i will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle

He spent the summer crawling on all fours like some sort of animal. He refused to walk any other way besides on his hands and feet, always with each extremity firmly planted against the ground. You could hear him coming from a mile away: his bare soles dragged against the desert earth as if they were trying to scrape every last bit of matter out of the soil, and you could always track him by the trail of blood he left behind, a Pollack-like pattern framing his every moment. It made the girls nervous, but they’d just giggle and say, “Well, that’s Jack.” and leave it at that.

In hindsight, it was easy to blame the angel’s trumpet. Yes, they’d all drank the tea they’d brewed out of the flower, but it was only Jack who’d scooped out the guts and eaten it whole. He’d always been a dumpster for drugs, or at least that’s how Dayton told it. The night was frenzied and feverish, fragmented by scattershot bursts of color and light, but everyone could recall Jack taking off into the desert like a beast unchained, yipping and yowling, racing out into the unknown as if it were the only home he’d ever known. He was gone for a week. They assumed he’d died out there of thirst or starvation or the like, but he came crawling back like a babe returning to the nest. He just didn’t stop crawling. 

∞

He was not blind. When he ran, it was because his nostrils caught the scent of something acrid and sour, a scent specific to the night itself, the starless sky, the all-consuming darkness, the red dawn beginning to swallow everything whole. He followed the scent like a bloodhound, tracking it down to the center of the desert, desperate to get to the source.

Pulsing at the center was a crater. A deep womb at the heart of the barren tract of existence, hot and wet and alive. A slit in the center of the earth. He skidded to the edge, peering over with wild eyes, taking a deep breath in through his nose. The smell was fetid, heavy with iron and rot and something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. When he pressed a hand inside the inner wall of the cavern, it came away slick. He dipped his finger inside his mouth and sucked. The sky broke apart, and out tumbled God, heaven, hell, things holy and unholy alike, things he couldn’t comprehend. He felt his mind begin to melt. All he could do was crawl inside. Crawl back into the mother womb of the ancient earth.

∞

Hot weather had always turned him into an animal in heat, prowling around the streets of the city like some feral thing, hunting for prey that never took the bait. He sweat through thin white tanks and low waisted jeans, everything sticking to his skin until he shed it all, lurking around corners in nothing but his underwear. It used to make the girls laugh to see him like that. “Crazy Jack,” they’d chant, “shedding his skin!” He’d hiss and scowl until he’d scare them all away; once, he pulled a bowie knife on Natty and that was enough of that.

They all worked the corners, of course, but Jack was a master of it, and the girls had theories as to why. “You’re an empty space.” Dara Jo told him. “People just want to fill you up.” Jack had just stared at her blankly that time. They’d both been high out of their minds, their gazes wide and open, seeing so much they saw nothing at all, and it was all nonsense, scrambled back in his brain until it read like morse code. “Sure.” He drawled, nodding his head and polishing his gun. Janie said it much more simply: “You’re like a black hole.” Jack never put much stock in any of their explanations. He didn’t care why it worked. All that mattered was that it worked.

His last corner deal, before the angel’s trumpet deal, had gone wrong in ways that nobody could’ve predicted. Jack had had close calls before. Everyone knew he wasn’t the stablest individual, wasn’t the guy you could count on for level headed decisions, but he was good on the corners because he got the deals done and he got people in. Something in this man’s eyes, he said afterwards, was “all Satan”. That was the only way he could explain. “It was the Black Arts working through him.” Nobody could accept that, not really, but nobody could argue with him either.

It was one of the hottest days on record that summer, nearly 110 degrees, and they were all going a bit insane in that heat. Jack had been stalking his corner like a caged thing, haunches up, eyes narrowed, teeth gnashing. He’d had three Budweisers and some DMT. His pupils swallowed his irises whole. He’d shredded his shirt to pieces, and the tattered pieces were fluttering down the alleyway, getting stuck in chainlink fencing and along brick walls. Later, they asked the girls if anybody noticed something different that day, but really, it was the same old Jack. He was just wired that way.

The man who approached him - a boy, really, a skinny kid of sixteen or so - had matted blond hair and patches of acne spurting up across his chin and forehead. Nobody heard their conversation. It was quiet. Jack’s voice was a low rumble, and the boy’s was warbly, shaky and a little bit metallic at the edges. “I’m telling you all, it was the Son of Satan standing before me. No question about it.” Whoever it was, Jack gutted him like a fish. His entrails dangled halfway down the street. The girls didn’t even worry about the mess. They just got the fuck out of there. 

They kept asking if Jack thought he was CIA, FBI, whatever: some reasonable explanation, maybe, even if the level of violence most certainly was not a logical response. But Jack shook his head. It was the Antichrist, plain and simple. 

∞

In the canyon of the earth, he found him. 

The kid was exactly as he had left him. His eyes were all the way white, streaked through with blood vessels popping a violent red, seeing nothing. His stomach was sheared open, exposing the hanging guts, giving him the look of a squid, something gigantic and monstrous from the sea, far older than Jack could comprehend. He was gray all over, and his limbs dangled precariously from the corpus of his body, hanging too loose. The boy smiled, and Jack shrunk.

“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.”

The boy opened his mouth wider and began to howl. The sound was legion. Thousands upon millions of howls, endless howling, the cries of all the beasts of the earth, of the sea, of the sky, eternal and immortal, poured out from the boy. Ear-piercing. Blood began to leak from Jack’s ears. He was frozen, staring in horror at what he had created, at what he knew came from deep inside him, or perhaps he was borne from. Something incarnate. Eternity begets eternity. The cavern began to shrink. A womb, only for Jack, backwards and rotten, something horrible, decomposing him within itself. He curled up and let it envelop him. There was nothing but darkness.

“I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”

∞

He came back crawling, and he never stopped crawling. The colony was in pieces, disorganized and putrefying. People were beginning to break. Jack was not one of them. He crawled out for their food and returned with bounties. He fixed the things that were broken: the faucets that leaked, the homes that were crumbling, the toilets that backed up. He made sure the vans had gas and the girls stayed armed.

He didn’t speak, and he didn’t go out to the corners, and he didn’t touch the drugs. He didn’t write, and he didn’t read. They found him staring at the sky. Frequently, he was caught digging holes.

When he opened his mouth, they found a short stub where his tongue used to be.