Enter Peabody
By that point Chris would have followed Ted straight to the bottom of the ocean. The fight had gone out of him. It took all he had just to shuffle across the library floor.
“I almost bumped into Ted when he stopped,” Chris said. “We were facing one of the walls of bookshelves. I figured he was going to show me a book—these rich guys love to show off their gems to someone who knows when to ooh and ahh.”
Ted did reach for a book but he stopped short. “Watch closely,” he told Chris. “Every brainy kid wishes they had a wall that slides open when you pull out the right book. I’m living the dream!” Ted tipped back a big leather-bound book and the shelf started to turn like a slow revolving door. The door opened to reveal a narrow hallway that ran parallel to the wall. “Come with me.” Ted stepped into the hallway. When Chris joined him, the door swung shut.
“The library and the hidden hallway were part of the original mansion,” Chris said. “The servants used the hallway so the family didn’t have to see them at work. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. I could see a staircase at the far end of the hallway. At the other end, closer to us, was an old wooden door with the paint half-stripped off. I knew there was something terrible behind that door. I could feel it in my nerves. The hair all over my body stood up. As we approached the door I thought I detected a low buzzing. It wasn’t a vibration. It was like a sound but I couldn’t hear it, not with my ears.” Chris rubbed his temples. “It made my brain itch, right here.” He pointed to the centre of his forehead. “Where your pineal gland is located—the mystics call it your Third Eye, the seat of occult noetic vision. This buzzing, it made my pineal squirm. I could hardly draw a breath. I tried to warn Ted: Don’t go in that room, don’t go. It was all I could get out. The fucker just laughed at me and dragged me down the hall.”
Ted opened the door into a high room. The walls and floor were made from poured concrete. Chris guessed that it was an old outbuilding that Ted’s architects had incorporated into the rebuild. The few windows were mounted high on the walls and covered in thick plastic sheeting, and it was so cold in the room that the men could see their breath.
“We hadn’t been in the room long enough for the Kelub to screw around with the temperature. Whatever was sucking the warmth from the air was already there, waiting for us.”
The room was empty save for a dentist chair bolted to the floor beneath one of the windows. The chair was tilted fully back and the leg rest extended so that the girl who was chained to the armrests lay almost flat on her back. Chris guessed her age at fifteen. She was awake. Without turning her head she smiled and said, Hello, Chris. Has Teddy shown you his new toy? Her voice was powerful but androgynous, with a reedy quality that put Chris in mind of a singing insect, a cricket or a cicada gifted with human speech.
“I almost ran from the room screaming,” Chris told me. “It wasn’t so much that the girl knew my name—Ted could have told her beforehand—but that she knew me, everything about me, every secret. I could hear it in her voice, the ugly insinuation, like she’d read my diaries and accessed my search engine records and inspected my dirty underwear. She knew every tawdry detail. Then she turned her head to look at me. Christ, a cobra’s eyes have more human sympathy.”
Chris drained the last of his beer. The alcohol was finally working on him. I saw his shoulders loosen, though his back was still rod straight, and some colour was returning to his gaunt cheeks. He’d shed several pounds since the last time I’d seen him, though I only noticed now. He’d been carrying the story’s weight for weeks now, and as painful as it was for him to share the load, the telling seemed to revive his hopes.
“When I was a kid I loved reading books about animals. Their lives are perfectly ordered because they always act in accordance with their nature. I found that comforting. Imagine not having to second-guess yourself. If you’re a predator, you hunt. If you’re the prey, you run, and if the predator corners you, you lower your head and accept your fate.” He let out a long breath. “When that girl, that thing, locked her eyes on me…” He reached for something in the air and then let his hand drop. “I was the rabbit and she was the wolf. I was her prey. And you know, it felt good to surrender my life to a superior force. That feeling didn’t last.” His hands were squeezing the empty stein. “My defences fell away, and I felt her enter my mind—like, objectively, physically enter me. Her presence displaced mass. I could feel her rummaging around in my head. My memories and dreams and all the little stories I tell myself: she pawed them with her filthy fingers. And she showed me things, things I’d done, people I’d hurt, and all the time she kept whispering, whispering. Her voice: it was the end of all hope.”
He paused to let that sink in. He looked at me and I felt judged. I didn’t understand why or by what standards this judgment was meted out, but I felt it, like a hand on my heart, a baby’s fist testing it’s grip strength.
“Ted gave me a shake,” Chris said. “Don’t let her in! Don’t look at her! Easy for him to say, she was already past the fucking gate. He could see I was a lost cause so he shouted a command in a guttural language—I mean, it must have been a command because the girl retracted from my mind. She wasn’t gentle. She wanted me to remember her visit.”
Chris mercifully passed out at that point. When he came to he was sitting on a patio chair facing the dentist’s chair. He didn’t know where the chair came from or who had brought it in and seated him there. Not Ted. He was fiddling with a computer set up on a wheeled work table, another new addition to the room.
“The girl was watching Ted with this bemused, contemptuous expression. I was close enough to see that she was covered in filth—shit and piss and puke. Oh God, the stink that came off of her. She must have chained to that chair for days.”
Ted saw that Chris had awoken. “You’re just in time,” he said. “I’m going to show you something…amazing. When you return to the mainland you’re free to tell your friends, write a blog post, call the newspapers—it doesn’t matter. No one will believe you, and even if they did, there’s nothing they can do.” Ted made a few more adjustments to the computer. His movements were theatrically triumphant, though Chris suspected that they were less for his benefit than for Ted’s ideal internal audience, likely the mother whose approval he still sought or the absent father who barely warranted a footnote in his bestselling autobiography. Ted adjusted a dial on a sleek powerful audio speaker and picked up a manuscript page framed behind thick glass.
“This is a fragment of the Kelub Sheirim that came into my possession last year. Seven lines of text, barely a complete paragraph. It was enough for my purposes.” Ted carefully placed the encased page back on the table. “As you know, the script of the Kelub Sheirim is Father Rodrigo’s approximation of the language he learned in Hell. Or so he claimed. I see it differently. What Rodrigo experienced as Hell was simply the astral realm as filtered through his Medieval Judeo-Christian mind. He was a man of his times. We are men of our times. The freedoms offered to us in that higher spiritual realm, where the body and its limitations do not cohere—we receive those freedoms not as a threat but a promise. Rodrigo projected his own primitive ideas about sin and redemption into the astral realm, transforming it into a demonic court where he was punished for eternity with his fellow sinners. What nonsense! He was offered eternity, but he couldn’t see that it was eternal life free of the Jewish Sky God and his bodily prescriptions. There is no Hell, no Heaven. But there is a world beyond this cage of the body. Peabody showed me it.”
At that, the chained girl let out a screeching laugh.
“Yes, Peabody, I don’t do justice to your teachings.” Ted reached out to the girl but made sure not to touch her. “Chris, let me formally introduce you to my teacher, the daemon Peabody. No need to shake hands.”
“That’s when it hit me,” Chris said. “The girl: she was Peabody. The daemon Peabody was inside her, possessing her.”
I interrupted here. “I thought the whole point of Peabody was that he didn’t need a body.”
“Exactly. I remembered enough from Catholic school to know that demons and angels are bodiless. They’re creatures of pure intellect and will. But by using that page of the Kelub he’d bought, Ted was able to lure Peabody into the girl’s body and trap him there Once he had Peabody trapped inside the body, Ted chained the girl to the chair. He knew that he was about to receive a longer section of the Kelub. Until then, he had to hold Peabody captive.”
Ted wasn’t quite ready to reveal the entirety of his plan. He still had some bragging to do. “I could never have translated the text on my own,” Ted admitted. “But we have at our disposal a tool unavailable to generations of spiritual seekers: the computer. And I know how to use a computer! I tell you, Chris, when the alchemists of old spoke of finding a Philosopher’s Stone that would convert gross matter to gold, what they were imagining but the computer? With this tool, I was able to translate the fragment of the Kelub in just under seven months. It was the most difficult work of my life. The language barrier between us and the daemons is wider than you can imagine. The daemon’s language, the True Tongue, is incomprehensible to us. It would be like a human trying to explain abstract philosophical concepts to a pet dog. So it is with the daemons: they must resort to a kind of pidgin English to make us understand them.” Ted was relishing the chance to play the enlightened tech guru again. “With this computer and these manuscript pages,” he announced, “I will soon be able to speak the True Tongue, and in speaking it, I can issue commands that daemons—like my teacher Peabody—are bound by celestial law to obey.”
The girl arched her eyebrows a few times, a comic gesture so perfectly timed that Chris burst into hysterical laugher.
“Go ahead: when I scan the manuscript pages into this computer, you won’t be laughing for long. Peabody has been a generous teacher through the years, nudging me when I needed nudging, whispering a few wise words in my ear, even sharing spells and words of power when I most needed them. Always sharing enough to suit his purposes. But I have my own purposes. I have ambitions, or all of humanity. Peabody could help me realize them. But he has been slow to share his secrets with me of late. I don’t have time for patience.”
At that moment, something crashed to the floor in the back room. Chris and I leapt to our feet. The cats were hissing and howling, their backs arched like bowstrings shivering to loose their arrows. I made a noise that was half-whimper, half-moan, then I felt one of Chris’ powerful hands clasp my wrist. I tried to pull free but he held on.
“Let me go!” I sounded like a hysterical boy, which is how I felt, struggling to free myself. “I don’t want to hear this!”
“You have to. It’s for your own good.”
“I don’t care what Ted did and I don’t care if you feel guilty about it. It’s not my business.”
My words sent Chris into a rage. With his free hand he slapped me across the face, and then he twisted my arm behind my back and marched me down the hall. I tried to dig my feet into the parquet floor but my socks slid like ice skates across the smooth surface. We stopped in front of an ordinary looking door and Chris freed my arm. He turned the knob and opened the door and gave me a gentle nudge. I closed my eyes as I stepped into the room, afraid to see what I knew was waiting for me: the source of that atmospheric disturbance that had been oppressing me since I’d entered the apartment. Whatever it was, I couldn’t smell it or hear it or taste it. And I hadn’t seen anything unusual in the two or three seconds before I closed my eyes. But it was there, right in front of me, an object or entity that emitted a powerful invisible force. My knees went wobbly. I took a couple of deep breaths. I had to hold on.
“Ted believed that he could wring the secrets of the fucking universe from Peabody.” Chris was a few inches away from my right ear. “Before I ran out of that room, he let me in on his plan to save humanity. With Peabody’s help, Ted was going to free us all from our bodies—or something. It doesn’t matter. Peabody was playing him the whole time. Open your eyes.”
“No.”
“Open them or I’ll lock you in this room.”
I called Chris an asshole. As a face-saving gesture, it was enough to get my eyes open. A simple cardboard box, big enough to hold four or five hardcover books, lay on the floor where it had fallen from one of the bookshelves in the room. The lid had opened, spilling out its contents.
“Is it human?”
“Well, it’s not pig’s heart,” Chris said. “It arrived by courier yesterday.”
I bent a few inches for a closer look. The arteries had been cleanly severed. I couldn’t tell if the sigil had been carved on the pink meat before or after the extraction. I guess it didn’t matter.
“The rumours are starting to leak in from the outer reaches of the web: Tech visionary and billionaire murdered on his private island. I don’t know how they kept it covered up this long. And no, I didn’t do it, and no, they haven’t come looking for me.”
We stood there awhile in silence, two men of the book trade pondering a mystery beyond the reach of our specialities. Then we returned to the living room to toast our mutual retirement from the business.
So ends The Heart of the Pig. To read the first part of the story, click here; to read Part II, here; Part III is here, Part IV is here, Part V here, Part VI here, and Part VII is here. If you enjoyed the story, please take a moment to share the joy on your social media channels. Also, comment below. I’d love to know what you think.
I tried to jumped backwards/ big enough four or five/ Those were the only two I spotted. I really enjoyed this strange tale, and I truly hope that it is mostly confabulation. I'll share it on FB.