Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions

by John Everson

With that he brought the knife down at the base of the boy’s shriveled penis, and pushed down. And sawed. And with a spew of blood and other fluids, he yanked and flipped the loosed sac of skin away.

  “Aaaawwwwhh,” the boy screamed, coming to just as Bill finished his castration. Again the knife went down, this time through the boy’s open mouth to bang with a jarring crack against the rocky asphalt beneath them.

  The scream trailed off to a choke, and Bill finally gave in to the lure that had been growing with every touch of his hand on Terry’s flesh. He could feel the life pulsing slower in the dying teen, and knew that he had to have what was left for his own. Pushing the knife handle out of his way, Bill bit down hard into the soft, warm flesh of Terry’s neck. Again the rush of heat, the ecstasy of orgasm, taste, life. He sucked the boy’s last life, and when the flood lessened to a trickle, he began pounding the boy’s torso, squeezing out the last drops into his own bloated belly.

  After a time, it was done.

  Bill sat back from the body as the fever receded in his brain. His stomach hung heavy and his whole body seemed suddenly weary. He wanted to lie down here, next to the battered corpse, and rest.

  But no.

  He shook his head, tried to clear his mind. The bodies would draw flies. And police. And he wanted neither near him. Pulling the remaining barrette from his body, he tossed it on the body, heaved himself to his feet, and shuffled back the way he had come, reaching his hotel room in the early hours of morning. He felt an odd discomfort as he collapsed on the bed, and reached to scratch the sticky hole in his back. In moments he slipped into a coma-like sleep.

  Bill woke the following night with flies buzzing around his face. How had they gotten in this room? he wondered, lifting a hand to swat them away. The hand struck his face accidentally, and flopped back to the bed. He was getting stiff, he realized, and losing control of his muscles.

  “I’m dead,” he reminded himself aloud, but the words meant nothing. If he was dead, how could he be staring at the ceiling? How could he be swatting flies? How could he have killed two boys…

  He broke the thought but it came back anyway. He’d killed last night. Murdered! Lifting his hand again, he could see the dark stains of the boys’ blood. He had had his revenge.

  But if it had been heavenly at the moment of action, it didn’t taste sweet anymore. It didn’t taste at all. His mind cried with the enormity of his act. He had killed them both. Sucked the life from their bodies with his mouth. Whether they deserved it or not, their lives had not been his to take!

  But the memory of the blood – and its effect on him – made his body shiver. He realized with a twinge of fear that he only wanted one thing – to kill again.

  Rising slowly from the bed, he saw that he had stained the sheets with blood. It had pooled near his head and beneath his crotch. A thin smear of it seemed to cover the sheets, as if he’d sweated it out through every pore.

  The mirror said he had. The single bathroom bulb reflected off a purpling face and dusky reddish chest. His entire body seemed drenched in blood. Its sight didn’t leave him nauseous, as it would have but three days before. He did feel weak. And hungry. Or more accurately – thirsty.

  Stepping into the shower, he saw that his feet and calves had purpled. His penis lay half erect atop truly blue balls. Dead, he reminded himself. Three days dead. He must stink. As he rinsed the blood sweat from his bruised body, he gulped water from the shower head. It was an unconscious ritual, but as soon as he had, he knew it was a bad move. He could feel it slosh into his belly, gurgle through his intestines. And moments later, a pinkish stream dribbled from his dick. At the same time, a brown-black sludge began dripping from his backside. He could vaguely smell the foul stench of shit and rotting meat as his bowels released to the drain. This frightened him. What if these excretions continued? He would be forced to rot away in this room. He couldn’t go out leaking sewage as he walked!

  But the drainage soon stopped. Bill shut off the tap and dried himself. Then he dropped his clothes into the tub and began to scrub the bloodstains out. When at last he stopped wringing them, the stains were dulled. Though not completely obliterated, people would notice that he was wearing wet clothes before they’d see the stains on them. Luckily he’d been wearing jeans and a dark t-shirt on the night of his death. When wet, they hardly showed stains at all.

  The night was cool and quiet when Bill at last stepped onto the street from the dimly lit warrens of the cheap hotel. He should have been shivering in his wet clothes, but he wasn’t. He could feel the cold, but it didn’t affect him.

  He walked, at first without direction. Images of the dead boys appeared unbidden in his mind. He angrily replaced them with the memory of his violated daughter, open-eyed and still on the morgue table. If he’d been alive, the battling emotions of the two visions would have led to tears. But he only blinked dryly.

  He thought of the events that led to this: his own inaction, his wife’s dismissal. How could she cast him out after all they’d been through? How could he have let it get to the point where she wanted him to go? He thought of the last time she had made love to him. As he’d settled into bed she had left one light on, and unbuttoned her blouse. Piece by piece, she’d dropped her clothing on the floor, not saying a word. He’d watched with growing interest, as the pink tips of her breasts grew taut and she stripped off her panties, as the kinky brown hair below her belly shifted, as she strode purposefully toward him across the room. Neither had spoken as she lowered herself upon him without foreplay. She had taken him hard, moved atop him brutally, and removed herself slowly when he had at last released a telltale groan.

  And now she no longer wanted him in her house, let alone her bed.

  He was angered, excited, lustful, thirsty. And he realized that he stood outside of his home. The lights were off; she was probably already asleep. Was she glad he did not snore beside her? Or had she regretted her words after the first night alone?

  Quietly he eased open the screen door and tried his key. It still worked. The house was still, heavy. He moved through it slowly, not needing a light. How many times had he walked these halls, oblivious to life’s fatal chasms yawning all around? Somehow, in the past few months, he’d fallen into all of them. His daughter murdered, his marriage in ruins, his life taken, and he himself had turned killer. As he passed the living room, he saw the dark square of the family portrait on the piano. Those people don’t exist anymore, he thought, and stepped past.

  Cheryl was asleep. He stood at the foot of the bed watching her chest move, hearing the soft hiss of her breathing. He touched his own chest, and felt the stillness there. He moved closer, could see the soft chestnut hair trailing across her cheek, could see the white of her teeth, as they touched, just barely, the warm blush of her lip. Could smell the heat of her blood pumping steadily through every artery, sending a reek of heady life through her pores. This, he could sense. With a trembling hand he touched her hair; she stirred.

  The fire in his heart was growing again, feeding his anger at losing this, at losing her. This time he felt his fangs protruding, felt his erection at the nearness of bloody orgasm.

  She turned on her back in her sleep, one nipple peeking seductively from the edge of the sheet. He leaned in to bite her, to steal her lifeblood. Yes. She should be even better to take than the boys. He would take her in lust and in love. As his teeth brushed her flesh, she murmured, “Bill?” in her sleep. Her voice was slurred, but seemed surprised and…happy?

  No!

  From somewhere beyond the vampiric haze, Bill found the strength to throw his body to the floor beside the bed. He had killed the boys for revenge, and what pleasure did he have for it now? Guilt. They were rotten kids, but killing them had solved nothing. They had no chance to atone for their crime. And Lissa was still dead. He was still dead – in fact, probably rotting faster for their infusion.

  If he stole Cheryl’s life now… Could she perhaps still find happiness, without him, without Li
ssa? Could he steal the chance from her, for a selfish moment of necrotic passion?

  No! He rolled back and forth on the white carpet, inches from Cheryl, fighting back his instinct, struggling with his thirst. He could smell her, almost taste her. The nearness, the memories, the anticipation of her hot kisses, her hot blood! It was too much. His chest spasmed, his nose sucked air, just a breath. And from behind his drooping eyelids, a tear fell to stain the carpet red. In the morning, Cheryl would see it and wonder.

  He took some fresh clothes from his closet, lingered a moment at her bed. “Goodbye,” he whispered. “Be happy again.” He went quickly then, to the only place he could think of to go. The alley by Ale’s Head Tavern.

  “Lawrence?” he called into the dark narrow street. “Lawrence, are you here?”

  There was no answer. Bill leaned against the brick back of an old store, slowly slid to the ground. Even the companionship of his killer was denied. He thought of the power of the blood lust, felt it still, and forgave the bum for killing him. If it had been anyone but Cheryl, if he’d had an ounce less control, he would have killed tonight. He still might. But not her.

  There was a shift, something sliding. The hollow metallic ring of the dumpster. From the shadow of the ancient alley, a lurching shape appeared. Even Bill’s dead senses could smell the stench. The bloated man sunk to the street beside him. Bill could see the black and green slime that was once a face shivering, rippling. The figure reached a skeletal finger to its head, pried open its mouth. As the hand dropped, it scraped the shivering ooze of its cheek, releasing a stream of white, wriggling maggots. Bill cringed.

  “Pretty, heh?” the bum gargled, almost unintelligibly. “Not long, not long now. Had your revenge?”

  “Yeah,” Bill whispered. “And yes, the price is too high.”

  “Going to…” Lawrence choked, spat a stringy stream to the ground. “Going to give someone else the chance?”

  “No,” Bill replied firmly.

  They sat silent for awhile, occasionally kicking at rats which tried to steal the meat of their decaying, yet still animated flesh.

  “Tell me,” Bill said suddenly. “How did you… get taken? How many did you kill?”

  Lawrence’s sagging, rippling face turned toward Bill. One eye glinted whitely in the streetlight. The other socket appeared empty. “Tell me first; will you drink again?”

  “How can I not?”

  Lawrence’s head shook stiffly, sadly.

  “The more you take, the faster you’ll go.”

  The echo of an Ale’s Head Tavern barkeep bellowing “last call” lingered over the alley as two rotting vampires quietly fought their thirsts and began to share the night with stories of when they were alive.

  The taste was as bittersweet as blood.

  In the ever-more-dangerous obsession with kink and extreme sensation, the most important aspect of human sexuality – the piece that can give the resulting orgasms a deeper resonance – is often lost. When emotion enters the equation however, the most perverse action can become a transcendent sacrifice.

  The Mouth

  Thrust.

  Pull back.

  Buck, fist, pound.

  Thrust.

  Pull back.

  he heart speeds up, briefly, adrenaline pumping in crazed waves. The mouth opens and shuts, gasps for air. Moans fill the air like rain, musk melds with the stench of sweat. And then it’s over, and the attack diminishes, the cries taper, the galloping heart slows.

  The defining evidence that separates sex and murder is really only the amount of blood left behind on the bed. The amount of heartache afterward separates lust from love.

  I’ve been a slave to these passions for so long, the gaping mouths and gasping wounds have all blurred together in my head. There are memories of thrusting – hands, knives, cock – inside the mouths, mammaries and musk of blondes and brunettes, fat girls and thin, ugly trash and haute delicate-skinned models. In the end they’re all sloppily the same and yet beautifully different. The tenor of their cries, the strange tics and angular movements that separate one girl from the next are delicious to watch, to feel. Some bleed heavy and thrash like mad. Others go wide-eyed in shock and disbelief. But in the end, sex or murder, fat or thin, it all comes down to moans and thrusting, hard nipples and harder cocks.

  And the challenge of distancing yourself after. Both in heart and body. I’ve never had much of a problem managing either, and I didn’t expect to today.

  Kyla, a D.C. hooker who’s played with me in my sex-death revolving roulette often over the years, told me the story that set me packing instantly. She knew I’d never resist the temptation. Her acne-pocked cheeks crinkled in a lopsided grin as she measured my interest and excitement.

  “They call her ‘The Mouth,’” she whispered, and then ran a thin tongue tip across her lower lip. She knew I could rarely tear my eyes (or cock) away from an eager oral slave. That’s why so often I had her videotape our little explorations with our chosen slaves. Or, as the case may be, victims. Later I could pick up the other details missed during my initial fixation. And rerun them, again and again.

  “She’s all fucked up,” Kyla explained, leaning in to nip my ear. A light chocolate breast slid out of the silk entrapment of her slip, and my hand didn’t hold back from trapping its eager nipple. She hissed and pulled away as I squeezed hard.

  “Tell me,” I demanded.

  Her fist pounded at my shoulder, but I didn’t ease my grip. Kyla would try to make me fuck her for the information, but I wasn’t trading.

  “Later,” she moaned, nails now in action across my chest and back.

  “Now.”

  And so, a few hours and a diseased fuck from Kyla later (sometimes I’m generous), and I’m in backwoods Virginia. “The Mouth” is apparently an Appalachian throwaway. A backwoods freak. Genetic disaster.

  And the thought of it has me harder than nails. Kyla has her ways and her contacts and she owes me more than I owe her. Her fascination with dismemberment in the midst of orgies has been a logistical nightmare for me on many an occasion. And there’s something highly unarousing about hosing the splatter of another man’s sperm and bile off the dead girl beneath you so that you can finish your own fuck.

  I hate it when Kyla cums before me.

  The houses had thinned to one per mile, and for most, the only evidence that there was a dwelling behind the tangle of lush forest and vine was the rutted track that broke the barrier of heavy hedge along the gravel road. I couldn’t go above 30 mph without fearing a hernia. This was not well-traveled country.

  But every time I felt lost, I’d spot one of Kyla’s landmarks passing by. A rusting John Deere overturned in a ditch. A wooden sign declaring “Keep Out. Property of O’Clannahan. Trespassers Shot First, Questioned Later.”

  I stuck to the road, such as it was, and watched for the only clue I had remaining on my list of landmarks. An outhouse.

  Why anyone would put an outhouse at the edge of the road out here was beyond my guessing, and why anyone would be brave enough to step inside such a structure in the midst of snake and spider and hornet country was a better question. An outhouse on an unused road would likely harbor more critters than shit, and I wouldn’t dare consider contributing to the latter given the threat of the former. Then again, many of the property warning signs might leave one a bit shy of pissing on a local bush. You might end up without privates.

  The outhouse jolted out of the brambles like a bell tower, and the car jerked and slid as I slammed on the brakes. A lurch, a shuddering slide, and I was skating down the rocky hillside drive that the outhouse had marked. A canopy of fern and leaf left me with the impression of driving through a poorly lit tunnel. Just as my eyes accustomed to the shade however, the forest roof broke to a clearing and in the white shine of a sweaty noon, I caught my first glimpse of The Mouth’s house.

  Correction: shack.

  It looked to be four or five rooms, a rotting testament to lazy carpentry. A
series of mismatched gray planks jutted from the roof eaves and only a door cut through the warped boards of the front wall. I could see one window on the side of the structure, a four-paned bit of relief that threatened to disappear inside a nest of leaves. The hum of bees filled the air and as I stared at the decaying structure I saw why. A stream of fat, slow flying insects traded flight paths from the nearby woods to a dark fissure in the roof above the window. Precisely why I avoided outhouses in the woods, I thought.

  Shrugging to myself, I trampled through the knee-high scrub grass and tentatively knocked on the peeling white paint of the front door. Could anybody really still be living here?

  From inside I heard the squeak of old floorboards and the murmur of voices. And then the door opened a crack. No more than four inches. I could see the glint of a dark eye and the spray of gray curls.

  “Yeh?” came a suspicious, guttural question.

  “Kyla said you’d expect me.”

  The door opened wider and a wrinkled short woman inspected me, hands on hips, not moving aside to let me pass ‘til her consideration was finished.

  “You been fixed?”

  “Not broken,” I said.

  She shook a heavy head.

  “Fixed. You had a va-sex-tommy?” Her accent was heavy with the hills, and I stifled a smile.

  Once her meaning sank in, I shook my head. “No.”

  “Then no oral for you.”

  I looked at her and thought that I didn’t want oral, anal or anything else from her. She was a potato sack of a woman, and long beyond childbearing years. I started to back away but she grabbed my arm and dragged me inside the dark house.

  “She likes the oral, but no fixed, no oral. Deal?”

  I said okay and she slapped my face, lightly.