The darkness deepened, and lights went on all over the property. I saw that a halo of flies surrounded the top of each post – there on each of them, hung a human head; each with a long gutter spike driven through its protesting mouth into the top of the timber. Shocked, I looked around to see if anyone else was seeing this. But nobody in the crowd seemed to take much notice, except to point and hoot insults as they thronged by.
What the hell was going on here? The 911 operator had told me that a corpse hanging off a railway underpass was business as usual – the only weird thing was that someone would think it was a problem.
Suddenly I cheered up. I chuckled to myself as I walked past. Hey, losers, you screwed up, no second chance! Below each head bloodstained signs read, TRAITOR, UNBELIVER (the Church’s sign-maker clearly had a hard time with “believe”), et cetera.
Then I stopped: What was I thinking? This shit was horrific. What’s happening?
When I glanced up, I got a shock like being grabbed in the dark. The closest head was looking at me, mouth open in a scream, spike protruding like a devil’s tongue. The face looked right into my eyes and for a moment I thought it was my own face – some young guy, someone like me, someone … I recognized the face.
It was Cody. The head belonged to Cody, my schoolyard nemesis since childhood, the last person I’d been to this building with, months ago, when it was still just an abandoned warehouse with a dritch in the basement. Cody, who told me, “The Old Ones were on our side.” Cody, who spent all his young life in a state of rage and now was pinned in rage forever. Cody, terrified in his last moments, staked like a vampire before the setting sun to warn others not to go where he went, say what he said, do whatever it was he did.
I pushed back a wave of nausea as the crowd swept me through the tent’s welcoming entrance. Why were they all so happy? Inside my head a lot of shouting was going on:
Serves him right! / No one deserves that!
Righteous payback for that loser, Cody! / Why would anyone … ?
Next time that happens, I want in! / Those are human heads – heads!
Inside the tent were bleachers and the scents of popcorn and sawdust, overlaid with a stranger smell that made me think of dank tunnels to dark places, and a creature dying, leaving, in place of its life, streaks of fading phosphorescence and words.
The hihyaghi called the Interlocutor had shown me “something that must be seen” – the stars. She’d said, “Sorcerer, too, is a thing … not a thing like me.” What did she mean?
I found a seat on the highest bleacher, at the back in the corner. I watched the crowd that was pouring in, vying with each other to get as close to the front as possible. Sure, they were assholes and losers but … As soon as I started to get alarmed, my thoughts would be drowned out by waves of anger – righteous, satisfying anger – and a dead certainty that this was all, in the end, for a good cause. It was all worthwhile, it was all for Oracle.
Oracle? Who or what was Oracle? I took my head in my hands, wanted to open a door and shine a light into my skull: Who’s in there?
I heard a clatter of steel tanks, and loud whoomps of igniting gas sent hot gusts of propane stink across the tent’s dirt floor. A gridded steel barrier was being folded back to each side of the stage, and around a cavernous trap door that had appeared in its centre half a dozen men with tiger torches had positioned themselves, avoiding the yawning darkness below and trying gingerly not to burn themselves, or each other, or set fire to the tent.
Jimmy, who I knew as the Proprietor’s right-hand man back in Raphe Therpens’s better days, took the floor, microphone in hand, glancing back nervously at the dark opening behind him. A short, heavy-set, dark-haired man, I had to admit Jimmy was looking good in a dark tie and a blue pinstripe suit. He tapped on the microphone, and the noise gradually subsided as people found seats. Then he began.
“I knew this was going to be a special day.” Jimmy paused for dramatic effect. “These are happy days. Life has never been better for us. But we still haven’t got everyone on board. There are always people who just want to wreck everything – that’s just what they’re like.
“Who here isn’t scared of dritches?” Jimmy asked the crowd. They murmured back at him. “But who hasn’t seen us bend dritches … befriend dritches … make them our buddies … command dritches as attack dogs, turn these magnificent creatures into assault weapons to destroy our enemies and defend our faith?” The crowd cheered.
“Because we’ve got God on our side. Because the family of God has come to Earth. Because we know they’ve come to help us. To save us. Because they’re here beside us.”
I looked beside me. On one side, the end of the bleacher and on the other side, a balding dad in a sleeveless shirt bickered with a little girl over a bag of Cheezies.
On cue, at the edge of the stage, a dozen or so people began singing softly.
“All these years I’ve kept on hopin’
That a change is in the wind.
Someday soon the sky will open
To let the old gods rule again.”
I was getting a headache. There was something too familiar about all this. What was a dritch again? The word made me think of Cody. Where did I know him from? And why was all this so hard? What was the matter with my head?
I’d heard this song before, but now it segued into something else. The crowd started clapping hands, and a chorus somewhere in the bleachers started up something more rousing.
“The lord is here again
Gonna get us to the top and then
If you got any doubts, my friend
Just ask O-oh-oh-ra-cle!”
The clapping spread through the crowd; the rhythm was irresistible but I resisted it and tried to concentrate. The crowd parted as a man in a black top hat and black cape made his way up the aisle, shaking hands as he reached the open gate and took the stage. For a chilling second, I thought it might be the Proprietor, newly recovered from the raving dipstick in a wheelchair I’d seen in the street a few months ago.
Up on stage, Jimmy gestured at the approaching figure. The house lights went down, and for a few moments there was only the glow of the fading sunset filtering through the blue plastic roof.
“And now” – Jimmy’s voice raised excitedly – “you’ve seen him on CHCH’s After Sundown sessions … you’ve loved him online so much that Blog for the Gods gets a million hits a day. Let the performance begin. I give you, ladies and gentlemen – the incredible Doctor Eldritch and His Cosmic Wonder Circus!”
Dr. Eldritch took the stage, throwing his glistening cape over his shoulder and doffing his top hat to the audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and those of you who, in this universe of miracles, preserve and express your own unique identities, welcome. We all know that we’re seeing the dawn of a wonderful new age. Wonderful, but evil has not been vanquished; we haven’t managed that. Instead, with your help, with your work, with your love, evil is coming under our control. The monsters of your nightmares are now our willing servants and slaves. Tonight, I’ll show you the vicious Stipley Devil – but don’t worry, this devil is my apprentice, my accomplice, my willing fellow performer in tonight’s show. The dritch, long a favourite of Church followers – barring, of course, occasional mishaps – the dritch, in my hands, is really just a big eager-to-please puppy dog. And at the urging of management, another new, uh …”
Dr. Eldritch missed a beat, as if he really wasn’t all that crazy about the new attraction, but he shook himself and continued his patter for a crowd who seemed to regard him as a genuine celebrity.
“Give ’em hell, Doctor El!” someone shouted from the back.
“But what’s this?” Dr. Eldritch had turned to wave to his fans and when he turned back, an assistant had pulled a drop cloth off a tall wicker basket in the middle of the stage. Continuing his stage patter – “Demon-haunted avocations of the mysterious east … dwellers in mystic domains long hidden from Western eyes …” Dr. Eldritch pulled from a pocket a plastic recorder like the one I used to play in school, and began to play some kind of tune so badly that I couldn’t figure out what it really was. Notes broke and went flat, he took breaths at all the wrong places, but he did it swaying in rhythm, and in response to that rhythm, something emerged from the wicker basket.
From seeing similar scenes in a zillion old movies, I expected a cobra, but this thing was more like a periscope – jointed like a leg rather than sinuous like a snake, and instead of a head it ended in a dull bony point with no visible eyes or mouth. Nevertheless, the audience fell silent, fascinated by Dr. El’s snake-charming act.
The “snake” swayed to Dr. El’s rhythm, and the audience picked up on the spirit of the performance. “I wanna pet that snake!” someone yelled. “Wannit to be my pet doggie!” yelled another.
After a minute or so, Dr. Eldritch’s hopeless recorder playing came to an end, his last phrase trailing off into a musical death rattle. The stage shuddered beneath him. Suddenly the wicker basket toppled, the floor heaved and, bony feelers rattling and wagging, the armoured head of a dritch erupted from the floor.