She opened her mouth briefly, curled her tongue around the cigarette, flicked it, and, leaning forward, put it in Ed’s mouth.
Not many women could do that trick with their tongues.
He tasted lipstick on the cigarette. Not a bad taste. A womany taste. From a tasty woman.
“Hi,” he said as the woman leaned even closer to him, almost falling into his lap. She wore a tight tube top through which he could see engorged thumb-sized nipples. She had on tight, shiny black leather slacks with a zipper that went from her navel down through her crotch and came out on the other side at the apex of her butt cheeks.
Despite his disdain for women, Ed found himself interested. The new revelation must be working, though he still doubted any of the old magic could still be there.
Ed sucked on the cigarette, highly aware of her saliva on its end, blew smoke sideways, and said, “I’m Ed.”
“Wanda,” she replied. “It all right if I sit with you, White Boy?”
“I’m not a boy.”
“You like hot chocolate?”
“Any marshmallows come with it?
Wanda laughed. “That’s the first time anyone ever had a good comeback for that line, mister.” She draped her right arm over his shoulder. He ordered her a drink.
“Never do anything for the first time,” he told Wanda.
They went back to his apartment. Perhaps in anticipation, Ed had cleaned it thoroughly before going to the bar. The place sparkled like the sheen on Wanda’s ass. Even the bed was made.
Ed gave Wanda another drink—she liked gimlets—and sat on the edge of the bed with her and sipped a beer.
“You’re not a working girl, are you?”
“Me? Hell, no. Do I look like a whore?”
“Well, to be honest, yes.”
Wanda laughed. “Okay. Maybe I do dress up too much.”
“It’s okay with me. I like your outfit.”
“Even the pants?”
“Yep. I never saw that kind of zipper before.”
“It’s made for action, honey. One zip and both sides fall down at once.” She stood up. “Wanna see?”
“Sure.”
Wanda reached behind her, tugged the zipper down the back of her ass, reached between her legs and pulled it up to her navel. She popped a snap and peeled down one leg of the slacks, revealing a thigh that made Ed think of polished ebony.
She quickly peeled the other leg. She stood there a few seconds, a broad grin on her face. She still had the tank top on, and it seemed to be even sexier with her lower regions on display.
Ed undressed slowly, deliberately. He focused on the black triangle he knew was twitching between Wanda’s legs.
He twitched a little himself.
It was pretty good sex. Back before he’d had his first revelation, he would have considered it great sex. But his new awareness had taken the edge off total enjoyment.
Of course, now he had his new revelation to stimulate him, but he was saving it for later.
With a little effort, some imaginative placement of pieces, and a lot of sweat, Ed managed to get all of Wanda into two trash bags.
He took the bags downstairs, one at a time, and deposited them in the dumpster across the street, behind the hardware store. Ed returned to his apartment and cleaned up. The bed was a particular mess. He made a mental note to himself that he would have to buy new sheets.
Cleaning up the kitchen cutlery wasn’t that bad, and the blood came up from the kitchen floor with a lot of paper towels. When he was finished, he had another trash bag to carry outside. This one he just left on the curb for the morning pick-up.
As he ascended the stairs the last time that night, he silently thanked the angel for the new revelation.
Life was good.
For the next year or so, Ed experienced the joy of sex again. Women flocked to him. He screwed them. He killed them. He stuffed them in trash bags. He left them in the dumpster across the street.
He experimented with ways of putting the women in the bags until he found the perfect arrangement for two bags, including the soiled paper towels and sheets. The only real problem with the whole thing was buying so many sheets and trash bags.
No one seemed to notice that women that went away with Ed never came back.
Women were disposable, after all.
Women were prey.
It was a big city. He’d have to dispose of many, many women before their disappearances would be noted. And who would suspect good old Ed, anyhow? He was just an average guy who happened to like having different women two or three times a week. Lots of guys who hung out in bars were like him.
The angel had saved not his life, but the quality of his life, which was much more important.
Ed was happy. His brain no longer contorted itself in multiple sexual positions while trying to understand things. He could appreciate the absolute ecstasy of sex again, because he always climaxed twice every time he was with a woman.
The second time was in his head, of course. His testicles couldn’t manufacture two wads in an evening. Not any more—not when the second climax—the cerebral one—was so exquisite.
Life was fantastic. The women came to him with little or no effort on his part. They allowed him to do anything. He sometimes thought they even knew how the evening would end, but that they didn’t care.
Yes, life was good, fantastic, wonderful, exciting.
But it was becoming boring.
Ed was sitting on the bench as he had before, awaiting a revelation. Had his angel forgotten him? He really needed its help now. What was there beyond the last revelation? How could he ascend to the next rung of enlightenment and spiritual pleasure?
The angel did not come.
Ed was about ready to leave, which meant he was about to give up on life, embrace its boredom and swear off women again.
Then she came along.
A woman who even in the dim light cast by the street lamp a half block away was stunning. Her movements were a study in fluid locomotion and the dynamics of kinetic science. Her breasts were two living, separate animals, hunching against the fabric of her white blouse like horny rabbits. Her stomach seemed to undulate in the throes of orgasm even as she walked. Her thighs smacked together like giant lips slurping up every last ounce of a man’s seed like a hungry two-dollar whore. She wore black checked slacks. No panty lines. The puff of her bush protruded beneath the fabric. She had five-inch black heels on. She carried a large pocketbook under one arm.
Under the other arm was a whip.
She was like one of those cartoons in the back pages of men’s magazines. Her hair was auburn, her eyes impossibly green, her lips magenta.
She sat down next to him.
“Hello,” she said, her voice a rasp of lust cutting Ed to the core.
For once, Ed was not glib. He merely nodded.
“You want it here, baby?”
“What?” he asked hoarsely.
“Me, of course.”
Ed shivered. Of all the women he had possessed the last couple of years he had never encountered anything like her. She, he realized, was the revelation.
In the flesh.
It was a quick walk back to Ed’s apartment, during which his pants almost exploded. He held her hand all the way there, and it was like holding electricity.
They fucked like quicksilver minks. They twisted in and out of each other. They turned each other inside-out, ass-backwards, willy-nilly, cat-a-corner, upside-down, over and under, inventing new positions to accommodate their lust. Ed’s brain was impressed.
Sweat, saliva, the mucilage of love, the fluids of conjunction, the spurts of jetstream jism—all flowed copiously, as if they originated in a bountiful, overflowing fountain that would never empty.
After it was over—or were they merely taking a break?—Ed was hungry for yet more.
He was, he realized in fact and not in fantasy—in love. And he didn’t even know her name.
He gasped as she st
ood up from the bed and used a damp towel to sponge her glistening body.
“That was fantastic,” he said weakly, hanging over the side of the bed. He had been drained dry, wrung out by a woman whose body was so different from any he’d ever seen before she could have been an alien. It was so goddamn, fucking, sonofabitching absodamnlutely perfect.
“Of course,” she said, her voice a rasp that dragged across his spine and made his testicles draw up in anticipation. Her chest was not heaving as Ed’s was. She didn’t seem a bit tired. “Ready to go again?”
“I don’t think I can immediately.” He gulped air. “Not right this minute.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t? You mean you’re leaving?”
“No.” She rolled him over on his back. “I still have to come.”
“But, didn’t you . . .?”
“That was orgasm, not coming.”
Before Ed could react, she had tied his arms and legs to the four posts of the bed. He didn’t put up much of a struggle.
“Kinky stuff,” he said lamely. “Maybe that’ll work.”
“It always works for me,” she said. “And I’m all that matters.” Ed frowned with curiosity. Then he grimaced with pain. He’d forgotten the whip she had been carrying.
That next morning, Ed awoke through a cloud of agony. The woman was gone. So were Ed’s private parts. The whip had snapped them off.
As she left, he had barely heard her say the words that now reverberated in his mind:
“Men are prey.”
Ed realized the angel was toying with him. Or maybe the angel was playing mind-fuck games with everybody.
He hadn’t lost much blood yet. He pulled his pants on, stuffed a towel down the front to staunch the flow, and put on a shirt and shoes.
He stumbled down the stairs to the street. The blood seeped through the front of his pants and, when he saw it, he vomited. Then he fell forward into vomit and blood ran from his mouth. He felt his life float out of him, taking the pain away, and he saw the angels come—
They were the angels of death and sex and taxes and things that go zip in the night and things that lie and fester, and things that just lie, and things that make the hapless brain do flip-flops like a badly adjusted television set.
They had been waiting for him. Now they beckoned to him. They said his time for thinking things over was up.
He started to protest that they had told him he could have all the time he wanted and they said they had lied.
He recognized the angels now. One was the angel of revelation. The other angel had a whip. The third, the last, strongly resembled the woman he had seen step down from the bus that day he received his first self-induced (or so he thought) revelation.
Ed started down the tunnel towards the light, just like in the pages of the National Enquirer; he imagined—but he didn’t expect Jesus to be at the end.
The angels fluttered before him, beatific, holiest of all the holies there ever were.
Ed was muttering.
“What did you say?” the angel with the whip asked.
“I said I’m so damn pissed.”
He threw himself at the middle angel, the angel of revelation, and tore open its back with his hands. He reached in and jerked out angel guts. Before the angel could scream—or make the sound dying angels made—Ed turned and snatched the whip from the second angel. He snapped the whip and lopped off the third angel’s head. Angel blood spurted from the stump of its neck. Then he turned on the last angel, the one who had, in her earthly guise, rendered him unearthly, and expertly split her asunder with her own weapon. The two halves of the angel fell aside, and angel stuff oozed and spurted out of them.
That’s funny, Ed mused. Angels are destructible. We never learned that in Sunday school.
The remains of the three angels hovered briefly, as if there was life left in them, and exploded. Blood gushed all over Ed and looped around the circumference of the tunnel, transforming it into a crimson corridor. Ed grimly sloshed through the blood, going beyond it, closer to the light.
Before he reached the light, he found his old bench sitting there off to one side, in its own alcove within the tunnel, just waiting for him.
Ed didn’t care where the light led now. Where was it written he had to go to the light?
Fuck it.
He smiled, settled down comfortably on the familiar bench, and crossed his arms. The blood-drenched whip was clutched in his right hand, prepared for any heavenly bodies that might intrude.
Ed was sure there would be more revelations, and he wanted to be ready for them. In the meantime, he would warn any unwary travelers who came along:
Never—ever—do anything for the first time.
Untitled Still Life
with Infinity Perspective
Rex Miller
After successful careers as a radio personality, parodist, and record producer, and while operating a mail order business specializing in character collectibles and nostalgia, Rex Miller decided (in 1986) to begin writing fiction.
What he’s produced since then includes two novels (Slob and Stone Shadow) nominated for awards from Horror Writers of America (and at least five others) and some two dozen much-discussed short stories. The latter have appeared in Stalkers, the Hot Blood series, Midnight Graffiti, Cold Blood, Dick Tracy: The Secret Files, Masques III, and elsewhere. Rex Miller’s Chaingang is slated for Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books in 1992. Some used his detective hero, Jack Eichord, or his anti-hero, Chaingang Bunkowski. But “Dead Standstill” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) gave us a different, gentler Miller and made the H.W.A. preliminary ballot for a Bram Stoker in the process.
One-third through my first reading of this story—blinking my eyes so I might go on thinking reasonably straight—it became clear to me that what happens to the writer protagonist in it is the very definition of horror, psychological and otherwise. Straddling genres boldly, it addresses the unspoken fear of every author who has found it necessary to become a human word machine. For any kind of reader, it probes both madness and the nature(s) of reality. Be warned, then—go with the flow. (But don’t get too close to the thoudiola.)
He was a moderately successful, midlist genre writer, and he was dying. Humorously enough, his metier was bloody suspense books, horror, crime and violence, and a weird sub-genre called dark fantasy/cyberpunk/speculative science fiction, a category so strange that not even those who wrote it were altogether certain what it was.
The point being that for a man whose every waking hour was spent immersed in the topic of sudden death, his own sudden death, imminent or otherwise, was an event that found him singularly unprepared.
The curious biochemical anomaly that had been slowly killing him for the last few years produced several interesting side effects, one of them being that some corner of his brain had been unlocked. In a stream-of-consciousness flood he had written nearly forty novels in four years. His publishers would be cranking out his books forever. He would not be around to see it, alas.
In all fairness it had hardly been a sudden death, his impending demise-to-be, since he’d had a good four years to prepare for it. And every morning, like clockwork, he’d been at the keyboard of his word processor pounding out the purple prose. Seven to noon. Break for lunch. One to three. Year in, year out. His agent and his editors were amazed.
Truthfully, he wasn’t a writer so much as he was a typist or a clerk. He simply typed onto the screen those dreams that came to him in the night. He always told interviewers who seemed awed by his prolificness, “I’d have written a lot more if I could’ve typed faster.” He’d tried dictating to a speed-typist but that hadn’t panned out. And what was the big deal? It would take them years to publish his oeuvre, as it was. Now his illness had progressed to the point where all he wanted to do was quit work and head for a warm, sunny clime. Drink tequila; sit on the beach. But it wasn’t going to work that way.
Som
ething was prodding him to write more. To write faster. To write and keep writing and write and never stop until the thing came and smashed him down once and for all. The dreams that had been a godsend for the last four years were now becoming nightmares. He dreamed all night long. Active, turbulent, strange dreams of bizarre characters acting out the weirdest death fantasies.
And in the morning, if he didn’t start writing it all down, he’d begin daydreaming—and the daydreams were a thousand times worse than the others—horrible, seamless things that caught him up and imprisoned him inside their crazed storylines. With each successive daydream it was harder and harder for him to escape, to think his way out, to plot his way out of his own scenarios of paranoia and murder.
He’d come to Dr. Kervale to see if there wasn’t some new medication he could try that would numb his brain, sedate him to the point where the stories might stop coming, where his ideas would leave him alone. It had become unbearable. It was like being inside one of those infinity drawings where you see a picture of someone looking at a picture of someone looking at a picture of someone looking at a picture of . . . and about the seventh or eighth level of hell, you began to go a little mad. What if there were an infinity picture that never ended, with a subject so mesmerizing it locked the viewer deep inside? That’s what the dreams had become.
Kervale was apparently with a patient and presumably had let his receptionist go to lunch. There was no one at the telephone and he didn’t see any nurses in sight. He was scarcely in any hurry so he sat in one of the chairs and skimmed through the magazines in the doctor’s waiting room.
The thing tugged at him. There was no denying the ideas when they attacked, he’d tried again and again. This time he tried to force his mind to other things, to think about business: he wondered what sort of a cover mechanical they’d produced on Lured, the book they were doing as a lead the following month. Without knowing why, he got up, put his magazine down and went over behind the receptionist’s desk.
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