The King Of Satania

The King Of Satania

         In front of an old house in the township of Elm Heights stands a small hill of magnificent splendor, tended by no man, but blooming with lush greenery, dotted with sprays of lovely flowers.  The hill exists as a natural memorial to a man who washed away his sins, his guilt, with a single swift and magnificent stroke.  Some say that what happened to that man was retribution.  But there is a stone planted at the base of the hill, a black marble stone, and upon it is etched a single word:
Absolution.

         The tower rose thirty feet straight up from the ground, ruining Elliot Taylor’s perfectly manicured lawn.  It had apparently torn its way up from beneath, displacing earth and grass in its path, decimating the dogwood tree growing there.  The thing was massive, as big around as a sizeable oak tree, made of lustrous black rock like obsidian.  As far as Elliot knew it was obsidian, though how obsidian came to be formed underground in the suburbs with no recent history of volcanic activity was anybody’s guess.  Not being a geologist, Elliot had no way of stating the possibility or impossibility of such an occurrence.
         While the thing’s appearance was high on the list of mysteries—the tower having risen from the earth seemingly over night—the actual aspect of the thing was not far behind.  At first one could believe that it was some kind of natural geological formation, until one stepped closer to it.  Its entire surface was covered with carvings of the most horrific kind.  Shining black faces distorted in screams of agony.  Twisted, thrashing limbs.  Exposed innards.  Carvings of such terrible detail, so realistic, that one could believe they were real, pathetic beings frozen in the rock.  This thing, rising like an obelisk from the depths of hell, was an atrocity, a scar on the surface of Elliot’s once impeccable yard.
         Here a man opened from stem to stern, his entrails being removed by creatures with the faces of dogs and the bodies of men.
         There a woman being mounted by a demon with a twisted maw full of sharp fangs hideously exposed in a smile of perverse delight.
         A battered old man whose back is flayed open by the whips of his tormentors as he attempts to climb a sheer rock face barehanded.
         When Elliot’s wife, Maureen, had looked upon the thing, she clamped a hand over her mouth, looking like she might vomit right there and then.  And she had not let the children out of the house in two days.  The children wanted to see it, to run up to it and touch it, but Maureen would hear of no such foolishness.  She had sealed the curtains of the front bay window closed with safety pins so they could not even look at it.
         “Get rid of it,” she had told Elliot at first, her face stern and somewhat disappointed, as if this had been some joke that Elliot was playing on her.
         “Get rid of it?  I don’t even know where it came from.  I don’t know what it is.”
         “I don’t care what it is or where it came from, just get rid of it.”

         Elm Heights was a neighborhood full of up-and-coming yuppies who thought they could protect their families by moving them to predominantly white suburbs.  Certainly Elliot was one of them, but he quickly learned that no matter where they may live, kids will be kids and families will be families.  They were going to do what they wanted to do regardless of how white, black, yellow or purple their neighborhood might be.  There were drugs here.  Guns.  When there had been no gangs, the kids had gotten together and made their own gangs.  Any groups of kids was basically a gang.  A member from one group beats the crap out of the member of another group and suddenly a gang war erupts.  Even in the suburbs.
         Not long before the Taylors had moved into Elm Heights, there had been a supposed group of Satanists terrorizing the neighborhood.  In reality, it had been two teenagers who had raped and beaten a ten year old boy to death, but when authorities found a copy of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible in one of their rooms, the media had turned them into instant Satan worshippers, linking their friends, family, and acquaintances to them in a circle of devil-worshipping blood.  That was the way things went here.  Bored, anxious and neurotic suburbanites who wanted to see the worst in everything so that they could get on television and get famous.  All of them afraid of each other, and of themselves.

         “That’s a hell of a thing you got there, Taylor,” Elliot’s neighbor, Chuck Schwarzman said as they stood drinking beers at the white picket fence and looking up at the tower.  Schwarzman, as usual, had a smirk stuck to his face that made Elliot’s nuts twitch.
         “A hell of a thing, yeah,” Elliot said with an unmasked tone of contempt in his voice.  Schwarzman was an odious little turd, and Elliot knew that this line of conversation would not end until he was fuming.  Schwarzman was the kind of guy that enjoyed making people fume just for laughs.
         “Guess your chances at the Best Yard Award are pretty much gone this year.  I hear Dave Miller and his landscaping guys won’t even come near your yard anymore.  Shame.”
         It was the way Schwarzman said the word ‘shame’ that made Elliot want to grind his face into the pavement.  So casual and off-handed sounding, but strategically placed so that it spoke a thousand words about what a loser Schwarzman thought Elliot was, what a freak.
         “I’m not down yet, Schwarzie,” Elliot said, using the nickname that he knew Schwarzman hated, “I still have time to get that thing down and re-do the yard before August.  Get the B.Y.A. back in the bag.”
         “No doubt if anyone can do it, it’s you,” Schwarzman said, “if only it’d be that easy.  From what I hear the Neighborhood Association is none too thrilled about this thing.  I hear they’re considering posting a notice on you.”
         “Posting a—who’d you hear that from?”
         “Katie Caldwell.  Saw her down at the Ikea the other day with Pete Morton.  Said she heard it from Nancy Bach whose nephew, Rob, is Association treasurer.”  Schwarzman took a sip of his beer and stretched, his back crackling and popping.           “Yep, they post a notice on you, I guess you can pretty much kiss the B.Y.A. goodbye for—well, forever.”
         “The hell they will,” Elliot said, fuming just like Schwarzman had no doubt intended.  The odious little turd.  Schwarzman was the kind of guy that hated peace and quiet.  He was the rubbernecker in traffic who slowed down and looked for the pool of blood, the severed parts, the twisted bodies, and then said something like, ‘Poor bastard shoulda slowed down’ with a smile on his face.  For Schwarzman, another person’s misery was his own entertainment.
         “Yep, hell of a thing you got there, Taylor.”

         There was a steaming, juicy pot roast on the dining room table, although nobody seemed to want to touch it.  Fresh asparagus, garlic mashed potatoes.  The repetitive clinking of silverware on porcelain as the Taylor family moved their food from one side of their plates to the other.  Elliot kept his face turned down to his dinner, but his eyes swept his family from one to the other.  Maureen, his not-so-dearly beloved wife of fourteen years, the woman-child, the twenty-years-old-looking forty-year-old.  Louanne, his daughter, who couldn’t have any more holes punched in her face if she had been born a whiffle ball, a perpetual victim of the intolerable Emo set, dark and moody.  And little Lyle, sweet, stupid and hyperactive.  God bless them all, Elliot thought, the apples of my friggin’ eye.
         “Lyle, you haven’t touched your food,” Elliot said in lieu of conversation.
         “Not hungry, Daddy.  I wanna go outside.”
         “You can’t go outside,” Maureen snapped from her end of the long dining room table.  Then she seemed to withdraw into herself as if she hadn’t intended to speak so loudly.  It did not matter; there was no way Lyle was paying attention.
         “It’s—it’s not a good idea right now, buddy,” Elliot said, “there’s just a lot going on right now.”
         “Yeah, Dad’s scared,” Louanne said, her voice grumbly and somehow amused at the same time.  “Scared you might touch the thing and turn into a demon with a dog’s prick and rape us all.”
         “Louanne, that’s enough,” Maureen said, her eyes glittering with anger but not leaving her plate.
         “Will that happen, Daddy?” Lyle asked, looking up with big brown doe eyes.  “’Cause I don’t want a dog prick.”
         “Lyle!”
         “No buddy, that won’t happen.”
         “I don’t want that kind of language in my house from either of you.”
         “Don’t see what the big fucking deal is—“
         “Daddy, what’s a prick?”
         “Louanne, please.”
         “Buddy, we say wee-wee, okay?”
         “Mom, take the stick out of your ass.”
         “I’ll rape you with my wee-wee.“
         “Lou-anne!  Lyle, no!”
         “Maureen, calm down, okay, we’re all—“
         “Don’t tell me to calm down—“
         “I’ll rape you with my wee-wee.”
         “Lyle!”
         “Enough, buddy.”
         Maureen slammed her fork onto her plate, scattering uneaten food all around her and making the family jump in their seats.  “Louanne, I’m not letting you watch MTV anymore and you’re going to take the shit out of your face and stop dyeing your hair black and smearing yourself in that awful makeup.  We’re going to Macy’s and getting you Revlon and a nice dress and dyeing your hair back to blonde and you’re going to be a normal girl.  And then we’re all going to church on Sunday and asking for forgiveness for the way we’ve—lost the path in this family.”
         “Maureen,” Elliot said, “let’s not be hasty—“
         “This is not hasty.  This is right.  This is righteousness.  That thing outside is our punishment for everything we’ve ever done, for having a daughter out of wedlock, for living in sin, for our greed and lust and envy.  That thing outside is our wrath of God.  And we’re going to ask forgiveness so it’ll go away.”
         Maureen stood, stared down at them all with the light of the Spirit in her eyes, then stormed out, the slamming of the front door seemingly shaking the entire house.  Elliot said nothing, could think of nothing to say.
         “Lou-Lou,” Lyle said, “I’ll rape you with my dog wee-wee.”
         “You gross little pig.”
         “That’s enough with the wee-wee, buddy.”

         Maureen did not come home until late that night, and Elliot found her asleep on the sofa, smelling of alcohol and smoke.  He did not bother to wake her.  Lyle was crying in his bedroom, and when Elliot got there, the boy was sitting up in bed, reeking of hot urine, cheeks red and puffy.  Lyle had been having nightmares every night since the tower came.  Elliot took him in his arms, ignoring the sour scent of fear rising from his son, and held him until he stopped weeping.
         “What is it, buddy?  Nightmares again?”
         “Yes, Daddy.”
         “What about?”
         “There was a monster coming to get me.  It was a girl, I could tell because of the titties on it—“
         “We say breasts, buddy, okay?”
         “—and it had great big teeth and black eyes and it was coming to get me and eat my guts out.  And it was Lou-Lou, the monster.  It’s sleeping in her bed right now.”
         “There’s no monster in Lou-Lou’s bed, okay?  She just likes to tease you because you’re the baby.
         Louanne made a hobby out of terrorizing Lyle, of course, but not like this.  More like big sister stuff, jealous big sister stuff.  Lyle had come late, born nine years after Louanne.  Until then, Louanne had been the baby and Lyle, with all of his issues and disorders, had stolen her thunder.  She had been the pretty princess, the golden goddess.  Now she was—well, she was still Louanne of course, but Elliot knew Maureen thought of her as a monster, something different, something that did not belong in her whitewashed suburban world.  To Maureen, their daughter was a symbol of their failure to achieve perfection.  Elliot was convinced old Louanne was still there somewhere, the free-spirited Louanne who wasn’t in a state of chronic pissed-offedness.  He didn’t care what color her hair was or how many piercings she chose to put in her body, he just wanted his daughter to be happy.
         “Come on, buddy,” Elliot said, “change your pajamas and jump in my bed, and I’ll be there in a minute.”
         “’kay, Daddy.”
         Elliot went to Louanne’s room, opened the door slowly.  The scent of perfume and cigarette smoke drifted out.  There was some kind of anarchist internet video playing on her computer.  Her window was open and she was not there.  Elliot did not expect her to be.  He walked back through the house, ignoring the mumbling form of Maureen on the sofa, then out the front door.  Louanne was in the front yard staring up at the tower, surrounded by a group of a dozen or so people.
         “Louanne, come in the house,” Elliot said, keeping his voice low as if this might keep the other people from hearing him.  It didn’t matter, their eyes were locked on the tower and they paid no attention to him.  Louanne turned to him, her skin pale, eyes bloodshot.
         “I asked for something like this, Daddy.  I couldn’t stand it anymore.  I wanted for something . . . wonderful to happen.”
         Elliot stepped carefully across the yard in his bare feet; it was treacherous now that giant clumps of dirt and rock had been tossed everywhere by the rise of the tower.  He pushed his way through the congregation seemingly unnoticed and grabbed Louanne roughly by the elbow.  He pulled her back towards the house and she went easily.
         “What are you saying, Louanne.  Did you make this thing come?”
Her bloodshot eyes were large and full of brightness and wonder now, and he wondered what kind of drugs she was on.  He could smell alcohol on her, but beyond that, he didn’t know.
         “I didn’t make it come, Daddy, I just wanted it.  For so long.”
         “Why?”
         She seemed to think about this for a moment, then answered, “Because sometimes life needs a dark tower.  To grab our attention.  You need it too, Dad.  Maybe more than the rest of us.”
         “Louanne, this isn’t funny,” Elliot said, “this is a disaster.  Look at the yard, my chances at the B.Y.A. this year are ruined.  Do you have any idea how much work I’ve done on this yard?”
         Louanne pulled away from him, moving back to the tower congregation, and he let her go.
         “Yes, Dad, I’m aware of how much work you’ve done on the yard.”

         Over the next few days the tower congregation, which still counted Louanne among its numbers, nearly doubled in size.  It was a dark and quiet assembly that only stood and admired the tower, its members’ mouths agape, as if the thing were some kind of icon.  A day or so later a group of protesters formed in the street.  It was a bright and loud assembly that recited psalms to each other through a bullhorn, carried signs adorned with crosses and images of a weeping Jesus, and even had its own traveling thirty-voice choir.  The Jesus congregation shouted at the tower congregation, spat curses at them, threw tiny plastic crucifixes and manger babies.  Each day, Elliot attempted to go outside and pick all of these trinkets off his lawn.  It was futile.  The more he picked, the more they threw.  The quieter the tower congregation grew, the louder and more infuriated the Jesus congregation grew. 
         Elliot tried on several occasions to bring Louanne back into the house, but she refused.  She was a part of something, she told him, something wonderful.  Elliot asked her once if she was happy, and she replied that she was.
         The tower congregation did nothing, said nothing, but only formed a circle around the base of the thing and joined hands sometimes.  Their faces tilted backward, eyes closed, as if bathed in some warm, golden radiance.  Louanne, too, looked exalted as the faces of the damned stared down at her from their obsidian prison.
At the dinner table, the Taylors were one short.  Maureen kept her eyes on her plate as always as if unable or unwilling to look upon any of them.  Lyle fidgeted and smashed all his food together.  Elliot had nothing to say.
         “Daddy, is Lou-Lou comin’ home?”
         “Lou-Lou is home, buddy.”
         “I should go out there and get her,” Maureen said.  “Those icky tower people might try to rape her.”
         “Rape her with my dog wee-wee?” Lyle said, but only half-heartedly throwing out words that were stuck in his head.
         “No one is raping anybody,” Elliot said.  “She’s safe out there.  At least we know where she is.  And I’m going to rent a backhoe tomorrow and tear that goddamned thing down.”
         “We should never have left the city,” Maureen said,” this kind of thing never happens in the city.”

         The next day, Elliot awoke to find the Elm Heights Neighborhood Association had posted a notice on his front door.  A citation for the installation of an unauthorized and unsightly lawn ornament in his yard.  At the bottom, a disclaimer printed in thick, bold type: This notice precludes the recipient from any further participation in the Elm Heights Neighborhood Association’s Best Yard Competition.
         Next door, Chuck Schwarzman stood smirking on his porch.  Schwarzman, always with that fucking smirk.

         Elliot sat on the backhoe at the end of the street, feeling the rumble of the engine through his body.  There were two hundred pounds of chain in the bucket.  In front of him, a police escort to part the crowd he might otherwise have had to plow through to reach the tower.  At this point, he would do anything to take the tower down, anything.  It was, after all, his own fault that it was here in the first place.
         The Taylors had moved from the city of Chicago to the suburbs of Elm Heights almost three years earlier.  Elliot had been a securities broker, a high stress job if there ever was one.  One night after work, one of his clients had approached him in an alley behind the office, an old man named Robert Jacobsen whose life savings had been invested and consequently lost by Elliot and his firm.  These things happened, Elliot explained to him; it was the gamble, the risk of playing the game.  Jacobsen, a greedy old pig whose love for his money was matched by nothing else, had been drinking and had pulled a gun from his coat.  Elliot Taylor, faster and younger, had snatched the gun from the old man and pistol-whipped him to death with it.  It was a moment of rage and horrific violence that Elliot could have never known he had in him.  It was the snap of a rubber band pulled to tight.  Elliot had not known if Jacobsen had intended to kill him or just scare him, and he never would know. 
         Elliot had taken the old man’s wallet, wiped down the gun, and tossed both of them into a dumpster three blocks away.  Then he had gone home and swallowed a bottle of gin until he vomited as violently as he ever had in his life.           And no one had ever known.
         Maureen had been right on at least one count; this tower was a punishment, the wrath of God.  But not theirs.  His.  And his alone. 
The crowd parted slowly now as the Elm Heights police patrol car sounded its siren and inched its way forward.  Elliot pushed the Caterpillar forward, ignoring the glaring faces staring up at him from the street, so many once supposed friends and neighbors, now blaming him for the blight upon their neighborhood, upon their perfect white world.  Only they really wanted something to hate, didn’t they?  They needed it.  They had tried to build a perfect neighborhood in order to erase some of the basic tenets of human nature, greed, jealousy, hate.  All of these things boiled beneath the surface, Elliot knew, threatening to splash over and burn time after time.  Now, with the arrival of the tower, they had an excuse to just take the lid off and let it go.
         “What’s with the parade, Taylor?” Chuck Schwarzman asked as Elliot reached the curb.  The crowd had parted, the only thing standing between him and the tower was his obnoxious neighbor with the chronic smirk.  Elliot would wipe that smirk away with a couple tons of steel if he had to.
         “I’m tearing the fucking thing down, Schwarzie.  Then I’m rebuilding my yard and getting the B.Y.A. back.”
         “I think you’re damned.”
         “What?”
         “You’ll never get it down.  Once something like that is there, it’s there.  The B.Y.A. is lost.  Absolution isn’t a last minute thing, it’s something you have to earn.  You don’t have time.”
         “Just get out of my way, Schwarzie.”
         Schwarzman only stared at him for a moment, then stepped aside.  There was a cry of outrage from both congregations as Elliot drove forward and stopped several yards in front of the tower.  He grabbed a handful of chain from the bucket of the backhoe and approached the tower.  He looked up at it, at the frieze of the old man with the contorted face, the demons’ whips at his back.  The face of Robert Jacobsen, the man Elliot had killed.
         “I’m sorry, Robert,” Elliot said to himself as he began wrapping chain around the base of the tower, his hands quickly becoming slick with the oily secretions of the thing.  “I can’t think about you anymore.  This was all a tribute to you, every blade of grass for every person who ever knew you.  Every flower for everyone that ever missed you when you were gone.  But you still came back to me.  You’ll never be gone.  So I have to take you down myself.”
         “Elliot, no.”  It was Maureen’s voice that came to him, more sober than he had heard it in years.  He turned to her, and there she stood, hand in hand with Louanne.  He hadn’t seen them together like that in as long as he could remember, mother and daughter.
         “Let me do this, Maureen.  This thing came because I killed a man with my own hands.  I’ll bring it down and I’ll rebuild the yard and I’ll get the B.Y.A. back and we’ll be happy again.”
         Maureen pointed to the tower, to the image of the man being disemboweled by the dog-headed creatures.
         “That’s Lucas Reynolds,” she said, “I had an affair with him in Chicago.  While you were gone all those nights, when you were working so hard and I—I cheated.  And we used to drink together, get drunk, you know?  He drove home one night and . . . and he died.  And you were just trying to take care of us.  I’m so sorry.”  She had real tears in her eyes, and they rolled down her cheeks and dropped to the ground where flowers had once bloomed.
         Elliot stepped forward and took her hand.  It was warm and alive.  There was some surprise for him in her admission, but not much.  She had changed without him even realizing it, from a young and vital wife into a bitter and quick to anger stranger.  He realized now that it was because of the knowledge she carried with her, the guilt, the responsibility, just like him.  If only they could have learned to talk to each other before now, before it was too late. 
         “This isn’t about the B.Y.A. Elliot, and you know that.  This is about us.  All the mistakes we’ve made.”
         “Daddy?”
         “Yes, Louanne.”
         “That woman right there, the one . . . “ Louanne swallowed hard as if she might be sick and she pointed to the gruesome portrait instead, “that one, right there.  That’s Mrs. Franks, from my old high school.  She slept with Tommy Wilkins, the boy I liked.  She was awful, Daddy, so awful, and I made all these phone calls and sent her letters and she killed herself.  You remember?  They said it was because her mom died, but I think it was because of what I did.” 
         When Louanne began to cry Elliot, still holding onto his wife, took his daughter in his arms.  And for the first time, they were a family again.
         “You were right, Mo.  This tower is our punishment.  All of us.  We’ll ask forgiveness of each other, and we’ll be okay.”
         “And all the other faces?” Maureen asked.
         Elliot stepped back, looked at the tower.  All those faces, all the anguish and pain.  Then his eyes came down and swept the crowd around him.  Young and old, rich and poor.  Black, white, Asian . . . everyone from everywhere, from all times and all worlds.  Maybe they all knew a face on the tower; maybe the faces on the tower changed for each person.  Maybe that was why they were here.  They all came for absolution, to ask forgiveness of the tower.  And Elliot suddenly felt less alone.
         “I’m bringing it down,” Elliot said, just a mumble.  “This is not the way things should work.  We’re all in this together.”
         “Dad?”
         “Elliot.  Honey.”
         Elliot didn’t listen.  He picked up the chain again, finished wrapping it, then clamped the other ends to the bucket of the Caterpillar.  All was silent.  Not a breath could be heard.  Elliot climbed back up into the cab of the backhoe and the sound of the engine cut through the dead air like a storm.  Maureen ran up beside him, looked up at him with . . . was it love in her eyes?
         “Elliot, honey, don’t be hasty,” she said with just a hint of a smile.
         “This isn’t hasty,” he said, his head bowed to her, “this is right.  This is righteousness.  Just like you said.  Remember this, Mo.”  He nodded toward the house, where he could see Lyle’s small face in the window, peering back at the scene outside with a wide open mouth and watery eyes.  “Tell Lyle he’s my little buddy forever, okay?  Tell him how his dad did the right thing in the end.”
         “Okay, honey.  Okay.  I love you.  We love you.  So much.”
         Elliot smiled, then reversed the big machine.  He didn’t even know if this would work, but it did.  The tower came down over him, falling much faster than he could have imagined.  He was glad.  For a second, the light in his world was blocked out by the shadow of the enormous falling thing, the faces of the damned growing larger and larger in his sight, more vivid and realistic with each passing moment.