11
Macbeth
Chicago, Illinois
Shakespeareʼs Twelfth Night Pub
October 31st, 2014
Time: 6:30 AM
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The night was Carlos Santanaʼs Maria Maria wrapped in a Roseville peanut farmerʼs cheap five-dollar-and-ten-cent cigars, and as Macbeth smoked, the silhouettes of the ashes of Dunsinane kissed the sky as ghosts. Skirting along the planes of hard muscle and harsher skin of the city. The flames around them rose, hissing with futile envy at the smoke, and the lovers in Chicagoan flagrante moaned. Moaned with the shrill ecstasy of the Scottish men and women in Fife, Dunsinane, Inverness, Glamis. Chicago was on fire, and as he approached the Twelfth Night with shaky hands, he too was the Windy Cityʼs paramour. Aroused by her violence, by the fiery blood in the air that possessed the fury of ten warships, by Chicagoʼs licentious kisses.
And then there was Ingibiorg, his brotherʼs wife.
Ingibiorg was the Rose of the West, laced in the deadly sins of their past and vintage rosette curls, and when the guitarʼs sorrow bled into the sky, so did his resolve. His brotherʼs wife was an Arabian storm that caressed the air with plumes of dark, original sin, an Arabian storm that coveted the clouds the way Ingibiorgʼs blind eyes coveted sin, sodomy, and salvation. When the chimeras hissed with delight at the sight of the Twelfth Night, plundering and pillaging its roof their pincers, they prowled towards her. Atop a bleeding chair of brass and bone, she sat – stroking the chimeraʼs chin – until her blind, silvery eyes followed his.
"So itʼs true," Ingibiorg mused in a thick Middle Eastern accent, chuckling. "Even the devil himself didnʼt want you."
Macbethʼs face hardened, and as Ingibiorg stroked the chimeras, she stared at him with that same look: a dark, treacherous face, deep and maniac in its muffled rage.
"Where is Marjorie, Ingibiorg?" he asked, patient.
She tskʼd.
"The chimeras are unique pets of yours. Portuguese breeds, I reckon; your dark flower had a penchant for exotic animals when she was a queen," she hummed quickly, reminiscing.
"She always wanted things she couldnʼt have, and after: bringing the world to its knees the first time you ruled alongside her, several assassination attempts, the death of your children, and spending nearly a millennium in Hell, one would think the King of Scotland himself would also avoid wanting things he couldnʼt have."
Ingibiorg smiled wolfishly, baring her teeth as she rose to her feet with his chimeras wrapped around her ankles. They hissed, they writhed in sheer anger, and as she strolled towards the bar, she writhed in red-hot emotion. Pouring wine with fingers painted in carmine colors. Leveling a mischievous gaze, Ingiobiorg watched Macbeth with a darkness to her, a cannibalistic darkness, a hungry darkness, and she beamed up at him, conspiratorial.
"You look good, Macbeth; or rather, sound like it. An Ozymandias archetype."
"And you look like a demonic succubus."
"I take it back," Ingibiorg chuckled. "I look good. So good for my age. Crazy good. You, on the other hand? You look like a Molochian demonʼs experiment of meek desperation and child sacrifice gone horribly wrong."
The wine was poetry; gospel as she drank with him, and with every dirty look, every inferno of sweet elation, every jerking and aching movement in her steely eyes only added to her poetry. Her theatrics, her scheming.
"Enough stalling!" Macbeth barked. "Did you really think I wouldnʼt know that you brought me back to life, that you sicced the DeMarcus girl on me? That you were in cahoots in Marjorie, with Shakespeare, this whole time to use the memory of my dead children against me? Exploiting children to do your bidding and bringing back the dead? Please. I taught you that entire play move-for-move."
Ingibiorg drank, her eyebrows arching upwards in delight at his malevolent snarls.
"Mmm, Macbeth, youʼre as arrogant as ever," Ingibiorg said menacingly.
"Yes, bringing the Marcella girl to Chicago...it was an orchestrated plan. I did bring her here to make you think about Marjorie, about Isabelle and Lulach. To once again, tear apart Scotlandʼs bloody king because somewhere in that little dead heart of yours is the same queer Scottish boy looking for validation in cheap p*ssy. To make you feel as I felt when you killed Thorfinn, or Banquo as they call him in this world. I wanted to hurt you, but, never forget. If you go down, I only go down with you. Fate has made that clear enough with this...Curse of ours, so yes, I sicced the Marcella girl on you, but Iʼm not Shakespeareʼs puppet or Marjorieʼs b*tch. I donʼt work for your wife or Master Shakespeare."
The fire was slick against Macbethʼs skin as he walked into Shakespeareʼs quote-on-quote "bubble," slithering with stark black residue like a snake. Soaking in Ingibiorg and her wickedness, Macbeth scanned the premises and picked up on the subtlest things. Hamletʼs skull. Dried up quills pouring from the ceilings with dreamcatchers, moans shrilly echoing in the halls and bouncing off the walls, cheap red carpets full of ale stains and stumblinʼ drunk, singinʼ drunk, stammerinʼ drunk women cascading to the floors like actresses in a dramatic rendition of one of Shakespeareʼs plays.
She had stunned him into silence.
"Then who do you work for?" Macbeth asked.
"Me. I work for me," Ingibiorg said, leaning in closer.
She was so deliciously creepy; Ingibiorg was. Like an arachnid, with her silvery blind eyes glistening, pupil-less. Her mannerisms were charming once moment, and sadistic the next. She sniffed him out, she purred at the way goosebumps prickled his skin, and then she smiled with a spiderʼs sluggishness.
"You see, dear, Marjorie may have promised you an apocalypse, but Marjorie has always been a dark, twisted liar. And she always leaves a tell, a sign that sheʼs bluffing. You forget, Iʼve known your dark flower far longer than you."
A beat.
"You think Marjorie didnʼt bring me back."
Ingibiorg turned to him, laughing as she grinned from ear-to-ear.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I know exactly who brought you back," Ingibiorg mused with mirth. "And she is so much more subtly evil than your dark flower. Behind the pain, and the exotic flair, everything about her is simply...glorious. Ozymandias in the making, and I must say, you getting a taste of your own medicine is everything I could ever want for you. Your legacy is a lie. Youʼre nothing."
Macbeth sized her up. Feasting, consuming, devouring every little tremble of her voice. Every cocky smirk, every menacing stare because like she knew Marjorie lied, he knew when his brotherʼs wife was bluffing. His legacy never died.
No, it lived on. His blood-line, his offspring. In bohemian summers and in exotic flowers and fauna, and blistering Cuban skin and bleeding Scottish torture. His legacy did live on, hanging barely by a thread, but it was inside Marcella DeMarcus with his fire thundering through her veins, his blood. Her skin was flushed in Isabelleʼs golden tan, cheekbones carved with Lulachʼs sharpness, freckles painted with Marjorieʼs cultural vibrancy – and that wasnʼt coincidence. His legacy did not die.
It lived on in Thorfinnʼs – in his brotherʼs family, in his wife. Somehow, somewhere.
Macbeth stared at Ingibiorg with a hollowness as she walked away, the cross branded on his cheek burning with the same inkling he got when he itched for a good...book.
"And you, my dear, are an ungrateful b*stard," Macbeth whispered, the promise of a threat stark on his lips.
"You underestimate me; you all have. Poking and prodding and reading the ramblings of a madman thinking you know what madness is even though you kissed my boots. And begged for mercy, for escape. Youʼve only tasted madness in blood and poverty and wanton lust and in Machadoʼs grief as you weeped over the remnants of Thorfinnʼs memory and you think, you think you know me. That weʼre not the same, that youʼre somehow better than me, when youʼre nothing but the same beggarʼs b*stard girl from Hijaz who sobbed for a pretty lilʼ coin and a wee few bobs of Western c*ck in that aching c*nt oʼ yours for the validation you like to speak about and the chance to open that bloody mouth for the chance to work just as hard for a kingʼs worship as it does on your hands and knees.
"When my brother and I magicked to your land, the barren waste that it is, in search of an opportunity to save Scotland from its invaders, you kissed my boots. Do you remember that, Ingibiorg? The need to be a Scottish queen was on the tip of your tongue, so you kissed my boots trying to seduce your way into another lie. Well, go on, kiss ʼem. Because you can talk, but you and I both know I made you. That I am the reason you are still standing, and that you are an ungrateful b*stard."
He slammed her body against the ground, his fists ensnared around the strands of luxurious black hair. Her skull was glass, glass that hit his carotid and made arterial blood splash onto them with the fury of ten warships, the bone snapping just as briskly. Clenching his jaw, Macbeth yanked her head onto the floor and slammed, repeatedly, again and again, watching her cries and her blood and her ruined flesh explode out of her body with an ecstasy. The sound of the sickening crunch was aimless, he watched with a calculated cruelness as his fists worked with a Nordic savageness.
"You have no power over me," Ingibiorg spat, mouth chalk-full of blood.
Macbeth exploded. Fists working faster, knuckles driving into her skull, nails digging and scraping into her skin.
"I HAVE THE POWER TO TAKE YOU OUT, ANYTIME I WANT!"
He exploded.
"You forget who I am. I took a cowardʼs crown and I made it the most feared symbol in history. I burned in Hell and I still managed to stay on top of you and Shakespeare, and Marjorie, and the Rebels held dear. I made the Order of the Dragon with my bare hands, an Order that took out your son, and I created it on the backs of mindless servants and practitioners of dark magic that would immortalize its might. I was in league with a confederacy of murderers and politicians who tried to bring me down but I came back. I am still here. And your husband, the selfish and dim-witted and foolish Thorfinn of Orkney, Banquo the Mighty, he was my patsy to insurmountable power. Oh, I have power and my secrets are going to rot inside of you because I hold all the cards. I have method to my madness. I spent 954 years in Hell, alone in the ashes of my glory, and you think I didnʼt spend every cold, waking moment plotting my rise back? Come now, you see everything. Immortals always do. So tell me, Ingibiorg, did you really think I was just some lovesick Molochian demon grieving over my life choices?"
Ingibiorg stared at him spitefully, deep in thought.
She spoke slowly, and he relished in every word.
"Ripping out the flesh from Decarabiaʼs womb, a place of life, summoning Orion with the Destroyerʼs portal, stabbing him and having your knife drink angelʼs blood, torturing Marcella and forcing out the tears of an innocent life from her eyes, taking that dead corpse in El Castillo and salvaging bits and pieces of her body. A constant push-and-pull with life and death...the dead shall rise, the damned will follow, we will take her lecherous body with the force of a thousand swords."
She froze as Macbeth pulled her in closer, his forehead brushing against hers.
"Itʼs a Moorish necromantic spell, recreated from one of Marjorieʼs spell-books to bring back the dead. You son-of-a-b*tch."
He inched closer to Ingibiorgʼs crippled form with a deceitfully touch. His callused fingertips reached for her face, his scabbed and boned fingers tangled in her hair and slamming her head closer to his. He relished in her tremors, in her fear, in her panic and her hate and he smiled as his face inched dangerously closer to his sister-in-law.
"Youʼre bringing back the dead to go to war for your godforsaken flower."
Macbeth stared at Ingibiorg listlessly.
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," he whispered simply, his hand ghosting over her throat.
Sweet and glorious it is to die for your country; sweet and glorious is war.
The dead rose with the fire, just as he remembered in his Norwegian captivity.
Pale shapes with haunted faces, hunched shadows, and flesh as white as motherʼs milk. The dead were dressed in thick black, boneless beasts with sullen eyes and ghostly bodies. Some were Blue Men of the Minch, water spirits that haunted the Minch Strait back in his day, frozen by the cold of Scotland and the sands of time, and some were fiery, snarling Arabian soldiers from the Falakian Realm of Fire baring their fangs. Growling, snarling, acidic venom oozing out of its lips – with a skinless nose, singed off by Hijazʼs scorching flames. Among them, among his undead Scottish soldiers, there was a fire. A spark. Ingibiorg shrieked as the chimeras screeched with the mournful cries of Macbethʼs bannermen, Words were wind, and they flowed with the wind better than anything he could conjure up. Mounting towards the sky, ripping the Twelfth Pub apart limb-by-limb.
Fire rained from the Heavens, thrashing in couplets of blood-stained downpour, and as Chicagoʼs destruction gave way to the christening of his army, he watched the beauty of the storm. Of its primordial creation of upper beings, greater beings. The sky was a blood red portal pregnant with the blood of those that fell with Macbeth into this New World, sputtering Scottish swordsmen and assassins and deft murderers from the damned isles of Hell. Fire was sewn from the most intricate blood of Scotland, his queen, his lover, his heaven, and when the dead came, they howled as wolves would. Hungry for vengeance, carnivorous as the fire grew more vehement. The bodies staggered in front of him, some decapitated some badly rotten, and his drums blared when they did, resurrecting his reign.
A constant reminder that this would be how creation ended.
The way it began.
Macbeth inhaled the sweet scent of the smoke as he watched the streets of Chicago, its splendor, its rugged glory, burn with the fury of a dragonʼs breath, and when he was done smelling the roses, his grip burned her throat. Crushing her windpipe with just a few measly fingertips.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings," he recited from Shelleyʼs poem.
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.