A hollowed out cavity yawned back at him. The tissue surrounding the small unblinking maw where her eyeball had once been seemed to be calcified with a dark reddish-purple syrup. Grant half-expected Charli to cover and shake in humiliation, but she did no such thing. Instead she grabbed hold of his hands and heaved between her thighs. Almost instantly, her corset was off and she was purring in his ear.
Grant brought his eyes down to the fissure at her groin and that’s when he first recognized the real deformity. A blinking eyeball bulged from the furrowed cleft where her legs met. Although at first the black pupil gently bobbed listlessly in a cloud of chalky white cream, it seemed to harden as it concentrated on Grant. He was hesitant, but his hands were determined to draw nearer and nearer toward the grotesque mutation. The eyelid fluttered powerfully, enveloping and uncovering the small bulge, as Grant’s inquisitive fingers drew nearer.
Suddenly, the venereal oculus began to shrink, withdrawing backwards into the blackened carrion pit between Charli’s legs. Before Grant had the opportunity to react in disgust, his fingers seemed to be drawn inside. Further and further. And without warning, his entire forearm had been inhaled by the hollowed cavity. Charli seemed to chortle in girlish delight as Grant’s forearm stirred inside the gap with a squelching sound.
Without warning, something pained Grant’s arm. He tried to pull, but it seemed to stir in place as if it were permanently locked. He felt his flesh gently boil, loosening as the flabby masses of lightly haired skin were swallowed down inside the gelatinous cavity. Finally his hand wiggled freely and seemed to loosen from the gurgling orifice. He drew it out and found his forearm had been completely shredded of all skin.
All that remained was throbbing mass of glossy pink muscle varnished with thin blue threads of veins. The freshly naked tissue seemed to ooze slime that was not so dissimilar from the sap already dripping down the paneled walls.
Grant couldn’t help but medically admire the numbing quality of the slime as it glossed his arm. This appreciation was swiftly dashed, however, as soon as more and more of his tissue began to bubble and drip, clotting with the milky sludge already pooling on the floorboards.
Of course nothing could be done, but Grant continued to call out until he saw Mrs. Leatheran in the doorway. She immediately challenged his wails of agony with a hellish cackle of contentment.
“I expect it hurts a great deal, Dr. Grant,” she hummed softly.
Grant was choking on soft, quiet sobs as he cradled the disintegrating appendage soggy with viscous fluid.
“It hurts as much as a young boy spread out on an operating table. A brain and a heap of flesh as merely putty in your palms.” She held her hands out as if to gently coddle the vulnerable form of which she spoke.
Grant staggered forward, but the pain was far too crippling and his knees buckled, knocking him to the floor. Mrs. Leatheran drew further inside the room and her heels quietly squished as they glazed over the gelatinous goo polishing the floor.
“I regret I haven’t been entirely honest with you, Dr. Grant. Charli and I are not endeavoring assistance in her disfigurement. She’s looking for a suitable lover.” She petted Charli, who continued to salivate, coyly teasing the doctor. “But, obviously, any potential lover found her deformity – revolting.”
Although Grant was trembling, bewildered, he could scarcely regard Mrs. Leatheran for too long without the occasional glance back down to examine his disfigured extremity.
“Charli’s mutation allows her to generate identical living tissue,” the old woman began. “Once the old flesh is duplicated, it gives way to a superior imitation. Naturally most wouldn’t be so agreeable with this process. Therefore, we needed to find a recruit. Someone – as expendable as you.”
His eyes cramped with fear as he found the flesh of his shoulder following suit and slowly softening into a dripping waxy paste. The dissolving tissue seemed to spread at a very swift speed as more and more of Grant’s flesh began to relax and melt.
“After all, even children are expendable,” she began. “Like Charli’s sweet brother. The bastard child of my daughter. The one whom you neglected and allowed his poor, helpless brain to soften to – goo.” Mrs. Leatheran’s eyes blazed with an unequivocal fury as she neared the doctor. “We couldn’t make a sound because the scandal would have destroyed the Leatheran family name.”
Grant struggled to make a rebuttal as his loosened jaw unhinged, drooping, and the flesh softened. He moaned as his tongue lolled out of the relaxed, yawning maw, and a collection of teeth dribbled from the dissolving gums. His rotten tooth no longer pained him. Nonetheless, he could find no strength for words.
Mrs. Leatheran had some, however. “Charli will have her child. Not from you, I regret. The child will be spawned from the living tissue that Charli and you create with these fluids, Dr. Grant. Flesh born from flesh.”
Without warning, the syrupy pools of pallid creamed gel began to fizz and froth while they simmered, thickening. As the gel bubbled, the shape of an undefined skull began to emerge, crowning from the churning glaze. A figure crawled out of the bubbling goo with the help of two undeveloped limbs of slimy tissue that curled and wiggled like tentacles. Although the shape’s form was seemingly human, the creature was nothing but a stretch of undefined naked muscle soaking wet with a coat of dripping dark red.
Grant shut his eyes in disbelief. He felt his lids flutter open, but an unflinching darkness greeted him. The creature’s tissue creased and two eyeballs expanded from the wrinkles on both sides of the gaunt muscle. As soon as Grant’s loosened lower jaw disconnected from the melting tissue and belly-flopped in the cream colored slush, the behemoth winced and inhaled for the first time through a widening slit above a formless jawbone.
While Grant staggered back, the remainder of his disintegrating body squirming in a puddle of liquefying flesh, the creature advanced and hissed through the expanding fissure of its mouth. It whispered, “I seem to have a rotten tooth...”
The Devil: A Love Story
Aaron J. French
The tunnel leading to the surface was a long one, but he had walked it a thousand times. It even cleared his mind, this slow steady uphill trek through granite and sediment, through caverns and caves, up through the underbelly of a mountain in California, USA, where the solitary door stood attached to nothing, composed of ether, not physical matter, invisible to all save the spirits, angels, demons, and the dead.
The flickering black door with an inlaid gold pentagram that had stood from time immemorial under the stars, moon, clouds, and sun. Among wind-seared rock peaks and thunderous oak trunks. The door from which he presently emerged, calm-headed and clear-thinking, into a world of thoughts and matter, which the silly humans called home.
His leather boots crushed into the sod as the black door swung closed behind him, and he took a moment to enjoy the verdant scenery and feel the cold mountain air on his fire-burnt skin. He flipped up the collar on his ageless, heavy-duty brown trench coat.
The woman was on his mind. Nothing short of that could draw him to the surface. Maybe a little war, a little famine, but even those tiresome things had grown old with time. New World Orders, genocide, imposed starvation, black-on-black crime, drug addiction, rape, even a bit of piddly-diddly among the priests and the young boys—all fine, all well and good—but these days it only bored him. He’d become lonely and cold in his subterranean prison. Worse, he had grown blasé, like some kind of jaded Bohemian convinced he’d experienced all there was to life, sleeping with the finest male and female lovers, partaking of the finest opium and hash.
Though life had lost its flare, he felt but a singular mode of expression available, a desire sprouting up from his coiled black soul: the need for female companionship. And not the drowsy fuck-for-alls, the languished huddling boys and girls plowing in and out of each other in the dark, whispering sweet notes of hate into twittering ears. He wanted the real thing, someone to occupy his eternity—a woman, the woman. He wou
ldn’t deign to call it love, but it was something close.
Something he dreamed of.
Like she dreams of me...
For years now—many years since she was a young girl couched away in the abusive and fragmented world of her family—dreaming of the day he’d arrive and take her into his muscular arms and wrap his death talons around her face.
She had dreamed, and each dream was a message, a bolt shot through time and space, and he was on the receiving end, and yet he hadn’t cared. Why should he?
But now... now her dreams of tender aching, her images of fierce longing, her promises of total unification, these coalesced in him and bound them both together irrevocably. They’d drawn him up to the surface after all this time, even when the most brutal and malicious acts of corrupted free will had failed to garner his attention.
He reminded himself again...
...she still dreams of me...
...and started down the mountain.
* * *
The world had become a stain. He’d not walked with earthly feet in his physical form since the early nineteen hundreds. How things had changed. What little life and vitality, what little fervor he had witness in the people back then, was now expunged, leaving their eyes and souls hollow, passionless, empty. Their words were like animal sounds, their idiotic laughter like chittering hyenas, even their petty wants and desires seemed pathetic.
At least before they could still evoke their drive for pure sin, their desire to corrupt reality and mutate it in ways unthought-of. Now they were walking corpses, animals devoid of thought. Thought, which itself was the basis for pure sin. Animals driven around by their desires, helpless pathetic beings sniveling, whining, with no concept of the power—for good or evil—they housed within.
It made him sick.
He walked for several hours, finally arriving in the smog-covered crumbling metropolis known as Los Angeles. He wandered among the colorless, many-windowed buildings, the zigzagging overpass highways, the swarming groups of civilians, of all ethnicities, spread about from gutters to sidewalks, from foothills to suburbs.
She lived here... somewhere.
He would find her.
* * *
Her house was a shabby one-story dwelling, of the ilk so common in the city, with walls painted gray, bars on the windows, fence around the scraggly front yard, and a semi-affordable automobile in the driveway. Lights burned in the windows, casting an eerie yellow glow across the grass. The faintly burning stars and bone-white moon hung overhead like silent observers.
She lived alone. A steady string of lovers came and went, but she’d managed to avoid the marriage curse. She was saving herself, he knew, for him. Luckily she had also been bold enough to stifle each child that had formed in her womb. Something like a half dozen abortions, and she was only thirty-five. But this was the way of things. A child would have caused problems. It was better that she endured her hollow existence alone...
...leaving space for him.
He opened the gate with his large raw hand. It squealed on its hinges. As he stepped over the cement path, his boots made barely audible clopping noises. For a moment he closed his eyes, left himself, poured his being through one of the windows. He wanted to double-check that she was alone. He returned to himself satisfied and moved around the house to the backyard.
Dogs barked; police sirens sounded in the distance. He crept up the porch to the sliding glass door. Tried it. Locked. Waved his hand. Unlocked. Silently hauled it open, slipping inside.
He examined the contents of her small, meaningless existence. The usual arrangement of furniture, a desk and a few chairs, and farther back the kitchen with its cupboards and appliances. A flatscreen TV gibbered mindlessly to his left. He glanced at it, watching the parade of colors and lights dancing across the glass.
She was in the room waiting for him.
He went to her.
Pictures hung on either side of his head as he moved down the hall. A slightly ajar door beckoned him into her room. He patiently observed the rows of photographs recalling her family members, the awful fiends who had made her life what it was. A few younger faces, which he presumed were acquaintances.
The last picture was a reproduction of the Christ being, oddly misrepresented in the usual manner that humans preferred, with soft white skin, blue eyes, and flowing blond hair. The being of the Creator made flesh had each of His hands raised—one palm up, one forming the holy mudra. An inscription at the bottom read: You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.
The devil scoffed and pushed the door open.
She was sitting on the bed. Mary. Mother of the Christ. Keeper of the Suffering. Cross-legged in perfect meditative repose, dressed in a flowing white dress that, though inexpensive, managed to instill a sense of elegance. Her long slender body seemed to poke out at various angles. Her thin face was calm and comely; her bushy reddish eyebrows matched her tousled red hair. Her eyes were closed and her small but appealing breasts strained against the dress. Her milky legs unfurled from under the hem, exposing a sea of sensuality.
She raised one hand and made the sign of the holy mudra. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
He stepped into the room and closed the door. “Long have your dreams invaded me,” he said.
The hint of a smile. “Finally you decide to answer.”
He grunted.
“Took you long enough.”
“I watched you grow like a flower from the river of your own suffering. A baby expelled into the prison of pain and matter. You were given unto wicked hands. As the dreams entered my awareness, I watched as your father molested you, your cousins as well, even the older boys from down the street. You were like a pincushion for their malice. Then your father died and I watched as your mother tried in vain to raise you. I saw the fights, the arguments, the beatings.
“Perhaps the worst was the time she slammed your head against the stove while the flame was still on, scorching you. Your face bears the scar. All you wanted was to get away, to be free of your family, the ones who had caused you so much pain and suffering. Is that true, have I read the dreams correctly?”
A single tear flowed down her cheek. She nodded.
He continued, “Later you escaped with a scholarship to the university. Your mother hung herself in the bathroom using one of your father’s neckties. You got the call in your dorm room on campus, but you didn’t return for the funeral. You let the phone receiver drop from your hand like a heavy stone, then you ran to your room and dove into the bed. You wept and sobbed, but not for her and not for her death. You wept for yourself—your own tortured existence, your pain, your suffering. Do I have that right?”
More tears, more nodding. She opened her eyes. Two blazing blue orbs in the throne of her skull, looking out into the room, into nature, into reality, marked by fierce intensity and a burning intelligence. The eyes from his dreams.
How he adored her. How he longed to ingest those eyes with his own burning desire and infuse their beings together, a knitting of the flesh, a binding of two hearts, the absorption of soul energy.
“May I touch you?” he said.
She furrowed her brow, tears falling, and made a sort of pouch-y face with her lips. “How do you mean?”
He raised his hand. It seemed to burn the air in the room, to swim with colors and a dense red haze, flickering in and out of focus. As he waved it back and forth, it left trails. “The touch of this hand,” he said, “is unlike anything you have ever experienced. It is not matter or flesh, but pure spirit, pure emotion. Pure other world. It will burn you.”
She shuddered with a wave of tears, a bubble of snot forming in her perfect white nose. “I wanna burn until only ashes remain,” she said.
He stepped toward the bed.
She was shaking before he laid his hand on her. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
He looked into her eyes. Her face was framed by the various paintings of Christ that hung on the walls a
round her. He ignored these. “I am only going to touch, just a single touch, but that will be enough.”
“Where?”
He smiled, understanding her concern. “On your shoulder.”
She relaxed. “OK.”
He laid his hand upon her.
Immediately she began to squirm. He could feel her flesh on fire, the intense burning he was channeling into her. Her skin turned reddish-orange. Long strands of red hair lifted off her head, as if by electricity. She screamed. “My God! What are you doing to me?”
“I’m bringing what’s inside of you to the surface. Be calm and try to relax. Let it happen.”
She whimpered something that might have been OK, then shut her eyes with deep breaths and managed to calm down. He pressed his hand more firmly against her, digging fingers into the spaces between her bones. A current of invisible energy situated miles above him in the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere funneled down into the top of his brimmed hat and discharged itself into her shoulder. He wondered how much she could take.
With a deep breath she deflated a little, then suddenly a flood of fresh tears burst from her and she made loud sobbing noises, muttering words in-between the gasps, her fingers curling and uncurling in her lap.
He closed his eyes, sending his essence down the length of his arm, diving into the center of her forehead and entering her mind. He watched. Images from her life, many of which he had seen before. All the abuse, the pain, the suffering—every vivid picture was a work of anguished art.
If he’d had any compassion left in him, which he did not, he might have felt an immense sorrow, but instead he watched, an emotionless spectator, as scenes of horror and abuse faded in and out. After doing this for a while, he released his grip and re-entered his body. She calmed instantly and opened her eyes.
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