At one point he stared into my eyes, and I was terribly afraid that he would take them. But he just remained there, making clicking sounds as if he were speaking a language I did not know. He was there long afterwards in my dreams, with his bloody saliva dripping down onto my face, burning.
And when I awoke, in my own room, in my own bed, I was swathed in bandages. My face was covered by something thick and heavy, but I could see out, and I could see that both of my arms were in casts and my legs were gone.
They tell me I screamed non-stop for another six months. I had to be put in an attic. There are, in Chorazin, lots of embarrassments hidden away in attics.
More than once, after I stopped screaming, Elder Abraham and Brother Azrael would come to see me, always late at night. They stood silently over my bed, regarding me, saying nothing. I could read nothing in their expressions. Once the Elder had a glowing stone with him, which he touched to my forehead. I didn’t dare ask what that was about. I didn’t dare say anything.
When my reason returned, more or less, and I had healed as much as I could, I was brought down from the attic, and began my new life as a cripple. My father had built a low, wooden cart for me. I could sit in it and reach over the sides to push myself along. No one mentioned Joram.
Almost a year had passed. That year, at Leaf-Falling Time, or Halloween as you’d call it, I sat with my parents on the porch as costumed children came up, fearfully, to receive a handful of candy, then scamper off. I just sat there in the dark, a lump of disfigured flesh. I don’t think they knew I was awake, or could hear them when they whispered, “What is it?” and “That can’t be him.”
It was that year, too, on the evening after Halloween, which would be All Soul’s Night (Halloween being the Eve of All Hallows – get it?) and that’s what we called it too, that Elder Abraham led us all out into the woods, into the Bone Forest, where generations of bone offerings, our dead, animals, others, dangled from the trees and rattled in the wind. By torchlight he delivered a memorable sermon. I heard it all. The way was too rough for me to get there in a cart, so my father carried me in a satchel on his back, and I crawled up out of the satchel and clung to him, my arms around his neck, and looked over his shoulder and saw the Elder in his ceremonial robe and holding his staff with the glowing stone on the end of it.
He spoke about change, transformation and transfiguration, about how, in time, the Old Gods would return and clear off the Earth of all human things, and only those of us who were changed in some way would have any place in the new world. And he emphasized something that I thought was aimed just at me, that this change comes as inevitably as leaves falling in the autumn, or a tide on the seashore, rushing in. There is no morality to it, for such things mean nothing to the darkness and to those who dwell there. What happens merely happens because it has happened, because the stars have turned and the gateways between the worlds have configured themselves just so.
If I’d been better read, better educated, I might have called it fate. That year I became better read and educated. I got out more, wheeling my way here and there around the village, sometimes scaring the younger children and making other people turn away. For months I had been desperately afraid of mirrors. I could feel that my face was thick and stiff and my cheeks didn’t move properly. I was afraid of how disfigured I might be. But in time was I angry. I had become a monster. I should damn well look like a monster. Finally I dared, and snatched up one of my mother’s mirrors and saw that I was indeed hideous, as if my face had been half dissolved and partially reshaped, until I looked a little bit like an insect, a little bit like Zenas, though I did not have multi-faceted eyes and my jaws and teeth worked normally.
Fate, education, yes. There I went, scurrying and scooting around town, the object of horror and fascination. I went to the general store, where Brother Azrael kept his collection of ancient books and scrolls locked away in a back room. Those weren’t for just anybody to read, but he unlocked the door to that room, and let me read them. He patiently tutored me in the languages required. He spoke to me of things we had known since the most ancient days, since before even Elder Abraham was alive, and Elder Abraham was over a thousand. (“He remembers when Charlemagne was king,” the Brother told me, and later, from a more conventional set of encyclopedias, I learned who Charlemagne was.) That was the essence of our faith, what other people would call a religion, or the beliefs of a cult, that we had no faith, that we knew with certain knowledge that Elder Abraham was indeed that old, and that there are things in the sky and the earth that you can talk to, and that the elder powers will one day rule again where mankind rules now. These things are merely true, we know, from what we have seen and what we have done.
Yes, I even read part of the Necronomicon. It should not be surprising that someone as eminent as Elder Abraham or Brother Azrael should have a copy. I read it in Latin, which wasn’t hard. For all my brother Joram had excelled me in school, I proved to have gift for languages, once I applied myself.
What comforted me most was that nowhere in all of this was there any discussion of right and wrong or of morality. It was just as the Elder had said. Things happen because they happen. In the larger scheme of things, by the standards of the Abyss and of the Black Worlds beyond the sky, such human concerns are irrelevant. Therefore I felt no guilt over what I had done. I had suffered much, but I was not sorry. It was like the leaves falling, or like a tide rushing in at the seashore.
I was also still a kid. I was, by my count, more than fifteen, and I should have been getting a bit old for Halloween, but I told my parents that I wanted to go out one last time, and either they felt sorry for me, or maybe they were even afraid, so they didn’t stop me as I worked for hours on my “costume.” If I was going to have to move around on wheels, I decided, I would go as a tank. I built a shell out of plywood and cardboard, complete with a swiveling turret, and I fit it over my cart, so I could indeed go out disguised as a goddamn Panzer tank from World War II, complete with an iron cross and swastikas painted on it. As a finishing touch, it was a flame-throwing tank. I rigged up a cigarette lighter and an aerosol can in the turret.
This did not work out well. When I trundled up to the first house and shouted “Seig Heil! Fuck you! Trick or treat!” the aerosol can exploded and the tank went up in a fireball and I set somebody’s porch on fire, and then everybody was trying to beat the flames out with rugs and such before I burned down the whole village. I was screaming once more, and I was hurt, but my screams gave way to screeching and chittering the likes of which no human throat should be able to utter, and I was answered, right there in town, from some point above the rooftops, and I began to understand what was said.
Like I said, I had a gift for languages.
Once again I was in the attic for a while, gibbering. The Elder came and touched me with his glowing stone one more time.
I should mention that I had only one friend during this period. My parents were my parents, and Brother Azrael was my teacher, but the closest thing I had to a friend was the muddy kid, Jerry, or more formally Jeroboam. He was odd like me, not that he was misshapen or missing any limbs, but that his special talent was that he could swim through the earth as if through water, so that any time day or night when he felt the call, but especially on certain festivals, he would sink down into the ground without smothering and converse with our dead ancestors, or with others that lay there. Sometimes he would raise up the dead, or bone-creatures, like skeletal beasts, for us to ride on as we went to places of worship and sacrifice. The result of this was that he was always dirty; even when he tried to wash himself, he never got it all; and he could feel the dead beneath the ground whenever he could touch it with his skin, so he went barefoot much of the year, except when it was very cold. It was hell on his clothes too, so he would turn up at school that way sometimes, barefoot and smeared with mud and nearly naked, but that was just Jerry.