Sex and Murder

by Douglas Allen Rhodes

  “Julia,” Louis intoned.

  “My lord,” she managed to whisper. “You’ve come.”

  Louis took her hand and guided the two of us across the threshold and into the front room. Julia’s gaze stayed on his face for long seconds. She seemed entranced—no, she was entranced.

  Louis motioned to me with his free hand. “This is a friend of mine.”

  She turned to look at me, as if noticing me for the first time, and favored me with a smile that spoke volumes on how much she envied my position.

  To be honest, I found her creepy.

  She quickly returned her attention to Louis.

  “The others are here, my lord. We were just about to begin, I…I had no idea you would….”

  I got the impression that Julia was not a woman given to stammering. She struck me—aside from being rather off—as an educated woman. Obviously our visit was quite an event in her world.

  Louis placed one finger to her lips to hush her. She quivered at its touch and, her eyes growing wide and mischievous like a young girl on her first date, she took his fingertip into her mouth. Louis gave a radiant smile.

  “I wished to surprise you with my coming.”

  She suckled his finger and trembled with joy.

  “Come now, Julia, let us join the others,” he prodded. “The time is right.”

  Reluctantly, she separated her lips from his finger.

  “Yes, my lord,” she answered.

  She turned and walked through the house with us in tow. We reached a large oak door at the back of her house and, stepping through, found a long stairway heading down.

  At the bottom of the stairs, we entered a small stone room lined with fifty or so candles in various shades of red and black. They provided the room’s only light. Through the back wall, the dull hum of chanting sounded. I opened my mouth to ask about it but stopped myself.

  Julia began to undress, revealing a nice but normal body that she obviously wished for Louis to notice. Several times while stripping, she paused to flash him a smile as if to say ‘You know I’m yours for the taking’. She even gifted me with a lesser version of the smile. I had the decency to smile back.

  Once she’d shed her clothing, Julia pulled a long, black robe out of one of several cubbyholes in the wall and put it on. An odd affair, floor length and trimmed in red, it looked like the kind worn by a church’s choir. It hung well on her, and, after she’d let down her hair, she seemed a good deal more pleasing to look at.

  Taking up a slender black candle, Julia pushed against a stone in the center of the rear wall, revealing an unobtrusive stone door that I had failed to notice. Through the opening, I clearly heard the chanting—now distinguishable as several voices speaking in unison—grow louder and more distinct. Without a word or motion of invitation, Julia stepped through the doorway and into the chamber beyond.

  Louis and I followed.

  The chanting, which sounded like Latin (but turned out to be Aramaic), grew to crescendo when Julia appeared, only to plunge into silence as Louis stepped through the doorway behind her.

  The six men and six women who gathered in the room gaped in awe at the sight of Louis. Of varying ages and appearances, each had dressed in a robe like Julia’s and held a black candle. They stood in two circles, the men in one and the women in another, each standing at one of the points of a six-sided star that had been drawn within their respective areas.

  At the head of these circles, and between them, was a third, smaller circle. Within, it contained the drawing of a pentacle. Julia walked to that circle, taking her place in the center. She beamed at the others, who, for their part, stood slack jawed and silent.

  They most likely would have stood that way for eternity had Louis not broken the silence. Slowly, in that beautiful timbre of his, he took up their chant, beginning it anew. They all joined him.

  Stronger and stronger, the chanting grew to fill the chamber, its lyric repetition thick in the air. Julia’s face shone with the ecstasy of the fanatic, and she swayed in time with the chant, her arms and hands moving in intricate geometric designs. Her movements had something powerful in them, something ancient and great, and they seemed to coincide with each rise and lift in the voices, as though Julia was an infernal conductor of a dark symphony.

  Louis ceased to chant the words of the others and took up words of his own. He spoke with slow, deliberate syllables, and the voices of the others surged to a near-screaming melody—yet his words rang clearly above all. They were everything that the words of the others had been, but they were also different, more magnified, as though theirs was the reality with the original chant a feeble copy. I swear I could understand them, but no sooner did they enter my mind than I found them gone, their meaning forgotten.

  Julia began to cry.

  Louis began to glow.

  It happened suddenly. I can’t really say at what point. I looked at the men and women then looked at Julia, and finally, I turned to Louis. He had become enshrouded in a nimbus of light. A light of purest white, it spoke nothing of the goodness that white is accredited in the Western world. No, this white was the eastern white of the Orient—the white of death.

  All eyes stared at Louis, mine included. Before us he transformed, changing from the flesh and blood, suit-wearing mortal I’d arrived with, into a creature of the supernatural.

  He grew and widened, his clothes ceasing to be there, until he stood an easy fifteen feet in height. His blazing aura filled the room, illuminating us all and beating at our minds with the insanity of the power it contained. I gasped and took a step back from him.

  The chanting continued, but I no longer listened to it. The light was both a deafening cacophony and a numbing silence.

  Then I saw his wings.

  They spread out from behind Louis’s back with a shocking suddenness, more beautiful than any human’s ability to comprehend. They danced through a multitude of colors: scarlets and oranges, purples and reds, indigos and blues. All the colors of flame spiraled throughout them, beginning with white and culminating in the purest black creation has ever known. Every shade they manifested tore at my senses. They shimmered and wavered like a mirage, all the while giving the impression of solidity that only diamonds possess.

  No being could compare or attempt to emulate what he became, and, as he stood there in his glory, the sounds of the chant, the very music of his acolytes took form, swirling about him and clothing him in their sound.

  Throughout his change and for some time afterwards, my mind screamed the entire time for me to look away, begged me in the name of my sanity, and pleaded with me for my soul’s sake. In the end, I could stand it no longer. I tore my gaze away and looked at Julia.

  She, and all the others, had fallen, smitten by ebullient rapture, to lay on the ground, unmoving.

  A hand—powerful and masterful, yet undeniably human—gripped my shoulder. I turned. Louis stood before me, clothed in his suit and looking just as he had when we’d arrived at this place.

  He smiled at me with affection. “Come, Robert. We really should be going.”

  A thousand questions filled my mind, but I asked none. Louis walked over to Julia, kissed her forehead, and strode into the other room. I followed him out and up the stairs, out of the house to the waiting limousine.

  I never asked Louis about that night. I’ve never even felt the desire to. I have my beliefs, I have my fears, but, most importantly, I have my sanity.

  I know when to quit while I’m ahead.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I spent the entire next day asleep. I woke up at nighttime, the previous day’s events still beating on my brain like a three-day vodka hangover. I needed to get the hell out of town. I showered, and the water eased away my anxiety. Dressed in Levis and a black T-shirt, I packed my .45s and two changes of clothes into a dufflebag and left the hotel for home, hitchhiking for a change of pace.

  The first vehicle to stop for me was a semi (isn’t it always?), its driver a big
guy—fat but muscular, who looked far too much like Bull from Over the Top to ever be trustworthy. He told really bad dirty jokes for about three hours and dropped me off at a truck stop when he stopped for gas.

  I ended up going to the home of a waitress named Kim, a fair-looking girl of the sort that always seems to get lost in small towns, buried in abusive marriages, and always wishes for a life as exciting as the stuff she sees on Jerry Springer. We stayed up most of the night, doing coke and fucking, and in the morning she gave me a lift two hours down the road.

  My next ride came from a minibus full of deadheads on their way to some festival or another. I dropped acid with them—around four or five drops of some insanely good liquid—and killed them all at the peak of my trip.

  I felt bad about that. Deadheads are usually good people, but shit, man, that acid was strong. I kept their minibus, and the skull of one guy, Pigpen (it kept talking to me, saying the most interesting shit about mice). The bus wasn’t in the greatest shape, but it had a killer sound system and more bootleg Dead albums than I’d ever seen.

  For a few days, I let myself go hippie, taking mass quantities of their acid and doing the various other drugs they’d left behind. After about three days, though, I had to get some other music; there’s only so much Dead one can hear days in a row. I stopped at a music store and bought a Queers album—the one with Ursula Finally Got Tits—and chilled to the irony of I Hate Everything playing on a Deadhead minibus.

  Around the fifth day of this long, strange trip, I happened to notice the blue lights of a small town sheriff’s cruiser coming up fast behind me in the rearview mirror. I pulled over obediently and waited for the cop to come up to my window. He never did. Instead, he called at me over his cruiser’s loudspeaker.

  “Haul your hippie ass out of that piece of shit and put your hands where I can see them.”

  I went along with his request.

  Once out of the minibus and facing the cruiser, my hands raised over my head, I got my first look at the sheriff.

  A decent sized guy, about 5’10” and relatively well built, he sported the obligatory beer gut and Stacy Keech moustache. His uniform fit well and was decently pressed out, though not starched like the troopers do. Mirrored sunglasses covered his eyes, and a black cowboy hat perched on his head at an angle. He stood confidently beside his cruiser, one hand resting on his gun.

  “Afternoon,” I drolled. “What can I do you for?”

  He looked me over with a speculative eye; obviously I wasn’t what he’d expected to find in the van. The thing was, at that moment, I was lost somewhere in the fourth hour of a hardcore acid trip and just about to peak. Far too many zany ideas about how to kill a sheriff ran around loose inside my head, taking turns peeking out through my far too-wide-open eyes to, low and behold, find just such a being standing there, right in front of them. It must have showed.

  The sheriff looked at me a few seconds more, sizing me up. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Robert.” I flashed several quick consecutive smiles. “Robert Parker.”

  “Uhn-huh.” He paused and spat. “Just what exactly are you doing in my county, driving that God forsaken piece of hippie trash down my roads?”

  I smiled. “Just passing through.”

  “Uhn-huh.” He spat again, this time with anger. “And what do you suppose I’d find in the way of illegal narcotics if I was to search that piece of shit?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” My smile broadened, becoming a Cheshire grin. “Couple pounds of weed, some acid; hell, you might even find a little coke if you look hard enough. I doubt it, though. I’m pretty sure I did the last of it yesterday afternoon.”

  His gun whipped out to point its business end very specifically in my direction.

  “All right, smartass, get your hands on your head, turn around, and face the van.”

  “Can’t do that, Sheriff.”

  “Uhn-huh,” he said, training his pistol barrel on my face, “and why’s that, Jackass?”

  “‘Cause then I couldn’t see you die.”

  Well, that did it. Before you could say Andy Griffith, the sheriff fired off three rounds at my mug. I stopped them, willed them to spin in front of me, making no progress, just inches away from my nose.

  He didn’t show too much surprise, though his jaw slackened a bit. I planned to send the bullets sailing back at him, but their shape and the way they spun fascinated me. I ended up just staring at them for several moments.

  By the time I managed to pull my mind back into my brain and away from the bullets, the sheriff had jumped into his car, turned it around, and started to get the hell away. My original purpose for the bullets recurred to me, and I sent them after the sheriff, traveling at twice their original speed. They shattered his rear windshield and sprayed his mind all over the front one. His cruiser careened out of control, left the road, and flipped two times, end over end, before landing on its roof.

  The whole sordid spectacle left me with the acid laughs, and, for the next two hours, I couldn’t stop chuckling.

  * * * *

  I arrived back home in Illinois, road weary and traveled out. I’d ditched the minibus a while back in favor of a sporty Catera I’d come across during a side trip massacre in suburbia.

  The whole thing had been the duck’s fault. I’d always wanted to see how one would handle and, hey, I’m a sucker for a Cadillac. To make a long story short, I got the car and left behind two dead yuppies and one massively mean king rottweiler.

  I abandoned the car (which, by the way, drove great) in downtown Chicago and took a cab to my house.

  Once home, I spent a day lounging around, smoking the last of the hippies’ bud and reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. By six that evening, I’d finished it and sat caught up in a moment of silent contemplation as I wondered at the vision Huxley had painted. The book, with its oppression through utopia future view is great and, together with 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 it forms an indispensable triumvirate of prophetic literature.

  After so much weed and a seven-hour read-a-thon, I’d grown quite hungry. A steak dinner was in order. I’d seen a fine place in town, a restaurant for the very upper crust (where chefs sport degrees in culinary science and waiters don’t care if you like your soup), and decided to try it out.

  I showered and shaved, did myself up, and dressed in a strictly Mafioso-ass black double breast with a black shirt and red tie. My .45s nestled snug against my ribs, and I sported my new rings. I took a last, approving look at myself in the mirror and made my way to the garage to get the Hummer and leave for the restaurant.

  I pulled into the parking lot around eight, dropped the Hummer with the valet, and walked inside. The place was nice, the sort of digs where you’ll see the beautiful and the powerful in their natural environment. I didn’t have a reservation, but a well-placed tip got me an out-of-the-way table where I could enjoy my meal with some privacy. I ordered a strip steak with russet potatoes, a bowl of soup with a name I didn’t recognize, and a bottle of Merlot.

  The waiter left to fetch my wine, and I took a moment to scan my area. Several couples sat around me: young, upwardly mobile executives and their specially bred consorts, middle-aged professionals and their wives, and, of course, the just plain wealthy. I was in the process of taking a second look at a very attractive brunette when my wine arrived. The waiter undid the cork and placed it solicitously upon the table to the right of my plate. He poured me a glass, and I thanked him, signaling that he could leave me to my wine.

  I took my first swallow of the Merlot and almost made it all the way to fully appreciating it. The distinctive ‘ping’ of sub-machinegun fire interrupted me, cutting my enjoyment short. Several different rifts of gunfire followed. The shrieking pandemonium that always accompanies that sort of thing kicked in, and more gunfire rang out.

  I loosed a heavy sigh, trying to feign annoyance at having my meal cut short, but, truth to be told, the prospect of watching some mayhem that I didn’t have
to start myself excited me. I’d been shot recently, though, and hadn’t enjoyed the experience very much. With a wave of my hand, I erected a transparent shield around myself and my table, one just large enough to keep me out of harm’s way without interfering with the ability of others to scramble about me, alternately screaming or shooting at each other.

  I settled back into my chair, sipped my wine, and waited for the chaos to reach me. I didn’t have long to wait.

  Several men, dressed in leather trench coats, black jeans, T-shirts, and various styles of biker boots, stormed into my area, indiscriminately mowing down the up and coming with AK-47s, AR-15s, and what looked to be a MAC-10. Common greasy thugs of the archetypal ilk, they sported flowing manes of unkempt hair and a wide variety of beards, goatees, and moustaches.

  That puzzled me. There seemed to be no reason for them to be doing what they were. Bikers, especially those who are organized enough to arm themselves well and stage paramilitary raids, tend to go for basic, straightforward objectives when killing things. They either want revenge, money, drugs, or women—all in that order. These guys didn’t seem to be after any of those things (unless some sort of revenge was taking place, which was unlikely considering the disparity in social circles involved), they just gunned down anyone and everyone at random.

  They moved closer, and I noticed that they all sported the same tattoo on their foreheads, three triangles in a pyramid formation, held together by a central circle. That raised a fifth possibility: maybe these guys were just nutjobs and this was chaos for chaos’s sake.

  It turned out their reason was none of the above. It all became clear to me the instant I spotted their leader.

  He walked around the corner with the cool, calculated strides of a warlord or general. He stood no taller than 5’9”, a medium-sized man with a slim build, yet a presence of power emanated from him, like the kind one would feel around much larger men. His long, reddish-blond hair separated into two layers—one pulled up into a topknot on the crest of his head, the other falling down to his shoulder blades. A long, black leather trench coat covered his black knit shirt and jeans, reaching down to the ankles of his square-toed boots. He held two .50 caliber Desert Eagles. In the center of his forehead, above his fierce Germanic features and long, reddish-blond goatee, he boasted the same triangles and circle tattoo as the others.