Satanskin

by James Havoc

  Filthy, uncomprehending man. Groping in misery; forever reproducing in the vain hope of burying his unutterable solitude in numbers. Slowly, his profane inter-breeding was dissipating the irradiance of his autonomous stellar analogues. Soon, the heavens would be extinguished. Henry could see but one solution: a glorious extermination of the human family.

  Mocking the antics of his parents, he took to fornicating with the sows in the barn. Some grew gravid. One night a storm came, and the sows dispersed in terror, leaving behind their stillborn farrows. In the fulminating light, the tiny corpses seemed to Henry half-human.

  Heeding this omen, he took up the hatchet. Parents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, sons and daughters alike were systematically axed and buggered, partially devoured and then preserved in subterranean vaults. The swampland acquiesced gleefully, guarding the scene of the crime with a rampart of grasses, prickling nettles and vines, quicksands and the mauve whorls of its erotic trees, whilst providing a fodder of dwarf bogs, mambas, and hot, horny fruits.

  Every full moon, Henry re-enacts his violations.

  Tonight, there must be a trial. Henry has reason to believe that Uncle Nexus, spurred by renegade shafts of sunlight, has slithered in his tomb and committed acts upon Mother, impregnating her with lobster claws and the jawbone of an ass. Soon, she may give birth to reeking shells or albino centaurs, crippled with eyes of syphilis resin; venomous usurpers in the mortuary.

  Henry brings order with three sharp raps of his shinbone gavil.

  He turns to address the jury, thirteen puppets of addled blubber roped in a spinal gallery. Just then, the skies occlude with an inflorescence of whippoorwills; a lifting, disembodied voice interrupts proceedings, soiling the chapter of his law.

  It comes from without. Pale Henry quits the chamber to locate its source. In his head, a mess of sick talons, itching; his breath like a premature burial. Trembling, he is lured into the gloom by a nursery lament, its chasmal sadness spelling the assassination of liberty. A girl child is sitting cross-legged in front of a skull-ringed acacia, scraping shit from her shoes as she sings; a stain on her panties recalling the genesis of comets. Confusion. This girl is not of the family. What possible fun then in stringing her up, whether it be to butcher or sodomise? Yet here she is, fresh from the marsh, an outsider in the gnarls.

  She has a sticky doll with her, a tar baby dappled with hornets and dragonflies, and she calls it Miss Leopard. Miss Leopard has guided them through the swamp; now she tugs her companion to her feet. The two visitors start to skip in circles, widdershins, the little girl singing a heart-rending ode to ravens. Entranced, Henry flings himself to the ground, face pressed close to the rank loam, contorted as if licking dog-meat from a soft trap. His exterminating angel has descended.

  Snakes pass. Girl and tar baby veer off into the swamp. Henry hurries after, powerless to combat his inexplicable attraction to the intruder; his every fibre ablaze with an insurgent desire to maim, to crush, to crucify.

  Ablaze with love.

  Deeper and deeper into the humid vegetation he pursues them, through vast spider-webs decorated with mortal remains, pools of iridescent vermin, leeches on the wing. Too late, he realises they have entered the quicksands.

  Their trail is obscure. Henry hesitates. On the point of turning back, he sees the girl appear across a tarn, waving her panties like voodoo. Sure of his attention, she hitches up her dress, legs apart, giggling as she displays her hairless loins, tattooed with pig skulls, before skittering off. With a bellow of lust Henry lurches after her, mindful only of a crimson slit amid the ink-bones; yearning to snap the pinions of desire between his ceremonial fingers. His thoughts are sparks vaulting through the blackest pit. Within his soul, the geometry of molten lard.

  In a trice, the thirsty sands envelop him.

  The girl reappears. She raises her skirts again, this time twisting to display her small buttocks. There, at the root of her spine, hangs a stubby, curled pink tail. She defecates loudly, her excreta resembling clusters of steaming raisins, then kicks off her shoes, aiming at the drowning man's head, to reveal a pair of ragged trotters.

  With that, she vanishes, giggling, hand in hand with tar baby. Spewing grit and slime, Henry perceives that his teenage nebula has regrouped; a spectre of high holy incest is once more roosting in the mangroves.

  The moon wanes. From the vitrified sky, winter photons that kiss with thin cyanose lips, charged with universal melancholy. The swamp folds in on itself; the quicksands swallow the last of Henry. In his crypt, the family still sits, motionless, at the mercy of the disintegrating dawn. Their last living descendant is playing with Miss Leopard among the flytraps.

  XV : WHITE MEAT FEVER

  The moon commands the torrents of creation. Yet so too does the body of woman.

  Hatched under a lunar bane, Turner grew up amid dark sexless days, id nurtured in a conclave of retarded asteroids. Vowing revenge on the cosmos, he pursued sinister paths until one day his demon occurred in a brimstone mirror. In return for the sacrifice of his hair, Turner was granted the utterance that steals. He began to harness She power.

  Rose had always loved the night. She viewed its pall as malign tar, shot through with living dolls like a coven of claws, a canopy that could consummate a thousand curses. Scorpio vanes conducted her sex energy into webs. On Halloween her victim came already naked, all hairless, pale skin glistening with an unguent of oyster grease and cinnamon. Numbed by lascivious scents, with eyes fixed on her crotch – an arrangement in black and gold displayed by her raised skirt –

  Turner shambled after siren; he followed her to her dungeon, mesmerised by the bare, swinging buttocks before him, each emblazoned with a tattoo of peach stones. Now it was Turner's time to pray.

  Stitched into a suit of civet hide, with a Roman candle jutting from his fundament, bound to the nitrous rock by a concatenation of tiny petrified wings; Rose prostrate before him with split thighs and religion. Strangling on his secret garden leash, Turner's face is close enough to see the pearls of sweat on her pubis, to inhale her bizarre odours of strawberry lemur oil and runic rust; yet his tongue falls short of the ditch. She sings a loop of syllables he is condemned to repeat – his voice waxes heavy as a tombstone and resonates as if devils are casting knuckles for his dying soul.

  Dawn approaches.

  At the last, Rose unlinks her victim. Like a wad of offal from a car crash, Turner is upon her, snuffling and choking with snot, his furious penis slipping around her groin, the veins on the hairless scalp above her face bulging out to spell Mother. Suddenly, ecdysis: she sees his pupils dilate and flood outwards, until the entire surface of each eye is a shiny black screen upon which plays an ancient film of slaughter.

  Foul, protozoic words slither from his lips, the epitome of plague. As he comes, gibbering like a crippled mastiff, Rose is plunged into a comatose sleep. She will awaken to a Hell of sex forsaken sorrows.

  In his hovel, Turner leers naked before a looking glass. There, between his nipples, is a chattering and braying vulva, its ring of hairs plaited with golden bows. He smears its juices over his bald pate, reflecting joyously on the origins of belief.

  A weird maelstrom of winter comes. With it, a strange new chastity amongst women – the Cunt Thief is abroad. Yet, by the Solstice, Turner's labial larceny is complete. Mewling vaginas entrench every surface of his body. Like pets, he has named each one after its donor; proudly he whispers to them, strokes them as he feeds them gobbets of fried chicken, eggs or walnuts. His favourite, Lydia, runs across the palm of his left hand. She hisses and pukes fish bones.

  On the shortest day, Turner serenades his slits while baptising them with sweet red honey; he then sets forth to usurp the catamenial throne.

  True faith is found on the altar of clitoral psychosis. Bristling with fallopian magnetism, Turner haunts woodland and misty glade.

  Streams boil as he passes, she creatures ovulate and moan. Henceforth, he alone will revel in the empires of the Su
n, debauching the velocity of living and dying, monarch gland in the brain of creation. Harsher than gold, the ribs within his pulp of magick slits form the spokes of a giant galactic wheel careering through inner space; while two hundred glistening lips whisper sedition, the millennium of Turner will commence with a solar orgasm to finally annihilate the tyranny of the dark.

  Alas, the prescient moon has fled her heaven! Turner is truly alone. He shivers in the grave unlight, so silent he can hear scorpions mating. Mocking insects dart from mushrooms of drugged silk, hatchlings lounging on bales of teat fur pelt him with parabolas of frigid phosphorescent oil. In their green flash he sees the rotting dead, coerced from the Pit by pucks of sour vomit. Vampire bats rain excrement upon him. Swarms of mantis spermwing, crystal feverclaw, all those who deny the dawn, conspiring to spellbind Turner. Even the trees attack, tumescent with diabolic adrenalin, and beyond their homicidal canopy a pitch ocean crashes shoreward. Great scavenger gulls wheel in from the East, talons dripping bilious carrion while, far below, the depths are commanded by enormous white sharks, versed in mysteries that man will never glimpse.

  Turner teeters, poised on the cusp of a side winding venus.

  Ditch cancer. In the absolute, atrocious darkness, he sees his own soul mirrored. Hollow, menopausal. His vaginas are growing parched and shrivelled, as arid as his dreams. Then comes a lightning bolt, and artificial sunspots flare cruelly on his retinas. Ululations and tendrils taunt his blindness; cuntless vegetable girls drop from the boughs above, dancing on ghostly nooses as they join in the invocation of the night for its sister moon.

  The moon responds.

  From a tarn she looses sway, inducing a final, mass menstruation in the body of the imposter. With a sigh Turner falls, lifesblood gushing from a hundred vulvas, blue flesh hardening like sheet metal. The storm doubles in, ritualising the sky which appears like the marbled haunch of some defaecating goddess. Lightning blasts an oak. Galvanised, its erect branches swoop down and fly deep into every one of Turner's clotted orifices, fucking him to the core, hoisting him shrieking into the air, body shaking and ripping up like pack prey.

  He finally flies apart, pelting the far terrain in a sultry crimson hail; echoed at once by demonic cackling from a luxurious satellite of hair.

  XVI : THIRTEEN

  Beasts and dolls alike suit chains. Rooted in the soul, beneath tragic mind blossoms, broods a longing for delusion – witchcraft.

  The city is shaped like a hypnotic pattern. West of a hovel, dawn is delivered prematurely, a shrieking embryo of clotted amethyst.

  Steeped in its carnal hues, Quinn reflects upon the measure of his kingdom. Sadly, he finds it lacking. For what is a king without his queen?

  He unsticks the bloody sheet from his back, letting it fall across the snub of his penis. His belly is scored like a side of pork for roasting. A crimson whip trail from bed to door, all that remains of Miss Anastasia.

  She is the one he warned her of, slit bearer with a heart of thorns, and he is the sacrificial swine. Shackled to the sty, wallowing in the tatters of sexual pacts annulled by the dawn, he relives the queasy thrill as his limbs were first pulled taut across her septic gash anvil, senses brutalized by sensual hammers, the day she lapped up his shadow like a dog from Hell.

  Quinn slept on rubber sheets, held rites of cruising the backstreets, licking used contraceptives. Shuffling through snow in a tiny suit, dreaming of young girls and their flagellated buttocks.

  Looking for perfect traces. Each midnight, he craved the intangible like a thing unchained.

  It was the coldest of winters, the pinnacle of romance. The domain of a moon with boils upon its crescent rim. On a crackling and leprous evening. Old Quinn alone. This time, something bristled in the air. Fleshy, oceanic. Movement like brains clinging to walls, glimpsed through a crystal entropy; dashing the virgin eye to flinders. The night, frigid and godless, whipped upon him like a bloodsucker made of two girls. In the shitpool, dark random buds as harsh and without sound as a suit of clams flaring. Spinning, nigger pearls, lancing aflame – rooting him at the trashcans. Such magick, that then unveiled the cocaine white bosom of an auburn venus, switching like destiny at the periphery of disbelief.

  Quinn flew to suckle her left breast, burnished with sciapods.

  Hot acrid milk fonting down his gullet. In the milk, sickle claws, fibrillating, weaving all through his vitals as Miss Anastasia reeled him in. He saw only the sheer chasm at night's end; felt nothing but the friction of phantoms at zero temperature. She had found the thirteenth and final member of her coven.

  Back in his broken toothed, flaming hovel, Quinn finds himself roped to the cot. Miss Anastasia is crouched above his face, her vagina mouthing sick promises in the gloom. His initiation has begun.

  Now, she is over his groin, licking like a cat at his circumcised erection, silken paws on his pouch. He begins to hyperventilate. Can this truly be the realisation of his wildest imaginings?

  All too soon, disorder. Fungus drips from walls. The room starts to smell, like the breath of a Peeping Tom through webbed panes of meat. Whisperings and snickerings arise, darkening the horizon of his pleasure. All around him – the coven. Eleven in number, crippled, insane, wall eyed and wasted, drooling, masturbating, braying like mules. Out comes the Nine tails, covering Quinn with ardent kisses while Anastasia harangues the sky in a mountainous language. Her snowy eyes roll over as the assembly comes together, drenching the initiate with torpid semen. Something tears the roof off and enters, hands on hips; Quinn is vomiting like a consumptive dog. Miss Anastasia has used his libido to incur a priapic demon.

  All night Quinn lies bleeding, listening to the coven revel as they watch his beloved copulate with the huge membered demon for hours on end; listening to her unearthly cries of pleasure. Finally, her dark lover dissipates with first light; the rioters disband in silence.

  Alone with the Sun, Quinn resolves to raise a demon of his own.

  The ability to achieve such a feat is not granted lightly. To obtain such power, Miss Anastasia ordains that he must suck at her third tit on the thirteenth day of thirteen months. She stands nude, mockingly, in front of him. Scouring her body, even probing her scalp beneath the auburn tresses, he can locate no such appendage. The watching disciples leer and snigger. Is this yet another cruel trick?

  Sensing his despair, Anastasia sneers, turns away from him and bends over, parting her buttocks with puce nailed fingers. There, drooping from her occluded anus like a butcher's trinket, a coarse umber plug of flesh, dribbling brown pus, curtained by rectal hair in plaits: the supernumerary nipple. Quinn kneels and gives suck avidly, flinching at the bitter gouts of liquid faeces, the jeering of the clan. And such, for month after month, is his lot.

  On the feast of the thirteenth moon, Quinn arises triumphantly from his mistress' parted haunches; his time has come. As he wipes away the sewage caking his mouth, he hops onto his bed and quickly starts to masturbate. Before the coven can react, he ejaculates the pungent seed of thirteen months' gestation, while gibbering a mangled spell. For a full minute, the room seems devoid of oxygen. Outside, a commotion of frantic mating Rottweilers; hot black light from under the floorboards. Then, from nowhere, a vast, ragged pillar of vitrified salt, and atop it a figure to terrify the assembly: Quinn has raised the very Jack of Sodom.

  At once, the Jack swoops behind Miss Anastasia and roughly doubles her over; with gnarled hands he lays apart the cheeks that guard the orifice of his exaltation. A hiss of dismay flees his lips at the sight of her occult teat; then, without further ado, his jaws descend and brown teeth snip through the offending growth. Her scream recalls molten criminality, an impact of racking sin upon the immaculate. The essence of Miss Anastasia gushes forth from her uncorked breech in a deluge that bowls over the startled Jack and sluices him back into oblivion, drowned in a maelstrom of nails, pith, fins, grain, beaks, flint and pins, pods, ash, roots and stings. Only her shrunken hide survives, sloughed upon the respirating meniscus.
Quinn retrieves the skin and, tugging the elastic anus over his head, wriggles up inside until it fits his rotund body like a rubber suit. He wades from the hovel regally, as if reborn.

  Above, an ovation of comets. Quinn takes to the frosty backstreets in the skin of Anastasia, searching for new disciples. His progress through the broken bottles and condoms resembles a dance, an epicene ballet for shivering sects. His words are bible, his thoughts red stains. Beneath its macabre awnings, his heart flutters like a nascent vulture scenting carrion from gutter to crypt; a carnival of souls adrift on seas that crash over fiery, desolate shores – looking for love through the eyes of the Devil.

  XVII : TONGUE CATHEDRAL

  Sheets of vermin quit the stinking sky, the night that Meredith came home. She crossed the portico as if celebrating some profound illness, last reveller at the core of a cancerous female planet. Everything was red, saturate, turbulent. Slow. From without, noise like blurred pistons.

  A thirsting white rose unfurled within her elastic grid of moods, she slid from chamber to porous chamber, where men hung. Blood sliding over rubies threw opulent beads of light across her kinetic, timeless face; the memory of flighted parasites. Mercurial embers, an eccentric twist of coloured oils. Decay on jasmine breath. Kisses from a basement opiate in waves; the sensation of inexhaustible faeces gushing through an open sphincter. Repetition. A vivisectrix knows deep, orgasmic sorrows.

  Her sister reclines in an ornate velvet coffin, sipping semen from baroque thimbles, slaying insects with a flick from her sickle of calcified lizards. The coffin is full of toadstools. Everywhere, sad and terrible hymns, unceasing. Bauxite. The undated bell shivers in its rat spattered spire, announcing a traveller on horseback. In from the storm reels simple Smythe, brushing tails and pestilence from his jerkin.

  Believing himself alone, he resolves to find dry clothing. A pretty dress, perhaps, or some exotic kimono embroidered with civets.