Dawn’s rose-tipped fingers parted matted boughs, reaching down to pry apart Babalon’s eyelids. Disbelief washed over her. She had slept. She had dreamed.
In a way.
Though she had no dreams of her own, she was content to walk through those of strangers.
In the first, she watched from above as a small girl fell from a rollercoaster. Her body gigantic, Babalon caught the girl by the tip of her ring finger.
In the next, she helped a man construct a casket built from his father’s bones. He protested as she shoved him inside, but he couldn’t hide his smirk. After she had nailed the final femur across his face, she sent the crate out to sea, where it fell over the horizon.
Dipping down into the water herself, she followed the sea floor until she reached an abandoned subway tunnel.
Hearing sobs, she investigated a narrow alcove. A woman had crawled her way inside.
“Come out,” coaxed Babalon. “It’s no good for you in there.”
“No one can hurt me in here,” said the woman.
“But it’s cramped. And filthy.”
“It’s too small for some man to come in and hurt me. That’s all they know how to do. Hurt.”
“There’s no one here but us.”
The woman glared at Babalon.
“Don’t act like you’re different,” she said. “I bet a man hurt you too. They hurt and they promise and then they change you forever. Whoever he is, I know he made you who you are.”
Babalon reached into the alcove, managing to grab a fistful of hair. Tugging, she pulled the shrieking woman out from the hole.
“No one made me, little girl.” she said. Her dead, violet eyes were especially bright. “I always was.”
Babalon shoved her head down, forcing her to face her fearful eyes in a dirty puddle.
“If I tore off your head, what would people say about you? Would they remember the men who hurt you? Whose name would they whisper?”
She put her lips to the girl’s ear.
“Forget who made you. Whose name will you take with you to hell?”
The woman trembled.
“Are you going to kill me?”
Babalon smiled.
“This is only a dream.”
She let go of the woman, who quickly ran up against a wall.
“Go back to your hole if you want,” said Babalon. The fire, a pure rage, began to build once more. Something in her wanted to kill the woman, to rip off her head like she had the coyote. And in her mercy, her inaction, the fire lashed out internally.
“I have no pity for you,” she added. “If it’s true, if someone else made you, then I will not hesitate to unmake you. You were never anyone to begin with. You live in your maker’s mirror. ”
She left that dream, walking down a black tunnel speckled with stars until she reached a twilit shore by a fertile crop of hills. Sitting by the rocks, a pale man with shoulder length auburn hair blew uninspired notes into a pan flute. Black tattoos slithered like serpents up and down his body. Babalon called out to him. He ignored her. She climbed up behind him, draping her arms around his shoulders.
Instantly, she pulled back. His skin was ice-cold to the touch. Looking at her hands, she saw silvery imprints where frozen skin had burned her. For his part, he had hardly noticed her. He shook his head briefly, sighed, then returned to his panpipes.
His loss.
She left him alone on the shore, where he doubtlessly would remain forever, and instead climbed the rising hills. She scraped at the silver spots. They did not budge.
At the top of the hill, she turned to watch the sunset. Orange gauze strained under black curtains. A taught tension that would never break. Not here. Not ever. She glanced at his distant silhouette on the shore. She was certain this was his punishment.
Suddenly, she felt a presence. A boy, maybe in his late teens, sat down beside her. Messy black hair, playful green eyes, but a miserable look on his blood-crusted face. His t-shirt equally coated. Turning back to the beach, she saw the head of the pale man roll of his shoulders and into the waves.
“What are you doing there?” she asked the boy, staring at the fallen pan-pipes. “Are you lost?”
He nodded, then looked down at his bloody shirt.
“I think I passed out.”
She looked at his shirt with mild interest.
“What happened to you?”
“I swallowed a worm,” he said bluntly.
“Yes.”
“Do demons always want blood?”
“Not always.”
Babalon turned around. She saw a figure creeping in the woods. A fish-man wearing a translucent mask in imitation of the boy’s face. Pallid, ghostly glow with blank paper eyes. Behind it, a golden light spread from his fish head like unfurling fingers.
It leered at her. She gave it a look that said she would remember.
“There’s someone watching you,” said Babalon.
“Yeah, I know. I hate being stared at.”
“Shall I get rid of him?”
“No,” he said, turning to look at the demon from the corner of his eye. He did not seem to care whether he was overheard or not. “Don’t you know what he can do? He thinks he’s taking advantage of me, that he can possess me, use my blood.”
He grinned, “Well, possession works both ways. Whatever he has, I want it.”
Babalon looked at his bloody shirt. The hungry look in his eye annoyed her. It was all too familiar.
“Don’t you understand what you have?” said Babalon angrily. “Don’t you understand where you are?”
“I’m in a dream.”
Babalon inspected the silver marks on her arm, then grabbed his wrist. The silver slide off her palm like melted honey.
“You blind idiot. If you want power so bad, you can have it.”
And then she woke up. Just like that. Jerked back into the waking world as if she were on the end of a hook. The world’s absence had not endeared her to its harshness.
Her first task was to bury the coyote skull. The coyote had given her a gift, and she was grateful. Standing briefly over its burial mound, she offered a few words of thanks. Perhaps soon she would be able to do so face to face. There were rumors that the spinal catacombs led to the land of the dead. That was why she had joined Aleph in the first place. Curiosity.
Whenever Aleph travelled the catacombs, they had worn lead masks with reflected lenses. She remembered once lifting it to scratch an itch before having it smacked back against her nose.
“It’s not a ceremonial mask,” Gregor had warned her. “Don’t take it off.”
“What’s your problem?”
“It’s not my problem. It’s yours. There are Djinn in these caves. And if one of them sees your pretty face, it’s over. Plenty of women have killed themselves to escape a lovesick Djinn.”
“Okay? And? Did it work?”
Even behind a mask, she could picture his hyena grin, framed as it was by a short, sandy beard.
“If it worked, I would have handed you a gun, not a mask. Dead or alive, it makes no difference. They have reach in every world.”
“If a Djinn falls in love with me,” she replied hotly. “I’ll make him regret it.”
Gregor turned his head, catching the reflective lens of a member behind him.
“I have no doubt.”
Her vision returned to the present. She would not find the catacombs entrance in memory. She kept walking.
There were as many paths to greet her as there were gaps between trees. Relinquishing thought, she took whichever way her feet led her. Beneath a tree, she climbed inside a tunnel that had eaten away at its roots, as if burrowed into by an enormous bug. Beetles played spiral games around her raven locks as she crawled. She thought of the pale man by the shore, the silver skin that slid off onto her own. She would give anything to fuck him.
Anger began to boil in her throat.
Let it go.
At the end of the tunnel, Babalon rose to her feet and brushed the dirt off her dress. She stared out at yet another indistinct expanse of woods. At that moment, she felt utterly lost.
About time.
She clung tightly to that feeling, then closed her eyes.
Ribbons of lights twirled lazily behind the dark of her eyes. Despair mounting, she noticed one growing increasingly bright. It was difficult to hide her pleasure, but she managed. One knowing thought and the ribbon would disintegrate.
She followed it for one hour, maybe two, or perhaps three years. Time was no longer present, though it lived nearby. Babalon was nowhere; only lost, following breadcrumbs. That was all.
Then, in what was either an instant or a millennia, the ribbons converged into a spiral, threading themselves towards an enormous spine. Flames burst from each bone column.
She opened her eyes.
In front of an enormous ash tree, a stout, impish man was masturbating. Pants wringing his ankles, he grunted and squealed like a whipped piglet.
Her disgust was so palpable she tried to chew it, if only to spit it in his face.
Hearing the shuffle of leaves behind him, the small man gave a cry then toppled over himself. He hurriedly pulled his pants up over his body before fumbling and tripping over his own legs. His third attempt went better.
“Good lord,” grumbled Old Crow, still struggling to hook suspender straps over his girthy frame. “That’s the second time today. Can’t no one let a man blast one off in peace? And you, of all people.”
Babalon’s eyes derisively glanced at the filthy pattern on his pants. She thought it looked like a dirt giraffe.
“You know me?”
“Do I know you? I could hardly dream last night with you stomping around with your big whore feet.”
“If you know me,” she said, stepping forward. “Then you should know to hold your tongue.”
“Nnngh, liethis?”, said Old Crow, holding his tongue between a pair of stubby fingers. He let go, flipping Babalon the bird.
“Fuck off, I liked the last one better. At least she had a sense of humor.”
“What do you mean, the last one?”
Old Crow eyed her curiously.
“Did you think you were the first scarlet woman? No, whore, you’re the latest in a long line of failures.”
She turned her head askew to study him. An ornery old lecher, a liar, but one who knew more than he should. Maybe.
“Oh? And what happened to the others?”
“They burned. I’m sure you feel it, that fire in your belly.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t go away, you know.”
“I’ve noticed,” Babalon growled, no longer willing to contain her irritation.
“That’s right. And if you don’t feed it, it will feed on you! That’s how they all go, burned up from the inside.”
She had no heartbeat to skip, and yet she felt it all the same. Could the answer really be that simple?
“If I give in to the burning,” she said, failing to sound uninterested, “can I…die?”
“ Die?” Old Crow burst out laughing. “Hell no, woman! Enslaved. That’s what you would be. The others still exist. Beatrice still exists. I can close my eyes right now and see their hollow bodies, these hungry little skin lanterns that wander beneath the earth. Once it finds your soul unworthy, the worm takes all before it abandons you like snake skin. It still has more to burn, you see. You think you can sustain it with your guts alone?”
She believed him. She was not the only one he was talking to. Though that part of her named Babalon did not speak, it did listen.
Old Crow adjusted his feather cap, then gave a mock curtsy.
“So forgive me if I don’t take an interest in your resurfacing, worm. I have learned to bet on disappointment.”
“You said I could feed the fire.”
He shrugged.
“Great. You’ll be the first. But I doubt it. Few have the heart for it. At this point, I don’t think anyone does. Horrible business, this thing that you are. Should have talked to me first.”
“I would not have wished to know you.”
“Pah,” spat Old Crow. “Look at you. What good have your wishes been?”
Babalon walked past the man, toppling him over yet again as she went up to inspect the tree.
“I had intended to flay you when I saw you disgracing the tree,” she said coldly, fingering a knothole. “But I did not find our conversation worthless. Leave before I change my mind.”
Grumbling, Old Crow picked himself up then begrudgingly wandered off, snapping tiny twigs off branches and stuffing them into his pocket as he went.
“Whatever you do,” he called. “Don’t do anything stupid. I like it here.”