Mad Gods - Predatory Ethics: Book I (7 page)

Kosta began to murmur under his breath and, after a
while, the words, upon leaving his mouth, glowed in the air in front of him. He
slowly continued the incantation, as it went past priceless stacks and shelves
of scrolls, parchment, vellum and pelts. The incantation continued, turning
right, left, around marbled busts and reliefs of Ptolemies, Alexanders,
Cleopatras and major political, religious figures, both forgotten and
remembered, who, after a millennium of complete darkness, once again saw light.

The glowing words came to an ordinary shelf, among
the many others, and slowly dipped to the second from bottom shelf. It then
wrapped around a pelt-bound volume, with cracked edging and four equally-spaced
steel bindings. Kosta bent down and retrieved the tome, snuffing out the
glowing breath like a candle. The incantation would not have worked on anything
other than the original
Idammah-Gan
Codex,
and Kosta could not have known it would work until he used it. If he
hadn’t found the lost mother of all libraries, and had the original texts been
returned to the ancient travelers in Alexandria, he wouldn’t have
the Idammah-Gan Codex
. There were so
many ifs, woulds and maybes, conveniently converging, that Kosta forgot to
breath. He became lightheaded and nearly forgot how to light his miner’s
helmet.

It took a few hours to weave his way back along the
path of the incantation. Kosta burned to sit and examine the book he carried,
but knew he could only examine it under daylight. The darkness hid too many
unknowns, and he wanted to concentrate on the codex, not on fighting phantoms
and madness. He would return again when he was more prepared to deal with these
uncertainties. Now, he needed to read the pages of the codex and plan anew. All
of his beliefs were gearing up with the renewed hope, provided by the codex.

A plan, designed by a long forgotten, medieval
philosopher, was about to be discovered. After a year of searching, Kosta held
what George Gemistos Plethon had longed to read. In his search for its
recovery, Kosta had learned what it was all about and that he must handle it
with caution. The volume detailed all the many lives of the main character in
St. John’s Revelations. After a long enough time in our imagination, the mythic
Beast had been made real.

TIME: AUGUST 14TH, 1961. WHITTIER MANSION, SAN FRANCISCO,
CALIFORNIA, U.S.A

Balzeer walked lightly down the corridor of the third
floor in the Whittier Mansion. At various intervals of the hall, he passed
lounging glassy-eyed devotees, some on the floor, some on chairs and couches,
all there to experience something different. The beatniks had carved out an
attractive scene, which had attracted many like-minded people. Some came to sit
and listen to Kerouac, Ginsberg and Bukowski read aloud from
Lonesome Traveler, Kaddish and Howl,
so
they could snap their fingers in appreciation.

The sad fact was that Kerouac had nearly gone mad
from drink and was traveling all around the country. Ginsberg was traveling the
world, traversing the U.S.S.R., Scandinavia, China and the Communist Block
countries. Bukowski had never even come to San Francisco until later in his
life. He lived and worked in a post office, doing his cultural wailing only in
his spare time, while sober, or most likely while he was not.

The Supreme Tribunal passed a dark-haired beauty who
watched him in disbelief. Her hazel eyes widened and her petal mouth slightly
parted at Balzeer’s touch. His hand traveled down past her stomach and began to
hike up her short skirt. She looked around for support from some of the others,
who were now starting to watch, but only saw hungry eyes. She was in a drugged
haze and could not bring her hands up with enough strength to ward off her bald
abuser.

The effort that she made to push him away only
spurred him on, as it seemed that she was only grasping for him. She could not
manage to speak, to tell him to stop pushing his hand down her panties and
parting her pubic lips. Her grunts and groans were stopped as his mouth closed
on hers, and then there was only the sound of a slow scuffle.

He pushed her panties to the side and stroked her
mound with an open palm. All the while, his other hand traveled up to cup the
back of her head and bring it closer to his. His kisses had turned hard and
rough, but his hands stayed tender, though still unwanted and unwelcome. The
hand behind her head moved and came over her chest, parting her shirt and, at
the same time, tearing it.

His lower hand moved and, with a few quick movements,
undid his pants, which promptly fell to the floor. In a matter of seconds, he
was on top of her, thrusting into her with slow, languid strokes. He held her
ankles spread wide as he pushed forward, the couch banging the wall behind
them.

Her head bobbed back and forth, her black hair
falling over her face, hiding the tears that ran down it. She hoped that it
would soon be over and prayed that she would only remember it as a bad
hallucination.

His strokes quickened until he stopped, then he
climbed off of her. He reached down and pulled up his slacks, and with a sharp
clink of his belt, buttoned up his pants and walked away, never glancing back.
He did not see the six other ravenous forms advance on the sprawled,
still-gasping girl. The ordeal had only begun for her, and even if he had
noticed, he wouldn’t have cared.

There were many other disillusioned men and women,
many of them hardly past childhood. They would never be missed. They had come
here to connect to something different from their parents’ Judeo-Christian
ethics. Some, like this girl, became lost in the crowd as they waited their
turn. The life they found was much worse than the life from which they fled.
They did not find freedom. As the girl was repeatedly violated, she realized
that she had lost all of her personal rights, her fragile protests ignored, if
they were noticed at all.

Balzeer McGrath wasn’t interested in either the girl
or the others. For him, sex was like pissing, or any other bodily function. He
did it when the need arose. Since he’d become an adult, he had never denied his
urges and lusts. He had long since stopped being able to distinguish his
desires from his needs. What he wanted, he got.

He continued down the immaculate corridors of the
mansion filled with antiques. Some had been bought with the house, while others
had been collected from various ancient, condemned and damned places, all over
the world. Everything was steeped in death, misery or brutal apathy. Even the
art was stygian and ghastly, created by madmen who had been condemned for their
ruined imagination and subjects of lunacy, by both the church and decency.

De Goya’s
Saturn
Devouring His Children
hung on the wall. This was mild fare, compared to
the depictions of rape, pillage and massacre that spilled and tumbled
everywhere in the inner corridors through which he trod. Every piece of art
depicted monstrous atrocities. Unknown, unseen commissioned works from masters
were also here. Botticellis, Michaelangelos, Raphaels, Da Vincis and
Caravaggios depicted black masses and Luciferian ceremonies. For these
renderings, the artists would’ve been condemned, or excommunicated, had their
existence been a matter of public knowledge.

Balzeer was the latest in a long line of church
leaders who followed a path very divergent from that of the Catholic Church.
They worshiped the First and Rightful Son of God, Satanael, not the Weakling
Son, Jesus. Balzeer and his predecessors continued in the old ways — open
belligerence for those that followed the Weakling’s Citadel, the Catholic
Church, and complete submission to the pleasures of the flesh.

The new initiates, and even some of the existing
adepts, had shown their desire to make their faith seem more amiable. Their
time would surely come, but for now, Balzeer and
his
dogma ruled.

He turned two more rights and went down a narrow
stairwell to the back entrance of the library. As he twisted the brass handle
of the mahogany doors, their weight turned on intricately carved, gleaming
hinges.

He surveyed the vast room and the book-lined shelves,
openly contemptuous of anyone present. To his regret, the room was empty. No
one was seated on the leather couches, or the luxuriously upholstered wingback
chairs, situated by one of the room’s three fireplaces. The seats would have
been comforting, had they not been placed before hearths that depicted the
torture and torment of the Venetians’ Inferno. Balzeer had commissioned a
promising group of art students to carve them, to his specifications, from a
long forgotten volume. It took them nearly a year to complete the project. They
finally went mad from the constant exposure to the images. Eleven months after
they had started their work, seven bright, young, promising gibbering idiots
left the mansion. He remembered them as one would remember a particularly good
screwdriver; they had been worth his attention.

He walked to the center of the room and stopped. His
left arm began tracing unseen patterns before him in the air. They remained
invisible until he mouthed words and phrases of slithering intimacy, like a
lover’s whisper or the slit of a sharp knife. His intonations barely audible,
the tracings began to glow with the sickly yellow of a festering wound.
Continuing his work, Balzeer raised his right arm and weaved patterns below
him. The patterns took on a tone of an angry purple bruise.

Beneath him on a priceless rug, weaved from the hair
of slaughtered innocents of a bygone era, a swirling whirlpool of colors
materialized. He began to slowly sink into it, unperturbed, until a short time
later, he was gone. Only the smell of mutton indicated that he, or his textured
whirlpool, had been there at all. He glanced around the chamber into which he
had sunk. At each place he glanced, a black candle sparked to life. They only
produced enough light to reveal the abominations surrounding him.

All about the room, and at various stages of
decomposition, were human remains. Some dangled from hooks, while others were
impaled on stakes from beneath and from the sides, hanging like forgotten
clothes. Impossibly, considering their state, a few continued to move,
unnaturally kept alive to suffer and to provide the room with its needed fuel.
The room ran on misery — it was its spark, its essence and its lifeblood.
Balzeer had created it during a moment of inspiration. He literally detested
getting his hands dirty, but he needed the ever-present sacrifices, so he kept
them all alive as long as he could. Some had been suffering for years, others
merely for weeks.

There were no animals, because they were incapable of
providing the required agony. No animal expected, or wished, for anything
besides a painless existence and food. Humans, on the other hand, had a
lifetime of dreams and hopes that he could grind into dust.

The physical pain was part of it, but the real fuel
came from their mental and psychic torture. He chose people who had the most to
lose. Sensitive souls, just entering their adult lives with promise and
expectations, found themselves barely surviving, until a bald persecutor came
and showed them the essence of true pain. When they were left alone with each
other and their shared grief, it all seemed horrible, but somehow, the true
terror was forgotten. The mind cannot remain focused on constant pain; humans
simply are not equipped to handle pain without some respite.

Balzeer went to a cage in the center of the chamber
and knelt down. Using a pair of long tongs, which belonged in a foundry, he
brought out a squirming and snapping land piranha. Fully equipped with the
trademark teeth and scales of a fish, this contrived beast breathed air, at
least for a short period of time.

He walked over to a strong, still-flailing brute of a
man. At one time, he had been a professional athlete. Balzeer had made sure
that no one would miss this him; as far as the rest of the world was concerned,
he had died in a car accident. As he got closer, the man tried to kick out with
his legs, unable to use his arms, as they were impaled against the far wall.

Balzeer stopped short and looked about him. On the
floor, he saw another stake, a yard in length, and hefted it with his left
hand, still holding onto the snapping land fish. He launched the stake and
caught the man’s left leg, just about at his ankle, pinning it to the wall.
Balzeer was quite impressed with his accuracy, but did not linger on it. He had
more important things to do.

He stepped closer to the man and, mumbling a quick incantation,
he pushed the fish forward, into his body, without need for an incision. It was
a small fish, barely two inches long. It would not do too much damage, but the
pain of being eaten inside out, was that for which Balzeer was aiming. It would
burst inside the man from over-eating, like a mosquito hitting an artery.
However, that wouldn’t happen for another hour.

He repeated this with five of the eighteen other
people surrounding him. Some were easier to handle than the football player,
but the results would all be the same. After he had finished with the last one,
he turned to the center of the chamber and saw that the pentagram he had
fashioned was beginning to pulse with life. It was quite large, intended to
shackle something monstrous.

The pulse was a raspy breath, drawn in and out with
the effort of traveling a great distance in a very short period of time. The
glow further illuminated the rest of the dark chapel. Screams echoed as his
charges saw their surroundings in full light. Some gagged, and vomit began to
permeate the air.