The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Now Frank is after the drugs, the money and the vengeance,” Eddie continued, “and I’m wonderin’ if you’re Bonnie to his Clyde.”

  “The gobshite.” Niamh slammed her head back against the mattress. “The dirty great scheming lying cock-awful gobshite. I should have listened to my mother. I should never have let my hormones get the better of me.”

  Eddie allowed himself a smile. He knew guilt like an old friend, inside out and up and down, and Niamh’s was not the reaction of a guilty woman. As he reached for the nylon stockings with the blade of his knife, he wondered, idly, what the best way would be to punish a ratface fucker like Frank McAuley.

  At least, when the drill ran out, Frank didn’t waste too much time kicking the safe. He’d only sprained his big toe before he realized he was onto a losing game, and that he’d less time than a priest’s wank to clear out of the place and get back to the Laika.

  Breathing hard, he reassured himself. So he didn’t have the money, but he did still have the goods, wrapped and bagged nice and tight under the bench where Niamh was tied.

  Frank opened the door of the office a crack and checked the corridor. Oh, she was a fine bit of woman, that Niamh. He’d forgotten, in truth, just how much she wound him up. What an arse she had.

  He’d only to wait for the next song now, something loud enough to cover the sound of the door scraping open. He craned his neck around the corner. The place was empty but for scuffed footprints on the lino and a few crushed fag butts. The walls in here were oxblood red, about the same colour as Niamh’s lips in the deep centre. Frank remembered how he’d left her, pliant and willing and begging for it. He slid along with his back to the wall, one eye on the door through to the bar. His heartbeat thumped so loud it almost drowned out the steady drone of the music. But no one appeared. Breathing hard, he reached the fire exit, propped open with an empty beer bottle. He could smell the yeasty mix of Dublin’s night air, the cigarettes and laughter and the thousand jokes that mingled on the warmed-over sea breeze.

  As he scurried along towards the Laika, keeping on the outside where the shadows were darkest, Frank added up in his head. Would he have time, yet, to finish what he’d started with Niamh, and still catch the last boat? Was it worth the risk?

  His cock twitched in his trousers, and he could almost hear it reason with him like a little devil-voice. Burn off the adrenaline, wouldn’t it? Almost make up for losing out on six-hundred-odd grand. He smiled as he reached the driver’s door, and pulled it open with a rush of relief.

  Primed for a swift, stunningly satisfying shag, Frank climbed into the cab of the Laika with a filthy great smile on his face. So when he went through to the back and failed to notice that the overhead lights were now out, he maybe dived a little too quickly towards the banquette where his oblivious, sweetly horny ex-girlfriend was trussed up waiting for him.

  Only as he groped for a breast did he realize, with a slowly growing sense of horror, that the chest he was feeling was hairier than his own.

  You know, the Irish fellows never fail to surprise me. I might never have believed that Dublin’s second hardest gangster was capable of the gentlemanly restraint that Eddie showed as he untied me and sat at the table, respectfully turning his back when I asked for some privacy to dress.

  Perhaps nobody would ever have thought Eddie for the type to turn his back on anyone, least of all a woman with a temper and an unresolved orgasm. But he did, meek as a choirboy, and allowed me time to lift the mattress and find the satchel and get a good swing at him. I’d only to lamp him the once. Force equals mass times acceleration, as we all know.

  And perhaps no one would have thought that I, Niamh Carmichael, with the bobbed hair, the good job and yoyos to spare, would have the gumption to take not only the satchel full of cocaine, but also, by way of getting a simple answer to a simple question that I asked Eddie nicely – though I admit I’d to slap him awake and hold his own pocket knife to his big sweaty bollocks right enough – get the coordinates of the safe, easily slip into the club by flashing my lipstick smile at the bouncers, and collect the money in the safe – a large sum but not too large to fit in my handbag, no, not the roomy leather one I’d splashed out a week’s wages on – before scarpering in a taxi, so, for the last ferry, and freedom, and even if nobody believed it and wondered where I’d got to, and whether I was at the bottom of the Liffey, it didn’t matter so much.

  No, I thought as I looked out over the Irish Sea towards fresh horizons. Home was home, and sometimes that was a good enough reason to leave. I thought of Frank and Eddie, stuck in that foul little caravan under the streetlights, and raised a glass to toast them.

  “May the devil make ladders of your backbones while he’s picking apples in hell, boys.”

  Barnacle Bill

  Angela Caperton

  By the middle of June, Melissa could not leave her room, the space beyond the door too terrifying even to consider.

  She left the windows open at night and sometimes insects flew in or rats and mice crept silently over the sill, lured by the bits of meat decaying in the sink and the pile of unchewed bones in the corner. Once she saw a cat slink in out of the moonlight gloom and circle the room like a shadow, not even noticing Melissa until she snatched it and savoured the dark scream as she snapped its spine and sucked its marrow.

  She thought about her life before, but thinking became harder every day and even the most focused deliberations seemed more like hallucinations. In time, she settled for dreams and gradually Melissa ceased to move at all.

  She dreamed of a pounding on her door, the shrill voice of the old woman, Sammi Marsh, with her lips red as blood and her cheeks the colour of bleached plums. “You owe me, girly. You better pay me that twenty dollars, bitch.”

  “Who’s that knocking on the door? Who’s that knocking at my door?”

  How long ago? Days? Months? The old woman had fled from Adams Manor weeks before and Melissa would have given almost anything to have Sammi Marsh back, to have her knocking on the door again, to ask her to come inside. Melissa remembered borrowing twenty dollars from the old woman the very first day she moved into the miserable, ancient boarding house, given its grandiose name because John Quincy was rumoured once to have stayed there.

  She dreamed of her first day too, the bus ride from Boston to a job interview in Arkham, her last ten bucks in her pocket and less than a hundred in the bank. Melissa owed over ten thousand dollars to her friends and relatives in Boston and she knew she could never go back there. She rode the bus north through Salem and then on the traffic-packed road west, along the banks of the Miskatonic River to the old college town, past strip malls and a Walmart to the old core of the city, dark buildings that reeked of impossible age.

  She interviewed for a job at an exporter down near the river harbour, but they wanted someone with accounting experience. Melissa lied, but then she failed a simple test and they told her they’d call her, though she didn’t know how they’d do that, since her phone was dead. Melissa remembered despair but it seemed pale as the crescent moon’s light through the open window.

  After the interview, bound for no place, she walked towards the river, and passed men darker and more dangerous than any she had ever seen. Their eyes, cold and shrewd as car dealers’, appraised every step she took. Dockworkers, she knew, and sailors, no women among them at all, not in the daytime.

  “Who’s that knocking at my door?” said the fair young maiden.

  Adams Manor displayed a vacancy sign in its dusty window and the landlord, a homely young man named Pyncheon who happened to be there, though he lived somewhere far away, took her cheque for fifty dollars, a bargain rate for her first week, and promised with a leer, “I’ll be back, to see if you need anything.”

  The only other tenant was Sammi Marsh, and the old woman had been delighted to see Melissa move in. She had been happy to lend a twenty, hadn’t hesitated, and Melissa thought maybe she would be good for a while. But how quickly the hag had r
efused to loan another dime!

  “Goddamn you, bitch, give me my money!” Pounding. Pounding.

  “It’s only me from over the sea,” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

  She pushed the pounding and the song away, and dreamed of her first night in the Adams, when Mrs Marsh fed her tea and black cake.

  “You won’t go out at night,” the old woman said, “if you’re smart. Men round here fall into two types – drunks and crazies. Just down the street’s a seaman’s church that ain’t a real church and the boys who go there . . . there’s something wrong with them. Better you find yourself one of the drunks.”

  Melissa drank the tea and saw soon enough what the old woman meant. The Seamen’s Church of St Fintan drew men all week to night-time services. Melissa watched them every evening pass on the street below her window, young and old known only by their pace, muffled in their jackets, hats pulled low. She could not see their faces.

  She noticed one man in particular, squat and heavy. He walked with a shuffling gait that might have been age or an injury, his legs invisible from her overhead perspective. His broad shoulders added mystery, along with the watch cap that covered his head. Something about his steps, a pace oddly rhythmic, almost mechanical, reminded her of a wind-up toy or a clockwork figure and she always shivered with a chill when he passed in the street below.

  “He’s the one I call Barnacle Bill,” Mrs Marsh told her with a cluck. “He’s the worst of the lot. Smells like rotten fish. Best you stay inside when they come and go from their church that ain’t no church. And if any of them ever come inside here, keep your door locked tight.”

  “Open the door, you fucking whore,” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

  No, Melissa thought and pushed against the dream. She wasn’t a whore. Sure, she’d thought about it, and once or twice back in Boston, she’d taken money for sex, but that wasn’t the same thing. In time, here in Arkham, she might’ve eventually turned a trick, but all she did in those first days was visit the club district near Miskatonic University, where she found a boy who would trade drinks and dinner for kisses. She promised to meet him again if he would loan her twenty. She hadn’t fucked anyone, and certainly none of the sailors or dockworkers. They all looked too dirty and dangerous.

  But many nights, she watched the darkening street from her window, the slow procession of the eerie congregation by ones and twos, to the church, and she could not tear her gaze from the dark shape of Barnacle Bill, until one night he finally looked up and saw her watching him.

  The man’s eyes were sunken deep in black pits. All Melissa saw were the craggy lines of his face, cheekbones sharp, and his skin waxy in the lamplight, but she knew that he saw her because he paused and licked his lips with a long tongue that appeared quite black in the deepening shadows, before he resumed his pilgrimage down the dusk-washed street.

  “Are you young and handsome, sir? Are you young and handsome, sir?”

  After a week, the old woman began to ask about the money she had loaned Melissa and then to demand repayment. Sammi’s caustic and accusing tone quickly soured Melissa’s tolerance and, by the end of the week, she could no longer keep the old woman company or drink her tea and gin.

  About that time, young Pyncheon the landlord came around as he had promised. He had a nice cock and he tasted good when Melissa took him in her mouth, sucking him until he clutched her hair in his hands and shot his wad down her throat. She hadn’t minded at all fucking him for the rent, though the act seemed unclear in her dreams and she decided he had not been a good lover at all or she would have remembered him.

  “Whore!” Mrs Marsh pounded the cadence of Melissa’s dream upon her door. “Give me my money, you fucking whore! Or I’ll put Barnacle Bill on you!”

  “Are you young and handsome, sir?” said the fair young maiden.

  In the second week, Melissa had watched from her window as Sammi Marsh, wrapped in a shawl against the north wind, waited in the street. Melissa saw the old bitch fall into step beside Barnacle Bill, hastening to match the dark sailor’s odd, rolling shuffle, saw the old bat whispering. Melissa watched them stop and then look up, Mrs Marsh’s eyes shining like the eyes of an animal in the moonlight but Bill’s eyes, Melissa remembered, stared black and dead as night seas.

  She remembered the fear and the sticky fascination that held her too long looking down until the street lay empty. Mrs Marsh did not return to Adams Manor. The evening hours crawled as Melissa listened and shivered until dread had risen in her like a tide and she could stand it no longer. After ten o’clock, in the moonless depth of night, fear claimed her entirely and she ran panicking from her room.

  Did panic taste of salt, or sewage? Melissa could not remember.

  “I’m old and rough and dirty and tough!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

  At the bottom of the stair, Melissa smelled the sea at low tide, a stench of stranded life, hardly one step evolved above the slime and returning to it.

  Barnacle Bill waited for her there.

  She remembered screaming, scrambling back up the stairs, his slow tread behind her and the silences between his merciless, angular steps.

  She threw the lock. Sometimes in the dreams, she threw the lock and she was safe. But not always.

  “I’m old and rough and dirty and tough!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

  She remembered opening the door. No, she wouldn’t have opened the door. He pounded and she opened. No. No. No. She hadn’t. She wouldn’t.

  “I’ll come down and let you in. I’ll come down and let you in.

  “I’ll come down and let you in,” said the fair young maiden.

  As he approached her, Barnacle Bill’s face was a miracle of symmetry, the cheeks identical, slit eyes shining in the depth of shadow pools, his mouth a drawn line of determination.

  “I’ll give her the money,” Melissa screamed but she knew, even in the most hopeful dreams, that Barnacle Bill didn’t care about the money.

  He caught her wrists in hands hard and tight as metal cuffs, and she saw the watch cap was actually a part of him, a fleshy blue crown that flared wetly. His face broke along the lines of its symmetry and his black tongue flicked long as her arm. Barnacle Bill’s eyes were moist pockets and his coat opened with a whisper. The sea smell washed over her but it no longer stank of death.

  She dreamed of algae blooms like monstrous roses in the waves, the caress of warm water, the rising and falling of her own blood with the cycles of the moon.

  He tore her clothes away with the sharp edges of his hands. His fingers splayed cold and wide on her thighs as his black tongue explored her throat, twining, tickling one nipple then the other. He held her down and probed her with his tongue, his scent overwhelming her terror, her screams growing hoarse, then silent.

  “What’s that thing between your legs? What’s that thing between your legs?

  “What’s that thing between your legs?” said the fair young maiden.

  Moray smooth, the head of Barnacle Bill’s cock emerged from between the half-shells of his parted coat, the ropy, seeking length tracing a line down Melissa’s belly, a cold smear of fishy slime, through her stubbly cunt hair to bump against her clit.

  She dreamed and remembered needing him inside her.

  The sinuous, growing length moved with serpentine purpose and the head slipped into her. Nothing had ever filled her like this, the throbbing, bulbous head seemed to spread inside and out, massaging her clit like a lover’s finger as he moved atop her. She wanted more.

  “It’s only me pole to shove in your holes!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

  “It’s only me pole to shove in your holes!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

  She saw, bobbing loosely behind his black tongue, his real eyes, merciless and hungry. His incredible length moved in and out, around, teasing her asshole then filling her pussy again, flicking as delicately as a tongue and as forceful as a fist. His cock flesh seemed to double and bend so she felt him within her and
behind her, forcing open the reluctant ring of her ass even as he gushed wet and warm and endless as the sea deep inside her.

  She remembered coming and coming and coming, sweat-drenched, collapsed against his segmented body, almost tender when he licked with his black tongue and kissed her most intimate places with his chalky beak, before he left her.

  Before the morning.

  Melissa lay naked on the floor, still wet here and there from her lover’s embrace, pushing against the memory, looking for the moment when she must have gone mad, though she did not find it. Numbness cloaked the soaked space between her legs, and she felt nothing, nothing at all. The night was only the beginning of dreams but in that first new morning the dreams had almost vanished.

  “What if we should have a boy? What if we should have a boy? What if we should have a boy?” said the fair young maiden.

  When the sun was high overhead, she dressed and went downstairs. Mrs Marsh’s door stood slightly ajar and Melissa considered pushing it open and looking in, but she walked by and out onto the streets. The thought passed mistily through her mind that she should find a doctor, but she could not imagine what she would say to one.

  She found one of the lowest of the whiskey joints by the main dock, an unlicensed room with a bar made from old tables, full of men and she took twenty each from five of them for blow jobs in the alley behind the building, knowing she must look awful, must reek of shore-stranded kelp. She didn’t care and neither did the men. They probably thought she was a junkie. Let them. Fuck them. Next.

  When she left the bar and the alley, she walked towards French Hill where she found a deli. She spent the hundred dollars the men had given her on cold cuts, sausages, and a fat, orange round of cheese, two bags full of food that she carried back to her room. Alone in the silence, Melissa stripped off her stained clothes and lay back on the bed.

  She hoped Barnacle Bill would come back to her in the night, but deep in her heart, she knew he wouldn’t. She knew she would never see him again.