His swollen penis and testicles were studded with succulent purple buds, like malignant kernels on an ear of corn from Love Canal.
He ripped the medicine chest off the wall in his haste to get the tweezers. When he pinched one, there was no sensation, but the rubbery skin refused to tear. When he tried to pull one out by the root, it popped and squirted acrid, unripe pheromones in his eyes. He reeled, clawing at his eyes as if he’d been Maced.
He saw the black room in murky shades of red, a dying solar system, and a collapsing sun in the shrine. He shielded his eyes and rushed at it, brought his fists down between its pendulous breasts and felt something give way beneath. At first, his blows rebounded like a child’s fist against a punch balloon, but he made headway with one of the dumbbells under the bench. It was like a pumpkin; beneath the pliant womanflesh rind, the Venus was a sac of membranes, bloated, fibrous organs and reservoirs of fluid, some his, some Hers. He smashed and smashed until his arm became tired and he noticed the stacatto pounding from the ground floor tenant.
“Call a cop!” Friendly screamed, and smashed on.
The next morning, Friendly called in sick and prowled the strip joint advertised on the rubber boner on the driver’s keychain. Knowing his name and rap sheet shed no light on the trail of the Venus, so he forgot it. He broke out the footlocker and unwrapped a Colt Desert Eagle and a .22 short-barrel automatic. He loaded each and shrugged into a shoulder holster for the Colt, an ankle holster for the .22.
Casing the parking lot from across the highway, Friendly recognized no one. He massaged rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide into his crotch until he was sitting in a quagmire of eye-watering antiseptic. He got on the highway and turned around, scoping for cops as he pulled into the lot.
Dancers wobbling around the foyer on cocaine fumes, tiredly offering private shows. Feminazi students blandly took notes. A naked woman sat on a director’s chair at the end of the runway, reading something with Oprah on the cover. Sad, sagging silicon ballast reminded him of the perfect curves he’d crushed, and he choked back a raw sob of longing.
Friendly paced the room, hoping to scare someone into flight. No one budged. He tossed the men’s room. Three sailors sharing a tiny bindle of crank dropped their works in the toilet and bailed.
He smelled the Venus. He touched his bobbing dowsing rod, still icy from its antiseptic bath. While the chemicals did nothing to stop the buds, they stifled the smell, so he practically saw the cloying contrail wafting out of the fourth bathroom stall.
He kicked the door in. It rebounded off the occupant’s kneecaps, and Friendly kicked it again. The screaming from within had barely gone into its overture when Friendly’s eager hands flipped the new cripple over and dunked his head into the toilet.
“I’m going to ask questions, and then you can breathe. Cool?”
Glubs of desperate willingness to please filled the bowl, or maybe he was just trying to blow the turds away from his mouth.
“I’m going to trust you not to scream.” He lifted the man’s head out of the bowl, cradling him in the prelude to a sleeper hold. His intake of breath was almost enough of a scream to merit another dunk, but it trailed off in whimpers.
Friendly said, “Tell me why you smell like you’ve been fucking my girl.”
“I didn’t know she was yours, man. Blow job for blow, bitch tried to cut me—”
“You know what I mean. I’m talking about Her,” driving the capital home with a quick dunk in the bowl. “Where did you meet Her? Where did you fuck Her?”
“Bullshit! I don’t know who the fuck you think I am—”
“Don’t shit me! I can smell her on you!” Friendly shoved his head in the bowl and flushed. A cyclone of sewage engulfed the toilet dweller’s impassioned cries for salvation or death. Friendly brought him up, a fist still knotted in his thin hair. “The House of the Venus,” he gurgled, punctuating his capitals by vomiting in the bowl. “Everybody knows where it is. Off the 17, ten miles out from Front Street.”
“Address.”
“No numbers out there. Just trees, and trees and trees and the House of the Venus. Three stories, no paint, bunch of fucked-up old cars and trucks and shit all around it. What, you want a map?”
Friendly rapped the man’s head on the rim and seated him on the bowl. As he turned to leave, he caught a glance, out of the corner of his eye, purely by accident, at the man’s dick. It was a priapic purple nightstick to shame his own, twenty inches and ribbed for Her pleasure with purple buds the size of macadamia nuts. Friendly saw himself dousing the diseased member with lighter fluid, but how could he do to another what he wasn’t man enough to do to himself?
««—»»
Friendly never had cause to wander the indifferently maintained roads that wound through the Santa Cruz backwaters; sheriff’s deputies had that detail, and he didn’t envy them one bit.
If the northbound PCH out of Santa Cruz was a tunnel by night, Highway 17 was a leap over a Berlin Wall of wilderness, a ribbon clinging to a mad jumble of rampaging ridges and valleys that time tried to forget. Forty miles of alpine hairpin tarmac christened “Blood Alley” by those damned to commute on it, the 17 claimed almost daily accidents, over half of which were fatal. Exits lurked behind glowering stands of pines, leading to hermitages for freaks who made the weirdest citizens of Santa Cruz look like Mormon missionaries.
He watched his trip odometer climb to ten, killed his headlights and slammed on his brakes to veer down an unpaved tunnel through the trees, a glory hole into the black guts of the forest. His truck shimmied and bucked on the loamy soil of the road, Friendly bolt upright and peering through the windshield, navigating by stray streams of teasing moonlight. Too narrow to be an exit, this was probably a private driveway, though there was no sign of the obligatory wrought-iron gates and TRESPASSERS EATEN HERE signs. He fought the road to a level stretch that broke out of the trees into a meadow strewn with a menagerie of rusted-out car-carrion. Across the vast expanse of junkyard and hip-high weeds, Friendly made out the derelict hulk of a school bus up on a scaffold like a Sioux warrior decked out for burial, its Day-Glo war paint proclaiming “House Of The Venus–All Suitors Welcome.”
Friendly drove up to the porch, climbed out. The windows were boarded up and covered with graffiti depictions of coitus in all its forms, animal, vegetable and spiritual. The door was reinforced with steel bands and had no doorknob. A view slit rattled open and bubbled over with suspicious eyes. Friendly smiled engagingly and sidled close enough to draw his revolver.
“What do you know?”
“I’ve got purple shit growing out of my dick.”
The door opened a crack and Friendly shouldered in and rapped the doorkeeper across the bridge of his nose with the massive muzzle of the Colt, scanned the room for potential threats.
The atrium opened directly on a great hall, the walls a shadowy smear of tapestries and incense clouds. Pallets and beanbags scattered over a crazy quilt of Indian rugs, bums and thugs spilled all over them, heads numbly turning like buds to the bright sobbing of the doorman holding his nose together.
A circle of huddled heads in the center of the room, each clutching a tube to the colossal hookah before them, inhaling and puffing out in unison like monks sucking the poison out of the world’s wounds. One of them stood and came around to the door. Dressed head-to-toe in clashing tie-dye patterns, his Santa Marx beard twinkling with tiny bells like twittering thornbirds. One of his eyes twinkled merrily as Friendly’s game face melted, staring fixedly at the hippie’s other eye, which was gone. Out of the socket sprouted a toadstool with iridescent orange gills, like a poisonous frog penis.
“Welcome to the House of the Venus.” His nose twitched and his smile went queer, bemused but ever playful. “You smell funny, friend. I smell cop, but I also smell our best kind of friend. What’s your pleasure?”
“I want some answers, shithead.”
“Hey, wow, you’re that cop, who wasted Rafe Heenan.”
> “That piss you off?”
“On the contrary, dude, if it wasn’t all in the line of duty, I’d owe you one.”
“He got the… Venus… from you?”
“He stole it out of my cellar. He was gonna die, one way or the other. Nobody steals one of my love goddesses.”
“There’s more than one?”
Bells tinkled in his beard. “Shit, dude, I grow ‘em.”
The dealer led Friendly down into the basement, a black abyss of hothouse damp, chittering animal panic and miasmal stench. The air was syrupy with Venus musk, and Friendly bit back thunderous nausea, which redoubled at the realization that he was sporting wood like never before.
Once a wine cellar, the cavernous basement opened on groined vaults that were in turn divided into stalls with curtains of black crushed velvet. From behind them Friendly heard men moaning, gasping, growling, begging. Voices called, “Bitch!” voices cried, “Mommy.”
“See, fuzz, my church welcomes all forms of worship. And when you think about it, everything we do is an act of worship or an act of rebellion against Her, isn’t it? Watch your step, fuzz. Big pits of batshit.”
The dealer stepped over a trench filled to the rim with tarry black bat guano. The trenches marched off into the inky darkness at the far end of the cellar. The festering excreta was pocked with clusters of flesh-colored bulbs, like a fat farm for headless Barbies. Real live Cabbage Patch Dolls, Friendly thought. Beneath the wrenching sounds of men and beasts, he could hear them growing.
A towering wrought-iron cage took up one end of the room. Bats squealed and hurled themselves at the bars. “Get it by the ton from a guy in Mexico, but it pays to have a source of fresh.”
“Tell me what they are.”
“It’s a fungus, but in function, it’s a lot like Sarracenia. You know, pitcher plants? No?
“Well, anyway, they secrete sweet juices to attract flies and bees, and they trap them in a sticky honey pot. Digest ‘em. The Venus is special, though. It attracts an animal host and feeds off it, while implanting its spores on the host’s dingus. Then he moves along, fucks another one, and the cycle begins anew.”
“Why do they look like chicks?”
The dealer’s bells jingled. “Natural selection, fuzz. Cavemen took a shine to the shapelier ones, started cultivating them to look the way they do. Or maybe they just knew what we liked. Kind of a chicken-or-egg question, really.
“This strain came from the Amazon. Psychopharmacologist friend of mine dug it up. But I think they were everywhere, a long time ago. You ever seen the Venus of Willendorf, or any Stone Age fertility fetishes? If you did, you’d recognize the Venus. To the ancients, I think it must have been the purest form of sexual congress–a holy communion with the Mother Goddess without the messy strings of human procreation. It probably survived as late as the cult of Astarte in Mesopotamia. Her priestesses were the first prostitutes, you know that? They had to take over after the matriarchy exterminated the Venus. They were jealous because men would rather fuck a fungus than them. These here are the fruits of original sin. Now let’s see what we can do about getting those spores off your dick.”
Friendly couldn’t let it go a moment longer. Pointing at the dealer’s infested eye socket, he said, “You know… you have something growing out of your eye.”
The dealer chuckled and touched the shaft of the toadstool gently, guarding it. “Shit, dude, if I can get viable spores from this puppy, I’ll buy a new eye.”
He led Friendly back to the furthest vault from the door, and raised his hand to part the mouth of a curtain. Friendly couldn’t see more than a few inches beyond it. He raised his gun to the dealer’s face. “Don’t fuck with me.”
“Nobody’s fucking with you, fuzz – not yet. The only way of getting the smut off, short of a blowtorch, is pollinating another plant.”
“No way. I’m never going near one of those things again.”
“Have it your way, man. Those things may just drop off in about ten years. Funny thing about the Venus is, they tend towards hermaphroditism. Big word, huh? Plain English, they may already be fertilized spores, and they could sprout. They like bat shit best, but they can grow just as well out of human flesh, when push comes to shove. I know you don’t want that, and I want my spores back. So why don’t you just be a man and go in and satisfy Astarte, back there.”
Friendly imagined the purple buboes sprouting out of his cock and balls, singing their virulent hormone mating call to turn him into their zombie slave, turning his crotch into a raging fungoid brothel. “Okay. What do I have to do?”
“Just go in there and introduce yourself, and let nature take its course.”
Friendly backed into the vault, his gun trained on the dealer. Then he heard something moving behind him and he turned. The dealer shut the curtains. “Don’t be freaked out by Astarte’s appearance. He’s, uh, kind of a mutant.”
“He?”
Friendly’s dark-adjusted eyes barely made out a column of mottled purple flesh rising five feet out of the batshit trench. Its gill-frilled stalk split in a vaginal mouth to display pouting red lips like a giant calla lily, or a giant baboon’s ass in estrus. The gleaming, honey-dripper lips parted provocatively as a tongue, white and eel-slick, slipped out and lapped up the cream of its own distilled overripe desire. Friendly backed away and raised the gun. “Don’t come any closer—”
A trumpeting fart split the lips of the fungus and ejaculated a shower of pheromonal syrup into Friendly’s face. There was no coy chemical invitation in Astarte’s message. It was an undiluted masculine command to render up his seed for fertilization, and though it made a WOMAN of him, it was not to be denied.
Waves of indomitable lust tenderized him, and he dropped his gun to tear off his pants. The prehensile tongue darted out of the mouth to circle enticingly above his head as he approached. Seeking its own spoor on him, it homed in on his engorged penis, now twice its normal size. More tongues shot out of the livid mouth and buffeted him, lifted him off the ground and into the waiting, hungry lips.
The tongues greedily scoured every last bud off his crotch, then bored into his asshole and his cock, down his throat and into his stomach to retrieve spores he’d ingested during his affair with the Venus. Penetrated and transfixed, Friendly retreated into a tiny bunker in the attic of his brain and sang to himself, rode out ferocious orgasms that multiplied to critical mass when he gagged on the fungoid tongue down his throat as it met another of its kind that had come in his asshole. He exploded fluids out of every orifice and felt them licked away by rasping tongues, MANIPULATED DOMINATED CONTROLLED.
He prayed to die until the male Venus spat him out.
He lay insensate for years at the foot of the torpid Venus, bleeding and heaving, gasping for breath enough to slip into a coma.
Then he heard gunshots.
Friendly clambered to his feet and staggered out into the strobing glare of flashlights.
“Freeze! Police!” A strident female voice pinned him down. Friendly tried to cover his nakedness and hold his hands up at the same time. He understood now the hesitant panic of the SUSPECT, that drove them to grope and make half-steps towards fleeing, even as they surrendered.
“Lie down on the ground! Put your hands straight out at your sides! Do it Now!”
“You don’t understand! I’m a victim! I mean–I’m a cop! I’m one of you!” Lying down in batshit, a boot on his back, hands laced in the small of his back and cuffed together.
“Really? Where’s your ID? In your pants?” Friendly was hoisted to his feet and steered towards the door. A line of cops, all butch bulldaggers, stood along the wall, up the stairs and on out the front door, waiting their turn to glare in righteous disgust. Friendly hung his head and tried to pin his shriveled cock between his legs, noticed that the buds were gone. His penis looked and felt as if cats had been licking it all night long, but he was free of its mark of sin.
In the Captain’s office, rubbing cuff-burns on
his wrists, studying his shoes. The Captain’s eyes flinty gray buttons robbing him of his last dignity. Her scrubbed, ruddy face pinched in distaste.
“I suppose I should say first that you are back on suspension. Your actions, once they’re finally sorted out, will be entered into your permanent record. We don’t like off-duty Dirty Harry’s in this person’s police force, do I make myself clear?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Now, I have to say that without your tip on the drug house, the raid we launched never would’ve been the success it was. We were unable before today to penetrate the ring, and you provided an invaluable source of information.” Her face pinched still more as the script she was reading from left its bitter taste in her mouth.
“It wasn’t a drug house,” Friendly managed.
“Not true. They were growing and distributing a controlled substance in the form of a psychoactive marital aid. We also found a number of other illicit substances, along with a cache of illegal firearms. They resisted our attempts to serve a search warrant, and we responded with force to insure your safe recovery.”
Her acting stank up the joint. If this was TV, Friendly would have turned it off. “How did you know I was in there?”
The Captain’s jaw worked. “You phoned us before you went in to the house.”
He wanted to scream at her to stop it. “How long were you having me followed?”
“You called us, Officer Friendly. No one followed you. Ever.” Tight lips pressing truth into the assertion. “We advised against your going in, which advisement you disregarded, hence your suspension. But your captivity led to a search warrant, which led to the raid. You – are to be commended. Well,” closing the file on the desk before her, “your ordeal has left you in need of rest, so why don’t you get yourself cleaned up and go home. You’ll be facing a board of review in about three weeks, but I wouldn’t worry.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
Mighty Unclean Page 3
