Burn, Beautiful Soul

by William J. Donahue

  He’s too busy dreaming of the acts he would command her to do to certain parts of him to notice them approach. A cloud of perfume fogs his mind.

  “Hey there, tall, dark and satanic,” says a thin brunette with a raspy voice. She weaves her hand into the slot between his arm and his side, and palms the indent at the small of his back where scales and fur comingle.

  A second dancer—a blonde, also thin, with smallish breasts obscured by the netting of a white brassiere—takes the other side, trapping him. The blonde smiles, showing crooked teeth and well-pocked cheeks marred by too much or too little of some essential thing, or perhaps just the horrors of age. She says in more than a whisper, “Want to get off? Fifty for both of us. Whatever you want, wherever you want it. Ten minutes or until you blow your top, whichever comes first.”

  A female hand fondles his fanny pack and creeps south. Panic overtakes him. He recoils, sloppily trying to undo himself from the pair. He stumbles backward and feels the ridges of his spine against the wall. They take a step closer.

  Television has taught him all about these kinds of places. Even so, the women’s aggression unsettles him.

  “I have no money,” he tells them and squeezes past.

  His hooves clamor against the sticky floor, and he nearly trips over an untended barstool. He plants himself in a leather chair away from the strobes’ glare and immediately has to reposition himself because of his tail. He pushes the fanny pack to the side and sinks into the cushion. “Assimilate,” the voice tells him, but he knows even his best efforts to blend in will bear no fruit. Still, he hopes for a moment to still his raging mind so he can figure out how to achieve his goal.

  “Hey, stranger.”

  The soft, confident voice both soothes and arouses. He looks to his left and sees her, the redhead from the stage, standing before him. Her breasts are conveniently at eye level, nipples poking through the diamond-shaped holes of a mesh tank top.

  “Saw you come in,” she says. “Want some company?”

  “You’re very talented,” he tells her. He nods toward the stage.

  “You have no idea. Mind if I sit?”

  He motions to the empty chair next to him, but she parts his legs with hers and drops her weight onto his left leg.

  “I’ve heard about you,” she says. “I mean, who hasn’t heard of you? But I mean I heard you were over in Beak. I didn’t believe it. Lucky me.”

  She reaches up and uses two fingers to trace the arc of his injured horn.

  “Are you here for anyone particular?” she asks. “Any thing particular?”

  “Just visiting.”

  “Will you remember me?”

  “I don’t see how I won’t,” he says.

  The erection in his lap pokes through the tuft of black fur. Her eyes widen.

  “We’ll just have to make sure you don’t forget anytime soon.” She circles her index finger over his cock. “Let’s say we go do something about that.”

  “I don’t have much money.”

  “Sure, honey. I’ll take what you can give me. I scratch your back and you scratch mine. Deal? Like I said, remember me when you see me next.”

  He wrinkles his forehead.

  “I’ve done things,” she says. “But I’m guessing you already knew that, sugar. I hope you’ll be kind when the time comes.”

  She slides off his leg and takes his hand, leading him by the talons.

  His eyes home in on the thong cleaving her dimpled ass cheeks, the flesh glowing red, blue and yellow beneath the strobes. She turns and beckons him toward her. As he bends down, she yells above the din, “My name’s Divinity.”

  They arrive at a red door guarded by a bald man with no waist, no neck—his body shaped more like a refrigerator than a man. Divinity leans into the bouncer, and the two have a conversation that goes on for longer than it seems it should. The bouncer raises his arms at one point, yelling, but Basil can’t decipher the words over the chorus of Poison’s “Nothin’ but a Good Time.” Finally, the bouncer steps aside, and he gives Basil a dirty look as he passes.

  The Kiss-N-Tell Room has eight cubicles, each one fronted by an opaque lace curtain. The curtain is pulled across in only three of the cubicles, but Basil can see into each of the occupied areas—a faceless woman either on top of or kneeling in front of a faceless man. Divinity leads him into the unused cubicle at the end of the row on the right and tells him to have a seat as she pulls the curtain across.

  “What was that all about?” Basil asks. “With the bald guy.”

  “Oh, that’s just Steve being Steve,” she says, prying off her mesh top. “He thinks he’s doing us a favor by being such a hardass all the time.”

  She wastes no time. She straddles him and places both palms on his naked pectorals, inhaling sharply through pursed lips to suggest she’s impressed. She then kneels in front of him and caresses his thighs, combing the fur with her fingernails, inches shy of where he wants her hands to be. She then turns her back to him and sits in his lap. She moves her hips in a clockwise motion, her ass cheeks massaging the head of his cock, now fully exposed.

  “Yeah, baby. Yeah, baby. Yeah, baby.”

  She reaches down and takes hold of his wrists, and slaps his claws onto her breasts, which he deftly cups. They’re softer than he would have imagined, softer than other breasts he has felt. Softer than Kamala’s.

  She continues to grind away, sliding side to side, up and down.

  Basil detects a change in her scent.

  She turns around to face him. One of her hands snakes down the curve of her belly and finds the top of her thong. She pulls it back to reveal the dark patch of fur lurking beneath, and then bunches this slimmest of garments to one side so flesh can meet flesh—hers against his.

  “See that?” she asks. “My pussy will make you do somersaults.”

  He merely grunts, the animal inside him finding its way out. His gaze moves to her breasts, targeting two precise spots—one on each breast—the slightly darker flesh of the areolae. His claws slide down to her hips and draw her closer. The moistening patch beneath her legs glides along the underside of his exposed prick.

  She throws her head back and gasps.

  “Enough,” the voice tells him. “Get inside of her.”

  His eyes zero in on the flesh of her exposed neck—a bone-white column begging to be choked or slit. Her outrageous smell, all her undulating parts and the smooth-as-wet-glass tactility of her pubis all work together to undo something within him. Sense abandons his better self, and the reptile within takes control.

  “Do it,” the voice growls. “Fuck this creature until it no longer moves.”

  He stands up, and she falls backward into the curtain. As she grabs hold of the fabric, the curtain tears away from the ceiling—rod and all. Her screams do not deter him. He grabs her and tosses her onto the loveseat. Despite her flailing and kicking, he turns her onto her stomach and tears off her thong. As he prepares to enter her, a thick wand of spittle drips from the space between his exposed fangs.

  Then comes the blow to his broad back. He turns to see Steve, the bald bouncer, holding the leg of a wooden chair. The rest of the chair lies scattered across the floor, demolished. Steve’s face beams with amazement. He seems stunned that the blow had no effect. After a second’s hesitation, he whacks Basil across the neck with the chair leg.

  The reptile turns back to Divinity.

  Steve drops the chair leg and swings wildly, fists pounding. One blow connects with Basil’s ear, stunning him. Basil grabs the man by the throat and tosses him into the wall—in fact, through the wall. He can smell blood.

  Twice he crouches: once toward Steve, intent on stopping the man’s heart; and once toward Divinity, eager to bend her over a chair and tar her insides with his seed. But he halts. Each time a quiet but convincing voice, unlike the one that encouraged him to fuck Destiny into oblivion, tells him to stop.

  “Retreat,” it says.

  His arms tremble, his conf
licted mind being pulled in opposite directions by two distinct governors. He clenches his fists and looks to the ceiling. His roar shakes the walls.

  He departs swiftly, hoof steps drowned out by the thump of the bass drum droning through the overhead speakers.

  * * *

  The music jags to an abrupt stop inside Cheeky’s Midnight Roadhouse, as bouncers, bartenders and a few topless dancers realize what has happened. Several rush to the dancer, Divinity, and the bouncer, Steve. None of their injuries seems to be emergent. Blood dribbles from Steve’s busted nose, oozes from the pin-sized holes in his neck. Divinity tests the rotation of her wrist, swears it’s not broken.

  A moment later, the music starts back up. “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake. A curvy silhouette slinks beneath the strobes. Dollar bills float to the stage like thrown paper airplanes.

  One figure stands as still as a statue.

  The ponytailed bartender with a handlebar mustache and a protuberant mole on his left cheek drops his jaw in disbelief. He utters the words Holy shit, and the act of moving his lips rouses the rest of him. The world looks different than it did five minutes earlier, when he walked into Cheeky’s nearly an hour late for the start of his shift, dreading another night of slinging beers to know-nothing rednecks.

  He forgets any worries over the pocket change he may have forfeited as a result of his lateness. He now knows he’ll have no trouble making up the difference—and right quick. He hurries to a small chalkboard behind the bar and drags his index finger north to south and north again until he IDs the correct number, conveniently listed beneath the word Bounty.

  His heart pumping wildly, the bartender fumbles for the receiver of a liquor-glazed phone in perilous proximity to the speed rack. He dials the ten digits and gulps as he listens to the rings tick off. When someone picks up the other end of the line, the bartender gives his name and location, followed by two more words.

  “Found him.”

  Chapter 22

  An Unfamiliar Hand

  Only a fool would abandon paradise for a pit. But this is exactly what I have done. Sometimes a man does not realize his folly until his mistakes have had their way with him. Now I know, for I have unwrapped the gift of regret.

  I want to scale the balustrade of Monument Bridge and step into the air, fall like a brick and shatter against the Thames. But what I want most of all, what I crave, is to hitch a ride on a wagon and roll back to Berwick. Upon my arrival, I would indulge in everything I quit: a warm bed of my own; the cool salt air blowing in from the sea and, when the winds go still, the stink of manure wafting in from the tilled fields; and, most of all, my bride’s warm body against mine as the first hint of sun colors the eastern sky.

  I cannot win. London has bested me.

  I wander, sullen and shaken, soggy from the dreadful mist that haunts this place, knowing full well my plan to track down Old Billy will be yet another folly—nothing more than tough talk from someone who cannot finish the task he set out to do. A cough rattles in my chest. My body craves warmth, comfort, something soft to fall into, even for a short time, to ease my mind of its burden.

  My feet know the way, even if the rest of me does not.

  I leave Monument Bridge and step into the borough of Southwark. Brick gives way to the softness of mud. Always this wretched mud. My feet sink with each step. As the mouths of side streets pass, I study the sad faces of others wrestling with regrets of their own. To end up in such a miserable place, how could they not rue their blunders? My nose wrinkles at the stench of emptied chamber pots. Boots soaked through, my feet swim in a shallow soup of urine and liquefied feces.

  My mood darkens further.

  I stand at the paint-peeled door, which looks different in the day’s fading light. A hand grasps the handle and pushes the door open, but I cannot imagine this hand is my own. Feet climb the stairs, but they cannot be my feet. Knuckles rap another door, three floors up, but they must be someone else’s knuckles, scabbed and bleeding.

  The door creaks open. Ruddy-cheeked Alice, the fifteen-year-old whore, stares back at me.

  Do I choke her or kiss her?

  “Well?” she says.

  My body sways. To a teenaged girl, a broken man like me must look a fright.

  Her eyes soften, and the corners of her mouth produce the slightest smile. She pulls her nightshirt over her head and lets it fall to the floor.

  “Come on in then,” she insists.

  The floorboards creak beneath my wet, mud-ruined boots as I step across the threshold. The door closes behind me.

  Chapter 23

  Some Kind of Idiot

  Basil jolts awake, his pulse racing. The fog of sleep lifts in an instant, his mind a sharpened blade.

  Something’s wrong.

  He closes his eyes to lend strength to his other senses, smelling, listening for the telltale din. A faint jingling, a cousin to the sound of running water, trickles in from the living room. He slips out of bed and moves with the shadow into the lightless living room. A silhouette darkens the space by the backdoor. He glides across the carpet, soundlessly, and flicks open the back door. He reaches into the darkness and grabs a fistful of collar, and hurls the intruder clear across the living room, into the far wall. The wall buckles.

  Basil flicks the switch on the near wall. Harsh yellow light floods the living room. A blond male—young, maybe eighteen or nineteen—tries to gain his bearings. He struggles to liberate his shoulders, still embedded in the buckled drywall.

  “Christ, Jesus!” the intruder yips.

  As Basil steps forward, the kid draws a small knife. Basil kicks it away.

  “You broke my hand!” the young man cries.

  “Whose fault is that?”

  The kid tries to back away, but he has nowhere to go, so he skitters sideways into the kitchen.

  Basil pulls a chair from the kitchen table. He turns the chair and straddles it so he can face his attacker.

  “What’s your name, son?” he asks.

  The kid hesitates and then stutters, “C-C-C-Carl.”

  “It’s almost three a.m., C-C-C-Carl. Why are you here?”

  “The Lord sent me.”

  “Come on, Carl. We both know that’s not true. So let’s try that again. Why are you here?”

  “Edna sent me.”

  “Edna sent you. Of course she did.”

  “She told me I had to volunteer, that it was my duty. I didn’t want to argue with her.”

  “Listen, Carl. First things first: I assume you’re here to try to kill me, but you’re woefully unprepared for the job. Nothing but a lousy pocketknife. A pocketknife, Carl. To assassinate a demigod. You should know that human weapons cannot kill me.” A lie. “On top of that, you’re out there on the patio trying to pick a lock, but I never lock my doors. Why would I? Please don’t take this the wrong way, but are you some kind of an idiot?”

  “No, sir.” It’s all Carl can manage.

  “How old are you, son?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “On a suicide mission at seventeen. She sends a seventeen-year-old armed with nothing but a pocketknife.”

  “I brought other stuff,” Carl says, seeming to want to impress.

  “Great! Let’s see it.”

  “It’s in the bag,” Carl says. “Out on your patio.”

  “Well, go get it. But Carl … be careful.”

  Carl gets up and sidles past Basil, trailing bits of drywall. He tiptoes onto the patio and retrieves an olive-colored canvas bag, which he drags across the floor and places at Basil’s hooves.

  “Tricks and treats,” Basil says. “Let’s do an inventory.”

  Basil rummages. He fishes out a dull machete, three butcher knives and a framing hammer, and then a pistol—an ancient Ruger Single-Six. A small and heavy object rolls around the bag’s bottom. Basil plucks the oblong shell and holds it up, studying the waffled pattern in the glow of the kitchen light.

  “A grenade,” he says. “A fucking grenad
e. Where did you come across this little bundle of joy?”

  “I don’t think it’s live. Everyone threw a bunch of stuff into the bag. They said I could take my pick.”

  “How democratic. What were you going to use?”

  “Pardon?”

  “To kill me. What were you planning to use to do the deed?”

  “The hammer, I guess. Maybe the pistol.”

  Basil rises from his chair and leans on the kitchen counter. He fishes a slice of pumpernickel from an open cellophane bag and drags the bread across the basin of a frying pan on the cold stovetop, wiping up jellied bacon grease. He pops the grease-sopped bread into his mouth and gives his jaw a workout.

  “Listen, Carl,” he says. A few loose crumbs spill from his mouth. “You seem like a nice kid. No matter what Edna tells you, I’m not here to lay waste to anything or to destroy your institutions or in any way insult your precious god.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Basil doesn’t have the opportunity to answer. A blur moves through the open back door. Booted feet fall heavily on the carpet. The man carries a baseball bat above his head, in attack position, his mouth open and screaming.

  “Paul!” Carl yells. “Wait!”

  Basil grabs the frying pan by the handle and wings it across the room. The pan catches Paul on the chin, and he drops like a sack of flour—out cold before he hits the ground. The bat windmills to a clattering stop on the kitchen linoleum.

  “Who do we have here?” Basil says, nudging the man’s feet. “That’s Paul,” Carl says. “He’s with our church.”

  “What’s he doing in my living room?”

  “He was my ride. My getaway, better put.”

  “I see. Well, time for you to go home, Carl. But thanks for stopping by.”

  “What about Paul?”

  “I’ll make sure he gets home safely.”

  “But he’s my ride.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Carl. Maybe the keys are still in the ignition. If not, that’s your problem to solve. Now get out of here.”