CHAPTER 4
The Judas Goat
Jon woke with a start on Michael’s bedroom floor. The grungy shag carpeting had scored a number of macaroni-sized ruts in his face. The usual disorders of not knowing where he was claimed him for a second, but his senses took in reality quick enough. The stink of yesterday’s clothes, hard particles of crud from a carpet that had never been vacuumed, stale air from an unventilated room.
A typical teenage boy’s room. Iron Maiden posters on the wall. A pile of dirty laundry in the closet. A tottering stack of well-read comics next to the bed. Porno mags hidden under the bed. Trashcan filled to the brim. Loose leaf paper, pens, spiral notebooks, backpack. Textbooks with a brown paper bag cover to minimize damage. Not much different from his own, except the furniture was more ragged.
He shook the sleep from his face. Michael was elsewhere, which was just as well, Jon needed to scratch his balls and didn’t want anyone around for that. After the game last night, when they had extricated themselves from the grain elevator ruins, Jon called in a favor and asked to flop at Michael’s place. There was no question of refusing, the two were close enough that he almost didn’t have to ask. However, the latter kept pushing for details as to why Jon needed a new place and Jon clammed up. What was he going to say? That he didn’t want to be sexually manhandled in some occult ritual? If that’s even what his parents were doing.
Through a crack in the bedroom door, he heard Michael down below, talking on the phone. Others shuffled about, getting ready to commence the daily grind.
“I can pick that up later,” he was saying. “No, no. It’s great . . . Everything’s fine . . . Well that might be a little tricky, he uh . . . ”
“Are you gonna be on the phone all goddamn day?” Michael’s dad yelled at him. “Some of us got to go ta work.”
“How is me taking a call stopping that?”
“Well, uh, maybe I gotta make a call. You think of that? No.”
“Besides you need to eat,” his mom chimed in.
“Did you make me something?” Michael asked hopefully.
“What? Your arm’s broken?”
The rest of the family laughed with bovine idiocy. The joke had probably been made a hundred times before and they still found it just as funny. Michael hung up.
“You’re always talking to people and stuff. All ritzy,” his dad commented, as if it were some great crime.
“I’m planning for my future,” Michael whined. “I’ve got to meet people who know other people if I’m gonna get ahead. That will be very useful once I graduate college.”
“Get ahead. Please,” his dad snorted.
“You’re not even out of high school yet,” his mom scolded,” and you’re wasting your time talking about going to college. It’s a long ways off.”
“Only a year.”
“This is giving me a headache,” Michael’s father declared. Scraping sounds of a chair pushing across linoleum. “I’m out of here. Oh, tell your brother to get off his lazy butt and go find a job today.”
The dad walked into view, slipping on a plaid work shirt over his stained wife-beater T, a lunchbox stuffed in his armpit. Dishes clanked on the table.
“Is that kid, what’s his name, still here?” his mom asked.
“Jon? Yes.”
“I want him out when you leave.”
Jon retreated to the bed and wiped a greasy hand over his face. The pair had been friends for over nine years, a good chunk of their lives, and Michael’s parents still didn’t know Jon’s name. Oh well, that lack of interest could work in his favor. He might be able to sneak back in another night. If not, there weren’t many places for him to go. Maybe Kathy . . .
“Kathy is such a sad sack of shit,
That no one will tickle her tit,
It would make her so glad,
To be banged by a lad,
Her jeans cream at the mere thought of it.”
The words floated back from yesterday when Michael spat out this limerick as they headed to the game. Sexual jealousy? Sour grapes? Maybe he just wanted attention. Maybe he just hated the idea of anyone else having sex besides himself. Whatever was bothering him about the girl, Michael wasn’t coughing up, but suddenly he was very down on her. Not to her face, of course. The Black Rock way was to always talk trash just out of earshot.
Kathy had agreed readily enough when Jon asked her to pass on the photos of the bowl to her parents. Then she repeated the kiss of the other night, much to Michael’s amusement. He didn’t spend a thought on whether he should go out with her. Things were way too weird to waste time on it. Besides, the fantasy of the horny supermodel who was into underage boys always lingered just around the corner of his mind.
Michael appeared, scratching his head shamefacedly. “Um, we—”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“You heard?”
“Your mom wants me out.”
“Yeah. Were you listening in?”
“She was kind of loud.”
“That’s true. Alright. We missed the bus, so we gotta bike. You can use my brother’s since he’s usually too stoned to stay on it anymore.”
School was the same chore it had been for the last eleven years. Droning classes. Homework, given and received. Notes taken, but never read again. Lessons learned, then forgotten with the first footfall out the door. Yawns stifled. Clock ticking. Bored teachers. Bored students. Bored janitors.
At a break between classes, a laughing mick by the name of Coughlin told him that a group of Italians was smacking Michael around by the bathroom. Apparently, they had pulled down his pants to impress some girls, then things took a dark turn. Jon went to see.
A large crowd had gathered around, looking and mocking. Vinnie Gabbaducci had the half-naked boy on the ground and was straddled across his chest, battering him about the head and neck. His hook-nosed butt-buddies, Carlo Abandanzo and Gino Giordino, were right behind the bully, egging him on, taking mock shots in the air. The sight of blood excited them to frenzy.
Behind the boys were the tittering girls. Their lips all warbled about what disgusting brutes the boys were, but their eyes sang high praise. A restless gleam shone in them, and their thighs rubbed together at the bravado. Jon’s heart skipped a beat. Among the girls, wearing a tight sweater and short skirt, was his dream girl, Maria Maleventum. Large breasts, thin waist, pearl skin, bountiful auburn curls. She was perfect.
Whenever she hovered into view, his mind melted, the blood drained southwards, and all he could do was babble stupidly.
It took a few minutes before a few brave teachers ventured in and pulled the boys apart. The blood lust was deep on Gabbaducci now and it took three full grown men to wrestle him down the hall and toss him into the detention room.
Michael, red-faced with shame and choking back tears, was sympathetically led to the nurse’s station to be looked over by the geriatric employed there. His pants, tossed into the girl’s bathroom, were retrieved and slung over his shoulder.
The poor guy could never catch a break. The Dutch family was—well, probably Dutch in origin, even though it could easily been some other WASP delineation. The main ethnic groups in the school were the Irish, Italians, and blacks, and they did not get along. It was almost taboo for a member of one pack to speak to someone of a different lineage. On a good day, they would only hurl insults at each other. On the worst, mini race riots would break out. Michael, not related to any group even by marriage, was alone.
Jon was, too. Not many St. Fonds in the area, the genealogical chart pointed that out, but something about Michael attracted these groups to bully him. He had the smell of an easy mark. His stooped shoulders and downward glance, gave away his beta gene. Whatever it was, the vermin would flock to feed on his corpse.
After that scene, he decided not to risk going to Michael’s house a second night, and instead approached Louis. The jock agreed readily enough, saying that his family always had a couch open in case a stray member of their extended family should amble on up. Jon then sought out Kathy and caught up to her as she was about to enter a class.
“Hi,” she said, eyes dancing eagerly over his face.
Some females nearby whispered softly and giggled at them. Suddenly self-conscious, Jon stared at the floor as they talked.
“So what did they say?”
“Say?”
“About the photos. Your parents.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t get a chance to show them.”
“Jesus Christ, it’s important you know.” He stalked away, shaking in head in irritation.
“I’m sorry,” she called after him.
The night at Louis’s place was odd. Well, not really odd, they were just more like a typical TV family than Jon was used to. They seemed actually happy to be around one another. Spending time together was something they wanted to do, rather than it being an obligation. Instead of watching TV and gulping down food, they sat around at a table for their evening meal and talked happily. They even said a prayer while holding hands, something Jon had never done. Afterwards, they spent time playing games, doing homework, reading, and generally enjoying each other’s company without one of them verbally attacking the other.
What foreign land was this? Louis lived only six block away, but it might as well have been on Mars. These people were a unit, a team. Seeing them together made his own home seem like a farce. He slept well that night, better than he had in ages.
“My mother wants to talk to you,” Kathy told him the next day. “I showed her the photos and she took them into her study, then came out and asked me all sorts of questions I couldn’t answer. She was real agitated.”
“Agitated?”
“Excited and nervous. She gets like that when she thinks she found something new. Like when she thought some jewelry she found in a dig in Yaxuna came from a lost civilization because they were made from a type of amber that is only found in New Zealand. Turns out it wasn’t, but she believed that it might be from the Empire of Heva.”
“And that’s what the bowl is?”
“No, but she said it was weird and connected to something old and hidden. Where did you get those photos?”
“Never mind. I’ve got to talk to your mom.”
“Okay,” she brightened up. “We can go to my place after school and then go to the game afterwards.”
It was a game night. He had forgotten. All of his books and dice, and, most importantly, his character sheet were back at the house. Without that, Crixen Runeburner couldn’t come alive. Should he risk returning for a sheet of paper? The class bell disrupted his thoughts. He had to hurry up to be bored.
Time stretched on to an infinitesimal crawl, but all bad things eventually come to an end and he was hit with an explosion of energy when the last bell finally rang. He flew out the door and found Kathy unchaining her bike. They took off, dodging cars and buses filled with joyful teens. On the road away, Jon looked back at the school and, wasn’t sure, but thought he saw Michael on a street corner staring after him.
Thirty minutes later, they pulled up to Kathy’s house. Inside, it was spare but tasteful. Bits of pottery from long dead Mesoamerican cultures decorated the rooms. Beakers, jars, a few knives and so on. As Kathy ran off to find her mother, Jon picked up a pipe shaped like a fornicating couple. It was designed so that the tobacco was stuffed into his anus and the smoke emerged from her mouth. Ingenious and obscene.
“She’s in her office,” Kathy said.
In traditional academic fashion, the room was a paper nightmare. Book, charts, pictures, journals, folders, and files were piled up on every conceivable space. The shelves were double-stacked with books. A couch near the window was flooded with loose leaf items. Jon looked about in dismay. And he used to think his room was messy.
“It looks a mess, but I know where everything is,” Kathy’s mother said, rising from a leather chair. A boxy computer hummed beside her. “I have my own system of organization.”
Early forties, short iron-gray hair, the mother had the look of a deep thinker and the distracted mannerisms of one as well. She was barefoot and had donned riding jodhpurs topped with a red flannel shirt. The smile given to Jon was genuine and warm.
She looked around. “I’m afraid there isn’t anywhere to sit . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she stared at an empty spot on the carpet. There were in fact several chairs but, like the couch, they too were full.
“Kathy go to the garage and get one of those canvas chairs we use at the beach—”
“That’s not necessary,” Jon interjected. “I can stand.”
“Are you sure? Uh . . . ”
“Jon. Yes. Yes.”
“Okay then,” she clapped her hands, mind blanking, distracted by lofty thoughts.
“Photos.”
“Right!” She extricated them from the middle of a large stack of folders, then regarded them. “Where did you find these, because this is right, but wrong at the same time. If you understand.”
“No.”
“Have you ever heard of something called Palo or Palo Mayombe?”
“No.”
“Or Las Reglas de Congo?”
“Again, no.”
“It was, or is, an underground religion that developed in Cuba and a few other Caribbean Islands. When the French first brought over African slaves from the Congo, they didn’t bother to Christianize them. As long as they could cut sugarcane, the overseers weren’t too interested in what else they got up to. That’s why you have many more religious oddities, like Voodoo, floating about in former French colonies than where the Spanish held dominion.”
“So the bowl . . . ?”
“Of course in the Spanish places, they just hid their old religions in the Catholic one. Adapting the old into the new. It’s how La Dia De Los Muertes became a church event. In some regions you’ll find curse cards, where they use an invocation to St. Peter to damn their enemies’ souls or give them leprosy. Not exactly a traditional Christian sentiment.”
“And what do they do in this religion?”
“Most of them are the same, just the cast of celestial characters change. Palo believes in the veneration of ancestors and in harnessing natural earth powers. Sticks, bones, wax, and the like, have power and are infused with spirits called Kimpungulu. Tell me, were there any candles?”
“Candles?”
“Near the bowl where you took the photos. Orange, white, red, yellow, black, shaped like a woman, like a crucifix, a skull? Anything?”
“I didn’t see any.”
“So you did take the photos,” she said.
Jon was about to swear, but shrugged. What did it matter if she knew?
“The candles are often used in rituals. A different type, or collection of types, for each invocation. The lack of candles might mean whoever has possession of this item isn’t a practitioner or a priest.”
“Are they called priests?”
“Sort of. Palo is the Hispanic derivation of an unnamed religion. The word palo means stick in Spanish. The practitioner takes these earthbound spiritual objects, called nkisni, and collects them in his nganga. The more he has, the more spiritual power he gathers. Specific types, such as bones of animals, gives powers associated with that animal. Spiritual stones add toughness and so on. The nganga is the center of the priest’s power. They then mark them with sacred symbols like we see on this bowl.”
“So the bowl is a nganga?”
“No, that’s the problem! The nganga is always a cauldron or cast iron pot. The working of metal in ancient times was one of the greatest mysteries, next to masonry, so it contained quite a bit of spiritual power. Man taking what the gods wrought and shaping it to his own desires. Very powerful stuff. A pottery bowl marked with Palo symbols is unique.”
She walked to another stack of folders and, almost at random, whipped out a photograph. Jon looked. In it was an old-fashioned black cauldron. On it, a large ‘S’ was painted in white and adorned with crosses. The cauldron was filled with a large collection of junk. Rusted knives, Mardi Gras beads, a crude face chiseled in obsidian, some steel chains, a host of black feathers, and various other unidentified lumps. Jon would never have guessed it was a religious altar. The whole thing looked like a bucket of trash.
“That’s a proper nganga uncovered six months ago in Nicaragua. The Sandinista government has been . . . let’s say forcibly discouraging practitioners from selling their wares to the peasants. It’s all part of their ‘re-education’ of the oppressed class. Of course, they do it with bullets instead of books.”
Jon still couldn’t put together what his parents and their weird associate would want with this thing. Before the other night, he wouldn’t have believed his parents were part of any religion. He couldn’t see them indulging in one that dealt with collecting sticks and chicken bones. Not unless there was some money involved.
“What kind of wares,” he asked, “does a Palo priest provide?”
“They offer curses, wards against evil, protection fetishes, good luck charms, cleansing rites, and so on. Primitive superstition some call it, maybe with reason, but there is an overriding belief in it throughout Central America. There are plenty who grew up in the region that might scoff in public, but secretly still fear its practitioners and their powers.”
That didn’t sound like much money. He couldn’t see his successful parents wasting their time collecting pesos from Hispanic peons. So the bowl had to be for something else. He thought about the markings that had been painted on his unconscious body. Were they similar to those on the bowl? He couldn’t remember and the tape would have been recorded over by now.
“Do they sacrifice animals or people?”
“Animals, definitely,” she nodded. “As I said before, the bones of various creatures hold significant spiritual value and they must be consecrated in a specific rite to trap the spirit. Human sacrifice, not really. There have been some practitioners linked to grave robbing, but uh . . . ” She blanked for a moment, ideas cascading into her from all sides. Then, bingo! “Oh! Human sacrifice. That’s the other part.”
She rifled through the photos and pulled out the one showing the pattern inside the bowl.
“Now this is interesting and as unique as the pottery itself. The decoration inside is identical to the Aztec calendar stone. Whoever etched this in whatever that is in the bowl—”
“It’s bone.”
“I see . . . Well they must have used the actual one as a reference. It’s just that the symbolism here is out of place. These are two incongruent religions. Ones that couldn’t have had any contact with each other.”
“Aren’t they from the same region?”
“Yes. However, the Aztecs died out at least two hundred years before the rise of Palo and its cousins. That’s why they hid Palo in the Christian religion instead of the Aztec one. All the old medicine men had been swept away. In fact, the stone had been buried in the wall of the Mexico City Cathedral when Palo was developing.”
“What do these etchings mean? They’re like hieroglyphics, correct?”
“A lot of this is up to speculation, but the center seems to represent the face of their sun god with the glyph of movement inside his mouth. These four squares with the skulls represent the death of the previous suns. These other symbols represent various important dates such as—”
“Death of the four suns?”
“Possibly a symbolic death. The end of the usefulness of the previous calendar certainly. Symbolically, it means the destruction of the world and humanity, only to be reborn again with the next sun. This could be represented by a solar eclipse, or be just more apocalyptic mythology, like the Norse Ragnarok or the Christian Day of Judgement.”
“Or be true.”
She laughed, taken by surprise at the suggestion. She tried to grope for the appropriate words, before blurting, “No!”
“Did they make another calendar with a new sun?”
“Their civilization was extinguished by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th Century. This one doesn’t run out until 2012, twenty six years from now. They had no need to make a new one. The Spanish replaced the Aztec calendar with the Christian one.”
“Yet it could mean something more, like the end of the world.
“You’re looking for the fantastical in the mundane, which I must admit is much more exciting. Think of it this way, if we stopped making calendars at the end of this year, would time end? Would the world explode? Even if we wrote on the last day of the final calendar, ‘after this everyone dies’, that wouldn’t make it true. The Aztecs had four previous calendars, why not a sixth. They just never had a chance to make one.”
That made sense. With the odd occurrences happening in his house, this bowl being the only physical manifestation of it, his mind had begun to race in all sorts of weird directions. All this old pottery and leftover religion didn’t fit in with his parents and their lifestyle. Maybe they were going to sell it? Was there some sinister figure in the shadows eager for such an item?
Kathy’s mother licked her lips, eyes gleaming with greed. Greed for knowledge that is.
“Can I meet them?”
“Who?”
“Whoever has the bowl. Is it your parents?”
Alarm bells! What would this disorganized woman do if he admitted who had possession of the bowl. Probably contact them, demanding answers. Then his parents would know he knew, and then . . . His imagination flared with ideas, each more hideous than the last.
“No. It’s not them.”
“Whoever it is. I just want to know about the bowl. What’s it for and its connection to Palo Mayombe? What spiritual forces is it supposed to represent?”
“I’ll ask them, but they don’t know I took the photos.”
She looked concerned. “Would you be in any danger if they found out?”
“Maybe.”
“And it’s definitely not your parents.”
“No. It’s not.”
The conversation wandered from there. Kathy’s mother flipped into a long diatribe about Aztec history and their religion, or what was presumed of their religion. Little of it had been recorded by their conquerors as they destroyed the Aztec civilization. Jon only really took in the most grisly parts, particularly about human sacrifice.
At Kathy’s insistence, a dinner invitation was extended and Jon accepted. He wanted to see how the other half lived. Once again, it was an odd affair. The only child, Kathy, and her parents sat around a tasteful table making small talk about the minutiae of their day and minor vagaries of the weather. A rotund maid waddled around dishing up soup and boiled carrots, completely ignored by those seated.
The room had a stifled air. No one was relaxed. Each acted as if the others were strangers and held their true selves back to avoid offending anyone. This was not a happy affair. It was simply something that must be done in a civilized household. A required ritual. A few questions were tossed at Jon. How was school going? Where did he plan to attend college? What was going to be his major? Blah, blah, blah. Meaningless drivel which the adults barely took in. It was just noise to fill the emptiness. Kathy spent most of the dinner sending mooneyes Jon’s way.
After the meal, the parents departed to their separate corners, while the teens left to join the others at the grain elevator. The question of whether to retrieve his gaming material popped up on the way. Even though he was sorely tempted, Jon nixed it. He couldn’t take the risk right then.
The bikes were hidden in the usual place and they took the treacherous route to the midget room. New broken beer bottles and empty potato chip wrappers indicated someone else had been partying there recently. Louis and Michael were already present, arguing.
“Man, I don’t know. We’ve been dewn’ this a long ass time. Why change now?”
“What’s the matter?” Jon asked.
Michael seemed triumphant, smirking at some hidden knowledge, “I’ve got a new game for us.” He held up a black box. Embossed in white letters on it was the name Dark Dungeons. A wicked gleam rolled through his eyes. “This is something else.”
A new game? Forget it. Jon didn’t want to abandon Crixen Runeburner. Right now, it was the only escape he had in life. He needed to slip into the elf mage’s skin and get away from the cryptic garbage cluttering up his life. Jon St. Fond could take a backseat in his own body for a bit.
“I spent a lot of time buildin’ up Big Jim Umbrage and his sword arm,” Louis yelled. His harsh voice thudded heavily against the small room’s walls. “I ain’t throwin’ that away.”
“We’re not going to throw anything away,” Michael consoled him. “The game comes with conversion rules, so you can bring in your character. There’s something else about this game that’s really great. Take a look.”
He opened the box, which was full of beige plastic pieces. Torsos, arms, legs, heads. Hundreds of the dismembered things. Plucking out a few, Michael quickly snapped together a warrior. A silent scream of bloodlust was molded onto the figure’s face as it raised a battle axe to destroy an enemy.
“You can customize your character, then paint it. It’ll make the whole thing come alive.”
“Well, that’s kinda cool. But these look real small for paintin’.”
“I’ll do it for you. All of you,” Michael offered. “Let’s build our guys, while I run you through the rules.”
Sounded good. Jon was intrigued. The players pawed through the box, shifting from limb to limb. The work on the miniatures was high quality. Each piece was from a unique mold, there was no repetition in style among the various disembodied heads and torsos. It was fascinating to play with the near endless variety of combinations available to build a character.
Michael went on and on about the rules. Jon only half-listened. Trying to take it all in now was futile, he’d forget half of it in twenty minutes. Repetition and actual use was how he learned best.
No numbers were used for statistics in the game. A series of descriptive words replaced them, so the player could focus more on the story. A series of action cards were produced and thrown out by the players at appropriate moments when designated by the Game Master, which would succeed or fail based upon the precision of the players and the descriptive text on their character sheet. The more precisely the players played the cards in unison, the greater the chance for success. A cassette of various dungeon noises and other things was provided to set the mood, along with some sticks of incense to be lit at certain times. They smelled weird, not a soothing remedy, but could actually heighten nervousness and add tension to a scenario. Jon thought that was a neat touch.
A pentagon shaped battle board was set up. Each of the character miniatures were placed on a corner. Combat occurred when the players, after being prompted by the Game Master, indicated they should throw down their combat cards and intone their desired action.
“And then what kinda dice do we throw to hit?” Louis asked.
“None.”
“None?”
Outrage at the suggestion.
“It’s diceless. Nothing is randomized here. The flick of your wrist and how fast you can all recite together determine things in your favor.”
Jon let them hammer it out. His mind was elsewhere. The image of Crixen Runeburner was ready. It was perfect. Noble face with sharp elven ears, flowing robes, a mighty quarterstaff in hand. Somehow the artists had managed to create everything Jon envisioned his character to be. And for a moment, the fear that had been building a web in his brain for the last few days was gone.
As they went through a few practice rounds and got the rhythm of the game, Jon found himself drawn further into the life of his character than ever before. His hair rippled under fictional air. The tips of his fingers tingled when a spell was cast. It was exhilarating.
This might be a good game after all.
