Blameless in Abaddon (21 page)

Over the course of his career, Martin had on several occasions encountered a human being he was forced to label evil. He would never forget the case of nine-year-old Jared Galitzen, for example, who had serially doused eight Glendale cats with kerosene and set them aflame. Then there was the time he'd investigated an ostensible instance of improper garbage disposal in Deer Haven only to discover that the stench pervading Gladys Wurtz's property came from the strangled corpse of her ten-month-old son. Now, once again, Martin found himself in the presence of irredeemable depravity. However much the coma might have atrophied the tailor's powers, this was still a being who—if it suited his purposes—would handcuff you to a bedpost and remove your liver with a jigsaw. But for the optic neuron's insistence that the best countertheodicies lay in the divine cranium, Martin would have excused himself forthwith and beaten his way back to the
Carpco New Orleans.

“I'm afraid there are no beds on the premises,” said Jonathan Sarkos as the Idea of Darkness settled over his shop, “but among the virtues of my packet steamer are six berths containing air mattresses inflated with the last gasps of slaughtered lambs. You've never slept on anything softer.”

Martin blinked, his eyes adjusting by degrees to the wan glow of the whale-oil lamps. The nearest rack contained five motorcycle jackets with the words
ANTICHRIST CONSORTIUM
embroidered on their backs. Beside them hung Saint Augustine's worsted suit and a dozen sheets featuring the logo of the Ku Klux Klan. He fixed on his maleficent host: a bald and boisterous giant, his eyes as red as a lab rat's. Dressed in an expertly cut tuxedo, the tailor was a walking advertisement for his talents, but the match between Sarkos's appearance and his profession was the only jot of rationality Martin could glean from his present circumstances.

“Before you turn in, permit me to entertain you.” Sarkos reached behind his worktable and drew out a device that, thanks to Martin's membership in the Abaddon Junior High Audio-Visual Club, he recognized as a Kodak Pageant 16mm projector. “I don't expect you to find these shots very amusing.” Setting the projector on the worktable, the tailor threaded up a 400-foot reel. “I expect you to find them painful, in fact. Of all my inventions, I am particularly proud of home movies. Mind operating the machine, Mr. Candle? I know you're familiar with it.”

“No problem,” said Martin warily.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Purgatory Pictures presents
It Came Upon a Midnight Drear
, written, produced, and directed by Jonathan Sarkos.” The tailor lumbered toward the far wall, took down a KKK sheet from its peg, and thumbtacked it to the doorframe. “Roll it,” he instructed Martin, simultaneously dousing the lamps.

Martin rotated the control knob to
FORWARD.
The projector bulb ignited, and the image hit the sheet: a wobbly, badly lit long-shot evocative of low-grade pornography. Dressed only in a wristwatch and a rhinestone necklace, a prostitute sat crosslegged on the stained ticking of a motel mattress. A customer entered the frame—a multihorned, thousand-eyed beast who might have just escaped from the Book of Revelation—and promptly availed himself of her services.

“My conception occurred against the odds,” Sarkos narrated. “The woman in question was infertile, her fallopian tubes having been clogged by a case of gonorrhea acquired on the job. She remembered nothing about my father, except that he smelled like roadkill. An abortion was out of the question. Mother was always militantly pro-life.”

The beast turned toward the camera and laughed. His semi-erect penis looked like a shock absorber.

“The instant God realized I was in the works, He resolved that mine must be a humble birth, lest the sin of pride infect me prematurely. He had a stable all picked out, but it was otherwise occupied. . .”

The nativity scene from the 1959 remake of
Ben-Hur
appeared: a Metrocolor Madonna sitting amid a congestion of cows and goats, staring adoringly at her newborn son.

“. . . and so He had to settle for something fancier.”

A Holiday Inn flashed onto the screen, its neon
VACANCY
sign glowing through a relentless downpour.

“Thus did the Father of Lies come into the world, borne by the Mother of Whores.”

Belly swollen with a full-term pregnancy, the prostitute lay sprawled across a queen-sized bed. As the camera operator zoomed capriciously in and out, the baby rammed his way through the cervix and down the birth canal, dragging the umbilicus behind him like a rock star trailing a mike cable. Smiling demonically, the baby crawled across the exhausted woman's torso and wrapped his cord around her neck.

“I really don't need to see any more,” said Ockham.

“Mother and I were fated to have a stormy relationship,” said Sarkos.

The baby cinched the fleshy rope. The prostitute's tongue shot out like a carved bird from a cuckoo clock. Seconds after her death, the infant Sarkos began sucking on her left nipple.

“Shit, this is disgusting,” said Beauchamp.

“Turn it off,” said Saperstein.

“From the very first, the outside world recognized the import of my advent,” said Sarkos. “Among the visitors to my cradle was a trio of potentates from the West . . .”

Three men with wildly divergent hairstyles charged into the hotel room, gaily wrapped gifts in hand, mischievously poking each other in the eye and conking themselves on the brow. The first visitor wore what looked like a black mop on his head; the second boasted a Jewish Afro; the third sported a crewcut.

“The low point of their careers,” said Beauchamp.

A mid-shot followed: the infant sitting on the dead prostitute's stomach, opening one of his presents. Seven cloth-and-metal snakes sprang out.

“Ever since then,” said Sarkos, “I have lived by the maxim ‘Beware of geeks bearing gifts.'”

The final shots showed the infant hurling the potentates into the Holiday Inn's piranha-infested pool.

“The end,” said Sarkos.

“Thank goodness,” said Saperstein.

As Martin shut off the projector, Sarkos struck a kitchen match, touching the flame to a lamp wick. The shop filled with the whale oil's warm mammalian glow.

“You missed your calling,” said Ockham acidly. “You should've been a film director.”

“I am a film director. You don't
really
think Robert Zemeckis made
Forrest Gump
, do you?” Sarkos strode to the projector, wrenched the reel off the pickup spindle, and waved the movie in Martin's face. “Logically, of course, I should be vehemently opposed to
International 227.
If the verdict is ‘guilty' and the tribunal pulls the plug—well, where does that leave me?” He flung the reel across the shop like a discus. “Still, an acquittal would depress me even more, so I'll be cheering you every step of the way. My disciples and I plan to watch the whole circus on my little Zenith over there.” Sarkos slipped a TV remote control from his jacket and pointed the device at Martin. “A remarkable tool. Not only does it change the channels, control the volume, and vary the contrast, the LED display allows me to assess every tin-pot Prometheus and would-be Job who blows through town.”

Pressing the remote control against Martin's forehead, Sarkos stared at the matrix of buttons. The device felt like an ice cube.

“It's cold.”

“Shhh,” said Sarkos. “Let's see . . . bitterness quotient: 147, good. Self-righteousness ratio: 175 over 96, excellent. Moralistic fervor: 38.8 degrees centigrade. By damn, Mr. Candle, you're the strongest contender we've had yet. You might even win. Justice is blind, after all. I ought to know—I sewed her eyelids shut . . . with this.” The tailor flourished a bright silver sewing needle. “Above all, whatever tricks Lovett pulls in The Hague, don't let him put the blame on me.”

“I won't.”

“Nobody forced our Creator to pollute the universe with a Prince of Darkness,” said Sarkos, flashing a sharklike grin. “My violent conception, my slutty gestation, my ignoble birth: none of this was inevitable. He made it all happen of His own free will.”

 

With the aid of Roxanol, Martin slept soundly that night—so soundly, in fact, that when he awoke it took him several minutes to realize he wasn't back home in Abaddon but afloat on the River Hiddekel aboard a broken-down, fifty-foot packet steamer called the
Good Intentions.
It was the river's distinctive fragrance that jogged his memory; the Hiddekel exuded the most wondrous odor his nose had ever known, a combination of red roses, hot marshmallows, and cured meat. Even in its present decadent state, God's cerebrum smelled better than most brains did at their peak.

He slid off the mattress, limped past the sleeping forms of Saperstein and Beauchamp, and ascended a companionway to the main deck. The
Good Intentions
was fully under way, steaming steadily west, the featureless mudflat gliding past on both sides. Her engine chuffed and chugged; smoke gushed from her dual stacks, bulbous black clouds speckled with orange sparks. The morning air was wet and viscid, its sticky molecules sustaining swarms of buzzing aquatic insects. As he approached the wheelhouse—a wooden shack boasting all the architectural sophistication of an outdoor privy—he heard a male voice singing what he took to be a risqué sea chantey. The lyrics reached his ears in ragged bits, as if issuing from a phonograph record so badly worn the needle was hopping randomly among the grooves. Martin made out “kissing a squid” followed by “humping a humpback whale.”

The singing stopped.

“Hello, Mr. Candle.” A hideous creature poked his snout through the open wheelhouse window. “I'm Belphegor, your fearless pilot, not to mention Mr. Sarkos's favorite disciple.” To Martin, the demon resembled what might have resulted if nature's laws permitted gorillas to mate fruitfully with warthogs. Belphegor's eyes were bloodshot. You could have stored Ping-Pong balls in his nostrils. “Do not hold my metaphysical status against me,” he pleaded as a dollop of snot rolled from his nose. He belched explosively. “Given the choice, I'd be playing professional baseball.”

Revolted, Martin lurched away from the wheelhouse and stumbled toward the bow, swatting blindly at the archetypal flies and primordial gnats hovering about his face. A mosquito as large as a hornet landed on his forehead and began to feast. He slapped himself, bursting the insect and spraying his brow with his own half-digested blood.

Dressed in the same brown worsted suit Martin had seen the night before in Sarkos's shop, a tall, solid, fiftyish man leaned against the stern bulwark, conversing animatedly with Ockham. Binoculars dangled from the stranger's neck, swaying in time to his gesticulations. His aquiline nose supported a pair of hornrimmed glasses; his handsome teeth clenched a briar pipe. He looked both distinguished and successful, like a tenured Ivy League professor, or an aristocratic Romanian vampire who'd managed to establish a pied-à-terre down the road from a girls' boarding school.

“. . . by conceiving of the Supreme Being as bipolar,” Ockham was saying.

“A bifurcated deity?” said the stranger, plucking the pipe from his cavernous mouth. “No, no, the Godhead is a tripartite unity,” he added, whereupon Martin noticed the man's ability to raise each eyebrow independently of its mate. “You're sidling into Manichaeanism, Father. I've been there. Don't go.”

“But the poles work in tandem, just as your eyes do when you use these,” Ockham insisted, brushing the man's binoculars. “In Manichaeanism, the two principles are at war.”

“It's a trap, friend. Stay away.”

“Bishop Augustine?” inquired Martin, approaching.

“The Idea of Augustine,” the man corrected him. He synchronized his eyebrows into a scowl. “Judge Candle?”

“Ex-Judge Candle. I've read your autobiography.”

“My
Confessions
? All of it?”

“All of it.”

“Congratulations. It is my dubious distinction to have produced one of the three masterworks of Western literature that fewer than seventy people, living or dead, have read in toto, the others being
Paradise Regained
and
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.” Augustine raised his right eyebrow. “These days, of course, I wouldn't have to bother writing it all down, would I? I'd simply go on
Geraldo
.” The left eyebrow attained the level of its mate. “So, Mr. Candle, you want to know about evil.”

“Indeed.”

“Mr. Sarkos says he won't charge me for my new clothes if I give you a tour.” Augustine crossed his arms over his stomach, rubbing the leather patches on his elbows. “I don't mind telling you
International 227
vexes me to the core. Educating you will give me no pleasure, and I'm inclined to back out of the bargain right now.” Again the bishop scowled. “Still, a free suit is a free suit.” Reaching into his coat pocket, he produced a folded sheet of pink computer paper, its edges fringed with perforations. “Our itinerary. Mount Moriah, the plains of Sodom, the foothills of Ararat, the Country of Dung, the Garden of Eden.” He repocketed the paper, puffed on his pipe, and exhaled a smoke ring shaped like a Möbius strip. “The urge to cleanse one's soul through confession can be overwhelming at times, wouldn't you agree? Right now, for instance, I am moved to admit that our upcoming visit with the actors on Moriah—Abraham, Isaac, the sacrificial ram—will arouse my carnal appetites.”

“You have impure feelings toward Isaac?” asked Ockham.

“The ram, actually.” Augustine curled his generous lower lip into his mouth and bit down hard. “Lord, what a foul and fallen world we inhabit! The word, Father, is
concupiscence.
Concupiscence, concupiscence, all is concupiscence.”

As the morning wore on, the bishop continued revealing himself. He told of his recurrent impulse to have intimate relations with various pieces of heavy farm machinery. He described his raging wish to wear lacy silk negligees. He admitted that he longed to referee one of the famous farting contests to which the Idea of Martin Luther periodically challenged the Idea of Satan. Halfway through this prodigious mea culpa, Ockham slipped away, but Martin decided to tough it out, eager to cultivate the bishop's goodwill.