Grimoire Diabolique

by Edward Lee

  Another tenant greeted him as they passed on the stairs, an old man. “Night’s coolin’ down, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.” Rosser feigned a chuckle. “It’s about time, too, hot as it was today.”

  The old man paused, “Oh yeah, I’se almost fergot. Mrs. Doberman was lookin’ fer ya.”

  Rosser almost shuddered. Careful, careful! But he knew he was also prone to overreacting. “Really? I saw her this morning. Any idea what she wants?”

  “Naw. She’s down in her office right now, though.”

  “I’ll…go see her. Thanks.”

  This was something Rosser didn’t need. But he still kept his cool. If I sneak out without seeing her that could definitely raise suspicion. It was probably nothing, though. She probably just wants to ask about next week’s rent, wants to know how long I intend to stay. I’ll pay next week’s rent now. Then no one’ll know I’m gone.

  He walked stolidly downstairs, through the day room to the office. The office door was open.

  Rosser cleared his throat and entered.

  “Oh, Mr. Rosser! There you are!” the landlady greeted from behind her desk. “I was just about to go to bed.”

  Mrs. Doberman had what could be described as a “hatchet-face.” Mid-fifties, paunchy, graying hair pulled back in a bun. Through her tacky blouse, her breasts seemed to hang down to her stomach in tubes. Not a becoming woman, in other words, and—now that he thought of it…

  She’s almost as ugly as Maxine. Jesus. Must be something in the water.

  “One of the other tenants said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Why, yes.” A big bright smile. “I just wanted to let you know that I didn’t call the police.”

  Rosser’s heart nearly stopped. He stared.

  The ungainly woman stood up, came around the desk, and traced a crabbed, veiny hand across his shirt. “I couldn’t do that. Selfish, call it.”

  Rosser croaked: “Puh-police.”

  “Of course. See, I know what you did. Molestin’ that poor baby. Shame on you, Mr. Rosser!”

  Rosser’s throat felt like it was sealing shut. “I-I-I was set-up. I didn’t do it, I swear to God. This-this woman I met on the bus… She made the whole story up.”

  She walked around, closed the office door, and locked it. Then she returned and sat up on the desk.

  “Woman like me, gettin’ on in her years, not much to look at no more? Then you walk in, the handsome stranger, so different. And on the run.”

  Rosser could not fathom this. “What…are you…talking about?”

  The big stiff smile seemed to hover in the air. “Oh, I know that stuff about you messin’ with the baby is all malarky—”

  Rosser’s eyes went wide. “You do?”

  “Oh, shore, hon! Maxine told me all about it. She’s always pullin’ stunts like that. What a character! But don’t you worry none. You take care’a me, and I’ll take care’a you.”

  God Almighty! Rosser thought. Now Mrs. Doberman had hoisted her skirt, revealing a panty-less pubis. She was masturbating right there on the desk, her finger roving a vagina that was as much of a repulsive mess as Maxine’s.

  “You give me a some lovin’ when I need it, and everything’ll be fine,” she said. “Oh, and just so ya know, what I like best is ta have my pussy et.”

  Rosser’s mind spun. Nightmare, he thought but he knew he was awake. Then he remembered what she’d just said: Maxine told me all about it.

  Rosser’s voice grated like millstones. “You know Maxine?”

  “A’course! She’s my daughter, and she just moved in here with cute li’l Shots. Hey, Maxine?”

  A door behind him clicked open, and in flopped Maxine, all smiles, all hanging fat and bulbous face and mole-studded neck. Now that he considered it, he easily saw the resemblance between the two women.

  “Hi, there, Mr. Nice Man!” she celebrated. “Bet’cha thought ya’d never seen me again!”

  The atrocious baby remained wrapped around her side. It glared at him, blowing spit bubbles.

  “Ga! Ga-ga!”

  “Git down on them knees, Mr. Rosser,” the landlady instructed, “and give me some proper pussy-eating. Once or twice a day’s all I’ll need. And each time yer done with me, ya kin have some fun with Maxine, too. Way I understand the law, there ain’t no expiration’a the time Maxine can press charges against ya fer child-molestation.”

  Rosser was growing dizzy in nauseousness. Mrs. Doberman spread her legs, dividing her sloppy vulva with her finger.

  “So come on, you silly man. Let’s git on with it!”

  Rosser fell to his knees.

  “And when you’re done with Momma,” Maxine added, “I’ll be in the bedroom, waitin’ on ya.”

  Shots flapped some feces on Rosser’s back.

  “Ga! Ga-ga!” the baby said.

  — | — | —

  THE MOTHER

  My God, Smith thought. This is my wife.

  He’d lain her out naked across the bed. Her nipples looked like bruises now, and her skin—every inch of which he’d once caressed in love—glittered pastily beneath the gelid sweat of death.

  My…wife…

  The bivalving scalpel flashed in his hand.

  I’m autopsying my wife.

  Smith took a heavy breath. Then he began to cut.

  ««—»»

  “Jeannie! Don’t go near that!” Smith shouted. He clambered clumsily after her down the wooded hill, careful of stumps and roots hidden under leaves. Whatever that thing was in the ravine—A keg? he wondered. A drum?—it just looked…nasty. It wasn’t supposed to be there, and he didn’t want his daughter touching it. “Jeannie!” he shouted once more.

  Jeannie gladly pretended not to hear these heated commands of her father, as would most 7-year-olds. Instead she nimbly wended through branches and brush, and descended into the ravine.

  The thicket crunched beneath Smith’s plodding feet. Two decades of a pack of Parliments a day reminded him how out of shape he was. Some doctor, but at least his patients couldn’t accuse him of hypocrisies. He loped ahead, gasping, and raised his arms to shield himself from the spiny branches that seemed determined to thwart his progress. Smith was a liberal; he was also an over-reactor. He remembered any number of headlines detailing his worst ecological fears. WAYNESVILLE CANCER RATES FOUND TO BE THREE TIMES HIGHER THAN NATIONAL AVERAGE. A.A. COUNTY FINED MILLIONS FOR SECRETLY PUMPING UNTREATED SEWAGE INTO BAY. BROCK CLIFFS NUCLEAR WASTE WATER SEEPS INTO RESERVOIR. And so on. Smith, as a father, felt legitimately paranoid of the faux pas of this new age of progress. Just nights ago he’d read in the Post about containers of toxic waste that had fallen off a truck near an Edgewood elementary school. Some teenagers had opened one of the containers, and had died in hours. Then there was that town up north, an entire community evacuated when cable TV diggers had uncovered a secretly buried consignment of binary waste products, compliments of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. The stuff had been there twenty years. No wonder the town’s miscarriage and birth defect rates had been so high…

  And this thing in the ravine, it looked like a chemical drum of some sort, with bright red stripes like a warning. Smith had spotted it from the back porch with his binoculars. Bird watching, he always told Marie. Oh, that’s nice, dear, she’d said once. It’s wonderful that you haven’t lost interest in your childhood hobbies. This was partly true at any rate; Smith had indeed been an avid bird-watcher as a child. The only thing he watched now, however, was that Donna Whatshername next door, the neighbor’s kid. On days she didn’t have classes at the community college, she’d lie out in her backyard, to work on her tan. What she also worked on was Smith’s libido. Jeeeeeeesus Christ! he must’ve thought a million times, focusing the Bushnell 7x12s. It astounded him, the level to which modern swimwear had reverted. Bikinis these days made the ones Marie had worn years ago look like winter parkas. Smith had a funny feeling that Donna Whatshername knew he was watching her. The poses seemed staged, lewd, near
ly masturbatory. Too often the girl would untie her top and idly roll toward Smith’s gaze, her eyes closed as if sleepy. Donna was, to put it eloquently, well-possessed of an ample mammarian carriage, or, in Smith’s less eloquent consensus: Good Christ and Lord Almighty, that is one humdinger of a rack of milk wagons!

  All of which had fairly little to do with the bizarre white drum that sat not 100 hundred yards beyond his property line. He’d been focusing up, the usual ritual upon coming home from work, while Marie prepared dinner. Donna sauntered across her own yard as if on cue, all long tan legs, curvy contours, and…mammarian carriage. “Jeeeeeeesus Christ!” Smith muttered, the binoculars close to welded to his eyes. “She ain’t wearing a bikini, she’s wearing dental floss.”

  “What’s that, dear?”

  Smith jerked the Bushnells quickly toward the woods. Marie had come out onto the patio, looking domestic as ever in her fuzzy slippers, lilac sundress, and calico apron.

  “A black-throated blue warbler,” Smith feigned enthusiasm. “A female too. You can tell by the pink spot on each wing. They’re rare for this area.”

  “Oh, that’s nice, dear.” Her broad, pretty face shifted in a blink of fuddlement. “I could have sworn you said something about dental floss… Anyway, dinner’ll be ready in ten minutes. Have you seen Jeannie?”

  “Naw,” Smith replied, never veering his gaze from the scape of the woods. “She’s probably watching those Star Trek reruns, as usual. Either that or she’s in her room playing with her Kirk and Spock dolls.”

  Marie disappeared back to the kitchen, leaving Smith slightly asweat. Be careful, you idiot. Yes, he’d have to be more careful than this. He felt no shame in his frequent voyeurisms—Looking’s not cheating, he rationalized. It wasn’t like he was having sex with Donna, was it? He was merely reveling in the visual appreciation of her womanhood. What was wrong with that? This was no different than bird watching, espying pretty things in nature, celebrating them. Donna Dental Floss was a rare black-throated blue warbler and nothing more.

  But, boy, oh boy, a thought seeped. What I wouldn’t give to—

  The most adulterous images betrayed him. Smith humping the foxy coed hell for leather right there in the grass, his eyes crossed. Dog-style, missionary, her feet pinned back behind her ears—it didn’t matter—redepositing one allotment of his semen after the next—

  Stop it! he commanded himself. Don’t be a cad!

  But cad or not, just as Smith would turn the binoculars back to the bikini-clad human masterpiece in the next yard, he caught one last glimpse of the wood’s descent, and he noticed the—

  “What the hell—”

  —white, red-striped drum.

  “—is that?”

  The drum sat half-buried in the ravine, and that’s when Smith dropped the Bushnells and bolted, for it wasn’t only the white drum that he’d seen, but also his 7-year-old silken haired daughter eagerly ambling toward it.

  ««—»»

  “Stay AWAY from that! Smith’s voice cracked through the dense green woods. Jeannie glanced up, and froze. Terror bloomed in the big, bright-blue eyes. Curiosity incarnate had been caught; Daddy the Destroyer was here.

  “One more step, young lady, and you lose your dolls for a week,” Smith threatened from the edge of the dried ravine.

  “But, Daddy—”

  “For a month,” he embellished. “Now step away from that thing. It’s dangerous. It’s dirty.”

  “No it’s not, Daddy,” the little girl replied. “It’s—

  “If you don’t do as you’re told, missy, it’s no more Star Trek. Forever.”

  This horrifying consequence reflected an even deeper terror in Jeannie’s shining child-eyes. She paused, peering at the white drum, then backed off. She ascended the ravine’s thatchy slope while Smith himself went down. “Stay there,” he said, pointing a stern finger.

  “But why is it dirty, Daddy?”

  “It just is,” came his articulate response. He plodded toward the cryptic keg. How can you explain something like this to a 7-year-old? Well, you see, honey, some really bad man decided to dump this drum of tumor-accelerating, carcinogenic, ganglionic-response-inhibiting and probably irradiated toxic effluvium in our back yard because he was too lazy to dispose of it properly. And it’s dirty, dirty stuff, and that means if you get near it your orbital lobes will turn into giant coaxial metastatic masses by the time you’re out of college, and your ovaries’ll be glowing like a pair of fucking Christmas tree lights. “It’s dirty, honey,” he replied instead. “It’s like dog poo. You don’t want to get near it.”

  Her little face looked cruxed. “But you’re getting near it.”

  Smith frowned, choosing a long fallen limb. “That’s because I’m a grownup, and grownups are allowed. But little girls aren’t.”

  “That’s dumb, Daddy,” came Jeannie’s haughty response.

  The drum’s rim appeared crimped, offering a small egress. Smith poked the branch into it and pushed. “Aw, shit!” he exclaimed and leapt back. The lid popped off, emptying a gush of black, lumpy sludge into the ravine’s craw. Smith could’ve vomited. The stuff stank worse than a fish market dumpster in high summer.

  He gaped at it a moment, his handkerchief to his face. The sludge looked coagulated, like gravy that hadn’t evened. Large bubbles rose from the surface of the spill, percolating, and the stench thickened. Thank God the creek had long-since dried up, otherwise the stream would be hauling this gunk away right now. Smith felt momentarily weird, staring at the crisp, popping bubbles. His sweat rushed—the mass of ichor seemed to waft shifts of heat.

  “Come on.” Smith huffed back up the hillock and led Jeannie away from the ravine. He took long strides, yanking her by the hand. Boy, this pisses me off, he fumed. I’ve got a kid for God’s sake. Some chemical company asshole dumps this crap near kids? Yeah, what a world.

  “I saw a falling star, Daddy,” Jeannie remarked as they headed back to Smith’s cedar-shingled Colonial. It cost 150k, in a nice cul-de-sac. Smith worked hard for it, and for everything to keep his family comfortable, and then some thoughtless creep pulls a stunt like this. Word gets around and the whole community could go to hell. Smith envisioned the headlines. TOXIC WASTE DUMPED IN STORYBOOK TOWN. PROPERTY VALUES PLUMMET. Assholes, he thought. “What did you say, honey?”

  “But it wasn’t really a star,” she enlivened on. “It was that drum. I saw it last night.”

  “You saw Star Trek last night is what you saw, miss.” Kids, Smith thought. Then they were back at the house, back to normality. “Dinner’s ready,” he said. “Don’t forget to wash your hands.”

  ««—»»

  He’d reported the incident to the police anonymously; he didn’t need a slew of questions. With my luck they’ll think I had something to do with it. Smith reasoned that whoever had dumped the sludge had brought it down the old logging road on the other side of the treebelt, and that’s what the authorities would conclude.

  That night he slept fitfully, dragged in and out of chasms of dreams. He never had bad dreams; his job had cauterized him since med school. Smith was the county coroner, and after so many years of autopsying human grotesqueries atop his Aimsworth pitch-tilt powerdrain morgue table, he could eat a tuna on rye with one hand and fish through gunshot intestinal vaults with the other. No big deal. Tonight, however, towlines of nightmares hauled him through rank mind-muck visions the likes of which his slumber had never before offered up. “She’s eating, Daddy, she’s eating! Isn’t Mommy pretty when she eats?” Jeannie smiled in her Care Bear pajamas, gazing down into the nighted ravine. Meanwhile, Smith’s wife knelt naked at the opened drum. With enthusiasm, she plucked lumps out of the stinking black spillage and sucked them off her fingers. Moonlight shimmered through the trees, a tinseled vertigo. Jeannie’s eyes shined wide as brand-new silver dollars. “Eat, Mommy, eat. I’d eat too but I’m too little.” Smith wanted to puke in the dream. Yeah, bend over and let ’er rip. It was not an easy thing to watch yo
ur extremely inhibited wife eat lumps of chemical shit out of a bubbling, odorous mass of toxic waste. No, this was not an easy thing to watch at all. “Oh, it tastes simply scrumptious, dear,” Marie remarked. “You really should try some.” No thanks, hon. That stuff’s probably not on the Atkins’ Diet. “Daddy can’t eat that,” Jeannie was quick to relate, which relieved Smith in his dream-paresis. He seemed to be lashed to a tree, forced to watch this disgusting play of nightmare in his boxer shorts. “The Mother,” Jeannie kept chanting from the hillock’s edge. “The Mother, the Mother.” Freud would shit in his pants if he could see this dream, Smith managed to muse. He fairly understood the psychology of dreams: eroto-societal symbolism, sex-death links, and all that. But— Sex-sludge links? he wondered. What did this scenario say about himself? It came as no surprise when, next, Donna, the lissome neighbor of the dental floss bikinis, traipsed down into the hot ravine. She too was buck naked, and she wasted no time in joining Marie’s putrid smorgasbord. “Donna can eat too,” Jeannie rejoiced. “It’s only Daddy who can’t eat, not here.” The dream seemed to peel Smith’s eyelids off; Freud’s manifestos forced him to watch. Good God, he thought, aghast. Donna and Marie openly caressed themselves in the lump-laden bilge. They were kissing! “Here,” Marie invited. She passed a lump, about the size of a walnut, from her own mouth into Donna’s. “More,” Donna panted. Good God, Smith thought again. Would somebody PLEASE wake me up! Marie, lying back in the black scum, had placed more of the lopsided lumps up and down her belly and betwixt her breasts, for Donna to eat off. “Your husband’s got a hard one for me,” Donna commented between morsels. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Marie laughed back, caressing herself in the slime. “He comes way too fast, and he’s not very big. Sort of like one of those little breakfast links.” They cackled at this remark, like witches breathing helium. Smith fumed in spite of his revulsion. Breakfast link, huh? “God, this stuff is really boss,” Donna delighted. Soon, when she and Smith’s wife had sufficiently filled their bellies, they focused their appetites on each other. Smith was sweating. This was like the lesbian porno flicks they’d shown at his bachelor party, only they hadn’t included curdled toxic sludge in the production. Donna and Marie slithered over one another in the muck, beslicking their bodies. They shined like black human lacquer. “Isn’t this great, Daddy?” Jeannie inquired, clapping with glee in the moonlight. No, Smith thought. This is not great. “Oooo,” Marie cooed. “You do it so much better than my husband.” Smith frowned. Donna’s face, amid a sound quite similar to that of a big, hungry dog tearing into a pile of Alpo, busied itself between Marie’s spread legs…