Deathbird Stories

Bleeding Stones

Alchemy high above the crowds.

Over one hundred years of the Industrial Revolution had spewed chemical magic into the air. The aerosols known as smog. Coal and petroleum fractions containing sulfur, their combustion producing sulfur dioxide, oxidized by atmospheric oxygen to form sulfur trioxide, hydrated by water vapor in the air to sulfuric acid. Alchemical magic that weathers limestone. Particles of soot, particles of ash. Unburned hydrocarbons. Oxides of nitrogen. The magic of ultraviolet radiation, photochemical reactions, photochemical smog: it magically cracks rubber. Unsaturated hydrocarbons, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, acetone. Magic. Carbon monoxide, carcinogenic hydrocarbons, days and nights of thermal inversion in the atmosphere. Carbon particles, metallic dusts, silicates, fluorides, resins, tars, pollen’ fungi, solid oxides, aromatics, even the smells of magic. Catalysis. Carriers of electrostatic charges. To the extent that they are radioactive, says page 184 of volume 18 of the 1972 ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, they increase the normal radiation dosage and may be cancer—or mutation—producing factors.

Finally, it goes on, as plain dust. they soil clothing, buildings, and bodies. and are a general nuisance.

Alchemical magical nuisance, high above the crowds.

Jammed, thronged, packed, overspilling, flowing and shuddering…forty thousand people drawn like iron filings to the magnet of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, filling the sidewalks and overflowing into Fifth Avenue…the mass bulging outward, human yeast, filling the intersections of 51st Street and Fifth Avenue, 50th and Fifth, 52nd and Fifth…rolling to find space along the sidewalks and doorways and garden walks of Rockefeller Center….

Hallelujah! The Jesus People have come to the holy summit of organized religion in the land that is the very apotheosis of the Industrial Revolution. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, built between 1858 and 1879, puffed out mightily like the pigeons roosting there for over one hundred years as the magic took its time performing its alchemical wonders, the nuisances of cracking rubber, weathering stone, pitting metal, mutating and inverting thermals. Hallelujah!

They are recognized. The Jesus People. One way, united in the worship of Jesus Christ, the Savior, the Son of God; here, at last, at this greatest repository of the faith in the land of ultraviolet radiation, they have come to spread their potency at the altar of organized power.

While above them, on the spires of the city and the parapets of St. Patrick’s, the nuisance bears fruit and the stones begin to bleed.

The Cardinal steps out through the massive front doors. The Archdiocese in person, recognizing them. They raise index fingers, thousands of index fingers raised in homage to the One Way.

The Cardinal lifts his arms slowly, his gorgeous robes resplendent in the sunlight glancing off a thousand automobiles spewing out alchemical magic; his arms lift and he is a human crucifix for a moment before his arms rise up above his head and he lifts his index fingers. The crowd trills and sighs with joy. They are known!

The Cardinal feels moisture on his left hand and looks up at his flesh emerging from his sleeve. There is a drop of blood running down through the fold of skin between his thumb and index finger. A fat, globular drop of blood that glistens in the magic air. It bulges and runs in a line down his palm. He is alarmed for a moment: has he cut himself? Then a second drop falls and he realizes the blood is dropping from above.

He looks up.

On the tallest spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there is movement.

For over one hundred years the stones of the Cathedral have been silent, still, solid and unwanting. Now the stones begin to bleed as the gargoyles come to life.

His eyes widen and see only movement….

But above, up here where the winds of the city carry alchemical magic, the stone gargoyles tremble, their rock bodies begin to moisten, and blood stands out in humid beads.

The first of the many shudders and its eyes open slowly. Color comes to its stone flesh. Its taloned hands rise from its knees and flex. Corded muscles bunched for a hundred years slide and move. Its belly heaves as it draws in life. Its bat wings twitch and suddenly unfurl. It drinks of the sunlight and the air, drinks deep and sucks the carcinogens deep into its bellows lungs; the nuisance mutation is complete. Come to life after a hundred years is the race that will inherit the Earth; hardly meek, the race made to breathe this new air. The gargoyle throws back its head and its stone fangs catch the sunlight and throw it back brighter than the hides of the vehicles below.

The clarion call blasts against the noonday tumult of the Jesus People. And they fall silent. And they look up. And all around them, on a hundred spires of a hundred skyscrapers the inheritors rise from their crouched positions, their shapes black and firm-edged against the gray and deadly sky.

Then, like the fighting kites of Brazil, they dive into the crowd and begin the ritual slaughter.

The first of the many swoops down in a screaming fall that sends the Jesus People scattering. At the final instant the gray death-kite flattens and sails across the crowd, its talons extended, arms dangling. The razor-nails imbed themselves in a skull and rip backward as its flight carries gargoyle and victim forward. It skims skyward again and great muscled arms throw the limp meat against the walls of a building, the body ripped open from occipital ridge to buttocks, entrails bulging, spilling from the sprung carcass. The body slides down the wall leaving a red fluorescent smear.

Another, with a hundred isinglass-thin lids over its lizard eyes, dives straight down at a young girl wearing a halter top and blue jeans with cloth patches of butterflies, flowers and elaborate crosses appliquéd to the fabric. It extends the extraordinarily long and pencil-thin first finger of each four-taloned hand, and drives them deep into her eye-sockets. Then, hooking the fingers, it lifts her, shrieking, into the sky. It drops her from twenty stories.

Two demi-devils with the heads of gryphons and the bodies of hunchbacked dwarves land with simultaneous crashes on the roof of a Fifth Avenue bus, slash it open with their clawed feet and throw themselves inside. Screams fill the air as the bus fills with bloody pulp. A window is smashed as an old man tries to escape and one of the demi-devils saws his neck across the ragged glass, spraying the street outside with a geyser from the carotid artery. The body continues to kick. The windows of the bus smear and darken over with pulped flesh and viscera. The demi-devils wallow like two babies in a bathtub, drinking and splashing.

A gargoyle with a ring of spikes circling its forehead hurtles into a knot of Jesus People on their knees and hysterically singing Jesus Is a Soul Man. It rips off the arms of a bearded young man and, flailing about, crushes the skulls of the group. One boy tries to crawl away, his head bleeding, and the gargoyle kicks aside bodies to reach him, grabbing him by the heavy silver chain around his neck. The chain supports a silver crucifix. The gargoyle twists the chain till it sinks into the flesh of the boy’s neck. Screaming, the boy tries to struggle erect, clawing at the garrotte with both hands, eyes bulging, face darkening to blue-black as the blood gushes from his ears and mouth. The gargoyle flaps its wings, lifts into the air dangling the struggling boy at the end of the silver chain and, swinging him violently, batters the crowd till the body is dismembered.

A gargoyle has ripped the arms from an old woman and peeled the skin and muscle from the bones, sharpening them with its fangs. It charges up the front steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and impales the Cardinal through the chest and stomach. The Cardinal, spasming in pain, is carried aloft by two other gargoyles who drop him with titters and giggles onto the topmost spire of the Cathedral. He slides down the spire, the point protruding from his stomach, and the gargoyles spin him like the propeller on a child’s wind toy.

A gargoyle crouches on a mound of bodies, eating hearts and livers it has ripped from the not-quite-dead casualties. Another sucks the meat off fingers. Another chews eyeballs, savoring the corneal fluid.

A gargoyle has backed a dozen Jesus People and elegant Avenue shoppers into a doorway and jabs at them with bloody talons, taunting them till they howl with dismay. The gargoyle scrapes its talons across the stones of the building till sparks fly…and somehow catch fire as they shower the shrieking victims. The fire washes over them and they run screaming into the fangs and talons of the marauder. They die, smoldering, and pile up in the doorway.

A gargoyle with a belly huge and round flies up and around, crouching and defecating on the hordes as they trample each other, running in all directions to escape the slaughter. The voiding is diarrheic and rains down in a thick green and brown curtain that splashes in heavy spattering pools and begins eating into cement and asphalt. It is acid; where it strikes human flesh it eats its way through to bone leaving burning edges and smoking pits. Hundreds fall and are crushed by stampeding pedestrians with no exit.

A gargoyle alights atop the bronze statue of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders that dominates the entrance to 630 Fifth Avenue, kicks loose the great bronze globe and sends it hammering into the crowd. Dozens are crushed at the impact and the gargoyle, laughing hysterically, boots it again and again. The globe thunders through the street flattening cars and people, leaving in its wake a trail of twisted bodies and a gutter-wash of blood and pulp that clogs drain basins with human refuse.

Three gargoyles have found a nun. Two have lifted her above their heads and wrenching her legs apart like a wishbone they are splitting her in half as the third creature breaks off a bus stop sign and punches the jagged end of the pole up her vagina, shrieking Regnum dei in vobis est. the kingdom of God is within you.

The slaughter goes on and on for hours. The screams of the dying rise up to meet the automated chiming of the Cathedral bells. Darkness falls and the hellfire of demon flames and human beings used as torches illuminates the expanse of Fifth Avenue.

All through the night it goes on as the gargoyles range out and around, widening their circles of destruction. Nothing can stop them. The weapons of humankind are useless against them. They are intent upon inheriting the Earth all on the first day and night of their birth.

Finally, nothing moves in the city but the creatures that were once stone, and they fly up, circling the stainless steel and glass towers of industrial magic. They look down with the hungry eyes of those who have slept too long and now, rested, seek exercise.

Then, laughing triumphantly, they flap bat wings and soar upward, flying off toward the east, toward the Vatican.