it was as though the gates of some fabulous and terrible menagerie had been thrown wide, and its inhabitants allowed to overrun creation.

Nobody’s ever born this way,
Maia had said, but I saw them as misbegotten all the same, of monstrous second births that had, by chance or perverse design, left them equipped to demand accounting for what they’d all become. And even if in the end they might only shake futile fists at Heaven, I felt sure their voices would carry much farther than the rest of ours.

In a way I envied them.

In a way I regretted they hadn’t the power to turn me into one of them.

But to aid their cause, all I had to do was spread wide my arms, fixate my soul upon the Christ, then do what came naturally.

“We’re of two minds on God, Patrick,” she’d explained to me. “But if he really had a son, and there’s even a little bit of him in that son, and if there’s even a little bit of that son now in your blood, and in that single tiny scrap of flesh he left behind, then maybe that’s enough for us to do what men and women have always wanted to do: understand the true nature of God.”

“What tiny scrap of flesh he left behind?” I’d asked.

Having heard stories of their revels and debauches, I’d half-expected them to behave like barbarians as they filled the cellars beneath the house. But they took their places amongst the stones and great oaken beams with grim and solemn faces, and waited with the kind of hungry patience that could only accrue over lifetimes.

When the Sisters came for me I was preparing myself in silent contemplation. The Order of Saint Francis had taught me well in this much, at least. I turned around to find they’d quietly filled the doorway, and when Maia laid her cheek to my bare back, the other two turned theirs, to give us our moment alone.

“We’re of two minds on God,” she’d explained. “Some fear he might really be the creator of everything. In which case, we have no hope at all. Even if there is some lost paradise that was once promised, we’ll never regain it.”

They led me into the chamber, in the center of eyes and teeth and throats, and naked, I lay down upon the waiting cross.

“But there’s another way it might be,” she’d said, reminding me then of how the Assyrians had made their demon by taking that malleable form and imprinting it with all the traits they desired in it, until they’d fed it to the point of independence, so that it broke away on its own.

They lashed my arms to those of the cross; secured my feet as well. The crown of thorns came last. And when they raised the cross upright, and dropped its foot into the waiting hole, all the old devotions came back to me again, and once more I became as one with Father, with Son, and with Holy Ghost.

Whatever those were.

“Some of us wonder if religion hasn’t gotten it backwards,” she’d said. “If what the world now calls God was born in the desert out of the needs of people who had to have something bigger than themselves to worship. So it heard them, and asked for more, and they fed it burnt offerings, and the blood of their enemies, and their devotion, and later on they exported it to the rest of the world. But even before then, it was getting stronger, until after enough centuries had passed, they’d all forgotten where that god of theirs came from and thought it’d always been there, and created them instead … and by then, it was ready to feed on them.”

The Sisters of the Trinity took their places while my weight tugged at the lashes that held me aloft. My every rib stood etched against flesh as I laboured for breath, and now, at long last, the empathy I’d always sought with Christ had come. I was no longer in a Dublin cellar; rather, atop a skull-shaped hill called Golgotha, dying in the hot winds and stinging desert dust.

“Who better to feed on than those who considered themselves his children?” she’d explained. “They’ve always called themselves his chosen people … but chosen for what? You have to wonder. From the time of the Babylonian exile, to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, right up to the Holocaust … he’s been eating and drinking them all along, like no other people on earth.”

Salíce stood before me, below, and slowly, reverently, took me into her mouth. Minutes passed, as I writhed upon the cross between the agony of breaths, until it happened anew — the flesh of my wrists splitting layer by layer, the blood freed at last in a gush of transcendence and ecstasy. It trickled first along my arms toward my ribcage, then began to flow heavier, drizzling down into Maia’s wide and waiting mouth. So that none would be wasted, bowls were set beneath my other wrist and my feet.

I turned my eyes toward the heavens, wide and seeing so very clearly now, like those of the martyr I’d once dreamt of being: Saint Ignatius, in that painting hanging in Greyfriars Abbey. I’d so admired it, always wondering if I could show his sort of courage when the teeth of the carnivores began to close. Perhaps, now, I’d equaled him, even bettered him. Or maybe I’d fallen short by the depth and breadth of the darkest abyss.

There was no truth but this: I was not the father’s son I’d once been.

“What tiny scrap of flesh he left behind?” I’d asked.

“Don’t forget, he was circumcised. In the temple, when he was eight weeks old. The Holy Foreskin — that’s what you papists call it,” she’d said, with a teasing shake of her head. “You people and your morbid relics.”

When I looked down the bloody length of my body, I could see that tiny dark scrap in Lilah’s fingers, stolen from its crystal reliquary north of Rome. Still soft and pliable, it was, neither rotted nor gone leathery. Incorruptible.

But flesh is flesh, and beliefs something else altogether.

“Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me,”
he’d asked, and while I’d never known for sure what impact I might have, perhaps the truth alone would be enough.

The truth, they’d insisted he said, will set you free.

Then again, doubt works miracles too.

Lilah lifted her hand, and touched the foreskin to my flesh, to wet it with my blood, then it disappeared between her teeth.

And in the convulsive rapture of fluids and tissue, in that moment that makes us one with gods, I gave them all they’d asked for, all they needed, all I had to give.

It was explosive.

The greatest revelations usually are.

IX.
Descendo ad patrem meum

“You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.”

It was Carl Jung said that. My uncle had only borrowed it.

I nearly bled to death on that night of the divination, the stigmata persistent and reaching for the very core of me. In the weeks that followed, as the Sisters nursed me back to health like a faithful dog they couldn’t bear to have put to sleep, I often fondled an old pewter crucifix while my thoughts turned to the subject of fear.

Fear the Lord thy God, we were taught since childhood in my family, and how we quaked. How we trembled. How we fell daily to our knees and supplicated for continued mercy.