Seraphim (40 page)

He closed his eyes again, his face crinkling with concentration.

Afraid he might tear loose an embolism in his physical body, he finally relaxed. And there sat an organ. He rushed over and inspected it, top to bottom. It was so real he could smell the lemon wax.

“Perfect!” he said.

“Child’s play,” assured a suave voice.

Chris jumped. Behind him, sitting in the front pew, was a handsome gent in a gray tailored suit, burgundy shirt, and white silk tie. Slick as a greased doorknob. Beside him sat five naked little girls.

“Shit,” Chris whispered. He began scanning their minds…then stopped. A stench burgeoned in his being; a stink so unbelievably fetid, so utterly vile, that if he were in his physical body and had to endure that foulness for even a fraction of a second, he would have literally been driven to eviscerate his nose from his face with the dullest spoon available.

“You’re a disgrace to your uniform,” the man observed, referring to Chris’s surplice.

“I’m getting my ‘Deuteronomy’ badge next week,” Chris said.

“How wonderful for you. Your mother would be very proud.” He winked. “Personally, though, if I’d been your old lady, I would have gone with the Black and Decker portable space heater in the hallway. But I’m sure that’s just the handyman in me talking.”

The admission startled Chris. “Reading the obits is a sign of a sick mind, dude.”

The man chortled. “How would you know the health of my mind, friend? You just tried making its acquaintance, but couldn’t even get your feet wet. Afraid of the water?”

Chris just stared.

“Like your grandad?” the stranger continued. “I’ve got to tell ya, kid, for a guy who didn’t have rabies he sure was one hydrophobic son of a bitch.” He smiled. “But his fear of H2O is all better now. Why, I hear him screaming for it every day.”

Chris laughed. “Nice try, numbnuts, but I don’t scare very easy when I’m being threatened with bible stories.” But Chris
was
scared now; very scared. How did this asshole know about his grandfather? Chris hadn’t even thought about his grandfather in years.

“Yes, bible stories,” assured the tailored gent. “Because where you’re heading, son, ‘slake’ and ‘thirst’ are as likely to find wedlock as ‘Baskin’ and ‘Robbins.’”

Chris just laughed, albeit unpersuasively.

The man stood. “I haven’t formally introduced myself,” he said. “My name is Gamble.” He swept a hand toward the girls. “And these are my daughters.”

“That’s a relief,” Chris said. “I was thinking you were some kind of wacked-out pedophile pimp.”

“Yes, I’m afraid they can provoke the most libelous suspicions,” Gamble said. Then he stretched out his arms the way a realtor does when showing a spacious living room. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve taken some privileges with your church. It was lacking character, shall we say.”

Chris scowled. “It’s not like you put up new drapes, dude,” he said. “I mean, you went from
Better Homes and Gardens
to Knights of the Round Table.”

Gamble returned to the pew and sat. “Yes, well...” He crossed his legs and appeared to search the material for lint. “I’m going to make a deal with you, Mr. Kaddison. If you walk straight out that front door now, I’ll see that you and your little ship make it home before the rooster wakes. But if you so much as play one fucking note on that organ, I’ll rip a hole so wide in your ego that your id will need a colostomy bag.”

Chris brightened. “
You’re
the one who tried yanking the organ.”

“Nothing gets by you.”

“And you failed, dude,” Chris gloated, patting the shiny veneer top. “She’s right here, pretty as you please.” He poked his chest. “You’re looking at the best carpenter in Wonderland.”

“Really? Hmmm. I seem to recall another carpenter who thought himself pretty handy. You know, I’m beginning to fear that it might be something indigenous to your profession.”

Chris shook his head. “You’re wasting your time, dude. Like I said, I don’t subscribe to that magazine.”

“Regardless, I can still bill you as the main attraction for a stormy crucifixion. But if that’s not your cup of tea, then we can discuss other options. I’m privy, you see, to an illimitable number of ways to agonize the flesh. And the soul. But rather than go into them now, I’ll just leave you with my brochure. As for your undefeated title, Melchizedek, you’re forgetting that I’ve made you a prisoner of these ancient walls, strongholds which I’m sure you’ve noticed do not fade or bend or roll with uncertainty. I have forgotten more about your ‘Wonderland’ than you will ever know, so kindly remove that feather from your hat. As for Juanita, I refuse to permit the successful installation of her...whatever it is.” He waved a hand. “She’s not worthy.”

As Gamble spoke, Chris concentrated on removing a distant section of wall. He hoped that if the man wasn’t giving his full attention to the subterfuge (a rookie mistake, though Chris really didn’t believe this guy was a rookie), then he might be successful.

Nothing happened. Okay, so he couldn’t bring down the walls, but he could create within them. That was something.

“I’m staying,” Chris said, then flipped on the organ’s power switch.

Gamble stood. “You’ll be making a grave mistake. I’m almost sure of it.”

As soon as Chris sat down on the organ bench, a thought struck him: the girls! They’re bolstering the dreamscape, jacking it up like a car so Gamble can lube it. The slick fuck. Okay, he needed a distraction. What could he pull out of his now-featherless hat that could capture and maintain the attention spans of five little girls, ages between nine and eleven? Snakes? Bugs? Wait…

Snails!
Snails and puppy dog tails!
Damned if he could remember how the rest of that went.

Instantly, five boys, all dressed in matching prep school uniforms, stood before the girls and began provoking them with sophomoric taunts and spit balls.

Gamble remained seated, indulging the scene with a carefree pose.

As the girls stood and confronted their attackers, Chris once again tried to make a portion of the farthest wall disappear. This time it worked, confirming his suspicions about the girls. But that wasn’t good, because that meant he wasn’t up against just one Cheshire Cat. He was up against a whole litter.

Who in the fuck are these people?
he desperately wondered.

Just as the segment of wall vanished, all five boys began screaming.

“Not such a tough guy now, are you?” the closest girl said to her knavish suitor, who had hiked up his sweater and was now groping violently at his own abdomen. His tearing, panicked eyes pleaded for her to stop. Within moments, his short blond hair was imbued with sweat. Unable to control his hands, he gaped down in utter horror as his self-mutilation advanced to abominable levels. Pointing his nose at the ceiling, he shrieked like some forlorn crane on a moonlit marsh, then began to thrash his head. Orbs of sweat and spittle, amber in the torchlight, left his head like fireflies from a rattled bush. And the first trickle of what would quickly become a torrent of blood left his nose and stained his cracked lips. The excruciating pain began to bounce him like a Pogo stick as he dug deeper and deeper, screaming and jumping and gurgling, sounding like Pavarotti in a rumble seat down a washboard road. Then, as he ripped through the fatty tissue, he reached in with both hands and pulled back the skin, splitting himself and the immense room open with a wet, sucking sound. Each cough, each bray, each explosive scream was another interspersing of blood across the white, taut skin of the girl before him, who continued to watch with unbridled fascination. A length of intestine now hung from his avulsion like a giant watch chain, and a big, purple bulge said more was coming. All around him now, the dirt floor was sopping up the blood and fluids that were splashing from the open cavity. His face twisting in unbelievable pain, he then plucked out his own bladder and forcefully fed it to the boy on his right, who was already mashing his own shredded genitals into the next boy’s mouth, who himself had a pair of eyeballs for the one next to him, and down the line it went.

The screams were unlike any Chris had ever heard in Wonderland, or anywhere else for that matter; wails filled with so much horror and insufferable pain that he had to finally cover his ears.

“Am I beaming?” Gamble said, smiling from ear to ear. “I swear, I haven’t been this proud since the whole lot of them brought down that family of moose outside Vancouver.”

Chris was still staring at the boys. Their screams were all but echoes now, their limbs twitching with the last, fading amperes of life.
Get a grip
, he thought.
They’re just pretend, you dumbass
weenie. Then he turned away, gagging. The feculence, like everything else, was too substantive to be ignored.

Dead, and no longer desired in their upright positions, all five boys crumpled simultaneously to the ground. Then the girls began scavenging their bodies for leftovers, one occasionally nipping or clawing the other if she got too close.

A pack of hyenas couldn’t have been portrayed any better, Chris thought.

He tried to make the bodies evaporate. And failed.

“The Shreveport School for Wayward Boys frowns on fraternization…and curfew violations,” Gamble explained, as if he were the Dean of said institution, speaking with the parents of prospective delinquents. “In fact, both are grounds for harsh, punitive action. But I think you’ll agree that these little recidivists have just been sufficiently punished.”

Shocked, Chris gaped at the man. “I...I created them, dude,” he finally said, more to himself. “There’s no way those kids could be real. They’re just like this church, this organ—they’re just projections of thought.”

Gamble removed an emery board from the inside pocket of his jacket, then began filing the nail of his right forefinger. “Be careful how you say that, Mr. Kaddison. I, too, was once a projection of thought.”

“No shit?” Chris said, a little more than intrigued. “Then, you must feel right at home.”

“This place
home?
I hardly think so. I’m only subletting this space until my new universe is fumigated.”

Chris kept returning to the boys.

“I saw you peek into their minds as they were thrashing,” Gamble said. “Tell me, Mr. Kaddison, do illusions so convincingly scream out for mummies and daddies? For God? For sweet death to take them…quickly?”

Chris didn’t want to believe him, but had to. “You’re one sick cookie, dude! You can’t be from topside! You live here, don’t you? In the psyche, in the mind, in the heart?”

“Chris, you’re a fucking poet.”

A succession of vibratory groans rippled through the church, the rings having emanated in either a distant part of the castle, or beyond the dream itself. It was the sound of imagination on a fault line; the land of make-believe shifting on its foundation.

The wrecking ball was coming, Chris knew. As were his deepest fears, no doubt.

“You know what that is, asshole?” Chris said. “That’s Juanita. Because of what your little harem just did, her psyche’s rejecting this dream like a bad kidney. It knows something’s wrong, and it’ll tear this dream apart to find us. Even your glue won’t hold this place together.”

“Shall we stay put then?” said Gamble. “Turn ourselves over to the authorities and take our punishment like the true gentlemen we are?”

“Fuck that,” Chris said, then reached for the organ’s keys.

But his hands weren’t there.

“Play it again, Sam,” Gamble instructed. “With your
tongue.
”

Chris’s tongue lolled out, all three feet of it now, and latched onto the sheet music holder. It grabbled the scrollwork like a blind worm looking for its hole. He thought of the missing segment of wall, and tried to conjure something.

Gamble softly clapped. “Play that Croche piece, ‘Tongue in a Bottle’— no, no—‘Tongue and Again’—wait—‘Tongue is on Our Side’—I’ve got it!—‘Song Tongue Blue’ by Neil baby!”

Then Chris saw it, the embodiment of his effort, moving like oil through the opening in the wall. Its head, as large as a Volkswagen, glided in on the end of a long neck fringed with a spiny sail. Even longer than his own, its flicking tongue was mottled red and black, and classically forked. Across its buffed scales, torchlight heaved and roiled and surged like the lamentations of a dying assassin. Its nocturnal eyes were sharp and searching, each girded by a row of bony spurs.

The ground shuddered again, followed by a succession of low, booming throbs, like the cadence of a giant soldier marching in place. As Chris listened, more noises joined in: the sounds of metal turning against primal metal; the grating squeals of prison doors being opened for the first time in centuries. Then the jingling of chains wafted through; irons falling to the floor as the foolhardy guards unclasped the ancient demons from their cold dungeon shackles. And set them about their quarry.

Chris, cursing the muse, hoped it was just Juanita’s demolition equipment. But one thing was certain: time was running out.

Imagining his own hands back in their cuffs, Chris hovered over the keys. They appeared, but just as he dropped his finger to play, both hands turned into shear ladies’ gloves. His finger bent backwards the moment it struck the key.

The dragon raised its head. Smoke curled from its nostrils. It was maybe fifty feet from Gamble and closing quickly, stealthily.

As his new prosthetic tongue was parting his hair, Chris added another item to the beast: a thermostat. Then he cranked it up all the way.

The girls remained on the floor, snorting, sniffing, grunting. One was using her prey’s femur to gain access into its skull. She was in after three more blows, pulling out her prize by the handfuls.

For a moment, Chris wondered if he might not be better off finding someone else to play the song, like that dead guy Liberace. Then he was off his stool and on the dirt. He looked up.

And there in front of the organ sat Liberace, wearing Liz Taylor’s jewelry and an outfit that made Elton John look like Rush Limbaugh.

The entertainer turned and smiled his famous smile at the man in the pew, wiggled his fingers at the girls, who were now staring up at him with wary surprise, then proceeded to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with more than just one digit.