Summary: by Matt Wallace Read by Mat Weller Links for this episode: Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page Author Matt Wallace About the Author… from Amazon.com… A screenwriter, novelist, and the award-winning author of over one hundred short stories, Matt spent a decade traveling the western hemisphere as a professional wrestler and combat instructor before retiring to write full-time. He now resides in Los Angeles and bleeds exclusively on the blank page. He has no actual knowledge of the answer to life, the universe, and everything. But he makes sure to ask every demon he meets, just in case. Knowing by Matt Wallace A grey pallor hung heavy over the landscape. Heaven’s fire had long gone out, leaving the sky a cold hearth. The ashen soot that covered it might once have been the burning ember of eons, but now its livid color irradiated the early dawn. It soaked every molecule of air like a pale leaden necrosis, existing independently of the season, fostering neither cold nor heat. A caravan of old cars rambled through the grey morning, balding tires rolling over the broken disrepair of State Highway 24. Chrysler Imperials and winged hatchback Newports, Chevy Chevelles and Novas and flatbed El Caminos, Dodge Darts and Coronets, Ford Fairlanes and Falcons, Lincoln Comets and Continentals, Olds Eighty-Eights and Cutlass Supremes; early 1960’s vintages, all. They traveled toward Oneonta, the Northern New York town whose name was taken from the Iroquois word for a place of meeting. The Earth’s reclamation of its wilderness in post-nuclear North America continued. Lush foliage blurred as the cars headed deep into the rural upstate, creating rich green wraiths in their murky windows that danced and swooped and curved. The lead car, a Dodge Charger that outshined the rest by miles, would reach Gilboa around breakfast time. There the wind blew warm through the world’s oldest forest. There they’d been called. There they’d find the Answer. ~ The demon’s name was Malphas, and he cursed them all in a foul stream of half-a-dozen dead and dying languages. His voice sounded like strands of steel wool being pulled through intestines. After a treatise in multi-lingual blasphemy that lasted almost half-an-hour, he began speaking to them in English. “Pig-fucking whore masters of a Gomorrhan slum! Corroded cock-peeling corpus cavernosum! Your libation is the sour milk of hermaphroditic mares!” He struggled against the meaty, Kevlar-wrapped footmen holding him to the base of the fossil tree, but earthbound demons are among the frailest of creatures. His milky, ink-veined arms looked utterly childlike encircled in the gloved hands of his captors. “You stimulate hemorrhoid-ridden goat ani with fingertips dipped in placenta butter! The cur tongues of your mothers are the mercy strummers of harpy clitorides!” They’d unearthed Malphas some time before noon. Maxon’s crew were hours splitting the bark of the forest’s ancient inhabitants, cracking the trunks where demons made their homes. They liked the old things, the decaying things. Father Kilbride mixed tea with a porcelain travel kit he kept tucked away under the shoulder cape of his Catholic priest’s cassock. “Corpus cavernosum?” the Irish priest asked the assemblage at large, absently. Most of his concentration was aimed at sprinkling petrified leaves the color of jaundiced flesh into a doll-sized cup. “In males the corpus cavernosum is spongy erectile tissue that functions as capillaries during the arousal process,” Meta explained. Father Kilbride nodded, only half-hearing. His swollen, liver spotted hands shook as they attempted to manipulate the dried tealeaves. They did not simply shake; they were wracked with junkie tremors. Into the miniaturized teacup he poured water from a heated thermos. Ghostly fingers of steam curled up as it hit the leaves. Instead of sugar cubes, Kilbr[...]
