Jake's Wake

by Cody Goodfellow, John Skipp

  And that was the hell of it.

  Part IX

  The Wisdom Of Whores

  Chapter Forty-four

  Back at Jake’s—alone in the holding cell—Evangeline could only listen to the gunshots and screams echoing on the wind, and wonder what the fuck was going on out there.

  She had screamed herself hoarse when Emmy ran past, but the poor cracked girl had disappeared around the far end of the house, flailing her arms and shrieking in hysterics.

  After the last, solitary gunshot, the silence was terrifying; but she might just be in the safest place, all things considered. Maybe it was over—

  As soon as she thought it, she rejected the hope for the wishful thinking it was. Nothing could stop him. Nobody would save them. The only hope left was to deny him the pleasure of having her, one last time—

  “This is where I did it,” said a voice from behind her.

  Cold in there, suddenly so frigid that she could see her breath. And the stink of shit and piss, like an overturned outhouse, made her gag.

  Evangeline turned around. Her voice cracked as she cried out in surprise that she wasn’t alone, after all.

  A woman’s pale face crushed into her own. Exotic eyes of piercing jade, with no whites or irises; lush, pouting lips, marred by webs of bloodless cracks. Shivering in the meat-locker chill, she hugged the generous curves of her compact, naked body. Dry ice mist oozed from her tragic smile as she bared herself.

  She was flawless, but for the smears of blood across her breasts. Only a man would linger on her nakedness, and miss the steaming slits plowed lengthwise up her wrists, to the elbows.

  “I didn’t know what else to do…”

  Neither did Evangeline. She couldn’t move, could barely breathe. But she couldn’t stop her eyes from seeing, her nose from inhaling death.

  Or her ears from hearing the soft, soft voice.

  As the dead girl began to tell her tale…

  From the moment she first laid eyes on him, she knew exactly what he was. Of all the foolish superstitions with which her grandmother tried to infect her, Natalya Lyubyenko only paid heed to the stories about money, and fat lot of good they did her.

  But she recognized the eye of a witch when she saw it.

  There were men in the clubs and on the street, when she came to Moscow, who could rape her with their eyes, and leave worse than disease in her purse. Some girls said they were old KGB, trained to pry out secrets without even speaking, while others said they were just dirty old men.

  But Natalya wished she had listened closer to her grandmother, when they began to follow her around, and the police would turn their backs, smiling, to let them have her.

  Better to get out, before she ran out of hiding places. The girls told her the game was easier there. The Troika would pay for her passage and papers, in return for a couple years of convention and Internet porn work. The men who took Russian brides were soft idiots, and the law in America wouldn’t even let them hit you. Anything was possible there, the Moscow girls always said, but never why they did not go.

  Natalya went to America. Even if all the rumors were lies, surely it would be warmer than Moscow.

  A sweaty little Georgian man met her and the other girls at the Los Angeles airport, and took them to the “marriage agency.” He called it that, and laughed.

  There was no marriage, no agency. He took her to a club downtown, and she was delivered to her new “husband.”

  She did not even know she believed in the Devil, before she met Jake. When she first met him, she did not think he was a Devil at all. Stupid girl, she thought she was falling in love.

  He played the role to the hilt for the Troika broker, flipping up her lip to check her teeth, palpating her tits like bread dough, jabbing a gloved finger into her purse and sharing her aroma with his dead-eyed lackey.

  But his eyes trapped her, the fire in them seeming to promise her that this was all a game, a dumb show, but there would be more games, and fun, later.

  In his car—a huge white Elvis Presley dream of a Cadillac—he told her how it would be. She would have a room at a motel, and Gray would pick her up to go to work every evening.

  The dead-eyed man never looked at her, but she could tell he was dangerous. Natalya was afraid to be left alone with this one, she knew his type too well. They hurt women, because they could do nothing else with them.

  They stopped at the motel, and Jake left Gray in the car. He carried her over the threshold, humming Wagner, and laid her on the bed like the treasure she secretly believed she was.

  No bride was ever so tenderly or so thoroughly fucked as Natalya, on that day. Jake was inexhaustible, using her again and again, coming in her mouth and ass and turning her purse inside and out with his hands, tongue, and magnificent cock. He must have drugged her, to wring such agonies of orgasm out of her. No man had ever made her feel anything to take away the shame of what she did, the sense of being used as a bicycle or a toilet is used. With Jake, she was under a spell, and she wanted only for it never to end.

  But it did, and quite rudely. She awakened to find the other one, Gray, sitting in a chair, flicking ashes into the tangle of chilled sweaty sheets. Waiting for her to wake up.

  When Jake took from her, he made her quiver and left her wanting only to give more, but what this one took, he kept it until it spoiled, and gave nothing back. He told her to get dressed in five minutes, or he’d beat her. Something cold and reeking of rotten fish dripped into her eye.

  In the mirror, she discovered that the dead-eyed one must have masturbated into her hair, while she’d slept.

  He took her to a nightclub in Palm Springs, where she sucked off rich old men in the VIP lounge; a bachelor party at a country club, where the best man fed her laxatives and made her take a shit on the groom’s face; a palatial house in the desert, where she ate a queer sixtyish dowager’s dusty cunt while her husband pumped his limp cock and called them filthy names.

  And more, the next night, and the next. All she could stand, and more, until her only defense was to lose track of the days. And when she could take no more, when her misery had all but overcome her fear of Gray, Jake came back.

  He was so sorry for what she had to do, but they paid a lot to bring her to this country, and everybody had to do a little dirty work, to catch up, in America, it’s what made this country great. When she had earned her keep, she could come and go as she wished. She could make her own life. Or, if she chose, she could stay with him…

  He stayed for only an hour, but he possessed her utterly, again, and left her floating in the afterglow of his passion. He left her with a steady supply of his passion, in little yellow capsules in a plastic bag.

  They helped. If she took too many, she threw up, and played with herself until she was raw, so out of her mind that she thought Jake sent his ghost to ravish her with her own hands. But just one a night, and she could almost fake her way through the work, could moan and coo at the sloppy attentions of the monsters who paid Gray.

  For a while, it was good enough. But long before she ran out of pills, her brain stopped responding to them. Like a sponge with the last droplets of water wrung out, it would only begin to stir when Jake talked to her. He never answered her calls. Gray took away her phone. When she tried to run away at a truck stop, he beat her until she pissed blood, and gave her to a bunch of Mexican fruit pickers to teach her a lesson. They pulled the train on her in a portable toilet in an orange grove, then flipped it over on her.

  Gray bundled her in trash bags and took her to the motel. He hosed the shit and piss off her and told her to get dressed in something nice. She was going to a party.

  At Jake’s house.

  A bachelor party.

  He was getting married.

  Too tired to run away, she tried to open the door and throw herself out onto the highway. Gray dragged her back into the car by her hair.

  She serviced many men, before she even saw Jake.

  He finally came
into the room, decked out in a dashing pinstriped suit, and smoking a cigar. The men circled around her. They held her hands and feet down, slathered her chafed purse with spit and Astroglide, staking her out for him like a sacrifice.

  Laughing, he poured champagne down her throat before he fed her his cock. It still had another girl’s stink on it, but she tried to take it in. She wanted nothing more, even after all she’d suffered, than to please him. She really believed exactly what the most pathetic, stupid johns believed—that if she just gave it to him good enough, he might lift her up and love her.

  She wanted only to give him pleasure. She tried to swallow him, but his friends shoved him into her and jerked on her limbs. She tried to relax her throat, but he jabbed her tonsils and made her gag and vomit up all the expensive champagne he’d shared with her, along with the commingled seed of all his friends, all over his beautiful suit.

  Jake screamed and jerked his manhood free, scraping it on her teeth. Before she could form the words in English to apologize, he slugged her in the mouth, knocking two front teeth down her throat.

  Laughing, they tossed her aside and moved on to the night’s next entertainment. Gray dragged her out to the storage room behind the garage. He kicked her a few times before locking her up and leaving her here.

  Natalya wouldn’t have gotten up and run away if the door was standing wide open, but she could still escape. What ever Jake was, she could never get away from him and his dead-eyed familiar, not anywhere in America. Not anywhere on this earth…

  There was nothing in the room sharp enough to cut, but Natalya was so cracked out that she thought nothing of biting into her own wrists. The first freshets of blood gurgled up her throat and tickled her nose, like warm Coca-Cola. She curled up around her arms, slurping the blood to keep the wounds open and flowing, shivering as her extremities succumbed to the chill of the grave.

  When her vision dissolved in carbonated black bubbles, she thought she would be free at last.

  She should have known better.

  Evangeline trembled with the cold Natalya described—felt it on her skin, and down to her bones—but more than that, she felt the near-unspeakable degradation, the emotional devastation that came from being one of Jake’s chosen whores.

  Take away the Moscow memories, and it might as well have been her own story, starting right from the very first moment she met Jake…

  …and Natalya gave her a moment to reflect on her own past, every single memory a wound that would not heal. The first night he’d shown her everything that sex could be, leaving his brand in her forever. The first night she’d swallowed an old man’s cum for money. The first night she’d puked on heroin, then relaxed into a pliant pincushion that every prick in the house impaled, over and over, for hours on end.

  The first night she’d been gang-raped under Gray’s supervision, as punishment for trying to get away…

  I know, Natalya whispered, close. So close that they almost shared the same skin.

  But Natalya was not finished with her story.

  Hell was not hot. It was colder than Moscow. When Natalya Lyubyenko died, there was only cold and blackness, but she knew she was in hell, because she could hear the Devil speaking.

  He sounded exactly like Jake.

  “I thought these Russian bitches were made of tougher stuff,” he grumbled.

  “Whores are whores,” barked the Devil’s lapdog. “You try to get your money’s worth out of them, shit always goes pear shaped.”

  “No, that’s not right, man. They’re not just things. They’re human beings, with feelings and fears, and hopes and dreams. And souls.” Then he laughed out loud. “And that’s the part I like most. I don’t know about you, but they’re a hell of a lot more fun to play with than any toys I had as a kid.”

  “I didn’t play with fucking toys. And this whore that you broke is way short of paid for.”

  “Forget about it. Those Russian fuckers know how whores are. Get Evangeline back on the beaners-and-bikers circuit a little harder for a month, and we’ll make it up.”

  “Easy for you to say. They don’t know where you live.”

  Natalya could not open her eyes. She could see only the ultraviolet snowfall of light on her eyelids. She smelled stale cigarettes and spilled liquor, musky man-stink and cologne, all enhanced by the coppery perfume of her blood.

  Jake said nothing for a long while, but Natalya sensed his brooding presence drawing closer, harder to ignore than the bottle caps and fingernail clippings digging into her dead ass.

  Finally, he started laughing. “Souls…When you save a soul, you’d have to be a sucker to just let God have it.”

  “Jake, this church shit is going to your head, man. Seriously.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did I fucking stutter? It’s a good grift, but…you’re starting to grift yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re starting to buy your own bullshit.”

  Natalya felt Jake leaning down over her, felt his hot breath on her marble-cold skin. The rising note of anger in his voice was like an inflammable gas leaking into the room.

  “Bullshit?”

  “It’s bullshit, isn’t it? You used to laugh about it, back in L.A. These fucks open their wallets and their legs for anyone who can save the one thing they don’t have. There’s no such thing as a soul.”

  “I can see,” Jake replied, honey in his voice, “why you’d want to believe that.”

  Jake laid his hand on her. It burned.

  She could not move a muscle, so she knew she was still dead. But the furnace-kiss of that hand, laid more gently on her than ever he touched her in life, would not be denied.

  “But there’s nothing bullshit about belief.” Stroking her, slowly melting the rigor out of her flesh, combing her hair with feathery waves of his fingers. Loving her back to life. “Everything that got done in this world that was worth remembering, that changed the world, was done by people who believed some crazy bullshit. Gave their lives for it.

  “Maybe there is no God, and maybe there are no souls, Gray. Maybe you’re right.”

  His hand curled around the bones of her neck and lifted her up off the shag carpet, wringing vitality back into her empty skull.

  “But you take this whore, for instance. If she believed in God, then she’s going to hell, which I gotta believe is even worse than pulling a wetback train with you conducting it.”

  “The bitch was sweet on you. So what.” Natalya hadn’t heard Gray move or breathe. “She didn’t think it through—”

  “But she believed!” Jake lifted her upright by her neck until she sat up in his arms. She felt his heart pounding against her, like a wild animal in a cage. “She believed in me, don’t you see that? Not in God, but in me! She gave her life, but she gave me her soul.

  “I can feel it, Gray. It doesn’t just float off, if you know how to hold on to it. If they love you more than they love life itself…you can do miracles.”

  Gray cackled until he coughed and spat his cigarette into a glass. “You’re losing your fucking mind, man.”

  Natalya tried to curse him, to speak up and prove her beloved was not a madman, but a prophet. If she could have spoken right then—if she could have said a word—how different it would have been.

  Jake would have seen the power of his own hand, demonstrated in the fertile soul of her heart.

  What might have grown—what might have been—if only he had looked into her eyes, and seen that he had reclaimed her from death.

  But he didn’t look down. His fist knotted up in her hair as he snapped her head back on her brittle neck.

  “Don’t you ever fucking call me crazy!”

  He stood and jerked her up as if he meant to throw her at Gray. She was a petite girl even before Gray stopped feeding her, and Jake effortlessly lifted her to her feet.

  I live! I am recalled to life through your grace, O lord! She willed herself to stand and speak, but she floated off her feet in h
is grip.

  And before she could part her lips to suck in a breath, he slammed her head into the glass and chrome coffee table between himself and Gray.

  She lay facedown in jagged shards of tempered glass. She felt every gritty razor edge digging into her skin. But somehow, she could not move, could not react, when he stepped on her head and ground her face into the glass, like crushing out a cigarette.

  There was a long silence between the two men.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Jake muttered at last. “I’m just tense, what with the wedding, and…all this.”

  “Forget it, Jake. It’s cool.”

  “Right on,” Jake said, clapping his hands to clear the air. He wiped his shoe off on her hair. “Clean up this fucking mess. I have to go call my fiancée, and ask her how her party’s going…”

  Evangeline’s wrists and forearms were beginning to itch: not just on the surface, but deep inside the veins, the throbbing veins now so much louder than the wind as they resonated with the thundering of her heart.

  She could not move her legs, or turn her head away. But her hands came up, as if idly, to drag their nails across her wrists.

  Left to right, and right to left.

  And the only other sound in the world was Natalya’s voice, whispering the last of her secrets…

  Natalya might have died again. She might only have gone to sleep.

  But when hearing and feeling returned, it was as if layers of gauze were wrapped around her head: a balaclava filled with sizzling coals and broken glass, through which the world came down a long, dark tunnel she could barely focus on through the pain.

  She was in the trunk of Gray’s car. The huge, heavy door swung up and he reached down to drag her body out, bathed in the deep crimson glow of his taillights.

  Perhaps it was only dumb luck; that she had survived herself and Jake’s callous resurrection was another peasant’s daydream. As hard as their lives were, Russians were notoriously hard to kill.

  Or perhaps it really was another miracle.

  But again, it was much too little, and much too late.