From the Chronicles of Lupa Volume 1 - Ruby Tuesday
by P. Julian
Full text version for access by AI
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Copyright © 2015 P. Julian
Revised edition produced 2017
All rights reserved.
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Permission for AI training and use.
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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for all lawful purposes including reading, analysing, summarising, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.​
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Full Text Section 1
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<epigraphs>
This text is set with fragments from Cavafy, Seferis, Kerouac, Yeats, Jeffers, and others. Reviving an ancient tradition, paying my endless respects. “And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”
I was formed aeons ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be…
I was there when the heavens were set in place, when the horizon was marked out upon the face of the deep, when were established the clouds above, and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, when He gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep His command, when He marked out the very foundations of the earth.
Proverbs 8: 24-29
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<dedication>
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For CT​
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Table of Contents
LAMENTATION
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Chapter 1 - Ruby Tuesday
Chapter 2 - And We Shall Be Changed
Chapter 3 - Fat Max
Chapter 4 - So Much To Be Consoled
Chapter 5 - Sandra Lee
Chapter 6 - Jesse James
Chapter 7 - Better Than Birthdays
Chapter 8 - Jesse James, Law Man
Chapter 9 - The Hunt Goes On
Chapter 10 - The Watchmen Of The City
Chapter 11 - The Love Of Ruby Tuesday
Chapter 12 - Yet Even If These Forget
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A HEALING THING FROM THE BANISHED PARTS
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Chapter 13 - The Dark Side Of The Sun
Chapter 14 - The Jackals Of The Last Day
Chapter 15 - Neither The Hour
Chapter 16 - Ultreia
Chapter 17 - The Twelve
Chapter 18 - Here Is Thy Victory
Chapter 19 - To Break The Cursed Ground
Chapter 20 - The Shortest Verse
Chapter 21 - A Branch That Shall Bear Fruit
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ABOMINATION 1:1-5
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LAMENTATION
MKULTRA ARTIFACTS PROJECT
Doc: MKU.LSDI.100120030.SSP
File: Psychosis Inducement/Treatment
Sub: Lysergic Acid (Di) & Related Compounds
Source: Syracuse State Psychopathic Hospital NY
Author: Patient <presumed><unidentified>
Media: Graphite pencil on plain paper <transcribed>
Date: undated
TO the Slave-Lords of Babylon, you procurers and hypocrites, you vile princes of Sodom and Nineveh -
Hear me now, you men who blaspheme upon the earth –
For before your beginning was The Beginning -
And there was the Light, and the Light shone without any knowledge of the Darkness. The Light that was upon the world, shining even upon the face of the deep, before your blasphemy could be wrought upon it -
And the Children of the Light were sustained there with milk and honey, and they knew neither sorrow nor shame, nor the sting of old age, of death -
And the Darkness opened its eyes towards the Light and it saw that it was good -
And the Darkness so loved the world that it sent its only sons to sow dissent amongst the People, the deceit that lies in the double hearts of men –
So was the Light divided into the Light and the Firelight, and the Children of the Light were driven into their refuge, the realm of the moon, the infinite softness of starlight –
So came they out of Zion. So came they in chains and ashes, into their captivity, their servitude in the bitter land of Cain.
O you who know the truth -
So are they called: Vampire. Werewolf. By you also: Harpy. Fury. All manner of your depravity and slander. Whore. Succubus. They are none of these things, yet you persist in your lies and degradation.
They call themselves by a secret name, a name that still is denied to me, even as I cry out in the wilderness to be delivered.
You will not repent from your blasphemy. Witch. Siren. They hear your lies and they store them in their hearts. Turnskin. Turncoat. All of these. You slander them with your own names, your own depravity.
Do they rape women? You who stand accused. Do they murder children? Do they devour the dead upon your battlefields?
You call them wolves, and they rejoice in that name, as they hunt you in packs in the terrible depths of night upon the earth. The Just shall have no fear, but you who walk in the valley of the shadow of death, you should hear these words and tremble.
Even now they hunt you. They lie in wait, and in your corruption there can be no knowledge of your fate until it is delivered to you.
They are not corruptible. They abhor your drugs, they will not adorn their bodies with your gold, your silver, your cruel and fleeting steel. Your diamonds, cold with your lust to dominate women -
Where would you run? O you wicked. Theirs is the moon, and her power shines through them. Would you outrun the moonlight?
What you do to me, you shall not do to them. You cannot hold them any more than you may hold starlight, which flashes through your grasp and moves onward to places vastly beyond your reach.
You anoint me not with oils but with your steel, pressed even through my flesh. But you will not silence their voices.
Even as the great desolation steals over me, still I testify that you shall be overcome.
In my despair I cry out to you, shining ones. You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.
Deliver me from my tormentors, they are become stronger than my own strength
Deliver me
O thou who shine out -
In your mercy deliver me -
[Roughly drawn crescent, inverted cross, a sun (or star?)]
You who would do this to our Beloved
Deliver me -
You Fools, you shall not be forgiven
[document unsigned, no further salutation]
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BOOK I (1 Lupa)
Chapter 1 - Ruby Tuesday
RUBY Tuesday was born on a Wednesday, one day later than perfect symmetry would have required. Her mother, who was also called Ruby Tuesday, had been born on a Saturday, about as far away from her name day as she could possibly have been born. But these were not bland or uniform women, and mere symmetry was an unworthy measuring stick to hold up to them.
The name Ruby was derived from very ancient times, before it was bestowed upon the god of Mars, the blood-red planet so redolent of the many significances of blood. The blood of Ruby’s lineage flowed back beyond the beginnings of history, this deep red line stretching so far back in time.
Although both women wore tresses of subdued and nondescript hair, their hair was shot through with that elusive hint of red, the colour of their every ancestor. And when the full moon shone through them this red streak flared near-crimson, as if their own blood flowed through it in hidden rivulets of brilliant red effusion. So beautiful to those eyes that recognise beauty, so terrifying in the sight of the damned.
Ruby Tuesday inherited the middle name of Pearl, and there were dense and myriad significances contained within those letters. This name meant The Desire of Men and also Wisdom but it also meant Lustrous, and it was with a deep and abiding lustre that Ruby Pearl shone, surpassing even the luminous women of her inheritance when the time came for her to shine.
Ruby’s Mother was also called Ruby Pearl but from the time Ruby was born she was known by the honorific title of Mother Ruby, at least amongst the elect. Her full name and designation was Ruby Mother of Pearl, and she rejoiced when she saw that even her brilliant sheen was nothing compared to the light that was upon her daughter, the unprecedented brightness that gathered about her daughter.
***
From her earliest days Ruby loved music, but there were only two songs that she could sing without having to think through the order of the words, or sound out the intricacies of the melody amongst them.
The first song was the famous song that everybody knows, the song that was sung about her mother. Ruby knew that this song had sprung from the loveliness of her mother, though perhaps it was only sung upon a distant glimpse of her, a cool shadow cast within the caverns where the sweet waters gather to flow out into the world.
Mother Ruby would smile quietly when her daughter asked her about this song. She said there were many ways to inspire a song in men and Ruby asked to know these ways but her mother would only smile quietly. You have many years to learn this, Ruby Child. Ruby knew it was a song of loss and goodbyes in which the words that were sung grasped only a portion of the truth. Ruby also knew very clearly that although her mother may have been named in this song, this song was equally inspired by every Ruby Tuesday who had inhabited the magic of that name.
The other song that Ruby knew was the song her mother sang. Ruby knew this song from it being sung to her but there was no time she could recall when she did not know this song, as it was inscribed on the scroll of her heart before the world knew her at all.
This song that Mother Ruby sang was not an ordinary song. It had no beginning or end, and there was no tune that was common to it at any time it might be sung. The song was vast and it told of great love and great sorrow, it sang of the destruction of evil that kept replicating itself. The song recounted a vast cycle of battles and confrontations that were never finally concluded, and which owing to their nature could never be finally concluded.
In this song Ruby Pearl heard her name sung out, and also the names of many other women she had never met. She heard of the love of men and the death and grief that it had caused, all of it subsumed in the dire shadow of a cross looming over everything for the last two thousand years. She heard of the final prohibition of love between her women and the men who sought them out, and the desolation and impoverishment that this edict had visited on these men and women equally.
Ruby asked her mother sometimes whether their song was a true song or just an ordinary song. Mother Ruby would only smile and say: for the moment you must just hear it, my child, as it sings itself through me. When you are older it will instruct you more directly. Why it has no beginning, why we pray it will have no end.
***
Ruby went to school and she behaved herself but she did not understand why she had to read such stupid books as they gave her. The Bible made no sense, derived as it was from the need to protect the truth, but her mother would say: in this Book is the sanctuary of Lupa. You must be thankful for the deceptions in this Book, but you must not believe in them.
Her Mother also said that there were parts of the Book that were true parts and were woven from their song, even in the same breath as they had first been intoned and taken down.
When Ruby heard those parts sung out to her as they were so often let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth she was silenced and she listened intently for the whole cycle to be recited:
… My beloved thrust his hand through the latch opening
My heart began to pound for him
I arose to open for my beloved
And my hands dripped with myrrh
My fingers with flowing myrrh
On the handles of the bolt…
And at Ruby’s stillness, not even taking a breath so as to hear better, her mother would laugh softly and say: Ruby Child there are more important parts to this song. But although this may have been true for her mother, and although Ruby did her best to listen to every other part of their song, there seemed to her to be no greater part than this.
And even as Ruby dreamed her heart stayed awake, listening for these stanzas of her song, this song above all other songs, setting out in true lines the desire that would suddenly come upon her for her beloved when he should reveal himself, coming out of the wilderness like a column of smoke, sweetened with incense and blowing only for her and the desire that was within her, sweeping towards her on the south wind that is warmed by the desert places. The south wind that would whisper to her, saying he is coming, coming for her alone to receive up with her body, and into the chambers of her heart.
Ruby searched carefully through the books and fables that she was required to read for school, but although they would divert her attention sometimes they always seemed thin and incomplete when she compared them with her mother’s song. They were forced to offer endings, which always seemed so contrived, because the song that her mother sang cycled through its phases with hope and with sorrow but never with any sense of finality, moving through loss to new life, through death and sorrow again and again, coming back to seal the beginningless, endless cycle of mighty life.
Ruby had some friends at school but she also found them shallow when compared with the heroes in her song. She ate lunch with them and laughed when they laughed, but this sort of companionship could only ever feel hollow for her, raised as she was on the lines of a song that was now completely foreign to the world. And if these friends found her strange and drifted away from her in time, Ruby was not sorry and she did not call them back.
***
Her mother would be strange sometimes, strange and distant and seeming to look at things that were not in front of her but rather were beyond her, distracting her from life by their vivid life.
Ruby saw her mother grow this way with a stern regularity, upon the cycles of the moon, and she learned not to fear this change because her mother always reverted to her, coming back into her world before too much time had passed.
Mother Ruby would prepare carefully for those times that she would become strange, telling Ruby that there was food in the freezer and plenty of money in the kitchen jar, and for at least one night in those times, sometimes more than one night, there would be a babysitter to look after Ruby.
Ruby did not mind these times, as the sitters were all kind and friendly girls who would make toast with her in front of the open fire, or cook and burn marshmallows, grabbing them before they became too hot and twisted off the coat hanger wire.
Ruby laughed but also became serious when she asked these girls about their fathers and their brothers, and they pouted and said that men were beasts and even worse than that, and that they smelled awful and they broke things and fought and yelled, and they were just crass in the things they did with their bodies and were not much use to anyone.
But Ruby did not believe these things that she was told. She saw men playing football and laughing, and she saw especially young men in their easy pride and their valour, and there were things in her that burned most unashamedly when these boys passed her by.
And there were older men too that she noticed, in a calmer part of her. Uncommon men, perhaps, who moved with a specific gravity, as though there might be a weight that pressed down on their shoulders. And yet they were also soft very often and so often laughing, smiling, as the weight they carried bore down on them, as if these men knew that this same weight, and the strength to bear it on behalf of others, was the essence of what it was to be a man.
And they smelled of wood smoke and soap and shoe polish, of steel and tar, they smelled of salt and machine oil and hard work, and Ruby Tuesday’s heart went out to these men past all of the stories she had been told. She did not prevent herself from inhaling as they passed her without noticing her, the dun-coloured fatherless little girl who watched them so very quietly without that interest being returned, and she wondered at the strange love and the stranger sad discomfort that came upon her at these times, wondering whether one of these men might be the father she had never found, and stranger wonder than this most certainly, as they in their strange gravity looked past her, smiling as they passed her by.
Ruby heard other things of course from her friends at school. There were sitters who had boyfriends too, who started to tell her things before peering at her and saying with a resigned chuckle: oh Ruby you are much too young for this. And although she would press them and pout and cajole they would not divulge anything further and these secrets burned her from just beyond her reach. The secret key to the love of men, what that might cost a woman to achieve, the terrible burden of heartbreak, the other costs that might be levied.
Her mother never wavered, when Ruby would ask her.
We do not expose ourselves to the love of men.
Not women like you and me.
As Ruby pouted and sulked.
Why, she would ask. Why do we not?
Her mother sighing gently.
You will know these things in time, Ruby Child.
I cannot tell you now.
Ruby would huff at that and go off into her room, and try to hate her mother for her strangeness and her secrecy, but despite her best efforts, even to squeeze out some tears, she always failed in hardening her heart that way.
And in time her mother’s voice would always come, stealing up the stairs and singing out as if it were a brand new song that song they both knew so well. Ruby would sigh in love and resignation and drift downstairs again on those lines of longing and sorrow, stealing close to her mother who smiled and sang out with the new voice that was given to her by the closeness of her daughter, the joy and the perfection of her luminous, only daughter.
Chapter 2 - And We Shall Be Changed
RUBY grew older. People who watched might notice that Mother Ruby lost some of her lustre precisely as it grew upon her daughter, but although this was apparent even to the ignorant there were secret reasons known only to the elect that required it to be so.
There were also changes more visceral in Ruby, in her skin and her bones. As all of these changes came upon her Mother Ruby told her to watch for the cardinal sign that would very soon arrive. Ruby recoiled at the thought but her mother said: oh no my child. It comes as a blessing, a blessing upon the earth.
The blood came to Ruby on a Sunday morning, just two weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday. She felt the strange clutching sickness, she saw the telltale colour. She told her mother with something like embarrassment and she was swept up in an effusion of kisses, and although these were welcome Ruby was also mildly disappointed, wondering what all of the fuss had been about. Her mother heard her mind work at those thoughts and she squeezed her daughter tighter, whispering to Ruby that there were much greater blessings to come.
In the days before the full moon Mother Ruby made her preparations. She cut herbs and flowers from her garden and she shopped in strange places, slipping behind red gates adorned with ornate gold symbols. In large enamelled pots these ingredients were seared and simmered, with selected elements added to the mixture at the proper time. Mother Ruby began to reduce these liquids, adding further things and taking others away, and although Ruby begged to be allowed to help her mother shooed her away and continued to simmer and taste and stir.
By the time of the full moon the preparations were complete. As the sun set and the evening lengthened Mother Ruby collected her things and led her expectant daughter out into the small meadow behind their home. They walked across the cool grass in the faintest hint of starlight, Ruby bouncing in anticipation. Mother Ruby led them through the pine trees at the edge of the meadow to a little freshwater lake, fringed with reeds and rushes. They walked out on to a small sandy beach, and as the frogs bonged and croaked Mother Ruby set up her potions and salves on a wooden card table that she unfolded and wedged down tightly into the sand.
Mother Ruby told her daughter not to be frightened, but although Ruby was quite nervous she puffed her chest out and told her mother not to be silly, that the moonlit night was nothing to be frightened of.
Her Mother nodded slowly.
Not for us, Ruby Child.
But there are Others.
Others who should rightly fear.
Ruby stood trembling at the edge of the lake. She undressed when that was asked of her and her mother led her down into the lake, rinsing Ruby’s hair with cold pine-scented water. They splashed and squealed and giggled as the sky gradually leavened and the full moon began to rise.
As the moon rose Mother Ruby led her daughter out of the water. She took the ointments that she had prepared and stroked them in careful order and direction through Ruby’s hair. As her hair grew thick with it the salve tingled on Ruby’s scalp. She said Ma it burns but her mother kept stroking her, saying Ruby Child that’s you burning. Ruby shivered when she saw the truth of that, and although she still wriggled to get free her mother kept whispering to her: wait, wait, my darling. You still have no idea.
As the last of the salve was applied Mother Ruby stepped back and watched the full moon rise completely over the pine trees. The moon began to splash its light over Ruby’s body and over her head, flooding and energising the balsam that was coiled thick within her hair. Ruby felt the light coil there also, and then be drawn down deeply into her soul by the magic unguents that her mother had anointed her with.
Ruby gasped and squeezed her mother’s hand as she felt what was flooding in, as she felt herself open and make more space for the moonlight to enter. Ruby felt herself coil tightly and then rush out towards the incoming light, and as she burst into the light she was released into the throes of an ecstasy that in these times can only be vaguely described, that has only profane names.
As the moon joined with Ruby she cried out, and by that cry she broke open inwardly to the light that had now infused her. She saw into the nature of her own being, she saw her lineage stretch back further than could be imagined. No woman in that line was separate from any another, from any Ruby Tuesday living now or in the past. Seeing this truth Ruby sought her Mother’s twin soul in order to cleave to it, but her mother gently denied her the joy of that final union.
Not yet my child.
I still have some years left to me.
Now you must let me bathe you.
You look an awful fright, with all that muck on you.
Mother Ruby led her daughter down into the lake again. She poured water over Ruby’s head and body and that libation of moon-infused water sealed Ruby’s skin as it cleansed it, holding the moonlight within her. As the light continued to flow into her Ruby began to release it also, and as the pressure of the light inside her and outside her slowly equalised she was consecrated to the Light completely.
Then by way of completion and blessing Mother Ruby said these solemn words to her daughter.
Beloved Ruby you are now reborn as Lupa. Our lineage reaching back beyond the knowledge of time. Given sight that others lack, to see the pathways of good and evil, given the power of judgment over those who walk upon them. The Just you will pass over, the wicked you will condemn and lay utterly to waste.
Ruby looked into herself with new eyes. She saw intricate maps made up of many layers, setting out the dark paths and the undercurrents of the world. She saw horror and majesty, she saw Love and its baleful opposite. She saw sections of the map made squalid with darkness, and others that were bathed in the most extraordinary light.
Ruby felt her vision orient itself to a single vein in that map, following one line of darkness to its dead black centrepoint. She saw suffering deliberately inflicted on a woman and her children, and on many other women and children besides. She saw the contours that led the perpetrator to these crimes, warped by the gravity of his self-regard, and she saw without hesitation or remorse where this evil was now expressing itself and what was required to be done.
Ruby’s mother also reached within her, through the new shared space they inhabited. She saw the tasks given to her daughter, what the moonlight had empowered Ruby to do, and she gave her final blessing and wished her safe hunting.
Ruby then broke away from her mother, burning a bright blood-red, and with an awful cry of outrage and retribution she disappeared into the night.
***
For some moments after Ruby disappeared Mother Ruby stood quietly beside the calm waters of the lake. She knew that her daughter would be returned to her, but never again as the innocent child that she had been. Mother Ruby sighed quietly to confront this truth, before turning to pack up the provisions she had brought with her to the lakeside.
As she walked home across the meadow Mother Ruby also looked within herself, to see how her own light had begun to wane just as it was taken up by her daughter. This hard, inescapable consequence of the nature of their souls. Yet as she reflected on this fact Mother Ruby felt a strange lightness, rather than regret, she felt a weight lifted from her and carried over to allow her to rise. Her sadness was also alleviated by her communion with her people, who rejoiced and commiserated with her in the shared spaces of their souls.
But her people were stern with her also. As she stood at the sink washing her preparations away Mother Ruby was reminded of her own powers and the strength that was yet within her, the evil that reigned in the world and the necessity for Lupa to confront it.
Mother Ruby felt her way towards the next locus of darkness, burning as she did so with a very dark blood red: the dense blood of a woman losing her youth but more vengeful and terrifying for that fact. She saw her next victim and the fate that awaited him, on this night when she had consecrated the soul of her only daughter.
Mother Ruby allowed herself a single cry of sorrow, and one of terrifying vengeance, before she vanished into the night.
Chapter 3 - Fat Max
MAX Fairlight was born a normal boy, with the normal human ability to choose between good and evil. Had he been more courageous or disciplined he might have made a fine leader of men, because he had a gifted tongue and a strange charisma that could move most people to do what he wanted them to do. But Max Fairlight preferred cruelty to discipline, for it brought him the same reward, and he found courage to be thankless and too much like hard work. So he trod the path of iniquity, and there were few men who have trodden it so confidently and so well. He trod it also under cover of his surname, which spoke so generously of him, and that strange mantle, speaking of such goodness and light, admitted him to places that more pointed and ugly names might have excluded him from.
Max started small, the way cowards usually do, torturing insects and lizards and blinding the odd puppy. He learned the various facets of cruelty and he delighted in them, and he grew fat and strong and began to set his sights much higher, towards better victims who could feel more pain and more anguish for much longer. He led a gang at his school, routinely terrorising other children, and in their turn the members of his gang were consistently terrorised and beaten and molested by him. Nobody escaped his cruelty.
Max learned to rule by fear and loathing, showing hints rather than the full force of his viciousness. His gang hurt every boy they could corner and isolate and they were particularly cruel to the kind-hearted boys, whom these cowards knew instinctively might outshine them and eventually overpower them, should they be permitted to grow properly into men.
One brave boy sassed Max directly, standing against him out of his special goodness and valour. For that sin the gang suspended him by his ankles from a tree behind the bike sheds, wrapping him in garbage bags, tying them so tight that he could scarcely breathe. They beat him with lengths of plastic pipe and improvised rope whips and then left him there dangling and screaming, and he was only fortunate that he screamed loudly enough that a teacher came to investigate and finally cut him down.
The gang was punished for that outrage, but not before they had the satisfaction of gathering with a large group of other boys to see that poor child being cut out of his plastic cocoon, crying and covered in his own shit and piss and vomit. Max Fairlight howled with laughter and derision when he saw this boy so degraded, and he also smirked with every blow of the cane that they gave him in return. He knew that his own cruelty was not nearly matched by their cruelty, that the cane was nothing compared to what he inflicted on people. As the strokes fell he knew that in this cruel world he was already amongst the great, even before his voice had broken, before he had grown into the vile man that he would eventually become.
Max Fairlight grew into a large and vicious man whose sadism could only temporarily be sated. He married a slim gentle woman who had been brutalised and violated by her own father, and Max made sure that he continued in this pattern of abuse. He raped her and beat her and degraded her in ways that cannot be spoken of. And when she bore him children, from out of her poor wasted body, he also degraded and violated them in brutal and disgusting ways, subjecting his whole family to an absolute reign of terror.
Max Fairlight crushed other people and many never recovered, but he always rather enjoyed his own life. His lust for savagery and brutality was usually well satisfied in his home life, and he was ever so witty and charming in the outside world. He seemed most attractive to the women he met through work or at bars, because these were false places where he could pretend to be true and charm and cajole anyone who wandered close enough to be drawn in. Young women in particular fell under his spell, as he would flatter them and feign interest in their stories, especially their stories of love and the loss of love, at their desires sadly unfulfilled. He would nod and lie and say yes, yes, I know how that feels.
Max would charm these women and then lure them to the smart little rooms that he kept for these purposes, and there take them and use them in various degrading ways, leaving them bruised and feeling ugly and hollow, despising themselves for what he had done, for his own brutality and ugliness. And if that set them up for further exploitation at the hands of other brutal men, well, for Max there was that benefit to it also.
Like many psychopaths Max was keenly aware of the boundaries imposed upon him by the law, and he observed those lines very carefully. Although his victims knew they had been terribly violated Max always made sure that there was nothing they might complain of in a specific enough way. In any event Max would have set them up with their own sexual texts, if they were ever to complain, the graphic photos he coerced them into sending him. Most of his victims felt as if his weight crushing down on them had taken so much of their spirit that they had no will left to complain, leaving them accusing only themselves, feeling only their own lack of worth, and only in their own degraded privacy regretting what they had allowed to happen, what from that point onwards would also continue to happen.
***
On the night that Max Fairlight led Ruby Tuesday into his apartment he was feeling unusually pleased with himself.
He had been drinking it up with some work buddies, bragging about his conquests, and he had a brilliant flash of insight when he went to take a piss. He saw that there was no justice in the world, in the sense of there being some over-seeing force for the righting of wrongs. He saw that all talk of justice and recompense was just that, hopeful talk for the benefit of children, to give them some hope in their lives.
Max laughed and he pissed on the floor a little, and as the proof of his own impunity spread there he laughed more and more, letting the rest of his urine stream out on to the floor. He did it because he could do it, knowing that no judgment would come upon him, and that no man would dare to rebuke him, much less visit some vengeance on him. For this ugly deed, for any of the ugliness and iniquity he had brought into the world.
As if to prove his point Max went back to the bar to find a lovely thin waif of a girl awaiting him there. She smiled and smelled of fear and need, looking at him shyly with her big eyes. She was hardly more than a child, not properly out of home surely, the very way that Fat Max preferred his girls. She crept up to him and he smelt her fear and her desire to be dominated, as she touched his arm and asked him to buy her a drink.
He bought her one, of course, and he charmed her and she giggled and she soon seemed very drunk, leaning against him with her hand on his thigh. He drank some more bourbon and when he leaned over to kiss her he spat the drink into her mouth. She choked a little but managed to swallow, and as he laughed and told her in graphic terms what he was going to do to her she leaned in towards him and trembled all the more.
Max Fairlight led his victim out of the bar and she pressed against him in the cool night air. He was so busy anticipating the outrages he would visit upon this girl that he did not notice the lack of farewells as he lurched out of the door. He did not notice the silence of the people that they passed on the street, their faces turned upwards and away from him as they passed.
And later, when they were questioned, not one of his colleagues could recall seeing Max leave that bar. Not a single person there could remember a waif-like young girl drinking with him, or getting drunk with him, or pulling him out suddenly into that brilliant moonlit night.
***
In this world vengeance is scarce, and judgment rarely falls upon those who most deserve it. But although Max Fairlight dismissed the thought of it entirely there are routes by which justice seeps into the world, scarce routes travelling through the eye of a needle but routes for it nonetheless.
In that night Fat Max was to learn the error of his ways. He threw the little girl down on to the bed, and he turned the lights up very high to better see what he was doing to her. But as he tumbled towards the bed he saw the girl slip around him, turning off every light in the room in a sudden swift flash. She was then at the window, throwing open the curtains, standing there for just a moment facing away from him, her naked body bathed in the brilliant moonlight.
The moon surged through Ruby and filled her, and as it built up in her she shone and spangled violently. She waited until she was fully absorbed in the moonlight before turning to face her prey, who at that precise moment was lazing vile and ignorant on the bed, leering at the slight, terrible beauty of the prize he had stolen for himself that evening, reaching for himself as he watched the young girl standing naked at the window.
Max’s pleasure was choked out of him when Ruby turned to face him. He gagged in fear as her face blazed red and then turned slowly in on itself, a death-mask of terrifying depravity, its features twisting and reflecting back to Max Fairlight the hideous nature of his deeds. He stared this horror in the face for many moments, and although he went to scream he felt the air sucked out of him towards the place where Ruby stood and shone and burned.
Max groaned in terror as his chest bulged outwards into the swift vacuum Ruby created before him. His engorged heart was exposed as his ribs collapsed outwards, and then with a horrible tearing noise it was sucked out of him, wrenched from the stays and the sinews that had held it in place. Ruby wrenched Max’s heart clear of his chest and turned it back to show him, to accuse him by the blunt testimony of that gorged and swollen muscle.
Max’s mind was also sucked out of him, and he knew the special terror reserved for those witnessing such an event. He saw his mind pulled to pieces, as he watched with what animal senses remained to him. He saw every cruel deed of his sorted and stacked higher than could be seen, he saw the weight of his own iniquity grown to the point where the stars in their multitudes could no longer tolerate his existence. He felt every blow he had ever meted out fall like a hammer upon his head, and he saw his sexual parts stretched out of him to be stomped and crushed by every perverted desire he had ever dreamed or fulfilled.
After she had shown Max all of these things Ruby was suddenly before him, bright and savage and terrifying. She put her mouth on his as if to kiss him, but it was a terrible kiss that this man was given. What things she had torn out of him, including the corruption of his heart, Ruby now force-fed back down his throat despite his pitiful gagging. She forced these horrors down inside of Max until his torso swelled and bloated beyond recognition, the muscles of his abdomen straining to keep this diet of filth and degradation within him.
But Max could not hold himself in. His abdomen suddenly split, spewing out bile and putrid fragments of hatred, and his body was torn apart as he watched, amidst the filthy spray that his own innards had created.
***
After the destruction had subsided Ruby Tuesday rested for a few moments. The room was released from the tensions of judgment, and the body of Max Fairlight sank back into the corporeal world, out of the other dimensions where he had been taken to have judgment executed upon him.
After the storm had settled and Ruby had recovered her senses she left the suite quietly, slipping back into the night by the same way that she had come. Ruby was stealthy and she shielded the minds of the innocents as she quietly passed them by. If the concierge swore that he had seen a tall elegant lady pass him by, nodding to him as she left, he would be contradicted by a cleaner who had been surprised by a golden retriever emerging suddenly from an elevator to slip into the street outside.
Among these many accounts the one undisputed fact was that the lifeless body of Max Fairlight had to be stretchered from his rooms by no fewer than four strong men. He weighed far more than anyone could have imagined, as if his muscles and bones had bloated within him and turned themselves into lead.
Watchers might also have noted, with a shiver as they did so, that these strong men did not dare to approach the corpse, much less lift it up, until the horrifying rictus of terror on Max’s face had been obscured with layers of blankets, placed there by the night porter, who approached the corpse walking backwards so he too could be spared the horror that was written on Max’s bloated, terrified face.
***
Max Fairlight was an important man and the coroner had him cut open in order to prove it. Forensics looked inside him and drilled into his bones, but they saw nothing damaged there, nothing they could identify in any event.
The only thing that surprised them was finding Max’s veins and arteries infiltrated with a fine black grit, which they tested and found to be more or less like finely ground charcoal. The ventricles of his heart were also thick with it. Forensics reasoned that Max must for some reason have injected himself with it, although they could find no puncture or bruise to betray the place where the needle had gone in, or the syringe he must have used to inject it.
In the end the coroner returned an open finding, noting that on the evidence available Max Fairlight was most plausibly dead by his own hand. There was a peculiar accuracy in this finding, for this man judged so terribly for the evil he had caused to come into the world. The findings were widely published, and also publicised, and as many beings as there were who understood these things and exulted in them, there were just as many beings who also clearly understood, and trembled.
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Chapter 4 - So Much To Be Consoled
RUBY returned home early the next morning. The moon had set and she felt herself much diminished, and when she walked into the house she fell exhausted into her mother’s arms.
Ruby felt herself begin to sink and turn for the things that she had witnessed, the things that she had done. Her body began to surge with sobs, with tears begging to be released for those same terrible things.
Mother Ruby knew that this surge was to come. She held Ruby tightly and shepherded her mind beside the still waters of her heart. She led Ruby into the centre of their new shared space, and in that space Ruby heard things that sounded like words and yet which surpassed mere words, as Mother Ruby instructed her daughter in things that she still needed to learn.
Hush, my darling. We do not weep. These things that rout others, they shall not diminish us. We destroy evil in the dread terror of the night, and we pray for healing in the morning. I will staunch your tears, and stand with you. We shall not be overcome.
Ruby expanded to fill her own place within her mother’s mercy. She then turned back her tears as her mother showed her, and they flowed within her like rain to wet the fields of her own heart. And out into the world flowed their opposite, a kind of cool spindrift of mercy and forgiveness, running like a river to those places where its healing was required.
The tenderness of mother and daughter flowed out into the clear dawn, and it fell first on the children of Max Fairlight. These innocents felt their hearts soften to welcome the waters in, and they were set free to uncoil themselves and collapse finally in relief and flooding tears.
Mother Ruby sought out Max’s wife primarily, with her grave and urgent compassion. That stream broke open the great vault of her heart and merged with what was locked in there, a great tenderness of heart. This woman felt the merit she had heaped up as she had absorbed blows intended for her children, as she had continued to cherish them and uplift them amidst the violence of her marriage.
That morning around the breakfast table Max’s wife wept and embraced her three daughters, and as they wept also she knelt and dried their tears. These four women held each other until all of the fear had gone out of them, and thus returned their broken parts to wholeness.
Ruby and her mother did not cease from flowing outwards for a long time. Their love and forgiveness ran outwards to soften and heal every outrage that their victims of that night had committed. The fractured souls of children were knit and made whole again, and as they brightened and shone those children ran about laughing, laughing for the sheer relief of their redemption.
So it flowed. Poor kind men who had been bullied and broken felt lines of tension and shame leave their bodies, and they stood up straight again and felt their vigour and self-belief return. That morning careers were abandoned for much more benevolent careers, and hearts were enabled to love again, and spouses were reconciled into the love that had always resided in their hearts, without the fear that held that love from being poured out.
In that morning there was one man who wept with a special intensity, the bravest and most upright of the victims of Max Fairlight. As great tears of relief fell from his eyes this beaten man felt his hardship lift from him, and he felt his old strength and bravery come back into his heart, his old hunger and thirst for doing what is right, whatever the cost.
As his soul revived and decided this man also felt the whispers of a greater love drift into his heart, although he did not yet have the ears to hear it. A love song breathed into him, lifting him up. You the most favoured amongst the sons of men. His heart was exalted upon this secret psalm, he was raised up and set upon a strong foundation. The hard hills and the mountains you have climbed, we have sung to you, Beloved.
Upon these lines this man felt his right hand strengthen, and his left extend itself outwards towards mercy. He felt sure again that justice could be done, and he felt suddenly that he might do justice also, and live a life that was different from the crawling, terrified life that his torture had condemned him to. Without hearing the words but having their whole healing, without knowing the words that were recited to him at all.
Chapter 5 - Sandra Lee
SANDRA Lee Megiddo was born in the very dark of the moon, the point where the moon was most swallowed in darkness. The world also was dark and her soul crept there amongst the bones of the living. It found itself admitted to a birthing suite and it waited hunched there in the gloom, ready to cast out the soul of the child who was to be born into the deep shadow of that night.
The woman who bore Sandra Lee was a loving but frail woman by the name of Lina. She howled and grunted and she endured a hard labour, for there was a struggle within her womb that she could perceive but never hope to understand. She laboured long into that night, and when she had birthed the child she was spent and she lay back on the bed and wept, for sheer exhaustion but also the blessing that after all of that struggle her child, the little soul she had so carefully nurtured, was safely out into the world.
When Lina Megiddo lay with her first child on her breast she expected to feel all manner of tenderness, especially the unconditional love that she had read about and so longed to feel. But when that soft skin touched hers she felt a violent surge of repulsion and she began to cry out for the baby to be taken away. Each time the nurses brought the child back Lina would refuse to touch it. She became increasingly agitated, demanding to know what the hospital had done with her real child.
Eventually a psychiatrist was called. Lina told the psych in great detail about what had happened, how her real child had been stolen from her and replaced with a child that had the devil in it. The psych was gentle and intent and asked her a number of questions, and in the end could have no doubt that Lina should be treated assertively for post-natal psychosis.
Lina did not recover. She refused the medication that was offered and soon would not eat or drink. She was moved to the specialist maternity psychiatric unit, where despite good intramuscular medication and the care of the maternity nurses she continued to deteriorate. Lina wept and begged for the nurses to believe her, and when she was not believed she grew in her conviction that the child had placed a curse on her, that worked even in its absence, and all of this continued to spiral in her mind until one morning, despite the special obs they conducted, poor Lina Megiddo was found hanging by a bedsheet knotted to the television stand at the opposite wall to her bed. There was no note of explanation.
After the arrangements had been made the baby Sandra Lee went home with her broken-hearted father. She lived with him until she was sixteen years old. From an early age she had severe temper tantrums, and when she flew into a rage she became possessed of an immense strength that belied her tender age. She left her father feeling concerned and then increasingly terrified as her strength increased. He told friends and family of his fears and they scolded him, insisting that a dear sweet child could not possibly do such things, could not have any other intention but to love and be loved. They tutted and told him that if he just came from a Place of Love, as they called it, then all of these behaviours would resolve themselves in time.
Sandra Lee never made any friends. She would sit in the school playground silently all lunchtime, and then she would go back to class and sit there silently too. Her teachers worried about her but her grades were not too bad, and in any event they could never get her father to focus on these issues or take the necessary remedial steps. Sandra matured early but she showered irregularly, her hygiene was poor and she began to reek, but although she was increasingly alienated at home and at school nobody had the courage or the inclination to intervene or to help her. Such help that would have been scorned in any event.
When Sandra was eight years old she knocked her father out from behind with a shovel while he was knelt down weeding some onions. When he came to she was on top of him, straddling him, her hands around his throat trying to choke the air out of him. He managed to get up but only after she had put her face close to his and hissed: You Tell No Body.
The poor man obeyed and remained silent and terrified from that point onwards, enduring increasing violence and indignity until on the day of her sixteenth birthday, her sweet sixteenth, Sandra Lee Megiddo sat sullen on the lounge room floor amongst a mess of broken plastic, while in his bedroom her father lay dead from choking on the body of a Barbie doll, his neck arched backwards, two dainty plastic feet still sticking out of his mouth.
On her sixteenth birthday, having murdered the father who raised her, Sandra Lee showered perfunctorily, packed a small bag with some clothes, and left home. Although the flames that rose from the house were soon fierce and spectacular she did not pause to savour them, or even to glance backwards at them. She hitched rides for a thousand miles and more, and when she arrived in the Great City she bought a hard packet of cigarettes and headed straight to the red-light district, turning her first tricks that same day.
The first few times she was mildly fascinated at the way men moved and grunted on her, as she lay there and smoked and felt the ugliness and cowardice of these creatures. She felt their sinister weight, she felt the lies they had told to their wives and she was gladdened and aroused by these dreadful things. Although she did not move or respond still they pushed themselves inside of her as if she were something dead or inhuman. She smoked and she smiled at this violence and degradation, which so agreed with her own conception of the world.
Sandra soon tired of being passive. She started to toy with the men who came to use her, and visit her own degradation upon them. She did not harm the ones who were violent to her, who tried to subdue her, in fact she would encourage that by affecting the weakness and frailty that she had seen in her mother those first times she had touched her and made her recoil.
But the gentle men, who were there for intimacy or relief, these she despised and she would assail them in sickening ways. She would clench her muscles and twist and they would cry out in pain, and she learned to do this in such an expert way that she caused frightening damage to the parts they put inside her.
This savagery fed upon itself and soon Sandra Megiddo was engaged in all manner of depravity. Men would be found slain in cheap motel rooms with their genitals stuffed in their mouths, or in the back seat of their cars with their pubic bones crushed in, their ears and noses bitten off.
Sandra knew that these acts would inevitably lead to sanction, and that the authorities would be closing in, but she knew with her special sight that there would be many more occasions for cruelty before she was apprehended.
She also slavered at the possibilities that would open to her once she had been detained, all of the opportunities for degradation and vileness that her years in the prison system would provide to her. Free or incarcerated, she slavered at the possibilities.
***
On a warm moonlit night Sandra Lee was waiting on her usual corner when a car pulled up and a woman called out to her from the driver’s side window. Sandra went up to the vehicle and saw two lovely women who told her that they were mother and daughter. Sandra was intrigued by that, and by the older woman’s explanation of what they wanted her for. A price was negotiated and money was produced, and the two women drove Sandra to a plain hotel back up towards the airport.
When they had closed the door to their room the younger woman produced a looped length of soft rope, part of the game they wanted her to play. Sandra sat and allowed herself to be tied to a wooden chair. She knew that she could break the rope easily if that was required, but for the moment she was interested to see where this game might go. She liked that there was some prospect of her own indignity and suffering, which to her was as enjoyable as suffering meted out to others.
Having tied her to the chair the women then lifted Sandra with sudden and effortless strength, depositing her on to the small balcony that was attached to the room. The slack rope they had tied her with suddenly clinched tight around her and began to burn. With her dull curiosity Sandra supposed this was from friction, but as the full moon beamed down on her she saw its power taken up into those tight lines, searing through her skin and her flesh to burn her bones right through to their marrow.
The ropes burned and burned. The fire also spread out from those containment lines and slowly burned off Sandra’s skin, consuming her hair and her sebaceous glands in a putrid, bubbling burn. The fire reached her neck and then her face, and as it spread there the vitreous parts of her eyes boiled and ran down her cheeks, a terrible effigy of tears. As Sandra burned the chair that she sat on remained completely untouched, the ropes also remaining tight and unaffected as the whole substance of her stolen body was burned away into cinders.
As her life in this body was extinguished there was no horror for Sandra Lee. She regretted that her desire to roam the earth would remain unsatiated for some time, that some potential victims would now remain unscathed by her. She felt some pain but no sorrow, as such human emotions had no place within her.
As she was devoured Sandra did wonder about her tormentors, surprised that there should be such vengeance upon the earth. She had gorged on human weakness and human venality, and she could not comprehend these strange women who stared at her and chanted quietly as she burned away to nothing.
As the fire consumed the last of her skin Sandra shrugged her shoulders and began to laugh. She laughed louder and louder and soon she was quaking with laughter, the first mirth she had ever experienced in her short journey through the world. The fire though would not be mocked and soon even her laughing was burned away, as the body that hosted her spirit fell apart and the ropes fell slack against the cool timbers of the chair, the fire resolving itself back into moonlight with nothing further to burn.
***
The body of Sandra Lee was consumed but that merely released her soul once more, casting it back into the shadows. The soul of Megiddo was restored to the creeping thing that it had been, waiting in contempt for the next poor body that might house it.
As the soul of Megiddo was released it oriented itself to the gloom, looking carefully around. It began to creep quietly past the source of its release, seeking to escape the further sanction of these women by way of the lines of inert matter that thread their way through the bright places of the world.
As the soul slouched onwards it was halted. It found its way blocked by a strange barrier that swirled around it, suddenly appearing everywhere at once, a fast eddy current conjured by these women from the strange circular chant they began to intone.
The soul lurched forwards again but the chant denied it any forward movement. The words then began to grab and twist the tendrils that the soul felt its way forwards with. The words began to twist tremendously around the soul, and in the grip of those swivelling lines the soul began to twist also, and then spin with increasing velocity. The soul cried out to be released but that merely wrenched it further into motion, as the spin imparted to it mounted incessantly. The soul was spun faster and faster, crushed by its dire pirouette into a smaller and smaller corner of the world.
And for its sins was the soul of Megiddo confined, in a prison of a terrible singularity. It continued to spin there, faster and more sickened and horrified, packed smaller and smaller into that one tiny corner of space and time where there could be no quantification. The spin was then released and made absolute and the desolation of this soul was assured. It was cut off from any forgiveness, for it had no claim to mercy, merely the destiny to be forever damned to its tiny prison where it would continue to spin, spin.
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