heya_baru | Demon Core: Part 11

Tlönian Stages

Something in the forgotten and phosphor-lit corners of the CDC has started to sing in distant and dreary tongues. Men with government haircuts strut sharply down the halls of the NMU hospital, requesting copies of copies, swabbing sink drains, diverting my bodies from the morgue. The chief of medicine told us it was nothing, just test runs for when the next SARS-CoV hits.

For a few days I began to believe the lies; it was just CDC exercises, just a week where tension hung in the air like a bad idea. Perhaps the universe wasn’t so large after all. Then a body showed up at the morgue.

Jon Doe, mid 30s, initial toxicology found 7.3 pg/mg THC-COOH, as well as traces of cocaine. The cops found his body in the middle of the road in Bosque Farms, about half an hour outside Albuquerque. Initial cause of death: violent, lateral bisection of the cranium and skull.

It was as if someone had driven a crowbar into the center of the occipital bone and out through nasofrontal suture, then pried him in two. The hemispheres of the brain had separated perfectly, a perversely clean anatomical separation. The severing of the brain’s hemispheres made for an easy autopsy, and allowed me to discover an odd detail that other acts of cranial violence would normally obscure: the perimortem excision of Jon Doe’s pineal gland.

Understandably, Salomón doubted my discovery at first. The human pineal gland is less than ten millimeters in size, although its position in the peripineal cistern means that separation of the brain’s hemispheres would expose the gland, it seemed more likely that the gland was destroyed during Jon Doe’s violent death, as opposed to a deliberate removal.

So resolute was Salomón’s skepticism that I started to doubt myself—in a desperate attempt for confirmation I described my preliminary results to the members of a private message group for medical examiners in the southwest, and received the following from an ME in Nevada, which convinced both myself and Salomón:

This is not the first such case like this. A near identical, currently unsolved, murder occurred two months ago in a suburb of Las Vegas: 68 year old male, violent lateral bisection of the skull, pineal gland removed. In this case, the victim was a retired lawyer, which elicited a much more thorough investigation; I suspect this is the only reason why the autopsy uncovered something so subtle.

If it’s a serial killer, this will be the kind of case that feeds Netflix and HBO a steady stream of true crime docs for years. However, neither myself nor any consulting MEs in Las Vegas have been able to identify any kind of murder weapon. The cranial injuries do not present with the kind of tool marks one might associate with a power tool or edged weapons.

The only other detail of note was a number of extremely small puncture marks, barely visible, that extended from the upper scapula to the C2 vertebrae. I can’t even pontificate on it; there’s simply nothing like it.

Over a century ago, Helena Blavatsky arose from a primordial soup of baubles and magical trinkets, her doctrine of Victorian mysticism locating the third eye deep in the meat of the brain—the pineal gland. Her assessment of the human endocrine system has long outlived the rest of her, making its way from Lovecraft’s New England to the gilded Sirens’ nest of Hollywood.

Perhaps there is a parallel in extispicy—divination from the liver of sacrificial animals—in Mesopotamian culture. The Akkadians, Babylonians, and Sumerians considered the liver to be the vessel of the soul, as it was the bloodiest of all organs, and thus a route to divine communication.@MesoRel This seems like a quaint belief to us today, but were our bronze-age ancestors wrong? Without a liver, one is just as dead as without a brain or heart.

For thousands of years we’ve been unraveling the long specter of evolution, tugging at a thread leading into the darkest nights of the past, the shape of our blood predating our cultures, our languages, our species. Perhaps there was some ancestral creature hobbling through the bush, forever cowering in fear of ancient jaws, that found some now-forgotten use in the pineal gland. Perhaps the liver is the seat of the soul after all.

Memetic Self-Destruction

Leander laid on the sofa and drifted away to a distant moment from his adolescence; he was sixteen, sitting on a bed in a shitbox apartment in Fairfax, California. Hero rested on his lap while he ran his hands through her dark hair, staring at the water stains on the ceiling while she half-read a Doujinshi on her phone. It was as perfect a moment as he could unearth from the caves of his memory.

The weight of her body on his drew the pain out of him, and in that moment there was nothing beyond the two of them that mattered; Hero’s mom was still at work, his father was three states and a restraining order away, he had forgotten whatever homework was due tomorrow, which meant it might as well not exist. The future was as distant as it was fallow. The two of them would get the hell out of California, move somewhere where it didn’t cost two grand a month to live, somewhere cheaper were he could go to trade school and Hero could sort her life out away from her parents. None of that happened, of course; COVID fucked it up, his mother dragging him and his grandmother to Albuquerque in a liquor-fueled attempt to get into a scam paralegal school fucked it up, the mental breakdowns every three months fucked it up. But that moment, so perfect in its naïveté, could not be tarnished by the future. He refused to let the memory dim in his mind’s eye, instead he wanted to fall into it, so the cool waters of the past could fill his lungs, drown him, and remigrate him to its soft crèche, its downy bedding as unchanging as death.

But the waters slipped away from him as he grasped for the physicality of that moment, the way it felt in his body—six years ago, twenty pounds ago, two suicide attempts ago, and god knows how many beers ago. The past was too far gone, lost under the years that had worked their way into his muscles and skin like a poison.

The din of Hero and Sestos’s argument thrust Leander out of his stupor.

“I know what I fucking saw! IT WAS RIGHT THERE.” Sestos paced the room, one of his guns jammed comically down the front of his pants. Ever since the murder he was never more than five feet away from one of his pistols.

Tears streamed down Hero’s face. “So you saw one of them and just decided to bash some random asshole’s skull in?”

“No, I, it was—” he threw his hands up in the air, “it was right behind him, it was about to attack him! Just like it did with you! I was trying to save him! The extinguisher just went right through it! Leander saw it too!”

The two of them turned their attention to him. Leander said nothing until he could feel their eyes drilling into the back of his head. “Yeah. It was there. Just disappeared the moment he hit it. Poof.”

“Fine. Whatever you two say. Not that it fucking matters anyway.” Hero wiped the tears and snot from her face with the back of her hand.

Sestos scoffed. “What do you mean whatever? Do you not believe us?”

“I think,” Hero scowled at him, “there is a part of you that’s angry and jealous and probably would crack someone in the head.”

Sestos exploded. “There is no part of me that’s angry. There’s no discrete components to dissect in here,” he hammered the tips of fingers into his temple, “this feeling is fucking everywhere. It’s like static in the background of the radio, it’s the water everywhere after your house floods, the wildfire smoke in the air when I was growing up in Larkspur. I wake up in the morning I’m immediately angry that I woke up at all, angry at the kids who called me a faggot in sixth grade, angry at my first boyfriend for taking advantage of someone half his fucking age, angry at my parents for lacking the mental acuity to recognize the blindingly obvious fact that they were hopelessly unfit for parenthood!” He threw an empty beer bottle across the room, sending it into the wall in a plume of twinkling glass. “There is no person. There is no Sestos. There is no part of me that’s angry, and part of me that’s sad, and part of me that just wants to relax and work a nine to five. I’m a crass homunculus of all my histories, and those histories are trapped in a walking puppet. I’m trapped in every moment of my life that came before this one. But now the world is ending, and I turned some fucker’s brain into pulp, so none of that matters. Thank fuck.”

The whole explosive episode ended as quickly as it started. Sestos calmly sat down on the floor and held his head to his knees. Hero collapsed onto the sofa and sobbed onto Leander’s lap. He said nothing, and ran his hand through her hair.

Neither of them spoke for hours; eventually Sestos crawled over to his pharma bag and took something, probably downers, along with another hit of Aella. It was nearly noon before Leander was sober enough to extract Hero from his lap and limp to the bathroom. There was a gun in the sink.

“Sestos! Why is there a forty-five in the sink?”

He responded from halfway across the house. “It’s not a forty-five, dumbass! It’s a Sig Sauer P365. And it shouldn’t be in the sink, it should next to the sink.”

Leander gingerly picked up the weapon and placed it next to the soap. “That doesn’t answer my question. If fire extinguishers don’t work against these things, I don’t think lead will either.”

“Got a better idea?”

Leander barely made it out of the bathroom before Sestos yelled at him again.

“Grab the suppressor out of my room while you’re there!”

Leander stumbled through the hallway, still drunk and feeling like death. “That thing is a walking felony, I’m not touching it. What the hell do you need it for?”

“They’re back.”