Marian Glessing was having a terrible evening. Walking out into a crowded North Market Street, the waitress avoided a gaggle of drunks and cursed as she thought about the lack of revenue she had garnered. That’s what happened when your customers were pond scum from Europe. Suddenly, the sound of high pitched laughter pierced the night and turned her bowels to jelly.
A block away she saw her pal, Megan, and something was terribly wrong.
Behind her she heard a commotion and saw two homeless men – one white, one black – running through the second market building. Hot on their trails were various men and women led by a middle-aged mother of three from Akron, Ohio, screaming, “Stop! My purse!”
She turned to see Megan enter the first building towards the two thieves, although Megan didn’t seem to be Megan. Her friend’s long flaxen hair seemed to be receding in front of her and her lush figure was distorted. The tour guide’s shoulders began to spread and her wasp-waist began to contort in unnatural ways. Her once-perfectly proportioned face began to elongate. Marian was not the only person to find this disconcerting. Video cameras whirred and cell phones flipped.
A fetid aura rose from the market, and as the amalgamation of what-was-Megan shifted, so did its surroundings. What was eleven at night was suddenly dawn. Another, somehow older, market building sat next to the US Customs House. Feral cats and mangy dogs began to follow market vendors that emerged from the shadows, laden with chickens and sides of beef.
The homeless thieves, previously preoccupied with the howling crowds gaining ground behind them, suddenly turned their attention to the chimera that lay before them. Time, space, and the thieves stopped dead in their tracks.
The crowd following them froze as well, halted at the border of chaos demarcated by State Street.
In that stationary space of time, Pedi-cabs morphed into horses that began bucking at the low-rumbling laughter, the atmosphere fecund with horse effluvium. Pigeons began to grow like balloons being filled, changing into grotesque turkey buzzards that lined the tiled roofs, their beaks dripping with rotten flesh.
Those logging onto the various sites streaming from the crowd’s iphones and cameras thought they were watching a produced program. The laughter, the sense of sebaceous despair, all came barreling across the electronic spectrum, disrupting the wave/particle duality. The consciousness of a schoolgirl from Leningrad, a professor from Wichita, a steel worker in Beijing and scores of others suddenly found themselves amid the crowd bustling through the 1902 tableaux.
The homeless men dressed in period rags watched in horror as the-thing-that-was Megan grew into a hulking black man, his muscles ripping though the fabric of his host’s clothing. His reptilian eyes alive with malevolence as he headed for the two theives.
It had all happened in less than a second, and the two men were still barreling along their escape route when they ran straight into the arms of the dark giant who grabbed them by the scruffs of the necks and raised them above his head. His voice rattled through the market, tinged with the tripping cadence of East Africa. “I am John Domingo. Behold, I am the ultimate sovereign of the root. I control all within my purview. I have come back from the dead and I am devouring your soul!”
Holding the thieves still higher, his sonorous reverberations rang ever louder, “I am more powerful than Christ himself! Behold, I hold a thief on either side of me. “
John Domingo’s eyes began to glow. A viscous green light began to fill the market like water in an aquarium, blanketing all in the 1902 scenario.
Then, just as quickly, the radiance disappeared. The stalls laden with meat and produce were bathed in a syphilitic sunlight. With the speed of meted justice, something yanked all three men to a level right below the rafters. Men and women, white and black, past and present watched slack-jawed as the septic face of the ancient root doctor contorted in agony, a white caul shrouding his jet black features. Massive finger marks made deep indentations as the sound of strangled gasps echoed through the City past and present.
Domingo’s massive hands unclenched the thieves, who sprinted off in all directions. Whatever held John Domingo suddenly wrenched him as a dog shakes a rabbit. Monstrous retching punctuated the dense quiet. To the world, something ponderous occurred, although if pressed, no one could explain it.
The massive black man fell to the ground and began to shape shift back into Megan, her body now broken and misshapen. Her head lolled back, distorted features masked by a cascade of flaxen hair. A disembodied voice from the ether croaked, “This place is mine.”
At once, traffic on both sides became as it should. Marian Glessing awoke with the sense that dusk was drawing nigh, even though it had only been an hour since Megan first encountered the ruffled man. Marian ran over to her friend. What she saw would scar her for the rest of her short life.
The videos of the curious case of John Domingo first appeared on October 31, at 10:57pm. By midnight it was breaking news. Millions all over the world stared into the eyes of unadulterated wickedness. By 2 am EST on All Saints Day, the evil stared back.
Mila Binhamton, a 16-year old cheerleader from Roslyn, Virginia, was transfixed by those orbs of iniquity. She felt a sensual tingling as her body began to contort in her bedroom. She walked down the hall to the kitchen. Her parents heard a sebaceous low laughter before being ripped to shreds with a meat cleaver.
All over America, this familial scene of bliss was repeated. As the sun rose on Washington, a homeless man sitting on the Ellipse stared at the White House and mumbled.
Inside the Oval Office, the order was given to launch every nuclear weapon in the arsenal.
Amid the rockets’ red glare, John Domingo just laughed and laughed.