Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  “If such a refuge were to exist, I’d be the first to hand over to the devil at the door every man, woman and child on this stinking world so’s I could get in,” Simone affirmed. Her eyes flicked from wall to wall as if half-expecting this offer to cause just such a passage to open, pluming flesh-colored fog and reeking of plenty of free, passive pussy.

  “And every time I get an invitation to a party like this, I can’t help but hope that when I get to the door, it’ll open on the bloody Kyoto of my dreams,” Garth agreed.

  “But seriously, Cave,” Simone said. “I would think you’d found your animal to merge with. Not meaning to insult your lovely bride. And does she have nothing to say of this fabled place we all crave?”

  Jason looked away, toward Rose sitting across the room, surrounded by admirers. Someone had gingerly plucked flecks off the razor wire for her and she nibbled it like popcorn drenched with too much butter.

  How could he admit that he’d never had sex with Rose? They wouldn’t understand. He’d wed her hoping to be shown the threshold. But, as yet, the only glimpses he’d had of that extreme paradise had been when he was a little boy. He’d come to believe, despite her resemblance to the supernatural female in the hellish vision from the dead Iraqi’s head, that Rose was (ghoul or not) a creature from this plane only. Just a rare specimen from a predator species, whose major claim to interest was the ability to vomit up new parts for herself: a bile starfish.

  But, well, she’d turned out to be good for business. This was why he put up with her disdain. She’d only married him to leave Egypt, wanting to go to America and fresher haunting grounds. He hadn’t pressed the issue of a husband’s rights. He’d seen how she could take care of herself.

  So he didn’t comment, not because he didn’t also pine for such a butcher’s cloister—which at least he’d seen when none of them had. He just felt it was pointless. As reachable as it was (not), it might as well be a figment of the libertine’s mind, the chimera groin at the end of a decomposing rainbow.

  “How’s that greenhouse gift I brought you?” he asked Garth, deciding to change the subject.

  “Got to admit she’s got verve,” replied Garth. He turned to Simone. “Can you believe it? He leaves a quad on my doorstep, veins and arteries tied off with nary a drip, like he’d done this all his life. My assistants are med students and were they jealous! And that thing with the eyes, stroke of pure genius. Your bitch on the cart there with the jewel nip? You should see how my patrons go for black sapphire pupils. Stars in them. Those stones must have cost a fortune. And forking the tongue? Inspirational without being the least over the top. You ought to check her out, Simone. She’s in the last crib on the left. Free tonight. Best advertising is word of mouth, I always say.”

  Simone wrapped the leash of her carted slave to a coffee table leg, like tying a horse at a hitching post, and parted the curtain.

  “Generous of you,” B.G. told Jason.

  “Waste not, want not,” he replied.

  Jason recalled the night he’d found the woman, not long after he’d moved back with Rose to Sheol’s Ditch. She’d been injured in her car, wrapped around a telephone pole, legs crushed in the little Italian tin can convertible. No internals though. She’d thought he was a brave fireman, pulling her out just as the flames erupted. Hearing the gas tank go up as it covered the sound of his hearty laughter. She’d thought he was a paramedic, winding careful tourniquets to keep her from bleeding to death. She’d sobbed in his arms, in agony and shame, knowing she’d lost everything in her bowels and bladder when the car skidded out of control and then slammed into the pole. Worse than helpless. She’d thought he was an angel, interceding where only heaven could, gently cutting off her ruined clothes, bathing her with cooling water he carried cupped in his own two hands.

  Her rude awakening had been scrumptious. He hadn’t used pain killers as both Boreolo and Simone did, depending instead upon the state of shock she was in to provide a haze across her mind. As a matter of fact, it was miraculous she hadn’t died of shock, especially after he fucked her, then sawed off the damaged legs followed by the merely bruised arms, fucking her again.

  He’d given the throwaway parts to Rose who’d not come into the room once. His wife had stared at him, unblinking, probably unimpressed with him as she ever was. But what the hell, she’d only married him for the green card, right? Some guys complained their foreign brides weren’t the slaves they’d expected. Boy, was that right.

  The woman decided he really was a demon, and that she must have perished in the accident. She screamed for forgiveness for whatever sins had landed her in hell. Jason only dumped her on Big Garth Listo’s stoop after he’d finished with her, the Hieronymous Bosch novelty wearing off like the shine on the kind of jewelry you could buy from guys on the corner. He’d done it to tickle his mentor as Garth saw how Jason left a bone showing through flesh on each stump, dressing its end with a fancy scalloped paper crown like Thanksgiving turkeys bore.

  “Did you wish to meet the ladies?” Garth offered, gesturing to the bonsai garden beyond the pink gauze. “It’s an all new seraglio since the last time you saw. Save for the one little gardenia bush you gave me.”

  Jason shook his head, seeing Simone in a primrose crinoline diaphane, dicking some girl who was no more than a turtle on its back, black apparatus longer and thicker than any appendage the vessel had. He began to walk away, hearing Big Garth quote again from Camus to perhaps no one in particular, “‘Convinced of their condemnation and without hope of immortality, they decide to murder God.’”

  Jason pondered that. And what of genius in the beast? Surely Garth knew that it wasn’t that God was dead but that He practiced copraphiliac cunning, making Him to shine with rhoid stigmata, and then inventing the world for Him to hunt in?

  This was the true Superman, divorced from society’s mouth-zippered mask and manacles, humiliated no more by original sin, not circumcized for the desecrations of his fathers. He was the one who truly remade himself, fashioned after not some cartoon of crucifixion but an icon of prehistoric purgation. Out with everything not of pleasure, not of immediate gratification. Godzilla gangbang, T. Rex huge, flattening by radioactive fuck the jungles and the diorama Tokyos (or, better still, the crotch-cosmic Bangkoks). Frankenstein’s monster shaking the planet by its short pubic hairs, not afraid of the world because he won’t be around for doomsday, since his bags are packed and a special doorway awaits.

  He didn’t obsess, didn’t hermit himself away in a rathole apartment surrounded by newspaper clippings and a dozen stolen TV sets all tuned to the news. The millennium’s arrival hadn’t meant diddly to him. He Juggernaut-ed through apocalypse every day, blood-bathed through Revelations nights, understood implicitely how holocaust was an hourly venture, requiring a profundity of animal animosity.

  Some synapses never rested and did not burn out. They insisted upon attention to their constant firing, like a rapist who repeatedly nicks with a knife the already purpled surface, so his victim won’t fall asleep between outrages.

  Some nightmares didn’t fade with dawn but ingratiated themselves, as an abusive yet charming lover one cannot bring themselves to shut out.

  Jason thought of the Camus line he’d quoted Simone. “Rieux believed himself to be on the right road—in fighting creation where he found it…”

  If Jason couldn’t fuck and kill it, sodomize and eat it, puke and shit it out to make the earth and mortar of his own planet, he didn’t want it around.

  He spotted a woman being auctioned off in the library where every tome was a holy book or collection of nursery rhymes that someone had masturbated in, spit in, or defecated in. The woman was a little older than the wide-eyed innocents usually swept here. She was an Asian if the almond-shaped eyes were to be believed. But she was a total albino: snow skin, platinum hair, pale cherry touchstone eyes. Her limbs were like white jade, her small breasts moonstones surmounted by pearl papillae. The curls at the juncture of her thighs resemble
d the froth on new milk. There wasn’t a single freckle, not a solitary soiling blemish.

  She was too clean, too perfect. Jason found himself tasting thick salt, and tasting copper as he chewed the inside of his cheek. Salivating like Pavlov’s dogs, trained in a sadist’s cellar, drooling every time they heard a bone dislocate or a ligament snap apart.

  He pulled a thick wad of bills from his wallet from having done a clean-up on some gangster’s cheating wife. Added the heavy gold belt buckle he’d taken from the wife’s paramour who he’d also diced. Threw in the ten carat emerald ring he’d been keeping in his asshole to warm him and keep him sharp.

  He led the woman upstairs and force-fed her a massive dose of laxative. There in a bed swampy with senna and ipecacuanha, himself feeling frisky on Ecstasy, he wasn’t interested in passing her some date rape ether. He preferred nails and teeth to the passive blow-up doll. He invented some new position invasively tracheal, doing a convulsive set of purgative sexual manuevers like an epileptic kama sutra. He studiously focused on censoring the cathexis, a desire concentration as he practically swam in her supreme despoilment, no speck of the lily left about her, flux even washing across those pink diamond eyes to smudge them out.

  And he thought about what it would take that he’d not already tried (both in this incarnation and as Crowley and as the line of sorcerers Crowley had claimed spiritual descent from) to conjure up the key to that smoky Eden, where every barbaric offense to a jealous god could be offered up, the risen Atlantis of debauchery where the wanton crapulence was so outrageous that if God wasn’t already dead, this would finish Him off. Extreme magic was always reputed to take sacrifices and acts of soul-saturnalia.

  How many beating hearts had Simone, Everson, Big Garth, and Boreolo (and all the other serious sociopathic misanthropes at this ruthless get-together) yanked from living chests, offering them for the meagerest hope of opening a portal into that infernal utopia? How many throats had they slit or fistfuls of duodenum necklaces pulled from steaming bellies, calling upon the Beasts of the Twilight or priapic incubuses or ancient tentacled mentors to lead the way to an idealized death-lewd wonderland?

  Jason didn’t know, had lost count of even his own attempts at conjuring up the celestial-cidal window which had been open to him so long ago—and so briefly. But he knew as he rutted in the albino’s indecent sea, lathered in her catharsis as she died from cramps, dehydration and drowning, that somehow in this act he’d come as close as he ever had to an actual summoning. He’d almost had a soiled epiphany, of a woman lifting her skirts to reveal what composed the lower half of her, dissolving beyond his reach. Before, what was left of the woman in Cairo had swirled around his feet like an omen, an invitation, a warning. And, unlike any other specimen of man save the Superman, Jason hadn’t recoiled in disgust and fear. He’d fallen to his knees and embraced it by the handfuls. As he did now with the albino, even though she was flesh, not shit. Even though she was just a dead woman, unable to offer passage.

  ««—»»

  “punkslapping

  mobsucking

  gravypissing poppa…”

  —from ‘F is for foetus(a’

  e.e. cummings

  quoted in Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 24

  Dorien heard laughter as she walked down the hallway of the Science Building.

  “Sounds like somebody’s doing stand-up,” she said to herself. “How come my professors aren’t funny?”

  This college was more expensive than the one she’d attended last year. They could afford to pay a tenured comedian.

  “Is that where I’m going? Does Dr. Singer thrill his students with scat?”

  Pauses. Then eruptions of giggles and guffaws. More pauses. She could hear a lone voice during these, muffled through the walls. A rising, falling cadence of somebody accustomed to frequent public speaking. Someone with confidence.

  She found the room the author of Sacred Sepsis was scheduled to be lecturing in, discovered by peering through the door that it was he, and slipped inside to take a position at the back of the room. The place was packed, other people standing at the back or sitting in the aisles, some taking notes, many too engrossed to do anything but listen.

  Damn, were all these his students? Or had a few sneaked in—as she had?

  “Now let’s progress to another myth,” said the older but rather handsome man at the front of the room. His hair was gray and he wore it long, even though this shaggy affectation was out-of-style. He was thin except for a slight paunch at the midsection, and it made her frown, smelling something signature inside him. Yes, he was a sick man. Did he know it yet?

  He didn’t sit behind the available desk but kept on his feet, bouncing lightly and then taking off to pace with more energy than she was sure he ought to be capable of. But this was what some people did: kept going until the last second possible.

  “There is an old Jicarilla Apache story,” he told the class, smiling with just one side of his mouth. “Once upon a time there was a wicked creature named Kicking Monster. Kicking Monster had four daughters who were the only women in that early era of the world to have vaginas. That’s to say they looked like women but really were only vaginas. There were vaginas fastened to the walls of their house, with square nails and the primitive equivalent of staples and an ancient super glue made from spider webs and coyote snot. But these particular four vaginas had all the other female things and limbs, having faces besides.”

  Male students snickered and a few of the young women raised their eyebrows, perhaps as a precursor to moral outrage.

  “I’m not making this up,” Dr. Singer explained, seeing a mind or two starting to shut down. “This is legend. You may consider it shit if you want to, much of what passes for truth is. Take it with a grain of salt as you should everything any institution of higher learning attempts to teach you. But remember: if you use too much salt, you’ll end up constipated.”

  He stroked his chin with his fingers. “Where was I? Ah! Just hearing about these vagina darlings brought men from everywhere, out of the woodwork, up from canyons, down from mountain tops, away from the flocks of sheep by the lakeside—but we won’t go there. The men would arrive at the house, tongues hanging out and throbbing, only to find Kicking Monster who would boot them inside. They were never seen again.

  “Along came a handsome young hero, so virile he had more hanging out than his tongue. His name was Killer-of-Enemies. No, kid. I see you wrote that down wrong,” Singer said, squinting and turning his head to peek—or pretend to peek—at the notes of a boy in the front row. “Not Killer-of-Enemas…enemies! Good. Yes, I read upside down. That’s what taking your Metamucil every day will do for you.

  “Now our hero had declared he’d fix that rascally Kicking Monster. And Killer-of-Enemies fools Kicking Monster (the myth doesn’t say how, maybe next term I’ll make something suitably cinematic up), and gets into the house without the customary monster-foot-in-the-ass. The vagina girls hurry up to him, fluttering and fawning over his biceps, hoping for some hero action.”

  Dorien scanned the audience, froze when she saw a familiar face down front. Annet, sitting with a girlfriend as emaciated as she was, hunching and shivering shoulders in apparent delight to be so close to the author of the book she’d left for Dorien. You’d have thought the old guy was a rock star or a guru. Or just a man who really knew his shit.

  Dorien moved behind some other people standing at the back, just in case her sister turned around.

  “But hero that he was, he only asked them, ‘What happened to the other guys? The ones who got kicked in here? There’ve been thousands, so it’s not like they’re all in the bathroom. And don’t try telling me they left because I have my sources. Everyone agrees the men were booted in here by Kicking Bitch outside.’

  “‘Oh, we ate them,’ the daughters admitted. ‘That’s our favorite thing to do. We’re very oral.�
�

  “They started to kiss Killer-of-Enemies, rubbing themselves up against him, the temperature in the house rising. But then he shouted, ‘Get back! That’s not how you use a vagina!’

  “The girls sulked prettily. ‘Well, what is the right way?’ they all wanted to know.

  “‘First you have to eat this medicine made from sour berries,’ he said. How lucky he just happened to have some of these very same berries in his pockets. Four different kinds—one for each daughter, I guess. ‘The vagina’s sweet this way.’

  “Well, the girls ate the berries which puckered up their lips. But they kept eating because he told them to and he was handsome and this was long before women knew better than to listen to any damned man preach about what constituted femaleness, as if he couldn’t possibly have an ulterior motive. They popped more and more into their mouths, lips parting wide and then constricting with each tartly succulent, full-to-bursting fruit. Eventually they couldn’t chew anymore—even if they could swallow.” And here Dr. Singer waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “The acid berries dissolved their strong teeth, leaving their mouths undefended and no threat. They couldn’t possibly eat up a man this way.

  “And Killer-of-Enemies said to them, ‘Now you’re ready.’”

  After the laughter died down, Singer nodded. “Okay, those of you who really do happen to belong to this class need to read Chapters 9 and 10 in your texts. Those of you who aren’t students but sneaked in here for a cheap thrill, goeth out into the world and buyeth my book.”

  Dorien realized people were starting to leave. And since Annet didn’t happen to belong here, she and her friend were already halfway to the door. Dorien might be seen.

  She hunched down behind a tall teenager and slipped out into the hall. Annet was probably only ten feet behind her. Dorien ducked her head and turned through the door of the ladies room.

  But they followed, still talking excitedly about Dr. Singer’s lecture.