by Lee, Edward
I stared at her with horror and the growing understanding that Winter had pitched my sister into some dark hole of insanity, mindfucked her into believing she’d been resurrected to a place where even hanging on hooks by your own skin seemed an improvement on what you’d had before.
I grabbed her arm and twisted it until she screamed (she wanted pain, I’d give it to her!), then hauled her toward the tunnel Winter and I had come through. She felt boneless, feather light, but the strength of her resistance was startling. Winter blocked the way. “Leave her. This is where she belongs. And you’re going to stay here with her.”
Maybe it was Winter’s idea of a suggestion, but it was my idea of a threat. When he took a step closer, I let go of Verna and grabbed my knife.
I still believe I didn’t mean to cut him, but then again, there are a lot of things in life I never meant to do, and most of them still happened. And maybe Painfreak twists people somehow, ups one’s capacity for violence as well as desire. Hell, maybe I just wanted to. But the blade was hungry for that beautiful flesh and unzipped a crease from bellybutton to sternum. I felt a thrill almost like lust, when he clutched himself and blood bubbled up between his fingers.
Our eyes met; I expected rage, but what I saw was closer to pity.
Verna screamed and struggled as I muscled her through the translucent pane toward the tunnel beyond. Ahead I saw the hybrid dog. The beast bared its fangs, so I let go of Verna and reached for the knife. It was gone.
Agony exploded through my rib cage. Verna yanked out the knife and slashed me again. I tried to fend her off, but her strength was demonic, the blade biting bone and butchering the meat of my chest.
Verna watched me crumble. I still don’t know if what she said next was something I dreamed as I lost consciousness or a curse she invoked at the end. “There is no sex after death,” she said. Then her haranguing voice grew distant; her face receded to the size of a thumbprint with a tiny smudged ‘o’ for a mouth.
My thoughts unraveled, my body disassembled itself like a poorly executed idea sent back to the drawing board. Separate identity was an unhinging joke, a vast and hollow emptiness.
Except…at intervals of what felt like eons, sound penetrated. A muted language imbued with scents and textures, each syllable a geometry of desire.
As a child, I used to climb the trellis outside my house to get to the upstairs window. There was a skill to finding purchase, to choosing rungs that weren’t too far away or too splintery to hold me. Like the trellis, these faint murmurs could be navigated, too.
The sounds called forth lurid visions. I was an Aztec warrior and Winter my male slave, groveling and butt-fucked for my pleasure. Then I was female again, mating with him under the open canopy of a savannah wide as the horizon, lush with wild grasses. I was Winter’s preening, incestuous mother, his twin brother and his vengeful concubine, his victim and sometimes his killer. Always, whatever the relationship, we inhabited each other’s flesh. We were soulmates and hellmates, bound to a wheel of desire as diabolical as any medieval torture device.
My soul, spirit—whatever it is—sloped back into my flesh like a snail inching into the muck.
I opened my eyes to the world of Painfreak and heard Leo Winter say, “I never answered your question.”
“So answer it.”
We fucked like the damned, which we probably were, like our final wish was to open up each other’s skins, infest each other’s blood and bones, and feast on the remains. Lust existing only for the purpose of spawning more lust, and I wanted nothing more than this—sex and death, the cycle everlasting. I reached for Winter’s hair, intending to drive him deeper into me, but…nothing. I was untouched, and my skin was screaming.
Above me, I heard laughter that ended in a sob. “It doesn’t end,” said Verna. “He didn’t bring you back to be kind. He wants you, and it won’t stop. Ever. Get used to it. You’re part of Painfreak now.”
Maybe.
But I’m stubborn—you can ask Verna. Tell me I’m not free to leave paradise and I’ll gnaw off my foot just so I can crawl back to hell. And almost had to, because finding the way out of Painfreak is no easy task. The distractions are multitudinous, the urge to stay enthralling.
The demon-pooch went with me, then turned back at the door of the casita. I checked to see if its teeth marks were still on my hand. They were.
««—»»
It’s been years now since I was stabbed to death by my poor, deranged sister and Winter lured me back with his mad energy. He still inhabits me—sometimes he takes me in my sleep and fills me with wild dreams; sometimes he provokes unbearable desires.
So I run, because that’s what I’m good at. To get as far away as possible from Painfreak, I answered an ad for a job teaching English in Tokyo and started a new life. Didn’t hook up, didn’t watch pornos, didn’t even look at the hardcore manga and anime.
But one’s own nature, in one form or another, has a way of catching up.
I’m on the subway platform late, when a slender young man approaches me. Bows formally.
Behind him shadows uncoil around a hauntingly familiar form as—.
—he clears his throat and starts to speak in over-enunciated English, laying out the words like coins across a counter.
“I saw your hand…”
The train’s kissing close, the platform’s edge a leap away.
“—that scar—?”
The rippling shadows disgorge a tail-wagging mutt with violet eyes. It glides to the young man’s feet, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Do you fuck…”
I cut him off. “Shut up. Don’t ask.”
The train pulls up. I take his hand. “Why don’t we go find out?”
| — | — |
The Reverend’s Wife
————
Tony Tremblay
The Reverend Jones touched his index finger to his forehead. He then slipped it to his chest. After a quick tap, he moved it to the left, but stopped midway. For the first time in his life, he was unable to complete the ritual. Please God, forgive me.
He stood before a door that was insanely large for a residence. It was made of steel—the metal tarnished and creased in places. Small, round dents pockmarked the surface. Locks, both keyed and numerical, lined the left side. In the center was a knocker—a simple cast iron ring—flaked with rust.
Jones beseeched God once more, lifted the knocker, and let it fall. Seconds later he heard the sound of a bolt sliding. The sound repeated twice more, followed by the clicks of locks disengaging. When the door opened, Jones gasped and took a step back. An abomination of man stood before him.
The largest person he had ever seen took up the width of the doorway. He had to weigh at least 500 pounds. He stood over seven feet tall with scars crisscrossing his face. Bald, his pate reflected the sunlight. He had small black eyes, a flat nose, and his ears stuck out at 45-degree angles.
“You Jones?” The giant asked in a guttural voice that was as ugly as his features.
“Y—yes.”
“Come.”
When the giant man stepped aside, Jones crossed the threshold. As the Reverend walked into a living room the sounds of bolts sliding and locks engaging echoed in his ears. When the giant had finished securing the entrance, he followed Jones in.
“Sit,” the giant grumbled. Jones did as he was told. The giant sat in a love seat opposite him. Jones marveled at the strength of the springs.
“Start talking,” the giant commanded.
“It’s—it’s my wife. She’s been missing for two days.” Jones expected a reaction, but the giant stared at him without speaking. He swallowed and continued. “She was walking home Tuesday afternoon after getting her hair done when she disappeared. We live in a small apartment behind the Unitarian Church—it’s only a fifteen-minute walk from the hairdresser’s.” He struggled to control his voice from cracking. “I went to the police early Tuesday evening when she didn’t arrive. They said it
was too soon to file a missing person’s report so I came back early the next morning. I walked the route with Officer Linson, he’s is a member of our church and our friend, to see if we could find anyone who might have seen her. Officer Linson spied a surveillance camera hanging from the Goffstown Pawn Shop, so we went in to see if we could view the footage from the day before. The owner of the shop obliged. When we played the recordings, all three of us saw what happened to my wife.” Jones stifled a sob.
The giant nodded for Jones to continue.
“A small person, walking with a crooked gait—it could have been a dwarf—went up to my wife as she was walking home. They spoke for as long as ten minutes. At the end of the conversation, the dwarf pulled out an object. We couldn’t tell what it was from the recording. My wife backed away but he grabbed her hand. He opened it and forced her palm down. He placed the object on top of her hand. My wife must have been in shock because her whole body shook for around five seconds. Then, he led her by the hand to the entrance of the brick building in front of them. She didn’t resist. They walked in, and then…nothing. We sped up the recording. She never walked out of the building.” Jones leaned forward and mumbled a short prayer. When finished, he sat upright.
“The three of us left the pawnshop and rushed over to the brick building. There was no entrance, only a solid wall. We pressed against the bricks and searched for any sign of a hidden doorway, but there was none. All the bricks looked equally weathered, and we saw no fresh mortar. There was an entrance on the right side of the building, but it looked nothing like the one on the recording. We hurried back to the pawnshop to re-watch the recording. Clearly, the entrance was there, and it shows her going in. When we fast-forwarded it to our search of the building, we discovered that the camera had stopped functioning when we had left the pawnshop. There was only snow.
“Officer Linson took the video chip and told us he was headed back to the police station. The pawnshop owner and I went back to the wall to search for anything we might have missed. That’s when I saw the card.”
The giant raised his head.
“It was wedged in a gap between two bricks where the entrance should have been. Neither of us had seen it earlier. I plucked the card from the wall and it had only one word on it. I was puzzled, so I spoke the word out loud. Painfreak.
If the giant recognized the word, he didn’t express it.
“The pawnshop owner asked me to repeat it. When I looked at him, his face was drawn. “Your wife is in dire straits,” he told me, “and you have little time to get her back.” I questioned him, begged him to tell me more, but he refused. Instead, he advised I come see you. He told me your name is Rex and I should bring money.” Tears streamed down Jones eyes. “Can you tell me what’s going on, Rex? Can you help me? I’m…”
««—»»
Rex lifted one of his immense hands, raised an index finger and placed it against his lips. If he didn’t hush the Reverend, he knew the man would keep jabbering on. He needed a few moments to think.
Painfreak. He’d heard rumors of a nightclub called Painfreak, but he had always dismissed them. The talk was that its patrons were nightmarish—perversions of humanity—and that it was sadist’s paradise. People said it was vast and was located in a time and space different from ours. The entrance to the club was ever changing. Nobody knew when or where it would appear. Part of the mythos was that not everyone who entered Painfreak left Painfreak.
The Reverend’s story intrigued Rex. On its surface, the job was very different from the mundane hits he was usually assigned. As a freelancer, his specialty was government commissions—taking out the scum that the local police or Fed’s didn’t want to bring to trial. He reported to no one, the work paid well, and it provided an opportunity to release his baser instincts without the prospect of incarceration. He loved his work and he was known—and feared—for his unique methods of inflicting pain. Working with the government meant periods of feast or famine. When times were slow, Rex would take on outside jobs. These non-government contracts did not hinder his enthusiasm when it came to inflicting pain.
Despite his appearance and line of work, Rex had his principles, and he strictly adhered to them. He abhorred the mistreatment of women, children and animals, and he harbored compassion for those he deemed innocent or wronged. The Jones woman met at least two of these criteria.
Rex made up his mind. He would talk with the pawnshop owner. He was obliged to thank the man for the reference, but more importantly, he would need more information about Painfreak.
“Two thousand dollars up front, and no guarantees,” he croaked.” If I bring her back within a week, it will cost you another eight grand. If I can’t find her within that time…tough shit.”
The Reverend reached into his back pocket and removed a billfold. The man opened it up and carefully counted out hundred dollar bills. There was plenty more in the billfold after the Reverend removed twenty of them and handed them over. I should have asked for more. That’s a lot of money for a man of the cloth to possess. Will the heating fund be a little lighter this year, Reverend?
His hands shaking, the Reverend also removed two photographs and placed them beneath the bills. “These are pictures of my wife, Betty. They’re fairly recent. My phone number is on the back of one of them.”
Rex reached out, took the money and photos. He glanced at the pictures. Betty was mousey—squat, overweight, with her hair brown and cut short to the shoulder. Her heavy breasts sagged to the bottom of her rib cage. Her face was neither attractive nor ugly, with no distinguishing features. Rex placed the photos and money on a small table next to the love seat. After a brief silence, both men stood. Rex pointed to the front door and the Reverend, with his head lowered, walked toward it. Feeling guilty about the money? After he unlocked the door and threw the slide-bolts, he opened it and the Reverend passed through. “I’ll be in touch,” he grunted.
The Reverend didn’t look back.
««—»»
Sixteen hours had passed since the Reverend had paid him a visit. It was dark enough for Rex to travel. In daylight, it was impossible for him to avoid the stares and horrified reactions of people. He climbed into his Hummer and drove to the pawnshop. The owner must have expected him—he could see bright light streaming from the gap between the front double doors.
Much like Rex, the pawnshop owner was an enigma to the townspeople. The owner was seldom seen in the shops or restaurants, and he never advertised. If someone wandered into the shop in pursuit of second hand goods, they always left disappointed. The only wares on the shelves were esoteric artworks, foreign language books, and mechanical contraptions that defied simple description. If any would-be customer lingered too long, the owner simply mentioned how costly the items were and that was usually enough to goad most of them to leave. If that didn’t work, he had other ways. The word in the street was that the owner was an occult practitioner and Rex knew this to be true. The pawnshop owner had approached him over the years for assistance, and Rex saw firsthand the methods he had used.
Rex parked his Hummer a block away and walked back to the pawnshop. The doors were unlocked. He opened them as wide as they would go. With a little effort, he pushed his girth through. Inside, he ignored the shelves of goods and proceeded to a long counter in front of the left wall. The pawnshop owner stood there with a frown, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Good evening, Rex.”
“Evening. Thank you for the reference.” His voice sounded like a car driving over gravel.
“You’re here, so I assume you took the job. This is going to be a bad one, Rex. No one who goes into Painfreak comes out quite the same—if they come out at all.”
Rex cleared his throat and growled, “Can you get me in?”
“I think so. Stand on the sidewalk in front of the brick building across the street.”
“Now?”
“You don’t have much time—it might already be too late. If I can bring the entrance back, I’m
not sure I can hold it here too much longer after you go inside. You get in, Rex, and then you get out as soon as you can.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
“You might still be able to leave. I just don’t know where you’ll wind up.”
Rex knew this job could be the biggest mistake of his life. But the lure of Painfreak, with its rumors of sexual abandon and unfettered carnage was too deep to ignore. He had to see this place. “Let’s do this.”
««—»»
Every passing car slowed. The occupant’s eyes widened and their heart rates accelerated when they caught a glimpse of what stood on the sidewalk across the street from the pawnshop. Their headlights revealed a giant—as big or bigger than any pro-wrestler or comic book movie character they had ever seen—standing still, his gaze set on the bricks before him. If he turned his head and the angle were right, they could see his face. Engines were gunned, some cars leaving rubber in their wake.
Except for an occasional sweep of his head left or right, Rex stared at the brick wall for maybe an hour. Fatigued, he closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, the entrance to Painfreak filled his vision. He breathed deeply, and before he could step toward it, he felt a pull on his pant leg. He looked down and saw a little man bent at the waist. The Reverend’s assumption was correct. It was a dwarf.
“Hey there, big fella,” the dwarf squeaked, “you want to go someplace where your wildest sexual fantasies come true?”
Rex raised an eyebrow and stared at the little man.
The dwarf continued in his helium-high voice. “Big guy like you, hell, you would fit right in! We got girls. We got small girls with big tits and big girls with small tits. We got boys, too, if you want. You like boys? We got big boys with small dicks and small boys with big dicks. We got other things, too. Things you never dreamed of…and maybe some you have.”