by Edward Lee
"You're a fuck-head, Gwyneth! You're a silly floozy fruitcake with tits for brains!"
"Oh, bondage, up yours!" she giggled some more. "I'm a worrier in Woolworth's!"
"Get up!" he barked, disgusted. He hoisted her to her feet, pulled her pants up.
"The morrow will not change your shameful deed!" she said, sing-songy. "You'll be someone else's fertile seed!"
It was just more nonsense she was blabbering. Finally she added, in an African American dialect, but giggling, "It was me and Lou Rawls. They locked us up in that cage and didn't give us nothin' but milk bottles and soup!"
"Aw, Jesus, you're all fucked up on drugs!" He roughly guided her back toward her bedroom. "You're a disgrace, Gwyneth. You're a dick-brain!"
In the hall, her knees began to give out; Melvin had to carry her the rest of way, not an easy feat for a confirmed weakling. When she burped in his face, Melvin nearly wretched at the smell: Poop-breath! Argg! He found some satisfaction, then, in finally heaving her out of his arms onto the bed because in his mind was the fantasy: heaving her out of a very high window.
Moonlight lay across her. Her hands feebly felt her groin. "The...ass of my pants is over my pussy!"
Tit-head! he thought. "Go to sleep! You're in a lot of trouble!"
She lay completely limp now, purring. "I'm...too fucked up to take my clothes off!"
"Tell me about it."
She tried to pull her top off but gave up. "Take my clothes off...and you can fuck me."
Melvin stared at her in the dark.
The moonlight made her eyes look like eggs. Her voice droned upward, "I really want you to fuck me, Leonard."
It was a vertiginous shift in his vision that showed him this fantasy: dropping the blade of a fire-ax into the middle of her face.
Melvin didn't do that, of course, and it wasn't really even a fantasy. It was just something that—combined with the trauma and stress of the moment—occurred to him.
Melvin left the room, after telling her in a voice like crumbling rocks, "My name's not Leonard."
««—»»
The mess she'd made was horrendous. Chunks of sheetrock lay strewn everywhere, and when he took another long glance at the wall, he groaned. It reminded him of the Three Stooges episode, "Goofs on a Roof," where Larry had dropped a television knob into a hole in the wall and used a hammer to get it out.
The entire wall section would have to be replastered, sanded, and painted. It's not my problem! Melvin reasoned. It's Dad's. That dizzy tramp is HIS wife. It only seemed fair. I'll have to hire a contractor and send Dad the bill. Dirk'll go nuts if he finds out about this.
Gwyneth had knocked holes all the way down to the top of the couch. When Melvin looked into the lowest hole...he thought he saw something.
It didn't look like a dead mouse. It looked shiny.
He pushed the couch away to maneuver.
He put his hand into the hole and reached down. Maybe...it's jewels! came the greedy thought. Or mob money! A secret stash!
What he pulled out instead was a can of dog food. Oh, come on! It looked very old, its label so faded he almost couldn't read it. BIG CHUNK BEEF DINNER, it read. Giant brand. With a happy German Shepard on the front.
So much for mob money...
Melvin didn't even want to try to contemplate why there might be a can of dog food in the wall. He reached in and pulled out something else. A sack? he guessed. A cloth bag?
Not quite. It was a black T-shirt wrapped around something. Melvin opened it on the couch cushion, and several things fell out.
A half dozen tiny plastic bags of white powder, a cloudy syringe, and...
More cans.
But not dog food. The cans were flat. Film cans, he knew at once. Small, four inches wide each. Masking tape provided labels on which someone had scrawled: Horsin' Around, Makin' Bacon, Dog Day Afternoon. The bottom can read Scat Comp - Wetshot edits (5-77)
Melvin looked at the bizarre cans, revolted because he knew what they were...yet fascinated all the same. These are some of the movies Leonard D'arava made for Paul Vinchetti's porn network. He read the white block letters on the T-shirt: VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR.
He sat back on the couch, thinking. Do I really want to see these movies? Of course not! But he could if he wanted to. It was old, old format film—8 millimeter, or 16—which people had stopped using decades ago, but Melvin knew he could take these films to a processing lab and have them put on DVD. Or—
Wait a minute...
The most morbid curiosity carried him out the back door and into the warm, cricket-trilling night. It probably doesn't even work anymore, he told himself. Blocks of moonlight carpeted the stable floor, while the floor itself creaked with each step. A breath caught in his chest when he whirled, a certain someone had been standing outside looking in through the plank-wood half-door.
A tall, lanky figure inked into shadow.
But when Melvin looked outside, no one was there.
He found the bulky editing machine and lumbered back to the house. In only a few minutes he managed to set the machine up on the end table. The machine read SANKYO on the face. A tiny screen—9 by 6 inches—was mounted over a projection hood. And when he flicked the power switch—
Unbelievable! It still works after all these years...
The screen turned a luminous pale white. Melvin selected the film can that read Scat Comp—Wetshot edits (5-77), presuming by the date that this one most assuredly had been made by Leonard D'arava, and after some difficulty he managed to feed the plastic leader through the editor's tiny film gate.
Melvin turned the speed-knob to SLOW.
And watched.
The machine didn't flutter like a movie projector; instead, it seemed to cruise in near silence. From the size of the can, Melvin doubted that the movie could last more than a few minutes but as it turned out, he only watched for a few seconds, before he picked the editor up, yanked it out of the wall, and dropped it in the garbage can outside.
He did his best to shut down all thought. In fact, the only thought he could think was Don't think, don't think, don't think, over and over. He left the house, staggered down the drive, and walked for a long time, peering through a thousand-yard stare at the revolting impossibility he'd seen on the minuscule screen.
This: an emaciated woman on hands and knees dipping her face down to eat from a modest pile of human excrement on the floor. Up her ass to the ankle was the foot of another woman, an emaciated blonde.
The activity, filmed in 1977, replicated an identical activity Melvin had seen his father's wife partake in earlier today.
PART FOUR
(I)
It was the strangest dream that dragged him down into sleep. He felt as though he were lying in a coffin, and the coffin was being slowly lowered into the earth. He could hear dirt falling onto the lid, until he was covered up entirely, and then suddenly his mind was a camera lens.
A big car on the open road. A Cadillac, gray, late '60s. A man's voice but a voice that did not belong to Melvin talked like a voiceover in a movie.
Here's how I lost my true virginity. I chopped a woman in half at the waist and had sex with the bottom half.
Then: It's interesting. Everything is providential...
The Cadillac cruised on. Were there...a bunch of women in it?
Another voice, which sounded British, sang in a terra-schzoid warble: Now all history is reduced to the syllables of our name. Nothing can ever be the same. Now the immortals are here...
From the dream's vantage-point, the eye of Melvin's mind tried to look more closely into the car, and he did indeed spy several women packed inside. Five of them, it looked like, all around 17. Their eyes all looked sated by some blessed contentment. The girls' hair was disarrayed, and they dressed in the oddest garb: frilly white bonnets and severe black ankle dresses. Their hands all lay folded in their laps, and in the distant yet joyous expressions on their faces, they seemed to be waiting for something.
The man's voice again: God said to go unto the earth and be fruitful and multiply. Well, that night, the devil said the same thing to me. It was a happy time.
Melvin finally got a look at the driver. It wasn't a man, really. It was a monster.
Something like a time lapse seemed to pass, like a transition in a film. Jumpcuts underpinned by the slow, heavy thud of a human—or perhaps not so human—heart. The Cadillac's roof sweeping down tree-lined country roads. A crooked roadsign: LUNTVILLE, VA - 60 MILES. More intercuts threw up flashes before the viewer's eyes. Roads grew more narrow, the woods grew deeper. The big luxury car had truly arrived at the backwoods, far away from civilization. And the voice again, in Bergmanesque narration, The monster... Me. I took care of my charges, as Adam took care of Eve after she bit the apple... Where was Max von Sydow when you needed him?
The shadowed thing in moonlight, the abominable hulk—the transposition—an ink-black cutout shape. Two horns jutted from its head as leaves skittered past in a midnight breeze. The five girl-women he'd brought here from so far away lay sedate and content in the fire-lit cave the monster had selected as their home—home, that is, and maternity ward. Their austere garb shed now, the women lounged naked—their natural state. Their breasts lay heavy, vibrating with untapped milk, their young bellies bloated with life...
The monster kept the women warm, kept them safe, kept them fed with the fruits of the land. And though the monster was a very sexual creature, it refrained from intercourse with their tender loins so not to damage the precious nuggets of evil within. But the monster did receive plenteous oral sex from the women because...well...
Why not?
And then they were born, the narrator returned as more jumpcuts showed glimpses of the women's bellies growing, backed by a pretentious ticking sound and flashes of old photographs of Leonard D'arava. My sons and daughters were born into the face of God's daylight, and they were beautiful babies. A wolf howled, for no apparent reason. Beautiful on the outside, unspeakable on the inside...
The women, teary-eyed in joy, coddled the newborns, and the newborns suckled greedily. Later, the women left the cave and drifted out through the woods, to a spectacular bluff. They smiled serenely, their eyes closed and upturned to the moon, and they jumped naked off the cliff, one by one...
The Cadillac on the road again, then the Cadillac pulling away from a county hospital, leaving the chubby babies on the doorstep.
The dream-narrator, one last time. My job was done. I drove far, far away until I came upon another plush and gorgeous woodland, and then I parked the car and got out and walked to the middle of the woods—
The monster walked far and aimlessly through the densest thicket amid trees.
—and then I lay down and died.
The monster lay still, and his inhuman body decomposed. Eventually, the thicket grew over it, until it could no longer be seen. As if it had never existed.
««—»»
Melvin woke up frowning. That was the dumbest dream I ever had in my life! But then he retracted the thought. At least it wasn't a nightmare.
His travel clock read 4:12 a.m. Damn... He let more time pass, sitting upright in moon-tinged darkness. Eventually he left the room, garbed only in T-shirt and briefs. His stomach felt so empty it could have been attempting to digest itself. Get something to eat, he thought.
That would surely make him feel better.
Melvin never made it to the kitchen, his trek discontinued by the sight of Gwyneth, fully naked, sitting quite oddly on the living room couch. Her legs were spread to the absolute limits of her hip joints and she was leaning over so far her back was bowed; she was looking directly at her splayed vagina. Two fingers of her left hand V'd at the top of the vulva, pulling upward, to completely bare her clitoris.
Two fingers of her right hand delicately manipulated a syringe. Melvin's inexplicable macro-vision returned, zooming to her crotch. He could see every pink, glistening detail—as if through the strongest magnifying glass—as the syringe was emptied through the needle directly into the clitoris.
"Aw, yeaaaaaaaaah..."
Gwyneth's clitoral bolus swelled momentarily, then reverted to normal size, the ever-tiniest drop of blood forming at the very tip.
She collapsed back against the couch, cross-eyed and drooling through the most indulgent grin. Very slowly, her head turned to Melvin.
"That's really good smack, Melvin..."
Then her stomach spontaneously emptied, a line of thin vomit exited quite liberally through her smiling lips.
Melvin staggered, half-convulsing, to the kitchen. I don't think this is a dream. I think. This. Is real...
No appetite remained, of course, when he reached the kitchen. But light bid safety so the first thing he did was flick the wall switch up.
Only to be left to stare in aghast silence.
Dirt covered the kitchen floor—dirt from the earth. Two skulls lay on their sides on the counter, and on the floor lay a headless skeleton and two more skeletons disconnected at the waist.
Melvin fled out the back door. He was nearly mindless now; hence he had no conscious idea where he might be going. Sounds of crickets and peepers throbbed densely as electronic music. He nearly fell into the hole Gwyneth had dug earlier.
It was much larger now.
(II)
Melvin awoke on his back. Whatever he lay on felt hard, coarse, and when his eyes fluttered open he saw several sparrows sitting on a wooden sill, chirping happily. Warm, wonderful sunlight flowed down on him from an open space. After a few more moments of conjuring his cognizance, he realized that he'd fallen asleep out in the old horse stable.
Either I've gone totally insane, he reasoned, or the Vinchetti house is very, very haunted.
Whichever the case, however, Melvin resolved quite quickly that he and Gwyneth would now spend the shortest amount of time gathering their things, and then they would get in their vehicles, and then they would put as much fucking distance between their fucking selves and that fucking house as humanly possible.
He nodded. He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he jogged back into the house, got dressed. He took to the task of sweeping the dirt out of the kitchen, throwing the skulls and skeleton parts back in the ground from whence they came, and refilling the hole.
Another hour he spent stowing their belongings, including Gwyneth's burdensome hobby debris, into their respective vehicles. Gwyneth herself was no doubt still sleeping, and though Melvin knew precious little about the particular effects of heroin, he suspected she would continue sleeping for quite a while. He remembered reading Burroughs' Junkie in an American Lit class, and recalled that the characters spent undue segments of their lives "on the nod."
He frowned at the plethora of hammer-holes in the living room wall. There was no way he could fix that mess himself, and there was equally no way he was going to stay here while a contractor undertook the repairs. I'll tell Dirk, and tell him to give me the bill, then I'll give the bill to Dad. Dad will pay. Dad's insane wife did the damage, so Dad will pay. Simple.
In the course of Melvin's determinations, though, and his cleaning the house and refilling holes, it never came to mind that there was one thing he had not happened upon.
The cruciform plaque that Gwyneth had made.
When he went to wake Gwyneth up, she was not in her room.
"Oh, not again!"
The Corvette was still outside, however, so she definitely didn't go back to the biker tavern. She's got to be on the property somewhere...
He called out her name in throat-roughening bellows, and he searched the entire house again, and the entire property outside.
At the edge of the yard, then, he heard...
Something.
Voices.
Some sort of revel?
The voices seemed very distant, carrying up the north side of the hill. Melvin grimly looked down the vast slope of land and realized where Gwyneth must have strayed to.
The Epipha
nite compound...
He began to stalk down the hill.
(III)
A few missing slats from the rotting fence provided his entrance. Melvin waded through high grass as he proceeded; the compound was a maze of old austere wooden buildings and crooked footpaths. The buildings all looked the same—drab, gray rectangles—save for one, whose steepled roof and bell tower indicated a church. Tall, arched windows had long-since lost their stained glass, and the massive front door hung off its hinges. Melvin wasn't sure...
Had it been the raucous voices that had led him here, or simply some undefined instinct?
He looked straight at the church. She's in there, he felt certain.
Three big Harley motorcycles were parked out front. It was through the broken windows that the voices channeled out.
"Ooo-eee!" a man's voice celebrated.
And another: "Un-fuckin'-believable! Didn't know a chick could do that to herself!"
Melvin crept up to the side of the church, rose on his tip-toes to peer through the broken window...
The church was gutted: no pews, no altar, no choir seats or organ, just dusty, wide-open space. An empty beer can bounced across the floor, echoing its clatter. Three very large, unkempt bikers in seedy leather jackets stood aside, leering down at Gwyneth...
