The Minotauress

by Edward Lee

  Balls stared. "Shut up. And Dicky? Git'cher ass upstairs and take care'a that splittail now."

  "Aw, but, Balls... "

  "Be a man, goddamn it!" then—

  FWUMP!

  Balls gave Dicky a hard kick to the pants.

  "Awright, awright!" Dicky hurried for the stairs.

  "And be quick about it. I'se don't wanna be here all night—"

  Dicky, however reluctantly, disappeared up the stairs.

  Balls gave the Writer a shove. "Come on, Writer. Let's git more loot loaded up."

  (V)

  Ain't fair, Dicky thought. It should'a been the Writer... His flashlight played over the wall, but then he quickly turned it off when he noticed the wedge of light in the gap of an opened door. That must be it...

  Dicky mounted the landing as quietly as a clumsy fat redneck slob could, then edged toward the door.

  A clock kept ticking but along with it he heard moaning, or at least he thought he did. Could Cora be right? Was there really a naked woman in there, masturbating? He didn't know what to make of the "painted black" part but—

  I'se'll just barge right in there and bust her in the chops, he resolved. Dicky was, for the most part, a monumental coward, but he wanted to make Balls proud. I'll show him I'se got what it takes, too...

  But before he could summon the courage to actually do it, a voice seemed to float out of the room, a quiet yet wanton woman's voice...

  Come in, young man, and bestow me...

  Dicky really didn't know what "bestow" meant, nor was he terribly convinced by the nature of the voice. It was more like words in a dream, not words actually detected by his ears.

  How could this be?

  Bestow me with your youth... and your surging virility...

  Dicky froze against the wall.

  I can smell your manfulness, I can smell your sperm...

  Dicky didn't realize it but the bizarre flutter of psychic vocalization had put him into a trance. Like a fat zombie, then, he pushed the door open and stepped in.

  Lamp light raved, overly bright, like the bulbs burning too hot, and of course it never occurred to Dicky now—in his half-wit trance—that there could be no lamp light in a house with the power shut off.

  I am the Night-Mother and the Queen of the Labyrinth, a shadow rising from the bed informed him. My cunt beats with your paltry heart, and your soulless lust and my evil are predestined to fuck...

  Kind of an odd thing for a maid to say, but then Dicky saw that it was no maid that rose smokelike from the high, four-poster bed. But it was a woman, all right, as voluptuous a woman as he'd ever seen, even in Hustler. High melon breasts; protruding, poker-chip nipples; a flawless hourglass contour. Long sleek legs rose to a hairless pubis dark and shiny as chocolate icing, and the flat stomach seemed to shiver around the slit-like navel. Yes, like the body of a Hustler centerfold save for one quirk:

  She was as black and shiny as newly poured road tar.

  Dicky could sense more than see her face; it was more of a symbol—an enigmagram—something that existed in an unglimpsable state. Hair just as black and wet as her skin seemed to radiate that same blackness.

  It has been eons since my infernal womb has gulped human seed, the voice flowed.

  As she moved gingerly from the bed across the room, the electric lamp on the Edwardian nightstand began to dim, but as this took place, her blackness seemed to glow within itself, as though she were composed not of flesh but electrified darkness.

  I need to be filled. A sleek hand that was hot and cold at the same time traced Dicky's fat cheek. He began to blubber like a baby, and with no volition on his part he dropped his dungarees to reveal a thumping, prong-like erection that felt so insanely hard he feared it might split like a hotdog in a microwave.

  Give me succor, the voice fluttered in his head. Let my night-cunt be the vessel for your lust, and then Dicky seemed to float backwards to the floor, levitating, until he lay on his back, his erection spiring.

  When the black woman sighed, the walls seemed to buckle. The cleft of her pubis parted as if by a specialized musculature until it gaped, and then she sat right down on Dicky's groin. His spectrally hard penis sunk deep.

  This otherwordly intercourse generated sensations that Dicky would never have thought possible. To him, a nut was a nut—the old Southern Boy Credo—and they all pretty much felt the same, whether he was raping a hot sixteen-year-old, having a go in a cow's backside, getting fellated by his uncle, or jerking off. But this?

  His brain seemed to turn to baby food from the intensity of the sensations: it was like a hundred wet, hot tongue-tips cocooning his penis simultaneously as the cocoon slowly rose up and down. When he looked up bug-eyed at his unlikely lover, he saw that her desire seemed to gorge her breasts even more, pushing the nipples out till their tips leaked a glistening black fluid. All the while more fluids at her groin gushed.

  My name is Pasiphae...

  Her breast lowered to his chest, then she rolled him over onto her, the black legs spreading wider to invite deeper penetration.

  Fill me now, fill me to the brim...

  Dicky's body froze up and his jaw locked open. His fat stomach heaved and then his eyes seemed to roll all the way back in their sockets until he was looking at his brain. He gibbered as he came, sperm rocketing up out of his penis as if by a hand-pump. The orgasm did not abate but instead magnified; it was as though he were taking a long hard beer-piss but with sperm instead of urine. His rotund body continued to quiver on top of her as his glands kept kicking his semen down into the hot satchel of her sex. Eventually he caught a glimpse of her eyes but saw only lidded holes through which could be glimpsed an insane, smoking city which smoldered beneath a red sky and black sickle moon, and when her lips parted to release a final blissful sigh, Dicky saw only a sparkling black chasm that went on without end. Black crystalline drool trickled from the corner of her lips, and then a black tongue lolled.

  Her soft hands gently pressed up against his fat-cushioned chest, and—

  THUNK!

  —she shoved him off of her body as though he weighed no more than a straw dummy. He collided with the wall. A painting of a woman named Elizabeth Bathory fell down and hit him in the head. Dazed, he looked on...

  Now she lay painfully spread-eagled, her tight buttocks actually arched up off the floor several inches as she masturbated fervently. Wet, slick clicking sounds filled the room as her black fingers plied the sexual fissure. More sighs of desperate pleasure rose up and up, until Dicky thought he could actually see those sighs, like rampant spirits amid the impossible black light...

  Good Gawd! Dicky thought.

  He scrabbled around on the floor, pants still down, until he found his flashlight and snapped it on. He shined it on the mysterious woman...

  The desperate masturbation continued, her hand a blur at her genitals. At a critical moment, then, her pelvis tensed as two fingers V'd open the abominable vagina, then the swollen black vulva puckered like grouper lips and began to spit out foot-long loops of some viscid fluid.

  She's comin', Dicky observed in the utmost shock, but like a dude!

  Indeed, the ejaculatory spurts did not abate until at least a dozen had transpired, collecting in a great glistening splotch between her legs.

  The woman's body tremored one more time, then fell still.

  Now I can die again, flowed the voice. Again and again and again...

  The room fell into utter darkness and for a moment was filled with a sound like a hundred rattlesnakes.

  She lay limp and quite dead, her sink-hole eyes half-opened and black tongue still aloll from the dead mouth.

  Dicky dragged himself up, shaking, his penis shriveled to a mushroom stem from the toll that his abyssal orgasm had exacted. When he'd retrieved his breath, he took a closer look at what the woman's genitals had expelled on the rug: what had to be several gallons of sperm-marbled slop.

  The fuck in tarnations is goin' on?

 
; The woman's body began to erode in the air, until it had disappeared completely.

  Dicky didn't even pull his pants all the way back up when he barged out of the room.

  (VI)

  The Writer and Balls both froze with boxes in their hands when Dicky plunged down the stairs into the mire of candlelight.

  "You bust her up, Dicky?" Balls asked.

  "I—"

  Balls smirked at Dicky's half-pulled-up jeans and limp-as-a-the-pinkie-finger-of-a-rubber-glove penis.

  "What the fuck you doin' standin' there with yer dick out? You punch the maid's ticket or not?"

  "I-I— Well, ya won't believe it, Balls," Dicky jabbered, "but Cora were right, there was a nekit lady up there so's I-I-I—"

  "You what?" Balls yelled.

  "I fucked her... "

  Balls frowned.

  "And then-then-then—she got's ta playin' with her pussy a mite fierce, and when she got herself off, she-she-she—"

  "She what?"

  Dicky's eyes bloomed. "She ‘jacker-lated... "

  "The fuck!"

  "I'se swear, Balls! While's she were comin', her pussy was squirtin' out a bunch-a goo—"

  "Goo?" Balls infuriated.

  "No lie. She come just like a fella, only with her cooze. Squirted a giant nut out on the carpet—there's a big puddle of it."

  "A puddle of what?"

  Dicky fidgeted. "Well, it looked like all'a my cum mixed up with a bunch of this black... goo."

  Balls frowned harder. The Writer thought: This is some high-brow crew.

  "Writer? Balls stood with his arms crossed. "Git upstairs'n see what the hail Dicky's talkin' 'bout. Shee-it. This here is gettin' blammed ree-dicker-luss."

  "Oh! Oh!" Dicky exclaimed. "She tolt me her name!"

  "Yeah?" Balls challenged. "Lemme guess. Everclear?"

  "Her name's... Pasiphae," Dicky blurted.

  "Pasiphae, huh? You're more fucked up than that meth-whore with the hairy armpits." Balls' glare dug into the Writer. "Git on up there ‘fore I start carvin' me some college-ed-jur-kated cold cuts."

  But the Writer had been taken aback. By the name Dicky had mentioned:

  Pasiphae.

  "Go on!" Balls' knife snapped open. "Git!"

  "As you wish, Mr. Balls," and with that the Writer mounted the steps.

  Pasiphae, he thought, climbing. Greek mythology. He thought briefly of Nancy's phone conversation earlier, the mentioning of a dream-baby with a bull's head.

  But why would a rube like Dicky make such a reference?

  The Writer couldn't hypothesize.

  His hand slid up the bannister as he moved toward the second-floor landing, the darkness seeming to magnify as he ascended. On his palm he felt odd but regular bumps in the vanished wood, and when he shined his flashlight, he frowned, noticing triplets of sixes finely engraved. Lucifer's cliché, he thought. The first thing he noted upstairs was an exquisite oil painting, tinged by age and very Rembrandtesque in its style: horned demons with skin spotted like slugs pushing aside the boulder which sealed Christ's tomb on Golgotha, as peasants moaned. Yeah, Crafter's really got the occult bug. The Writer found it amusing. The only supernaturalism that truly exists is math, he knew. But Crafter's trite fanaticism notwithstanding, the Writer found it uncanny how the man could fill the disguised house with priceless antiques, busts, and art but not have a single bookshelf in view. Crafter was a cliché in and of himself; surely an "occultist"—especially one with money—would have a veritable library full of pricy occult tomes.

  Yet he'd seen none since they'd entered the house.

  Perhaps upstairs...

  The first bedroom he slipped into was obviously the one where Dicky had experienced his calamity. The flashlight revealed a bed chamber that went hand in hand with the rest of the house: a mini-museum of various archaic styles, save of course for the television sitting upon—the Writer winced—a genuine Robert Gillow half-table made of Brazilian rosewood and well over three hundred years old. I wonder where Crafter gets all his money? but then he laughed. Probably a pact with the Devil.

  The room smelled funny: a meaty, musky scent that was close to foul. No woman in black paint lay on the bed, though the sheets and blankets on the finely crafted poster were disarrayed. Then he shined the flash down to the fabulous hand-woven carpet and was surprised to discover Dicky's aforementioned "goo."

  It looked like black gelatin surrounded by another gel-like substance that was clear but milkily lined. The Writer was mystified. Alcohol or cerebral defect obviously accounted for the younger man's account of this woman's ejaculating after her intercourse with him. Nevertheless...

  What on earth could this substance be?

  It lay in a gelatinous puddle, shimmering in the light.

  Finally! A book! Another sweep of the flash revealed a night-table with a small book on it. The Writer scanned the cover, intrigued: THE ACCOUNT OF THE INCUBI OF VASR MONASTERY BY THE REV. M. BARI. The spine crinkled when he opened to the copyright page. London, 1787.

  "Incubi, huh?" the Writer mocked aloud.

  Nevertheless he stuck the book in his back pocket. It was probably worth some money...

  Nothing here except some crap on the floor, some... goo, he deduced and turned to leave, but he stopped at the door as his light raked the carpet.

  He shined it down and stared.

  How peculiar...

  The inchoate mass of black and clear gunk was now not so inchoate. How did I miss that when I first looked? It seemed to take on a configuration that he hadn't noted previously: something akin to a starfish shape, and the top "arm" possessed two small protrusions, like hooks.

  The Writer fixed his gaze.

  All five arms slowly extended.

  You know what? the Writer posed to himself. I don't think I'm seeing things. I think that slop is really moving, and with that, he made his exit and hastily rejoined Balls and Dicky downstairs.

  "Well?" Balls demanded.

  The Writer lit a cigarette. "There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is—there's no woman wearing black paint—"

  "I done told ya she weren't there no more!" Dicky raged. "She disappeared after she cum'd all that spunk'n goo on the floor!"

  The Writer looked more resolutely at Balls. "I'm in concurrence with, at least, the latter component of Dicky's statement."

  Balls shot him a funky look. "Huh?"

  "There is indeed an odd substance on the floor that no manner of speculation on my part can account for."

  "I told ya!" Dicky cut in again. "It's my load all mixed up with some black shit in her cunt, and then it all squirted out while's I were watchin'."

  "Shee-it," Balls snapped. "I don't know which one'a yawl's more fucked up in the head! Guess I gotta see fer myself!"

  But before Balls could bound up the stairs, the Writer interjected, "Mr. Balls? It's my deduction that we can go up and down those stairs all night, and we won't find any answers to our questions. However, I have an inclination—er, I should say I have a hunch... that there is a more likely place in this house where we will find those answers."

  Balls smirked his irritation. "Where?"

  The Writer pointed. "The basement."

  "The fuckin' place stinks. Why there?"

  "Because, as I've said, I have an inclination."

  Balls and Dicky paused. "All right," Balls said. "Let's go. Dicky—bring that dirty cum-dump and drag her ass down with us."

  The Writer led the way, steeling himself against the rotten aroma coming up the cinderblock steps. Balls swore behind him, gagging. Dicky trudged down, too, with the still-unconscious Cora slung across his back.

  The stench thickened once downstairs. The flashlights lit up circles of strange doors, tables, and—yes!—shelves of books. The Writer flicked his Bic to light numerous sconce-set candles, and then—

  The low-ceilinged room was alive now in squirming light. Dicky, Balls, and the Writer all stared speechless at the same thing.

&nb
sp; "No fuckin' wonder the joint stinks," Balls muttered.

  "Jaysus Chrast!" Dicky exclaimed, and in his disconcertion actually dropped poor Cora on to the cement floor.

  "This place looks more like a temple than a basement," the Writer noted, "and how appropriate... A sacrificial temple."

  Three of the room's walls were ornamented by Doric pillars, however short, and between them were a total of six shoddy wood-plank doors hung within keystoned arches. But it was what hung in one of these arches that flagged their concern:

  A naked woman's corpse.

  Only the Writer dared to approach, to register details. A rive had been made from navel to throat, separating two flaccid breasts the color of oatmeal. A pair of surgical retractors remained in place on her chest, which forced the rive open, much like double doors, to expose the cardiac cavity. Said cavity was empty.

  "Now that's what I call a ruckin'," Balls remarked with a crook in his voice.

  "Looks like someone... sacker-ficed her," Dicky contributed.

  "Indeed, her heart's gone," the Writer told them, then shined his light on various areas about the room. "And by the looks of that crucible, that crematory, and that old book on tephramancy, I'd say she was sacrificed in grand style. Look. See these ashes?" The Writer gestured the smear of ashes over the door's stone transom. "Tephramancy is an occult science which utilizes the ashes of a sacrifice victim for a variety of dark arts, including incarnation."