by Lee, Edward
Mr. Decker was a reporter for The New Orleans Bugle until recently, when he left there to pursue a freelance career after a dispute with his editor.
“Richard was obsessed with a story he was working on,” City Desk editor John Delacroix said, “an urban legend with supernatural overtones known as Painfreak, but I thought his time could be better spent on more serious issues. In the end, he wouldn’t let it go and decided to leave the Bugle instead.”
Before he left the newspaper, Mr. Decker did see his urban legend story published by the Features Department. His co-writer on that story was Gerald Horner, who shortly thereafter was found hanging by the neck from a doorknob in his apartment, an apparent suicide.
The police say they have no leads, adding that as ghastly as this case is, it nevertheless will be conducted the same as any other homicide investigation. They declined to comment when asked to confirm an earlier report that they had found a recording of an interview Richard Decker conducted on the last day he was seen alive.
| — | — |
He Who Whispers the Dead Back to Life
————
Lucy Taylor
I woke up when the violet-eyed dog that had accompanied me into the New Mexico desert sank its teeth into the back of my hand. I screamed and rolled over, barfing the dregs of that last tequila shooter onto a cactus and frightening a couple of lizards.
I gaped at the dog. “Where’s Winter?”
The beast thumped its black, bovine tail. It wasn’t any species of canine I knew, but a tufted-eared creature with wide-spaced human eyes. And those eyes were imploring me to follow.
Nine hours earlier, I’d been slamming shooters on the patio of a Santa Fe bar when I spotted Leo Winter, the man I’d been looking for. A Navajo drifter and medicine man of dubious repute, Winter had recently passed through the Navajo Nation, a predator in full stalker mode, spouting off about energy vortexes, sexual bliss, and orgasms everlasting. He’d found an easy mark in my younger sister Verna. She was nineteen, and a few months before, had been the victim of a horrible crime. Since then, she’d barely spoken and seldom left the house, so when she ran off with the self-proclaimed shaman, I hoped maybe she’d found what she needed.
Then I learned more about Leo Winter and wished to God I’d tried harder to stop her.
Rumors circulate fast on the rez. Word spread that Winter (whose real name was Leo Nez and who used to sell flutes to the tourists at the Four Corners) was into some seriously dangerous shit: sorcery and skull-fucking and selling his soul to those darker angels who traffic in such. And while he’d come up in the world—his current persona was that of a high end Santa Fe dealer in Native American art—his true home was a fabled fuck palace called Painfreak.
Which was where I guessed I’d find Verna.
Beside me, the demon-mutt gave a death rattle growl and trotted off toward a distant, blood red mesa.
I lurched to my feet and followed.
««—»»
Painfreak’s a bitch to get into. There’s a hand stamp at the door and, before that, a rather arrogant question would-be visitors use to identify themselves to those who’ve already gained access. Winter shared this with Verna and she, in turn, divulged it to me—maybe thinking I’d like to try out Painfreak myself. So, when I saw Winter on the Plaza that morning, I drained my drink and sauntered over, trying my best to look like a woman who knew what she was doing and wasn’t scared out of her wits.
Winter was admiring a pair of Tony Lama boots in a fancy men’s store while a couple of female tourists were covertly taking his picture. Not hard to see why. His long, ink-black hair flowed to the belt of tight Levis; his narrow waist supported a massively muscled upper body. I had a mental picture of him squatting by glowing black rocks in a sweat lodge, naked and oiled. A dangerous image. I banished it.
“Hey, I wanna ask you something,” I said, and he looked up sharply, maybe thinking I was just another out-of-towner needing directions to some local attraction. “Do you fuck as good as you look?”
His eyebrows, chunks of obsidian above raptor black eyes, bunched above a prominent nose. “Go home and sober up.”
“I am sober.” Well, mostly. All right, not so much. But I’d needed to chill, and the tequila shooters in this town are fucking sick.
Winter turned away, and I caught his arm. Like grabbing a baseball bat. “You took my sister Verna. Got her locked up in some crazy sex club’s what I hear. Painfreak it’s called.”
His expression didn’t change, but the atmosphere did: a jolt of energy sizzled through me, hot and electric, like I’d been hit by the shock wave of a distant explosion.
“You’re Verna’s sister. Cory, right? Yeah, she talked about you. Said you’re a lush who likes to fuck and get high.”
“Man, that’s hurtful.” I said and started to laugh. Couldn’t help myself. “Thought you were a badass., Winter. If the truth’s supposed to scare me off, you gotta do better than that.”
He seemed surprised, like he wasn’t used to being talked to that way. Squinted up at the sky, then looked back at me.
“How about we go for a drive?”
««—»»
We drove southwest in Winter’s Range Rover, taking 550 toward Cuba (that’s Cuba, New Mexico), his weird-looking dog glowering at me from the back seat.
Out here the land turns brutal fast. Miles of blistering sand and shriveled plants against a backdrop of striated, red and white cliffs. Fifty miles into the heart of all this heat-blasted nothing, he pulled over and pointed.
“See that mesa to the north? That’s where you’re going. And you’ll have to walk from here. Sorry.”
“Are you fucking crazy? I’ll have heatstroke.”
“You want to find Painfreak, don’t you? But maybe you don’t. Not really. Maybe you want me to drive you back to Santa Fe?”
I barely remembered exiting the Rover or the mongrel tagging along. I watched the dust cloud from the SUV with rage and despair. What stretched before me was an arid deathscape of parched shrubs and sand-swept arroyos, the stillness broken only by the occasional skittering of lizards and barbed, translucent scorpions with segmented glassine bodies.
At some point, I fumbled in my back pocket for my flask and my hand brushed the knife I always carry. Just in case something happens, you know, because in my life, it usually does. I let the knife be and opened the flask. Thought I’d take just a sip to steady my nerves, but finished it off, ended up falling-down dizzy. After I collapsed, the cur mistaking my hand for a chew toy spurred me on, but by the time we reached the mesa, I wondered if it had all been for naught.
I was expecting a pleasure dome of debauchery or a floating fucktopia on some virtual Caribbean Sea—what I found was an adobe casita squatting frog-like at the base a mesa whose sandstone cliffs were as creviced and cracked as the grotesquely scarred face of the freak guarding the door.
Said giant inspected my bloody hand. Stupid me, I figured he was going to offer first aid. A fucking Band-Aid at least. Instead he lifted my hand to his mouth, licked off the blood and nodded like a wine taster acknowledging an especially good vintage. I looked at the bite pattern on the back of my hand and realized this was the ‘stamp’ Verna had told me about.
Mutilation was my admittance to Painfreak.
««—»»
The casita opened into a rock tunnel lined with eerily-lit hollows where hazy forms grappled and grunted. Troglodyte sex. Feral rutting. Here a trio of nude women swarmed over two men decked out in the furry, fake hides of fantasy creatures; there, a bald beauty with a tattooed scalp inked ivy vines onto the swollen cock of a sweat-drenched, shivering masochist. Blue light slanted from recessed niches in the walls, where elastic shadows ghosted. Behind me, I could hear the click of the dog’s claws on stone.
A rock staircase descended to a high-ceilinged chamber where the cavern opened like a belly and arched doorways glittered with a facsimile of colored glass. Lovers nested in hammocks high off the ground; th
eir groaning and cooing echoed off the walls like a gigantic dovecote. The moist air swam with scents: sandalwood and frankincense and, now and then, the sharp, jarring whiff of decay. Unlike those who frolicked higher up, the lovers here were elfin and agile, otherworldly in their contortionist abilities.
I tried to imagine my sister in this bizarre and sensuous world, timid Verna, prone to depression and rumination, skittish of men and protective of her virginity until last summer when a trio of Barrio Aztecas up from Ruidoso used her for a gang initiation. The memory of what she’d told me about that night was unbearable; instinctively, I looked around for distraction. In Painfreak, it wasn’t hard to find.
Beside a cluster of moist and dripping stalagmites hunched a monkish elder whose robe was open to reveal a double-headed penis which two supplicants, female and male, were lustily fellating. I watched and then, as if entranced, moved in and took a turn. I expected to feel something from the encounter—mild arousal or even disgust—but I felt nothing.
The old man seemed to sense my disappointment and advised me, in the plummy tones of a TV evangelist, to continue farther into the cavern.
I obeyed him, but soon after, the way was blocked by lurid, stained-glass panels bolted into the rock walls. At first, I looked around in consternation, unsure of what to do, until I watched several people penetrate the barrier with no injury or difficulty. I discovered if I held my breath as though diving into a waterfall, I could wade through the gorgeous, scarlet and emerald-colored ‘windows’ and partake of what was on offer within. The options for erotic dalliances appeared unlimited. The panels nested one within the other, each tinted window the entryway to yet another curiosity or orgy or Kama Sutra coupling.
I meandered through a series of these small, erotic wonderlands and was stunned to realize I’d forgotten Verna for long periods of time—if time, indeed, was even a relevant concept in Painfreak.
One of the limpid panels unsettled me so much I couldn’t bring myself to enter: shadows resembling moths or dragonflies flailed in a silver web. I found it powerfully disturbing and was backing away when a dark hand, manicured and mapped with ropey veins, fell over my shoulder. Spinning around, I stared into Winter’s feral eyes. No longer the well-dressed art dealer, he stood before me, naked and bestial-looking.
“Still searching for your sister?” The contempt in his voice was virulent. “Or are you too distracted by all that Painfreak offers?”
“This sideshow? I’m already bored. Just show me where my sister is.”
“She’s far away, but closer than before,” he said, relishing my confusion. “When she first came here, she was nervous—as most are—afraid to go beyond the upper chambers. Now that she’s delved the deepest parts of Painfreak, she’s utterly depraved. She won’t stop until her very soul’s corrupted.”
“Save the woo woo bullshit for someone who’s buying it,” I said. “Just take me to her.”
He sighed—a teacher at a lagging student—but led the way, still downward, into a sloping labyrinth of granite and sandstone tunnels. Inside the claustrophobically tight maze, I felt his energy began to flare. Distracted and unnerved, I tried to keep my mind on Verna, but everything I saw aroused desire, made my thoughts blur into one another like a rain-soaked watercolor.
We passed through the Room of Dreams, where naked women and men lay on pallets, eyes open but apparently asleep. A few masturbated or made love while entranced, their darkest and most private dreams writhing across their flesh for all to witness. Dogs like the one who’d led me here squatted by their feet or crouched hungrily on a belly or breast. When one of the sleepers twitched or moaned, the demon hounds bayed furiously, a sound like tolling bells.
A blonde with a slash of a smile glided toward me. She was a doll molded from marzipan, white as a sweet store confection, sugared and oiled and perfumed. A dazzle in her ivory skin, she cruised among the writhing bodies in her flamboyant nudity, eyes narrowed, sizing up the edibles in this lavish buffet of flesh.
Her indigo gaze sought me out.
“A newcomer,” she said, pronouncing the word like a succulent “May your stay be fruitful.”
A milky, sweet voice, so at odds with the predator gaze. I wanted to touch those sugarspun tits, those broad sturdy hips, but was afraid her flesh would be sticky, like taffy, that peeling free would cost me some skin.
Leo Winter had no such qualms. He mashed her to his chest, walked a leg between her thighs, entered and pillaged her in one swift stroke so cavalier I thought she’d protest. Instead she melted against him, merged utterly. I stood there rapt, filled with lust and envy.
As I walked away, but the woman called out laughingly, “Go deeper!”
I thought she was giving Winter instructions; then I realized she was talking to me.
“Plunge into Painfreak as if your life and death depends on it. Consume its corruption. As much as you can stand.”
“I’ll leave when I find Verna.”
“You’re free to do that, of course” said the sweet store goddess, whose raised rump Winter was pounding. “Or you could stay and fuck yourself to death, you know. Some do.”
Her fervor seemed authentic, which disturbed me all the more.
I went ahead, threading my way beside an underground river that vanished periodically among the rocks, then reappeared in a fierce hiss of spray and waves. In places the water gleamed dark red. I wondered if it was blood.
I heard a chuckle and turned to find Winter walking with me. “Many ask about the color. It comes from the red sandstone that formed the cave system, but I like to think it’s something more, the red thread that binds us to our carnal appetites.”
The river crashed around some rocks and swept out of sight, into the next leg of its subterranean journey. Ahead, a fall of boulders blocked the way. Suddenly I found myself peering through a murky, water-spattered glass at the same winged creatures—giant dragonflies or cave bats—I’d seen before and found so frightening.
Winter nudged me. “Go on.”
This time I felt I had no choice, but pressed my forehead and palms firmly against the facsimile of glass. It didn’t give. What if this time the glass was real, I thought, and slashed my eyes when it shattered? As I considered this, one of the creatures slammed against the pane feet first, bounced off and arced away, giving me a glimpse of painted toes. I pushed inside, the translucent pane exploding into a thousand silver drops. Winter glided in behind me.
Before I could register what I saw, a drop of blood landed on my wrist and dripped off a finger. I looked up and saw not dragonflies, but naked men and women impaled on hooks and swinging from their grotesquely tented skin, human kites whose aerial displays were controlled by minders on the ground maneuvering their tethers.
But for her long hair billowing behind her, I would not have recognized my sister in her hook and tether snare. Blood rubied the air behind her as she soared. Her eyes were closed, her face serene and luminous as a full moon.
Others swooped and dove around her, but such was the areal choreography of the minders on the ground that no one collided. Only occasionally did hands reach out in passing and fingers brush. Whenever that tiny connection was made, I saw wild longing in the faces of the flyers.
I called Verna’s name, but she showed no sign of recognition.
“Bring her down!”
I hoped the man controlling Verna’s tether would lower her, but now there was no one there, no minders at all. Verna and the others seemed suspended by their will alone.
Winter whispered in a language unknown to me, and Verna angled earthward, a look of complaint and bafflement on her face. I grabbed her, appalled at the limp weight of her tortured body. Her eyes gleamed like polished agates.
“Come with me,” I said. “Can you walk?”
She blinked. “Cory? What? Where are you doing here?”
“I’m taking you home.”
“But I can’t leave.”
“Of course you can.”
&nbs
p; “No!” She turned beseechingly toward Winter. “Don’t let her do this! I want to stay—with you!”
I shook her. “Verna, don’t be stupid! He’s not your friend. He talked you into coming here so he could use you.”
“That’s not true. He saved me!”
“From what? Boredom? Abstinence?”
“Death!”
I had no answer for that, so I went to work on the hooks, sliding them free of the skin as carefully as I could. It was a bloody job and had to hurt like hell, but I knew my sister had endured worse.
“You think I’m delusional,” she said.
No point in denying it. I nodded. “But I’ll get help for you. So you can put Painfreak in the past. Painfreak and…everything else.”
“We never talked about it.”
I cringed, knowing what was coming. “The Barrio Aztecas? I thought it best to let it be. To forget.”
Her laughter was a mix of derision with hysteria. “You never understood how horrible it was, what they did to me, how afterwards I wished I’d died. So one day I said to hell with wishing. I went out to the greenhouse and looped a rope around a beam and climbed up on the ladder. Stepping off was easy—I pretended I was a little girl jumping into Papi’s arms—but then it hurt so much! I tried to get my feet back on the ladder, but it was on its side. I tried to undo the knot, but it was buried in my neck. All the blood was in my head and pushing out my eyes. I’d bitten off the end of my tongue, and all I could think was what I’d look like when you or Mami found me, how I wished I could undo I, how I’d give anything to just undo it. But then I heard him—” She looked at Winter. “—he was whispering, reciting spells, casting out words that had life in them. I held onto that voice like a hand. I followed him here, out of Death, to this amazing place, just the two of us, to Painfreak.”