The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (18 page)

She picked up a small wooden crucifix
and threw it on the ground before Matt’s feet. Estrella stepped
through the fire and smoke into the ring. She had a loose smile and
staggered as though drunk. A moment later, Usnavy jumped through
the flames. In turn they spat on the cross with convincing
contempt. María leapt into the air and landed on the crucifix,
splitting it in two with the heel of her boot. She spoke like she
was spitting venom. Her temples were tight, and her jaw was sharp
when she bit down on her words. “We are the Templars, through
DeMolay. We preserve the secret of the Grail, though slaughtered by
the Church. We discovered it in the ruined temple of Solomon in
Jerusalem. Thus we must walk in a cloak of darkness and preserve
our knowledge under a secret society. With the ritual lost we walk
in a barren land with a wounded king. Only the Holy Grail will heal
him.”

María motioned to Estrella, and like a
faithful apprentice, she presented a black felt marker. With it she
drew the symbol of the Grail in the form of a cup on one of Matt’s
hands and the symbol of a crown on the other.

“
These symbols of ours,”
María said, “will guide you to the word. I am your Grail, Mat.
Shekinah is there waiting. You’ll recognize her. She is the child
of me. You were her father twice, once when we met, and once after
the Rosicrucian Temple.”

María’s face softened. The intense
anger left her and she smiled warmly. She held her hand up to
Matt’s face and tenderly wiped away his tears. “I had given up on
getting pregnant, Matt. I gave up until I saw you in a dream. Dr.
Mike led me to you. I gave up on getting pregnant until that night,
the night I became pregnant with my twin. My twin Shekinah. My twin
that died before I knew her in this world. She was growing again in
me. I spoke to her in my dreams. She was going to be reborn. We
conceived through the ritual in the Rosicrucian Temple in David. We
miscarried, Mat.”

Matt hadn’t known until that moment
that he had gotten María pregnant. What could have changed had he
known? He silently studied her face. She stared down at him in
silence. A shudder and then black and white streaks -- the ankh she
had painted on her face was now awash in tears. It was the first
time Matt had seen her cry. A mad clown distraught with
grief.

She dropped to her knees
and screamed into the sky. Her biting rage returned and her screams
echoed through the trees. “You will understand when you see that
what happened to us is no coincidence. You will forgive me. In the
exile of death, Shekinah will lead you to the receptacle of the
soul, my womb, the Holy Grail. You... you will be reborn through
me. Resurrection! And as Isis, your mother, I will help you
remember this life. Think of the power when you keep all that you
have learned into your next life. You will gain the power of
generations. Knowledge will grow tenfold in you upon the body of
the Great Goddess. You are the first in the creation of a new order
of beings in a new world order that will be able to remember past
lives
. Novus Ordo
Seclorum
.”

“
Novus Ordo
Seclorum
,” Estrella and Usnavy chanted.
Estrella dutifully picked up a machete and handed it to María.
María rested the blade on Matt’s shoulder and spoke above the heads
of the captives around her, as though she were addressing masses
from the center of an immense coliseum.

“
I hereby invoke upon this
candidate the powers of death,” she yelled. “Endow him with such
fortitude that at the hour of trial he falls not.”

Then she leaned in close to Matt and
whispered, “I’m going to put your penis in my mouth. It’s not hard
now, but it will be. Your instinct will kick in. Don’t worry. We
can heal that wound one more time.”

She got down onto her knees and lapped
at his penis with the tip of her tongue. She looked into Matt’s
eyes as they stretched in horror. His penis became erect in spite
of all of his efforts to control it. His face grew flushed with
rage. He bit hard into the bandanna tied around his mouth. He
wanted one kick. Just to feel the sensation of his foot slamming
into her face.

Suddenly Dr. Mike began twisting and
writhing in a savage spasm of anger and fear, like a caterpillar
caught on the edge of a toying child’s shoe. He managed to free his
mouth to shout, “You fucking psychopathic whore! This is all a
fucking lie, María, can’t you see? Matt was right. All of them
lies.”

“
The Bible is a lie,” Maria
retorted calmly. “But from great fiction comes great faith, and
through great faith, truth. Only you, the male myth makers of the
world, the Church, the Freemasons, fail to see truth through all
the pollution you ejaculate into the world.”

“
Usnavy!” Dr. Mike pleaded.
“Help me, please.”

Usnavy walked up to Dr. Mike. “I know
now,” she said. “I know how you moved us. You control. I know you
make the sex dreams with you. I’m not a whore. I know more than you
now -- the love I have is not controlled by you. Now I am the
boss.”

“
You’re quoting fucking
María, Usnavy,” Dr. Mike shouted back. “She told you to say that.
Look at yourself, painted up like some child at a birthday party.
She’s desperately trying to escape who she is, her past. Usnavy,
María was my patient, a prostitute racked with guilt and
depression, traumatized by -”

Usnavy kneed him swiftly in the
testicles, causing his rant to end in a gurgling shriek. “You’re no
fucking different!” she screamed. “No different from other gringos.
No different from my father! Run away and throw me like trash!” She
burst into tears and collapsed on the ground. “I’m thinking I was
happy,” she sobbed. “So happy. It was you... I saw it in my
dreams.”

María walked over to Estrella, who had
lied down on the grass, staring at the sky with her eyes glassed
over. She lifted her hand to her face to study her lucid dream
symbol. María squatted down at her side, resting a hand on her
shoulder. “It will all be over soon. They will soon wake up. Why
don’t you sleep? Everything will be fine.”

Estrella lifted her arms and Maria
held her. “I am asleep,” she said, “I love you so much. I want this
over,” she cried. “I want you, I want us.”

María untied the two by four pinning
Matt to the tree. His knees buckled under his weight and he fell to
the ground. Usnavy and Estrella stretched him out on the moist,
dark soil.

“
I can conceive you,” María
said, towering over him. “I wouldn’t do this if I thought you
couldn’t return. Follow your symbol, and you will be reborn in me.
Death is like the sleep we have learned to control in our dreams.
Shekinah is your sprig of acacia. Your soul will acquire coats of
skin, in my womb, the Holy Grail. I’ll be a good mother. I’ll teach
you to remember. This is the secret of the Grail -- the secret of
eternal life.”

She stared down at him, a boot on
either side of his stomach. Her face was a blur through tears and
smoke. The black and white ankh was now a mess of drying caked
paint, peeling away to show her skin. Her face, with her mouth a
portrait of twisted evil and her eyes like pearls of confused
compassion, was suddenly beautiful again,

“
Hiram was -- like you will
be -- murdered. Sacrificed in the temple. Your ritual at the Blue
Rock was your training for rebirth -- the ritual that Dr. Mike
stole from the Freemasons.”

María rested on top of him now,
straddling him, leaning back to flex her abs. She ran circles with
her index finger in the bright paint around her tattoo. Then she
took his erection to make small circles around the opening of her
vagina and lowered herself onto him, letting her well trained
muscles do the work. He lay there, unable to speak.

Leaning forward, she purred quietly
into his ear. “I like to look into guys’ eyes when they cum. I can
always tell by the strange contortions in their face and the slight
flushing of the skin when they’re about to cum. You can see the
pupils dilate. If a guy’s penis was severed just at the moment of
orgasm, would cum still spurt from the hole where his cock was
attached?” Then she stopped “You feel like you’re gonna cum don’t
you?” she taunted. “This is the moment, Mat. Isn’t it strange to
know that when you cum, you’re going to enter my womb and pass
through this life? Still your cock is hard. Tough, no? ”

She grinded her clitoris hard into his
pelvic bone and reveled in the ultimate rush of sexual control. She
squealed when she saw the fear in Matt’s eyes -- his fear of
climaxing-- mesmerized by the complete power she held over him. She
felt his hatred and desire. She was sliding in excitement, close to
orgasm herself.

She brought them both near a rushing
climax. His hips rose up to meet hers. The pain and pleasure
dissolved into a numbing need for rapture. María’s eyes rolled back
-- she was lost in trance. Matt’s body suddenly went rigid... And
it was done. Maria opened her eyes. She could feel his warm semen
spill into her.

María raised herself slightly, keeping
about three quarters of Matt’s penis inside her. She took the blade
of the machete and slowly dragged it across the shaft of his penis.
Muffled screams came from beneath the bandanna. He struggled in
vain to lift his head and pull loose his hands. Despite having
honed the blade sharp enough to shave with, María had difficulty
cutting the penis off in one go and had to slide it back and forth
several times.

Matt sank back into the caverns of his
mind. His life was not nostalgically passing by. He wasn’t in a
warm place.

María’s nose was inches from his
gaping, flowing wound. “No,” she said quietly to herself. “It
doesn’t still come out.” But blood did, splattering her cheek and
forehead. It ran down Matt’s thighs and onto the grass. Bright red
lined the inside of Maria’s thighs. She rubbed some of the blood up
her abdomen, mixing it with the bright body paint up to her navel
and around her tattooed sphere.

Matt remembered the pain he felt in
his groin at the pilgrimage of the Black Christ and in his dreams.
They were prophecies. He didn’t know at the time, but his
unconscious knew. It told him about this moment – it warned
him.

María rolled off Matt and stood up.
His penis stuck inside her for brief moment and then slid out like
a large, dead worm – the broken obelisk -- and hit the ground
silently.

“
The killer awoke before
dawn,” she said with a deep penetrating voice. “He put his boots
on. He took a face from the ancient gallery and walked on down the
hall. He went into the room where his brother lived and
he...”

She stopped in front of Dr. Mike. The
blood stained blade gleamed darkly and menacingly in the firelight.
His frantic, darting eyes followed the shimmering streak as María
drove the blade deep into his abdomen in one strong, brutal thrust.
She swiftly pushed the blade up into his chest cavity and it became
stuck. There was an audible crack as she snapped the blade from his
chest. Dr. Mike’s eyes remained open. But they stopped darting and
fixed on nothing now but darkness. María untied his arms and he
fell over. His intestines spilled out onto the dirt and
weeds.

Estrella walked over to Steve and
rested her hand on his chest. She fell to her knees, resting her
head against his feet kissing them. She looked at the palm of her
hand for her dream symbol. Nothing was there. She began
crying.

“
He’s not dying,” Maria
said softly to Estrella. “You know that don’t you? He’s afraid, but
he’s never been more alive. Consciousness cleaves to form. He
thinks he is leaving this, and he is afraid.”

Matt wished he could speak to Steve;
tell him that it was okay, and that he was his best friend and that
they would get out of this.

María stood directly between Matt and
Steve’s motionless body. “The body was concealed in a grave marked
with a sprig of acacia -- a shrubbery,” she yelled with a fake
English accent. She spun around and took huge steps toward Matt.
“Then he walked on down the hall,” she yelled. “And he came to a
door and he looked inside. Father?” she glared. “Yes son? I want to
kill you.”

The white of Matt’s eyes glowed in the
dying red sun. He breathed furiously through his nose. Maria swung
the blade through the specters inhabiting the rising smoke. The
fire had died. She suddenly stopped behind Matt. The blade rested
against her long painted legs. She slowly lifted her
chin.

“
Father... I want to...
fuuuuuck you!” she screamed.

She swung the blade in front of Matt’s
face, cutting his chin and nicking his neck. She danced in a
frenzy, a mad shaman in a frantic dance of death. She jumped into
the air, digging her boots into the grass and earth when she
landed. Abruptly she fell onto her knees before Matt and dropped
the machete. She put her hands over her eyes, smiling to herself.
She bit her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. She swallowed.
Her painted breasts heaved up and down.

Small bursts of blood shot out of
Matt’s neck. The blade had nicked his jugular. He bit down hard on
the saliva soaked bandanna covering his mouth. The blood hit
María’s face and she began laughing loudly. Then the blood poured
out in a steady stream down the center of his collarbone and onto
his chest.

María held her hand over Matt’s
spurting wound, stalling death as if she was holding her finger
over a tear in a leaking life raft.