by John Everson
Natalie stripped off her shirt and used it to wipe the trail of sweat down her back. But as soon as the cotton touched her skin, she burned inside like scalding water. She dropped the shirt and unbuttoned her jeans as the fire cooled above the waist and spread to the places where her clothes kissed.
She cried out at the sensations that coursed across her skin; molten lava chased with frozen cactus needles. The intensity of the sensation only stilled when she ran her hands across her skin. She discovered this solution to the heat, as she stripped off her panties and bra. Soon she crouched on her knees in the cave and kneaded her breasts and belly to relieve the heat, and then her ass and thighs. Her fingers were a flurry of motion, but when they slipped between her legs, well, that was when the heat turned to ecstasy. She saw the face of the sallow man on the ground, his lips ghostly flesh atop the bones. Natalie whimpered and lay down next to him, yearning to get closer, yet still afraid to feel his ghostly touch.
He smiled at her and nodded, urging her to come closer, closer. The wish voices whispered louder all around, exhortations to grovel and groan. They whispered sexy things…and horrible things.
Fuck the dead and taste the bread
Death is life and life is dead
Lick his ass and find your place
Stick your tongue into his face
Suck the juice of broken skin
And suck the teeth of open sin
Spill your pleasure in the mud
And be the slut you yearn to love
The smile of the sallow man grew as Natalie pressed first her fingers inside her, and then rubbed her wet crotch against his pelvis bone. Her eyes fluttered closed as the voices sang singsong rhymes of nakedness and depravity, and her body burned with pleasure at every movement she made. Natalie groveled and pressed her lips to the open skull mouth of the dead man, and shivered at the touch of her lips to the empty teeth bone of the fossils there. She could taste his dust like spice, and something like a tongue sprouted inside her mouth, pressing its way deeper inside her. She sucked his ghostly tongue like a cock until her throat filled with something that was strangely both acid sour and honey sweet.
She gagged on the taste and instinctively rolled away, but the bones of the ancient thing came with her, almost as if he were pinned inside her as she’d tried to move away. And then as her eyes opened, she realized he was inside her…his mustache was ghostly soft against her lips, and his eyes empty black like doors into nowhere. The bone of his femur had somehow separated from the rest of his skeleton in their tussle, and her hand had been working it against her clit as if it were the stone dildo she’d left in the house.
“Mine mine all mine…” she heard a chorus of voices wail, as the cave grew dark, and the man leaned down to kiss her one more time.
When Natalie woke, she was cold, and felt disgusting. Her thighs and belly were covered with smears of dirt, and an old bone lay cold against her belly. She shoved it to the side and rolled to a crouch, looking all around the shadowy space. But it was silent. Something cool and viscous had gelled across her cheek, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand.
Natalie pulled her jeans from the ground and stabbed her leg in the leg hole, nearly falling over before she got the pants pulled up to her thighs. She pulled the shirt over her head in a flash, grabbed her underthings and fled the cave.
The afternoon was already waning when Natalie half-ran, half-stumbled her way back to the house. She stripped right back out of her clothes and turned on the shower as hot as it would go before stepping in to soap and scrub the mud from her flesh.
When she stepped out, her skin glowing red, she felt a little better. But as she dressed and walked around the empty house, fixing leftover chicken and rice for dinner, her mind kept seeing what had happened during the afternoon over and over again.
“Jesus,” she said seemingly a million times. “How could you?”
Feelings washed over her like a kaleidoscope. Self-loathing and disgust and depression and then the creep of carnal excitement as the memories of the sensations returned…and then loathing again…
She barely ate her dinner, but popped one of Crisofer’s Coors Lights and downed it almost in two swallows.
The house had grown dark as she’d eaten and fretted, and Natalie sat down on the couch in the living room with the empty bottle in her hand. The windows were black as her mood. But then in the distance, she saw something shimmer orange and red…a distant car light…or maybe a fire.
She stared at the faint light outside and sensed that it was growing closer. And then the hair on her arms stood up, and she knew that it was definitely closer. Natalie stood up and walked slowly backwards, away from the approaching flame. Then she turned and ran down the hall to her bedroom, and slammed the door behind her.
Heart pounding and feeling flushed, she sat down on the bed and put her head between her hands. “Oh my God,” she murmured. “What have I done?”
The temperature in the room suddenly rose, as if the furnace had kicked on and run for ten minutes in a closed space.
Natalie’s eyes widened as she felt sweat drip from her forehead to her arm. It rolled down the faint hair and dropped to the bed, but soon another drip followed. She could feel the heat breathing down her back like flames.
“Leave me alone,” she cried out, and rolled across the bed to wrench the nightstand drawer open.
The stone phallus lay there, white and ready.
She picked it up and cradled it in her palms, and instantly felt the heat dissipate.
“It’s mine,” she whispered to the air. From somewhere far away she heard more voices crying. “Mine,” they argued.
Natalie smiled and set the stone on the bed, as she stripped her shirt and pants off. Part of her was screaming inside, in complete disbelief that she would do this again. Twice in one day lowering herself to…whatever this was.
But when she lay down on the bed and pressed the cool, slippery smooth head of the phallus between her legs, those thoughts disappeared as she felt her reward. All she could whisper as waves of beautiful heat and pleasure surged through her nerves, making her legs shiver and her belly heave, was, “Mine…mmmm mine.”
When Crisofer got home a couple days later, he found Natalie lying naked and curled in a ball on their bed. He stepped over a line of colored stones near their doorway and picked up the sheets from where they lay crumpled on the floor, and draped them over her. He saw that her feet were smudged with dirt, and frowned. Natalie was far too neat to ever climb in bed with muddy feet. WTF.
“Wild night,” he said softly, running his fingers through her hair. One of Natalie’s eyelids fluttered open, and she grinned feebly. “Had a hard time sleeping while you were gone,” she said. And seconds later, her face went slack, and she dozed off again.
“Wow,” Cris said, backing away to quietly unpack his suitcase. He turned off the lights before stripping down and walking to the bed where his wife lay, seemingly comatose. He slipped in beside Natalie and draped an arm around the smooth skin of her waist, then moved his hand up her arm. His fingers brushed against something cold and hard in her hand, but then whatever it was slipped out of her grasp and thumped on the floor. Cris thought about getting up to see what she’d been holding, but the warmth of the bed won against his desire for neatness. He’d get it in the morning. Or she would.
Comforted by the warmth and smell of her, he instantly began to drift off to sleep himself. But after a few minutes, the warmth of her became too warm, and he rolled away. He pressed his face into the pillow, searching for a comfortable position. But even moving over to the cool sheets didn’t take away the heat. Cris tossed and rolled, and finally threw the sheets completely off of him. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
“What the hell,” he whispered, and got out of bed to get a glass of water from the bathroom.
When he climbed back in the b
ed, Natalie didn’t budge. But Cris grew increasingly hot. Soon he was lying on his back, face to the ceiling, sweat dripping down his cheeks and pooling on his chest. His breathing increased and his skin flushed.
He almost thought that the air at the corners of the room was growing a faint, wicked red.
“What the hell,” he gasped, as the skin across his entire body suddenly felt like a fingertip pressed to a hot frying pan.
It may have been the smell that woke her. Natalie’s eyes peeled open, and as she struggled to wake, her nose wrinkled in dismay. She rolled onto her back.
The source of the smell was in her bed. Inches away.
The blackened husk beside her didn’t look much like her husband. But still, somehow, she knew him. The hair had shriveled into ringlets and ash around his skull, and his blue eyes had yellowed and dried in pits beneath a face warped by dozens of blisters and singed as if held to a blazing flame.
His body seemed made of ash, and Natalie opened her mouth to scream. But then held it in. She knew what had burned her Crisofer to char. She knew almost instantly. She had felt that heat herself.
“Why,” she whispered to the air.
“Mine,” an invisible sound answered.
Natalie shook her head and got out of bed. Naked, she walked to the line of stones she’d taken from the tomb the day before and replaced at the doorway of her bedroom. She had guessed the meaning of those stones, and figured she had only set the thing free by taking the stone back to her bed. With his phallus in the drawer and the warding rocks restricting the doorway, he was trapped inside her room, for when she needed or wanted him. Or so she had surmised.
“No,” Natalie said, tears running down her face as she picked up the stone cock from the floor where it had dropped during the night. She placed it gently in the nightstand drawer.
“Mine,” she said. And then she stepped out of the room, closing the door behind her, leaving both of her lovers behind.
The Eyes
They’re probably gonna die, so they might as well have a little fun with it, right? I always offer them this game: “If you can drive the needle into the white of your eye—not the colored part in the center—and then pull it out of your head without puncturing that precious gooey fluid sac in the middle…I’ll let you live.”
Only one person has ever actually risen to that challenge and survived…and my current candidate seemed unlikely to join her. Jake thrashed and tried to scream in the converted gynecologist’s chair he was strapped into, but the ball gag sealed his anger in. I held out the foot-long needle to him and said again, “Touch the needle to the side of your eyeball and push. It’ll feel a little slippery at first, until the tip really sinks in and penetrates the eyeball. Then give it a good tap with your hand—not too hard, or you’ll puncture your brain. That won’t feel good at all…”
I paused so he could think about that a moment, and then explained.
“What you wanna do is, knock it in about an inch, so you get the tip of that needle all the way through the back of your eyeball. Remember, if you hit the cornea, you’re disqualified. I want you to skewer the eye on its end, and then pop it out of its socket. I’ll cut the optic nerve for you, if it doesn’t separate on its own.”
In my hand, I showed him the exacto knife. In that instant, it almost looked like his eye might fall out of its socket all by itself, he was glaring at me so hard.
“Last chance,” I said. “C’mon, it’s a game. It’ll be fun.” This was the tough part for most—would you really consider jamming a needle in your eye and then pulling the thing out to live? Or would you rather just die?
Believe it or not, more women took the needle from me than men. Higher pain threshold, I guess. It was ironic but men are usually pussies about pain. I kinda hoped Jake would fail, because I had an experiment I wanted to try involving his testicles, his eyeballs and about a foot of his still-living intestine. So, I have to admit, I really didn’t want him to win.
Jake took the needle. He touched the point to the side of his eye, which was crying…that would only make the going more slippery. He gave the back of the needle a quavering thump with his free hand, and this time he screamed loud enough to get past the red rubber ball in his mouth. His whole body convulsed and shook in the chair like an electrocution. The needle stuck out of his eye like a dart. Blood streamed down his face like red Kool-Aid.
“Pull it out,” I reminded him, and with two shaking hands, he grabbed the needle and tried to rock it to the right and left, so as to pop the eyeball out of his head. His screams had turned into rhythmic panting shrieks and finally I yelled at him, “Do it!”
With one good yank, he separated the eyeball from the socket so hard that the optic nerve snapped instantly and hung like saucy spaghetti down his cheek. The jelly of his once-blue cornea slid like thick snot across the bridge of his nose. I took the skewer from his hand and tsked.
“Sorry, Jake, you ruined the center. I told you not to do that. You lost, my friend.”
“Brenda? Let me have the spoon.”
I snapped the restrainers back onto his arms and accepted the grapefruit spoon from Brenda. In a second, I was pushing the serrated edge down beneath the lower eyelid on his good eye. The spoon slipped in easy, and with just a little wiggling, I got it all the way under his eyeball. Then I gave the handle a good pull and popped Jake’s second eyeball into my hand. His face was really bloody now, and two raw meat sockets stared at me and my soon-to-be snack.
But I told you there was a game afoot. Here was the fun part. I wanted to play a little taste test with Brenda. Taking the exacto, I cut a slit across Jake’s ballsack and removed the slippery white testicles. Nothing like the salty taste of man-oysters in the back of your throat to get the mood going, I thought.
As Jake’s screaming and thrashing quieted, fading to unconscious tremors, I cut open a six-inch slash right across his bellybutton, reached my hand inside, and pulled out a length of gory, slippery-slick intestine. I’d made him fast for the past three days, but I looked inside the steaming pink flesh just to make sure there was no shit surprise there, once I cut out myself a good length. I didn’t want to have to wash out impurity if I didn’t have to—cleaning the guts took away the flavor and I wanted them fresh.
Finally, as Jake lay dying in the chair, I snipped his bloody intestines into four short lengths and stuffed the ragged holes in each with either an eyeball, or a testicle.
I skewered each one to make a plate of cannibalistic hors d’oeuvres, and called for my lovely bride.
“Tasting time,” I said. “Get ’em fresh and hot before they die!”
I gave her the man-oyster stuffed gut first, and she licked her lips before touching the bloody flesh to her lips. Then she slid the still-pulsing meat into her mouth. She chewed, and made a confused, though not unhappy face.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“A little something special,” I said. “Jake Oyster Surprise.”
She raised an eyebrow and chewed some more. She shrugged, as if to say, “I’ve had better.” Then I gave her an eyeball-stuffed gut.
When she bit down this time, you could hear the wet pop as the cornea gave way and all that gooey good stuff turned to a delicious bloody iris jelly in her mouth.
“Mmmmmmm mmmm good,” she moaned, nodding.
Her happy eyelids fluttered over empty eye sockets and she grinned, strings of pink gut still sticking like Coney Island taffy through her teeth. She looked as happy as the day I had fed her her own baby blues.
“Oh, without a doubt,” she sighed. “The eyes have it.”
Sacrificing Virgins
The last thing he wanted to do tonight was to have sex with a beautiful virgin.
Tony stopped walking from the stage to the dressing room and scratched a lock from his head at that uncharacteristic thought. He slumped with a sigh against the dingy b
lack hallway wall.
How had it come to this? He actually was dreading the idea of fondling the virgin he knew awaited him just a few steps and a door away.
When you put it on demonically notarized legal paper with a schedule, sex just didn’t end up being as much fun as it used to be. The contract had sounded unbeatable at the time—fame and fortune for him and his band. And what he paid in return was a reward in itself.
The price?
Deflower one virgin after each performance.
By midnight.
Not a problem!
The contract stipulated that to meet the terms, the virgins thus deflowered must be those that would be delivered by “The Messenger” to his dressing room. It also guaranteed that they would be “pleasing to behold”.
Tony had always liked ’em young, so this worked out well. Since they had to be good-looking virgins, the girls The Messenger brought almost always were young—you didn’t stay a virgin for long if you were hot! And the whole virgin thing saved Tony from worrying too much about STDs with the girls. He hated condoms.
What could be a sweeter deal? There were always hot, tight babes willing to do whatever he wanted after every show when he was pumped full of hype and adrenaline. It was just what he needed. And he did his best to ignore the suspicion that the girls provided were somehow drugged. They seemed alert, but no girls were that pliable. Hell, there’d been one he’d tied to the chair, gagged, poured a pitcher of beer over her and then invited in a couple members of the crew for a gang bang (after he’d given her a Miller douche and deflowered her himself, of course). When he took off her gag and handed her over to The Messenger at midnight, she had smiled dumbly at him and said, “Thanks.”
