by Rob Bliss
THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE
Rob BliSS
Necro Publications
2019
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The Bride Stripped Bare © 2019 by Rob Bliss
Cover art © 2019 by Stefan Gesell
This edition 2019 © Necro Publications
ISBN: 978-1-944703-72-1
LCCN: 2019940622
Book design & typesetting:
David G. Barnett
www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com
Assistant editors:
Amanda Baird-Schmidt
Necro Publications
necropublications.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, or his agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television.
All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.
Ebook formatting & cover design:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
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Necro Publications
5139 Maxon Terrace
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For Psycho - a Touring Iguana
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PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART 2
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
PART 3
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
PART 4
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
About the Author
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PART 1
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Chapter 1
I got an email out of the blue from my old buddy, Gord, telling me he was getting married. I hadn’t heard from him for about five years, didn’t think he would still have my email. We were still friends, didn’t hate each other, just drifted apart. I had finished my Masters and became an English professor for a small college no one had ever heard of, and which paid shit. But it was better than working at a real job.
Gord was blue collar, an auto mechanic, drank a two-four every weekend and a six-pack every night after work. I drank wine and sometimes liked it. He and I were poles apart, but that wouldn’t come between us. Friends were friends, no matter how far apart they were in character.
Or where they lived, for that matter. Gord had moved across the country to Washington State. Said he loved the redwoods, the Douglas Firs, that he had started hiking and camping. Back and forth emails told me how much he had changed.
And, goddamn, he was getting married! Thought he always liked girls too much to settle for just one. One email said the bride-to-be was amazing, gorgeous, great in bed, “fucking rich, too, buddy,” and the two of them had too many things in common to count. He attached a few pictures of them somewhere tropical. Laughing, swimming, sitting by the pool, standing arm in arm on a beach, sunset behind them. Tourist photos, romantic and sappy. Had they already gone on their honeymoon? I wondered.
She was hot, I’ll give him that. She looked like a 1920s flapper with black hair cut into a bob, with a skinny body, hint of ribs, even a string of small pearls wrapped three times around her slender neck, hanging down between her ample breasts. D cup, minimum. She must’ve been a bit of a freak. Who wears pearls with a bikini? A Wicked Weasel at that. Heavenly camel toe and not a trace of razor burn.
Gord was sending this to me to make me jealous. And I was. Lucky bastard. I had the pick of some of the ugliest women, students and teachers, at a third-rate college. The kind losers went out with…like me.
I’ll admit, I was jealous of Gord’s life in more ways than one. I was an egghead who had spent his life reading boring books, giving boring lectures, talking to boring people, having boring sex. Gord made more money than me, didn’t take his job home, relaxed on weekends instead of marking papers, went to bars, and slept with women who had never heard of Franz Kafka. I slept with women who looked like Franz Kafka.
I was happy for Gord to be getting married, and happy for myself to go on vacation, away from my East Coast, buttoned-down, cardigan life. I couldn’t wait to get on a plane to see my old best friend and his new bride-to-be.
They looked so happy in the photographs.
Her name was Venus Baer.
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Chapter 2
He paid for my flight—or, he said, his fiancée did. Venus had money, he repeated—her own and that of her family. Old money, but the Baer family weren’t blue bloods. A large family that went back, possibly, to the Mayflower. Gord hadn’t met them all, doubted he ever would, since they were spread far and wide. They had lived in the same area of the Northwest, close to the Canadian border, for generations. Some had crossed the border and were now Canadian.
He reserved a flight for me as soon as I said I had booked vacation time, then sent me another email confirming my flight details. Said I could stay at his place to save on a hotel. He picked me up at the airport in his pickup truck and I could easily tell that time had taken its toll on him. Less hair, bit more of a waistline, a few wrinkles. To be honest, I wondered what a gorgeous girl like Venus was doing with him. It wasn’t his paycheck she was after if she was richer than him. Then I stopped my silent trashing of my friend, and we caught up on old times.
We headed to his one-bedroom apartment, where I would be sleeping on the couch. I considered getting a motel. At least he was clean, and it didn’t look like I would stick to anything; he confessed that he had started cleaning—and bathing—more often since he had met Venus. He threw out old clothing that had holes in it instead of waiting until the holes expanded to reveal too much skin. His bathroom was spotless, and I didn’t mind having a shower in it. I thought to myself: God, what the hell’s my problem? Am I glad to see Gord or not? Was I such a neat freak? Why was I criticizing him so much in my head?
I sat on the couch and cracked open the first Pabst Blue Ribbon (Gord never changed his beer brand after all these years), and when the alcohol hit me, I realized why I was being such an anal-retentive dick.
The jealousy rearing its head again. Gord had it all. He was successful, doing what he loved, and now he had an incredible girl to marry him; I did a job I hated, loved no one I fucked, felt as though I had made all the wrong decisions, and
Gord had made all the right ones. The beer was relaxing me, so I decided not to be such a snobbish prick, and relaxed. I congratulated Gord on all his success and his love life.
He told me how they met.
“You know how much I’ve always loved horror shit, right? Movies, books, comics—you name it. That wasn’t just when we were kids. Hell, I still re-read all my Brian Lumley and Clive Barker, even my Anne Rice. I never could get into the smarter stuff you liked.” He said ‘smarter,’ it seemed, instead of ‘boring.’ “But remember that time we had a zombie movie marathon in my basement? Me, you, Josh and Rick…what’d we watch, like, five zombie movies in a row? And that was in the ’80s. I didn’t know they made that many back then.”
We chatted about all the movies we had rented—when you still could rent movies—which seemed to correspond to Gord’s personality phases. When he had a vampire phase, we watched every vampire movie we could get our hands on. The Lost Boys and After Dark being two we watched again and again.
Gord even became a Goth for a year or two. Had a black cape, wore black eyeliner and lipstick. I could barely look at him without laughing. I knew why he was doing it. He was going to some school to upgrade his high school diploma in the hopes of getting into college. Which he did, taking auto mechanics. At this school, he met a cute Goth girl with big tits. Very big. So he changed his appearance for her, went to Goth nightclubs, even took photos of himself and the girlfriend (what was her name again?) which he showed to me. Well, he showed me the ones where they both still had their clothes on. I didn’t want to see my friend’s dick as he growled at the camera with bloody plastic fangs in his mouth.
He had many phases, to put it mildly—Goth, prep, punk, metalhead—but he gave up each one when some girl broke his heart. All phases were centered around a girl.
Hell, I couldn’t blame him. All guys did crazy shit for pussy.
I watched him go from phase to phase just as I had watched all those movies with him. It was entertainment to me, which wouldn’t jeopardize our friendship. It never did. Still, I didn’t read any of the novels he had on his bookshelf; I tried, but I just couldn’t take seriously the world of vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, zombies, and everything in between. There was no way in hell I could read 300 pages or more about that shit without wanting to toss the book out the window.
I wanted to be a serious writer, so I felt I needed to read serious literature. Essentially, a snob.
I guess that was why it came as a big surprise to Gord when I told him, in one of my emails, that I had read all five beginning books of Lumley’s Necroscope series and had finished Clive Barker’s Weaveworld and his Books of Blood. And I confessed that I could read H. P. Lovecraft every day for the rest of my life.
Gord howled and laughed when I reminded him of the email. We clanked bottles in celebration.
“You’re changing into me!” he laughed, then asked, “Explain this email—I thought it was a typo or something…what the hell made you come over to the dark side?”
I explained. The ‘literature’ I had been trying to write wasn’t getting published. That’s why I had to get a job as a teacher. My career as a full-time writer wasn’t happening. So I fell back on the age-old rule: if something isn’t working, change it. I still wanted to write, I just had to change the type of writing I would do.
I recalled his library of horror from when we were in our teens and twenties, so I went to the library and started reading the novels Gord had loved, and which I had intentionally ignored.
We toasted again, and he showed me his expanded horror collection. Battered copies of writers I had only discovered in the last year. He asked me if I had written anything yet, he’d love to read it.
“Just a few stories, published online,” I said, suddenly shy. “But I’ve got a few ideas for novels. Teaching takes up too much time.”
“Well, hell!” he smacked my arm. “Get writing! I want an autographed copy of your first book.”
His excitement—and the fact that his horror obsession hadn’t changed—fueled me on. I felt like grabbing a pen and some paper and start scribbling a horror novel right there. The beer hit me harder than I thought. He slapped a hand around my shoulders, and I felt time reverse—like we were seventeen again.
“Let’s watch ‘Evil Dead’!” I yelled, my beer frothing over as I speared my arms to the ceiling.
He laughed and tried to reign me in. I had completely forgotten where I was and why I was there.
Gord was getting married. He had grown up, and I was, once again, trying to deny my age, wanting to go back to our collective youth. He must’ve seen the sorrow in my changed disposition, so like a good friend, he cheered me up.
“Wanna see some pictures of her?”
“I saw the ones you attached to the email,” I said, half-slurring my words.
He winked. “That was nothing.”
Firing up his laptop, we sat down, guzzled beer, and he opened a folder of pictures of him and Venus.
Naked Venus.
Porn shots. Shots of her sucking his dick (was he waiting all these years to show me a picture of his dick?), of getting fucked in every position, of her posing like a porn star. One of them on a beach, like in the email.
“Dude, she’s hot!” I said before a small belch escaped. “You don’t mind showing her to me naked?”
“Fuck no—I’m bragging! I get to fuck this!”
I raised my beer. “Yes, you do. Where’s this beach?”
He smacked himself on the forehead and barked out a laugh. “Holy fuck me—I forgot to tell you. All the horror shit. Yeah, I went to a horror convention in Los Angeles. That’s where Venus and I met. It was a four-day convention, so I got a motel. Met her on the first day, we hit it off, went for dinner and drinks that night. I told her everything. I mean everything. I knew it was a cliché, but I seriously bared my soul to her. She did the same to me. We have so fucking much in common, it’s freaky. Way more than you and I ever had, no offense. I never met a woman who was like my twin. So, we fucked like psycho rabbits that night—the shit she does in the bedroom! Goddamn! Everything—she does everything! And a few things more. I swear, we’re perfect together, it’s eerie.”
I was in awe, still jealous, wished I could meet my female twin. I sat behind the laptop as Gord went to answer a knock on the door. Didn’t even realize, in my increasing drunken stupor, that I was gazing at a photo of Venus with her legs spread wide, pouring what looked like a margarita—with umbrella and pineapple wedge—down between her naked breasts, a cherry held between her teeth. My mind instead focused on my self-pity.
That is, until the girl in the photo came to life. Standing on the other side of the laptop, with clothes on, smirking down at me from between her perfect breasts, was Venus.
Her hair was dyed white—platinum blonde actually, with a metallic sheen to it, somehow—ruby lips, and a black mole at the corner of her mouth. She wore a low-cut tight t-shirt on which a reproduction of The Dead Kennedy’s album “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death” was warped by the curve of her breasts.
Tight jeans rode low on her hips, two lacy strings of her pink thong rose out of the denim and rested on her hipbones. Camel toe, again. I was easily mesmerized by a stunning girl, especially when drunk and stupid.
Venus saw my tranced gaze as it roved up and down her body and giggled to herself and to Gord. His arm was around her hip. Venus snapped me out of my libidinous hypnotism by leaning down and kissing my forehead.
“He’s cute,” she told Gord.
She smelled like cinnamon candy hearts. Gord smacked her ass and pulled her down to sit on his lap beside me on the couch. His hands came up from either side of Venus’ ribcage and tucked under her breasts. Venus moaned and arched her neck back as Gord kneaded her tits. He peered at me and winked.
“She likes you, buddy—you’re in.”
I crossed my legs, feeling an erection growing that I couldn’t keep down. I slapped the laptop closed. “In w
hat?” I asked.
“The club,” Gord said, planting a kiss on Venus’ neck under her ear. “The Venus Club.”
She giggled as she looked at me, with the seductive gaze of a vamp. She spread her legs open and scratched red fingernails up the inside of her thighs.
“I hear you like horror. Only bad boys like horror. And bad girls, of course.” She licked the tip of her tongue along the upper row of her perfect teeth, staring deep into my eyes. “You wanna be in my club, Chris?” she asked.
I chuckled uncomfortably, took a swig of beer, tried to remain nonchalant. “I dunno. What do I gotta do?”
She moaned and pressed back hard against Gord, who pressed his hands harder against her breasts.
“Worship me,” she cooed, her throat expanding, a red flush forming on her cheeks. I was sure I was hallucinating. My libido fogging my vision, and my mind. “Worship me, just like my Gordy does.”
