Apocalypse of Jude

“Come, let’s do what we have to do quickly.”

Paul’s whispered words snake into Jude’s ear and tighten the noose around his soul. Jude turns fearfully, but slavishly follows from his bar into what once was the kitchen of his home. There Paul opens and enters a door to an adjoining office. A slug of air finds difficulty in passing down Jude’s throat. He enters. Turning to close the door, he feels the sudden pressure of being pinned up against it as it slams, the snort of Paul’s breath in his face.

“Rumour has it you were at mass this evening?”

Paul’s black eyes entrap Jude’s, but Jude cannot say or even guess what they hide. Sinking his eyes only brings Paul’s left hand to his chin, clamping his head back against the door.

“I thought I’d made it clear that when I bought this house from you, and put you in charge of its bar, I didn’t want the Church screwing with your head any more than it already had.”

A sullen look now glazes Jude’s eyes. “And all it did was confirm itself as dead.”

“I’m still going to have to kill you. That was our deal. Your going to Mass is not going to break that.”

With his hand still on Jude’s chin, Paul twists his wrist to see the second hand on his watch go ten seconds to midnight.

“It’s time. Shall I behead this priest-king?”

Jude breathes deep. “Behead him.”

Watching it down to four seconds, Paul suddenly puts a finger gun to Jude’s forehead.

“One, two, three, let the King headless be.”

He follows with the sound of a shot being fired.

“You’re dead my May King. You had better play the part that will allow us to resurrect Dionysus. You know the consequences if you don’t.”

Jude nods, slumping relieved at nothing stranger having passed, leaving the knowledge of his betrayal of Caul as almost mundane.

Paul leaves him against the door and turns to the desk, the quiet refrain of Hey Jude on his lips. He opens a drawer and lifts a plastic package that he dumps on the desk. Paul looks up from behind the desk.

“You in Mass is not good for business either Jude. The three stooges aren’t eating out of my hand yet. But if they smell a rat…”

Paul’s eyes bore into Jude. “…they’re going to bolt. That is not an option I’m willing to consider. I will do whatever it takes to get them under my thumb. You got my meaning?”

Paul walks back up to Jude and looks him squarely in the eye, sinking his dark light deeper and deeper into Jude.

“Thought so.”

He laughs with much mirth.

“What is it that made you want to hold onto that detritus anyway? Surely you understand Jude. You’re part of the mysteries now. They’re going to free our waters from this desert. There’s no shelter in this desert anymore. No relief. No sound of water. Only dead trees and dry stone. But you’ve got to be serious about coming in under the shadow of our rock, and I promise you I will show you something different from your shadow striding behind you every morning and it rising to meet you in the evening. Look at tonight as your first and final warning.”

He laughs again, then speaks almost kindly to Jude, turning with a gesturing hand.

“Come, the hour grows late. Get your pay and go rule over your bar.”

Jude watches Paul disappear from the office, then looking fixedly at the plastic package, takes a step towards the table. He picks it up, weighing it for a moment as if a soul. Then clutching it, he turns and leaves the office to hide his package in the kitchen. Having done this, he emerges back into the wooded aura of the bar. He stalls for a moment, realising that the bar suddenly seems a more shadowy place than the bar he had left some minutes ago, its maroon walls absorbing into near darkness what negligible light was emanating from two dull fixtures on the left wall. Inside of him, he feels the faintest flickers of a desolation enter his heartbeat.

/is this what caul meant/

Shrugging off the cold shiver that snakes down his spine, he steps full into the arch-shaped, shining yellow bar, its new shadowy darkness giving it the glow of a shrine.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 16