The door to the room opened. Elias was followed in by Siam bitch-bitch-bitch. He swung about, successfully connecting his fist in her rounded abdomen.
“We’ll never call the baby Clint. I like David,” Siam said to someone.
Only she didn’t have anything left to name. (But Elias had seen him there, only a moment ago.)
Elias had read somewhere that a haunting could manifest by just a recording of a past event or events. An imprint. And they needn’t be in order.
Havoc’s glacial thighs tightened until Elias could barely breathe. Bloody dregs dripped into his nose and mouth. He tried to spit and snort it out but he couldn’t. He couldn’t spit or swallow. Puke rose with nowhere to blow.
But his balls rocked.
“There now, son. Where’s our jasmine mommy? I won’t leave you behind this time.”
Elias’s ears buzzed. Did flies laugh?
Hours. How long since he’d blown her away? Days. Flies… silent as a stopped clock… backstroked. Went cave exploring in the lemony mucus in his sinuses—the original necromantic daredevils. Constricting thighs. What an embarrassing way to be discovered.
Spelunk and spunk.
He wished he’d settled for a messy divorce, instead of a messy death scene Elias would forever be the fool in. They would joke that he’d shot his wife, then had somehow arranged for himself to be throttled in the most perverse auto-erotic strangulation.
She leaned from a wall, face swollen with lust until she looked different. He’d never seen Siam so sexually charged. And her face was painted in blue spirals and shooting red stars. Her hair had been teased, sprayed a punkish green.
The door to the room opened. Siam entered the room, nude save for the edible body paint and peppermint spike heels. Elias grabbed her hand before she could hit the light switch.
“It’s all darkness from here on out, baby,” he said, then blasted her at close range. The first shot vaporized her head, the second practically bisecting her at the waist.
The door opened and Elias felt a heavy pain before dropping like a man through a gallows trapdoor.
Siam again entered the room, staring hard at him, holding the baby as it nursed. The woman leaning from the wall—and in whose stiffening legs Elias strangled—was his law partner, Siam’s lover.
“I won’t stay here with you when I die,” Elias barely managed to sputter. “I’m leaving. You stay in this place but I can will myself to cross over.”
“No.”
Who said it? One or both of the women? The baby? All three?
(Someone else… a jealous god?)
A final sharp constriction of the thighs. SNAP! Elias’s neck stiffened, then went soft as the erected, ejaculated invertebrate worm that defined him.
The door opened and closed, spirited stitches in time.
ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT RECOGNITION FAILS
Theme music like Lucifer Rising:
“Their shit is just tasteless,
Degenerate facedown faceless.
They don’t quit ’til the case is
Solved, but all evidence baseless,
Only layin’ the streets to waste,
…layin’ the streets to waste.”
(Down on the ground! Down on the ground now!)
THAT STINGS, thinks Icygirl, hair trigger clit and screamin’ poppasucker.
Opening free sequence clips from Cocaine Cowboy Files: drug interdiction, headcheese swissed, the synapse breaststroke stoked, stuttering jug veins, canine dreadlocks, downhill blood spooking to uphill clot. Random lives sound-byte the dust.
Call My Mama! Pisslessly flawless, loaded tech 9, no fuckin’ lock-up for Slick and Icygirl. Cut the engine, chihuahua-head. Thumbs up.
No siren lure from the woods but shrieking harpies, red blue strobe eyes flashing, flying trying to catsup catch up.
Somehow always crash and burn. Tibia/fibula/brainpan spew, bouncing through wildflower scenics. Wild oak, wild outs, hunts with hard horns on full curves into the mind. Sharp turn ahead.
Loaded with extras, giggle, gristle, out-takes, bonus features you can screw to. Hostage by the throat, long hair salon half- scalped scooped out the rear window like bailing a leaky boat. Tires assassinate a conga line of midnight tarantulas.
Semis, eighteen wheeler roll, over over, chance encounters of the menudo kind. Death tailgates routine torsos chucked from hellhole undercarriages cool! Pass the bong and pretzels.
(On the ground now.)
In the sky don’t know why up in smoke gone for broke. Channel 23 traffic chopper comes down for a three point cuisinart landing. Crash nearby.
Slick and Icygirl merge, spleen sandwich and the helicopter gets footage of lovers on the interstate. Greasy kiss, teeth silt. Audience loves it when runners get kilt.
TILT!
You wanna play dirty?
Crike! Pops! Serve ’em up tomorrow morning with a tall glass of Fuckjuice.
Ads, perversities: back at the meth lab Ratroo’s lungs ignite. Not even God hears the scream after the flashy WOOSHSH. His atoms bubble toward indifferent stratospheres. The new poster twit, Should Have Just Said No.
Drifter carve-ups, hoes and plaid treadmarks, domestic disturbances, anatomy’s late supper, under-aged necrophilia distorted dollhouses. Commercial break question: What if there’s no such thing as DNA? What if Hollywood made it all up? Our team investigates. Starts next Thursday on Inquisition T.V.! Watch it or we’ll kill you. We know where you live.
Return now to ‘Bloodiest gross-outs on Cop Cam!’
Whatcha don’t see, inside engulfed in you, you and more, artificial limbs, sweepstake slabs stitched from unconnected bunches-disconnected leftovers-heads no jaws-previous episodes non-survivors. Is anyone really out there?
Anybody on the road real?
Wired, taxidermied, spinal cord and straw, eye socket wrench, lead fragments, fishing line catgut twine say you’re mine, Icygirl. Souls intimidate the freeway, hands on the wheel, upper lip flapping back, no DNA match, not even on a mitochondrial cusp.
You see streaks cross medians into the garish oncoming. Wheels piglet-squeal, burning rubber, whiplash, gray cottage cheese and queerly mucusoid cherry jelly. You dunno, even here: marionette jobs, corner blobs shaved from bins after autopsies. Ballistic baby full copper jacket car seat through a windshield darkly, wailing in the night, good for background to air in a cremation soon near you.
Pelvic bones jut and jungle, shaman’s castings.
The searing truth about road kill. Used and re-used. Run for your life into infinity, engine-grind gladiators.
Gas stench, oil umbra stalks shapeless phantoms, exhaust mirage of zombie paradise, senses vicariously assaulted by viewers who can’t see inside past a glimpse of the back of a head or of an arm levitating down a rolled down window holding a gun bigger than any of the chum-stumps used in assembly (pulleys or levers).
Purple fog sulphuric sweet not matching violet’s color but part of the contrast.
Contrast static, rumbler of guts cotton candy thunder in turbo generation. Fuck you, forensic me.
Anybody really out there?
Pull ’em from the car, now images wonders in switchmavision.
(PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD. I SAID PUT YOUR HANDS...)
People. Like. To. See. Other. People.
Without it there’s no link between sex, mortality, empathy. Chatterjabble startled husks skreak collisions boom resounds in untidy percussion veins in one cheek like paintings of madonnas weeping blood sounds of stones.
Trunk-junk only grosses the first few episodes. Retakes as Rookie gives Icygirl’s recycled titty squeeze. Stitches pop, Severed fillet splats a window, nipple leap-frogging it. Pardner sez, “Man, don’t be a goon. If that ends up on the Undernet…”
Goobers out nostrils have legs. This nose not quite sanitized before re-use? Naw. They’re the bugs-in-your-teeth variety, vortexed through the shattered windshield tinseling Icegirl’s rigid bubble gum-sputum smile.
What’
s that up her ass? Doc lose a rectal thermometer?
It’s Slick’s right index finger, snapped off like a popsicle stick in a nuddy butty.
“You remember them remote control cars?” Rookie asks Pardner. “Sure got robo-jiggy.”
Pard nervously hushes him.
But Rookie persists. “When do I get to ram a car? This license and reg shit’s a bore.” Then, suddenly inspired, he blurts. “Why not have the chick’s head come off, roll down the road, and get mushed by a big truck.”
“Did that with the baby last week,” the director reminds him.
Rookie sulks, “I didn’t get to do that.”
Rookie Gets His Big Break.
Rookie stares at the super combine, bigger than anything at a monster truck rally.
“Like a sci-fi movie hologram, only even you don’t see the blue screen. It’s the latest tech,” explains a cameraman.
The director went over it one more time. “Get in your car, pedal to the metal, up the ramp, bob and weave, then do a Knieval over the median into oncoming, following your runner. Now you see the combine, sputter ‘oh shit’ over your radio, head-on under the combine. We’ll splice so you seem to screw to wood chipper pooch. Clear, Officer Hoss?”
“Clear. See you on the other side.” Rookie nods, grins, high-fives sweaty Pard.
Pard hangs his head.
Icygirl twitches on gravel, does a slight pivot and thrust that nobody notices. Waiting for Rookie. Tired of Slick.
Is anyone really out there?
Hell, yeah.
THE LONELINESS OF THE UNDERGROUND TRAVELER
“Miss? Do you need help? Can I give you a lift?” The driver’s face was a shadow.
Covered in blood over greening old bruises and shiny black and blue fresh ones, she appeared mortally wounded. The way her ribs showed through her tight tee-shirt did give evidence of her being half-starved. She climbed into the truck and accepted a cup of stale thermos coffee. The man drove them away, shrugging when the girl didn’t answer.
She saw the raw circle on her bare ankle as she answered after a few minutes. She whispered, “He kept me chained to the bathroom door, halfway between the bedroom and the toilet.”
“Who did?”
She blinked, silent for another five minutes.
“I think he might have been my husband. I do remember he didn’t want me running off, the way his other wives did. I’d been there about a year, maybe. Just recall being so lonely. Glad to see even a monster. I miss the reservation.”
Her dark eyes squinted in concentration, black hair hanging in her face.
“I got his razor off the sink. He plumped his on the crapper. I smelled his Jim Beam farts before I slit his throat. I found the key around his neck. I sure miss the lakes and streams on the reservation. Truman! I remember!”
She smiled and he judged her to be about fifteen or sixteen. A damaged doll. “His name’s Truman Kidd. I’m Anna Lori. Will you take me to the water, Mister?”
The driver grinned. “Sure.”
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
He took one hand off the steering wheel and extended it to take hers. He didn’t stare at the old and recent scars.
“I’m Gary Ridgeway.”
Worms and beetles grinned as she moved through the earth, random skeletons ‘ad infinitum’. She didn’t even think to wonder how she knew this. And why she wasn’t blind being under the ground. It was simply so and that was that. Like the rules in a dream. One didn’t have to be told what the rules were. Not that it was common sense but it was some kind of ‘sense’.
These skeletons held together even with nothing left to hold them. New ones and old ones and old OLD ones. Hundreds, thousands followed her. Not as predators, not eaters. Not ZOMBIES.
Anna Lori no longer smelled the river. How much time had passed?
“This way, Anna Lori…” Spiders scuttled, auspicious sentries pointing the direction.
If the ribcage held the spirit close to the home of a doomed and desiccated heart, could this be the real Ghost Dance?
She wanted from the soil. She wanted to find water and slide into it. To be cleansed as a dreamless current carried her away. But for all the distance she went, she always missed the waterways.
Looking back, she saw that the skeletons swarmed with hunger-mad spiders and voracious scorpions scurried through eye sockets and brainpans, frenzied on their slowly moving-inching feast. No need to knit wet-works between archways of pelvic bone.
Passing between towns, cities, cemeteries old and new to right of Right and left of center. Relics of all sorts of necropolises wound around one another, seeking and giving the comforts to be taken from ruined flesh. It might not be appetizing but at least they weren’t alone.
(Anna Lori was lonely, worse than she’d been while chained up by Truman Kidd.)
The spiders insisted, “Come on, Anna Lori.”
She struggled to change direction, willing herself to be among the dead because she was dead. So many, filling this planet she never knew to be kind of hollow. Or at least so frustratingly like a river—as she moved through it in a manner that was a cross between swimming and crawling.
She heard the spiders cajole and the skeletons moan as she tried to swerve, to turn about, to grab some autonomy for herself.
“I want to join them,” she protested, stubborn mouth filled with mealy nothing, sometimes filled with a graying claustrophobia as if she were trying to pull herself out of a mucusoid net.
How could the bones touch, appear to make love? Why?
(Sex was the surest affirmation of existence.)
“They have waited a long time for you,” said the spiders, pulling her on an intricate chain of webs. Not unlike another manacling.
The bodies—in many stages from the merely gross to the horrible—never stopped caressing one another as they followed. Greasy whispers, vibrations of teeth and finger bone tuning forks. Out-of-reach with shrouds peeled from gummed-up works. Occasionally she managed to glance behind her. Why did they ‘look’ happy? Those smiles, ragged gaps…
Who took care of her? Who had ever loved Anna Lori?
She tried whispering back to them. There appeared to be a reason for a respectful hush, as if they were just in church. None answered. Maybe they couldn’t hear her over the chitter-chatter- chewing of the spiders. She tried again, yelling out, “Can you hear me? Please answer! Tell me your names. Mine’s Anna Lori!”
Moans, groans, sex, death.
But there weren’t spiders on her. Only their masterful bits of clinging cobwebs. Only blind, black earth, crusts of blood. The smell of stagnant green water.
Sweltering hot, nearer earth’s core. Dark around these mortal slops. Who was she supposed to be anyway? The Pied Piper? Orpheus?
She hardy expected to shake, as if her decaying body sickened her trapped spirit. But the ground trembling around her. Did she make earthquakes?
“Won’t you at least talk to me?”
She listened as they slugged behind her, yet none answered. A gruesome gruel of laughter insanely innocent, hawking up bronchial emeralds.
Anna Lori counted different colored strata: the pale of long drought seasons, ores in rich red or yellow, ash from when the world had burned.
“I hate you,” she muttered to her followers, denied even a serenity of tears.
The world eroded down back streets of black sediment, through rot in its residence. Her isolation, disturbed, was almost pornographic. Thinking of a boy she’d been with only once, before her father gave her to Truman Kidd for three cases of warm beer and a 1972 Chevy Impala with bad shocks. After that she might just as well have been alone.
Rag hands permeated of sour mutton. Dead, mewled, grabbed, sighed as apparitions sucked dissolving eidolon. That ridiculous attachment ought to be a result of divine compassion and demonic humor.
“Soon, Anna Lori,” promised the spiders.
She didn’t remember the boy’s name, but she couldn’t b
ear to think he’d died and was now back THERE with THEM.
Could this downward place be any kind of space if light hadn’t been present?
“Why do they seem to be part of something while I’m part of nothing?”
“They are corpses,” the spiders replied.
“Then what am I?”
“These are their bodies in fugitive flesh. You are an underground traveler, a soul in dead-fall. Your remains still lie beside the Green River. Magic!”
She’d died near water, never touching it, never returned to her element. Hearing the river go slowly past, unmoved by this or any violence.
Did Death leave footprints?
Did they follow her blindly, as he saw them—as if through a two-way mirror?
Would anyone ever find her body? What then?
(Crawling fitfully, digging and burrowing in the fragments of a tomb. One great grave, that’s all this was. You held me as if skin-on-skin made a promise. Where are you? I am of the ignorant dark spilling the underground across all borders.)
Crust shattered like glass. The spiders pulled her aside as bodies spilled out into living water beneath a wide-mooned sky.
Anna Lori tried to leap, to fall, to splash. But she couldn’t go beyond the dust’s edge.
In the distance, more that played and laid buried shambled forward.
Her world, inside out.
RED CRACKLE LOVERS
She was a beautiful woman. She went boldly up to discolored Carnival faces who didn’t look ‘right’. And she’d say “Be my lover until All Saints Day.”
These creatures knew their time was measured in vaginal seepings and sebaceous thrusts. What had they to lose but a few spoonfuls of silvery saliva, steamy and irretrievable?
They fucked her with slowly blackening limbs, painted her skin white with frosted breath and were always with her: shrieking, laughing, hunting down the frothy tide through Halloween.
And as dawn broke—morning often does this just after such a night of sin and excess, of gradual undressing from the flesh and the red crackle of eyes that realize the wait was at last over—as dawn broke…
Dawn shattered like a glass hymen, light horrible in vivid roentgen rape. This was when, according to the script she always used, she brought out baby.
The Myth of Falling Page 10