The smell filled the room. It stunk like burnt rubber mixed with lemons. Where was it coming from?
Teresa moved her head to the side, slowly. She felt like her body was surrounded by thick bales of cotton balls, pressed up hard against her so she couldn’t move. Her neck tingled and she could only move so far before her muscles stopped responding. She rolled her eyes over in the direction of the hissing sound.
Sticking through the bottom of the open window was a small length of rubber hose, jagged at the end. Gas hissed from the tip of the hose and filled the room.
Her heart thudded as panic set in. She was being poisoned. Teresa could not move, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t even wiggle one of her toes. The only muscles that seemed to respond were her eyeballs and her inner organs, for she was still breathing and her heart was thumping in her chest so hard she was afraid it was going to split open like a rotten cantaloupe.
She tried to scream but her vocal chords buzzed quietly as her tongue and lips refused to move. She tried again, this time squealing a high-pitched siren. Her lungs became sluggish, filling up with the heavy, invisible mist filling the room.
A dark shape strode into the room and reached down to grab her big toe, twisting it hard. She once again tried to scream but the sound strangled in her dead throat, barely seeping out as a frantic whisper.
The dark shape turned out to be a man. He was tall and skinny, with a black overcoat and gloves and heavy boots that clunked along the floor as he walked. His face wasn’t human, but that of a bug, with big round, black eyes, shiny like glass, that reflected her terrified expression back to her. He had a long, hanging snout that extended from under his eyes, ridged black as his outfit. It swung like an elephant’s trunk.
This was the Mad Gasser, and although Teresa couldn’t know his name, she certainly sensed he was going to be her death. He hovered over her for a moment, stoking her fear, before grabbing her big toe again with his long, gloved hand, this time twisting it until it broke. She screamed but the sound was weak and tiny coming from her throat. The Mad Gasser leaned over and examined her as if he were a scientist studying a bug.
Teresa’s eyes flew back and forth as the Mad Gasser bent forward, his head inches from her face, and she could see his bug eyes were really goggles and his snout was the long end of one of those old gas masks, the kind they used back in World War I. The snout dangled in front of her before his gloved hands slid up and slipped the mask off.
The Mad Gasser opened his mouth, parting his tiny black lips to form a large ‘O.’ He belched a noxious cloud of green mist that sprayed Teresa’s face and coated her nose and mouth in a blanket of dry, yellow dust.
She coughed as the mist entered her lungs, burning like red hot coals. The mist soaked into the moist tissues and into her blood; she felt it course through her body, riding in the blood, carrying the poison into every muscle, every nerve, every inch of flesh. Her entire body felt like red fire ants were marching through her veins and arteries, stinging everywhere along the way. She couldn’t move and now she couldn’t scream; she was paralyzed and helpless as the Mad Gasser slipped his mask back on.
He drifted back from her, his heavy boots scraping the wooden floors. With a wave of his hand, the hose pouring gas into the room stopped.
Her body convulsed and she gagged as something big and wet slid up past her lungs and caught for a moment in her throat. She coughed and spasmed as her stomach pushed through her esophagus. It erupted from her mouth, flopping over her chin and sliding to a rest on her chest.
Her intestines followed, bulging in her throat and spitting out in a long, continuous string. They wriggled out of her mouth and sprawled across her face and body, networking out like a giant spider web.
She gagged but somehow remained alive. It had to be the gas the monster had belched inside her, but all of this flew through her mind and was gone in seconds.
Her lungs, her kidneys and her liver all followed, flung like spit from a madman’s mouth. Teresa’s body convulsed until nothing was left, until she was a flat flap of skin and bones from her neck to her waist. All around her, on the bed and on the floor, laid her internal organs. And still, Teresa did not die.
Her eyes blinked and blood squirted from her tear ducts, spraying into the air and foaming on her cheeks. Her head hurt, and although she could no longer see, she could still comprehend what was happening. Her brain squeezed itself down through her sinuses and strained out of her nose and mouth in bits of gray matter.
The Mad Gasser stood by silently and watched, his head cocked to one side, studying the effects of his gaseous poisons.
V
St. Joseph, Illinois
Doug Trauber was having trouble sleeping again, so there he was, out in the middle of the night, scraping along the empty streets of St. Joe, his mind full of worries. It was nearly three in the morning, and this was the fourth time this week he hadn’t been able to sleep.
He was twenty-three, tall, with sandy blonde hair, a thin, swimmer’s frame, and deep, brown eyes set back into his skull. He was a recent college grad, having had to work his way through school, and had just started a job as an intern in the big city in Champagne. It was his job that was driving him crazy. Every day he sweat over his work at the accounting firm, and every night he had restless dreams filled with numbers and anxiety.
He tried TV and drugs but both had their drawbacks. After a while, he took to walking and had managed, over the course of a few nights, to map out nearly all of the small town of St. Joe. He’d walked from one end to the other and even into some of the outlying areas, his feet carrying him wherever they felt like taking him on a particular night. In all of this walking, he’d never once seen another person, until that very night, when he was out in the cool breeze, pulling his collar up against the chill. He looked up and he saw a man across the street, silhouetted against the crescent moon.
The man was standing on top of a house.
Doug stopped and stared. It was a strange sight and he wondered for a minute if his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. The man was tall, nearly seven feet it seemed, and extremely skinny. He looked more like a skeleton, with dark, old-fashioned clothes hanging off his limbs like moss dripping from a tree branch. The man wore a tall top hat and a long, billowing trench coat that flapped in the breeze.
He watched, unmoving, mesmerized by the sight. The man was like a statue, so still. In fact, Doug was beginning to think this man wasn’t real, that he was some kind of forgotten Halloween decoration, until the man pivoted on his back foot and leapt off the roof into the back yard. He vanished, coat fluttering in the wind, seeming to float instead of fall.
From behind the house, Doug heard a dog bark, whimper, and then yelp. All went quiet after that. He sprinted over towards the house, carried by an insatiable curiosity, and crept across the street into the front yard of the sleeping house.
He stopped and listened but heard nothing. The breeze stroked the grass like a hand rubbing the top of a cat’s head. He slunk over to the driveway until he reached a tall wooden fence. A dull red Toyota sat parked in front of the fence and a child’s tricycle was parked next to a latched door that went through the wall.
Doug held his breath. He couldn’t hear anything. Should he go into the back yard? Should he snoop around or just leave? Part of him wanted to go, and it wanted to go very badly, but the more curious part of him held sway. Counting to ten, he unlatched the door and froze. Something snapped on the other side of the fence.
He paused, hand extended and fingers dangling inches from the latch, and tilted his head to hear better. There came another sound, something wet and slick, like someone rubbing two peeled apples together. He dropped his hand from the latch and placed his ear against the door. He could hear the sound much better now, coming from the back yard. It was a knife, slicing through something thick and meaty.
He stumbled back, eyes glued to the latch on the door, when a black, round shape flew over the fence and land
ed at his feet with a soggy smack. Doug looked down and stared into the eyes of a Rottweiler, its tongue thick and purple in the moonlight, lolling out the side of its mouth.
His mouth fell open in a silent scream when the man he’d seen on the roof suddenly leapt over the fence—leapt over the fence!—and landed right in front of him. Doug’s eyes flicked from the dog’s head to the pale, gaunt man standing before him. He got a better look at the man now that they were so close to each other. The man had a long, white face with a wide, toothy grin stitched into place beneath a broken, hooked nose. He wore all black, from top hat to overcoat and the clothing beneath was old, from the Victorian times, when Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of London. The man stood before Doug with a knife in each hand, the long blades glinting in the moonlight. All of this was frightening enough, but the most terrible thing about the man was what passed for eyes: two large, round black buttons sewed over the sockets.
Doug ran. He dashed down the middle of the street, trying desperately to scream, nothing but a small squeak coming from his throat. His mouth was dry, like someone had jammed a wad of sandpaper between his teeth. His feet pounded the asphalt, his steps echoing between the houses, all eerily silent and dark. Surely someone was up at this time? He didn’t bother to stop; he kept running, driven like an antelope fleeing a stalking lion, his legs like pistons pounding the concrete. He sprinted two blocks before he finally slowed, his breath nearly gone, to turn and look behind him.
The man stood in the middle of the road at the end of the block, unmoving, staring after him. He did not pursue but remained where he was, an uneasy, black silhouette against the backdrop of American suburbia.
Doug bent over, hands on his knees, gasping for air. He would rest a second, catch his breath, and scream for help.
The man leapt straight up into the air, a loud sproing reverberating down the street. He landed, coming straight down, and jumped into the air again, flying up about forty feet before landing back on his feet.
Doug’s jaw dropped as the man sprang through the air, bolting after him. He covered fifty feet with each leap, the sound of spooling springs resonating between the houses. With two leaps he’d traveled halfway between where he’d been and where Doug was.
This time Doug did scream. It ripped from his throat as he turned and ran again, his legs burning and his lungs scorching. The man pursued in great leaps and bounds, gliding high into the air, landing without a sound, and soaring forward again. The distance between the two of them halved with each jump.
Lights came on in some of the houses. Doug, encouraged, hollered and yelled bloody murder as the sounds of the man bouncing behind him, coils winding and releasing, drew closer, closing the gap. If people came out, Doug should be safe. This man, this thing, would not harm him with so many witnesses.
Residents burst from their houses like ants swarming a cube of sugar. All were dressed for bed, in pajamas, robes, or shorts and tee-shirts. One man, a chubby, middle-aged guy, obviously so startled and shocked by the noise coming from outside, ran out completely naked. His gray chest hair glowed in the moonlight as he stopped at his stoop and stared. The old man’s balls shrunk when he saw the man in black, leaping through the air, coat flapping in the wind behind him like bat wings, closing in on Doug.
The man creased the air, landing then bounding once again. He leapt over Doug and landed on the other side of him, some twenty yards away. The man turned and faced Doug as he skidded to a stop, nearly tripping over his own feet.
“Help me!” Doug screeched.
The man whipped out his two long knives from pockets inside his coat. They glittered as he spun them and sprung forward. He slammed the blades straight and deep into Doug’s stomach.
Women screamed and men fainted, but no one ran to Doug’s aid. The townspeople were too scared, too stunned to do anything but watch.
The man in black flicked his wrists, slashing horizontally, and pulled his knives out. Doug watched, detached from himself, as his guts spilled out into a steaming pile between his feet. He couldn’t accept this was happening to him. It felt like he was having a nightmare, having a horrible dream. For a moment, he wished for the dreams about numbers and office anxieties.
But it was his intestines, not numbers that were sliding from the gashes in his stomach and no matter how hard he tried to scoop them up and push them back in, they kept gushing out. This was no dream. He was really standing here, in the middle of the night, across from some creature of hell, dying.
The man stared at him, his odd, button-eyes not blinking, just boring in past Doug’s face and into his soul. A weird, crooked smile crossed the man’s face as Doug’s bowels let go.
The man leapt straight up into the air, springs ringing from beneath his heels, and spun, lashing out with his right foot. He kicked Doug’s head like a soccer ball, knocking it cleanly from the shoulders. The head flew to the left, hitting and skipping across the lawn of the naked old man until it skidded to a rest at his cracked feet. The old man looked down and Doug looked up, their eyes meeting, as Doug’s mouth opened and shut. One of Doug’s eyes closed and he died, winking at the naked old man, who promptly pissed himself and fainted. The old man fell back into his open doorway, cracking his head on the step behind him.
The man in black, known through legends as Spring-Heeled Jack, looked around at the gathered crowd. They shrank back, fearful of his button-eyed gaze. Doug’s dead, headless body flopped to the side and convulsed.
Spring-Heeled Jack looked to the sky and leapt, bounding down the street and disappearing over the horizon, his heels sproinging, leaving behind a bizarre mystery.
VI
Red River Gorge, Kentucky
Martin Thomas sat on the edge of the precipice and watched as the sun set in the distance, its red rays turning the sky into a giant. blazing grapefruit. He gazed as the clouds overhead slowly drifted and floated, heading to where only God knew. Martin wanted to light up a cigarette and enjoy this quiet, peaceful moment, and he smiled at the thought. He’d quit smoking a year ago and although the first few months had been the toughest, there were still moments where his addiction would come back, roaring like a hungry monster, demanding to be fed. If quitting smoking was this bad, he wondered what it would be like with heroin, or any other hard drug. He ran his hands through his thick black hair and kept his eye on the sunset. He was a ruggedly handsome kind of guy, with a square jaw, a perpetual five o’clock shadow, flat nose, and piercing brown eyes. He was six feet tall and thick, in a muscular sort of way. He’d grown up on a farm in Eastern Kentucky and he had the rough hands of a farmer, the same kind of hands his Dad had, although he was half his Dad’s age at twenty-one years old.
Cindy glided up behind him, sat down, and put her arms around his shoulders. She smelled good, like fresh soap with a hint of cinnamon. She snuggled her nose and mouth into his left ear and nibbled softly.
Martin groaned. “You keep that up,” he said. “And I’m going to flip you over and fuck you right here, in front of God and country.”
“Who’s stopping you?” Cindy said. She was small, petite next to Martin, with sandy brown hair that ran to her shoulders, a round face with cherry apple cheeks, small nose, blue eyes, and a pert, cute mouth. Cindy had the body of a runner; as well she should, since she was on the University’s track team. Her legs and ass were firm but she had a soft way about her. Martin always imagined she’d make a great mother someday.
He turned and his mouth met hers and the next thing he knew, they were tangled together, tongues swirling and bodies pressing against each other. He leaned up, laughed, unbuttoned her shirt, and smiled as her small breasts popped free from her bra. They were tiny, a little less than a handful, but Martin loved them. He adored Cindy’s fair skin and the way her nipples, so pink and soft, winked up at him. He stuck one in his mouth and sucked on it, gently, sliding his tongue back and forth and around. Cindy groaned and arched her back.
He licked her breasts and worked his way down
, pausing only for Cindy to scoot out of her shorts and panties. He nibbled at her stomach down to the edge of the fur patch between her legs. This was what he liked the most about her: she had a bush. It wasn’t something crazy, with hair growing wild down her legs; it was trimmed to an inch deep but it was thick and sat atop and around her pussy like icing on a cake. He loved bush. He wanted his woman to look like a woman, and Cindy had no problem complying.
Martin hovered over her for an instant, the sweet musk of her smell filling his nose. This was a moment to treasure, a second to freeze forever in his mind. Then he dipped his head and went to work, bringing pleasure to his lady.
When he finished, when she came, he crawled up on Cindy and they cradled each other for a bit before he entered her. They bucked against each other as the sun disappeared in the distance, the grapefruit-colored sky turning orange and then gray and then, finally, to twilight.
Martin came, his body shaking with the release, and collapsed on top of her, gasping for air. He looked into her eyes and she smiled at him, sweat beading her face.
“I love you so much,” she said.
“I do, too!” Ken called from the bushes.
Martin bolted up and spun as Ken and Colleen stepped from between the bushes, shining flashlights on the two lovers in the fading daylight. Ken clapped his hands together.
“Bravo!” Ken said. “Bravo! I just wish I’d brought my camera!”
“How long have you two been there?” Cindy said. She sat up, lips curled in anger, and covered her breasts with her discarded shirt.
“I guess we came in about four minutes ago,” Ken said, still smiling. “Man, it was great! You two should be in movies!”
“Asshole,” Martin said. He rolled off Cindy and found his pants. He slid into them and into his shirt as Cindy put her underwear and pants on.
Men of Perdition Page 4
