by John Everson
No matter how you cut it...
I edged back as the boy pushed down his trunks. He was going to have a go, too?
Given the stretching I'd given her, I severely doubted whether the kid was going to feel much grip on his drill. Though, of course, he was willing to try.
It didn't take him long. Fast hips, boys have.
Then junior was asking me to help him rebury her.
We scooped in silence, and when the mound was complete, he grinned at me once more.
"Star. Much fun!"
He nodded politely at me, then, and I think I bowed. Then we separated, him slipping through the dunes to climb his way back to the road, me heading back towards the line of the tide. I had a half-mile or more to go, and the sun was already just a red glow on the horizon. I would follow the waves back to my hotel.
* * *
The next afternoon, I considered my attack. I didn't want the boy to beat me to the mound. Nor did I want him to join me. There are some things a man likes to do without an audience. At least, I do. I figured, the night before, I'd probably walked past the boy playing on the beach and he'd seen and followed me. This time around, I wanted no spectators.
Instead of following the surf, I walked down Ocean View until I reached the crab shack. Only then did I venture out onto the sand. I knew the buildings where she lay were right there, at the end of the island. I didn't expect to have any problem locating them, even though I came at them from another angle.
And, as it turned out, I was right. As soon as I got near the surf at the south end of the island and began following its line north, I spotted the buildings. Hell, I spotted our footprints from the night before. Apparently, the boy and I were the only ones who knew of the girl beneath the sand.
Well, this time, she was mine.
I hurried up the beach (as fast as one can hurry when scuffing through powder-thin sand) and found the mound we'd built the night before. I thought briefly of my wife and kids back home.
Briefly.
Then I began to uncover her.
There are some things in life you simply have to go for. And this was one of them. An average guy like me will never have a South Beach girl. Shit, we're barely able to even look at one, let alone score. And right now, I had my own babe of the beach laying right there, willing and open for my lovin'.
Okay, so she was dead.
She was still perfect.
Dead.
The thought did register. Don't think it didn't. I'm not that kind of freak or perv. But... she'd felt like a live woman. And she hadn't smelled. And... damn, but her boobs were everything I'd ever wanted. I knew if she'd opened her eyes, she would have laughed out loud at what was "taking" her. But, as long as her eyes were closed... my dreams were made flesh. Her flesh.
I dug fast.
I wanted her again.
Once more.
I had to leave in the morning. I'd jet back to my sweet, if sometimes nagging, wife, and my lovable, yet loathable kids. I'd find my shag carpet still musty, and my aging German Shepherd still uncontrollable.
They loved me, the lot of them. And I loved them. But there are some dreams a man should get to live, once or twice in his life.
This was one of them.
Dead.
Minor detail.
That made her willing, right?
I laughed, a little nervously, and scooped sand faster. My suit already displayed a painful tent of anticipation, and I wanted to set the main pole free.
The waves crashed nearby, a lulling, relaxing sound. From far away, I could hear voices, cajoling and laughing shouts. The revelry of early drunken fun.
My fun was here.
And my time was now.
I pushed away a length of sand with my entire arm, and found the lower length of her leg.
The bone lifted with the force of my scoop.
The bone and a putrid soup of blackened, reeking flesh.
I gasped and fell back, staring at the white long bone, replete with gooey strings of tendons still clinging to it like wisps of gum. There it lay unearthed atop the white sand, and from the hollow I'd lifted it from flowed a dark, stinking mess of liquid flesh.
The stench was ungodly. Puke mixed with rotten hamburger. Fresh sewage blended with old fish. I rolled away from the smell and felt my lunch struggling to escape. When I dared to peek back at the pit I'd dug, I saw dozens of black leeches climbing the lip of the pit to escape towards the surf.
Yesterday, I'd fucked her like a virgin, today she was a flowing mass of rot.
Was I at the wrong tomb?
I looked around and saw the mounds of what could have been a dozen other burials. Scattered around between the abandoned buildings were other mounds, but there was only one trail of human evidence. The footprints of one pair of small feet and one large led from the beach and ended at this coffin of sand. The trail of the boy and me.
Was this some sick joke? Had he buried a woman here before bringing me to the spot and later replaced the body with... no. That was even more ridiculous than fucking a perfect (dead) woman lying beneath the beach.
I thought of his insistence over the placement of the shell and realized that today, I hadn't set it at the head of the mound.
Reaching into my pocket, I found it still there.
Was it really the "key" that allowed one to unlock the hidden beauty within the sand? If so, had I "killed" her?
Was I losing my mind?
I moved to the head of the mound and held the shell in my hand. If it had worked before, would it again? The sea breeze was spreading the stench of the rot I'd uncovered and I coughed, hard. I forced a swallow to keep from adding my own spew to the smell in the sand, and without another thought pressed the shell to the ground.
The sand shook beneath my hand.
Something pushed upwards under me and I fell backwards. From far away I heard a keening, a hellish wail like sharp nails dragged across a slate and the throat of a pig at the same time. From the pit I'd dug, a spray of black ichor erupted, and the sand we'd so carefully piled yesterday began to shift and sift away from the center of the mound.
The sound grew louder, and then with a puff of expelled sand, exploded from a muffled wail to a clear siren at my face. She was alive again, but she wasn't remotely human. Her tentacles drew from beneath the sand like wriggling, slapping snakes.
I rolled away from the mound as the first grey octopus-like tentacle lifted from where I'd expected her gorgeously tan arm to be, and slapped against the sliding sand. Then another snaked to the surface, then three more, and five.
She screamed and screamed from five purpled beaks set below dozens of spider-black eyes as she came to ground, and I could see the reason. Below her enraged mouths was a blackened, shriveled stump, and from it, in sync with her screams, pumped the stinking black blood, staining the sand.
Tears came to my eyes as I watched her writhe in pain, jabbering and screeching from all of her mouths and using several of her arms to try to stem the flow of her blood. As she fully emerged from the pit, I saw that her skin was a delicate grey sheath that looked as if it would barely be able to hold in the long coils of intestinal tubes and shuddering organs within. But as she tumbled across the sand in horrible, audible agony, the vellum-thin skin cracked and blistered quickly in the Miami sun, and her elastic arms brushed and beat at her segmented body. One of her suckerpod fingers split off as she slapped the top of her bulbous head and in seconds another stream of runny tar stained the sand from the broken appendage.
I had injured her by not using the shell. Now I had sealed her death by forcing her to ground half-formed. She was burning away.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. "God, I'm so sorry."
She screamed again, an elephantine bellow, stepped up in pitch, and swiveled towards me as I spoke. She bled from all her arms now, and the skin on her head seemed to be sinking inward. But still she moved towards my voice, dragging her disintegrating body at me with unfriendly intent.
/> I rolled as a tentacle slapped the sand where I'd been seconds before. It broke off and lay there on the ground, a bubbling, fishy mass of grey and black. I didn't stick around to watch, but rolled out of the way of another grasping suckerpod and then half-ran, half-crawled out of her reach.
Her cries had been deafening, but as I turned back from what seemed a safe distance, I realized they were lessening. She no longer moved forward, and not all of her beaks were opening to cry. Only three of her arms were raising and falling, trying to drag her bulk forward. Then only two. As I began to move back towards her, the last arm fell to the sand, and one mouth feebly keened, a thin, heart-wrenching wail.
I knelt nearby, and staring into several of her lidless, black marble eyes, I apologized again.
"I never meant to hurt you," I said.
She cried.
As did I. She was burning away in the sun, and sorry or not, it was my fault. I had betrayed her, betrayed my wife with her...
"I'm sorry."
It wasn't enough.
"STARRRR!"
I heard the cry behind me and knew its owner.
The boy grabbed my shoulder and shook me.
"Star? Must use Star! No, no no!"
He was crying now, and threw himself down in front of the creature.
She seemed to respond to him, her teakettle cry settling to a quieter hiss.
The boy reached out and touched one of her beaks, and then turned to shoot me a black stare.
"All gone," he said, and pointed at the other mounds. "No more much fun."
The creature went quiet as he stroked its mouth, and settled further into the earth.
He stood up and walked over to the demolished mound that she'd exploded out of. In a second, he'd found the shell and shook it at me.
"No more star. No more change. No more."
He shoved it in my face and then stuffed it back into his own pocket.
The creature was now little more than a black bubbling stain on the sand. I tried to put my hand on the boy's shoulder, but he shook me off.
"Go," he said, choking on his grief. "Find your own."
I backed away, thinking of the beauty beneath the sand, of the boy I'd shared her with. Of the boy I'd stolen her from.
Forever.
Thinking of how I'd found perfection, and then ruined it. Thinking of how I would feel if someone had done that to me. I stared at the pale band of skin on my left hand. The cruelest part was, I already had my own. I didn't need to find it.
I didn't know what she was, or how he'd found her or what the shell was. But as the boy dwindled to a brown speck in the distance, my feet began moving faster and faster. I had to get home. Before someone or something else got there and ruined it for me. I already had found my own.
I began to run. I hoped I wasn't too late.
To Earn His Love
What better way to spend Halloween night than to watch a witch in action?
I shivered as the cinnamon-sharp autumn wind cut through my denim jacket, but the thought of the coming night made me warm... and a little scared. Marshall had asked me to sneak in and watch before, and I had, thinking the whole while that it was a put-on, that my older buddy was ditching me in a draughty shack for kicks. But I'd gone along with it, hiding behind the wooden boxes for an hour, and, sure enough, she had shown up. She turned out to be Miss Carny from 4th Period English! What the heck is going on here? I'd wondered, but Marshall showed up right after and the two began their strange erotic magic without a word.
Marshall never called her Miss Carny. He just said "the witch." She'd called him to her a couple other times since that night, but Marshall hadn't invited me to watch again. Understandable, really. I don't think I could do what Marshall did with the witch while anyone else was watching. The time I watched, my heart had nearly stopped as I saw my teacher savagely strip her clothes and then buck and shriek beneath Marshall on the floor. As soon as he was spent, she pushed Marshall off of her. Then she reached between her legs with a flat hand and scooped a sticky mixture of their lovemaking out. She walked boldly naked across the shack, used a wooden spoon to scrape the goo from her hand, and mixed it into a mason jar with other, dark and fuzzy things. After a few minutes of concentration, she turned back to Marshall, still lying on the floor, and smiled.
"Se-magic," she whispered. "Your semen seed will draw his interest. You will bring him to me." She groaned as if in orgasm at her own words then, a deep, throaty sound that made me cringe.
Marshall thought "he" was a wizard, but I was sure it was the devil. Marshall thought their trysts were, in his words, "awesome," but when I watched them together, my heart shriveled up in my chest. It was evil.
But exciting.
So I was going back tonight. Marshall said she had promised him something special, the culmination of all their heaving magic. As his silent partner, he wanted me to see what the witch created. It would be easier for me to get out of the house this time - I'd just say I was trick-or-treating. Ma would say I'm too old for that, but she'd let me out anyway.
* * *
It was dusk when I set out across the graveyard and ducked into the foliage beyond. I hoped I could find the trail again. The wind had calmed, but the night felt colder than ever. Leaves rustled slightly overhead, and their fallen brethren crunched loudly beneath my feet. I'd started out early, not wanting to risk the witch getting there before me.
At last I found the trail, recognizable only because it stood out as a narrow lane in the woods without trees. Something had cut out the forest without stripping away the grass and weeds. I waded through the chest-high stand of brush, all the while moving farther away from the edge of town. And then, as the last deep red of the sunset slipped away from the sky, I was there. At the shack.
The witch's shack.
It was made all of wood; old wood bleached grey by the years and leaning slightly. A chimney slanted from one side, and branches and rotting leaves all but covered the roof. The glass of the windows was spider webbed and splintered from the sport of young explorers. I wondered if any of them had blundered into this decrepit cabin after dark. When the witch was there.
I pushed the squeaky door open and stepped inside. When my eyes had adjusted enough to tell my thudding heart that no one was there yet, I walked across the spongy, sagging floor and secreted myself behind a topsy turvy stack of wooden boxes, as I had the last time. It wasn't long before I was shivering, both from cold and, I think, fear. Why had I gone there? I knew it was wrong. Miss Carny was evil. The evidence was all around me. Bottles of magic-stuff lined a shelf on the far side of the one-room shack near the fireplace. The floor was scuffed, not only with wear, but with circles and triangles and strange symbols. Miss Carny was more than some child molester (though the molesting was mutually enjoyed). She was a witch. I'd seen it in her eyes over the past couple months in school. They seemed slanted, slightly. And a weird gleam seemed to focus from them on certain students when they were causing trouble. That look always silenced the room. I suspected it wasn't a natural thing.
The door slammed open and I jumped, almost giving myself away at the start. But the protest of the hinges safely masked any noise I made, and it swung closed again. She was there.
Tree branches were piled high in her arms, which she dumped into the fireplace across the room. Thank God! I praised silently at the promise of heat, and then bit my tongue at the inappropriateness of that calling. The witch, I thought, would be calling on a different deity tonight.
As she bent over the fire, nursing the kindling to hellish life, I squinted at my watch. It looked like another half hour or so until Marshall was supposed to arrive. I was starting to wonder if I could hold out that long. My butt was going to sleep on the cold floor, and the spider webs stretching from the boxes to the half-boarded up window over my head were giving me the creeps.
Soon the fire was crackling, throwing red and orange shadows at the walls behind me, if not any heat yet. The witch was busy. I watc
hed as she got down on her hands and knees, and darkened the symbols already carved there with a marker. It occurred to me that she didn't look like any witch I'd ever read about. Her face was young (for a teacher), and her eyes were... stunning. They flashed a piercing aqua blue that was, literally, spellbinding. I had had a crush on her last year, when I started at Pierson High. After I'd seen her naked with Marshall, I'd become afraid, but yet, still drawn by her. She wasn't much taller than me (maybe 5'6 or 7, I'd guess) and she still had a thin, high school girl figure. And her hair... God, it trailed in kinky black ringlets down her shoulders and back. In school, she wore it tied up and pony-tailed, but now, it hung from her shoulders to the floor, masking the characters she drew from my sight.
I couldn't believe that she didn't somehow sense my presence, so close to her, but she worked diligently a few feet away from me. I could see most of her through a crack of space between two of the boxes, and had to keep reminding myself to breathe as I stared at her. The heat was starting to seep into my corner of the room, and I relaxed a little, when she stood up and surveyed the floor.
Don't come here, I begged, but she walked over near the fireplace and opened a cabinet set on the floor. She gathered some things and went back to the largest circle in the floor. There was a pentagram inside it, and outside of it, squaring it off, were four smaller circles with strange geometrics inside each. Then I saw what it was she had gathered.
Knives!
With practiced ease, she threw one at the floor, and it stuck at a slight angle inside one of the smaller circles. She missed the second circle, but levered it out of the floor and threw again, this time hitting her mark. When she was finished, four gleaming silver daggers ringed the large circle. She grabbed a bag from near the door, and then knelt in the circle again. She took a tape measure from the bag and adjusted it to what looked like about two feet. Then she set a candle at the tip of the internal pentagram on the perimeter line of the center circle. Measuring an exact length each time, she proceeded to space out 20 or 30 other candles, all the color of burnt cherries. When she was finished, she clicked a lighter, lit a spare candle, and used it to light the others in the circle. Now the center of the cabin was bright, and the place was beginning to reek of the tangy wood smoke mixed with the flowery, musky fragrance of the candles.
