The Teratologist (13 page)

Then he thought:
Wait a minute!

There he was right there.

Bryant caught movement on one the screens. The bald monk was copulating viciously with a defected victim, and sitting in the corner of the same room, watching it all, was Farringworth. The billionaire sat naked and perfectly still, gazing intently at the horror on the bed, and propped upright between his legs was an obese woman with no arms or legs. She was slowly fellating Farringworth.

Bryant remembered the room, it was where he’d been originally taken after they’d straitjacketed him, when Michaels had let him know the full score. The room was just down the hall.

But when he opened the door to leave for that room, Michaels faced him from the doorway, a pistol in his face. Bryant edged back into the room.

“
Where is your associate, Mr. Bryant?”

“
I got no idea.”

“
It seems he’s running about lighting fires. It’s a waste of time, though. This house has a multimillion-dollar sprinkler system.”

Don’t count on it,
Bryant thought.

“
I do hope you’ve been paying attention,” the Englander said next.

“
To what?”

Michaels pointed to the screen. “To the festivities. The monk broke. His spirit is gone. He’s destroying that poor woman. Look.”

Bryant didn’t look; he’d seen enough. “You really think God’s going to show up?”

“
Who knows,” the response seemed to float in the air.

This was a stalemate. Bryant already knew what he had to do so he didn’t deliberate. He simply did it.

He spun, offering the least target space to Michaels, knowing he’d probably be hit. The movement did indeed cause the Englander to fire, then:

Snap!

Clink!

—
The small silenced pistol cycled. Bryant was so charged with adrenalin, he didn’t feel the pain. The bullet caught him in the right arm, but with his left he clotheslined Michaels. The gun flew out of his hand when he hit the ground, and by the time he regained his senses, Bryant had retrieved it. Now
he
was pointing the gun in
Michaels
face.

“
Give me a reason,” Bryant said, feeling the British man’s pockets. There was nothing, no keys of any kind in any of them. “Every exit door in this place is locked from the inside. Where are the keys?”

Michaels smiled triumphantly. “They’re voice-printed. Only my voice and Farringworth’s can open them. Look’s like you’ll have to take me with you, hmm?”

“
You’re too much of a pain in the ass,” Bryant replied. “And you know something? I really don’t like your face.”

Snap!

Clink!

Bryant put a bullet in the center of Michaels’ chest.
I’ll get Farringworth to open the door,
he resolved.
After I kneecap the son of a bitch.

He was about to leave when he felt something tugging his pants cuff. It was Michaels, still alive but not for long, blood looping out of the bullet hole that pierced his aorta.

“
What do you what?” the journalist asked.

Michaels couldn’t answer in voice. His arm slowly rose, his index finger extended. The Englander was pointing at the monitor in Sato Masaaki’s room.

All Bryant could do was stare.

It looked like Masaaki’s room had filled with light.

(XVI)

Bryant practically trampled the dying manservant as he burst out of the security room and sprinted down the hallway. Outside Masaaki’s room the light was eating through the cracks in the doorway, blackening and searing away the paint on the opposite wall. As Bryant reached the door a piercing scream blasted his eardrums and sent shivers rattling up his vertebrae. Someone in that room was in indescribable agony. The smell of burnt hair and flesh came wafting from within, roaring in Bryant’s nostrils and churning the bile in his stomach. The journalist paused just beyond the door and leaned against the wall, listening to the shrill cries of pain and struggling to overcome his fear and nausea. He stuck a hand tentatively into the blistering light emanating from the doorway and felt a heat that tightened his skin and opened his sweat glands but thankfully didn’t burn.

“
Thank heaven for melanin.” He thought as he prepared to wrench open the door and empty the gun into Farringworth.

Bryant had never killed anyone. His parents had moved him out of Oakland to Santa Cruz California when he was only six years old to ensure that he’d never have to. Now here he was, crouching in a hallway with a loaded gun about to murder a madman in order to prevent him from becoming God. And if that light was what he feared it was, than he’d be killing the man in full sight of the all-mighty.

“
This just can’t be happening.” Bryant shook his head and chuckled to his self as he looked down at the automatic pistol in his hand.

“
What the fuck am I doing here?” A day ago he didn’t even believe in God. Now he was about to meet him face to face.

Slowly he turned the doorknob as his heart trip-hammered in his chest and his body trembled as if it had been doused with ice water and plugged into a light socket. Bryant took a deep breath, clicked the 9mm Beretta off safety, and prepared to yank open the door when it exploded from within and a body came crashing through it, landing in the hallway in a steaming heap. Bryant looked down at the man who was covered in blisters and third degree burns, his penis a blackened stump that looked more like a spent match then human flesh. It was Sato Masaaki.

“
Evil. It’s all evil!” the Buddhist said through cracked and scalded lips, staring mesmerized into the white-hot conflagration inside the room. The moisture on his retinas was boiling and sizzling as he continued to peer into the light. Bryant shielded his eyes and stepped into the room.

It took a moment before he could see anything at all. Then his eyes located Farrington who was standing up shouting jubilantly as semen erupted from his rigid penis in a copious spray. His ejaculate bathed the enraptured visage of a gelatinous misshapen blob of a woman who sat beneath him with her face turned up toward his and her tongue outstretched to receive his seed like some twisted communion. Farrington’s eyes were fixed on another woman across the room from which the light seemed to be emanating. Her body looked like someone had wrung it out like a dishrag. Her limbs curled and twisted like crazy straws. But she was giving birth to something, something too big for her vaginal passage that was tearing her apart in its haste to be born. The being seemed to be composed of pure light.

“
God! God has come!”

Bryant heard Farrington shout excitedly.

“
That—that can’t be God. No fucking way God would split someone apart like that.” Bryant thought as the entity tore its way out of poor Sharon, cauterizing the huge avulsion it ripped in her torso as it shrugged out of her flesh like a diver crawling out of a wet-suit, turning her twisted body inside out. The light was so brilliant that Bryant could feel it burning his skin.

Bryant was struck dumb by the scene. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find when he busted into the room but it was definitely not this. He stood rooted to the spot with the Beretta pointed uselessly at the floor. The blazing phosphorescence seemed to be consuming the entire room. The walls, ceilings, floor, the entire mansion disappeared like a desert mirage leaving only the light, as spectacular as an exploding star. It was as if the sun itself had come down from the heavens and into the room with them. Bryant continued to stare. His mind unraveling as logic failed him, unable to reason away what was so clearly beyond reason.

(XVII)

Farrington stumbled forward, knocking the fat limbless woman aside as he approached the light and fell to his knees in awe. This was it. This was what he’d been working so hard for all these years. Finally, God had come. His head filled with a universe of colors as starlight washed over him and into him.

“
It’s so beautiful! My God! Finally! You have come!”

The billionaire trembled with delight as he narrowed his eyes against the searing glare, trying to glimpse the entity within.

“
I AM ALL! I AM EVERYTHING! I AM THE TRUTH!” The voice shook the room and seemed to vibrate through every molecule.

“
Show yourself! Let me see you!” Farrington shrieked as his tear ducts emptied and the tears sizzled down his cheeks.

Gradually, the startling pyrotechnics died down. Farrington squinted through the diminishing light and his mouth widened in a perfect O as the scream ripped its way up from his diaphragm and the shadow within the light revealed itself.

The entity materializing before him could not have been God. Nothing in or in sight of heaven could have been so profane and hideous. The monstrous thing was a chaos of limbs and mouths, genitals of every sex and species, and suppurating orifices with purposes that seemed beyond appetite or reproduction. Tentacles stretched out in all directions from its bloated body feeding down into the earth and off into the distance. Farrington’s eyes followed one fat slimy appendage, which lead from the hideous thing directly into the top of his own skull.

“
W-what are you?” Farrington whispered, utterly appalled at the abomination he’d invoked. He could now feel the creature’s tentacle crawling around between his thoughts. It’s presence felt more familiar than alien. He felt no pain as if it had not been suddenly thrust there but had always been there and only just now revealed.

“
I AM LUST. I AM AVARICE. I AM GREED. I AM LEVIATHAN!”

Its voice was a chorus of roars and hisses, howls, moans, and screams. Every sound that had haunted man’s nightmares since he shivered in dark caves still only dreaming of fire. The light was now completely gone and in its place was a dank humid fog that seemed to coat everything with a sweaty film as if the creature was emanating some foul noxiousness.

“
YOU CALLED ME AND I HAVE COME.”

“
But…but I didn’t call you! I called for GOD!” Farrington shrieked, delirious with fear.

“
GOD? BUT I AM GOD. I AM THE GOD OF MAN. NOT THE CREATOR BUT THE INNOVATOR. ALL THAT MAN HAS WROUGHT HAS BEEN WITH MY INSPIRATION. I AM EVIL AND MANKIND IS MY INSTRUMENT.”

An endless sea of mouths smiled out at Farrington from the creature’s enormous bulk and tongues slithered out to lick the thing’s vulgar lips. Farrington felt the tentacle move inside his head as the thing leaned in close.

“
LET ME SHOW YOU WHAT I AM.”

And Farrington saw…

Teenagers mugging old ladies to buy drugs. Kids even younger murdering other adolescents over gang turf. Prostitutes swapping diseases with sex-addicts in dank alleys and semen-stained motel sheets. Rapists plundering and bruising the loins of screaming victims. Sexual predators using surrogate penises of sharpened steel to open the tender flesh of their dying lovers. Pedophiles abusing children. Terrorists bombing embassies. Satanists sacrificing babies. Murderers, cannibals, thieves, wife-beaters, drug-dealers, every manner of evil in the world, all with this demon’s tentacles manipulating it, orchestrating the madness. Perhaps God valued freewill, if there truly was such a thing, but to this creature man was little more than a marionette, a toy for its perverse amusements.

Farrington was impressed. This was not God but it was something much better. This was a different type of perfection. Perfect evil. Something the billionaire understood and even more, could emulate. He didn’t have tentacles with which to fiddle with the minds of humanity but he had other resources, money, computers, an entire global network. His control could easily surpass that of the creature who stood before him now. But it wouldn’t help him to turn the angels. For that he needed more power. He needed the ability to control minds and wills as this creature obviously could.

“
Show me how,” he said.

(XVIII)

Westmore had no idea what he was walking into. He’d been just a few doors down releasing the religious leaders from captivity, at least the ones not already enthralled by the Metopronil, when he’d seen the light explode down the hallway and heard that voice like the shrieks of the damned. He knew right away that Farrington had unleashed something and it damned sure wasn’t God. He unlocked the last door and turned to race toward the cacophony when he was nearly trampled by two seven-foot albinos.