Autumn in the Abyss

by John Claude Smith

  I clenched my eyelids as fists, a boxer ready to fight, damn it, fight. I had to wake up, had to extinguish this horrid nightmare from my system, my mind. I had to let it all go and start afresh with research that might lead to something that made sense. I had to—

  —open my eyes and scream.

  In the bathroom, the mirror I had broken years ago was solid, a lake of lies made icy at the center. I saw my reflection, fifty plus years on, Henry Coronado, once a handsome man, now resembling more a pile of excrement left to petrify on the lawn. My shape was huge and unruly. The hair atop my head jutted thick as rat’s tails around my face twisting every which way, a barbed wire halo. The slope of my large shoulders suggested sloughed off glaciers settling into dead oceans, the glaciers made of flesh. Massive white rolls tattooed with blue veins and moles as thick as my pinky and a conglomeration of scars that resemble embroidered hieroglyphs radiated as languages long dead, a living death, the proof of the guardian’s words. Dead yet alive; no, dead, yet existing, no real life here. My enormous belly spilled forth, blanched to transparent, the veins and organs and rattlesnake intestines roiling frantically, bruise-blue trimmed in decay-black faded into other hues within the rancid, rainbow spectrum causing my gorge to rise. I projectile vomited on the mirror, blotting out the image. Thankfully blotting out the image.

  Yet within the stinking, dripping black discharge, faces took shape— Kerouac again, Burroughs and Breton, Catherton and Borges, Lovecraft and Ginsberg, Plath and Sexton and Rimbaud and DeVries and faces I did not recognize, their allegiance privy only to those who truly understood: the guardians and perhaps the dark legions. Perhaps many of these had ended up as me, pushing too far, too far…

  And there was Randlebot again; a man I loved; a man I hated, my savior— the final nail in my splintered coffin— laughing.

  But he was not alone now. They were all laughing at me, my eardrums swelling with their gruesome guffaws, all as if in on a secret I was only now beginning to understand.

  The mayhem on the roof, a riotous racket, joined in the cackling sonic fray, deafening, determined.

  I denied it all, leaning forward, lapping up their laughing faces, slurping and swallowing the lies with every slick caress of my tongue against the mirror… And the mirror itself; the glass cracked and crumbled in my eager mouth. My tongue and lips, a blind plastic surgeon’s masterpiece. Blood smeared as comets flashing bright red across the mirror that remained only to be ingested with the next stroke of my crudely enthusiastic tongue. I devoured memory and lies and suggestions and fictions and silenced every laugh in the belly of the beast, this beast: Henry Coronado.

  I howled, “Amen,” as I finished my banquet. I smiled in the darkness, stumbled out of the room and waddled drunk on insanity as I made way to the bed. I tottered as the leaning tower of Pisa before my legs gave out and I landed on the floor, a fistful of blanket snagged to no avail. The crash shook me to the jiggling core. My abandoned soul scowled in a corner of the dark, below the now humming battle above, a static hum of the melee in motion put on hold, waiting, waiting…

  ~

  My vision blurred, then sharpened, focused. I rose from the floor, not sure how I got there. Clumsy me. I strained as I do and tossed the blanket to the bed. It landed as a crescent, the shape of a toothless smirk. My lips and tongue ached as if shredded, but I ignored this and hobbled through the hallway toward the den, toward my computer. A package of uncooked ramen noodles awaited me. I tore into it, stuffed a fistful of noodles in my anxious maw. I tapped the mouse, shuffled it a bit more, and the monitor lit up. Alive.

  Ready for my research.

  Jogging my memory, moving the obsession to the front, the impression was vague at best, obscured by the muddle of dreamsickness that filled my thoughts with indistinct images

  I sat there, crunching on dry ramen noodles, trying to remember who I was researching. Who and why. A name rose above the debris: Henry.

  Henry who?

  Circling and prying deep within, it finally came to me: Henry Coronado.

  This information did not bring me comfort.

  I entered “Henry Coronado poet” into the Google search engine.

  There were no results.

  I entered variations of this, to no avail.

  I simpered meekly while the incessant tick tock traipse of the many clocks ricocheted off the walls around me— circling and prying deep within— signifying nothing more than my unfortunate existence.

  I heard contented purring from above— the roof— and carried on.

  Because my obsession grew crystalline, my obsession grew teeth. My obsession insisted without question. Only one thing mattered to me in this life…

  I needed to know what happened to Henry Coronado.

  “I myself am an absolute abyss.”

  —Antonin Artaud

  Broken Teacup

  “The path to knowledge is paved with the carcasses of experience.”

  With the statement, he could tell that it understood; shadows rippled as a smile from the void. It spoke:

  “You will get me what I need, yes?”

  “I will get you what you need.”

  ~

  “She’s just lumpy, misshapen. You can’t really want to—”

  “She’ll do, yeah. She’ll do.”

  Lemmy and me, we’d been doing this gig for a few years, exploring the depths of perversion and presenting it in one form or another to those willing to pay the price for said perversity. We brought joy to the sickos of the world.

  Why? Good question. It was primarily dark curiosity on my part. And the money, now that it’d started to kick in big time.

  But for Lemmy it was different. He was just a walking hard-on at all hours.

  I once told him, “You’ve got no soul,” shaking my head at his impudence.

  He responded with the expected crude rejoinder: “Who needs a soul when I’ve got a hole?” and proceeded to unload into any willing, unwilling, or just empty hole he could find.

  A few years back, just out of high school, I’d been headed for college— I got smarts but what I really wanted was experience— I was sidetracked by a bunch of noise bands that specialized in a kind of aural rape, bands like Whitehouse and their offshoot Sutcliffe Jugend, Smell & Quim, and the True Crime Electronics of Slogun. Lemmy and I decided to join the fray and make our own noisy excursions into the like-minded, sexually depraved world of our heroes.

  Our kink was that we went for a kind of “real world” take on things, not exactly original but you had to start somewhere. We scraped the bowels of the small towns in Texas that we frequented for the lowest of the low hookers and suggested the most disgusting encounters imaginable. We taped the responses and even the encounters for use on our recordings. These tapes were manipulated and we added the appropriate noise accompaniment, guitar and bass cranked full throttle, creating a dense wall of sadistic sonics. The repetitious mayhem sounded like an orgy of hump happy monster trucks. We played up our roots calling ourselves Texas Chainsaw Erection. Our live reputation, replete with the most obscene video accompaniment, got us our first release, the underground classic, Elbow Deep in Love.

  Heads turned but our pocketbooks still seemed in cahoots with the poverty line, and we needed money to pursue our interests.

  One of the advantages of doing this kind of thing, specializing in such decadent ventures, was that it draws a unique fan base and from that fan base come unique requests.

  People wanted to hear the most screwed up shit, but beyond that, we realized with the release of a couple of homemade video clips that what they really wanted was to see these things in full on, Technicolor clarity.

  A thought about moving on to more lucrative endeavors simmered between Lemmy and me, but we let it simmer, unformed, while we whipped out a couple more releases. They were the same old shit still limited in their scope.

  Of course, we enjoyed making them. Our most famous track, “Curly Straw,” included a Texas sweetie, twan
g and all. She was a skinny girl who did things you would not believe— flexible, she was. She claimed, “Hell, I’d suck the shit outta your asshole with a curly straw and a smile for that kinda money.” We looped this and interjected bleats of the most dense, abusive noise you could imagine. The gist for us was our gleeful participation— we were nothing if not thorough— but something dark simmered under our glee. What simmered finally came to a head and demanded expression.

  I remembered when it happened, one of those classic moments when one discards the parachute and takes a leap anyway.

  Ain’t life grand?

  We’d noticed Black Hat at a few of our live shows. He had a look in his eyes that made me think he was in league with Lemmy. Like Lemmy he didn’t have a soul, but he lacked Lemmy’s sense of humor— the only thing that tethered Lemmy to some kind of humanity, lean as that was. I felt it swell, the cock in need of a stroke, and Lemmy pulled hard, without flinching.

  Lemmy, cigarette dangling, to the point: “Whatcha really looking for, cowboy?”

  Black Hat teetered. The unexpected question jostled his honed-to-a-laser-pin-point-focus on the screen behind us. The video playing between sets was culled from a Japanese old school classic, Guinea Geisha. I wasn’t sure what episode, but the woman’s just had her hands cut off and they did that questionable curl, closing like a dead spider, as if real.

  Readjusting his focus to us, he steadied himself and laid it out hardcore, no foreplay.

  “I want a bitch to die at the end, after she does a horse.”

  It was boring, predictable. I somehow had expected more. We catered to our audience’s requests, so bestiality was part of the action we were into. Our second release, Squeal like a Pig, was full of bestiality samples, which were a lot easier to get than you would think. The desperate would stoop to anything for whatever they needed.

  The death thing was a place we had yet to explore.

  Made me a little uncomfortable, so I popped a couple Rolaids, kept my mouth shut and listened to where this was going.

  Lemmy dropped ash, not missing a beat: “How much you willin’ to pay if we record this and put it on a DVD for you?”

  Black Hat’s eyes flickered with a light of euphoria so unmistakable that it was something I will never forget, like he came alive for the first time then and there. “Anything,” he said.

  The band died that day, and the new agenda took form: internet clips and D.I.Y. DVDs, driven now by real money. We recruited Elvis, a California computer whiz into our stuff— he had created a fan website for us, so we hired him to make it the authorized website— and started on the next stage of our sleazy careers.

  The killing was odd in the beginning. No problem for Lemmy, but I only did a couple of girls before I realized that wasn’t my thing. That said, most of these girls, hell, they haven’t been living for a while, so it’s not like they was missing anything important. It was not like their missing would be noticed.

  The sordid requests that went with the killing, they were another story. Nothing too mind-bending— hell, they were going to die after all was said and done anyway. Nothing much we did beforehand could match that for visceral impact— but still… The usual included cut-and-dried fetishism, bestiality, coprophagy for the shit eatin’ enthusiasts, piss drinking as well, BDSM, some double penetration stuff that turned into double anal, all the average extremes. All of it starred Lemmy and me and a couple of good old boys, Lance and Pete (whoever wasn’t involved held the camera). We paid them off in free pussy and whatever they were drinking or chewing at the time. Kept the real profits for ourselves.

  We had Elvis do his magic; keep us so under the radar you’d need sonar to know anything about us. It was a dicey sleight of hand, took a series of passwords to get in, switching daily. Visitors needed encrypted codes, decrypted codes, synchronized watches and more. They had to jump through flaming hoops, give up their first born, if it was a female we could eventually defile— just to get in. I was amazed that anybody ever got in. I couldn’t picture anybody being able to enter all of this with one saliva slick hand on their joint while they typed with the other, but they did; these boys were hungry.

  Those who really cared found their way.

  On the two year anniversary of the site, we headed to the East Bay of northern California to officially meet Elvis, the third part of our triumvirate, and to check out the nightlife, so to speak.

  It was a road trip in search of fresh meat. Now, here’s the gist: in Texas, the core hooker populace was skinny girls, really young, bad teeth. They were freewheeling girls who don’t give a fuck. They do whatever it takes to get the meth they needed. Hell, they were willing and able and even if not so able, they would anyway.

  Louisiana has some dark-skinned pieces of meat that really put up a fight once the hammer came down. That made for one of our most popular downloads, “Hammerhead Splatterfuck,” the one where we offed the big legged bitch mid-orgasm and, realizing she’s about to be offed, she fought like a champ.

  Lemmy still proudly flaunted the scars he got from that one.

  But the East Bay, this place has some real disgusting, let it all go and still think they were hot shit hookers. Cruising down East 14th in Oakland and San Leandro, changing from that to Mission Boulevard in Hayward, and back up to Oakland, we got the real class of the class, cream of the crop, the top load winner. This bitch that Lemmy was checking out had no shape, no discernable age— no nothing to indicate that she was human. She was disgusting on a level that made even me want to puke. And he’s thinking his always erect dick will find pleasure in her hole. It must be some kind of wayward repugnance that got him hot and bothered, that made it okay to fuck her as long as he got to off her afterward. Straightforward cum ’n’ kill exercise, nothing special, more to keep the edge on and maybe give Elvis a bit of a thrill by letting him witness an actual performance.

  But then it came to me, as I scrolled through the notes on my cell, we had a request for humiliation, mutilation, torture and death from a mysterious Mr. Liu— as if this formal declaration of self meant anything to us. We called him Mr. Liu to his face over the web cams, but in spite of his pretentious manner his nattily attired ass was deep down just like the rest of them fucks who got their rocks off on this kind of sick stuff. He was a reclusive self-made millionaire, but that was all the info we could get out of him or that Elvis could find. We were wary at first because we usually needed a whole lot more info before letting somebody into the fold or onto the website, but his perseverance made it apparent he was just some horny old Chinese guy looking for that “special something” that would rouse his aged pecker to life.

  Whatever. As soon as we found out specs and that he was willing to pay big bucks, we moved him to the front of the line. No waiting. Let’s take care of this boy ASAP.

  He was going to pay two-hundred fifty thousand dollars, our biggest take yet. Seems like we could have set our own prices? Hell no, we lost more than we got, but this one had teeth. With the aforementioned specs and his insistence that the act had to be performed in a room with only one light, making it hard to film because of all shadows and such, it seemed authentic. Maybe the grittiness was part of his kink, or maybe he was trying to deny what he actually was paying for: murder. Long drawn out murder. This one had resonance and we could tell it wasn’t bullshit.

  Passé, yes, what with those torture porn movies like Saw and Hostel leading the way, or some of that old school Japanese seriously screwed up shit like Guinea Geisha and Delicate Flower, but if that’s what two-hundred fifty thousand wants, that’s what two-hundred fifty thousand gets.

  “If you’re gonna do her, we should do it as per the request from Mr. Liu. You know what I’m talking about.”

  Lemmy scratched his crotch, more like fondled himself, and said, “Not this one. I want somebody feelin’ the streets in her smile for that one. I think Mr. Liu would really like it that way…” He clenched his fist, as if one dead bitch or another really mattered, but I dug his
determination. “Maybe he’d get off on more of the same. If he’s got the money and inclination to throw it our way, well… I mean, this fat bitch, she’s got nothing for him to get off on, she’s humiliating just to look at. We could off her for sport, y’know? And make a few bucks, kind of a promo deal on the site, right, Elvis?”

  Elvis’ eyes’ glazed. “Yeah, do her. Let me watch you do her… live.”

  Elvis was zoned.

  Lemmy looked primed as though he knew the evening’s entertainment was already aligned.

  Mr. Liu would have to wait.

  Later that week, after we gave Elvis a show he would not soon forget (along with a souvenir clit ring still dappled in blood), as we were cruising again along that same desolate stretch of road— Sunday morning, probably too early for the churchgoers, but not so early as to surprise— I spotted the perfect victim.

  “There. Over there. Look at her.”

  “What? It’s Sunday morning and there ain’t no hookers—”

  “Fuck that, she’s lookin’ for some action. She’s perfect, look at her.”

  I was smitten by this dyed blond bitch with a rockin’ shape looking all nervous and shit. If she’s hooking, it’s clear she’s not been at it for long, that’s for sure. She’s got victim stamped onto her corneas with that pleading look.

  “She’s perfect. Look at her eyes. Check out that desperate look. She really needs something, boys. And that smile, kind of like a broken teacup, some kind of beautiful design scarred, chipped. She’s barely hanging on. Can’t you see it? Can’t you see her future, peering into the broken teacup and reading the tea leaves and there’s nothing left but this dismal existence…?”