Whargoul

by Dave Brockie

  I stand in the rough earthen tunnel and climb upwards through a vertical shaft that empties into the void, which until recently had housed a coffin. Now only broken shards and scraps of cloth remained as I raise my head above the lip of the grave. I was in the workers plot, a gaggle of rude tombs, torn by shell and bomb, which was nestled in a courtyard behind the house of Necrosov, master of Stalingrad. And the screams poured down upon me, like a horrid radio play.

  A volley of Russian shells tear across the sky, briefly lighting the church. It was simply built, and any decoration had long since been scraped away by the fires of war. But the building had not taken many direct hits due to its location in the midst of several huge factory buildings. It was well protected, and this is why Necrosov had chosen it as his home. The building itself was very solidly built and didn’t even resemble a church—the commissars frowned on religion but the factory managers found it essential. It was one of their graves I peered out of now, gazing upwards at the bloated building that all but blotted out the sky. I would know your secrets, Necrosov. I wanted in.

  This was how it went. The cities were becoming depopulated according to plan. In a sense it was very close to what had happened to the Jews. The “undesirables” were herded into the ghettos. When they were all in one place, they were destroyed. The same thing was happening to the blacks. Except instead of Zyklon B they used crack and cheap guns. They used crumbling schools and low-grade health care, lies and deceit, false hope and fake money. It was undetectable genocide, cities built with bone.

  Young black men killing young black men wasn’t a cultural phenomenon. It was population control. And men killing men wasn’t the only payoff. It was also the countless retroactive abortions their premature deaths caused. That was why black men seemingly had no concern for birth control. It was because they could instinctively feel what was happening to them as a race, and they were determined to fuck themselves into continuance.

  “I am the death of America!”

  The screaming man stands on the edge of the ledge, teetering in the wind. He is a young black man wrapped in an American flag, with a gun in one hand and a megaphone in the other.

  “I am the death of America!” he screams at the backs of the retreating crowd. “I am going to die today, and you can’t stop me, and when I die, America will die with me!”

  I watch on TV as the spectacle unfolds. Somehow this guy has gotten into the Empire State Building with his hardware and taken up a position on the ledge of huge lights above the main observation deck. Holding a gun to his head, he screams and rails against the injustices of the world as the crowd of observers grows. First they try to talk him down, then they consider shooting him. Then they try some reverse psychology.

  “Go ahead and jump asshole, you’ll just be another splat on the pavement.”

  The man drops the megaphone and dumps a jar of gasoline on himself. He lights himself on fire.

  “ I am the death of AmericaaaaAAAAH!” He screams one last time as the police shoot at him. He leaps off the building, trailing flames, and plummets earthward. At the last second he shoots himself in the head and impacts, exploding like a watermelon.

  ***

  A woman has survived my attack upon the prison and she flees into the sewers, me pursuing, popping off shots at the fleeing Jewess. My howls shake the stone. She stumbles along in terror, her arm bloody and mangled, hanging loosely at her side. I chase her droplets and watch her ass shake. She falls heavily and I come up behind her in a rush, cradling her from the filth and clutching at myself, rubbing my crotch the length of her leg, as I tear at her clothes in slobbery fashion.

  Gods, she was a beauty. Wide and dark like a gentle rift to the world of comfort, the plane of pleasure, the completion of the ideal. And she wasn’t afraid of me anymore. When she saw me she saw a devil, and when she saw a devil her belief in angels was confirmed. When she saw Whargoul she knew she would go to heaven. She stared through the piss-soaked gloom and I saw pity in her eyes, and tenderness, and understanding that I was powerless to do anything to avoid my existence. She accepted me and what I was. As a woman she understood me better than anyone in the world, even my dead friend Kepler. She was a creator, I was a destroyer. We needed each other.

  My submachine tears off the top half of her head in an iron roar.

  “Who are you, bitch?” I said. “Who are you bitch that is dead? Who are you, women, which I can’t understand, who are you women, and who is your man?” I scoop the remaining brains out of her head and jab my tongue into the hole (it’s warm).

  Then I heard the whirling flesh mixture calling me all from behind. The slobbery slip of a thousand tongues all clutching each other from the river of filth which ran through these bowels, these foul holes where men poured the contents of their asses, which helped to plug up the works with their war-mangled carcasses, which went to feed the flesh-vats. My journey craft was built in the midst of the shit brown blood from the sub-tunnel, leading down but moving up. Leading far past the boundaries prescribed by the city planners, into the areas where no human could survive, but where their presence was required.

  Her soul is sucked into the making, and there I cannot give chase. Her energy is used right in front of me. I can only behold as the river thing spews forth a pulsing cocoon, a glistening, hive-like, quivering array of molten flesh, which I move to become a part of, which moves in anticipation of my clutch. It wraps me in those same dreams of comfort, the feeling of belonging, the touch of a woman. The meat whirl swallows me, and I pass below the surface of the shit-choked water drawing me through these new canyons of undead pulp.

  I have passed the surface world and surge to a new dawn. East Front no longer exists, and I go to greet the birth machine. I see now that my whole life has been building to this, from the first moment I was spewn forth from the icy Volga. I have been drawn back to the west the whole time, bearing buckets of blood that were the lessons I had absorbed to make me worthy of such an effort. I sensed that there were others who had failed similar tests. I had killed some of them. I was the victor here, the generals were my pawns, their leaders made of uncomprehending clay. I knew now that they were all to be killed, all to be sent below, sent to the center of the Earth where it lurked and lived and spat out its murder machines.

  The creator of the destroyer. Warsaw is being destroyed. I ride a wave of fresh corpses back to the anti-womb. I’ll be rewarded—I’ll eat ‘til I burst—I’ll find a new form. I’ll suck it in and spit it back out at you and the world, reveling in my love of spite.

  And then—could it be done? Could I then achieve the goal I had barely let myself even dream about, yet knew in my blackened heart I had been created to accomplish?

  I would murder everyone in the entire world.

  6

  armored whore

  Bear with me. I cannot tell my story in chronological order. I must write it down as I remember it, and it is good for my sanity to not remember everything at once.

  I’m hiding by the side of a road. Not a nice paved American road, either, a rutted and gnarled goat track winding through inhospitable terrain. No lush forest here, only stunted growths clawing life from the land. Night enshrouds this world but does not prevent me from seeing the things that I see. Like a bug on a tree thirty meters away. Like the column of trucks and armored vehicles slowly snaking their way up the side of the valley whose side I perch upon.

  They are Iraqi soldiers, and they have come for me.

  They call me the Wolf-Woman. For years I have been working in this area. I’m naked, as usual. I haven’t washed for over a decade and it really shows. Hair grows out of me in matted clumps, from my armpits, enshrouding me in a set of surrogate clothing, framing a face that would later be seen as a lovely one. I haven’t cut my hair for years and it stinks. It’s matted with shit and blood; bugs live in it. My breath is a fetid vapor that will wilt green leaves. My breasts jut with vigor from the filthy forest, baked by the sun, pendulous and bloated with undeli
vered milk. I revel in my wretchedness and use it as a shield against encroaching humanity. Especially my own.

  This region was rent with misery and thus it was perfect for my hateful activity. The native people, the Kurds, were desperately trying to carve out an independent nation inbetween Turkey to the north and Iraq to the south. The Iraqis had lost much at my hands, and apparently they felt I was some kind of demon the Kurds had summoned to fight them with. The truth was I couldn’t give a damn about either parties and did my best to inflict suffering on both.

  I squatted on a rock and ground my clit across its rough surface as I watched the humans approach my mountain with mixed feelings regarding their arrival. Their lives were in my hands but for the first time in years I was filled with doubt.

  Should I release my ambush of piled boulders and logs? It would certainly close the road down. Then I could hunt them at will through the vales and dark passages, cultivating their terror, as you would season a steak. I would kill them one by one until there were none left to report back as to why their mission had been a failure. There was just another mystery, another missing patrol, and another series of letters to write back to concerned and then grieving parents. And another glutted Whargoul, one slaked on souls and blood, fat and happy and filled with an unquenchable desire to inflict suffering on others in order to alleviate her own pain.

  But if that was my plan then why had I let one escape the last time they had come for me? Why had I let that man with the torn and bloody uniform stumble eight miles through the snow with my howls driving his frozen feet?

  It was easy to hate the humans and I’d been determined to never return to their midst. I had been living outdoors for ten years, ever since the Mossad had blown my lover and myself up. Since they had tortured us to the point of death with a blowtorch and liberal applications of battery acid. I could still feel the kiss of the naked flame upon my instep.

  They had arrived unannounced in the middle of the night. They had Gabby at gunpoint and promised to release her if I acquiesced to their demands. So I had allowed myself to be wrapped in heavy chain.

  Then they tore out her tongue. It took considerable effort as she had quite a strong mouth. I will never forget the sound it made as the last strand of muscle popped free.

  It flopped to the ground and glistened wetly as one of them pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, regarding me coolly through thick glasses perched on the front of his bland and egg-shaped face.

  “Your name is Joachim Pieper. You were a member of the Waffen SS. In 1944 you commanded a Kampfgruppe in the Ardennes offensive. Your unit massacred both civilians and prisoners in the area of Malmedy, Belgium, on December 28th of that same year. We have come to exact some small measure of vengeance.”

  His voice was as bland as his face, as he paused to remove his glasses and wipe flecks of Gabby’s blood from them. She mercifully had passed out, a torrent of crimson spilling down her chin as she was bound across from me by the other one in the immaculate dark suit. After this he unpacked a black leather bag, arranging the contents on the table in front of me. A pair of pliers, a hacksaw, a variety of drugs, and a propane torch. And let’s not forget the hot glue gun. After he is done he turns to me and fixes his piggy-little eyes on me. His slash-mouth barely moves as he speaks.

  “We are here to kill you. We will do this by hurting you for as long as possible. And there is nothing you can tell us to make us stop. We don’t want to know anything about you—we know all that we need to. We have been sent here for no other reason than to torture you in the most agonizing way possible for as long as we can. When you begin to pass out we will give you stimulants. When we need to sleep we will give you sedatives. We are here to flay every molecule of your body.”

  I try, but could not telescope my tongue into his eye and suck out his brain. My powers, ignored for so long, had totally abandoned me.

  “Let us now be to work. I want to see you cry before breakfast.”

  They had thought of everything. They had brought food. They had brought reading material. They worked in shifts, the skinny one who never talked, and the fat one that never stopped. They pulled out my teeth, one by one. They ripped out my fingernails, poured acid on my genitals, and squirted hot glue up my ass. They had worked on us for days, and to their credit they really seemed to enjoy their work. And every now and then they would show me a photograph of a man they said I had killed. And gradually the memories I had worked so hard to erase came back to me, and I realized that I deserved every ounce of pain that they gave me. I prayed to the abyss for a death that I knew I could never have.

  But Gabby could die, and she did. She died in sobbing agony, her mouth spouting foam as they poured acid down her gullet. They were amazed that I did not die, though they would not show it. So finally they just blew us up.

  But I never cried, never screamed, never gave those bastards an ounce of satisfaction other than the blood they drained out of me.

  This experience had left me filled with fucking hate until there was no room for anything else. Yes, I had done the things they accused me of. But I had been powerless to control myself; I had done these things because I thought it was the right thing. I had only been trying to impress my Father. I had been programmed. Everyone else was doing it—these and a thousand other reasons.

  But certainly Gabby had not deserved it. She had been the only person to ever show me love, and left undisturbed she might have healed me.

  And my paintings. My other love. The days I had spent under the blazing sun, fancying myself some demonic Van Gogh, painting and drinking with Gabby at my side, gobbling at my rod. After a few years the work had begun to get quite good, and the shed in which I was storing them soon was full. The Whargoul’s boundless energy applied to the fine arts. Perhaps they are in there to this day, shining in the dark with the conviction and expression of a beast that for a time sought to heal his sin through pigment. How useless to think that could have worked. How self-indulgent. There was no way to paint over my sin. But if you could find them, perhaps you could get me a show.

  They took me from my love, they took me from my art, and they brought me back the past I had tricked myself into forgetting. If they thought they were doing the human race a favor they were horribly mistaken. Because the vengeance I swore would take years to achieve and the body count would be unimaginable. Now, with my tits, pussy and strangely dark skin, I take leave of my past and walk towards my cursed future, crunching through the fresh snow in my bare feet.

  I wander the Alps, staying high in the hills, skirting mountains and glaciers, occasionally attacking an isolated outpost of humanity and making quick work of any I find within. I had tried to outrun my destiny by staying in one place, tried to drown myself in wine instead of blood. How foolish of me to believe they would have let me escape.

  I move to the south, shunning all except when hungry. I move at night, slinking like a shadow through the brush. And the whole time I puzzle at myself and the new bits that I have. Like the hole I must fill with my fingers in order to know glee. Like the useless dick-nub that pee no longer comes out of. Outcast, unsure, I become as wild as dirt and vow to never return to their world again.

  But vows, like necks, were made to be broken. I await the column that will take me back to the humans, to once again lead them into the death maze. Men were on the moon and nuclear bombs sure had potential. I had wasted enough time painting and playing animal-woman. New wars were forming and I was missing all the fun.

  ***

  I’m standing in the ruins of the Polish diner. I guess the bomb finally went off. I can’t eat heavy bread so I just walk into the midst of the ruin, ducking under the yellow police tape and crunching through the debris until I stand where my favorite table used to be.

  “I’ll have bread, and make it heavy. Make it banal and tasteless, and keep it coming until I’m dead.”

  I sit down amongst the rubble. The whole block is gutted from the resulting fire my bomb caused. When
the fire trucks arrive the locals attack them. Thirty eight people die that day.

  I’m looking for the Chinese man. I know he can help me. He made me fall asleep. He knows what I am and he knows how to help me. If I could only find him.

  I get in the Riv and cruise. Finally it runs out of gas and I leave it in the middle of the street. I walk around for several days, occasionally snorting huge bumps of heroin from a ketchup dispenser. Finally, I grasp the obvious and decide to look for him in Chinatown.

  The streets are filled with raucous celebration. Giant beasts prowl the streets and suck writhing maidens into their champing jaws. The people applaud with glee every time a virgin is ripped apart. Nearby skeletal ducks applaud from rotating corpse-roasters as firecrackers ignite constantly or go out in the sticky blood that clogs the gutters. Everywhere there are slick and stylish young men with dangerously angled faces, leering from doorways, comparing guns and stories of pussyfucking. I am surrounded by deals and air charged with sweat and cordite, cooking flesh and Asian snatch. Gods, I’m giddy. Jesus, I’m horny.

  At Lo’s Noodle World there is a denser crowd of young people gathered outside, climbing up on trashcans and clinging to the window grates to get a glimpse inside. I wedge myself through their midst so I can understand.

  “What’s happening?” I barely ask one as the words plop out of my drug-addled mouth.

  The man gives me a strange look but decides it may be prudent to answer my question, lest I bite half his face off.

  “Happens every year. Some crazy old man eats a whole bathtub full of noodles.”

  I can’t get closer without getting physical so I do. I use my expanding fingers to pry flesh apart and one-by-one the mass begins to relent. It’s hot inside, and bright with lacquer. Impossible scenes of Asian bliss throw themselves off the walls as bodies squirm against me. Several times I’m off the ground but I make way, ignoring curses, threats, and finally a switchblade rammed into my back. I’m too fixated on my dream of salvation to care what anyone thinks and the fact that I am the only black and huge man in the place means nothing to me. I’m finally in the inner chamber where the spectacle will unfold, as I pop my joints out and gain another six inches.