Please Don't Go (47 page)

Laughing out loud, throwing back his head, Rattup rubbed at his freshly shaven chin, noting, “You’re just saying that to get under my skin, boy. You’re just as pseudo-intellectual as the next guy, we all know that. You think you’re so different from me, but I beg to differ. Shithead. We all take this path. I, with my applauded writing style and witty mentality. You, with your optimistic youth and fumbled thoughts. Regardless of the final wash-out, our goals are what drive us, and our goals are similar enough to make us brothers.”

“
Leave him alone, you snake,” Jackie snapped, purposefully turning her shoulder enough that she could not detect Rattup’s form in her peripheral vision.

“
Watch your mouth, little girl,” Rattup blasted back, his face turning hot and red.

“
She’ll do no such thing,” Zephyr proclaimed, glaring at Rattup for what felt like an eternity. Charles grinned. He looked back and forth between Tabitha and Zephyr, an idle threat badly masked beneath those darting eye movements.

Rattup pointed towards the overgrown chessboard before them, “It’s about to begin. Shall we quiet our verbal repartee until the end of the match?”

“
That would be
wonderful,
” Jackie snorted without casting her eyes at Charles, smiling at her daughter as if to inform her that they were doing just fine, that everything was right with the world, in its proper place, and without turmoil. Her eyes, in honest essence, were lying. Most infants could not detect such internal conflict. But the beginner parents knew Tabitha could. Tabitha was special.

“
It’s okay, Mother. Please don’t compromise yourself for my sake,” Tabitha said.

Jackie’s face fell apart and tears seeped from her eyes.

“
Look,” Zephyr said, his voice gripped in uneasiness.

The dark night overhead started to release black clouds and a slow smattering of rain. In the distance, thunder crashed against the unstable horizon as more clouds bustled from all four cardinal directions. They appeared to dance and swirl with the crashing showcase of the natural world’s music.

At each end of the chess board, figures emerged from the foggy perimeter, each snarling as if announcing itself to their isolated and bleak world. In succession, sixteen figures came stepping from the darkness in each direction, thirty two in total, as on any standard chess board. Instead of the usual alternation between rooks, bishops, queen, pawns, knights, and king, there were only monsters, each with flapping brown wings and hunched backs.

They sounded off howls and grunts, stepping on to their respective squares on the board, their sandaled feet squishing in the slippery membrane that covered the surface. Each of the contestants was more than ten feet tall, double the height of Zephyr, Jackie, and Rattup. At the sight of them, Charles inhaled slow, taken aback by their utter majesty. “They’ve brought their champions to play.”

The angelic monsters were anything but beautiful. Zephyr first wanted to label them as angels, but settled on something closer to a demon, for the state of their grotesque faces. Fangs protruded from their upper lips, hanging over their lower ones, a sinewy mixture of black and yellow. Their eyes were blank, like Jackie as possessed by Lilith. Their skin was a speckled auburn color, not as deep a tone as their petulant wings, flapping with flies buzzing about them, looking for a place to land.

The smell of them was overwhelming, and even the fiend Rattup had to plug his nose with his fingers.

Each of them had breasts, indicating to Zephyr their sex. Like their filthy feathered wings, flies danced on their encrusted black nipples, wretched milk dribbling from them, a greenish tint to the sappy liquid.

“
A house divided among itself cannot stand,” Rattup quoted Abraham Lincoln.

“
I’m scared,” Jackie whispered to Zephyr, obviously fearful that the demons would hear her and turn their attention toward the outer edge of their tainted battlefield.

He hushed her and gripped Tabitha tight against him, knowing that they could not simply walk away without observing the oncoming match. This was where they needed to be. This was where they were
meant
to be.

The first of the winged beasts flitted across the board, crashing atop her contestant on the opposite side, digging her sticky talons into the thing that looked to be her doppleganger. She shrieked like a velociraptor. In traditional chess, there was a black team and a white team. This, Zephyr noted with an uncomfortable twinge in his eyelid, was not the traditional pairing. “Shades of evil,” Rattup noted, gazing at Zephyr, as if he could read his mind. “Some evil is not complacent, not without total devastation. Other evils are only along for the ride to Hell.” Zephyr looked at Rattup for a moment, and then looked back into the playing field as though the man’s words did note faze him at all. Rattup snickered, “You have so much to learn. You can’t be a father. You’re just a fucking child still yourself.”

A second crooked angel blasted across the gap between them, but from the opposite side. Following her was the entire front row, which prompted the opposite side (the “brown side”, just the same) to take flight. Within only a moment, those first lashings were dead and gone, with the entirety of both opposing armies upon each other, tearing and squawking and thrashing about in wild abandon.

“
I love this part,” Rattup observed with a slight hint of satisfaction in his voice.

“
Hold on to her,” Jackie whispered to Zephyr, urging him to hold himself even tighter to Tabitha, though he thought it impossible to further fortify his grip.

“
You can’t keep me safe forever, rapist,” Tabitha sneered at Zephyr, who was taken aback by her nasty wording. “This isn’t child’s play. Not anymore.”

“
Tabitha!” Zephyr shouted, disgusted by his daughter as she fidgeted with her talons. He had not noticed their transformation, but the image shook him to his core. She scraped the long hardened nails along his chest, giggling to herself in a deepened, unreal tone.

In the battlefield, many of the vile pseudo-angels started to fall to the ground, slithering through the muck for a dose of mercy. They cried out, wings torn from their gargantuan bodies, still flapping on the ground, though detached for good. One of the beasts fell to her knees, her nipples dribbling with an infested ooze, her head severed from her body. Her hands surveyed the weeds and slime, presumably searching for the hideous head that had been attached to her neck only moments earlier.

“
Like a chicken with its head cut off,” Jackie commentated, holding her hands to her lips as though she was on the verge of vomiting at any moment. Zephyr started to back away from the edge of the playing field as only a few living contestants remained from the carnage, winged bodies and limbs slumping in every direction, piled as high as his neck, their mouths still screaming with all that was unholy, words that were centuries dead and wholly unintelligible to Zephyr’s modern ears.

With only three beasts remaining of the bloodbath, they started to inch forward with chaotic steps, unsure of their footing, their bodies damaged from their battle. They walked in a straight line and Zephyr soon realized that they were of one particular side (which side, it didn’t seem to matter) of the tournament, the sole victors of the hellish battle royale. They squawked, their fangs pulling apart to expose darting, split tongues. Their wings flapped joyously, yet slowly and laboriously. They reached forward with their blood-coated talons, intent on Tabitha with their vacant eyes.

Rattup chuckled to himself and said, “You can’t protect her. They made the world, and they can tear it apart just as easily. They’re older than all of us put together. Being so arrogant to think we can outsmart them… that’s grounds for eternal damnation.” He backed away at a similar pace to Jackie and Zephyr and their child.

“
Play with them, Daddy. The rapists of the world expect it of you,” Tabitha murmured with a voice of falling gravel, digging her little talons deep into his chest. He could feel his heart being prodded by the pointy ends of her primordial tools of torture. He looked into her eyes, begging for a reprieve from her malicious behavior. Tabitha tore his heart free from his chest, splatters of blood coating her as she giggled, examining her prize.

The angels said nothing, but growled and cackled in response to their infant protégé.

They reached out to snatch Tabitha from his arms.

She had never belonged to Jackie and he.

Tabitha belonged to Lilith. Even more so, she belonged to Lilith’s legion.

To the many shades of evil.

***

Zephyr woke, feeling at his chest to be certain that his heart was still within his body. For one fleeting moment, he felt as though he was free of the formulaic depression cloaked about him by the demon Lilith. His reality came crashing back to him as he looked to the other side of his bed, where Jackie’s eyes glowed in the dark, like white beacons on the edge of a rocky shore. Though he could not see anything but her phosphorescent eyeballs, he could detect a certain shape to her invisible black face.

She was smiling like the troublesome snake who had just swallowed a fat goose egg.

10.

For only a moment, which Zephyr could not grasp on to with his frightful eyes, Jackie surfaced once again. She came back for but a flash, long enough to scream as if the hounds of Hell themselves were nipping at her bottom, that she was only a breath away from losing her soul altogether. She had been sprawled on the couch when it happened, Zephyr sitting beside her, holding her icy hand while she and Lilith napped.

With a jolt, she snapped upright, her eyes returning to normal. She started at him and transitioned into an elongated gasp and scream. Zephyr, his eyes heavy on the cusp between sleep and wakefulness, gripped her hand and begged to know what was happening. He was sure that Lilith had finally snapped and that she was eviscerating Jackie’s soul on the inside like a rock star destroying his hotel room, that he would lose the last inkling that remained of his love.

Jackie’s true eyes left as fast as they had come, reverted to nothing again.

Lilith took control back from Jackie, pulling back the pristine white house dress that she had dressed Jackie’s body in that morning. In doing so, she exposed a large patch of wetness, dotted with red niblets. She stood, looking down at herself and then at Zephyr, the collected moisture trickling down her bare thighs and into a slight puddle on the floor. She touched the wetness, then touched her face, leaving a trace behind on her upper lip.

She giggled in delight, rubbing her hands into her mouth awkwardly, much like a baby trying to eat for the first time, saliva covering her grinning face. “The time is near,” she said and continued her raspy giggle.

Zephyr jumped from the couch, his hands shaking as he asked of her, “What the fuck do I do? We haven’t rehearsed, goddamit.” He immediately scolded himself for not taking better precautions, for being a piss-poor birthing mate. Perhaps it was his passive-aggression against the situation. He regretted all of that now, for his baby was readying her grand entrance into the universe. “Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck,” Zephyr mumbled to himself as he escorted Lilith to their bedroom, his arm clutched around her waist in support. She loved this kind of treatment, like royalty. Lilith blushed and Jackie’s cheeks filled with a pinkish hue that Zephyr had not seen in her for months. “Do we need hot water?” he asked between panicked breaths.

Lilith chortled, stepping with care in the direction of the bedroom. “We don’t need anything but a mop afterwards,” she said, the image disgusting Zephyr and so he cast it from his mind. He focused on the task at hand, as best he could.

***

Zephyr fell to his knees and it felt a hell of a lot like praying, though he had not taken to such a bizarre ritual in decades, not since he was a small boy, before he had learned enough of his own free will, of that which Lilith had now gutted from him. On one hand, there was proof of a God in the impending arrival of his new daughter. But on the other, God was a real piece of shit for having backed him into such a filthy and demonic corner. For that, Zephyr found it hard to forgive. But now was not the time for the mental processing of deities.

“
Children are a miracle until they discover your weakness. Just like your succubus. Just like Lilith, that black charred flower of the trampled field who has so enamored your heart and sealed your fate!” Charles Dickens blasted from the den, chuckling to himself that he was a real jester. Zephyr noted this behavior in his head for later. Dickens would burn in the fireplace, for sure.

He shook his head, becoming aware that he was displacing his mind again.

Lilith rolled back and forth on the mattresses, agonizing through the first of what would be harsh contractions. “I’ve never produced a human child!” she snarled, the pains of labor submitting obvious turmoil to the ancient ghoul. Zephyr wondered how a modern woman dealt with the pain, especially if an eternal beast like Lilith had difficulties. She yelped and hollered and begged for mercy, but all the while kept a sinister grin slapped to her face, hardened in place like stone. There was a distinct pleasure in her pain that could not be described with her nasty words. “I’ll shoot it out of her snatch like a fucking bullet, lover.
Like a bullet.
You wanna catch? Watch me do it, just watch me!” she shouted with spittle that blasted across the room, cackling between gags and coughs and laughter and tears, enjoying the power she had in the situation. It was Lilith who was set to deliver her child, not Jackie. It looked like Jackie, and even somewhat talked like Jackie, but Jackie was removed from the physical pain, that experience essentially stolen from her by her possessor.