The Attraction, page 11
When it thrust down, he screamed. Charlie Goodrow brought up a big mass of pulsating red, and started crowing, “He’s a gusher! Lookit that! The boy gushes like a goddamn sweet Texas oil field.”
Josh’s blood sprayed up, peppering their faces, splashing their features until all of them were red. Josh thrashed, wanted his heart back, but felt no real pain.
Someone began playing some kind of reed instrument, and a drum was beaten slowly. A woman’s voice began singing a strange, unmelodic song. Although it was in another language, Josh knew what it meant:
Flayer of Men
Bring us your rainfall
We give you blood
Bring us life!
We offer flesh for scraping
To you alone—
Flayer of Men
Dance in his skin
Dance so that children may be born!
Dance so that the crops will grow!
Dance so that the sun will not burn your people!
Dance and be reborn in blood and life, from your dark place!
And then Josh became disembodied, floating along the flat but rough stone floor within the pyramid, lit by torch, and watched as the Flayer of Men scraped the skin using the long needlelike talons, carefully drawing the top layer of flesh from the meat, and pressing it, with blood still dripping, against his shadowy face.
Josh drew closer to look at the eyes of the scraper, but they were empty sockets, and Josh realized that he was looking at his own skin, laid across the Flesh-Scraper’s small body, wrapped and sewn together.
The Flayer began to move oddly, side to side—a dance of life and death, wearing the skin of the sacrifice.
Suddenly, Josh no longer watched this dance, but was inside, behind the skin, looking out.
10
He awoke.
It was night.
He sat up, feeling the dryness at his lips and the scaly feeling in his throat.
11
He waited a long time, until he heard the scraping sound.
The only light was the luminescence of the white sand of the desert, the enormous blue-faded moon in the sky, and the stars, which, as he looked up at them, seemed to him so far away as to be unconcerned with the problems of a man of nineteen in the middle of a wasteland waiting for a monster.
12
The gasping sound came first, then the sound of something being dragged.
Against the whiteness, he saw a small dark form.
Running between bits of brush and clutches of cactus.
He felt a lump form in his throat. He wondered whether a person could genuinely die of fright.
13
He knew Scratch’s hunting method now. He knew that the little mummy liked to get the scares going. It was its ritual. Get the scares going, make a big to-do, get people on the edge of their seats, and then strike.
He felt his nerves jangling, and wondered whether prey animals felt this just before an eagle or owl swooped down, or a mountain lion neared.
He felt like prey, and it brought with it that strange sensation he’d felt before:
That somehow he was more alive now. That this monster, this evil, horrible thing, could somehow make him more aware of every cell in his body, right down to his toes and the electrical whirring beneath the skin of his fingers.
14
And as he sat there, thinking all this, feeling it, he felt the first scrape of talon along his ankle.
He reached back for his weapon.
The obsidian arrowhead, tied to the nearly smooth stick.
The hunt had begun.
Chapter Thirteen
1
A second scrape at his ankle took away an outer layer of skin. Bleeding. Hurt like hell. But he leapt up and circled around, feeling like a hunter in some ancient world, holding the spear up.
“Come on, Scratch,” he said. His voice was raspy.
He could not see anything other than shapes against the earth.
He wasn’t sure if he had begun imagining things, but it seemed like there were several shapes moving—shadows against shadows.
I’m losing it.
2
Make me a warrior. Make me a man. Make me the hero. Make me the one. It was like a chant in his head. Fill me with strength. Give me power over my enemies. I am good. I am just. I will overcome. I will defeat. I will be the victor.
As he circled the car, then wandered a ways into the dark, holding the spear up, he felt . . . tribal. He felt connected. He had a welling within him that made him feel as if he were not fighting some monster on the desert, but participating in some ancient rite of manhood—that he was meant to be here. Gone were the trappings of home and university and his sense of the future and his hold on the past.
He was HUNTER.
He was HUNTER and this thing was his HUNTED.
I AM NOT PREY! I AM NOT PREY! You are rabbit. I am coyote. You are serpent! I am eagle! I AM THE HUNTER OF THE GODS OF DEATH!
3
A lightening of his being occurred—he no longer felt the small jabs of rock beneath his feet, nor did he feel the fear, nor did the desert seem as dark.
He felt as if a weight had been lifted from him and cast off into shadows.
And there it was.
The Being.
The Creature.
The Flayer of Men.
He knew its name. Its ritual name.
Xipe Totec! You are under my foot!
Xipe Totec! You are the skin of the snake!
Xipe Totec! You have no power of me!
I am the PRIEST and the HUNTER of Death.
A small voice within him: Am I mad? Is this insanity?
But the larger voice within him—the voice of a man he barely recognized—said aloud, “I am here to destroy you!”
4
His voice seemed to come from a different place inside him. Something had been awakened.
5
The creature leapt at him, and he lost his balance, falling backward. The spear went flying back, out of his reach.
He felt the claws dig in—Scratch was crawling up along his left leg. The pain was excruciating.
I’m not afraid of pain. I will not be afraid of pain. Pain is nothing. Pain is a scream to nowhere. Pain is meaningless.
He felt as if the veins of his legs were being ripped out, but he gritted his teeth and refused to accept the agony.
I AM THE PRIEST. I AM THE HUNTER.
6
It tugged at his legs, and began dragging him across the rocks and sand. His head hit the back of a rock, and he felt himself lose consciousness.
I AM THE PRIEST.
I AM.
7
Hang on. Hang on. This is no dream. This is real. Wake up. Wake up.
Josh opened his eyes. He felt blood pumping within him. I am alive. I am alive. I will not die. He pivoted on his hips as Scratch drew him across the dirt. Then he reached out and dug his fingernails down into the earth. Pressed his fingers in. Held on.
The screaming pain in his calves was intense.
The talons had gone in deep. He wasn’t sure how much blood he’d lost.
He dug his other hand into the dirt. Hurt like razors.
He groped in the dirt and tugged himself back. Maybe a quarter inch. Glanced in the darkness. Manzanilla. Rocks. Car. He dragged himself farther. Toward the spear. Toward the obsidian arrowhead.
He couldn’t be certain, but he thought he saw the makeshift spear lying just out of his grasp.
Scratch was chewing on his left leg, but if he tried—if he took all he had—he could get the spear. Something was drawing him down into a dark maelstrom in his head, but he dragged himself forward.
Touched the edge of the spear. His hand went around it. He drew it back, and sat up.
He thought he saw the look on Scratch’s face, as the turquoise eyes stared at him.
He brought the spear down into Scratch’s jaw, and then pulled hard on it until he heard a crack. At first, he thought the spear had broken, but it was the creature’s lower jaw that fell sideways, hanging by a small bit of gristle.
Josh drew the spear out, putting his hand close to where the obsidian was wrapped around the base.
He plunged the arrowhead into the space beneath Scratch’s breastbone.
Scratch’s claws curled around his fingers.
“You can’t kill me,” Scratch said with Tammy’s voice, but it was funny-sounding as its dangling jaw wagged. “You know that. You know all about me, don’t you? Give yourself to Xipe Totec! Heroes must be sacrificed.”
But, in fact, just as Josh had suspected, the mummy had some kind of moist pulpy material within its ribcage: a beating heart, perhaps not like a human heart, but a heart nonetheless.
And the obsidian went into it.
The claws let go of his wrist.
Josh drew the arrowhead up.
At its tip, a mass of bloody tissue.
The great Flayer of Men lay still at his bloody legs.
At some point, Josh passed out.
8
When he awoke, someone was pouring cool water over him.
Josh opened his eyes. Early daylight.
A large, thickset man with a day’s growth of beard sat beside him. In his hand, a large bottle of Poland Spring Water.
“Ely?”
Josh glanced around. Ely was carefully lifting him up to get in the truck with him. “Hello, kid. I was pretty sure you were a goner.”
“My legs . . .”
“Yeah, I saw ’em. Torn up real bad. Mountain lion?”
Josh didn’t respond.
“You’re some kind of superman, kid. Lost a lot of blood. I saw you just crawling by the road there. Let’s get you over to the hospital. They can patch you up. I suck at it. Look, don’t talk. We’ll get there soon enough. Can you hang on?”
Josh nodded. He took the bottle of water from Ely’s hand and drank from it.
He felt the rumble of the truck start up.
“You kill the lion?”
“What?”
“The mountain lion. That attacked you. You kill it?”
“Not sure,” Josh said. “I hurt it. I know that.”
“Well, that’s something,” Ely said. He got the truck in gear and pulled back out on the highway. “It’s something to put a hurt back on a beast like that. When you’re all better, I want you to tell me everything you didn’t tell me, okay?”
Chapter Fourteen
1
And that’s when I became a man. My name is Joshua, and I’ve grown to love this desert. All that happened a long time ago, before the new highway came in, before I moved permanently to Naga, Arizona, and before I began to understand my place in the world. I dropped out of college, went to live in that small town where Ely had dropped me, and a few years after wallowing in misery and guilt and alcohol, met my wife, lived my life. I got work as a writer and worked at a bookstore in town, but I didn’t last long in many jobs.
2
I went back, after I’d plunged the razor-sharp obsidian in that monster’s heart. After my legs healed. After some time had passed and I could face it again.
I wanted to examine it before destroying it. In size, it was four feet four inches tall, and while I didn’t weigh it, I can guess it was about sixty pounds. The gauze on its body—what kept its bones wrapped—was not what I had expected. I had assumed it was some kind of cloth, but, instead, it was fine, thin layers of human skin, torn into strips, wrapped around the bone of the creature. I held up one of its claws. Each talon was its own blade, and was razor-sharp.
I plucked the turquoise from its eyes, because I’d been reading about rituals by then. It could be blinded. It could be incapacitated.
The more I looked at it, the more I began to feel for it. What is it in human life that does it? That holds a monster in its arms and feels something like kinship—an instinct to care and protect? A demon, sleeping, in my arms, seemed vulnerable and in need, to me.
I placed it inside a leather-bound box lined with stone, closing Scratch up inside it, its coffin. If no one fed it again, if no one let it out, surely, it could just sleep forever.
And in sleeping, what damage could this thing do?
In the meantime, I began reading more about ancient ritual. I got odd jobs, and then, after my parents died, I inherited a lump sum of cash, and spent much of it on ordering books from around the world. I wanted to know more about this—the invisible world around us, the monsters, the gods, the creatures of legend. I wanted to understand this “it” until I began to see “it” as “him.”
One night, troubled by fears, I went out to the furthest mesa, and buried him deep, the way I’d bury something toxic, something that no man should ever touch, ever know.
But the cities and towns are growing. They’re taking over parts of the desert that had once been vast wastelands, miles of nothing.
Now suburban homes are being built on the mesa, and the bulldozers dig down deep to lay foundations and carve out swimming pools. Scorpions swarm as they’re sent from their nests. Rattlesnakes are killed by workmen who find them under nearly every rock.
I didn’t mark the place where I buried Scratch. I didn’t put a flag over it so I could see where it was.
I buried it to end it, to forget it, to put the demon somewhere it would never be found.
But I was wrong.
They’re digging all over that mesa. They’ll find him. They’ll bring him out. Maybe they already have.
The Flayer of Men will dance, and this time, I may not be able to stop it. I will try to understand Scratch. To try to keep him from doing what his nature compels him to do.
I may not have enough skin on me to keep that thing from running wild. There may not be enough obsidian blades to stop its beating heart.
They say a rainstorm’s on the way.
THE NECROMANCER
A novella of Harrow
Being the Diary of Justin Gravesend
on the Year of his Rebirth,
and his forced initiation
into the Chymera Magick,
including his early visionaries.
For Melisse, a story of debauchery and darkness for you,
and a borrowed name.
To be shared with M.J. Rose.
Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, fagas, nocturnos lemures, portentaques . . .
—Horace
All places shall be hell that is not heaven.
—Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
A Brief Note from Douglas Clegg
The early tales of Harrow are drawn from diaries and fragments of diaries, for the most part. This diary of Justin Gravesend’s early life is one of several he kept during his lifetime. Additionally, he encouraged the keeping of diaries by his wife and mistresses when he was an older man, no doubt to enhance whatever fame or delusions of grandeur he had.
What is perhaps most remarkable, to me, was the discovery of poem fragments in this diary. I include with this document an introduction by an esteemed academician whose primary studies have been in the history of the occult and classical mythology. Additionally, I have placed Gravesend’s so-called “Visionaries” in the order in which he had set them, on separate sheets of parchment, within the diary itself, as if place markers of some sort.
Introduction from a student of the Necromancer’s Diary
As someone who researches the arcane and unusual artifacts of mystical significance, I chanced upon this diary purely by accident while researching a series of grisly murders that occurred in London in the mid-1800s. These were lesser-known killings than the more famous Whitechapel murders attributed to one Jack the Ripper decades later. My hunch as to why these murders did not become better known is that the authorities did not know what to make of them, given the condition of the bodies, and because there was the hint of scandal of an upper-class sort around them (for four of the victims were eventually identified), that it was kept quiet in all but the highest circles. There is also the peculiar nature of their discovery: The six victims included two young men of good family, two women, also of good family. They had been entirely eviscerated, their facial features obliterated so that it was difficult if not impossible in some cases to identify them, and on their bodies, occult symbols and monstrous creatures had been tattooed, to the extent that not an inch was left that was not somehow painted over with the tattoo. In going over papers at Scotland Yard, in their historic records library, I learned of the existence of this diary, or rather a fragment of the diary, and, through a series of collectors, managed to purchase a photocopy of it, which I’m reprinting here. Some of the pages were illegible or drawn over with symbols and a language I could not precisely translate, if it was anything more than nonsense.
The nature of a diary is not toward narrative. It is an accounting of events, generally in order. Certain unnecessary sections have been eliminated, including Gravesend’s obsessive bookkeeping, house accounting, as well as his sketches and diagrams of both the human body and of fantastical machines that are his ideas, apparently, of how to either torture a human being, or how to drill into the earth. The stuff of science fiction novels or pornography. This diary in your hands is slightly different, for there is something of a narrative to it, although this utterly falls apart in its latter half. It is not about order, but about disorder, and this seemed to speak to the state of mind of its author. If we are to believe there is some truth to Gravesend’s grand conspiracy, of Watchers who follow his moves and direct him to his fateful destination, we would give in to the madness that was Gravesend himself. As you perhaps have read from other books written about the man, he was “the most evil man in existence,” or at least that is what the newspapers called him, when he held his famous “Summoning Demons” parties of the late 1800s at his magnificent estate called Harrow. We must understand a little of Gravesend in his later life to put this account of his youth into context.
While Gravesend died in the mid-1920s, outliving his own son, he was not a well-known personage of his time, except among occult circles, and I suspect he enjoyed keeping it that way. In his younger years, he had some fame, primarily from claiming that he was bringing what he called the Age of Baphomet into the world through spiritual endeavors and gatherings that read like a Who’s Who of the occult world. (This information can easily be found in the other books related to Gravesend, including the famous memoir, The Oracle by the mysterious Isis Claviger, a clairvoyant of the early twentieth century who claimed to be the reincarnation of one of Gravesend’s first human sacrifices. She also claimed she was a reincarnation of Astarte, a priestess of the ancient world who was the mythic founder of the Chymera Magick and of the flower called herein “Lotos.”)
