Sunday Archive: Knights of St. John, Part One

The Knights of Saint John was written during the Dirtyfreaks.com years and, I should say right now, it is unfinished.

Back then, we had a larger group of front page authors: Rotting Corpse, Jezebel, Leff, and X10. This was back in April of 2001. In the spring of 2002, we made the shift to Greatsociety and all of our lives were a sad mess, so the front page dynamic morphed more into what you’re seeing today: Me whining about pain and hardship while drinking vodka tonics at 9am.

Knights of Saint John is the last entry from the old Dirtyfreaks fiction section. There were six parts before I gave up on the story. In keeping with the insular attitudes of Dirtyfreaks.com, the story features my fellow front page authors. Which means it doesn’t make sense and is really just a little bit stupid. Enjoy!

Nacho Sasha and the Knights of Saint John Part One: A Scream in the Night

My hideously deformed manservant had George Michael’s “Faith” on the CD player as we walked to the neighborhood bar. I wrapped my coat tighter while my manservant shuffled along in half-dance steps, noiselessly mouthing the lyrics.

I know you’re asking me to stay. Say please, please, please – don’t go away.

I allowed a smile as I stopped outside of 7-11, the night sounds behind me as cars rushed along the road. A woman in the window above stood beside an early Christmas tree, her head bent to the side as she spoke into the phone. She smiled, swaying, and waved down to me. I didn’t wave back. My gaze drifted into the store, where another woman reached shakily for a six pack of beer and turned haunted eyes towards me, muddled grey locking with my green for just a moment. A shared heartbeat. Then I turned away and continued towards the bar.

A scream broke the mood of the evening – a woman, her voice cascading out of the yawning mouth of a dark alley. Nobody moved, nobody reacted, though her scream could have cut flesh. I grabbed my manservant, who was snapping his fingers and mouthing “Father Figure,” and pulled him into the dark alley. For a moment, I was without thought or fear. My every action automatic. I pulled up short as the alley widened, with the lights from another street at one end and darkness behind me. In a pool of pale blue light, the body of a woman lay broken before me. I began to step back, then her hand launched into the air and began to claw at nothing. She turned towards me, a voice rattling something incomprehensible. I moved forward and knelt beside her, taking her hand in my own. Blood poured from between her lips as she spoke and I leaned closer to her bruised face.

One word, a name: “Ibrahim. Ibrahim…”

Then I watched her die. The shuddering, bleeding pain drifting into something calm, beautiful. Just an instant, that’s all it took. Her hand slipped from mine, her chest stopped heaving. The blood still flowed thick and glistening. I turned towards my manservant.

“Give me the cell phone.” I said softly, afraid to disturb the new ghosts in this alley.

It took another hour before I could make it to the bar and finally get that drink. I sat down with two “Coronas” in front of me. Of course, that was the code word for absinthe these days.

My manservant was nearly as moody as I was, but he still drifted to the jukebox and loaded up three hours of 80’s hits. We started with Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth” as I polished off my first Corona and began to complain about women, the room swimming and my manservant feverishly preparing more Coronas before the darkness hit me.

Between Coronas I rose in the booth and began shouting to the 20-something professionals next to us. “Look now! Look all around! There’s no sign of life.” I passed my hands in front of my face — my best impersonation of early Jagger. “Voices, another sound. Can you hear me now? This is planet Earth!”

My manservant, clucking his tongue, pulled me down into the booth and stuffed a Corona into my hands just as “Girls on Film” started up. We could all relax, but I knew that he had loaded “Hungry Like the Wolf” as well. And he knew that I knew that. And he knew that I knew that he knew what I would become once that song started.

So I tried to clear my head. “What is it with women, anyway?” My eyes drifted towards a girl sitting at the bar. Her low-cut jeans dipped far enough so that I could make out the spider-pentagram tattoo on the small of her back. She turned her head in slow motion, blonde hair waving through clouds of smoke as dark eyes fixed on me and blood pounded through my body.

I lifted the Corona to my lips and muttered, “In touch with the ground, I’m on the hunt, I’m after you.”

Discord and rhyme! I slammed the Corona on the table and my manservant jumped slightly, watching me with his murky yellow eye. “Why don’t they just say what they mean?”

My manservant cocked his head to the side.

“Women.”

He nodded knowingly.

“They complain about how men are stupid. We’re not stupid. Our job is to cut off people’s heads and pour boiling oil on them. Our job is to rape and pillage and build dragon ships. Our job is to burn villages and stab senators.” I looked around the bar, then back to my manservant. “We do our job!”

He smiled thinly and gently pushed my Corona towards me.

“But the women…they hint. They say, ‘Could you stay a little longer?’ They rub against you and say, ‘You’re so warm.’ They put a hand on your thigh and say, ‘Why can’t I meet a guy like you?’ But then you act on a perceived…whatever, and they get offended. Or they tell you sex will hurt the friendship.”

I took a breath and cracked my knuckles.

“What does it mean? I think the friendship thing bugs me the most. People don’t just have sex anymore, they have mutual emotional trauma.”

Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand. Just like that river twisting through the dusty land.

I downed my Corona, spent a moment spluttering, then looked up again and tried to regain focus. “What do they want? I mean, just say they want to have sex. Why dance around it? Just grab me by my collar and say, ‘I want Nacho’s Hammer – Now. In me. Shut up. Take it off. Shut up!’ Seriously, I don’t see what the problem is. That’s what I would do if I was a woman. Maybe we should have taken our women on those village-burning raiding parties way back when. They’d probably be more functional today.”

My manservant prepared another Corona and slid it across the table towards me.

“I could do with some water. Or pretzels. I would select either one and call it gold right now.”

My manservant rose and shambled towards the bar while I put my head into my hands and tried to get my thoughts together.

I felt someone sit down across from me and, then, the darkness came. Choice for you is the view to a kill. Between the shades, assassination standing still. The world came back slowly and I looked across the table into a pair of stone-grey eyes. A vivid and clear gaze framed by a white mane of hair. A man in his 70’s, I judged, sat across from me.

“Nacho Sasha.” He whispered, nodding towards me.

“No, you have the wrong planet.”

“I am Jacob D’Artagnan. Grandmaster of the Knights of Saint John. Is there someplace where we can talk?”

My manservant had returned with a glass of water. He hovered nervously by the table, glaring at D’Artagnan with his yellow eye.

“We are talking,” I replied.

“I mean…in private.”

“We are private. My house is bugged. This is where I conduct all my business. What do you have to say?” I paused a moment while a wave of death hit me in the stomach. “Excuse me, I have to throw up.”

I returned from the bathroom and resumed the conversation where I had left off, “Fleecing me of ten dollars plus two. And I said, gold or not, it’s not the path to iron! Not the path at all!”

“Nacho!” D’Artagnan said sharply.

“Yes!”

“I need your help. I need you to come with me to the Island of Rhodes. I have created a machine that can travel through time, and I need a man without scruples to assist me in altering history.”

“A time machine? I’ve heard quite a bit of crazy shit in my day, but you take the cake.” Something caught my eye beside the dartboard, and I think I was muttering “the cake…the cake” for a few moments.

“Allow me,” D’Artagnan took the glass of water from my manservant and placed it on the table. Then he pulled out what looked like a palm pilot and began frantically punching keys with a small plastic pen. There was a brief flash of blue-green light, a distant and nagging noise that made me flinch, and then the glass of water shuddered and vanished.

“Christ on a broomstick!”” I breathed, “Where is it?”

D’Artagnan shrugged. “In the past. This same spot, but far in the past.”

A man at the bar screamed, “Grandfather! The glass!” Then he fell to the ground and turned into a cloud of vapor. Nobody seemed to notice.

I nodded, calculating. “Right, then. What do you want and when do you want it by?”