Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  “Where do you suppose the parents are? I didn’t see an Amber Alert on TV this morning,” he said, helping her to stand. He shut his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “What sort of monster would you have to be to do that to a kid?”

  “I hope I never find out,” she replied.

  He’d gone with her to class, the same one they both took. They sat together at the back of the lecture hall, almost too quiet, shocked. How was it they made a date to see a movie later? Dorien had been surprised when he’d invited her. She didn’t consider herself to be especially attractive, probably why she didn’t date much and still hadn’t slept with anyone. She wasn’t sexy or vivacious or even remotely fashionable. But he’d asked and she’d said yes, counting lucky stars one by one to have (however the ill-favored auspices of their introduction) the attentions of such a gorgeous guy.

  Dorien hardly remembered the rest of the day. She’d had one other class in the afternoon, biology. They were studying parasitic flatworms prone to infesting the liver and digestive tract. The textbook showed photographs of invertibrate Cestoda (phylum Platyhelminthes) and the occasional drawing or painting of extinct or at least very rare species like the aureum incretum. Her biology prof, Leonard Landa, droned, “Called ‘aureum’ because of its bile-yellow color, this pest was quite a problem in the ancient world where it bred in unsanitary conditions in primitive cities that didn’t have the benefit of modern sewage management. Similar in appearance to many tapeworm species, it possessed a definite head, followed by a series of identical segments called proglottids. The head, called the scolex, bore suckers and hooks which allowed it to fasten onto its host. The body was covered in tough cuticle through which food was absorbed. It had no mouth or digestive tract and was hermaphroditic. Unlike tapeworms, the aureum incretum would live in its host without reproducing until fully grown, reaching a length of up to many meters coiled within the digestive tract. But it was only an eighth of an inch in diameter. Upon reaching this stage, it would then exit the host by swimming down the intestine and the rectum, sometimes killing the host but usually only causing a great deal of discomfort as the bowels were blocked and locked up for a time. Ancient doctors—when a patient was stubbornly constipated—used to quip ‘he’s raised a champion goldworm.’”

  Landa paused in case anyone wanted to laugh. When nobody did, he continued, nasally and upon a single note. “The last time the aureum incretum was actually seen much was during the heyday of Victorian patent medicines. Ladies would ingest one to keep them slim enough a man could put his hands all the way around their waists. Then one decided to swim downstream to spawn—as it were—while the lady in question was at a function attended by Queen Victoria, and this was the end of that particular fad.”

  Dorien felt woozy, leaving biology fifteen minutes early. She went home, showered and sanitized, then stretched out on her couch until it was time to get ready for her date. Maybe it was because she couldn’t get the image of that baby out of her head. Or perhaps it was a case of nerves, giddiness at going out with somebody like Gavin, someone clearly out of her league.

  Dorien didn’t even remember what movie they saw. Some chick flick. Women in fussy clothes talking about their orgasms in high prose, profound pussies yack yack yack. He’d chosen it, perhaps to prove himself sensitive. Dorien always found those dull, preferring action to pretention. Show me life as I’ve learned it: blood and guts, violence and sex. Even if she’d never had sex nor hurt anyone. That wasn’t the question anyway; the question was realism. Anything less was a sham, unworthy of anybody who recognized grimmer truths.

  The theater was across the park from the university. She lived farther into the city, but Gavin had an apartment just off campus.

  “Come back to my place first, Dory?” he offered, not pushy, not acting as if he expected her to screw him for the price of the movie ticket. But the scent of his aftershave was a scented, secret garden. “Sure,” she answered, trying not to appear nervous. “And really, I prefer to go by Dorien.”

  There had been several students at the movie. Dorien and Gavin were hardly alone as they took off across the park. It was about 10:00 p.m. The moon had already climbed halfway up to the top of the sky, where it sat like a round caramel, sullied by the smog. They strolled across a bridge, in a group of at least ten others. When a scream came from the culvert below, everyone ran to the railing to look down.

  “Hey!” Gavin cried out. “Don’t! Hey!”

  It was dark below. There had been lights but the bulbs had been smashed. It was hard to make out the black-clad group as they attacked some hapless, homeless old woman. Their victim managed only the single shriek before something scooped from the ground was thrust down her throat to shut her up. She’d been stripped naked and beaten. No one knew if what had been stuffed into her mouth was her own shit or a gang member’s. Dorien heard her choking, strangling. A couple of guys ran to either ends of the bridge to scramble down the slopes to help the woman.

  The assailants wore stocking masks, dark-tinted hose stretched to distort and conceal their features. They’d hunched over the woman and relieved themselves, now shaking their naked asses at the people on the bridge. From what she thought she saw, some of the punks were female. One pulled a pistol from a coat pocket and shot a boy coming down to save the woman. He—or she?—then swung about and aimed it at the other would-be-rescuer until that kid started trying to climb the slope again, slipping, sliding down toward the culvert.

  They pulled their jeans up slowly-as-you-please, understanding full well there was an indignant audience overhead. They didn’t even care that someone had turned a video camera on them, getting their fifteen minutes of fame. Fuck yeah! Well, if that camera lacked night vision, they wouldn’t get much. So it was no big deal that this was the first time anybody had witnessed one of The Shit Detail’s crimes. How much did they really see? Dorien assumed they were leering and sneering under the stocking masks, but there was no way to know for certain. It was strange how silent they were, not gesturing and shouting obscenities. Yet when they ran off, they howled and yipped for about fifteen seconds, raising the hair along her arms and on her scalp.

  She clung to Gavin, frozen with horror but also oddly detached. As if watching a crime as it was committed a long time ago…or somehow witnessing an act destined to come about painfully, atrociously in the future.

  Was this the worst thing she’d ever seen? Or had the baby carriage been that? How did you measure atrocity? Was there a point system for grading, so much for each participant and more for every perversion? Did each blow count? Every drop of blood or splinter of bone or inch of greasy coprolith? Was gang defilement necessarily worse on a scale of one to ten than murder, and ought there to be a greater distinction made if the victim took an especially long time to die? Before tonight Dorien thought she understood what evil consisted of. It was graphic, intentional of blunt force and explicit with gore. It grinned as it turned cities into abattoirs, dancing without subtlety with blood splashed to further inflame already burning loins. Evil was extreme, unspeakable, relentless violence. Its aim was to dismantle you unto your most sacred atoms, rape your soul into uncreation, rip your sanity from asshole to lips, and snort the names of your most sacred beliefs until you were damned forever in the five second high it enjoyed immediately after. She seemed to have eagle eyes, seeing down into the dark so clearly, senses at a crucial peak she wouldn’t have thought possible. She saw the bloody mass as it leaked from the old woman’s torn rectum where something—a bottle or piece of brick—had been forced. She heard her wheezing the final breath. Smelled rust and uric acid and earthy stool. Tasted from the air the spaghetti the woman had found in the trash outside an Italian restaurant, her last meal. Felt her own sphincter muscle clench. Read the message written on the hard culvert wall, printed in darkness in the dark, in a spot where the lights from the bridge didn’t shine. So how could she see that? What? Did she suddenly have super powers?

  A small black angel getting
sick

  From eating too much licorice stick.

  He takes a shit, then disappears;

  But as the empty darkness clears,

  Beneath the moon his shit remains

  Like dirty blood in dirty drains.

  —Rimbaud

  Dorien’s vision abruptly spiralled, turning round and round faster, faster, clockwise and completely lightless. Then she was in Gavin’s arms, hearing him shout, then whisper her name. “Do you do this often, Dory?” he asked when she finally came around.

  “Do what?” she wanted to know. Did he guess she’d just had these sensations, like some smutty savant?

  “Faint,” he clarified. “You know, you almost tumbled over the railing.”

  “I never faint,” she said. “Twice today is a coincidence.”

  He managed a subdued chuckle. “Sure you’re not pregnant?”

  She smiled back, rueful. “That I’m positive I could not be.”

  And she added in a whisper, “It’s Dorien…”

  ‘Dory’ had always sounded infantile to her. It was demeaning to be rendered down to the childish component. As if you didn’t have even the remotest possibility of survival. Her father had always called her Dory, a growl that drifted down the hallway as he prowled it. Sirens in the distance came nearer, sound gargled in the clotted atmosphere. Several of the witnesses on the bridge had gone down to help the boy the one gang member had shot. From his moans and gasps, it was obvious he still lived, even as he clutched his gut and bent double in the shadows. A couple others checked the old woman but only shook their heads, hands pressed protectively against their noses and mouths, keeping out the stink—and shielding themselves from the invasion of evil.

  Gavin and Dorien remained long enough to give statements to the police. She’d started shivering even though the night was warm yet. Gavin took off his shirt and wrapped it around her. It made her feel guilty, noticing how muscular he was, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, washboard abs. This was inappropiately arousing, moistening her between the thighs as an emergency crew loaded the old woman’s corpse into the back of an ambulance. Shame on me, shame shame. How can I allow myself to feel steamy? Guess I’m no better than a jungle creature myself.

  They continued their walk to his apartment. She really should have just gone home but she shook too much. He wouldn’t hear of it. “I think you need to sit down and rest first. My place is just right over there, quarter of a mile tops.”

  He kept his arm around her to help hold her up. Then once inside his door, he led her to the sofa and got her a glass of sherry. Could you believe that? In this age of imported beer and flavored wine coolers, he gave her a glass of sherry for chrissakes. Amontillado, pale in the glass. Its flavor was high and dry, no note of sweetness in it. Nothing of the taste of alimentary-processed, garbage can spaghetti.

  He gave her this romantic swill, then held her, stroked her wheat hair, studying it with an admiration that said he could tell it was natural—not dyed. She’d wilted from the sheer stress of the day. Coming upon the scenes of two separate murders was extreme even by the standards of their city, which had from time to time been the murder capital of the country. She couldn’t just flip it off as simply more random acts in homey hell. She felt unclean and knew that once she reached home, she would indeed be burning this set of clothes.”

  “Would you like a hot bath, Dory?” he suggested. How had he realized that? Could he be the perfect man? “Of course you would! After something that nasty…”

  And this time she didn’t bother correcting him on how she preferred her name to be. She was starting to think she liked the way he said it: no growl, no thrum from the jungle.

  He ran the bath, pouring in foaming soap which smelled of vanilla. He gently removed her dress, panties, bra. Carried her to the tub like she was a child who’d been pushed down at a river bank. Still naked to the waist so there was no need to roll up his sleeves, he washed her, caressed with strong yet tender hands. Gavin massaged the horror right out of her back, arms, legs.

  This is a dream, she thought. And I’ve no plans to wake up for a while, thank you.

  Could he be for real? Dorien didn’t know, not having anyone to compare him with. But she’d heard other women talk. She’d heard them bitch was more like it. Drunken, selfish dicks, the lot of mankind. Didn’t care, didn’t call.

  No, Gavin was wonderful. If he wasn’t, then how come he always had so many females chasing him? He possessed the raw, magical talent to banish evil from the moment, disarming its threat with holy finesse. He anointed her into believing there might be hope yet.

  Damn, did that sound like emotional drivel? Right out of a vapid paperback with a couple on horseback, riding across the beach? Fragile lady and Renaissance hunk? Well, so what? It’s how Gavin made her feel: safe, cherished, redeemed as only love could do it—a heart at a time. She was glad she’d saved herself for a man like him. (Actually, she hadn’t saved it. She wasn’t a saint or made of particularly moral stuff. It just hadn’t been asked for prior to this.)

  Dorien’s alter-ego (who liked to believe she was so tough) knelt in a corner of her subconscious, stuck not just two fingers or three fingers down her throat in the gag joke choke but the entire bulemic fist. Puked up roses and kittens and cooing doves. Give me a break…

  (Fuck off, Id. This here’s my moment.)

  She stood in the tub as he toweled her off, then let him carry her to his bed. It was just a mattress with a bottom sheet on it and a single feather pillow. No top sheet, no blanket or quilt. He laid her down here and then began to kiss her. She let his fingers roam anywhere and everywhere they pleased as he whispered her name, “Dory, Dory…”

  Almost sounded like ‘I adore you.’ Music. Fairy tale or wet dream, the heat inside her built until she thought her nipples and crotch would catch pink fire. Having sex for the first time didn’t have to conjure up the images she’d seen on cable’s soft porn. This was her own poignant torture and then frenetic release. It filled her with delicious grief, then emptied her out again. Made her buck with her sturdy pelvis until she lifted him right off the mattress. Slung herself upward and across the ceiling like some metaphor for orgasmic levitation, then made all her flesh turn into frosted peach jelly.

  She’d bled some; virgins were supposed to do that, right? The hymen split by the man’s erection and then a small amount of what felt like boiling scarlet spurted out with or without a startled feminine scream, juice of the proverbial cherry. Clinical, traditional, amazing. She rippled in all possible directions, out toward a contrapuntal combination of nervous laughter and freakish deaf-mute transcendence. She went blind for an instant, next saw the city’s stygian shit straining at the window, matting itself in brown sworl against the panes, trying to desecrate this single pure moment of hers by passing through the glass by means of a feculent osmosis. It did enter the room, overtaking Dorien and Gavin, covering them in suffocating purgation until they froze in mid-thrust, fossilizing as ash-covered victims in Pompeii. It was evil coming in, determined not to let her escape through love, determined to drag them into the underworld which existed on a tide of worldly sewage.

  Dorien bit her tongue, confused and angry. Where had that come from, so close on the heels of rapture? It was the baby submerged in monstrous scurf in the carriage, the old woman throttled with her own void. It was the damned brown night, arriving in buggery behind a bleeding asshole of a sunset. Because you couldn’t help but be poisoned in a city like this, body and mind. Body, mind, and soul.

  The hallucination, or whatever it was, fled. She lay nestled in Gavin’s arms, inhaling the musk and spice notes of his cologne, his clean skin. Did she also detect something else? A foulness left behind from the lapse she’d suffered?

  She let herself muse on sentimental schtick. They would never be apart. They would live together forever, never tiring of each other’s bodies. Even if it wasn’t true, she could imagine it for a while. And it might end up happening. Such things did occu
r.

  She glanced toward the window again. For the first time, the night had changed. Not brown, not putrid with toxins and tricked out like a whore trying to hide her plague with cosmetics. It was black, velvet, clean. As if the apartment had been transported to somewhere far outside the city, far beyond the earth. She held her breath, it was so beautiful. How could it be that there was no light, no corrosion?

  Gavin leaned close, nibbled her ear. He whispered sweetly, “Leave now.”

  She was distracted, confused. “What did you say?”

  He gave her shoulder a little push.

  “I’m finished with you. Get out.”

  She stared at him. He must be joking. But if he was, his face didn’t betray the humor.

  He shrugged. “Go away. Get out of the bed, get dressed, go home.”

  Outside, brown darkness against the window pane. Impure night. Inside, brief love affair with the “love” removed and “sordid” used to replace it. His game was not revealed to her but she crawled off the bed and, shaking, began to dress herself.

  He also got off the bed, began stripping off the sheet and the pillow case. Without looking at her—as if she’d already left the apartment, at least as far as he was concerned—he folded these neatly around the secretions their sex had left behind. He took a plastic bag from a drawer in his dresser and slipped the items inside.

  She saw the bag bore a label with a name on it.

  Dorien Warmer

  So he didn’t have trouble with her name.

  And he had the bag prepared before bringing her there! He’d planned this humiliation?

  He opened the closet door and laid it on top of a pile of similarly labeled bedsheets in plastic. His souvenirs.

  He glanced back at her, arched one finely crafted eyebrow, and asked, “What? You still here? Would you get turned on by my foot up your ass? See these?” He indicated the bags of memorabilia. “This is all you are now. The sum total of your importance in this world. Get fucked, get sick with sores all over your body, get dead. I don’t care. Just get out.”