For a few moments her eyes wouldn’t allow her to see what was painfully obvious in the staring representation of that three-thousand year-old face.
When the penny dropped, her eyes widened and she looked up at Cairns as though unable to believe.
“Yeah,” Cairns smiled and nodded, “and I’ll bet you a penny to a pound, a photograph of old Sam Bevis doesn’t look any different, either.”
SacRificial Version
Jeremy Thompson
1
The Sisters
On the television screen, a woman jogs upon a treadmill, sweating, her carefully arranged bun disintegrating into a mass of frizz. This is no ordinary treadmill, mind you, but a custom job with thick metal walls forming a rough cubicle around the flushed female.
The woman fills most of the screen, her prominent breasts bouncing as she exercises. She would be beautiful, if her face wasn’t contorted into an expression of soul-smashing terror.
As the camera pans up, I witness a baby dangling just above the woman, held aloft by a cackling goon in a purple overcoat and a psychedelically patterned top hat.
The obvious villain of the piece—looking like a cross between Dick Dastardly and the Colin Baker iteration of Doctor Who—drops the baby into its mother’s hands as the camera shoots back a considerable distance. Now I can see that the treadmill is positioned at the edge of a cliff. Apparently unable to jog and clutch her newborn at the same time, the woman launches off the edge of the vertical rock formation, screaming as she and her spawn plummet to their deaths. Their gory demises reveal the program’s budget limitations, as the sound of the cackling villain transitions into a commercial break.
“The Diabolical Designs of Professor Pandora will continue after a word from our sponsors,” a ghoulish voice over intones.
I switch off the television. The other inhabitants of my lodge will be back soon, and they frown on anything broadcast outside of the Sundance and IFC film channels. The ways in which they express their displeasure are varied, but never fail to disturb and confuse me. Over the years since my absorption into the collective, I have been pelted with human feces, held down and tickled with an eagle feather for hours at a time, forced to submit to a pickle juice enema, and even been required to spend a night inside their Founder’s Lodge, wherein rest dozens of dead hippies. And that was for the smallest infractions, such as leaving a toilet seat up or neglecting a day’s milking duties.
* * *
Our rural community encompasses nearly 3,000 acres, with barns and single-story clapboard lodges interspersed around crop fields and milking sheds. Cattle graze behind barbed wire fences. Chickens cluck indignantly within rickety hen house walls. Chores rotate among our community’s members, with only the sisters being exempt from participating.
The sisters. Just the thought of them makes my blood pressure rise. There are currently fourteen of them, but that is liable to change at any moment. Of the three roles that our commune permits women to inhabit, the sisterhood is the most prestigious, and their custom-designed lodge is the finest around.
To signify membership in the sisterhood, each woman bisects her hair into long pigtails, which she connects to the pigtails of two other sisters, one on each side of her, creating an extended line of femininity.
In their lodge they dwell, wiling the days away in thirty parallel bathtubs. The sisterhood has yet to rise above a membership of twenty, but we prefer advance preparation in our commune. They also maintain thirty parallel toilets, with no stalls to divide them. So close have the sisterhood grown that their bathroom breaks are fully synchronized.
The sisters are mostly unrelated, and encompass a smorgasbord of races and generations. A female enters the sisterhood on the day they become a woman, and leave it only upon birthing a child. The mothers are in charge of child rearing, housekeeping and meal preparation, but the sisters are devoted solely to the pursuit of passion.
Us men rotate in and out of the sisterhood’s orbit. Each evening, one man is permitted entry into their lodge, wherein he will spend the night on their colossal mattress, moving from female to female until his every muscle burns with exhaustion, and his every fluid has been spent. He will have to wait until all the other community men have had a turn with the sisters before he gets his next at bat. With over fifty virile males in our group, the wait can be quite brutal at times, let me tell ya.
Prior to entering the sisterhood, our community’s females are referred to as daughters. Daughters live a carefree existence—skipping through the fields, playing with the young lads after the boys have finished their chores. Until they are called upon for that most sacred duty, they live in ignorance of the sisterhood.
Some women of the sisterhood never bear children, and thus remain sisters well past senility, raisins in a line of peaches. Women have died on the line, some in the throes of passion. Upon this occurrence, their braids are unwoven and the link contracts.
When a woman enters the sisterhood, they give up their name. Should they reach motherhood, they are allowed to choose a new name, as majestic as they please.
Now our community isn’t perfect; I’ll be the first to admit it. Many of our children bear the telltale signs of incest: thick brows, jug ears, and deformities of the face and limb. But we are happy, or at least that’s what they tell me.
2
The Door in the Floor
I share my lodge with three men, a boy, two mothers and a daughter. The men are Raul, Kenneth and Mitch, while the boy is named Ariel. The two mothers are Eileen and Starshine, and the daughter is called Lament. Ariel appears an average boy, but one of Lament’s eyes is fused shut under the mass of spiraling growths that envelop much of her head. Lament cannot speak, but is quite adept at communicating pleasure or displeasure through the inflection of her variegated hoots.
Lament will never be inducted into the sisterhood, but will instead be sent to Lodge Cherubic when she’s older. All of the permanent sons and daughters are sent to live there once they reach a certain age, and the lodge is padlocked for the safety of our community. The locks don’t protect our ears, however, and the sounds drifting from that mad edifice are enough to sour one’s dreams.
At this moment in time, my roommates are with others from our community, filming scenes for yet another chunk of experimental cinema. These unintelligible flicks are cobbled together inside Editing Lodge, wherein a number of so-called “visionaries” are free to follow their muses. When completed, they are projected onto the side of our largest barn during our Film Celebration Nights. Even the sisters come out for these, feigning interest in a series of random images and abstract close-ups.
* * *
I study my feet, clad in well-worn moccasins, and then at the floor upon which they rest. Before my eyes, deep grooves form in the hardwood, birthing a rectangle. A knob rises from within it, and I find myself gawking at a door in the floor. This door should appear incongruous, but it is as if it has always been there, and my eyes have only just brought it into focus.
Now this isn’t my first door in the floor, mind you. I passed that milestone nearly two decades ago, while attending a chemically enhanced rave inside a haunted slaughterhouse, long abandoned. To those who have learned to see them, the doors appear at counterculture communities all over the world.
With the door’s arrival, I know that my time at this particular commune is drawing to a close. Soon, no more than a couple of weeks from now, I will turn the knob and descend the concrete steps then revealed. As always, I will enter an underground nightclub, populated by some of the strangest characters this side of science fiction. When next I ascend the stairs, I will exit into a new set of circumstances.
The door will then disappear behind me, until the time arises to pass into another community. In the past, I’ve dwelled amongst opium-addicted mimes, transgender midgets, and perverts of all shapes and stripes. I’ve consumed human flesh, and even worked in a zoo with no animals, its menagerie composed entirely of morbidly obese albino
s. You never know where the door will send you, but it is impossible to resist its siren call for long.
* * *
Mitch enters the room now, followed by Starshine. Spotting the door in the floor, Starshine attempts to open it. The knob doesn’t turn. It’s not her door, after all.
“I remember the last time that door appeared,” Mitch remarks, thin lips twitching under a black handlebar mustache. “Eileen and I were snuggling on the couch, and suddenly you ascended into our living room. How long ago was that, anyway? Three years?”
I nod, although it has been closer to four.
“I guess you’ll be moving on now,” Mitch says.
“Soon enough,” I promise. “I’ll never forget you guys, though.”
A singular tear slides down Starshine’s cheek, and she moves forward to embrace me. In her bright yellow sundress, she is gorgeous, and something shifts in my nether region as her breasts press against me. But mothers are denied the physical act of love in our community, and so I gently pull away.
3
My First Time
Knowing that my time at this particular commune is growing shorter, I find myself beset by nostalgia, revisiting days gone by. I’d only been seventeen on the occasion of my first visit to the nameless club, which I can feel pulsing underfoot even now.
My body was a shimmering wave of Ecstasy-induced sensations, as I clung tightly to a petite blonde named Esther, a frock-wearing pixie of indeterminate age. Weaving our way through a crowd of pleasure seekers, my newfound acquaintance dropped her Day-Glo Slinky onto the ground. Her freckle-face contracted in annoyance.
Always the gentleman, I crouched to retrieve the toy, and observed a doorknob arising from the slaughterhouse’s rusted metal grate. Before my eyes, the grate formed into a door, with a dull white light emanating from around its edges.
“Are you seeing this?” I asked Esther. She nodded assent, but her eyes seemed too unfocused to comprehend the event’s import. The other ravers appeared to take no notice of the door, yet still managed to avoid treading upon it. They danced under black light halos, their teeth shining like radioactive Chiclets.
Hesitating only for a moment, I turned the knob and yanked the grate door open. When confronted by a flight of concrete steps, my natural curiosity got the best of me.
Grabbing Esther’s hand, I pulled her in after me. She giggled uncontrollably, her discarded Slinky already forgotten.
Halfway down the stairs, the door closed behind us, and then it seemed that there was no door at all. Still we traveled forward; still destiny’s wheel revolved.
Leaving the steps, we treaded upon checkerboard tiles, traversing a long dim corridor. At the end of the passageway stood a second door, constructed from reddish wood veneer. Kissing Esther’s cheek, I ushered her beyond this point of ingress.
* * *
Inside was a nightclub, its walls blue metal laminate. Chrome mirror tiles adorned the ceiling and floor, and the air reeked of sweat and bad perfume. A curving bar, its top polished onyx, snaked around the room’s far end. To the right of us, a DJ spun records atop a raised platform.
The music was strange, a hodgepodge of genres and instrumentation jumbled discordantly. One second I’d hear trance, the next black metal. Light jazz segued into throat singing, which became gangsta rap. It was as if an FM radio had become possessed, and my brain clenched under the onslaught. Then something shifted in my mind, and I found myself reacting positively toward the sonic assault. Spastically, I danced my way across the floor, adrift within the wildest crowd I’d ever seen. Shedding Esther like old dandruff, I waded through the flesh tide.
There were people with animal parts grafted to their beings: rhinoceros horns, shark fins and kangaroo pouches. One wrinkled old bondage queen proudly displayed a pig’s tail sprouting from the center of her forehead. There were drag queens, hippies and hipsters dancing alongside gang bangers, voodoo practitioners and nudists. Some of the dancers foamed at the mouth; some bore the signs of self-mutilation.
Sweating profusely, I approached the bar. Strangely enough, there was a toilet mounted upon its surface, into which a woman in a princess outfit was urinating. Its drain led behind the bar, and I leaned forward to see that it emptied into a child’s swimming pool. Within the pool reclined an obese man wearing swim trunks and bright yellow arm floaties, lazily performing a simulation of the backstroke.
The bartender stumbled over, to regard me inquisitively with eyes like curdled milk. A large swarthy man with sewn-together lips, he pointed at me and shrugged his shoulders, silently inquiring as to my drink preference.
“Can I get a Heineken?” I asked.
Shrugging his shoulders, he continued to stare. It was as if he’d never heard of the beverage.
“House special,” I tried, withering under his obstinate gaze.
Finally, he lurched away, ambling toward the under lit bottle display, which showcased strangely colored beverages inside impractical containers. Pulling a star-shaped flagon from the rack, he upended it into a glass. After the bartender handed the glass to me, I attempted to pass him a twenty. The man spared this but the briefest of glances, before moving along to help another of the club’s patrons, a wheelbarrow-bound quadriplegic being pushed by a grizzly bear.
“First drink’s on them, I guess,” I said to myself.
Peering into the glass, I beheld the strangest of drinks. It was like radioactive fuchsia churning within an aubergine lake. Lifting it to my nose, I inhaled. It was like smelling a memory, like sun rays swallowed by the sky. The Ecstasy high was ebbing, and I felt engulfed by unfamiliar sensations. It seemed that I’d grown an invisible skin, which was pulling me apart from opposite ends. So thinking, I placed the glass to my lips.
The concoction entered my body as a vapor, setting my neurons afire. Exhaling, I felt a coolness pour out from within me, a cold front swirling out from my esophagus. Riding curlicue gravity waves, I fell into a bar stool.
My vision returned to the dance floor, revealing Esther in the grips of a leather daddy. The man had pulled aside his rhinestone-encrusted eye patch, and she was licking whip cream from his vacant eye socket.
After this last bit of perversion, I felt like I’d seen enough. And so I pushed my way through the dance floor, past depraved, bizarre patrons, slaves to the ever-shifting music. Reaching Esther, I gently tried to pull her away from her newfound paramour, but she batted my hand aside.
Leaving the club, I ascended cold concrete steps, feeling more sober than I’d ever been, as if sobriety itself was a new kind of high. Reaching the top of the stairs, I realized that the door had changed.
What had once been grate was now stretched epidermis, human skin bearing an assortment of tribal tattoos and pockmarks. The knob was an infant’s skull, which pulsed under my hand as I twisted. Pushing the door open, I emerged.
The slaughterhouse was gone, as were its patrons. The door disappeared the instant that it slammed shut, blending into the hard-packed dirt. I found myself within a large circus tent. The canvas was yellow, marred with ugly brown splotches. Surrounding me were a number of individuals, all wearing white grease paint, red lipstick and bright neon wigs. Overalls and plastic shoes were their chosen attire.
Some juggled, others pranced maniacally before empty stands, but most were gathered around a fire pit, ravenously devouring their supper. There were children, adults and senior citizens present, all colorfully attired, enjoying their repast. Moving closer, I saw that they’d roasted a small child on a spit. Much of the meat had been carved from his body, but his charcoal face still stared accusingly.
A hefty clown with a bright blue soul patch drifted over, and pushed a piece of roast prepubescent into my hands. Noticing the stranger in their midst, his compatriots surrounded me. Obviously, these deviant jesters were testing me, and I shuddered to speculate upon the consequences of failure.
Reluctantly, I placed the meat into my mouth and began chewing. Thus began my six-month stretch as a memb
er of The Circus of Cannibal Clowns.
4
A Man to Lead Them
I am in Dining Lodge now, seated at a long oak table alongside much of our family. Only the sisters and the occupants of Lodge Cherubic are absent, having received their meals in advance.
The table fills the entire structure, which consists of a single room adorned with one massive chandelier. It hangs over my head like a guillotine’s blade, both generating and reflecting light within the folds of its many facets.
Wooden bowls filled with food sit within arm’s reach. There are fresh-cooked biscuits, steaks, ears of corn and lamb chops, along with a vast variety of salads. Yet no one eats, or even glances at the food for more than a moment. Our leader has yet to arrive.
Tension builds; conversation slowly evaporates. All eyes turn to the paneled door, so that when our leader finally arrives, a great exhalation passes from our lungs. He seems to glide rather than walk, a seven-foot-tall behemoth wearing only a knit wool tunic. Prognostrum is the name of the man before us, smiling through a face like a stone slab. He grips a short red leash, which trails to the collar of his pet hog-nosed skunk.
The skunk is trained to recognize each of our community’s residents, and will quickly drench an interloper with its noxious spray. On my first day at the commune, I myself caught a blast.
Freed from its leash, the skunk climbs from a chair to the tabletop. It begins digging into the nearest salad, searching for insects with its long heavy claws, but we pretend not to notice. We know how Prognostrum feels about his pet.
Prognostrum begins speaking, his booming voice impossible to ignore. “We are gathered here to celebrate love. Love brought us this bounty. Love binds us together in the face of infinite uncertain futures. With love I sit amongst you, if only to see my love reflected in your many faces.”
Onyx Neon Shorts Presents: Horror Collection - 2015 Page 11
