by Brian Hodge
LIES & UGLINESS
By Brian Hodge
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright 2016 by Brian Hodge
Cover by James Powell
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the award-winning author of ten novels of horror and crime/noir, over 100 short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and four full-length collections. His most recent collection, Picking The Bones, from 2011, became the first of his books to be honored with a Publishers Weekly starred review. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater as one of the 113 best books of modern horror.
Recent and upcoming works include a lengthy novella, Without Purpose, Without Pity; a collection of crime fiction, No Law Left Unbroken; and an updated hardcover edition of his early post-apocalyptic epic, Dark Advent.
He lives in Colorado, where he’s currently engaged in a locked-cage death match with his next novel and other projects. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
Connect with Brian online through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), his blog (www.warriorpoetblog.com), or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).
Book List
Novels
Dark Advent
Deathgrip
Mad Dogs
Nightlife
Oasis
Prototype
The Darker Saints
Wild Horses
World of Hurt
Collections
Falling Idols
Lies & Ugliness
Picking the Bones
The Convulsion Factory
http://www.brianhodge.net
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Original Publishing Credits
“Madame Babylon” © Brian Hodge, 1997. First appeared in Hot Blood 9: Crimes of Passion.
“The 121st Day of Sodom” © Brian Hodge, 1996. First appeared in Hot Blood 8: Kiss and Kill.
“Empathy” © Brian Hodge, 1998. First appeared in Hot Blood X.
“Cancer Causes Rats” © Brian Hodge, 1991. First appeared in Cold Blood.
“Some Other Me” © Brian Hodge, 1997. First appeared in audio format on Hear the Fear.
“Nesting Instincts” © Brian Hodge, 2001. Original to this edition.
“Before the Last Snowflake Falls” © Brian Hodge, 2000. First appeared in Imagination Fully Dilated II.
“An Autumnal Equinox Folly” © Brian Hodge, 1998. First appeared in Midsummer Night's Dreams.
“Confession” © Brian Hodge, 1996. First appeared in Palace Corbie 7.
“Cenotaph” © Brian Hodge, 1998. First appeared in In the Shadow of the Gargoyle.
“Far Flew the Boast of Him” © Mike Mignola, 1999. First appeared in Hellboy: Odd Jobs.
“Now Day Was Fled As the Worm Had Wished” © Brian Hodge, 2000. First appeared in Dark Terrors 5.
“Pages Stuck By a Bowie Knife to a Cheyenne Gallows” © Brian Hodge, 2000. First appeared in Skull Full of Spurs.
“Driving the Last Spike” © Brian Hodge, 2000. First appeared in After Shocks.
“Little Holocausts” © Brian Hodge, 1997. First appeared in Dark Terrors 3.
“Dead Giveaway” © Brian Hodge, 1989. First appeared in Book of the Dead.
“Past Tense” © Brian Hodge, 1991. First appeared in Final Shadows.
‘Our Lady of Sloth and Scarlet Ivy” © Brian Hodge, 2001. Original to this edition.
“The Last Testament” © Brian Hodge, 1997. First appeared in The Mammoth Book of Dracula.
“The Alchemy of the Throat” © Brian Hodge, 1994. First appeared in Love in Vein.
“Come Unto Me, All Ye Heavy Laden” © Brian Hodge, 1998. First appeared online at Hellnotes.com.
“Endnotes: From the Gutters of Civilization to Your Discerning Eye” © Brian Hodge, 2001.
Once more, to Doli, who was there during all twenty-one of them.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
— John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Sh*t happens.
— Contemporary folk wisdom and bumper sticker
Table of Contents
Madame Babylon
The 121st Day of Sodom
Empathy
Cancer Causes Rats
Some Other Me
Nesting Instincts
Before the Last Snowflake Falls
An Autumnal Equinox Folly
Confession
Cenotaph
Far Flew the Boast of Him
Now Day Was Fled As the Worm Had Wished
Pages Stuck By a Bowie Knife to a Cheyenne Gallows
Driving the Last Spike
Little Holocausts
Dead Giveaway
Past Tense
Our Lady of Sloth and Scarlet Ivy
The Last Testament
The Alchemy of the Throat
Come Unto Me, All Ye Heavy Laden
Endnotes: From the Gutters of Civilization to Your Discerning Eye
Madame Babylon
For every turned cheek, a hand to stroke it; for every pursed mouth, another to kiss it; for every bared back, a whip to stripe it … for every desire, fulfillment, and for every act of every kind, eyes to watch it.
These were the unwritten credos of exhibitionist and voyeur.
If it could be done, Kraaft wanted to watch it. And if it could be done by Shawn, so much the better.
He had an image fixed in mind, from last year; couldn’t get it out of his head; spent time with it every day, like a painting bought for a desperate sum, then hoarded from all other eyes.
Shawn’s was one of the better-developed abdomens he’d seen, daily workouts augmenting what had been genetically blessed already. He’d always enjoyed pressing his cheek against it, and running a hand over the golden-olive skin, so warm, so silken on the surface, the
muscles beneath hard and taut in their intricate contour of ripple and curve. Her flaring hipbones were magnificent petals. Her shallow navel was both oyster and pearl.
Kraaft no longer recalled the faces of her lovers from that weekend afternoon — they were as interchangeable as his students at the university, and often drawn from the same pool — only that there had been four of them. It had been September and still warm, the breeze blowing through the bedroom windows sticky, the blunt tips of her honey-colored hair clinging to her throat. From chest to mons, a copious musk of sweat and saliva and semen coated her skin with a milky glaze. She’d drawn an unhurried fingertip up through the slick and put it to her lips while looking at him across the room and smiling, nothing in her green eyes to connote anything other than lust, satiety, and free will. Certainly not coercion.
He returned to the memory of this the way men in wars clutch photos of home, reminders of what once was real.
Nine months later, and she was gone without so much as phone call or note. There’d been no foul play here, not with an emptied closet left behind to plunge him into doubt, second-guessing each act to which she’d agreed and every cock that wasn’t his. Combing recollection for any hint she’d not been enjoying herself as much as he had after all.
This could not be the end.
To Kraaft there was nothing inherently sacred about marriage.
But he missed her terribly, and broken vows deserved at least an explanation, if nothing else.
The first true lead came during high summer, while the campus readied for its brief hibernation before resuming with the fall term. When Kraaft came home each afternoon and checked the voice mail accounts he teetered between eagerness and dread. The hope of news was often all that got him through the day. Nights took stronger stuff.
He’d sprinkled personals ads throughout possible destinations Shawn might’ve had. While she could’ve gone anywhere, he’d begun with the most likely metro areas. Chicago first, ninety miles to the east. Milwaukee and Indianapolis and St. Louis, the next nearest cities of any size. More. He’d composed ads directed at her, others for those who may have come to know Shawn in all her passions, for while she might conceivably have quit herself of them, he’d believe that when he saw it. Hungers, once roused, were like dragons: easier to awaken than put to sleep again. Any addict would tell you as much.
His ads had gone into papers catering to adherents of, if not the expressly forbidden, then at least the widely reviled. Pulp stock media made sex lives easier, saving time and effort, a cutting of the chase altogether. Vanilla sex needed no networking. Vanilla sex was a closed system — one cock, one cunt, one position, ideally a marriage license, and all of polite society bestowed its hands-off blessing. Skew the equation’s components too far out of balance, though, and how easy to find yourself contemplating the new horizons of underground self-help.
Personals ads were part catalogue shopping, part messages in bottles, but weeding through his voice mail messages in each city availed Kraaft of the ugly truth: They drew more than their share of pranksters, predators, and dolts. The honestly mistaken were the least of his troubles.
They were callers who claimed to have filmed her. Callers who claimed to love her, warning him from the search. Callers who claimed to have loaned her money, demanding of him repayment. Callers who assured him there could be no reunion unless they first repented of their sodomite ways. Callers who claimed to have dismembered her. Callers who claimed to be Shawn, then made demands — money usually, but not always. One pretender said there was somebody he would first have to kill.
Of course it was a sick world. The astonishing thing was the degree.
Finally, then, hope, a single ray from a black sun:
“I know her — the one from your ad? I met her a few months ago and that was it, but I could check around, maybe.” The voice was nearly sexless but ultimately female. “The offer’s only good if you’re who I think you are, maybe she mentioned you once or twice. You teach college? Sociology?”
At last, a response that didn’t reek of lies. From Chicago, no less — very heartening. If Shawn hadn’t deep down wanted to be found, why, then, had she stayed so close to home?
“So how do I know I can trust you?” was the first thing she said. “How do I know if I help you, you’re not planning on just shooting her in the head when you find her?”
“Shooting her in the head…?”
“Like you’ve never heard of that happening. It’s what men do best. Track something down and kill it. Why should their wives be exempt?”
Her name was Maggie and she appeared nearly as sexless as her voice. She wore no makeup, and her tangerine hair had been shaved to crosshatched stubble on the sides of her head, chopped longer at the crown. Her face, squared; her clothes, shapeless; her nails were gnawed to the quick. He counted nine silver rings up one ear.
“Because Shawn must’ve left you with a different impression of me,” he said. “Otherwise you never would’ve answered the ad in the first place.”
Around them, the clink of forks on dense white plates, the rattle of sweaty water glasses. Diner noises. The place had been her edict, public and neutral. A few strides down Lincoln Avenue and he could stand before the Biograph Theater, where decades ago bank robber John Dillinger and his big swinging dick had exercised their final lapse in judgment.
“Any other reason you would’ve called?” he asked.
“That’s a rhetorical one, right? If you’re dropping ads into Back Door Chicago, you have to know you won’t be hearing from people out of the goodness of their hearts.”
Kraaft slipped a hundred dollar bill from his wallet, split Franklin’s face down the middle before pressing half into the ring left by her water glass. It soaked through, clung to the tabletop like a wet leaf.
“Just like you have to know I’m not paying for attitude alone.”
His voice and steadiness of hand … for a moment he felt they were someone else’s. Someone who hadn’t rehearsed conversations in his head, writing his script in advance. He tried to regard it as no different than any classroom lecture.
Maggie peeled the sodden half-bill from the table and began blotting it between napkins. “Okay, I’m thinking.”
While she blotted, his gaze began to wander, sifting those he found watch-worthy from the rest, settling on a couple in a booth. The woman was East Indian, perhaps twenty, perhaps a student. Her lips were generous and softly brown. He watched them pucker around the tip of a straw, watched the shallow dimpling of her cheeks. The leap was a given, imagining how she’d look with her friend, mouth widening to accommodate. The palpitations of her throat were teasing, would caress flesh like the beating of a bird’s heart. Her hair, silk spun from obsidian, would sweep down to tickle the sensitized groin. He imagined the urgent coaxing of her hands.
“Hey,” Maggie said sharply. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you it’s rude to look at other women when you’re with one already?”
He was too startled to do anything but shrug an apology, then press on about Shawn.
“It’s too early now to do anything anyway,” Maggie said. “I just wanted to meet you first. You want me to earn the other half of that hundred, you’ll have to wait until tonight.”
“You haven’t even told me how you met her.”
“Like I feel like sitting here, telling you my business? I don’t think so.” She tucked the damp half-bill into a pocket. “But tell me something, Professor. You loved her, right?”
Kraaft said that he did.
“Then how you could do it? And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Shawn told me, I know. How does a man sit there and get off on watching the woman he loves fuck other men? Groups of them, even. How does a man ask her to do that in the first place?”
He considered outright refusal. If she wouldn’t tell him her business, what right had she to expect it from him? On the other hand, he wasn’t keen on Maggie’s harboring mistaken impressions.
“There was no gun to anybody’s head,” he said. “You think Shawn couldn’t have said no anytime she wanted? You don’t credit her with much, do you, implying she had no will of her own.”
“Well, obviously she did. She took off and now here you are.” Maggie’s smile was smug. “Would you fuck her after everyone else was through?”
“Yes.”
“Slip and slide around in whatever the others had left,” she said, and now he began to wonder what was going on. This had gone beyond idle cruelty. “When you kissed her, could you taste another man’s cum?”
“Is there a point to this?”
“Could you?”
Kraaft felt himself drawn in, and with an unsettling twist of loins realized not only that Maggie might have been enjoying this for its own sake, but so was he — revelations to a total stranger.
“Sometimes,” he whispered, “it would be on her breath.”
“But it wasn’t a gangbang every time, it couldn’t be. It was just the two of you sometimes, wasn’t it?”
Kraaft nodded. “Most of the time, in fact.”
“Those must’ve been pretty dull in comparison. How’d you get through them?”
“I…” He frowned. “I pretended to be somebody else.”
“No shit,” Maggie said, with abrupt and crushing judgment. “You must really hate yourself.”
She stood then, telling him when and where to meet her later, and as she left he decided against arguing. It would’ve done no good to cause a scene.
While finishing his coffee he returned to the Indian woman — what else might her splendid mouth inspire? But when her friend made her burst out laughing, her teeth were nothing as he’d imagined — yellowed as old ivory, with darker stains and snaggled spaces. Her gaze met Kraaft’s, and instantly self-conscious she clapped a hand over her mouth, then a moment later began to choke, as though laid low by his unexpected revulsion.
It had to have been written all over his face.
Kraaft considered checking into a hotel but knew he’d have no patience to while away the hours there. He instead remained in the broil of late summer and the throb and crash that was Chicago, that was anyplace of comparable size. He’d always found a morbid fascination with it, its barbarism so far removed from small town university life. It encouraged the deviant because the deviant was so easily overlooked here, its incubation nurtured behind endless facades of pace and purpose.
