THE ANTI-SOUL

The Anti-Soul is my most accomplished work of fiction. A metaphysical horror story, The Anti-Soul turns the hoary cliche of the devil-child inside out by giving adolescent Anti-Christ Paul Jones a baby sister. When mom brings newborn June home from the hospital, Paul recognizes in the infant's unfocused eyes the total self-absorption and unyielding demand for instant gratification that he not only recognizes in himself, but that he associates with Godliness.

On March 18th Amazon released the names of the authors/novels that had made it through Round 1 of the 2014 Amazon Breathrough Novel Award competition. The competition starts with up to 10,000 total entries divided into 5 categories; General Fiction, Mystery/Thriller, Romance, Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Horror and Young Adult. Over the course of 5 and 1/2 months and 4 rounds the field is winnowed to one winner in each category, with each winner guaranteed a publishing contract with Amazon and a $15,000 advance. Amazon readers then vote on which of the 5 winners receives the grand prize, an advance of $50,000.

Published in the spring of 2011, The Anti-Soul is available as an Amazon e-book that can be downloaded to any computer, tablet or smart phone as well as to Kindle readers. Click on the cover shot above to be taken to the Amazon listing. There are several interesting reviews. Here is a two-chapter excerpt:

THE ANTI-SOUL

PART I: The Anti-Soul

Satan left after I committed my crime. He destroys and then leaves.

Andrea Yates, to Dallas police

God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”

Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited

Chapter 1

As Karim hands Madam Nezrallah her change, her father, Akem, says, “This time it is different. This time it will not stop.”

The tiny, wizen-faced woman counts the few coins before dropping them into her black cloth bag. She gathers the bundle of warm pita loaves from the counter, grunts and turns toward the door. Karim speaks to her hunched back: “Good night, Madam Nezrallah.”

Akem comes from behind the counter and sees his last customer of the day out into the cool, dry, evening air. Far to the west the sky is clear and the setting sun has turned the underside of the overhead clouds a luscious pink. The fading sunlight gives a dun glow to the white aluminum siding covering the front of the bakery and for the moment the color of the storefront almost matches the mortar walls of the building’s second floor. Madam Nezrallah turns her stooped body to the baker.

“They’ve been fighting in the suburbs for a month,” she tells him. “Every day it grows closer. You admit this, yet you stay. I am alone. You have children. You must leave.”

It is the greatest number of consecutive sentences he has ever heard her speak. Seconds pass and still she holds him with her shiny black eyes.

“Oh,” he says when he realizes she is waiting for a response. “I will think about what you have said.”

The old woman nods and resumes her slow walk home.

“Stupid woman,” Akem thinks, enunciating the words carefully in his mind. “I like it here just fine. That’s all that matters.” He unwraps the awning draw-string from its hook and pulls the green-striped canvas in for the night.

* * *

As he locks up, Akem watches Karim tally the day’s receipts. At fifteen her breasts are large and firm, as her mother’s were, years and children and pounds ago. Akem’s obsession with his daughter’s breasts is seven weeks old.

His bakery faces Rue Hoamal, not far from the corner of Corniche Mazraa. His family lives in the three-bedroom apartment above the shop. Karim sleeps with her grandmother in the smallest bedroom, Akem and his two sons sleep in the largest, his wife, Rahael, and their two youngest daughters share the room that looks out over the small garden in back. When Rahael and he need privacy, he usually asks his mother to take the children on an outing. As soon as she and her grandchildren leave, Akem hurries to his bedroom. When Rahael enters she is already nude under her robe. Up until seven weeks ago the grandmother had not been asked to gather the children in almost a year. There have been periods of late when she has taken them out daily and more.

When Akem first resumed sending the children out, Rahael was as excited as a schoolgirl, coming to him moist with anticipation. He was already erect when she entered. When she lay beside him, he said not a word. He didn’t even kiss her. He just rolled on top and began sucking her teats like a frantic infant. Without a hint of prior suspicion, Rahael knew that her husband lusted after someone he could not have.

That first week he sent the children out twice. The second week he did so four times. The third week they had sex twelve times in seven days. Then, in the fourth week, he left her alone. When the fifth week came and went with no further encounters Rahael presumed the worst, for Akem spent several evenings out without explanation. At home he was preoccupied; his care of the bakery suffered and he was short with the children. The back garden, his pride, was dying; the sycamores browning from thirst, the jacaranda blossoms wilted and rotting. The fact that Akem was fat and ugly never entered Rahael’s mind. She was convinced that a woman whose body was still firm and supple had stolen her husband’s love.

Ten days ago, Akem sent the children out in the middle of the day and Rahael nearly wept with relief. The affair was over. Preparing to go to him, she took a few moments to perfume and brush her long, thick hair. She entered his room to find him lying on his side, his back to her. Sitting on the edge of the noisy iron bed, she placed a hand upon his shoulder. That was when she felt his soft trembling. He rolled over and she saw that he’d been crying. She lay down, gently slipping her beefy arm under his jowly head, and they embraced. But instead of being quieted by her caress, Akem began to laugh. Fear nuzzled Rahael’s heart even as it occurred to her that perhaps she’d been mistaken: perhaps there was something worse than another woman. But by then it was too late.

Rahael had never been sodomized before. The next morning she caught Akem peeking through the crack in the door to the small bedroom. His erection was noticeable even in the dim light of the hallway. She knew that their daughter Karim was in the bedroom, dressing for school.

* * *

Akem pauses in his lock-up duties and watches Karim finish the books. As she adds a column of figures she absently tugs on her right earlobe. This has been a habit of hers since birth. For an instant his madness ebbs and he sees his child. And in this instant he offers up a prayer for release. But it is a prayer without a prayer.

He cannot remember when the world changed. He doesn’t even know that it has. He harbors no hope of life returning to what it once was, for he believes he has only learned to see what was always there. The world hasn’t changed, he believes: what has happened is that he has attained wisdom. And with this thought the prayer without a prayer, the last vestige of his original self, loses its weary grip upon the shore.

He giggles softly. His daughter does not hear. He recalls trying to find satisfaction in his wife’s flaccid flesh. At first he’d thought he had. But then the headaches returned, stronger each time. Finally he’d left the house late one night and wandered aimlessly, savoring the smells of cordite and sulfur wafting in from the suburbs, drawn by the distant crackle of guns chewing on the edge of the night.

He remembers the cat he found on that first walk. It took fifteen minutes of crouching in the mouth of a stinking alley before he managed to coax the sinewy, feral thing out of hiding. When the cat finally came close enough he grabbed its tail, swung it over his head and shattered its skull against the corner of a building.

He’d felt such relief then that he went home and had his first good night’s sleep in weeks. But the next morning he was ashamed. What a long time ago that was.

He went out almost nightly after that. Once, he found a cow; lost and frightened, driven into the heart of the city by the fighting. At the sight of the animal, Akem snapped the antenna off a shiny red Fiat. He crooned soothingly and the cow seemed to welcome his approach. He was touched and affectionately stroked the animal’s neck before he lifted her ear and plunged the jagged base of the antenna into her brain.

And, finally, there had been the boy. They’d crossed the Green Line together, keeping to the shadows till they reached the Jisr El Pacha refugee camp. Once Akem’s eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the boy’s hovel and he saw the sick old woman watching their sex from a mattress in the corner, he refused to continue. The boy began to cry. Akem put money on the floor beside the woman, took the youth’s hand and led him, unresisting, beyond the camp’s western perimeter to the banks of the Beirut. Afterwards he threw the body into the river, but the water level was too low to carry a corpse. Akem didn’t notice. In his mind the boy had already been washed out to sea.

After the Palestinian, Akem was untroubled and free from pain for days. But recently the headaches had returned. Shortly after sunrise, two dawns ago, Akem wandered into a firefight between Phalange troops and Shiite guerrillas. Bullets ricocheted all around as he strolled happily down Rue Mahash, thumbing the blade of his favorite bread knife and idly dreaming of owning a pastry shop in Riz Beirut. A Shiite ran out from the doorway of a gutted apartment building and pulled him under cover. “Are you crazy?” the man snarled. Akem did not like the man’s tone of voice and so he stabbed him through the heart with the knife. The young militiaman looked down at the handle protruding from his chest and then into the eyes of the man he had rescued. As he bled out it came to him that he had saved a ghoul.

* * *

Akem watches Karim ascend the stairs to the apartment above. The dead Shiite’s Kalashnikov lies on a high shelf in the storeroom. Normally Akem makes a final check of his shop before going up to dinner. But on this night, whatever else he is, Akem is not normal.

He enters the apartment living room. There is nothing that can be done to change what will be done. His mother, his youngest daughter and his youngest son are present. He asks about his wife: “Where is Rahael?”

“In the kitchen, with Sheena,” his mother answers. From the doorway on the far side of the living room comes the clatter of dinner preparations and then some chatter between his wife and Sheena, their middle daughter.

“And Karim?”

“In our room.”

“Please take Rahael and the children out for a bit.”

Akem’s mother assumes her son has made a slip of the tongue in saying his wife’s name when he meant Karim. As her son helps her to her feet, she calls to Sheena in the kitchen. “We are going out, Sheena. Go tell Joseph and Karim.”

In the kitchen, all clatter ceases.

Akem says, “No, not Karim: Rahael.” When his mother looks at him quizzically, he adds, “There is a certain matter a father must discuss with a daughter in private.”

His mother’s eyes go big. “There’s been a proposal?”

He smiles, but his tone is firm. “Out.”

She shoos her two nearest grandchildren toward the stairway door. Before the children exit, Rahael and Sheena enter from the kitchen.

“I am not leaving you alone with Karim,” Rahael tells her husband.

The grandmother looks between the couple, confused.

“All of you wait,” Akem says. “I have a wonderful surprise.”

He descends the stairs to the bakery, gets the Kalashnikov out of hiding and returns to the apartment. He stands in the living room entrance, examines the weapon, finds the safety, clicks it off and makes the rifle comfortable in his arms. No one present can comprehend what is happening.

When he is ready he asks, “Is Joseph in his room?”

Rahael, gray-faced, answers, “Yes. Yes, I think so. He has homework.”

At this Akem tightens his lips and nods, as if to say, “Yes, of course: homework.”

He pulls the trigger. The ferocity of the automatic weapon’s firing speed startles him and he releases the trigger almost immediately. His wife, his mother, his youngest son and his youngest daughter are all down, the boy twitching in seizure. Daughter Sheena, who was standing a bit to the side of the others, is uninjured. Shock has contracted her pupils to pin holes and her irises stare blindly into the acrid smoke. In this moment it is a kindness that the original Akem no longer exists.

He fires again; taking care to rake the group well after Sheena’s head explodes.

The shooting has taken only a few seconds. Akem turns toward the bedrooms. His oldest son, Joseph, bursts out of the hallway. The sight of his father holding a machine gun brings the boy up short. A throw rug slides out from under him and he crashes to the floor.

Akem levels the gun at his fallen son’s face. He asks, “How’s the homework going, son?” and pulls the trigger for the third time.

When Karim throws her door open her father is calmly leaning his weapon against the hallway wall. He says, “Praise God for your safety.”

He rips her blouse open, jerks her brassiere straps over her shoulders, frees her breasts and gives her chocolate brown nipples a searing pinch. The girl wails and tries to tear away, but she is caught. The rape lasts less than a minute.

Panting, Akem rolls off of his daughter; eyes closed, heart at peace, his soul fulfilled. So great is his contentment, he doesn’t notice Karim picking up the Kalashnikov. As bullets shred his chest, his expression is more one of surprise than pain.

* * *

It takes nine minutes for Akem’s brain to suffocate for lack of oxygen-bearing blood. During the process of death, quantum fluctuations occur as the electrical aspects of the nervous system dissipate into the ether. A particular aspect, peculiar to the amygdala area of the limbic cortex, speeds off into the western night, an indecipherable ripple amongst the swirling, charged dance of the biosphere. Across the Mediterranean, over the northern bulge of Africa and out into the mid-Atlantic night, the aspect flies. Its motion is an illusion. In truth, the aspect has become still: so still it no longer participates in the rotation of the earth. It is this dynamic that creates the illusion of westward flight.

As anti-matter is the precise opposite of matter, so this aspect is the precise opposite of a certain faculty of the soul. It recognizes no physical impediment. When it encounters them, the anti-soul pierces the core of mountains with the same ease it shows soaring above moon-drenched seas. At an apparent velocity of nearly a thousand miles an hour, the orbit of the anti-soul never varies from the latitude, fifty-three minutes and eighteen seconds north of the thirty-third parallel, and the altitude, twenty-nine meters above sea level, where Akem’s limbic cortex came to rest.

Weeks pass into months pass into years and still the electron-wide path of the anti-soul fails to intersect the amygdala of a human being. Seven years pass and then, on a clear, perfect autumn night, the anti-soul emerges from the side of a ridge overlooking a broad, rolling valley in the southeastern United States and quickly overtakes a westbound Buick.

Chapter 2

The idea for a Lord of the Rings chess set came to Keith Stropper the first time he did acid. He carved the original set while living on a commune in Ohio. Counting him, Sue and fourteen-month old Gracie, the commune had twenty-one members at the end of the first harvest. By New Years the harvest was gone, smoked or sold, the profits spent. A month later, their number dwindled to ten and six weeks of winter yet to go, Keith decided the time had come to sell his work. The commune members pooled the last of their money and were still two dollars short on the price of a bus ticket to Cincinnati, so Sue and the baby hitch-hiked with him to the village and helped him pan-handle the rest.

When none of the head shops in Cincinnati would give Keith what he felt the set was worth, he took his work to an art dealer: more for an educated opinion than anything else. The dealer offered to handle it on commission. Keith asked if he could get anything in advance. The woman gave him $200 on the spot.

The money kept the commune going till April, when a letter arrived from Cincinnati. The set had sold for $1,000. Less the dealer’s commission and the advance, the enclosed check was for $600, the most money Keith had ever had. At the end of the month, when he made his usual rounds collecting food money and rent from the other commune members, he was more than a little peeved to learn that the rest of the group considered his windfall theirs as well. At the climax of a heated meeting he threw $50 on the brick and board coffee table in the farmhouse living room, packed up his small family and rejoined the system.

A generation passed. Keith and Sue owned their home in Athens, mortgage free. Gracie, recently separated from her lay-about husband, and Keith and Sue’s two grandchildren were staying with them. Punk had eviscerated rock; rap did the same to punk. After that, Keith lost interest. Daughter Gracie hadn’t had a civil word for her father since the onset of puberty; wife Sue was having an affair, again; and Keith was a Republican. Of all the changes in their lives, the one Keith understood the least was the music.

* * *

On the Stropper family’s last night, Keith got home from his studio just after sunset. He was sitting in his Buick Regal in the driveway, doing a quick hit of overpriced blow, when speed metal exploded like ordinance inside the house.

Keith stormed into the den. “Turn down the goddamn noise,” he bellowed.

Gracie and her oldest, four year old Mona, laughing crazily, froze in the midst of fist pumping in an imaginary mosh pit. Gracie gave her father a withering look and bolted, leaving Motorhead to rage and her bewildered daughter to cry in her wake. Keith recognized Gracie’s look from the inside. It was the same look he used to give his father, back when Captain Beefheart was goddamn noise.

Sue came to see what the noise was about. By the time she reached the den, the stereo was off and the shouting was over. She found Keith sitting on the arm of the La-Z-Boy, holding Mona on his lap, blankly staring at a silent Klipsch speaker.

Without looking up, Keith said, “I never really thought it would happen. Christ, I’m not even fifty.”

Sue, having long ago given up fighting the contempt she’d felt for her husband ever since he’d forgiven her for her first affair, snorted.

Keith stood, Mona in his arms. He hugged his granddaughter, handed her to his smirking wife and left his home. No one called him back. He drove aimlessly for hours, first toward the coast, then south, then inland. North of Marietta, as he was crossing a rolling valley between two steep ridges, his limbic cortex intersected a point on the line fifty-three minutes, eighteen seconds north of the thirty-third parallel, at an altitude twenty-nine meters above sea level, and his end began.

It was half past midnight when he pulled into an all night truck stop and bought a tin of aspirin, dry swallowing four while the attendant filled the tank. As he pulled away from the pumps it came to him that life had lost its transcendence. There had been a time when life seemed a progression toward something: something meaningful, if not significant. But adulthood had disabused him of the notion. His dreams of becoming a major artist died around the time he accepted his first commission from the Franklin Mint. Sue discovered the pleasures of adultery: he discovered the joys of coke. And now his daughter not only thought her father’s sun was setting; she clearly found the display undignified.

Ten miles from the gas station a raccoon dashed onto the road. Keith swerved to hit it. Just before impact a small, inner voice cried out. But the thud was so satisfying, he quickly forgot the prickle of fear the voice had raised. He noted with relief that the aspirin was kicking in.

The house was dark when he got home shortly before two; his wife, daughter and grandchildren asleep for the night. He would try not to wake them.

Before he went upstairs he stopped in the kitchen.

* * *

It was getting light out by the time Keith pulled up in front of A.J. and Miriam’s four-bedroom split-level in a suburb west of Athens. He rang once and then started pounding on the door. A porch light went on. The door opened. A.J. pulled him inside.

“Fuck, Keith! What are you doing?”

“Hey, A.J. Sell me some acid.”

From another part of the house a female voice, husky with sleep, called: “A.J.? Who is it?”

“It’s Keith Stropper, higher than a kite and looking for acid, of all things.”

Miriam appeared at the top of the stairs. She tied her robe as she descended. “Keith?” she said.

“I’m here for some acid, of all things,” Keith told her. He reached into the right pocket of his tweed sport coat and pulled out a paring knife. He held it in his fist, elbow cocked.

A.J. glanced at Miriam. Their clients were all professional people. Despite living as full time drug dealers for most of their adult lives, violence was as foreign to them as it was to their customers. The couple exchanged a look of bewilderment.

Sue, Keith thought, had looked at Gracie that way just before…

Just before what? He struggled to fit shards of memory into some sort of buoyant order. The shards fit. A mild seizure shot through him. His eyes rolled to white, trying to see inside. The knife fell to the floor.

“Hey,” A.J. said, instinctively grabbing Keith by the shoulders to keep him from falling. Keith’s eyes rolled back round front. A.J. hadn’t fully processed the fact that his friend of many years, as sweet a guy as he knew, had pulled a knife on him. The distraction of the seizure rendered the knife pathetic. A paring knife, A.J. thought. What was Keith going to do, peck me to death?

“I got some Valium,” A.J. said. “Why don’t I get you one? I’ll call Sue and you can, maybe, lie down till she gets here?”

“Oh, God, A.J.,” Keith moaned. “Oh, God. I hurt Sue, A.J. I hurt Sue and Gracie and the grandkids.” He turned to Miriam. “I hurt them so bad I had to change clothes.”

Miriam jerked – a muscle spasm, the kind that protests the onset of dreams. “He’s mad,” she said quietly, keeping her eyes locked on Keith’s. “Get away from him, A.J., he’s mad.”

Keith pulled another knife from his right coat pocket, a six-inch utility knife. The blade entered A.J.’s left cheek, passed through the oral cavity, pierced the lower right gum and lodged in the root of a molar. Miriam watched A.J.’s tongue get sliced in two when he screamed. She ducked into the kitchen, returning seconds later with a freezer bag of narcotics in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. She lobbed the bag to Keith.

“Oh, great!” Keith said, oblivious to A.J.’s agony. “Thanks so much. What do I owe you?”

“It’s okay, Keith,” Miriam said. “You can work it out with A.J. when he’s feeling better.”

Keith left. When Miriam heard his footsteps descend the porch stairs she ran to the front door. The snick of the deadbolt sliding into place was lost in the roar of the Buick’s engine.

* * *

The police found Keith, soaked and stinking in his own waste, dehydrated and delirious, on the warped linoleum floor of cabin 7, Art’s Bide-A-Wee Motel, outside Durham, North Carolina. He’d peaked at dusk, two days before. Bathed in acid’s white light, he’d been filled with terror and awe. Like a sleeper startled awake by the sense of an intruder crouching in the near dark, Keith perceived the anti-soul and understood that his nervous system was no longer sovereign territory.

The police called for an ambulance. After two days’ sedation and re-hydration, Keith returned to lucidity. He feared that if he told the doctors about the entity inside his brain they would tell the police he was insane and he wouldn’t be executed for the murder of his wife, daughter and grandchildren. He also feared he wouldn’t be executed if he pled guilty and showed remorse. So he said nothing to the doctors and told the police he was innocent: and even if he wasn’t, Sue, at least, had it coming.

The trial was brief, the verdict quick, the sentence death by electrocution.

Keith spent seven years on death row in Palmerstown Penitentiary, sharing his cell and his amygdala with an anti-soul. Mandatory appeals kept him alive for the first three years. That was when Georgia and the six other states that still used the electric chair were temporarily enjoined from using them. A Federal court had agreed to hear a case challenging the constitutionality of electrocution on the grounds the method was a cruel and unusual way to kill, compared to lethal injection or gas. The case dragged on for six years; the patience of the People of Georgia lasted four. Faced with a growing backlog of men in need of dying, Palmerstown Penitentiary retired its electric chair and the State of Georgia went shopping for a gas chamber.