Hecate Lee and the Church of the Bloody Word

Hecate Smith and the Church of the Bloody Word
by
Bobby Derie

Pale bees buzzed around the tree, a y-shaped ash whose trunk was as thick around as a woman's thigh, and whose leaves scattered the sunlight into dappled shades of white and green on the surrounding sea of reddish moss and ferns. At the elbow where the trunk had split, the fur-covered remnant of a creature hung, eyes and lips long eaten away, so the bare fangs hung out from exposed skull, skin dried and taught against the bone. In general outlines perhaps it had once been human, but the head had the long cast of a muzzle, and a carnivore's teeth.

"What sacrifice is this?" A voice broke the silence. She stepped into the bower, a black-suited woman with dark sunglasses that hid her eyes. Dark freckles fell in a thick band across her nose and cheeks, but her skin was an unhealthy olive like virgin oil, and her hair was muddy red. Shiny black leather shoes crept through the undergrowth, hands held out in front of her, twitching like the whiskers of a cat.

"Why, it must be an offering to some pagan spirit that dwells in this glade, an echo of some classic worship of ancient days, maintained in degenerate form by the inbred inhabitants of this desolate locale." she whispered aloud, drawing ever nearer as the bees buzzed and hummed in their strange dances. "And yet might there be some primal power yet held in this carcass, imbued as it is with terrible blind faith and ceremony? Aye, and some power that a skilled necromancer might be able to take!"

With gentle strength she touched the faded fur on the corpse, her fingers sinking in to the rancid flesh, and as the buzzing rose to a fervent pitch she wrenched, bone and fur coming away in sticky gobbets to reveal the crimson honeycombs within. "What strange nectar is this!" she whispered, drawing forth a handful of sticky black comb studded with shiny red cells, on which pale grub-like bees clambered in confusion. "No doubt distilled from narcotic blossoms, and used in the profane rites of the cult for secret initiations into the nigh-forgotten mysteries! Now I too shall join in on this secret communion!"

So saying, she stuffed the scabbrous honeycomb into her mouth, teeth crunching and sucking at the sickly-sweet stuff, until her cheeks bulged and her face and hands were stained with the dark crimson remnants of her profane feast. Behind those black glasses, her pupils dilated into vast pools, and within her skull she felt the throbbing at cardinal points as tumorous chakras resonated in communion. A bloody froth arose at her lips as she collapsed into the crimson grass at the base of the tree.

*

In the hollow of the fossil titan's chest, pale humans scraped out hexagonal chambers from the calcified bone. Hovering above them vast pale insects danced and sang in eternal communication, descending now and again to regurgitate from its orifice a red stream into the open mouth of a starving parishioner, or to guide a thin and aging worker into one of the finished cells, which was then sealed with red wax.

One of the older cells bulged and sagged, then cracked and broke from within, vomiting forth a thin figure in a black suit and sunglasses, mud-colored hair in disarray. She looked up at the distance sky, tracing out the great spine, and the manifold ribs of the titan, the interplay of humans and monstrous pale bees in their eternal dance and labor. She smiled and scuttled forward, clattering over dry bones stripped free of flesh and desiccated carapaces sucked clean of their juices, for she found herself at the peak of a great morbid mountain of remains, and surveyed the workers above and below.

"Aha! A posthuman settlement." she murmured, nails idly scratching sigils on the cone-like elongated skull of a little girl. "No doubt in ancient days the bees once served men, and then in some atomic apocalypse the tides of power shifted, and all the weight of centuries of hubris fell with terrible irony on those who had crafted these great insects. Or perhaps again this is some prehuman survival, a remnant of those hoary days before the rise of Sumer and Acchad, before benevolent gods recreated the universe in their own image, and the stories of elder lore were handed down only by hidden priests that degenerated, generation after generation, into simple magicians whose illicit brewing of narcotic mead was the only remnant of their service to the pale buzzing masters..."

As she spoke, a drone began to descend from the endless dance, buzzing in zig-zagging flight towards her.

"Ahh! I am discovered! Forgive me, oh buzzing insect-god, for trespassing on your terrible domain! Strip not my flesh from my bones!" So saying she threw herself prostrate, but so unbalanced herself that she began to fall down the pile, precipitating a general avalanche of carved ribs and elongated skulls. The great clatter echoed throughout the fossil titan's thoracic cavity, and when at last she came to a rest, she sat up amid a great plume of bone dust and swirling dirt, cough, sputtering, and her black suit painted grey and white. He sunglasses had been lost in the fall, and she squinted against the light.

Looking back for her buzzing pursuer, she saw that the pile had half collapsed, and revealed beneath the massive pile a low cathedral, carved into the titan's ilium.

"A hidden fane!" She said, as she stumbled toward the irregular entrance to the weirdly Gothic structure, whose fluting lines were carved to resemble skeletons and corpses in relief. "No doubt the original temple of the humans, before they were impressed by their rebellious creations, and perhaps still to contain the secret of their nameless rites! I will enter this shrine and discern the lore with my esoteric learning, and come to be the mistress of this place..."

The entrance was a rough rectangle, but irregular, the carving uneven of depth and quality, as if the original structure had been carved and carved again over generations, worn down over the centuries with decade after decade of elaboration by skilled but blind hands. The entrance itself led to a short tunnel, where she ran her hand over murals of strange cannibal feasts and necrophiliac rites, one leading into the other, now with bees and now with humans, pale buzzing forms metamorphosing into thin human wiggly grubs and back again. Past the tunnel was a chamber, where massive mummified insects stood guard around a central plinth of carven ivory. She smelled a sickly-sweet scent, a strange incense of copper and burnt sugar, and crawled forward on her knees, hands blindly treading over carven histories that bordered on the pornographic, bees and men and women locked in carnal congress, underage nymphettes sucking off bearded priests with compound eyes, the off-shoot sect of lesbian drones, locked forever in their pseudo-mating dance of parthenogenesis and murder... The top of the plinth itself was a shallow bowl, filled with a thick liquid covered by a thin crystalline scab.

"What holy nectar is this...it can be nothing less than the royal jelly, the salve of transformation, the true grail from which all these blasphemies have sprung. I must sup from this chalice if I am ever to divine the full mysteries of this place..." And so saying through herself face-first into the bowl, catching a glimpse in only the final instant a glimmer of her reflection in the bloody liquid, the compound eyes wide, the beginning of proboscises forming along her jaw...

*

The red-cloaked druids struggled to nail the sacrifice to the sacred tree, her pale olive skin contrasting against the brown ash-wood. Her foul curses came out as a burble, bloody froth foaming at her lips as her head lolled back and forth, and she did no more than shake as the ash-wood stakes were driven through her flesh, between the bones of her forearms, to pin her to the tree. Stripped of her strange black garments, she was decked with garlands of crimson flowers, the narcotic dust of which covered their fingers, their hands, and painted her breasts with the strange rows of parallel scars. At last the archdruid came, bearing with him the black chalice of old, and they pierced her tongue with a holly thorn so the blood flowed down her chin and fell among the blossoms. Removing the lid from the chalice the softest of buzzing filled the sacred grove, and with great care he removed the pale, fuzzy form of a queen nymph, and placed it upon her bloody tongue.

Unnerved, the archdruid removed his fingers quickly. Though life must surely be fleeing quickly from her form, still she was smiling.

###

In the Kingdom of the Night

In the Kingdom of the Night
by
Bobby Derie

Broken, she walked the streets. Knees, hips, and toes hurt, thighs trembling, calves hard as knots, sweat carving channels through the grime of the city on her skin, black grit accumulating in her creases and corners, rubbing against each other, skin wearing raw, and she could feel the blisters and pus forming beneath the each, anticipating the swelling and cracking to come, the thousand infections already begun. Yet she couldn’t stop.

Lungs burned, though she wasn’t walking fast, and she sucked at the air that tasted of sulfur and ozone and offal. There was something primal to it, the uncleanliness of a volcano’s caldera, the air itself burned and stung and filled with the ash of new rocks screaming to life; it washed away the industrial scents, the chemicals and dyes and acids that ripped and tore at eyes and lungs, and even the human smells were just a substrate beneath it, all the piss and shit and cooking-fires, oils and rot carried on the wind, the herd-smell of the two-legged race crammed into their coffin-chambers and tombs, ignorant of the cloud of dander and grime they left on everything they touched, ever day breathing in and out cells and smells of a million people.

She breathed brimstone, and she knew it came from her, wondered if the yellow fumes were rising from her mouth and nostrils, a wretched oracle wreathed in pallid smoke, and the adyton was within her. There was a hole in her chest, like the ache of a sudden loss that would never stop, but it radiated heat. Autumn winds blew cold on her skin, but the fever rippled through her veins in waves, settling behind her eyes, in her ears, pounding at her temples as she moved her legs forward mechanically, bare feat scraping on the stone and soil of the city, feeling the steps in rhythm, her mind tracing the path of the sigil she carved step by step through streets and alleys, around buildings and through parks, across streets and down concrete slopes to culverts, naked feat crashing through the thin ice atop pale brown sludge, leaving oil-flecked rainbow prints when she emerged on dry ground once more, climbing chainlink fences, still moving through the arcs and knots…

At last she came to herself, bright with fever, in the darkness beneath the city. She crawled on her belly through a sewer, only her nostrils above the water. Around and with her were the crawling things of the earth, roaches and centipedes and deathwatch beetles, some strange and glorious in their slick and darkling shapes. The pain in her heart flared as she crossed over, and she shuddered and choked in the tight tunnel like a goldfish stuck in salt water. For whole minutes she could not scream, paralyzed with pain and exhaustion, and could only breath in shuddering gasps, alone in the dark save for the crawlers in the darkness.

When she had recovered, she moved on again. Every arm-length she seemed to gain in strength, the pain and exhaustion fled from her. She crawled from that secret heart of darkness, up through ancient sewers of stone and brick, where water that had never seen light flowed through screaming mouths carved in stone by blind hands, where every brick was mortared with blood and pain, and beneath every foundation-stone was buried an undying sacrifice. New rhythms came to her through the stone beneath her fingers and toes, the warm pulse of a living city, the reverberation of screams in strange harmonies, the grinding of vast machines and stamping feat in unison. Her instincts guided her through dark galleries and past long-disused pits where unseeing, maimed things lingered; past the broken shrines to dead false gods, and the hidden fanes where blazing sinners lay sealed in the tombs they had made for themselves. At last she stood before the iron portal, as tall as four men and carved with the triumphant engravings that spoke of the raising of this single great city of the Fallen and the Damned.

Pandemonium. Dis. The City of Hell.

She did not place her hands upon those doors. She did not even open her eyes to read the scenes of the city's foundation and rise. In her heart, the burning flickered from an ember to a flame. Her mouth tasted of ashes, and from the chin up the liquid filth that clung to her darkened, dried, and cracked, leaving her hair in stiff unruly dreads. She opened her eyes, and as if as one, the doors opened before her.

The street was thronged by worms that had once been men and women, crawling on their bellies; strides atop them were the demons in all their majesty and myriad forms. Twisted parodies of man and beast clustered among vague shapes of shadow and flame, spoke harsh and sibilant tongues that were old when Adam first learned of evil, and at the center of the street a dark man stared at her, and with but a word halted the procession of souls and soulless alike. For a moment, her heart skipped a beat, and the flame within it stuttered, but did not go out.

He stared at her with wide black eyes - androgynous and sharp-boned, though the flesh hung off him oddly, as though he had not put it one quite right - and he addressed her in the common language of the Damned.

"What does a living soul do here?"

"I have come for my beloved." she answered.

"You have come to bargain, little Orpheus?" He did not smile or sneer, and never blinked, his eyes as flat as polished pebbles or cloudy glass.

"No," she said. "I have come for her. Give her up, or I will take her."

There were no hearts in hell to beat, except for her own; and for three heart-beats neither said anything. Then he whispered.

"No."

Without a nod, she seemed to kneel, and sank within the stone of the sidewalk. The dark man stared at where she had been, but did not move until the rumble swept through the streets and the great ziggurats began to shift and heave.

Then he took to the air - a straight vertical leap, spreading black wings wide like a heron taking flight, and the long bones seemed to shift beneath that ill-fitting skin as he climbed toward the sunless sky, higher and higher. The closer he came the less he looked like the ill-fitting man, but discarded the guises of men; six black wings fluttered and flapped, and a black halo sat about his head, wreathing him in darkness; unhealing wounds marked him, which dripped burning drops like pitch, and from his feathers came forth a swarm of stinging insects, that surrounded him with the aura of a buzzing cloud.

Yet below him, and rising swiftly after him, the city stood. Stone and brick shifted in unfamiliar patterns, but reassembled themselves as those they had always been meant for that purpose. Great ziggurats balanced against each other to form a great spine leading up to the dome of the parliament for a skull, the windows placed now like the eyes of a spider, towers and shrines to black saints shaped themselves into talons at the end of mile-long arms, and streets sunk in on themselves like hidden veins, the scuttling souls moving along the paths unheeding of the strangeness.

The dark angel had fought men and angels before, had thrown down rebel demons and dark would-be gods, flayed the skin from mortal wizards who dared defy him, and had inflicted more elaborate tortures on those witches who had betrayed him. He had laid waste to cities, and stood unmoved when they died and lay still. Yet he had never fought a city. He had never fought a city magician, who had dared to ply their trade in Hell.

As the serrated spikes that topped the dark shrines reached for him, the dark prince held out one hand.

"Hold," his voice buzzed, the swarm carrying his voice throughout the entire city, though demons cupped their hands to bleeding ears and glass and crystal rattled and shattered. "To defeat you would be to destroy what I have wrought, for though I could slay you now, to do so would destroy what I have built. Take your beloved's soul, and never return here again."

And the city lay down, the streets finding once more their ancient courses, the shrines sinking into familiar foundations, until in a handful of moments none would ever know the city had moved at all. But in the darkness beneath the city, a woman crawled through filth and darkness, infernal strength ebbing from her as the spirit of Dis flowed from the urbanomancer, and behind her followed a pale figure. All the way back to a more earthly city, where day was breaking, and it's light fell between skyscrapers to illuminate the avenues in great streaks that left the cross-streets yet in shadow.

Still, in her heart, the dull ache and ember flame never quite went away. For still within her she carried something of all the cities she had ever known and loved, and now she carried within her the scent of brimstone and the memory of hellfire, and those who listened close to her heartbeat would swear there echoed there the whisper of the screams of the damned and the dialects of Hell.

###

The Female Alhazred

The Female Alhazred
by
Bobby Derie

“From the darkling daughter he is reborn / Iä! In her house dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
- “The Forbidden Sura,” Kitāb al-‘Uzzá, Aisha bint Suleiman ibn Qaroon al-Azrd

The study of esoteric and occult traditions is not free from the prejudices that plague more traditional areas of academia, and only in recent decades have scholars begun to correlate the contents of disparate libraries of forbidden books, to draw together a more complete picture of the strange beliefs of various and heretic cults, and how they were transmitted down the centuries despite censure public and private, where more than one text was consigned to the bonfire by authorities civil and ecclesiastical. Considerable effort indeed has gone into the study of the history and manuscript tradition of the various Necronomicon texts, the various recensions of the Codex Dagonensis and Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and so illuminated the dim biographies of the men that wrote these works, and probed into the murky background of the occult traditions that they drew on and set down in writing.

Yet for all this effort, scholars have generally overlooked—or ignored—a parallel, complementary occult tradition, one which was by its nature suppressed much more ruthlessly, and perhaps more successfully, than the more familiar mythology, simply because the writers of the various texts mentioned above deliberately omitted much of the material related to it from their own works. I speak of a primarily feminine mythology, whose few survivors—related only where they interact with deities that have a male aspect—include Shub-Niggurath and Mother Hydra, Cthylla and D’numl, Nctosa and Nctolhu, and the ancient cults of Bubastis and Cybele. Lost too are the finer details of their cults, and the men and women that worked rites in their names, and perhaps most especially the female scholars of the mysteries whom because of their gender saw their opportunities limited, their status denied, their writings suppressed, and their lore dispersed and destroyed by the prejudice of both the authorities and their own male counterparts.

As a companion to our work on “The Life Cycle of a Necronomicon” we will be examining the first among those nigh-forgotten authors: Aisha bint Suleiman ibn Qaroon al-Azrd, known somewhat infamously in the Renaissance and early modern period as “the Female Alhazred,” based on the somewhat erroneous belief that she had translated a version of the Necronomicon into Ladino. In truth, al-Azrd was a Mozarab, the daughter of a Syrian Jewish merchant that dealt in books and paper and a middle-class Hispanic Christian woman, and was born in Toledo during the reign of Ad-al-Rahman III (c. 920 CE). Contemporary records state that al-Azrd was a natural polyglot, who by the age of seventeen could read and write Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, as well as speak Mozarabic and Syrian. Her father took her along with him in his travels throughout the Mediterranean, where she is said to have visited Alexandria, Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, and Damascus, and in every port she sought out what learning was available to a woman, learning the arts of music and poetry, astronomy and mathematics, and to have memorized the Qur’an, the Talmud, the Peshitta, and the Vulgate. She is said to have passed at different times as Jew, Christian, and Muslim; sometimes posing as a man to obtain entrance into libraries where she would never have been permitted to set foot, and thus learned secrets that men had long sought to keep hidden.

Much of this comes directly from al-Azrd herself; outside of her own surviving work there is scant mention of her, the most notorious and widely-circulated being a description included in certain of the Arabic manuscripts collected by Abraham Hinckelmann as he prepared the Hamburg edition of the Qur’an for print in 1694, which give a broad outline of her as heretic among heretics, supposed to have been “torn apart from within as though giving birth to an abomination, which could not thereafter be found” while disguised as a man and riding a horse in Rome—obviously based on the then-popular legend of Pope Joan, which became popular in the 13th century.

Most of al-Azrd’s fame rests in her sole known work, the Kitāb al-‘Uzzá, of which three manuscript copies and several fragments survive. All of the extant copies date from approximately the same period, around 1000 CE based on dating of the materials and the style of the script, and have the rather uniform appearance of a Persian safinah, a horizontal format (the width was greater than their height), a polyglot work written simultaneously in Arabic and Latin, with several names rendered in Hebrew characters in both sections; the whole book is so written that the Arabic and Latin sections are on opposite pages—Latin on the left, Arabic on the right—so that Arabic readers would read the book right-to-left, and Latin readers would read the book left-to-right. Both of the “first pages” contain al-Azrd’s short biography, including the poignant note on the research that went in to creating her work:

As did Zaid, I have searched and collected the pieces of what was lost, what was written on palm-leaves and dry scapula scraped clean, from parchments and thin white stones, from the memories of women who knew it by heart, until I found the last verse, the Forbidden Sura, with Yogash the ghūl, and I did not find it with anybody other than him.

The book itself is organized as a tafsir, an exegesis of the text of the Qur’an, and immediately enters controversial territory by discussing the so-called “Satanic verses” referring to the worship of the three daughters of Allah (Manāt, al-Lāt, and al-ʿUzzā, for whom the book is named) that existed in Mecca prior to the advent of Islam, and which according to the hadith were briefly included in the Qur’an (though modern scholars dispute the historicity of the work, it was fairly common in the early tafsir literature). Al-Azrd then expands on this theme to discuss the influence of that religion on the development of the Qur’an, citing as sources certain very obscure, foreign, and even pagan works (of which the very least is the Kitāb al-Așnām, the Book of Idols written by Hisham Ibn Al-Kalbi); this work gradually expands in scope, revealing the fundamental origins of the monotheistic practices of Islam and Judaism in polytheistic practices that worship male-female deific pairs—presaging much contemporary archaeological research, which finds parallels between the polytheistic elements of early Hebrew religion and other religions in the Near East.

From there, the Kitāb al-‘Uzzá descends into ground at once familiar and unfamiliar to scholars of the esoteric, as she unveils a reconstruction of the rites and worship that lay behind and bellow the common dross of Arabic legendry. Scholars of the Necronomicon will appreciate the sketchy re-telling of the coming of Cthulhu, and the prophecies associated with his return, but will perhaps be surprised that this focus is on his wives, sisters, and daughters, who enable and empower his struggle, and their own expanded roles in the cosmic conflict, and where they were imprisoned, and the spells to charge the obscene eidolons of Idh-yaa, and the talismans of Cthylla and Cthaeghya; Shub-Niggurath in her various guises is laid bare in great detail, and the terrible series of sexual sins whereby libertines may be initiated into her service; and the secret names of the ghūl-mother for the ritual psychodrama of hideous necrophilia and more hideous maternity, where the corpse of the devil-bought is made to quicken and bear once more. Fittingly blasphemous secrets indeed for the “the female Alhazred,” and her notorious work—which, if it is not the equal to the Necronomicon in sheer size, at least offers a different and long-forgotten view on that notorious mythology and occult system.

How many copies of Kitāb al-‘Uzzá were made, or for what purpose, and to whom they were given or sold, we do not know; not even the records of their destruction survive, although as Hinckelmann’s manuscripts reveal, al-Azrd and her work were known to at least a few scholars, and certain Christians in particular seemed to have seized on the first portion of the manuscript as a weapon against Islam. Robert of Ketton is said to have read a copy while translating the Qur’an in Toledo in the 1140s, and abandoned a project to include the first chapter as an appendix to that work. It is rumored that the pope ordered the burning of the first printed Koran—the Venice edition of 1537/38—because Alessandro Paganini had included suras from the Kitāb al-‘Uzzá. Ludovicco Maracci and George Sale are also supposed to have read it, with a letter from Sale still surviving about a “queer text by a female Mohammedan” that had been bound with a Spanish copy of the Gospel of Barnabas, although all mentions of this text were excised from the final edition of The Preliminary Discourse to the Koran (1734). A catalogue at the British Museum lists the Kitāb al-‘Uzzá among the books produced at the Arabic press in Khenchara in 1736, although this may have been more of an advertisement than evidence that an actual printed version of this work exists.

What we do know of the Kitāb al-‘Uzzá is primarily by its absence. There is no mention of it in any recension of the Necronomicon, though some of the later printings and translations include elements and prayers that also occur in the Kitāb, but not in any surviving manuscript of the Greek text. Similarly, Von Junzt makes no mention of the Sapphic or necrophilic cults that al-Azrd gives in the regions he travels, but he replicates some of the invocations to Shub-Niggurath under some of her many names without giving their source. Cultes des Goules at least gives mention to certain chthonic and pagan cults in the Pyrenees who use a book “longer than it is tall, and which may be read from the left or from the right, by those who know one tongue or the other,” though it is doubtful d’Erlette actually read one of these copies, or else he would have incorporated more material from that work; as it is, he gives a fairly accurate portrayal of the “Feast of Ghouls” from the Kitāb (albeit the incantations seem to be a hopelessly corrupted version of Sabir, rendered phonetically). Perhaps because of its very obscurity it appears to have largely escaped the notice of cataloguers and bookmen, students of the occult and scholars of esoteric theology who have that strange mythology as their primary focus—or then again, perhaps they simply did not wish to acknowledge this one book, which is after all focused so much on the female aspect of religion and occultism, and its author who, if she truly existed and did the things she claimed, would have stood above so many other scholars of the period.

###

All Saints

All Saints
by
Bobby Derie

Young Miguel crossed himself as he stepped into All Saints; out of old habit. Father Guittiez, behind the bar, gave him a measured stare, but said nothing as the boy pushed the handcart stacked with cases down what used to be the center aisle, the eyes of all the saints upon him.

Once All Saints had been a church, an old Anglican affair with a steep sloping roof and great wooden rafters like an ancient ship turned upside down, the ribs extending to the floor, stained glass windows of the lives of the saints on either wall. The city had closed in on either side of the old church, so that the small gardens became trash-choked alleys where whores plied their trade and drunks marked their territory on the rain-eaten stonework, and the congregation dwindled and dwindled until the diocese had repurposed the building.

Guittiez had placed the bar along the altar rail, and kept the cross; the pews had been cut and made seats at tables. Miguel rolled the booze past hard men in dark suits under the hanging lamps. The oldest ones were all scarred, mentally or physically - the crippled and maimed and crazy, who fingered their rosaries and topped the sacramental wine off with vodka. A pair of them liked to talk, in Latin, and ruled a corner table near the eaves. The younger, more able men clustered near the bar, some silent and withdrawn, others telling stories in voices that tended to carry across the room. Miguel liked to listen to their stories, when he was fetching glasses from the tables, but Father Guittiez didn't like him to linger too long.

The altar and the hanging cross they had also kept, though no masses were ever said on it any more, and Father Guittiez used it to hold the glassware.

There were three phones behind the bar, Miguel knew. The black one was for everyday use, and no one cared when it's bell sang. The red one was the bishop's office, and when it's titter carried over the bar Guittiez would lay down whatever he was doing and limp over to answer the phone; after a moment the Father would call out one of the drinkers by name. Miguel had seen it many times, as a man in his dark suit would finish his drink, then stand, and walk almost without urgency to the bar. They would listen for a minute, perhaps two, and then hand the phone back to Guittiez. Then they would pop their collar back on and leave, every man watching him go, knowing they might not see him return.

The ivory phone, an old-fashioned L-shaped receiver in a dusty gold cradle, had never rung since Miguel had been there.

Miguel left the boxes and handcart in the storage room behind the altar, then hurried back again to collect empties, before Guittiez cuffed him on the ear for shirking his work. He took his tray from table to table, dirty glass clinking against dirty glass, not looking anyone in the eye, when he felt something warm and rough grab his crotch. With a surprised squawk, the tray rattled and slipped, glasses crashing into the floor, and Miguel crashing down shortly after them. The series of crashes was quickly followed by the sudden rise of dark jacketed men from pews.

When Miguel looked up again, he saw old Father O'Doyle, lean and sweating, a crucifix tattooed across his face, his teeth gritted in pain. His right wrist was held in one meaty fist of Father Gustavsson, a hulk of a man of god with the broad shoulders of a linebacker, and all around them the other men stared daggers as the massive Swede tightened his grip on the thin Irishman.

"Stephen," Father Gustavsson said. "No more altar boys."

"Gus..." the Irish man squeaked out. "...I'll repent!"

"No more, Stephen. We warned you. I warned you." The giant rumbled, tightening his grip still further. From the floor, Miguel saw tears come down from Father O'Doyle's cheeks.

None of the men of the cloth moved to stop him. The whole room seemed to hold its breath, and Miguel did not need to see all their eyes to feel the waves of disgust and anticipation as the room waited for blood to be spilled, with all the casual hunger of a pack of lions.

A clear scream like a siren shattered the mood. All the men turned as one as Guittiez raced stiff-legged to lift the receiver from its cradle, and crossed himself as he held it up to his ear. After half a minute he laid the phone back in its rest, and the atmosphere had changed to a very different kind of expectation.

"The Vatican has called All Saints," the old priest sang out, so no one in the bar could miss it. "There is a nest at 5th and Woodrow."

As a body, the clergy stood and drained their glasses, all in a single motion. Even Gustavssen released O'Doyle as they fixed their collars. Rosaries rattled and silver knives were loosened in their sheathes as the exorcists, all those who could walk at least, headed toward the door en masse. Those few too crippled to leave muttered their blessings in Latin and Greek and Aramaic over each man as they passed.

Miguel at least had the presence of mind to begin picking up the fallen and broken glasses and putting them on the tray. As the last of the men were headed toward the door, Miguel felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at Father Guittiez, a sawn-off shotgun resting on his shoulder, a dozen silver medallions hanging on his chest like medals from some old war.

"My son," he said, "watch the bar."

Then he limped to join the line of exorcists. Miguel added his own prayers to those already heaped upon them, and wondered how many would return.

###

The Vineyard, Pt. 1

The Vineyard, Pt. 1
by
Bobby Derie

"A vineyard," she explained, "is how rich people piss away money while maintaining the vague resemblance of not doing any work."

They were out on the porch, drinking cervezas served in square black bottles, marked with a goat head in a pentagram. She called it a veranda, but where J.J. came from it was just a porch, built around a stone deck on a house that they'd hollowed out of one of God's hills, overlooking a sloping terraced valley of ripening vines in the boiling sun. Every now and again, a shotgun would go off - one of the keepers shooing the birds away from the crop.

In his mind, he called her the Bitch. She was every inch of one too. There was an aggressive ordinariness about her that women did not really achieve until they hit the other side of fifty, practical jeans, blouse, and boots that probably cost more than his truck, but would be fit to wear for a lifetime; she was as timeless as his own grandmother had been, and Abuelita had been a proper ball-buster. The Bitch had snow-white hair that she could afford to keep cropped short and wrinkles she didn't feel the need to hide because she was past using mere sex to get men to pay attention to her - though she was fit enough and sprightly enough a cougar to claim whatever she wanted. Trying not to eye her cleavage as he took a sip of his beer, he admitted to himself that she would not be the one begging him to bed, if it ever came to that.

"The thing about a vineyard, is that it's agricultural labor - which is difficult - and a small business unto itself, which is more difficult still. Lots of people have to work together for things to prosper, for a crop to come in, but in the end one person owns the land, one person makes the bulk of the money, one person is responsible for hiring and firing - and so the livelihoods of all the rest. A very lord-of-the-manor mentality sets in. Quiet feudal."

She took a drink, and J.J. noticed her fingers were free of rings - free even of the pale circles where rings might once have been. He could picture her as a lady in Castille, or perhaps a conquistadora keeping the indios in their place with whip and steel, looking down her pure-bred nose at all the mestizos...

"This is my land," she said, putting the bottle on the table, "and I treat my people well. Doctors for the sick and the hurt, the children go to the schools instead of straight to the fields. Not everyone is so kind. Not everyone can afford to be kind."

The Bitch looked west, to the dim blue line of the Pacific, and then north, to the neighboring valley. Even in the shade, drinking a cool beer, the sweat coated J.J.'s upper lip, trickled gently down his ribs. It was time for a siesta. Yet the neighboring valley was busy as a hive of bees, small brown downs flickering up and down.

"Senora," J.J. said, laying his empty bottle on the glass-topped table. "I am sure many of your campesinos appreciate what you do for them. It is much better," he nodded northwards, "than the alternatives."

"If things do not change soon," the Bitch said, as she crossed her legs and leaned onto the table, arching her fingers so the empty bottle hanging between them like the fly awaiting the mercy of a spider, "then there will be no alternatives. As I have said, vineyards are a business - but one for decaying millionaires, not fresh ones - and the attitude can be positively medieval. We have so little left, and when it is threatened, we will fight to protect it...and, for those with more ambition than sense, they will fight to take what is not theirs."

Ah, at last it becomes clear. J.J. did not say; the Bitch was bothered by a Bastard. Fair enough.

"If you..." the Bitch began, but J.J. simply held up a hand, cutting her off.

"No more words," he said, "let us speak in numbers."

She nodded, and pulled a pale blue piece of folded paper from a pocket, and laid it between them. J.J. opened it just enough to read the zeroes, then grunted and nodded his head as he took it and placed it in his own pocket.

"Let us have another drink, senora."

"To what?"

"To the harvest, of course."

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