Charlie’s got him. She’s got him. She has no right.
Ignore the dead girl and focus on the husband.
He’s not restrained. He’s compliant. That’s not my husband. It’s a clone.
I must stop thinking crazy. You’ll understand though if crazy is becoming my default mode.
“Oh Lena! I’ve brought somebody to see you. Ken, say hi to your wife. The dead fuck.”
Ken freezes visibly.
“Oh come on, it’s okay. I was there, remember? I told you. I was the white trash slut at the end of the bar. I heard everything you told your buddies. You are aware you got off easy. Rodriguez was within an inch of slashing your throat and spraying it across the men’s room walls. Splashing that shit on the cunting cover girls. Women who love hard cock. Well, is it true or not? Your wife is waiting for your response. We don’t have all day.”
“Please, Ken,” Lena begs. “You don’t have to say anything. I don’t care what you said, even if it’s true. I love you. I miss you.”
“How very touching.” Charlie spits. The glob falls down the hole in the floor and lands beside Lena. She stands up.
“I’m going to throw you down a ladder,” says Charlie. “If you want, you can bring the failure. In fact, I insist you do.”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb. The dead girl, Lucy. She doesn’t weigh much. Sling her across your shoulders. You can do it.”
“I’m not doing shit for you.”
“That would be a poor choice.” Charlie pulls out a .357 from her black leather jacket. She loads the chamber. She places the barrel against Ken’s temple. “Pretty please, with cherries on top.”
7. Bordello of Death
There are many rooms in the house of death, and one, not the least, is a bawdy house. Also known as a sporting house. A brothel. A bordello. A whorehouse. A cathouse.
Now the cat has sprung, and a ceremony of evil has begun.
The career proper of Ms. Charlie Morgan as proprietor of the first whorehouse for lovers of the stiff began January 18th of the year __________ and ended with a powerful load of JIZZ pumped into the pitiful creature known as Ms. First Trial.
Charlie walks us back to the cell I came from. She makes us carry Lucy between us. Ken says nothing. I try to tell him with my eyes that I love him. But he’s avoiding mine. I don’t understand. I don’t want to believe Charlie is right. I love him.
I love him when Charlie takes us next door, to the bordello. I love him when our cheeks brush the beaded curtain, and in the dank, reeking interior, we see the blackened skeletons of the Gold Rush whores propped up before their vanities. A perfume that smells like opium pervades the room on top of the rot. The skeletons are dressed in their turn of the century finery, red stockings, merry widows, silk and lace. Somehow Charlie has articulated them like mannequins. This makes them look even more dead, if that was humanly possible.
Charlie brushes aside the crumbled remnant of a harlot and ushers us into a bedchamber. She tells us to lay Lucy on the moldy mattress. Then she tells me to place Lucy on top of me, her legs spread out around mine. Strangely, Lucy has no smell. Not that I’m familiar with bodies that have been sitting around for a while. Even more strange, there’s no sign of decay.
How the hell did Charlie do that?
She gives Ken a handful of blue pills. When he starts to resist, she crams them in his mouth and puts the gun to his head again. He has to swallow. He gulps them down. She gives him a paper cup with water, the way a nurse would. His hands shake so badly he spills half the water, but gets the rest down his throat. Charlie smiles.
“Now cums the hard part. Pun fully intended.”
Charlie won’t let me shut my eyes as she tells Ken to fuck me. The cadaver’s hair is in my face, stifling me, suffocating me. Charlie tells me to move the head aside so I can see how badly Ken wants his wife. His dead fuck. His concubinal corpse.
“Please don’t…please don’t.” Tears stream down Lena’s face. She can see the pain and anguish in Ken’s. This is a horror beyond measure.
She’s shocked at how swiftly he enters her, face to face with Lucy, pushing Lena’s thighs further apart. His eyes have gone up into the whites. He’s really enjoying this. It’s not coercion. It’s not an act.
There are only so many things she can shut out from her mind, and Ken’s enthusiasm in this instance is not one of them.
He shudders into her. Moaning. Biting his lip till it bleeds. Licking his lips.
He cums again.
Ohgodohgodohgod
And then there is the rain again. The drops don’t splash and plash. They hit like bullets now. Streams of water descend down the walls.
BANG BANG BANG
The water begins to rise on the floor.
And, unbelievably, just like that, Charlie levels the surprise part.
“You can go now.”
We can go?
I look at Ken. Ken doesn’t look back. He’s wiping himself off now with his shirt.
I push Lucy’s corpse off me. I’m horribly sick. My vomit gushes out of me. Now it’s a series of blanks, single frames from some demented movie.
“Ken?”
We can deal with all of this later. The main thing is to get to safety and get a SWAT team down here.
The trouble is, I’m not sure now whose head I want to see spattered across these walls.
8. Transubstantial
“Ken?”
“Yeah, honey.” He sounds like a zombie. Lena makes herself hug him. But her fingers feel like daggers. She thinks of the children. Their names are Thomas and Rhiannon. They are innocent. They have never hurt or harmed anyone.
“We need to get the fuck out of here, or we’re going to drown.”
“Drown.”
She slaps him across the cheek. Harder than she anticipated. She just wants to wake him up. He’s got that postorgasmic dose thing going on.
We can deal with all of this later.
Rock and roll ain’t
We have to
Rock and roll. Lock and load.
Charlie just stands there, laughing like the maniac she is. Anger forces me to move, for completely different reasons now. We’ll have to get a separation. We’ll need to…move now, before it’s too late. My brain is going a million miles an hour. I grab Ken’s hand and yank his arm hard. The rain is really coming down now. I ignore the trillions of aftermath flashes splitting my brain. And then, suddenly, I’m calm.
I realize that when I thought I was going down the hole in the floor, my eyes were closed. The room with the dead girl wasn’t SIDEWAYS. I’d actually gone around in a circle. Or had I? It doesn’t matter. Fucking M.C. Escher.
We’re slushing through three inches of water. Soon it’s a foot. I cut the knot in my mind, the map I’d made erased. Going by instinct, I pull Ken along until we’ve gotten to the stretch of tunnel with the skylights. He blinks. I order him to get it together. Charlie and I have something in common now.
We’re sisters.
Maybe not biologically, but…you don’t always get to choose your real family.
And then the shrieking begins.
I look back. Not that there’s time for any fresh hells. But I can’t help it. I need to know. Maybe it’s me. Charlie is still standing there. Her mouth is wide open, and Lucy’s voice is coming from it.
She’s struggling to stay upright. Some force is dragging her down into the water.
“FUCK YOU, BITCH!”
Charlie’s on her knees.
Then she’s face down in the water.
Her shoulders shake. Lucy’s ghost holds her down. From within. Her arms rise and fall, like some bizarre attempt to dog paddle.
I understand that drowning is one of the hardest deaths. For the first time…or maybe not the first…I feel sympathy for Charlie. For the SHATTERGIRL. For everything she’s endured. For everything she’s suffered. For the pain DADDY and JIZZUS put her through.
There’s a steel ladder inset
in the wall in the first room off the main corridor. It leads to the manhole. I tell Ken to go first.
Bubbles break the surface. Charlie’s back undulates like a python. She’s fighting with every last ounce of strength in her body. She doesn’t want to go.
I can’t help it. “I’m so sorry!” I scream.
Suddenly Charlie is back on her feet again. She vomits forth blood and water. Lucy’s voice mocks mine.
“I’m so sorry so sorry so very SORRY…”
Charlie sinks back into the water.
As I look at Ken’s back, I wish I still had that shard of glass. I want to see it make a thin hole in his throat. I want to see him cry and beg me for forgiveness. He pushes the manhole aside and crawls out. I follow. The rain is coming down in torrents. The sky looks angry. It looks red. It looks like
BLOOD like
Anger like
My heart. Shattered. Split. Splattered.
Still, there is the matter of the children…
Shattergirl: Hyr Testimony Page 4