Bullet Through Your Face (improved format)

by Edward Lee

  The scream came down like a guillotine blade. Rudy and Beth went rigid in the bed.

  Then another scream tore through the air.

  “Thuh-that came from M-Mona’s room, didn’t it?” Rudy stammered.

  “Yuh-yeah,” Beth agreed.

  “She’s your friend. You go see what happened.”

  “Fuck you!” Beth shouted. “Inconsiderate coward son of a—” “We’ll both go, then. Here. I’ll protect you.” Rudy boldly

  brandished one of Beth’s nail files. Then, disheveled in their underwear, they crept out of the bedroom. “Aw, Christ,” Rudy muttered when he saw the trap-door to the basement standing open.

  Then they padded down the ball, and peered into Mona’s room...

  “Aw, Christ,” Rudy muttered again.

  But Beth didn’t mutter. She screamed.

  Gormok, his face smeared scarlet, grinned up at them in the lamplight. And atop the stained bed lay Mona, naked and quite dead.

  She was also quite eviscerated.

  The student’s trim abdomen had been riven open, and from the rive an array of organs had been extracted and arranged about her as if for some macabre inspection. An outline of slowly seeping blood spread about the corpse like a Kirlian aura.

  Gormok was eating something dark and wet out of his hands. Her liver, Rudy realized. He’s eating Mona’s liver.

  “Friends! Hello!” Gormok greeted, chewing. “How art?”

  Rudy bellowed, “What in God’s name did you do!”

  “Not in God’s name,” Gormok lamented. “In Nergal’s. Lo, and to my eternal shame, behold the freight of my curse. I try to fight it, on my heart. But the blasted Nergal has condemned me to such heinous acts wheneverest I breathe on the salt’s divine fumes.”

  ‘Uh . . . huh.” Rudy shuddered, feebly wielding the nail file. Should I kill him? he debated. But he thought about that. He’d never much liked Mona anyway. Bitchy, arrogant, and always taking cheap shots. Sure, he’d fucked her a couple times when Beth was at work (—no great shakes in bed, either. Like fucking a starfish—) and since then she’d regularly implied that it wouldn’t be a good idea for Rudy to ever raise her rent.

  “Gormok, wait here a minute. Beth and I have to talk.” “0f course! Enjoy your discourse, dear friends,” Gormok invited.

  “Whilst I enjoy my meal.” Rudy had to about carry Beth back to their bedroom. She was going pasty-faced, pale. “Rudy,” she fretted, “we have to get out of here while we still can! We have to call the police!”

  “Don’t overreact, honey. He’s harmless.” “Harmless!” Beth’s eyes came close to jettisoning from her head. “He’s eating Mona’s liver! You call that harmless?”

  Rudy had a plan, but he had to play it out right. “Listen, Beth,” he said in a consoling, quiet voice. “Mona’s got no relatives or friends— hell, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend. She’ll never be missed. And she wasn’t doing well in school, anyway—”

  “Rudy! You call the police right now!”

  “All right, all right.” Rudy held up his hands, his hair sticking up. “I’m calling the police. See?” He picked up the phone and began to dial.

  But not the police. Instead, he dialed 1-900 Sportsline. He listened a moment, tapping his foot. Then he hung up and smiled.

  “Clipper won the bout in the sixth round.”

  Beth went into a staccato burst of crying and screaming. “Rudy, you’re out of your mind! What is wrong with you?”

  “Baby, it’s only because I love you,” Rudy, well, lied. “I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for us. I want us to be married someday,have kids, and all that.”

  Beth sniffled, looking up. “Really?”

  “Of course, honey,” he assured her and gave her a hug. “But I need you to have faith in me, okay? I want you to go to bed now. Just trust me.” He lovingly touched her cheek. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  Rudy did exactly that. First, he put Gormok back to bed in the basement. The alomancer, smiling calmly, said, “I’m sated now, dear Rudy. My curse is relieved, and now I can sleep. And I am heartily sorry for any inconvenience I have caused you.”

  “Hey, Gor, don’t worry about it.” Rudy winced a bit, thinking of Mona’s liver. “These things happen all the time.”

  “Until the morrow, then! And for now—sleep. For to sleep is perchance–to dream.”

  “Uh . . . huh,” Rudy said.

  When he went back up, this time, he locked the trap-door.

  Digging graves was hard work, harder than one might expect. Yet dig Rudy did, maniacally in his boxer shorts. He dug deep. Inserting Mona’s internal organs back into her opened abdominal vault proved a trying task too, but at least it was unique . . .

  And later, in the little moonlit backyard, with the crickets trilling and the grass cool under his bare feet, with the scent of the bay in the air, Rudy buried the fickle bitch.

  But one more task remained. Gormok said he was cursed to commit murder on any day that he performed a salt-divination. That’s a big problem, Rudy realized. He couldn’t very well have Gormok cutting folks up and eating their livers every time he gave Rudy the read on the next fight or ballgame, now could he?

  So . . .

  He crept quietly back down into the basement.

  Gormok slept on, murmuring sweet Babylonian nothings . Here goes, Rudy thought—

  —and raised the fire ax.

  “Sleep no more!” Gormok quoted Bill Shakespeare as the great blade cut down. “MacRudy doth murder sleep!”

  Blood flew like spaghetti sauce. Things thunked to the floor.

  But there was no other way! Hell, I’m doing him a favor, Rudy felt convinced as he chopped and chopped.

  And chopped some more. Once he’d succeeded in severing Gormok’s limbs, he tied off each stump with twine. What a day, he thought when he was done.

  IV Beth, shrieking, pummeled up the basement stairs the next afternoon. “What did you do!”

  “Hey, didn’t I say I’d take care of everything?”

  “Rudy! You turned him into a . . . a torso!”

  “Yeah, well, he can’t hurt anybody now, can he?” Rudy rationalized. “And he doesn’t even care, as long as we keep him happy.” Beth’s face crimped. “What do you mean?”

  Rudy thought it best to change the topic. “Look!” he celebrated

  and waved a sheaf of $100 bills. “Our man came through again.

  Pimlico, baby! Afternoon Tea by a nose in the first! The odds were 32-to-one! Can you believe it?”

  Beth, quite reasonably, went nuts. “Rudy! You bet again? He’s a murderer, for God’s sake! We can’t keep a murderer in our basement!

  Much less a murderer who’s a torso!”

  “Sure we can.” Rudy placed the stack of bills in her hands. Beth went lax, astonished. “This looks like about ten-thou—” “Eleven thousand clams,” Rudy corrected. “And I already paid

  off Vito The Eye. We’re rolling from here, babe.”

  Beth’s eyes stayed fixed on the money.

  “But, uh, you see,” Rudy commenced with the bad news. His

  throat turned dry. “There’s a catch. Remember when I told you, ‘as long as we keep him happy’?”

  “Yeah?” Beth replied.

  The catch was this: That morning, Rudy had shown the head atop Gormok’s delimbed body the racing journal as he held the fuming ashtray under the alomancer’s nose.

  “Afternoon Tea, dear Rudy,” informed the happy head. “In the first tourney.”

  Rudy didn’t argue, in spite of the odds. But since last night, a question had itched at him like stitches healing.

  “Hey, Gor? Yesterday you said something like you had to commit a murder any day you do the salt thing.”

  “Upon any such day I perform a holy alomance, yes,” Gormok affirmed. “Nergal, the abyssal prince, has cursed me as such.”

  “What happens if you, uh, don’t commit a murder?”

  “Then the gift of prophes
y is lost to me. Forever.”

  Balls! Rudy thought. Shit! Fuck! Piss!

  “Unless,” Gormok’s head leaned up and added, “I am, as a substitute, properly relieved of the groin wheneverest such needs of passion call.”

  Rudy’s gaze thinned. “You mean . . .”

  “No!” Beth wailed upon the revelation. “No no no!”

  “Honey, come on,” Rudy urged. “It’s the only way. If you don’t,

  he can’t pick the winners anymore.”

  “Rudy, read my lips! I’m not going to have sex with a torso!” Ho boy, Rudy thought. Women. You ask them to do a little

  something and they get all bent out of shape. Time to lay on the

  heavy bullshit, he decided. “It’s for our future, sweetheart. It’s for our children.”

  Evidently, children was the magic word. Beth pouted a moment more. She looked at him, pink-faced.

  “Our . . . children,” she whispered. “I- I . . .”

  Rudy hugged her, stroked her hair. “It’s the only way, honey. I wouldn’t ask you to do it, but it’s the only way. Don’t we want our children to have the very best?”

  “Our children,” she dizzily repeated. “I guess, I guess you’re right.”

  Then she turned for the basement steps, began to descend.

  That’s my little trooper, Rudy approved. Little trooper was right—and then some. Rudy, being an investigative kind of guy, felt it only fitting and proper to make an observation or two, so he sneaked down a few minutes behind her and peeked through the slight gap in the door . . .

  Good God! he thought.

  Most would deem this a reasonable thing to think when witnessing one’s fiancé engaged in the physical act of love with a living torso. Beth wasted no time in the deletion of her garments, and, despite a rather disconsolate look on her face—just as reasonable— she commenced to her task with something that could only be described as a formidable resolve. She squatted over Gormok, who lay unsurprisingly motionless atop his blanket. This afforded Rudy a front-on view, and though Beth’s discomfiture was plain, she soon began to ease into the brass tacks, so to speak, of the project.

  In the dim basement light, her face flushed, and her small, pretty breasts began to sway. Meanwhile, her companion gibbered sweet Babylonian gibberish in response to her attentions. How does she do it? Rudy wondered. This was, after all, a torso. Moreover, he wondered next: What is she thinking about?

  Now there was a question! What would any woman think about while slamming glands with a dismembered salt-diviner? Perhaps it was brute rationalization, but Rudy came up with the only answer his psyche would allow.

  She’s thinking about me—

  Of course. Who else could she be thinking about? Certainly not Gormok. In moments, Rudy became aware of a considerable hardness loitering at his groin. My girlfriend’s humping a torso and I’m getting a woody. And as he watched further, the image transposed.

  He imagined himself in Gormok’s place, right there on the basement floor and shuddering in bliss as the slot of Beth’s womanhood slid hotly up and down over his cock. His crotch felt smoldering, his heart raced. Beth’s breasts bobbed vigorously on her chest as she stepped up the momentum. Up and down, up and down, hot and frantic, her hips began to locomote like a machine, until—

  Aw, Christ . . . “Sweet mercy of Ea!” Gormok exclaimed at the obvious brink of his crisis.

  Rudy caught his breath, and realized that he’d had a crisis of his own, his libido relieving itself to the sheer exploitation of his underpants . . .

  I just watched my wife-to-be get it on with a fat torso, he realized. And I spunked in my shorts.

  He crept back upstairs, as bewildered as he was disgusted. But he did feel convinced of one thing at least: it was all for a good cause . . .

  V No, a great cause, an absolutely big time wonderful cause. Within a week, Rudy was something he never recalled being: debt-free. Exit the ‘76 clunker Malibu, enter his and hers Mustang GT’s. The 52” Sony tv was nice too, and so was the Adcom stereo and the $50,000 worth of new furniture.

  And the new house. A spacious, skylighted A-frame off Bay Ridge Drive. It was the nicest house in the area that had a basement.

  VI Gormok remained surprisingly content, considering what Rudy’s greed had divorced him of. He jabbered and drank beer through a convalescent straw during the day, propped up behind pillows in bed, while Rudy cashed in at the track. Not once had Gormok’s divinations failed, and soon Rudy’s biggest problem was what to do with all the money. Beth, of course, had her ups and downs—the freedom to buy anything she ever wanted was a bit spoiled by the constant sexual service she was required to perform upon the libidinous torso in the basement. Eventually, she began to complain . . .

  “That thing downstairs made me give it head today!” she spat at Rudy. “Did you hear me! I had to give head to a torso!”

  Just like a woman, Rudy frowned in thought. You give ‘em a good thing and they STILL bellyache. “Honey, he’s not a thing. He’s not an it. You’re talking about Gormok–he’s our man.”

  Beth gaped. “Our man! Then you go down there and fuck him! See how you like it! You go down there and blow our man!”

  Rudy thanked the fates Gormok wasn’t gay. “Stop being selfish,” he told her. “Don’t we have everything we want?”

  “Yeah, Rudy, we do, and that’s my point. We have enough now, so I shouldn’t have to do it anymore.”

  Rudy looked up reprovingly. “Beth, there’s never enough.”

  “Oh, so that’s it, huh?” Beth, who rarely wore anything other than panties these days (due to the mounting frequency of Gormok’s need), stomped exasperated around the kitchen table. “You think you’re going to spend the rest of your life cleaning out the goddamn racetrack while good old Beth fucks and sucks a dismembered Babylonian alomancer!”

  “Don’t be vulgar, honey. It’s not like you.”

  Beth’s little breasts jiggled as she belted out a bitter chortle. “You make me fuck a torso and tell me not to be vulgar! I’m sick of it! You hear me! I’m sick of fucking that disgusting, ridiculous, grinning . . . trunk!”

  Rudy brought a finger to his lips. “Keep your voice down. He might hear you. You’ll hurt his feelings.”

  “God,” she lapsed, paling. “He takes forever sometimes, and—” she gulped—“he’s—he’s—he’s just so . . . huge.”

  Then quit complaining, Rudy felt inclined to say. Women always want the big dick—well, baby, now you got it. At the table, he weeded out the ones, fives, and tens, into the garbage.

  “Beth, oh Bethieeeeeeeeee!” called out the familiar nasal warble from downstairs. “Wither thee, my sweet beatific vision? My lovely, lovely Beth of the light-brown hair?”

  “Oh, no,” Beth croaked.

  “Leave me in turmoil no longer, oh, my wondrous angel, so lovely of countenance and sweet of loins. Come! I beg thee! Come assuage my beckoning fancy.”

  Rudy cocked a brow. “Assuage my beckoning fancy?” Beth glared at him. “That means he’s horny again, Rudy.” Her eyes rolled back in despair. “I don’t believe this. All I ever wanted was a nice normal average life, and what do I get instead? A torso

  with a boner.”

  “Dearest Beth, please! Partake of my desire! My loins cry out for thee!”

  Beth’s disdainful glare focused. “And you, you fucker. You haven’t made love to me in months.”

  Rudy shrugged. It was not an easy thing for a man to rise to the occasion when he knew his squeeze was doing the bop with a naked torso. Hey, she’s got her gig, I’ve got mine, he thought. His bevy of call girls at the track wore him out. Some of those girls could suck the paint off a battleship. Not much lead left in the old pencil after when they were done. “It’s all the stress, honey,” he lied through his teeth.

  “All this betting everyday—it takes a lot out of a guy. And now the IRS is all over me.”

  “Wondrous Beth!” the torso whined on, “my passion throbs for the
e! Oh, let thy lovely loins be wed again to mine! Let your angel’s lips give succor to my manly love, and drink of my warm and copious seed!”

  “You better get down there,” Rudy advised, “unless you want me to lose everything on the next race.”

  Beth stared at him, her shoulders slumping.

  “I hate you,” she said.

  One thing Rudy had added to the new house, unbeknownst to Beth, of course, was the hidden video camera in the basement. Rudy, after all, was a successful man now, and successful men didn’t watch their girlfriends tuck torsos through mere cracks in basement doors. No, they watched with state-of-the-art video equipment. And Rudy had a lot to watch . . .

  Jesus Christ in a hotdog stand , he thought, staring at the screen in his den and adjusting the remote, low-light lens.

  Despite his arousal, Rudy could no longer deny that watching Beth’s sexual feats maintained in him a necessary level of disdain for her. It didn’t matter at all that he coerced her to tend to Gormok—that was beside the point. And so was logic. He needed to hate her as much as he could in order to compel her to continue. In truth it was money, not love, that made the world go round, and Rudy liked the world very much.

  Sometimes, though, the things he saw on the screen really bothered him. Like right now, for instance. Beth was performing an act of fellatio on Gormok the likes of which would make Linda Lovelace look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. “Goddamn! can she smoke a pole,” he whispered aloud. And he saw with even more distaste that her earlier claim was no bull. To describe Gormok as huge was sheer understatement. Try hung like a fucking Clydesdale stallion. That fruitloop motherfucker’s got more dick than four or five guys, Rudy grimly realized, and at the same time he stroked his own endowment which, in comparison, more resembled a Jimmy Dean breakfast link than a penis. And what Beth was doing to Gormok more resembled a freak-show sword-swallowing than simple fellatio. Down her assiduous lips went, all the way to the hilt, as Gormok’s legless hips squirmed in pleasure. Where did it all go? Deep throat, my ass, Rudy thought. This is deep stomach. She never sucked my cock like that, the dirty bitch.

  And Rudy’s hatred did not abate in the least as his hand assuaged his own beckoning fancy. I’ll bet the little whore is enjoying it, he convinced himself. I’ll bet she’s getting off! And, Christ, she’s making more noise than a truck-load of hogs at the slop trough!