“A devil made of crystal,” Shrike said.
Then he pulled at my arm to go keep going, but I was flabbergasted by the sight before me; a sudden fear planted my dirty shoes and not even the onslaught of bikes and cars could make me move. I’d caught a curious glimpse of Shiva. This time he was a twisted pretzel, beckoning for me to come to him. His eyes glowed maniacally with the fervor of his millions of worshippers, with the temptation of mysticism; his thighs fairy-winged like a woman giving birth. I imagined the lush and delicious smells that would cradle my senses between his legs: peppery cooking oil, jasmine and rosewater, the sultry reasoning for sex.
I’d always had a naughty imagination, and no wall of shadow was going to bar me from my thoughts. I knew beneath that kilt would be the delicate scrotal sag and a shriveled penis hardening at the sight of me. But would there be more than one? Four appendages seemed natural; Shiva was the husband of Kali—skull-necklace, eater of souls—and there was no way to satiate her violent hunger without violating acts of sodomy. Oh, how large a snake his phalluses must be, and how easily they could rip into my earthly rectum. I’d always had an affinity for the larger male anatomy; the phallic violations of India certainly lived within Shiva’s soul.
“Imagine the…well, how good a man of that size must be in bed,” I inquired.
“Lucian…no real man can ever be the size you want him to be,” Shrike’s ashy green eyes closed, the kohl was clumped across; he seemed either pissed off or dismissive. “As dirty as these people are, Indians find oral sex to be unhygienic, a carnal intercourse against the order of nature because it carries no potential for procreation.”
“I think there’re enough Indians on the planet, don’t you? They could use a little more liking to oral sex.”
“A billion bodies who believe in nothing more than to make another billion bodies. A culture that finds oral sex pornographic, but which reveres phallic symbols such as Lord Shiva. An incongruent bunch.”
“No wonder Kali’s anger subsided when she married him. His dick must be as long and gracious as his arms. Kali’s tongue is tipped with blood; her teeth are like thorns. She must’ve bit Shiva and found a liking to him. Maybe he has four penises.”
“I hope so,” I said with my face pinched and assured. But is this the law you bide by, never taking me up on my advances?”
“No. I’m just not like you. I need more excitement than that!”
Then we were in the forbidden backstreets, away from the loud thoroughfare of the main boulevard. The sky was as carnal and desirous as the pagan beliefs in this part of town. We were in hell now. Electricity was not found here, not even a flashlight. Everything seemed to tighten; the buildings were timeworn and ravaged by nightfall. Bodies lay like stumps of deciduous trees; the people who were not passed out drunk on brandy wine or whiskey were horrendously masturbating. I read once that in Calcutta the dead rise at night and stink the place up, but in turn are cleansed by daylight. Here in the city there is no sense of time, no sun rising and falling: the people here don’t have to be dead to be vicious.
Iron gas lamps marked the panacea of our journey. It was a place to loathe and love, where desire and sin would become one. Shrike recited this over and over as some kind of lucid poem. Appearing like a trick of the eye, as if the boiling rays of moonshine had hit a tender spot in the earth and there it materialized: an antediluvian structure, grand as a palace in shambles with aggressive Bengali scrollwork engraved in the concrete মৃতু্য and লিঙ্গ. My brain did not know what to make of the symbols, but Shrike seemed to know how to decipher them; in fact they turned him madly horny. We shot past the door and as if the dimensions of the inside of the building were bigger than the outside, a small iron gate surrounded a great concrete expanse, the front end studded with steel impaling spikes. I imagined lifting Shrike and letting the sharp metal slide into his intestine, coloring the gates with his blood and shit. An apex phallus.
What was wrong with me?
A scattering of what looked like cats lay around, and it wasn’t until I saw a small boy crush its head with a brick and then throw its lifeless corpse at us did I realize that it was a very large rat. In front of the smoky club a barrage of mop-haired men gave us toothy grins, sticking their hands down their pants. Their fingers were the gnarled limbs of banyan trees; their dicks were lowly ginger roots. They either wanted to fuck or eat us, I couldn’t tell. They all looked ravenous.
Then Shrike grabbed my hand and we were moving into a maze-like shroud of chrysanthemums and other colorful flowers innate to India. I began to see things glowing by the light of the low white moon and a billion iridescent stars; I saw swamp gas erupt, phosphorescent desert insects, the zigzagging bonfires of Calcutta and the vampire voltage of New Delhi viewed from the sky. We entered through a large door clothed in gold and slipped into Wonka’s delicious factory indeed.
* * *
“You’ve not tasted the underground of India…until now,” a scrappy man said in heavily accented English.
The room was filled with dark swirling smoke and the smell of dreamy Hooka like a noxious influence. Filthy mirrors boarded every corner, haunted by the ghost of Hindi and Bengali poetry in terrible lipstick. Shrike took an immediate left and was soon a chameleon amongst the swarm of people. I saw him order a bitter beer and smoke his usual stale cigarette down to the filter, then fill his mouth with an unlawful amount of cough drops.
I took a right, following the chaotic rhythm of Hindi music, horns and cryptic strings, an agonizing synthesizer. Pitchy, drastic, and effervescent; each sound was a crescendo of exotica, each vocal melody the secret pain of a country’s war against its women. This all echoed into my brain, tickled like white noise down to my very balls. The smell of sex was rather potent. Brown bony hands spidered from depthless corners, ridden with human waste, looking for a chance at life as mouths begged for coins in the best English they knew. I was in no Kalighat or Holy Temple: I was in Sodom and Gomorra. Rightfully so.
Young girls twisted their bodies upon multiple stages garnished with incense ash, rose petals and sopping dhotis; their washboard torsos concaved and twisted impossibly as they performed belly dances of a thousand generations born into sweltering Indian midnights. Tumescent nipples and pubic hair were exposed beneath the traditional Ghagra Choli in exquisite colors of lavender, salmon and gold.
Filthy men in squalid cliques waved crumpled singles. Their eyes were hungry and deviant; Hookah tobacco fell freely from their pockets as they called over young server boys with stilted arms and no sense of respect. The boys passed around Hookah pipes shaped like that of a serpent phallus and poured liquor down hungry throats wearing nothing but Langota loincloths that barely covered the prepubescent scraps of flesh between their legs.
At the bar I found Shrike once again, drunk on Indian brewed Scotch Whiskey. He waved his arms in unison to the music and opened his hands like a horny carrion plant. Curlicues of dayglo Henna paint raged against the strobe lights; scales and petals juxtaposed on the palms of his hands, thorny stems on his twiggy arms. I contemplated the meanings of each: an ambigram prophesying the end of the world, a demigod clothed by the moon, a sexual pandemic of biblical proportions. It was nothing of the sort, for Shrike had already written the books on such subjects in quill ink by the light of gas lamps and candles, swiping paper madly with the sharp end of a crow’s feather. What a glorious sound ink swiping paper is; it’s the surety of permanence is what attracts me most.
“We’re going to witness the Dance of Death,” he said drunkenly.
I didn’t know what the fuck he meant, what madness or archaic spirits of deities we were going to encounter. Indians are so over-polygamous it becomes confusing. Each god is the shadow of another, resurrected in a new form and then killed off to be reincarnated into something eviler or purer. Instead of using my brain I indulged in Shrike’s offerings of a joint rolled with salvia and shisha tobacco, as well as a tiny pill labeled X. The pill turned blue when
it hit Shrike’s sharp tongue; bad ink smeared his teeth and made them glow. Soon my mind settled into the leaky dream that follows brain altering substances, a hand of doom cradling my very soul.
The music halted; the colored lights haphazardly slowed their gyrating rhythm and a new cacophonic mix of Indian music hit the air. The stage insidiously glowed. I heard a snake-hiss and the moaning of a billion worshippers. I saw the brittle color of bones scrunched in a corner, the shadow of a full skeleton clothed in a Sari. Four arms parted the velvet curtain four maddening ways and a slew of men fell to their knees with bone dust and smelly green leaves in their hands.
Not leaves, but money!
Lord Shiva took the stage.
His blue arms were melodiously knotted between dazzling crowns of fire; the cobra upon his neck waved its thin tongue in the air. Shiva took a few steps out of shadow, eyeing the silent crowd. I saw that his ankles were lined with gold charm bracelets and his toenails were painted black as coal ash. I wanted to kiss those holy shining feet. A Devil Made of Crystal indeed. Shrike would have surely agreed if he were not so wasted.
Shiva’s eyes filled me with inherent terror. They glowered with craven lust, with the need for reverence. His tongue was forked and the color of ice as he projected it from his wet his lips. But it was the sight of his pelvis that electrified me with despair. I needed to see what was beneath his lavish silk kilt, needed to feel those four appendages wrap coolly around my body. They would be tentacles of a new nature. After all, they sated the man-eating Kali.
But soon the crown of fire was no longer just for show. Lord Shiva’s foot came around and kicked a ball of flame at a dirty man’s hands that’d touched the stage: with his right hand! A small fire spread, caught onto the man’s dhoti as if he was covered in holy oil, and quickly devoured him. Women grabbed their nipples; young boys masturbated until explosion. As the fire grew so did the howling, the screeching and the sound of snapping chords. Heavy spotlights ripped from the rotted ceiling and exploded upon the floor; glass spread like diamonds ripped from an ancient mine.
Lord Shiva was at the edge of the stage now, hovering, dancing blindly and his legs fanning open for me. The sight of hanging flesh engulfed my very being, controlled me. How many phalluses? One, two, I counted, maybe three, but had to immediately stop. I became suddenly lost within the fucked up throes of booze, THC and bad pills; my pupils refused to dilate before the darkness of the Lord’s pelvis; the fluid within my ears became an unruly ocean. Balance betrayed me. I blacked out.
* * *
I really wish these snakes were your arm…
I was in a palace, my body snarled between silk sheets fit for a Demigod. I caught the scents of liquid curry and warm bodies. This was dream and nightmare, a swarming infinity that lived within my own perverted head. A hundred crystal statues in their phallus forms surrounded me with their boggled eyes and tentacle arms. A myriad of slimy hands fed me the delicacies of the Indian world—a sip of the milky Lassi and a bite of the donut like Balushahi—until I became bloated and felt faintly sick. My tongue could crave no more.
To my dismay Shrike was passed out on the same bed, his tongue a tiny pink thing lying limp out the side of his mouth and a jug of whiskey death-gripped by his left arm. I tapped the jug; it was empty, sad to say because I was due for a mean drink. Shrike’s REM eyes rolled with pleasure and pain; they juxtaposed the wild life he sought after, and the naughty things he did to never become bored—all the naughty things that didn’t involve me. His right hand was artfully moving deeper and deeper into his crotch; he had a huge boner. I wondered if he would want me to wake him, to finally touch him. But it was the constant suffocation of boredom that had brought us here, and so I left Shrike to his wet dream.
And perhaps I was trapped in my own jealous nightmare, because I imagined it so perfectly. A blade fashioned from a betraying Indian midnight glinting in my hand, it cutting Shrike’s filthy button up to expose his smooth pallor and rickety looking bones. There would be no mercy as I unzipped him from groin to sternum. Lord Shiva was all that mattered. Poor Shrike, I thought, dead at the hands of his own friend. Did I want my friend to die? My affinity for Shrike, I can admit, was dangerous. He was the kid who I wanted to share my life with, more bestial than the bond we already had.
Hindi music swung into my ears then; I felt the walls vibrate. A calling, an attraction, a betrayal. Bright jade light shone upon one large statue of Lord Shiva, at first frozen, but then standing. His lips became lively, his face mounted in jewels, his hand laced with tiny bits of flesh that could have only been the dark sweet delights between a horny man’s legs. Four shadows beamed from between Shiva’s legs that spread like forever. I was ready to be taken into eternity…but I was still fucked up.
“I want it,” I said. “I truly want it.”
But it was not I the shadows chose. Like some ultimate plan it was Shrike they mounted. I asked myself the necessary why and how, begging for a resilient turnaround, but I was awarded with nothing of the sort. Perhaps it was Shrike’s natural curiosity for the world that attracted them, perhaps his innate boredom and cravings for exotica, or him constantly refusing me. I knew that my inherent abhorrence for everything except the male anatomy was what they rejected. In essence, the only thing I truly wanted was to get laid. I failed myself miserably.
So I decided to understand it, that I was no longer in the reality I was trained to live in, that the countries of Hindu polygamy, Pakistani imprisonment and Bengali spice was my only world. The next set of actions would either have driven a kid to question the plethora of realities before his face, or force him to indulge in the sodomy that has plagued the world since the beginning of time.
All I could do was sing myself into a frenzy, wash myself in lyrical abandon as I decided to learn how to loathe and love.
Shiva’s four crystal phalluses elongated, dripping thick blood at the tips, and latched onto Shrike’s sleeping body. I wondered why Shrike wasn’t waking up. Where had his soul gone to party so that he could not feel death taking over his real body like a despot? I caught the odor of semen and spit as they began to pull Shrike into the chasm of Shiva’s universe.
But then I remembered the show, how that dirty man had touched the holy stage with his right hand, the one he wipes his own ass with. It was a motion of disrespect to a religion that demanded only the pure to worship. Shrike was the least pure thing on the face of the earth.
The glassy shadows forced Shrike’s lips apart and ripped his teeth out with a glittery crunch. Two of them twisted like nooses around his sleeping throat as the others tore down the tunnel of Shrike’s liquor stained throat. All at once my world became a gory explosion of hair, sweat and bone as the serpents cleared a redraw hole through the back of Shrike’s head.
Loathe and Love must become one, I remembered Shrike’s words, because those two words exist in a certain symbiosis. And in order for a man to first understand what he loathes, he must first discover what he loves…
Le Petit Mort
Mandy DeGeit
The French call orgasms “Le Petit Mort” which — if translated to English — means “The Little Death”. Most people don’t know how one may relate to the other, but I do.
What if I could promise you the best orgasm of your life? The kind where your brain shuts down and every muscle fiber tightens at once as you start to convulse over and over and over?
But shortly after your orgasm starts, and just before it begins to ebb away, you die.
* * *
He sees me in the bar. I’m not prettier than the next girl and I’m really nothing special. Even still he can’t look away. He’s like all the other men, simple creatures they are. There’s something about me he can’t quite figure out, but I know what it is. Even though I look plain, I exude sexuality. He watches me walk across to the barroom floor; his eyes follow my every movement.
Like all the others who have come before him, he has to have me.
I know he’s
picked up on my vibe. I can feel it. It starts as a dull throb deep in my loins and radiates up through every nerve. The sensation hardens my nipples, and I lick my lips slowly as I sense him making his way to me through the crowd. He nudges my elbow as he steps up to the bar beside me.
“Hey…” he says as he eyes me up and down.
“Hi.” I hold his gaze and smile.
“Did you want to get out of here?” He doesn’t waste any time, but there’s a tremble in his voice that lessens his air of confidence and he blushes.
“Sure.” I nod and slip my hand into his. “Let’s go.”
A look of surprise crosses his face. He didn’t expect it to be this easy. But then again, they never do.
I follow him out into the parking lot and we weave our way to his car. As he unlocks the passenger side door, I lean into him from behind. My hot breath burns the nape of his neck. I whisper, “Where are we going?”
He turns around and pulls me into him as my lips meet his. I kiss him softly and allow him to take the lead. His tongue slides along my lips, and he shudders. He holds me tighter, unashamed of his growing erection and kisses me harder. I open my mouth to his probing tongue and he moans.
The change starts.
The wetness seeps from between my thighs and my nipples stiffen painfully against the lace of my bra. I break the kiss. “Where are we going?”
“Anywhere but here.” His reply stiffens my nipples as I bite my lip and writhe in silence.
The car ride is quiet and the sexual tension between us suffocates. He squirms in his seat as his pants tent uncomfortably between his legs. I imagine what his cock looks like, what I’ll do with it and things he’ll do to me, and it speeds up the change. I agonize over the fact he isn’t already inside of me. He navigates through the city streets, and my pussy is already wet and throbbing.
Of Devils & Deviants: An Anthology of Erotic Horror Page 24