Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  She walked on, never really passing him by for long before he showed up again. She didn’t wear a veil down here, nor a blindfold, nor sunglasses. In this one place she didn’t have to. She felt tears on her cheeks. Such a waste, so much void. Were they tears or did the wind just whip stray droplets from her eyes? What were tears if not empathy’s moisture?

  She thought of the elitist dumpers who philosophized on killing God but who swore their shit didn’t stink. She watched the crazed plumber trying to translate his rage on the bodies of the lost. He assassinated not God but only the notion of a being of Light who could let Darkness happen. It was a foolish conceit, the idea that makers of shit could question the motives of deities.

  He opened a teenaged kid up and pulled out the intestines, lifting them to festoon a jackal-shaped sconce with. He sang morbidly, moronically, “29 feet of guts on the wall, 29 feet of guts. You pinch a bit and down it with spit. 28 feet of guts on the wall…”

  He did pop a piece into his mouth, like an afterthought, and swallowed. Then he shrieked as a cramp doubled him over. He hurriedly unfastened his trousers and squatted, auger dangling like a heavy dick, banging awkwardly against one thigh. Sweat ran down his face in grimy rivulets as he strained to force out a hard lump.

  It fell behind him, rolling off the walkway’s ledge to splash in the sewage trench. He made a grab for it, missed, and jumped in after it. She watched as he went down, then bobbed back up shaking strings of mucous from his head, blowing grumy bubbles out of his nostrils. He sank back down.

  Chilling voices came from every body, dead but not quite motionless, drilled but dreaming. They called after him plaintively, “Don’t leave us!”

  They were calling for him, weren’t they? For they didn’t seem to actually see her, even if she was their goddess, their mother.

  Was it possible they cried for somebody else?

  She watched him surface and submerge again, the nihilism inherent in the shit act, the wish to restore what was lost. It was, after all, the body which gave it up. Thus these diamond-hard bricks and pools unbearably golden must be the keys to immortality.

  She knew he’d never find that piece. In so much—oceans’ worth, galaxies’ worth—how could he? He’d climb back out as he always did. Resume his grisly work. But he’d forever be aware that he was boring what had already been squandered and jettisoned, conscious in what floated past.

  ««—»»

  Dorien woke up in the Volkswagen. She threw her hands up as the sun struck her in the eyes, even through the dark glasses.

  She’d managed to get the car started again after it stalled at the light—as the killer approached. He’d left and she’d started it easy as pig fart pie. She drove for a while, then parked at some point and fell asleep. The night had ended. Damn! Her shoes were muddy. So she must have been out of the car at some point. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a splotch of blood on the side of her nose.

  Where was she?

  There were any one of a number of slums in this city. Which one was this?

  She peered through the windshield at the nearest street sign. Corner of Rilke and Buber. Where did she know that from?

  Only about a month ago some cop had been killed here. It had been all over the news until a Shit Detail crime took its place in twelve hours. This was Sheol’s Ditch.

  She giggled. “You mean I’ve been asleep and alone in an old sardine car, parked at a curb in The Ditch, and I’m still alive?”

  But—mud on her shoes (she hoped that was mud) and blood on her face. What happened last night?

  She noticed the grisly appendage hanging from the mirror. Gavin Parrish’s perishable jewels. In the August heat they were already starting to steam and smell.

  “What the hell do I want this for?”

  Well, she might give them to Neela as a trophy.

  “Why? The guy was diseased. And now he’s dead. Dead things should return to the earth.”

  She took the meat down and tossed it out the window, just as cavalierly as the severed cock and balls had been thrown in by the assassin the night before. It caused her to think of Lorraine Bobbitt who’d mutilated her husband, then driven down the road a bit to throw his severed penis into a field. But that was recovered, and John Bobbitt had it successfully re-attached—enough so that he could become a minor porn star.

  Gavin wouldn’t be so lucky; he was dead. Maybe even eaten up by the woman Dorien had seen approaching the body after the killer had walked away. Dorien had sensed the strangeness about this female—as alien as she herself had become? Perhaps those without humanity knew one another.

  She thought back to the night before. Had this woman looked up at her while bending toward Gavin’s still-warm corpse? Had their eyes met briefly, sharing an understanding about the necessity of the scavenger in a world which would perish under its own waste if not for pigs and jackals and ghouls?

  (oh my!)

  No Bobbittisms here. Gavin’s penis and balls lay in the dirt and gravel, already attracting the ants and flies of full-blown summer. Maybe a couple of crows circled overhead, round and round, like the proverbial and ad nauseum circle of life.

  Dorien thought about her dream. The underground tunnels where the lost ended up. Was Gavin there now, lying in sludge alongside missing children far more innocent than himself, awaiting a visit by the plumber?

  Maybe not. She didn’t get the feeling this was a place for the evil to be punished. It was more of a…what? A purgatory, a dimensional sewer trap for those time accidentally lost its grip on.

  On the other hand, she was sure (without understanding how she knew) that Gavin hadn’t ended up in Aralu. That required a special pass from the goddess of shit. She wished she’d given him that, but she hadn’t. She’d witnessed his murder and knew she’d had nothing to do with it.

  There might be many hells. What had that book said in the introduction?

  There were more religions in the past that had underworlds but didn’t have heavens.

  ««—»»

  “We repaired the hole, having been informed that in the adjoining room, the one selected for his activities, there was a pierced chair and beneath it a chamber pot we had been busy filling for four days and in which there must have been at least a dozen large turds. Our man arrives. He was an elderly tax farmer of about seventy years. He shuts the door, goes straight to the pot he knows to be brimming with the goodies he has ordered for his sport. He takes up the vessel and, seating himself in an armchair, passes a full hour gazing lovingly at all the treasure whereof he has been made the proprietor; he sniffs, inhales, he touches, he handles, seems to lift one turd out after another in order to contemplate them the better. Finally become ecstatic, from his fly he pulls a nasty old black rag which he shakes and beats with all his might; one hand frigs, the other burrows into the pot and scoops out handfuls of divine unction. He anoints his tool, but it remains as limp as before. There are moments, after all, when Nature is so stubborn that even the excesses we most delight in fail to awake a response.”

  —The 120 Days of Sodom

  The Marquis de Sade

  quoted in Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 23

  SHEOL’S DITCH,

  SIX MONTHS AGO

  The party showed no signs of winding down.

  That wasn’t to say that some of its members didn’t become too spent to leap to the next game. For them it was possible to rest, recupe, and indulge in voyeurism while others labored.

  In a corner of the room was the tattoo genius, Boreolo, who paid all sexes to let him fuck and intaglio them, both activities applied strictly to the face. (He examined them thoroughly beforehand, to assure himself that they were clean and smoothly unmarked below the jawline first. What they did afterward to the rest of their bodies was their own business.) Most of them were homeless, unemployed, starving. When he was through, all of them could make a tidy living
charging gawkers two-to-five bucks a glimpse. You’d see them in the park, on the piers, with lint-frazzled sheets draped over their heads, but pulled forward a bit because breathing was hard for some of them once Boreolo had his way. The folks in line would tiptoe up with their profferred sweaty sawbucks, getting a nauseating peak, lurching away with wild eyes, clutching their guts and groins.

  Tonight, of course, Boreolo hadn’t been required to pay for his canvas. It had been supplied him by the same benefactors who brought all the treats to the party they sponsored. His scrawny backside jiggled and became taut, jiggled and became taut. The runaway lay beneath him, face obscured and revealed in momentary increments as the man rhythmically thrust himself into the quivering mouth. The rest, visible from the neck down, was thin and slack. The anesthetic and whatever pain managed to leech through the soporific fog ensured the boy wouldn’t get an erection of his own. There was the smell of burning flesh from the hot needles, the tiny buzzsaw skree of whirring blades, the scrape of very slender scalpel against bone. Boreolo’s hands worked faster than his cock. Every now and then a muffled groan escaped the boy’s plungered lips.

  Jason marveled at how Boreolo could do this without excitedly slipping with the instruments. But he never missed a beat, made no mistakes in his vision for the boy’s mask. A tray sat nearby with antiseptics and antibiotics, so the final product would heal properly. Boreolo wanted walking, talking galleries—not fatalities.

  In a cubicle behind a translucent gauze curtain of shocking pink, Big Garth’s girls were available to the party. Recently he’d patented a white noise machine. Those suffering from chronic insomnia sometimes used such machines to help filter the outside world and create a drone to even their stress with. Traditional ones employed tapes of surf, waterfalls, rain. But Garth Listo had just begun to market one for the underground, with tapes of whimpering dogs, crying babies, screaming women.

  But he’d been known for years as another master of the makeover, some of his tools larger by necessity, others with points or wires so fine they almost escaped the naked eye. Even though the man who feigned the samurai persona was never called a pimp to his face, he made more money peddling crunched-up ass than most of the state’s crack dealers raked in. Some of his subjects he acquired from an abduction ring that traveled through Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. But he also met whole runaways at bus stops and on street corners, bringing them home to his do-it-yourself grind-em-up and turn-em-out business. He did such a booming trade, he’d had to hire assistants!

  But he was capable of producing stumps with ends in the shapes of roses, an origami of bone splinter and folded flaps of abbreviated skin. No mere purveyor of random scars was he. The appeal of his stable was to connoisseurs of more than simple trainwreck erotica. His customers—many of them influential people everywhere in the world—paid amply for the genteel human bonsai, manicured of the extraneous limb, artificially turned to a concept of microcosm sexuality. Not mere lovers of the quirky blunt, they appreciated the beauty of the ends of the stumps themselves, turned as if on a potter’s wheel, sculpted, blossomed.

  The political of the world (when in private), knowing of his penchant for the samurai pose, often referred to Garth Listo not as a chainsaw procuror but a Japanese gardener. And his blank-eyed females were amputee geisha.

  Jason had brought Rose to the party and was now among the throng who’d been watching Boreolo work. He saw her across the room, sitting by herself, aloof, ignoring the creatures who crept up to her to flirt. She usually dressed in such a way as to hide the long veils of flesh that hung from her torso. It had been completely necessary to do so as the Caves traveled the world and then as she came through immigration as the bride of an American former GI. It had taken every connection Jason knew to keep her from having to undergo an inspection. And, once back in the city, he’d had a private doctor falsify documents, claiming she’d passed all the physical tests that immigrants had to have. Grade A human. She could never be seen on the street unless she wore a long-sleeved, loose robe that hung to her ankles. Fortunately, being from Cairo, it could be claimed she was a proper Moslem and preferred to cover herself fully for this reason.

  But tonight, Rose had worn only a long coat which she removed after coming into the house. Jason wanted to show her off. He knew the word had gotten around about her true background. People were curious. And as far as people in their criminally-based circle went, it didn’t hurt his reputation a bit to have a trophy wife like this one on his arm. Who else could boast a ghoul?

  They had all heard about the desecration of recent graves in the news. Of cadavers disappearing from morgues, hospitals, and funeral homes. And she came in handy for disposing of anyone Jason had been hired to kill.

  He wondered if a ghoul had been the reason nobody’d ever found Jimmy Hoffa’s body.

  Convinced she could take care of herself if anybody got closer than she liked, Jason swung away from Boreolo’s spectacle. He remained suitably impressed as always but he’d seen it before. He passed the curtain where the girls flapped short meat flippers and undulated lumps of squat marigolds.

  “You resting, Mr. Cave?” a tall, shaven-headed woman asked him. Red fetal tissue boots went all the way up to her wide hips, clinging to the hard muscles of her legs like wet Play Dough.

  “I never need to rest, Simone,” he replied. “I just find observation of another’s invention to be stimulating.”

  He studied her, nude save for the boots and a matching strip of leather about her chunky waist. He was more casually attired himself: jeans, muscle shirt, Doc Martens, brass knucks elegantly revealed above the breast pocket like a monogrammed handkerchief. He glanced about for a mirror to see himself in but the one across the room had several people primping in front of it.

  “You seem to have acquired something new in your repertoire.” He pointed at the black penis skin-grafted to her white pubes.

  “A doctor on Jaspers Street who sidelines in pirated organs did it for me. Hasn’t been any tissue rejection so far,” she explained, holding it in her hand to examine it. “It’s so big and thick that, even if I can’t crank it up, it’s a formidable truncheon and stocking stuffer. It’s never exactly soft. Sort of completes the wardrobe, don’t you think?”

  Jason’s head bobbed up and down sagely. They looked up as two men with heavy gloves began laying down a wide coil of razor wire. At the opposite end a couple, the woman’s hands tied to the man’s feet, were about to be forced to crawl a gauntlet through it. Ah, it must be one of Everson’s little diversions. Known as the Vigilante of Love, Everson created amazingly entertaining labyrinths of torture, designed especially for couples and out of which few ever emerged alive…and none unscathed. Jason recalled the cage of bones the man had erected not long ago, every bone end sharpened. A couple crawling through had first been separated from each other by a bone partition, and then—as the additional bone walls began to come down in sequence, making their individual spaces narrower and narrower—were soon separated even from themselves.

  “Reminds me of something Camus wrote in a little item called The Plague,” Jason said and then quoted, “‘…Rieux believed himself to be on the right road—in fighting creation as he found it…”

  “Man, Cave, you should have been a professor,” Simone said. Without looking, she raised a stiletto heel and brought it down on a finger of the slave on the floor, hooded and suitably leashed. She ground the heel against it until she heard an audible crackle and pop.

  The slave didn’t scream, not even a meager whimper infiltrated the rubber appliance over the mouth.

  Jason noticed the dyke’s slave wasn’t really on the floor but on a low, wheeled cart. As Simone tugged slightly on the leash, the little wagon rolled an inch or two, the wheels also making no noise at all. She kept her accouterments well-oiled, so it would seem. He wondered if the woman in restraints was dead. In another room was a guy dragging around a dead dog on a chain. It had obviously been deceased for several days and left s
hreds of its greening self as he yanked it from place to place.

  “I am a professor,” Jason replied. “My students complain I never grade on a curve.”

  “Hopefully you enforce their claims into silent ones,” said the dominatrix as she nudged the tits of the supine slave with the pointed toe of her boot. The nipple on the right breast wore a ring with a penny nail dangling from it. The nipple on the left one was missing, replaced with a single teardrop ruby.

  “I like noise,” Jason replied, spreading his large, scarred hands. “Every shriek is a metaphysical revolution.”

  Big Garth emerged from behind the vulva-colored curtain. He slapped both Jason and Simone on their sturdy shoulders, the tattoo on the back of his hand (not Boreolo’s artwork) was of a Willendorf Venus—one of the very few exceptions to an otherwise all-Japanese motif. It was one of those fertility symbols with the tits, big belly and hips. Only the necessities. Not much of a head and certainly no face, no arms and legs to get in the way. He nodded, wriggled fingers, the nails of which were so eternally blood-stained it resembled polish.

  “Speaking of Camus,” Garth added, “he also said, ‘Metaphysical rebellion is a claim…against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its completeness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil…’”

  Simone absent-mindedly scratched beneath the black dick, as if it had balls. “Sounds like psychosexual hyperchondria to me. Kind of my dick hurts, therefore I am.”

  “More of an extrospective satyriasis,” Jason argued, “humping anything that farts or bleats.”

  “Everything’s a sheep to you,” Big Garth joked.

  Jason grinned. “We’re all seeking an animal to merge with, and a refuge for that hybrid.”