Still

by Charlee Jacob

  “You gonna believe those two crack whores? Nobody just licks a picture and gets a movie.”

  “This is too cool. I want to get me some of that.”

  “Cool, you retard? Is that your mother being bottle-fucked on his ass? And some of these are little kids. You the next generation Short-eyes?”

  “Roll him over. Let’s see if he’s got it on his dick.”

  “No, wait, look. You can see it going up his asshole. Like there’s a projecter inside there. See the flicker?”

  “Great shriekin’ fudgepackers! Part them buttmounds and lets see…”

  The classroom door banged open, making everyone jump.

  A very old black lady walked in, long green silk dress, lace from here to the moon. The gown even had a bustle.

  “What are you supposed to be?” one of the football assholes challenged her.

  “I am Mrs. Antoinette Delacroixe. Today I am the substitute for Mr. Fu-Shy’s class,” she replied in a voice so cultured Beta might’ve mistaken her for the grand dame at an expensive acting school. She had a few red freckles below her eyes.

  “I didn’t ask what you are. I asked what you’re supposed to be,” the hulking senior snapped.

  She moved down the aisle toward him, coughing into her hand.

  Then she put this hand on the teenager’s head.

  When she stepped back, spiders were crawling across his shaved pate. He screamed as one skittered across his eye and another explored his ear.

  “Sleight of hand and phantom illusion are both artforms, capable of eloquent surprise” she told the students.

  Both seniors vacated Peter’s back. The class that had been attacking him now scurried, much as the spiders on the one thug’s skull. By the way, the spiders had vanished.

  Kelly Cooper came into the room. She looked officiously annoyed. “What’s going on in here?”

  The kids turned in her direction.

  Still on the floor yet trying to push himself up, Peter saw only a silky swish of poisonous green hemline, then nothing.

  Mrs. Delacroixe had disappeared, as had her arachnoid menagerie.

  Ms. Cooper called the athletic department to have one of the coaches bring him some sweatpants and a jacket. She tried to call an ambulance for Peter.

  He refused one, only wanting to leave.

  Which was fine with her. Because they couldn’t have deviants working with children. And anybody with THAT all over him had to be a deviant.

  Peter was fired.

  He wasn’t surprised.

  ««—»»

  He drove to Dr. Noll’s office. Maybe he ought to have been in a hospital, he didn’t know. But he didn’t want to have to explain his situation again. Besides, she’d already begun handling his case.

  “Your appointment isn’t until tomorrow, Mr. Beta,” some receptionist told him when he arrived.

  “I’m suffering a crisis,” he replied.

  The young man shrugged as if he heard it all the time. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be right back. Have a seat.”

  Nika came out of her office personally.

  “What happened?” she asked, seeing bruises on Peter’s face, a bloody nose, a split lip.

  She turned to her secretary. “Thanks, Thomas. Cancel the rest of my appointments for the day.”

  The young man’s eyebrows went up. “ALL of them?”

  She nodded as she began to help Peter back to her office.

  “Has the problem worsened since I saw you on Saturday?” she wanted to know once she and her patient were alone.

  Peter laughed, a nervous siren of a laugh.

  “Show me,” she said.

  He was so sore she had to help him undress.

  “I don’t see any change,” she started to say, walking slowly around him. “How is it different?”

  First he held up both hands to show her the palms.

  “Just these two new ones?”

  “Yes, except the scenarios are altered. See? Not just victims anymore. I’m a walkin’ talkin’ holocaust nickleodeon.”

  He could tell by her measured gasp that now she did notice it.

  “I want to make a second document.”

  “Sure. Go for it.”

  The camera and another slow walk around, having him spread his legs, bend over a table, spread wide his arms. This as he felt the itch, the buzz and sting of each bloody deed.

  Then the ultimate shame.

  He got an erection, posing for her this way. The mortality of the mortifying. He started to stammer an apology.

  But then Nika turned the camera off and set it down, stepping close to him, pressing her breasts behind a silk blouse against his chest, grinding her hips against him. She pulled back only long enough to unbutton the blouse. The bra beneath it had a front clasp which she unsnapped to free her breasts. She had very tiny pink nipples, making Peter think of unopened blossoms on prize miniature roses.

  “This is unprofessional of me,” she admitted. “I could lose my license. I could go to jail. I mean you do understand, don’t you, that a doctor having sex with an emotionally or physically vulnerable patient is considered to be committing an act of rape? Many of my patients who act out fantasies with one another tell me they use safe words when they can’t tolerate a particular violating situation. If you want me to stop, say so.”

  The itching, buzzing sting increased until he needed her to scratch at him. He told her, “Stop isn’t a safe word. It’s dangerous. Especially when if you did stop, I think I’d die. It’s the old joke. Stop. Don’t. Stop. Don’t. Stop. Don’t Stop. DON’T STOP!”

  “Forgive me,” she murmured as she stroked the horrors on his flesh, bringing up one leg to clasp his left hip with. “I’ve never been so aroused. Your skin is so hot.”

  She ran her tongue down his chest, down his stomach, up the shaft of his decorated penis. The wet trail sizzled and smoked. Her shoulder-length red hair snaked out in medusa coils, likewise the gingery down on her arms, reacting to some electrostatic field. She could feel the itch/buzz/sting when she touched him, highly charged, half-expecting to hear a massive thunderstorm outside. The lights inside did flicker when the couple made considerable contact. Talk about sexual magnetism.

  He heard her breathing, fast and shallow. Saw the blush on her face. A few tears sparkled in her eyes.

  She pulled up her skirt and guided the burning brand of his erection beneath the elastic of her thong, rubbing it against herself. All the time muttering, “This is aberrant. I’ll be needing to see a psychiatrist myself. You’re worse than a Roman Circus. Not you, you understand. But this is the greatest manifestation for the purely fetishist I’ve ever encountered…”

  Peter groaned as he grabbed her by the ass and lifted her up, sinking deeply inside her. Compared with the feverish temperature of his skin, her cunt seemed to be walled in ice. Not a bad circumstance. “Could we get back to psychoanalyzing me afterward?”

  ««—»»

  She’d taken him home, closing the office early. Thomas didn’t seem to mind having the afternoon off.

  They made love in the bed Peter used to share with Diane. Something that seemed like a long time ago.

  The electricity continued, painful sparks during rubbing only heightening their pleasure. With the curtains drawn and the light going down on the other side of the house, the bedroom was dark. He counted the static snaps as fireflies turned on, then died between them.

  He’d had no idea he could do it and do it again. A peter and a repeater. Once in a twenty-four hour period had been all he’d ever done it with Diane. Either he was, in truth, a fuckin’ dynamo—or Nika was.

  (Didn’t it take two?)

  He fell asleep sometime after sunset. He had a dream.

  In it was each victim, coming toward him through a black and white fog.

  Well, he’d dreamed this before, hadn’t he?

  But now Pete was afraid of them. Because he’d misused the flesh, hadn’t he? He’d abused the privele
ge of being—what?—their monument?

  A walking gravestone?

  They looked so intense.

  (Leastwise, those with faces did.)

  Actually, you’d be surprised at how intense somebody could appear to be who’d had a shotgun blow away most of their head.

  Severity. Frenzy. Safe Word. DON’T!

  Leading them was Zane McFadden, holding Rosaluna’s baby in his arms. Was the pain in their eyes betrayal?

  Peter forced, forced, forced himself to wake up before they reached him.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 20

  “I know why he came to grief: it was because

  he was afraid…”

  —Nicolai Gogol

  The Viy

  Temptation by flesh was a double-edged sword.

  Veronika Noll specialized in abnormal psychology, catering to the (sometimes) seriously maladapted.

  All the divisions for paraphilias.

  The word meant ‘attraction to the deviant’.

  There were a trio of paraphiliac classes. The first referred to those whose penchant was for employing nonhuman objects to achieve sexual excitement. The second was for repetitive sexual activity within the human species, but requiring genuine or simulated pain or degradation in order to become aroused. The third had as its basis repetitive sexual activity with partners who didn’t consent to their suffering.

  She had among her patient list an assortment. Sadism. Masochism. Bondage. Dominance and submission. Rubber fetishists, shoe freaks, hair and nail collectors, toilet servitors, exhibitionists, even practitioners of parthenophagy (the cannibalism of virginal young girls). A number of these were cases referred to her by the courts, people who were ordered to seek professional help as a condition of their probation or parole.

  She’d treated people who liked to suck toes dipped in dog shit and folks who walked around with toes severed from dead bodies inserted up their anuses and pussies.

  A lot of fascinations with the by-products and end results of nature—including the greatest of these: mortality. Sex and death, interlocked in both media and subconscious symbols.

  This had always interested Veronika. Whether or not she happened to be subconsciously jaded and this was why she’d elected this branch of psychiatry back in school, or whether she’d discovered a streak of solid jade after treating society’s deviants for years, she couldn’t answer. Not even she knew.

  One must be at least clinically fascinated with people who got off on sucking their partners nostrils or with those who had orgasms because they knew the lover they were screwing carried an inoperable, metastatic cancer. Some of these clinicians even made up the words for such conditions. A kind of poetry perhaps. Nasolingus for the nose thing and nosolagnia for the dying swan obsession. The first one had a further classification, being mucophagy, the snot-eaters and mucous-drinkers. And this wasn’t referring to little children who picked their noses and ate their boogers. These were adults who wanted yours. It helped to have a strong stomach.

  After all, there were traumatophiliacs—folks who got hard and/or wet from witnessing injuries and shock—working in E.R.s across the globe. And there were some secret acrotomophiliacs among noted trauma teams, achieving boners with their bone saws, revering amputees as the pinnacle of pulchritude. Also a few amokoscisiasts in the field of plastic surgery, stifling their frenzied pig grunts of delight while slashing female patients in the name of perfection. And she knew of at least one famous coroner who practised necrophilia.

  Of course, just being insinuated somewhere in the business of helping those that the societal norm refused to tolerate (sometimes out of simple misunderstanding and prejudice, other times for damned good reasons) didn’t necessarily make a professional even mildly kinky.

  Nika had never permitted her private emotions to interfere with properly administering to her patients. She’d trained herself to show neither amusement, attraction nor revulsion. She’d had patients whose criminal deeds were so vile and utterly beyond even the most charitable god’s forgiveness, that even other doctors suffered nightmares from contact with them. She’d had those who’d tried to shock her or to find the sweet spot of her own secret passions. None had ever succeeded.

  Not that Nika hadn’t experimented on her own time. With men and women, with giving pain and receiving it, with restraints so severe they had practically rearranged her bones and organs, and with drugs which assassinated more than a few brain cells.

  (Drugs. Might she claim diminished capacity should Beta sue?) Yet she’d never done anything to anybody who hadn’t consented.

  {Safe Words}

  ‘Consent’ was a safe word.

  Never Do A Patient. Four very safe words.

  Until Peter Beta.

  Why him?

  Stupid question. He was an enigma in skin of every atrocity she’d seen or written of in case studies.

  He had, simply put, the most bizarre physical expression of the maladaptive she’d ever encountered. If his was a case of pseudocyesis, then he had to possess a degree of subconscious concentration and manipulation over his body’s most primary atomic structure than any stigmatic saint or miracle fakir in history.

  That’s what her obsession was. Not that she’d ever known it about herself before. Not until she saw Peter’s little movies and felt his body heat. Stigmatophilia. Not a saintly stigmata, no.

  Beta himself seemed completely average, beneath the veneer of sinister masterpiece.

  After he fell asleep, she’d gone into that office he called Hell. He’d pointed it out to her as they were headed for the bedroom. And she was his doctor, so she didn’t view her checking out his private sanctum as a betrayal of trust. And if it could be termed this in anyone else’s book, it was certainly not as bad as her having seduced him.

  How totally unprofessional.

  How reprehensible.

  How sick.

  Nika knew she ought to recuse herself from being his doctor. She’d become the least appropriate choice.

  Even further…she should retire, having become unfit as anything but the lowest thrill seeker.

  No drug she’d ever taken had flown her as high as he had. Forget Ecstasy, cocaine, or L.S.D. Or even her brief brush with heroin chic. Any mere pharmaceutical rush paled with the space and time frisson Nika found when welded to Peter Beta’s carnage tapestry.

  But in his office, what had she expected? Some dungeon beyond the usual tawdry nonsense, perhaps a few bodies? At least body parts? A holographic gallery of lust and gore? At least a new definition for bizarre.

  Only stills from horror movies. Silly, really. The sort of thing a kid might collect. Well, okay…most of this was a mite graphic for kids. It was still basically R-rated schtick, available at any cineplex with a hundred forty-seven screens, Dolby stereo, and canned nacho cheese sauce.

  Beta’s vintage stuff wasn’t as bad as what Nika watched on regular television these days. The popularity of contrived ‘survivor’ soap operas, explicit forensic dramas, and news vérité (watch Uday and Qusay Hussein get blasted into dog poop before your very eyes!) had pretty much turned everybody into jaded voyeurs.

  Then she saw the scrapbook and couldn’t resist opening it. First page: the little girl from Peter’s left hand.

  ««—»»

  It scared Peter when he first woke up the next morning and found Nika gone.

  “Oh, God…she freaked out,” he concluded.

  The light was on in Hell so he knew she’d been in there.

  “Just like Diane,” he mumbled, scratching his ass, rubbing his arm.

  But then he went into his office and saw the note she’d left him.

  Good morning, sleepyhead.

  I hope you don’t mind my having a look in here—purely in your interests. I don’t find your horror collection to be maladaptive. Please realize there may be a difference between the deviant and the maladaptive. Deviant isn’t necessarily maladaptive. A deviation might only be a penchant for brig
ht blue eye shadow or an addiction to chocolate. There is a great science fiction writer, for example, who until recently—although he’s written volumes about space travel—couldn’t even climb aboard an airplane for a trip. I’ve also heard he doesn’t drive. This is deviant behavior, insofar as it is not the norm. This doesn’t mean he actually has a deep-seated problem requiring rehabilitation in order to lead a productive life. But being maladaptive does imply a problem, in which the patient has behavioral tendencies which arise out of being unable to cope with stressful situations to the point where they engage in activity harmful to themselves or others . As for the scrapbook you recently acquired. I still believe that your physical manifestations are a result of pseudocyesis on a scale never before studied. Which means it should be possible for us to find a way to treat and relieve you of your symptoms.

  Don’t be afraid. I will not abandon you.

  Forget about your appointment this morning. Try to relax. I would recommend getting out of your house for a while, so you’re not cooped up alone with stressful memories of your recent family separation. Go see a movie or something. I’ll swing by after my office closes later this afternoon.

  At the risk of sounding unprofessional at this point, let me add that I happen to think you’re pretty terrific.

  Nika

  Why not, since he didn’t have to go to work?

  (Although he considered going to the Unemployment Office to apply for benefits. Except then the reason for his being fired would have to come up and how could he explain? And he couldn’t go to another school because they’d want to know why he no longer worked for this school. No matter what Nika said about the difference between deviance—which wasn’t technically bad—and the maladaptive, he knew the world could only see what he was covered with as dangerous.)

  “She’s right,” he told himself, gasping for air as he started to hyperventilate. “I need a break.”