Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  Here the jazz gave way to Elvis on the radio singing "Don't Be Cruel" . . .

  ". . . I could hear Elvis through the keyhole between my prison and the main room. We lived in this old Lafon house in the French Quarter, the top floor of which was furnished in antiques. Bookcase, credenza, chiffonier, and desk by artisan Prudent Mallard. The clock on the wall surrounded by masks a genuine Gustav Becker. Here, during Mardi Gras, Mother made a fortune by torturing men. When we arrived from Canada, after she killed Dad, by poisoning him to watch him die before cutting a hole in the lake to bury him in the Arctic, we didn't have a penny. Suzannah found work stripping in sleazy Bourbon Street bars, but soon found kink was where money begged to be made. I spent weeks at a time locked away in that room, light out because she knew how much I dreaded the dark, that keyhole my only window on the world outside. 'Mommy! Mommy, I'm sorry! Forgive me, Mommy! Please!' I would cry while she pranced about her parlor, the rings passing the keyhole each time Suzannah slinked by. When she was high on cocaine—and that was most of the time—Mother used to talk to the masks. ..."

  On the wall facing the French doors to the balcony hung carved wooden masks from Africa. A Baga Nimba with an Ashanti fertility head. A Bambara elephant face with an Oule mask from Bobo. Staring vacantly at the door to Sparky's prison were painted masks from the Near or Far East. A mummy mask from Egypt with a Roman mask of Pan. A Japanese Gigaku with a Chinese T'ao T'ieh. Around the keyhole and its teary eye hung faces from pre-Columbian times. An Inca death mask with a Hopi Katchina doll. An Iroquois false face with a Salish spirit mask. Circling the French doors open to greet the masks of Mardi Gras were masks each guilty client would don before she took him downstairs.

  Hollow eyes.

  On naked flesh.

  Bending over the table.

  Tearful eye.

  At the keyhole.

  Fixed on Mother's rings.

  The razor blade tapped to the music as she chopped up the white powder, working it into thick lines across the glass table. Rolling a crisp hundred-dollar bill into a tube, she placed it to one nostril and plugged the other, and then inhaled sharply to suck up all the drug. A shudder shook her spine, jiggling her ample breasts, the rouged nipples of which she plucked as she threw back her bald head and groaned an orgasmic "Ahhhhhhhhh . . ." To complete the ritual she wet her index finger and washed it over the surface, then rubbed the residue of coke around her gums.

  Also on the table were the texts of her trade:

  The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade.

  "A Child Is Being Beaten" by Sigmund Freud.

  "The Discipline of Pain" by Henry Havelock Ellis.

  Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing.

  Jitterbugged by the drug, Suzannah strutted to the doors and spread her hands high and wide to embrace the fireworks. "Carnival! Flesh, farewell! Mardi Gras!" she cried. "Let the Lupercalian rites begin! Come to me, my lovelies! Pagan, perverse, and unrestrained. Hide those faces, yes. But you can't hide from me. For I know your secrets, and you've been naughty boys. Only punishment will relieve your guilt. And my kind of punishment will cost you dearly. So bring me money, or bring me jewels, and let the blood flow!"

  Turning from the balcony, she sashayed across the parlor, rolling her shoulders to twirl her breasts as she did onstage when all those piggy male minds drooled for her body. This bedroom off the parlor was a riot of red and black. The walls were red satin with red velvet drapes to match, the spread on the bed a red patchwork quilt. The carpet was black; the dresser, wardrobe, and washstand were onyx; and each ebony post supporting the canopy of the bed had chains and handcuffs of blackened steel.

  This was the room where Mother straightened Sparky out.

  On the bed.

  "Watch the rings."

  With the tools of her trade . . .

  ". . . saddle straps to separate the buttocks for the bite of the taws. Slave sandals, locking bibs, posture collars, anal probes, cattle prods, choke gags, valved submission helmets, and the like she used upstairs. The heavy-duty stuff was down in the cavern. ..."

  Cocaine shivers tingled her skin. Trickles of cold sweat snaked down between her shoulder blades to tickle the small of her back, while her heart beat wildly in a bid to burst out through her breasts. Eyes glazing in a face flushed by blow, she pinched her nose to sniff her head full of snow. She sat across from the Ice Queen in the boudoir mirror and washed a hand with red-lacquered nails across her shaved scalp. The blue veins spreading like fingers reaching up from her temples throbbed with the rapid pulse at which her heart pumped blood. Feline green eyes watched her blacken sultry lids with theater makeup, fingertips working the smoky shadows around the sides of her head. Having cleaned her hands with cream, she chalked her face white, then painted her mouth with bloodred lipstick. Suzannah kissed the mirror.

  "You beautiful bitch," she purred.

  Feeling ferocious and dominant, she gathered tools and work clothes from the wardrobe, then strode back to the parlor to douse the lights. Bursting over the krewe parades along Royal Street, fireworks flashes danced on her masks, the sightless eyes focused on the keyhole in the door. The flame of the match Suzannah lit to ignite the candelabra flared the eye at the keyhole and caused it to blink.

  The gold rings winked.

  The chair on which Mother sat, one leg raised high to pull on a stocking, had leg irons affixed low on the rear legs, and handcuffs low on the front legs to grasp the wrists of men bent over bare so she could flog what Shakespeare called "the afternoon of the body." Lifting a red garter belt from the pile of clothes, she pulled back one suspender like a slingshot elastic, then fired the snap at the nearest mask. The whap of the slap rang hollow within the German executioner's mask next to the Beelzebub by Theodore Benda.

  "Will you be coming to Mardi Gras for Gesasserotik this year? Your Gauleiterin is waiting with her bridle, saddle, burs, and spurs. What guilt you carry from what you did during the war, Mein Herr General, so lay those diamonds you smuggle in from Paraguay at my feet, and I will ride you around below like the horse meat you are, until your plump white crupper is one ruby Mensur scar. Did you know my father in Vichy France? He collaborated with your ilk, when he wasn't fucking me in the stables of our vineyard. I don't have him, but I have you, Mein S.S. Assman, so Gesasserotik it shall be with my Horns of Venus."

  Suzannah fastened the garter belt around her waist and tethered the top of each stocking with two snaps at the thigh. The nylons rasped softly as she bent to pick up the birch, the red suspenders blood through cream to the eye at the keyhole.

  "Behold your dreaded soko birch, my ardent flagellomane." She held the whip out to the empty eyes of the Corbel hung between the Creon mask from Stratford and a death's head Hussars busby. "The closest to poetry in a flogging tool. Made, at most, of five or six long, lean withes, toughly budded and further hardened by steeping in brine. Birch being a water-retentive wood, salt eats into wounds. Compounded with strips of whalebone of the kind once used to stiffen ladies' corsets. A wire wound around makes it stiffer still."

  She poked one eye of the Corbel with the rod.

  "Are you and your quivering nates coming to Mardi Gras, my lord? Le vice anglais I promise you. We French know in every Englishman's subconscious lurks a cat-o'-nine-tails and a maid in black stockings, so here waits the maid"—she plucked a garter and let it snap back—"eager for you. In no land has passion for the rod been as systematically cultivated as in yours. What evil did you yoke on your empire that burdens you so? You remind me of my husband, shiny brass buttons and all. So tough on the outside and penis puerile within. What he did to me I'll do a hundredfold to you. No tidy pain. Birching to blood, my lord. You'll find Horns of Venus make me a perfect prefect."

  With a pirouette by candlelight, Suzannah spun and lashed out at the whipping chair, pff-ffuikk pff-ffuikk pff-ffuikking the birch so splinters tore from the wood thrashed with all her strength. Rings glint-glinting at the keyhole eye, breasts bobbing r
hythmically with each vicious stroke, the pff-ffuikk pff-ffuikk pff-ffuikking a relentless rain of terror, her breath hissed raggedly through even white teeth as each bite of the rod curled her lips into a satisfied grin.

  "English pig," she snarled, tossing the soko birch aside. "You think yourself superior to your own osychology. ..."

  ". . . I was afraid to watch, but even more afraid to back away. For there were things in the darkness behind waiting to swallow me. Things injected by her before my first memory. ..."

  Each tick of the clock seemed to tug the room into tighter focus, bitter coke running down her throat from her nose, while Suzannah did her striptease in reverse, preparing for tonight's work. The corset was cut low in front to accentuate her cleavage, and ended just short of her groin. Stitching both sides of the black leather garment were red laces, while circles cut in the bodice exposed her rouged nipples. Leather straps running from the armpits up to her throat were fastened to a studded black collar. To complement the fantasy, the dominatrix pulled on a pair of spike-heeled, red-laced, knee-high black boots with silver spurs. Then a pair of shoulder-length, red-laced black gloves snapped onto the collar, with fingertips sliced away to reveal her red-lacquered nails.

  "I'm ready for you, precious. See," she said, hand holding a cigarette case full of needles up to the hood of the Ku Klux Klan, mounted between a New York Yankees catcher's guard and World War I gas mask. "We all yearn to hide behind a mask. There's no culture in history in which masks don't play a part, so carnival appeals to a basic human urge. But you, my Yankee Doodle Dandy, give 'Flesh, farewell' such literal meaning. Hide under your second skin all you like; the plaster will make a white white supremacist out of you, but"—plucking five-inch needles from the case and slowly jabbing them into the hood—"don't think you can stop me getting under your skin."

  Suzannah turned.

  "Now you, Sparky . . ."

  ". . . I watched her walk toward me through the penis of the keyhole. Have you ever noted a keyhole's phallic shape, the knob at top for the rod of the key and shaft below for the teeth? As she neared, candelabra in hand, her head and feet, then breasts and knees, then stomach and thighs disappeared, until all that filled the penis was her thatch of pubic hair. ..."

  "Are you your father's child? Or do you belong to me?" The voice from above was hoarse and throaty. "Time to go to Mother's bed and straighten you out."

  The candlelight winked off six gold rings piercing the labia of her sex and glittering in Suzannah's pubic hair.

  The rings through her lips were laced shut with a black leather thong.

  Winterman Snow

  Totem Lake

  "Let's get a look at you. See if anything's broken inside."

  The bullet hole in Spann's parka was directly over her heart, exposing the lightweight body armor beneath. The order was all Members flying to the lake had to fly sheathed, the rebels having shown a penchant for taking potshots at planes, so Spann had worn a vest during the flight with Dodd. It amused her that Bush, like most men, had ogled her chest, which protected by the vest was as shapely as Queen Victoria's bust.

  "Ughh," Spann gasped as she reached up to undo her parka. Sharp pain like that of a heart attack shot down her left arm.

  "Allow me," said the Mad Dog, gallantly easing off the coat and stripping her body armor. "I can trust you not to cry sex harassment, Kathy? Could be a broken rib stabbing your heart."

  He unbuttoned her shirt and spread it wide to bare her bra. "That's an ugly bruise," he said, while poking her rising and falling breasts where they sloped out of the cups.

  "Now's your chance for a good long look," she said dryly. "You've stripped me with your eyes since the day we met."

  That day was years ago during the Headhunter case, when they'd squared off in the locker room of the Tudor building that now housed Special X, the Mounties around them betting whether he or she could arm the better ERT team, and this macha woman had whipped this macho man's cockiness.

  The Force had first recruited women in 1974, and Spann had topped the original troop trained at Depot Division in Regina. Most men back then were hostile to her being in the ranks, so when her barracks trunk was sent ahead to her first posting, detachment Members held a lottery to guess her bra size. When she arrived, a suitable pair of plastic breasts were waiting on her desk, regimental number penned around both nipples. The way Spann viewed life, breasts were the battlefield of feminism. Whether it was fashion flaunting them for ages, or Hefner launching Playboy with Monroe's pair, or bra burning hi the sixties, or Barbie implants, or Madonna's side show, or Hooters restaurants—tits were it. The Mounted's first uniform for women had been designed to show them off. Unlike men, who wore cotton shirts with pockets, she was issued a silky top without pockets that clung like Handi-Wrap, so all could see "her high beams" when she was chilled. Women's trousers were also pocketless, so notebooks and other equipment were tucked in her belt. The hat looked like an inverted flower pot.

  Spann had fomented a vote among women to have that changed, prompting a reprimand for "aggression" from an inspector who, the only time she phoned in sick, marked her file with a circle colored red. The passing of that vote quashed the sexist uniform, and now women wore the same working dress and Red Serge as men, forage cap and Stetson included.

  In 1992 women finally reached the select ranks of commissioned officers who ran the Force. Since she came in laterally, the deputy commissioner didn't count, but that same year saw women rise to the rank of inspector, and if—as Spann was confident—De-Clercq promoted her the head of Administration at Special X, then she, too, would soon be among the Brass. With zero tolerance the rule for sexual harassment, the only all-male bastions left were the ERT teams.

  How Kathy yearned to crash them!

  A brawny loner with a heavy-browed scowl, Mad Dog Rabidowski was the meanest-looking Member in the Force. He was the sort of sexist who believed "harass" was two words. There had been a tune when people said he looked like Charles Bronson (I was too rough on Hollywood, thought Spann), a likeness he welcomed until Bronson went soft, so now he echoed the screen moves of Harvey Keitel. The Mad Dog made a point of dating only whores, for—as he put it—"Why mess with amateurs if you can blow with a pro?" Alone with him in the ERT command trailer at Zulu base, Katherine Spann could smell testosterone awaft in the air.

  "I'm hurt," said the Mad Dog, "that you find me so crass. I'm engaged to Brit, and was gonna ask you to be my best man."

  "You! Getting married?"

  "Sure. Why not? You're a not-bad-looking broad. So why aren't you hitched?"

  "Never found the man who was man enough for me."

  "Must break your heart that I'm outta circulation, huh? And speaking of broken hearts, your rib cage seems okay." He buttoned up her shirt and said, "If you're so hung up on tits, you oughta see Brit's."

  "As I recall, everyone saw her tits after the bomb blew at the Red Serge Ball."

  "So with such beauts at home, what makes you think I wanna gawk at yours?"

  Trust the Mad Dog to take a hooker to the regimental ball, and boast to one and all about the fortuitous way they met:

  "I'm on the Lougheed a few years back, driving up valley to an ERT meet, when I see the car ahead weaving down the road, crossing the center line and then veering toward the shoulder, back and forth, this way and that, gotta be the best impaired I ever snagged, so on go the wigwags to pull the drunk over."

  The Mad Dog offered Spann a cigar to accompany her glass of port. "Don't stop now," she said. "I'm hanging in suspense."

  "Sitting behind the wheel is a naked babe, jutting the best set you ever did see, not a stitch to hide the buff before my eyes except a flimsy G-string around one ankle."

  "You ask her to blow?" said Spann, feeding him the breathalyzer double entendre.

  "No, she told me to give her the ticket fast Said she had a job stripping in a local bar, and having been late three times that week, she'd been warned once more and she was out the doo
r. Due onstage in five minutes, that's why she was changing in the car. Asked me if I'd ever tried swapping undies for a G-string with my foot on the gas."

  "Have you?" Spann asked.

  "Funny girl."

  "Give 'er the blue?"

  "Didn't have the heart. I drove her to work code three while she changed in my car."

  Spann looked at the next ballroom table, where Nick Craven was conversing with the Mad Dog's date, a bleach blonde in a low-cut, skin-tight gown. Yes, Brittany Starr did jut the best set she'd ever seen, so Kathy took the offered cigar, bit off the end, and lit up.

  "That's what I like about you, Spann. No bullshit. Hit in the heart by a slug, yet still you hold onto the Smith."

  The Mad Dog held her gun up in one hand, comparing it to the SIG/Sauer he carried. Since 1954 the side-arm of the Force had been the Smith & Wesson .38 Special, a six-shot revolver long outgunned on the street. The ERT teams were the first to get semiautomatics, but now the Force in general was switching to the Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter in two models. The larger Series 5946 held a double stack, fifteen rounds staggered zigzag hi the mag and one in the spout. The smaller Series 3953 held a single stack, eight rounds piled high and one in the spout, with a lighter trigger pull for dainty fingers. Cop mentality is such that no sane male would dare pack the "woman's gun."