by Edward Lee
Daphne stormed off down the hall. Dean, entrapped by terror, raced after her. "Honey, please! I'm sorry! I'll clean the house better tomorrow, I promise! And I swear to God I don't know where that can of—"
The bedroom door slammed in his face so hard the entire house shook.
««—»»
DESMET, SOUTH DAKOTA
"Name?"
Arianne's skin crawled. "Arianne."
The fat-faced cop scowled. "Last name?"
"Zausner."
"Current place of residence?"
That was a good one. "Uh... I used to live at the Callisto-Brownsroad Trailer Court."
"Current place of residence?" the fat cop repeated
"My car!" Arianne blurted and just thought Fuck... I'm fucked now.
The desk sergeant, whose name tag displayed A.T. LASS, filled out the rest of the booking report. This would be her third bust for solicitation—it didn't matter that the johns had ripped her off. She was crazy; whenever she smoked a piece of ice, she went out of her mind.
Her memory felt like a sheet of skin shorn by razors; she could only see through the minute red lines. She'd pulled up at the GORTYN'S WOODLAND TAVERN, swearing to herself No ice tonight, no ice. I'll just have a few beers and turn a few blowjobs. The promise had corroded as quickly as her future. Her first john had offered her a piece of ice in trade, and that had been it. Next thing she knew she was flying. She was on her back in the woods behind the tavern with her feet jacked up in the air and a line of men standing in wait, each with a sawbuck in their hand. By the end of the train her pussy felt like an overflowing sauce pan full of Sperm Stew, and her purse was empty as chuckles faded through the trees. That's when the police had found her. A fat line of semen ran down the inside of her leg when she was hauled up, covered with a raincoat, and Mirandized. They let her sit in the tank for eighteen hours (that's how good the ice was around here; the Callisto-Brownsroad Court was the location of the town's biggest meth lab, and it was real funny how the cops had never busted the place), then she lay for a few more, wracked in withdrawal. If she'd had a gun in her hand, she would've blown her brains out onto the cell wall, no hesitation.
"Three-Time Loser now, Arianne," the sergeant reminded her. "Three strikes and you're out. No more PBJ, no more court leniency because of your past. You're up for thirty months, no parole, no good behavior. The county slam, honey. It ain't no joovie hall and it ain't Club Med."
Arianne's drawn face fell into her lap. Her tears plipped onto the floor. "I don't know what's wrong with me," she sobbed. "I can't stop, I just can't... "
The following silence smothered her. She thought of the same silence within a buried coffin. That's what she needed: to be dead, to be buried.
"You know," the bulbous sergeant remarked, "I remember you. I'd only been on the force three years when you graduated from DeSmet Senior High. You were top of the bill, honey. Top of the honor roll, 4.0 student, valedictorian, prom queen, and scholarship offers from Harvard, UCLA, and Georgetown." Rancor ran steep in his voice. "You had it all, you had what no one from this pinch-of-dung town ever had. And look what you did with it."
Kill me, just kill me, she thought. Death seemed so much less cruel than living like this. There was no way out, though. She couldn't stop.
"What happened?" the sergeant asked. "What turned you into a meth-head whore?"
Dean, she thought. Dean's what happened.
"I don't know if I can do the dry-out," she croaked into her knees. "I don't think I can make it."
"Look."
Her spine felt like a creaking board as she raised up, blinked, and looked at the booking sergeant. His fat fingers spun the arrest report around for her to read.
He hadn't filled it out.
"One more chance," he said.
Then he dropped a plastic bag full of chunks of crystal methamphetamine on top of the blank report.
"Thank you," she whispered.
"But nothing's free, you know?" He stood up and lowered his starched-blue police trousers. "You know the game, right?"
Nodding, she stood up, came around the desk, and got on her knees. His little dick looked like the end of someone's nose in a nest. But then he turned around, bent over, and spread his buttocks.
"Rim job first, okay?"
"Sure," Arianne said and slowly slid her practiced tongue up the hairy crack until it found the puckered aperture. She pressed the cheeks further apart and began to suck.
««—»»
And as Arianne commenced with the indecorous task of sucking dirty police ass—tasting spoiled tints of Burger King and grape-jelly donuts—a few miles away, a shadow slouched in the dark, an outrage beyond description, beyond cogitation. It tasted smidgens of consternation and ancient blasphemy.
A breeze slipped across her subcorporeal face like spirits whispering.
The world just got worse—she understood that now after so long a gentle slumber. She could not imagine...
She was beautiful in her skein-weave of darkness. She was made of darkness. It was darkness which flowed through her veins of ghostly dust. It was darkness that filled her eye sockets.
And when she thought of what she would do—as she'd just done, in fact—it was darkness that dripped like ichor from her dark goddess cunt.
The breeze, over the night air, continued to sigh. Messages from her world? Chatterings from the overseers of the dead?
Her name was Pasiphae, the Slut Mother.
Her pretty, bare feet were but a dark fog, her cunt a night-smile. In her excitement, black milk shed from her ebon bosom.
In the shit-pocked dust, the sentry lay, his odd garb pulled down. As his glorious cock had plumbed her long-dead loins, she'd sucked out his eyes, swallowed them as sweet white-chocolate buds. He'd still been quivering, still been alive, as she sucked out his sperm, then sucked out his gorgeous balls. Later, sated, she'd pressed her unreal lips to an empty eye socket and sucked out his brain.
The meat fell richly into her gut, made her more real.
Soon she'd be real enough to call out...
Outrage for outrage. That's how it was and how it had always been.
Her bottomless gaze surveyed the sentry's corpse a last time. Seeing him like that, splayed and ravaged and dead, left her cringing. Pasiphae's nebulous hand touched her clitoris—a small nugget of coal—and she could actually feel solidity burgeoning, smoke turning to slime. What would the slime become tomorrow? Gel? And the day after that?
Then she could conjure up her son through the same threshold of horror that had summoned her.
She left the corpse, sauntered her nightness through the night, ghost-feet stepping daintily between the hideous scatterings of horns—the horns which lay like so many curled fetuses in the dirt, aborted for some meager mortal's indulgence like the tiny lives kicked, clubbed, or cut from innocent wombs by wine-drunk Athenian soldiers.
Black tears bled from Pasiphae's cosmic eyes.
Some things, some horrors, could even bring dead gods back to life.
CHAPTER THREE
"You're kidding me, right?" Ajax asked.
Dean fidgeted over his halibut fish and chips. "Well, I mean, it's reasonable. After all, I only make twenty-five a year at the credit union, Daphne makes three times that. She brings home more money so it's only fair that I take care of the house. And I guess I have been a bit negligent in my chores. The house was a little dirty."
Ajax'd met him for lunch at Anthony's Fish Bar on the waterfront. He put his face in his hand, shook his head. "And what time did she get home?"
"Like, one in the morning," Dean told him.
"One in the morning—from a work meeting?"
"Like I told you, she's in a hectic business. It's non-stop."
"Right, those quarterly inventories," Ajax droned. "Till one in the morning. And now she's gone off to Las Vegas? For a work convention?"
Dean knew what he was getting at. "Ever heard of the Las Vegas Convention Center, smart guy?"
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"Yeah, and she left her wedding ring on the bathroom sink." Ajax crunched into a pile of fried clams. "How long does it take you to realize that two plus two equals infidelity?"
"She's not cheating on me for Christ's sake," Dean insisted. "And the ring?" He'd noticed it this morning, after driving her to the airport. "Simple explanation. You take your ring off to wash your hands, then you forget to put it back on."
"Yep, simple explanation." Ajax ate some more clams in order to avoid chuckling. "But you had another Jig-Jag. Isn't that what you said on the phone?"
Dean nodded as if in dread. "This one was really bad. In my mind... I actually saw myself—"he gulped in shame—"doing violence to her. Then I... kind of like... raped her."
"Kind of like?" Now Ajax laughed out loud. "That's like saying you ‘kind of like' took a shit. You either dropped a steamer or you didn't."
Well then... I guess I did. "It was horrible because it seemed so real," Dean drew on. "Then I snapped out of it, and there she is for real, bawling me out for not cleaning the house and for having a can of Skoal."
"I thought she made you give that stuff up."
"She didn't make me," Dean clarified through a frown. "It's a bad habit, it's bad for my health, so I cut it loose."
"She made you give it up 'cos she knows she's got you wrapped around her finger—" Suddenly Ajax craned his gaze as an attractive, busty blond traipsed by on mile-long legs and high heels, smirking in self-confidence. "Man, I'd like to fry that smug bimbo's clam, and I've got some super special tartar sauce to put in that pouty face. I'd ass-fuck her so hard her colon would bust—then she'd really have something to smirk about."
"Come on, Ajax," Dean complained. "I'm trying to talk to you about something."
"Yeah, sorry." Ajax dragged his gaze off the sauntering blonde. "Where were we—oh, yeah, Skoal. If you gave it up, why'd you buy it?"
"That's the craziest part. I didn't—er, at least I don't remember buying it."
"Not good." For once, Ajax appeared serious. "First, you're having spells of Non-REM Imagery Syndrome, and now you're having blackouts."
"Blackouts?"
"The fuckin' can of tobacco probably didn't walk into the house, and unless the Good Fairy put it there, you must've bought it in an unsentient state. That's what shrinks call it. It's like sleepwalking during the day."
Dean chewed his lip, considering this.
"You might want to think about seeing a shrink," Ajax added.
Oh, man, Dean thought. I'm not crazy, am I?
"So what did you do with the Skoal? Stuff it all into your yap for a taste of the old days?"
"Hell, no. I threw it out."
"Really? Not one little pinch?"
"Nope."
"But I'll bet you wanted to, huh?"
Dean's fortitude crashed. "Well, yeah, I did want to. And I almost did... but I threw it out instead."
"Good boy. So back to the Jig-Jag. You saw yourself beating her up and raping her. You never did stuff like that in the past, did you? Back in South Dakota?"
"No, I never raped anyone," Dean hastened. "Christ, what do you take me as?"
"You didn't answer the entire question." Now Ajax was flicking clam crumbs off his plate. "You ever beat up any girlfriends?"
Dean calculated an answer. "Well, I didn't exactly beat them... but I guess you could say I slapped some of 'em around a little."
Ajax grinned in shock. "You guess I could say, huh? How many?"
"How many what?"
"How many past girlfriends did you ‘slap around?'"
Dean cast a sheepish look. "All of them," he admitted. "But I swear, half of 'em like it anyway—"
"Don't change the subject." Now Ajax looked studied as a pro chess player. "Why? You catch them cheating on you?"
"Naw. They couldn't have cheated on me if they wanted to," Dean said, fully uncomfortable now. "I was the horn-cranking champ and, well, I was kind of a bad-ass back then. I beat the shit out of dozens of guys, never lost a fight. Shit, I'd send guys to the hospital for just looking at one of my girls."
"Hardcore," Ajax said in awe.
"I'm not proud of it. I admit it, I was an asshole back in DeSmet. I was a redneck rancher, getting drunk in bars every night, slapping my girlfriends around for no reason, cheating on them whenever I felt like it. I was a prick, I was a bastard."
Ajax stared, amazed. "Young, dumb, and full'a cum."
"That was me."
"But... you look like a frat boy," Ajax couldn't get over it.
Short hair, conservative clothes, good manners. Dean had to agree that that was the appearance he gave people, and that's the appearance he wanted. "This is what I used to look like, before I moved to Seattle." He slipped an old photo out of his wallet. It was a snapshot of himself with his arm around one of his droves of girlfriends.
Ajax spat out a mouthful of Diet Coke when he looked at the picture. "You gotta be shitting me! This is you?"
"I was about twenty-five when that was taken. Couple months later, I blew town, moved here, started my life over."
Ajax was aghast; the picture showed a sun-bronzed stud in a muscle shirt, hair down to his shoulders and a goatee. His arms bulged like a power-lifter's. Ajax repeatedly switched glances between Dean and the photograph. "Unbelievable. Talk about Jekyll and Hyde. This is incredible. And—" Ajax reglanced at the photo and gulped. "And who's the brick shit-house piece of box standing next to you?"
"Arianne," Dean revealed with remorse in his throat. "She was my last girlfriend in DeSmet. I dated her for three years... and cheated on her for three years. I treated that poor girl like total dog shit."
"Why?"
Dean shrugged. "‘Cos, like I was telling you, I was an asshole." The memory sunk in his gut. "Arianne loved me bigtime, and all I did was shit on her. She had a scholarship to Harvard but I wouldn't let her go. Told her we'd get married, have kids, all that, but I never meant a word of it. I just strung her along till I got sick of the whole town, my whole life. One day I told her I was going out to pick up a can of Skoal, but I went to the airport instead. I split, left her cold. Never spoke to her again." Dean's guts just sank and sank. "She was so depressed when I dumped her, she just went off the deep-end. Now she's a street whore, turning twenty-dollar tricks to support a drug habit."
Ajax just sat there with his mouth hanging open. "Man, you were a Grade-A Number One low-down motherfucker! What a scumbag!"
"I know, and I don't feel too good about it."
Dean didn't feel like talking anymore, and Ajax could tell. Dark clouds slipped in over Elliot Bay, and the wind gusted up. "Shit, man, it's Saturday. You've got the car, your wife's out of town—it's settled."
"What's settled?"
Ajax put his cigarette out in his tartar sauce cup. "We're going to your place."
"Why not?" Dean said. "You can help me vacuum the carpet."
Ajax laughed as they walked away. He eye-balled several girls getting off the Waterfront Street Car, uttering typical sexist comments. But as he and Dean waited for the WALK sign, Ajax said, "Hey, what did you say you did with that can of Skoal?"
"I threw it out," Dean said.
"You sure?"
Dean cocked a brow. "Yeah."
"Then I guess that's a can of lark's tongues in aspic sticking out in your back pocket."
Huh? Dean's hand padded back to the rear pocket of his jeans. His hand froze.
Then he withdrew another can of Skoal.
"You're putting me on, right?" Ajax asked. "You're making all this shit up just to jerk me."
"I wish I was." Dean's eyes fixed wide on the inexplicable can. "This is really creeping me out."
He looked at the can some more. His mouth began to water. And then:
"Fuck it."
Dean opened the can, and took a big dip.
««—»»
"What the damn bloody fuck?" exclaimed the first cop.
The second cop squinted. "What's that... hangin' out of h
is... "
"Dick?" the third cop finished.
The third cop would be one Sergeant Alphonse Taylor Lass, the DeSmet Police Department's ranking officer. He was essentially the chief, having only to answer to the town counsel and the mayor. His asshole and cock still felt radiant from the whore's first-class butt-suck and blow job back at the station. Fine indeed. But the recollection turned to rot at what he was looking at now in the hard streams of three police Mag-Lites.
It was the security guard who lay at their feet.
Pants down.
Eyes gone.
And—
