my life as the source of all evil

My Life as the Source of All Evil takes us back to 1999, the last year before Things Went Bad: the internet bubble bursting, Janet Jackson’s breast, subprime, steroids in baseball, the war. And it’s all Joe Tudlong’s fault—but he can explain.

Fumbling to raise their social profile at a major university, Joe and his best friend Sam have revived a defunct fraternity, replete with ramshackle Victorian house and a charter book entitled Diablos Ex Machina. Turns out they’ve inadvertently resurrected Satan’s brotherhood. When they succumb to the temptation to conjure a demon, they realize they’re missing one key ingredient: a virgin. And where are they supposed to find a virgin in a college town on a Friday night? Enter Rachel Pierce, president of a sorority legendary for the beauty, wealth, and cruelty of its Sisters. She offers Joe and Sam a deal: she supplies the virgins, she gets half the demons.

Unholy ritual meets runaway consumerism; irrational exuberance finds its nadir, then digs deeper. Virgins are sacrificed, demons raised, keg parties thrown—it’s a Hell of a good time until the bill for services rendered comes due. Stalked by the netherworld’s collection agents, Joe faces the choice of surrendering his soul or selling out the world . . . and though he has built his life around sacrifice, it hasn’t exactly been of the self-sacrificial variety. What’s a guy raised in an everything/all-the-time culture to do when called upon to account for himself?

It’s an apocalyptic satire. It’s 90,000 words. It’s finished. If you’re a literary agent or editor and this sounds like your goblet of blood, please contact me at info@edwardcowan.com.

 

An excerpt from My Life as the Source of All Evil

Don’t make me beg for my own damnation. Give me a push into my pit of despair—throw an elbow, a full body check, anything to start me falling.

Here I drift, having seized my fate by the neck and throttled it, having crammed my feeble Becoming down its hoarse screaming throat. Here I drift, somewhere twixt Heaven and Hell, paradise and perdition, being forgiven and being forgotten. Infinity and zero.

But there was a time—huh boy. . . .

There was a time, kids, when I rocked the hereafter.

Follow me back to 1999. The internet bubble threatening to make millionaires of us all. Y2K preparedness. (Did you stock up on carbon-filter water bottles? I bet you did.) Monica, cubans, the definition of is. Boy bands and Britney. Visible thong. 1999: the last year before, in the argot of our times, Things Went Bad.

And for that—really—I apologize.

For what? you ask? Hell. All of it.

First off: I apologize for engineering this debacle during my college years. Why couldn’t I have wrecked the world as an amazingly precocious six-year-old, or from the executive suite of a ninety-story corporate tower? What’s more insufferable than the hormonal melodramas of the undergraduate mind?

But—what can I say? When the apocalypse knocked, I answered with a hangover, a Widespread Panic T-shirt, and an unwritten English essay hanging over me.

So . . . follow me back. To a major University in This Could Be Anywhere, USA. That’s right: names have been changed to protect those with delusions of innocence—names, places, facts, figures—everything but the date. The hour.

October 1, 1999. 10:17 p.m.

Why?

Because even the End—the capital-E-End—has to begin sometime.

 

Chapter 1

I wouldn’t say the cellar reeked of death—that would be getting ahead of the story. At 10:17 it simply smelled as any deep, subterranean hollow does: of mold, decay, clammy earth, and all the other things that stand in fetid opposition to hope and sunlight and compassion. Sweaty gym sock meets open grave.

. . . So maybe it reeked a little of death. Old death, though; we had no ambition to add fresh stench. I swear.

Sam and I stood before a massive ebon table inspecting the ingredients piled atop it. The heart of a cloven-hoofed mammal, filched from the Dairy Science Lab at the vet school. A rodent’s tail, snipped off one of the innumerable rats that scampered through the walls of our house. A gold ring, Sam’s grandfather’s wedding band, foisted on him by his mother in the hope that one day. . . . Down the list we skimmed, a full page front and back, “Four Score and Thirteen Numerous Charms.”

“Well, it took forever,” I said around an exhausted but self-satisfied sigh, “but it looks like we finally have everything. A dozen pig’s feet, forty cloves of garlic, that damned chicken—”

“Wait a minute,” Sam interrupted. “What about a virgin?”

I scanned the list. “This one doesn’t call for a virgin.”

He hoisted our charter book, thirty pounds of tattered parchment bound between covers of a hide you wouldn’t mistake for leather. Let’s call it leathery and leave it at that. The words DIABLOS EX MACHINA emblazoned the cover in faded gold filigree.

“Ahem.

“Article IV, Section 7: All summonings require a virgin.

            A. Everyone knows demons/gods don’t respond to ugly virgins.

            B. The virgin should be wearing white.

            C. The virgin should be awake and lucid during the ritual.”

I slumped. “Guess you’re right.”

“The by-laws never lie.”

“Where are we going to find a beautiful virgin at this time of night? It’s a college town, for Christsakes!”

He shrugged. “I guess we could always hit the Crusaders.”

*     *     *

‘Hit the Crusaders?’ Don’t smirk; we did. We hit everything: the bars, the house parties, the coffee shops. From parking decks to back alleys to bus depots.

Something stirred in the air as we drove downtown: the icy black finger of Fate whipping the night into an ugly vortex, the stupefying womb of innocence, sweet naïveté, spitting us out. The sky, a vomitous spray of streetlight orange and stormcloud blue, stank as if some lethargic god had emptied his bladder into it.

We had Ramsey Corman, Sam’s freshman bio lab partner, halfway out the door at Shooters when this little exchange occurred:

“Did we bring any chloroform?” Sam barked over the bass thuds of Tupac and Biggie trading phantom punches across the dance floor. “Rope?”

“There was no time. We’re going to have to do it subtle. Smooth.”

“Smooth? That’s your answer?—hey! Where did she—oh shit, I think she heard us!”

“Is that her talking to that cop?”

“He’s pointing at us. . . .” 

“Run!”

10:25—nothing.

Only after we goaded one Stanley Broadnax—grad student, chemistry; nice legs—to Sam’s car did we realize it was A Nite on Boybon Street at Club Euphoria. 10:33—nada. One of Sam’s exes chased us from the Campus Alliance For Responsible Sex Meet-N-Greet at the Full Moon Pub (something about a busted rubber), and none of the girls at the Bean Fiend Friday Night Poetry Slam satisfied Clause A of our by-laws. 10:38—zilch. By the time we made it out to the Botanical Gardens for the Harvest Ball we’d given up on pretty persuasion, resigning ourselves to a nabbing. Ten feet away in the brush and one of us snapped a twig—and a mad dash to the car seconds ahead of the County PD’s K-9 unit, which happened to be holding its annual Meet-N-Sniff in the next rotunda. 10:45—nix.

Everything, I say—and now this:

10:50—the both of us gaping at the PARTY WITH JESUS! banner drooping slack-jawed over the entry to the Tate Memorial Ballroom. Dead center in a sea of taupe milled a subcontinent of primly-dressed students ladling unspiked punch, chatting up the Lord and flirting with what we hoped was mutual chastity. The room hummed with tepid Christian rock and an utterly alien strain of conversation . . . it wasn’t pregnant with alcohol or sexual desperation. Rather, a thrum of conviction shook the room: the marching beat, the Hi-ho, hi-ho of Christian soldiers.

A devastatingly cute blonde forced the words “Welcome to the Christian Student Crusade for Christ” through the smile gouged into her face. Wielding her dimples like scourges, she herded us into the crowd. She branded us each with a nametag, disarmed the dimples and left us by the punchbowl. A backward glance would have shown her two pairs of unblinking eyes following her every move—a couple of crocodiles watching a hapless swimmer wade into the Nile.

Sam began peeling away his nametag before starting, glancing about nervously and smoothing it surreptitiously against his chest. “I’m scared, Joe.”

“Me too.”

“How are we supposed to lure a virgin like this?”

“We must know someone here. We’ll take her outside for—for a smoke.”

“I don’t think they smoke.”

“A breath of fresh air, then.”

“With us?” He sniffed an armpit, picked at his Big Johnson T-shirt; we had both dressed for a mess and smelled not so faintly of dank earth. “And if we do, how will we know she’s a virgin?”

“I’m sure we can work that into the conversation somehow.”

“This is hopeless.”

“Hey, you’re the one who had to invoke the by-laws. Wait—I know her. Sandra, Susan—Sara! Sara from Intro to Ethics. I think.”

For the record, her name was indeed Sara. She did not smoke. But!—she was happy to get a breath of air with us. Catch up. Step away from that guy who’d been hitting on her all night. . . .

And then: the nabbing. Followed by: the pursuit.

No word yet as to the state of Sara’s purity. Good screamer, though.

The Crusaders rounded the corner at a gallop. I crashed into a tree at full sprint, coming dangerously close to an erotic encounter with Sam as I airbagged his own sudden stop. He slipped around me, slid over the hood of his car and racked himself on a parking meter—

But you know something’s on your side when his asthmatic, ‘68 Mustang treasonous transmission fires on the first try. He jumped the curb, catching air that would have done Steve McQueen proud, and peeled off.

Like I said: smooth.

*     *     *

The house grinned lopsidedly at us as we waded through thigh-high weeds and mounted the front steps. Our residence stood starkly apart from the others lining Fraternity Row, proud in its putrescence, like the junkie brother convinced only he really “gets it.” What it lacked in Playmate posters and dart boards, forty guys sharing ten bedrooms and two showers, it somewhat less than made up for with a floor that sagged and groaned, a tetanus-laced cornucopia of exposed, rusted nails, and creepers out back that had devolved into a writhing organic deathtrap capable of engorging small children and stray dogs . . . but it was a roof over our heads, and even if that did leak in anything but the lightest drizzle, the house had two things going for it: location and our Greek letters hanging crooked over the porch.

The Alpha Omega house: an Amityville Horror in miniature, a House of Usher frozen in the midst of its Fall, a Hill House just big enough to haunt two young men.

Lighting and heat by Hell.

Sam vectored into the living room and dissolved into the Green Monster, a half-ton colossus of a couch forced on us by his parents. Its age and general fetor suggested he’d probably been conceived on it during some especially wild key party back in ‘79. I crumbled to the rug, listened to the clock merrily tick-tocking our demise.

We sprawled in wretched silence, Sam working on a black eye and I sporting a split lip. In an hour the universe would fall out of alignment and slip back into something more comfortable—that meaningless, star-speckled void of which the Junior Sagans, holding their vigil on the Physics building roof (the all-male Junior Sagans; a bitter pill after all that stair-climbing) are so enamored. For once in a thousand years on either side of our flyspeck lives, those stars and planets and quasars and black holes were a line drive up Orion’s Belt, ONE NITE ONLY!!! and screaming for blood.

The eleventh hour struck. “We’re finished,” Sam moaned. “It’s over.”

“It never even began,” I answered sonorously.

Before the last bong left the clock, headlights flooded our driveway. An engine died. Doors slammed. I looked at Sam, saw two glimmers of fear in the shadows. “Who—?”

“What—?”

“Why—?” Before we reached where, when and how and hit for the idiotic cycle, I crawled into the foyer, slinking up against the front door. Menacing footsteps ground the gravel drive. Shapes indistinct enough to hint at a mob of vengeful Crusaders coalesced in the moonlight.

“There are three of them. . . .”

Sam pressed his face to a window. “Isn’t that Rachel Pierce?”

We exchanged doomed looks, but there was never any doubt once he named our poison. The door swung from my grasp, hit the wall and rebounded into my outstretched hand as if it was eager to see this thing—whatever it was—get started . . . or get the hell out of the way before the shit went down.

*     *     *

Rachel Pierce usually wore an expression of predatory disinterest, a lioness carelessly surveying the savanna she owned, her eyes green fires stoked by unearthly hands. She didn’t alter it tonight.

She swept into the house with a groin-wrenching whoosh, each step shotgunning a hip at one of us. A spaghetti-strap sheath the color of the sky in heaven clung to her with carnal abandon. The heels she wore seemed like a simple prop for one whose feet never touched the ground; the floorboards that creaked angrily at Sam and me only whined in submission beneath her weight.

No member of Alpha Omega Alpha was anything less than stunning; something about the hazing transmogrified the mildly attractive pledges into avatars of splendor and disdain. AOA was a man-eating shark cutting through the chum of college life, leaving a lustful wake wherever a Sister passed. Each drove a luxury car no more than two years old. Not one had ever seen a skirt too short to wear. And Rachel Pierce personified the apex of their philosophy, the President of a coven of succubae preying on our campus.

Two of her cadre followed her in: a blonde of the pouting variety and a brunette from the school of flawless alabaster skin. Each wore a black minidress and an unforgiving look.

“You’re Sam Vasquez?” Sam swallowed audibly and nodded. “And you’re Joe Tudlong.” I tried to answer, but fear and lust had concocted an interesting blockage in my throat. I had never heard Rachel speak, never been allowed close enough. Her voice sounded like—honey. No—smoke. No. . . .

“So this is Alpha Omega.” She eyed the foyer, the living room, tossing a head that on any other body would have been called vulpine, shaking a bronze mane that on any other head would have been called frazzled. “Okay: so you two are trying to raise a demon.”

“What?” I sputtered. My best “I am not a crook” impression: the shock and incredulity unfeigned, though the innocent-yokel shtick needed work.

“Is this some kind of . . . interfraternal . . . hazing thing?” Sam choked.

I would certainly have let Rachel haze me.

“Oh, come on.” She put her hands on her hips, cocked a knee. “If there’s a Satanic fraternity, didn’t it ever occur to you there’d be a Satanic sorority, too?”

*     *     *

In the ensuing silence you could have heard a pin drop—though it would have been followed by two thuds as Sam and I fell dead from shock.

Sure, we’d passed the AOA house at Fall Rush. The Sisters posed like marble Venuses, making absolutely no attempt to woo pledges; instead, at long intervals one would simply jab a finger at some doe-eyed freshman and spit “You!” in a tone that brooked no disobedience. Not that I have a nose for evil (just a taste, really), but nothing about their behavior hinted at the otherworldly kind.

Sam cleared his throat raggedly. “We’re not really Satanic. . . .” He trailed off under the concentrated fury of our three flowers of evil, two in the bud and one in full, mordantly glorious bloom.

“Are we going to argue semantics or talk about this demon?”

We waved them into the living room. Rachel sat at one end of the Green Monster; I fell onto the other. Sharing a piece of furniture with her felt akin to shooting up morphine while giving blood. Sam tumbled into the recliner. The blonde occupied the doorway—blocking our escape?—while the brunette hovered over her mistress.

“How—I mean—how?”

“We have séances, contact our dead Sisters, and they tell us things. Like what’s going on here tonight.”

“They’ve been watching you two ever since you moved in—” the blonde said in a voice as soft and void of sustenance as cotton candy. A look from Rachel shut her up.

“What else did they tell you?”

“That you had to summon it tonight, and that you needed a virgin to sacrifice. Which you don’t have.”

“They knew we didn’t have a virgin?” Sam asked, touching his blackened eye.

“No.” Rachel glanced pointedly about the room, letting her eyes light acerbically on each of us. “I figured that out for myself.” She rose, began pacing like a caged tigress; the image of her in a cage forced me to cross my legs. “Don’t look so afraid, boys. We’re not here to threaten you—we’re here to make a deal.” Judging from the looks on her Sisters’ faces, “we” and “I” were interchangeable concepts to Rachel Pierce. “You’re trying to raise a demon but you don’t have a virgin.” She stopped. “I can supply the virgin.”

Sam glanced at me, brows furrowed. “What do you get in return?”

“Half the demon—plus the right to raise others. On a fifty-fifty basis, of course.”

“Can you take a timeshare out on a demon?”

“Why not? If we summon it, it has to do whatever we tell it to, right?” She stepped between us and thrust out a hand. “Deal?”

I rose first, fast, but wobbled; watching me, Sam chose dignity over speed and stood slowly, beating me to her hand by inches. “Deal.”—She said it for us, beaming.

“We’ll be back in twenty minutes. Wait here.”