Satanskin

by James Havoc

  Honey puking hamadryads are sniffing his trail, stringing their lutes with the milky pubic hairs he sheds while masturbating to the Queen of Hounds and her stinking, prolapsed uterus; nearer and nearer, plucking notes that reverberate through his threat of ash and rowan.

  The greenfly on these twigs rub their smoking rear legs in harmony.

  They sound like the clink and clicker of fornicating skeletons amplified across a pessary strewn rift valley. Galpin wipes the sweat from his scrotum, feeds it to his Dalmatian bitch. The hour of harvest is upon him.

  In adolescence, Zillah had instigated a clitoris cult founded on a tenet of sympathy with animals. She believed that only in orgasm could humans attain that state of innocence, devoid of conscious thought, enjoyed by the beasts in the forest.

  Naked save for boots and waist length jackets of rubber, she and her cohorts would round up boys by night, shepherding them to the cemetery where they bid them dig up graves. Then, writhing split thighed amid the wolfbane and cool, upturned humus, they allowed the thirsting youths to drink their fill at each orifice. Evicted corpses, stuffed with orchids, were hung like boudoir curtains on cords from overhead branches.

  Flat on her back, dizzy at the kaleidoscopic stars, Zillah began to imagine sexual disease as a dark, sad wanderer in a valley of ravens; the truth bringer ever travelling under malediction. An undead spy, lean and devouring, dormant in ransacked atomic chambers, revelling only in the body's nether spasms, the upsurge of its most deep seated wellsprings. Then conjoining, like the prodigal returned, drawing all extraneous energies to sacrifice in his unfathomable nucleus; glorifying the transience of flesh through a decadent mirror.

  Soon, Zillah would only court the attention of much older males, men who might harbour the predatory paramour she longed to embrace. No longer welcome in society, reviled even by her sisters, she herself became vagrant, her errant figure staining the world just as she hoped an erogenous voyager would one day haunt her interior landscapes.

  And so Zillah set forth in search of stricken flesh, attended by a caravan of weird fauna. Nailing choice morsels to the slab of obsidian which she bore across her shoulders, she began to construct a mirror of her very own; a glass in which her all consuming prince would one day come to light.

  On, Zillah, on; scythe poised to reap albino meat, and the clairvoyant sores that circle it! On, until the clucking of your frog winged vanguard sounds its alarum at the fugitive's first wall of defence: the She hound. Curling jowls bearded with jackrabbit thews, Galpin's familiar crouches defiantly on the bridlepath. Zillah can see that the dog is a shape shitter; its straining, bullseye dappled haunches are giving vent to irregular septagons and triangles, which in turn emanate turquoise ghosts. Preposterous visions compose their wall of weeping sleep: saurian sacs that pustulate in the forked tail of the whirlwind, anacondas gleaning honey from a priest head cluster, a cabinet of dead jackdaws in the rain. Deathshead moths have alighted on the bitch's teats, which hang in morose rows, pitted by Galpin's milk teeth. Its howls breach a sky of orange rags.

  Only Zillah stands unrepulsed by this display; comprehending the signal novae in a dog's orbit, she is able to communicate a beautiful, viral spectre of her own: the apparition of hydrophobia. Senses scrambled, the bitch bolts, foaming with blind fear. The chimeras from its faecal polygons dwindle. Beyond the vaporised wall cowers a sweating fugitive, pasty chops puffing like bellows. His face resembles a cantaloupe of rotten ham, all awry with deliquescent chalk. Galpin whimpers as the huntress stands astride him, urinating onto his face; then, without resistance, he submits to the glittering blade.

  Abandoning her victim, Zillah affixes her latest prize to the mirror of contagion, at last completing its putrid frame. The inky stone begins to clarify, images coalescing in its sorrowful, precarious depths.

  Images of destiny.

  Through the decaying funnel of pirated, prophetic abscesses, Zillah beholds her wedding day. She in a hooded gown of red velvet, vivid carnations wreathing her brow – clashing with the green, mortified tissue beneath, the fused features of tertiary necrosis. On her warped arm, the groom. Her saturnine avatar of carnal decay.

  Yet he appears different, somehow, to the virulent knight in her dreams. White. Far too white. And flabby. Ugly, sweaty, ungainly.

  Snowy haired, and pink eyed.

  And emasculated by her own fair hand.

  XII : DITCHFINDER

  Alas, poor Gutrig! – The very cunt of night has bled into his sleeping mouth.

  Star saturated, he was spewed up and carved down in a hole where bad things shed skins. His Daddy would come home from killing drunk on arterial mink blood, fisted with reels of gleaming viscera, sulphuric vomit fonting from his copper graven gizzard. He had four testicles; barbed white worms poked from the abscesses on his huge, unclothed penis. While Gutrig gorged on regurgitated meat, he would root around inside Mummy. One night, his fearful rummaging split her in two. Down amongst the compost and cockroaches, Daddy howled and howled. Gutrig looked up at the grievous vermilion sky. It resembled a face destroyed by sharp teeth. First came floating organisms, like ciphers for destruction, and beyond them the planets, dancing with the elegance of burning children. Under this bad zodiac, he abandoned the nest.

  Alone, a sad scavenger in the rank, unbounded wilderness.

  Thorn riddled hearts dangle from the vicious trees, whose fruits bear the seeds of cannibalism. Everywhere, open graves. Gutrig comes to a place where no dogs howl. Here, the heavens are negated by the copulating cedars, and the only illumination drips from overhanging gargoyle lanterns of oppressive iron. The serpentine path is demarcated by piles of stripped skulls with pizzles rotting in their eyesockets. At its end, he spies an edifice shaped and shaded like a bruised mouth: the palace of the Queen of Slits.

  She is caparisoned in a grey, wriggling cloak of live rats, stitched together with catgut. All manner of knuckles adorn her brow.

  She parts the cloak. Her skin is fathomless and mercurial, an elastic mirror in which Gutrig catches the first ever glimpse of his own face: a smudged portrait, the semi digested flesh almost molten over glints of bone; no nose, just a spike filled maw and the solitary eye, adrift beneath a clouded yellow cataract. Startled by himself, Gutrig fails to notice the Queen's soft approach until his senses are assailed by a fish head stench. Tracing its origin, he comes face to face with her fabulous genitalia.

  Loaded like iron, Gutrig is slowly drained of all consciousness by means of a sexual lesion; dimly aware only of the arhythmic whirring of her lethal reproductive organs from beneath their adipose dewlap of stubbled, greasy skin. On a brink, he senses the advent of some massive universe; the very seams of fear are about to burst, and a delinquent aristocracy shall pray before the crimson altar.

  There are ditches within ditches. The Queen's elongated labia snarl corruptly, disclosing the suggestion of a twilit, carnivorous poppyfield. Gutrig can soon discern this interior domain with intense clarity; its iconic, ruby dawn, filtered through a skin chilling mist, meaty and sugared, pervades.

  Everywhere, wheels bearing gutted torsos that teem with web dwellers. Ahead, the caves. Here Gutrig found Daddy, the stone walls of his home daubed with friezes depicting life in the belly of a raven.

  Flat on her silvery back amongst a tangle of pelts, legs parted, the Queen. Her dismal cloaca gapes open, bloodied and sperm sprayed, a frayed orchid. The orchid starts to whirl like a dream grinding machine, Daddy kneeling before it, shaking, and Gutrig suffers the impression of watching locusts in combat behind stained glass.

  At a masque inside a girl where billy goats gnaw salted feet on sticks and magpies pick at the gangrenous wounds of gold boys fallen from the sky, father and son swing on cords. Pods open and close, revealing fat rows of puce male organs; the Queen is on her rat fur throne. Proudly, she holds aloft her orb, a vase of bone stripping acid, and her sceptre, a slender pair of corroded castrating tongs. Soon, these religious tools may terminate Gutrig's journey to the end o
f the ditch.

  Yet the stalking grey skeletons that mock him can only mimic her music box tempo; as it winds down, their parched limbs stiffen.

  Daddy is a hunter, versed in the joys of snapping prey – even the bloodless provide, spurting hot marrow across his jowls. The Queen reclines in her seat, pulling her thighs apart like a contortionist. From her vulva, a circle emission of glowering narcoleptic rays, glutinous rings of hypnoses and concentric trances. Her eyes promise ritual murder. Gutrig's last glimpse of Daddy fades, and he slips once more into the vortex.

  Voices. As raw as an angel's liver pecked out by vultures.

  Hooded ones are holding Mass in their hidden jade temple. Gutrig hangs by the neck over a gore crucible, kicking and convulsing, spurting moribund universes. Before his eyes, cascading religious signs, seemingly hacked from hemispheres of gristle. Scimitars appear.

  Then the hemp snaps, plunging him into a gaugeless, sardonic deep.

  Dankness. Claws across his cold face. His grave is shallow, a brackish rattery by a dead river. The air is gloomy, heavy with excrement. Through this dreary, tainted tract, he carries home to Daddy an image of the Queen, encased in a bead of bilgewater.

  Where is Daddy?

  A distortion of smouldering black musculature, he appears through a succession of oneiric mirrors out of time. The seventh and final mirror, convex and scorched, is the taut back of the Queen as he fucks her like a beast. One hand squeezes together her breasts, while with the other he twists and tugs a coarse noose which is knotted around her bruised, bloody throat. Listening to their whining and growling, Gutrig suddenly feels an immense pressure on his ribcage, forcing the air from his lungs. On the point of asphyxiation, he sees himself blasted from a sow's backside.

  Sprawled across his familiar bed of carapaces, husks and nettles, he watches as Daddy, roaring with laughter, butchers the sow and proceeds to roast her up for supper. For Gutrig, the shivering brains. Sweet woodsmoke curls to the pink and benevolent sky, while a reassuring warmth permeates their home. What could ever disrupt their newly regained harmony?

  With a contented yawn, his regal step mother uncrosses her legs.

  XIII : CRIMES AGAINST PUSSYCAT

  The Sphinx – loneliness as a cold altar.

  Fellating kittens in a witch house, Momus began to hear the chime of ancestral voices. Soon, spoilers came from the dark side, playing panther music on his sternum as he slumbered.

  One night he awoke, dry mouthed, from a nightscape soaked in tails. Throughout his quarters, an eddying groundswell of numinous, psychotropic illumination. At the foot of his bed he could discern the form of a large he creature, black skinned, cat headed, covered with strings of pigeon skulls. Its breath stank of apples and oysters. A pearly set of claws flourished twice, leaving snuffed out photon trails that hung briefly like an odd crimson rune, the crock of iniquities at rainbow's end. Then all light vanished without flicker, reminding Momus of that moment when the noose snaps tight about a young murderess' throat. In a trice he was asleep once more. He slept profoundly, for hours on end, his nocturnal canvas now scored with caricatures of genital mutilation and other cackling anathemas.

  Nothing stirred in the witch house.

  Morning. Seven storeys below, Lupercalia sits and greases the tools of her trade. Long since bored with her given lot of pumping slack gash in dirty basements, she is now fired by wild and daring ambition.

  Whilst servicing two novitiates with spring loaded dildos, she has managed to decipher from their delirious babble the kernel of a long hidden truth: the truth about Momus. This mystic runt is, it seems, the offspring of some blasphemous miscegenation: progeny of pussycat and preacherman, he is the last in an ancient line of familiars, the apogee of occult learning given human shape. Now, Lupercalia plans to taste that learning, to rise above her prurient mistresses.

  Singing songs of whipcord, she sets off to work. Slattern hounded, happy, sad, bent on terminal penetration; loving her ladies till they rot.

  Feeding from a taurus lode, the young hags are already aroused; preening in bull pizzle wraps, lewdly reclining on palanquins of horn. Lupercalia opens up her scuffed medical case and selects the two most impressive instruments. With vigorous application, she soon produces a state of ecstasy in her patients. She listens intently as their talk turns, as ever, to the dweller in the attic; in particular, to lascivious speculation over the nature of his sexual organs. Lupercalia knows that the witches have never mated Momus, never sought to propagate his magick potency. Why then did they not have him castrated, as was their wont with the poor Toms that lurked in the scullery?

  That night, on a mission to seduce and slice, she determines to resolve the mystery.

  With a purloined key she infiltrates the cloister, choking on the stench of excrement, dried cat piss and regurgitated herring. Clasping a scented rag to her lips, she searches out her quarry. Momus is perched on his bed, rocking back and forth, silent. At the sight of female he becomes instantly excited, pulling out for display his pride and joy: a massive, heavy penis the colour of over ripe loganberries. Smiling, Lupercalia reaches down to stroke this unnatural organ. As Momus lies back, with a terrible purring sound like phlegm from an anus, she changes to her left hand; deftly slitting his member from root to tip with a hidden razor. While the catman shivers in shock, she tugs away at the opened skin. It starts to unfurl like a scroll, finally hanging to the floor on red threads from the scoundrel's original penis, now revealed to be no bigger than a baby's forefinger. Shaken by indelible delight, Lupercalia rips away the fleshy sheet, flees the squalid quarters, and locks herself away in the basement with her bloody prize.

  A grid of glyphs is tattooed within this roll of priapic fat: an entire malefic alphabet, the sum arcane knowledge of centuries. Spells that can incur death, undeath, or life in a vinegar jar; spells that can strip the skin from a ploughboy and march it to the nearest keyhole; set clothes pegs on a rampage or turn bonfires into gripe water. Spells that can cook a redbreast in suet on the wing, drape oceans across the saddle of a rocking horse, place vertigo in the dreams of volcanoes; spells that can bury a demon, or raise one.

  Spells that can liberate Lupercalia.

  For days she practised, trying out chant after chant, rubbing herself raw with the inducing of more efficacious orgasms; at last, her chosen one came forth. He came with the scree of arctic arenas, a harbinger of tears, progenitor of ordeals. An obese Incubus with jet black ice beneath his foreskin. By night he settled on each witch in turn, fucking them as they dreamt white dreams. Soon they were frozen, turned into icicles that slid from the bed and splintered into a thousand shards across the limestone tiles.

  All the while, Momus hissed and caterwauled and spat in his cloister. Scratching at the scabs on his penis, he eventually split them, releasing malignant jaguar sprites which, at first incorporeal, soon took form from puddles of diarrhoea and octopus. Desperate to regain the scroll before every witch was reduced to frosted smithereens, these fluctuating shapes seeped beneath the door and then flew at the Incubus as he fornicated, lodging themselves between his buttocks and pecking at his exposed membrane with deceased, undersea beaks. Irritated, the Incubus sat back heavily on the floor, crushing his persecutors. He got up, flab undulating, and slowly hauled his bulk to the attic.

  Momus was propped up on his bed; barely alive, surrounded by foul haemorrhages. A pair of sprites were rolling around weakly in one corner of the room, trying to coat themselves with fish scales. The Incubus trod on them. Then he snapped off his left forefinger and held it against Momus' throat with the bereft hand, while his right changed into a mallet of solid meat. One blow nailed the catman to the wall; a breath of boreal flame set fire to his squirming body.

  Even as Momus burned – and he burned in the cold fire for several long days – the Incubus installed himself as king of the witch house, with Lupercalia as his Queen; announcing his intent to usher in a lustrum of sodomistic rape. While his attentions turned to the preparation
of their marriage bed, Lupercalia unpacked the magick skin, seeking an inscription to rescind his advent – in vain. She had neglected to salt the hide, and it was already little more than a tray of larvae.

  Lupercalia had jumped from frying pan to fire; indeed, the smell of roasting flesh hung in her nostrils until the day she died.

  XIV : TWIN STUMPS

  Silence – sweet harbinger of disfigurement!

  The family must die, but without the family there can be no sacred crimes. How mundane it is to kill or rape a mere stranger –

  masturbation by a ringless hand. Henry sinks his rigid kin into frosty meat pits, an ancestral burial womb insulated with sleek maternal pelts.

  When the full moon rises, he and the lonely dead come out to play.

  Henry, last of the bloodline, presides in this organic mausoleum, where a clock driven by thorny hearts records thirteen fathoms of midnight. All the furnishings are styled from the dead. The exterior walls are proofed in human skin, tattooed with pornographic tableaux, and the roof is cobbled with eyeballs so that all the pretty stars have mirrors.

  Inside, the family are at table. At the head sits Henry, and opposite him his exalted brother Griezell, a gothic foetus on nails. On either side, four generations. Mummified, necklaced in teeth and testicles, pierced all over with tarsals; some skinned at death, others at birth. Half-eaten, bladdery and bloodless, some barnacled with transplanted nipples, some sporting multiple genitalia, legs screwed into arm sockets or heads crammed inside gutted bellies. Carpal chains leak from desiccated fundaments, rare maggots squirm in brain pans and pubic wigs.

  As an adolescent, Henry had visions. Gazing up nightly at the steamy firmament, he came to realise that each star above was immaculate, a perfect and uncompromised entity. Evolving from dust, and later reverting to nuclear ash, the stars had no need to marry or multiply, no need to align themselves to familial groups. Astrology was akin to vampirism; constellations arbitrary, an atavistic conceit of man.