He smiled, obviously not heeding my warning.
“That was some meeting you were having in the conference room,” he said.
“You liked that?”
He nodded. “You could probably do better with your choice in colleagues though,” he said.
I glanced at Ayad.
“You can see someone’s true colors when the chips are down,” he continued.
“Or when the skirts are up.” I blushed. I was so blatantly flirting with him. Hysterical flirting.
“I probably won’t be booking your travel any longer,” I said. “I think I’m all through here.”
I was debating going back inside to get my things when the fire was out, but it was all crap wasn’t it. I realized Thirteen was looking at my legs.
“Nice tattoos,” he said.
“Do you want to see a picture of my pretend girlfriend?” I asked.
He looked at it. For a moment, I thought shock was registering, but then I saw that same bemused look I saw in the conference room.
“This is a very interesting photograph,” he said. “I think we should get together sometime.”
“You do?” I asked. “Even if I’m working as a waitress at a strip club? Because that’s what I’m going to be doing next.”
He nodded. I heard Miranda shriek. The fire was out. With a fireman in tow, she headed over to Crystal. I saw something glint in his hand. I knew what that was. I’d left it in the storeroom. The lighter!
Thirteen got out a scrap of paper and a pen to write down my phone number.
“Nice pen,” I said. “I know a lot of uses.”
The sexual tension between us was crackling. I never wanted to fuck someone so bad in my life. All that conflict on the phone between us had been like some sort of intense foreplay. I knew he was feeling it. I could see it in his eyes.
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“I have a lot more pens in my car,” he said.
And just like that, I trotted off after him toward his car, like a dog in heat. Miranda caught sight of us.
“Where do you think you’re going, missy,” she called out.
I waved her off and caught up with him.
“This could cause you problems,” I said.
“No. It won’t. I wasn’t going to use your travel agency any longer anyway. That’s why I came in for a meeting.”
His expensive car was parked in two hour parking. The moment I got inside with him, I forgot all about the pens. He was as horny as I was. Over the console, he pulled me into his lap so I straddled him. Pushing my panties aside much like Ayad, he was inside me lightning fast. I was really tight today, or he was big as well. Very big.
“Don’t you think it’s perverted you met me with another guy’s dick in me and now you’re screwing me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And you don’t care about sloppy seconds.”
“No.”
I shoved my tongue down his throat, licked his tonsils, and bumped his uglies with a passion I never knew. The moment I came up for air, I realized the entire office was watching us with open mouths, Miranda, Pam, Ayad, and Crystal. And there it was. The end of my travel career.
Hitting the window button with my elbow, I leaned out my head as Thirteen was grabbing my hips and ramming me into him. He was quite the fucker.
“See Crystal. I do like a lot of bone,” I called out.
Cry of the Loogaroo
John Edward Ames
“Feature this: A dark, dank, fetid, wildly overgrown place dominated by alligators and snakes, by tall tupelo trees marching on stilts that, on closer inspection, turn out to be exposed roots. Imagine a dripping, insect-humming monotony of sound that’s eerily akin to the uneventful stillness of a mausoleum. This is a place where death is lazy, primitive and anonymous, and thus, vastly more terrifying in its pitilessness.”
I gave a little fluming snort as I switched off Libby Mumford’s microcassette recorder.
“Fetid?” I repeated, watching Captain Breaux. “The hell’s that mean?”
He shrugged one beefy shoulder. “I look like a dictionary? I think it means stinky. This chick’s got a nice voice.”
“Nice everything. In fact, she’s a certified traffic hazard. Most of these award-winning female-journalist types look like constipated librarians. Not Libby. She was a model before she got into photojournalism. Here, check her out.”
I opened a folder on my knee and handed him a color glossy of Libby Mumford; she was running along a beach somewhere, damn near butt-naked in a yellow bikini thong.
Breaux, who normally has all the élan of a deep coma, loosed a sharp whistle.
“She’s a tidy little bit of frippit, all right,” he allowed, visibly impressed.
Libby was a blue-chip chica all the way, pampered and sleek and boob-enhanced. Breaux took in the shoulder-length platinum hair, eyes the soft blue of forget-me-nots, skin tanned to the exact shade of sunlit honey.
“Yeah-boy,” he added, handing it back to me. “That’s something to wrap your leg around. Where’d you say she’s from?”
“Houston.”
“What, she’s with one of the crap sheets there?”
“Nah, she’s freelance. But not a scoop merchant, just fluff and feature stuff. Specializes in travel pieces and photo features for the Sunday supplements. Also writes hot romance novels under the name Deanna Chambers. But when she disappeared last week, she was working on a series for Eros magazine called ‘Hot and Haunted America’ – which her editor described as—”
I glanced down at the notes on my flipback pad.
“ ‘—a showcase for some of America’s most colorful and steamy regional-bogey legends.’ ”
Breaux, negligently sprawled on a swivel chair behind a messy pecan-veneer desk, raised one hand like a traffic cop to stop me. He was a huge and sloppy rag-bag of a man with a lopsided mouth and big pouches like bruises under his eyes.
“Yeah, well let me guess: our hot little infobabe caught wind of the scuttlebutt about Shrieking Swamp, uh? Figured being diddled by an ‘invisible sex fiend’ might be more of a rush than the politically correct coffee-shop weenies who usual schtupp her?”
“Somehow I doubt she went there to get laid,” I assured him from a deadpan. “But yeah, she knew about the stories, her editor confirmed that.”
“He the one reported her missing?”
I nodded. “After she failed to check in by phone.”
He pointed at the microrecorder. “How’d you get that?”
“Search and Rescue turned it in. It’s all they found.”
“Play some more.”
I switched it on. Her throaty contralto voice again filled Breaux’s cubbyhole office on the second floor of the New Orleans French Quarter Precinct Building.
The recordings were obviously made at intervals as time passed and her location varied. For a few minutes there was more of the same tour-guide stuff; just verbal notes of her physical impressions, ideas she obviously intended to help her when she wrote her article later.
“Vast Honey Island Swamp has formed around the mouth of the Pearl River where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico along the Louisiana–Mississippi border. Since the earliest days of settlement in the Deep South, this remote area has played host to French, Spaniards, Creoles, Arcadians, various Indian tribes, pirates, runaway slaves, criminals and deserters from countless armies.
“Where I’m standing right now, however, is actually the one-thousand acre ‘inner circle’ of Honey Island, a taboo place known to locals as Shrieking Swamp. It is this area, so the well-established legend goes, that’s haunted by a mythical demon known as the loup-garou or ‘loogaroo’ to locals, a distinctly American variation of the European werewolf.”
Breaux raised a hand, and I switched the recorder off again.
“ ‘Well-established legend’ my sweet ass,” he repeated, his tone mocking the words. “It’s pure horseshit being shoveled by a bunch of redneck chawbacons. Did y
ou say this dizzy broad went in there alone?”
“She hired a local Cajun guide who took her onto Honey Island. But he refused to go into Shrieking Swamp, so she made him wait while she took the boat in alone. He claims she never returned.”
“You’ve put him under the light?”
I nodded. “He’s got no priors, and we can’t poke any holes in his story. He also volunteered for and passed a polygraph.”
“Mm . . . well, the way this chick looks, somebody fucked her and killed her, you can make a book on it. That or the silly little twat fell into some quicksand. Either way, by now she’s fermenting in a ’gator hole, end of story.”
It never took Breaux long to get into his hardass riff. He was a gruff old coot, notorious for his impatience when subordinates failed to produce, and he could be a pig-headed son of a bitch when his hems were flaring – as I suspected they were now judging from the way he fidgeted in his chair. Made me wonder how many solvable investigations he had closed down just because his asshole was on fire.
“That’s pretty much what I thought, too,” I assured him. “But there’s more on the tape, you need to hear it.”
I thumbed the microcassette back on.
“In the case of Shrieking Swamp, however, the loogaroo tale has taken an . . . interesting deviation from the usual reports of violent, killer attacks. For this loogaroo does not kill or injure – reportedly, it sexually ravishes its victims. It is an invisible, supernatural sex fiend, and according to its supposed victims, it is either male or female depending on the gender of the person attacked. In fact, I talked to a husband and wife who were attacked simultaneously, only a few feet apart, and each one reported the attacker as ‘of the opposite sex.’ ”
“Screw this,” Breaux interrupted again. “Why do I need to hear this shit? It’s the same old doo-dah we been hearing for years now. You a cop or one of the fuckin’ squirrels?”
“You need to hear some more,” I insisted.
“And you need some serious couch time, Savoy.”
But he piped down when I turned the recording back on.
“I could no longer avoid this story once it became a persistent rumor. Oh, it never makes the air waves or establishment print media, not even locally in Louisiana or Mississippi. But it’s creating a growing fascination on the Internet. Yesterday I interviewed a Tulane University graduate student in anthropology who claims to have been ‘ravished’ by the sex demon of Shrieking Swamp. She has developed an interesting theory that the ‘loogaroo’ angle developed back in the earlier days because attack victims were too scandalized to openly report the sexual nature of their bizarre experiences. Some cover story was needed to explain torn clothing, scratch marks, and bites left by the—”
“Shut that fucking drivel off,” Breaux growled.
“It’s coming up,” I insisted. “Just listen.”
“—and I’ve also interviewed folks who live near Shrieking Swamp, for no one actually lives in it. And most of them concur: the eerie sounds emanating from the swamp seem much more like gasps than shrieks; howls of ecstasy, not terror. And as another attack victim admitted to me: ‘Once you’ve had it, you may well wander back in for more. I have and so have others who—”
Breaux heaved himself out of the chair, nearly 300lbs of pissed-off precinct captain angling around his desk and bearing down on me like the Apocalypse.
“Savoy, you and this broad are so full of shit your feet are sliding. I said turn that fucking thing—”
A sharp gasp sliced into his threat, and Breaux froze like a hound on point, staring at the microcassette recorder.
“What? Oh, good heart of God! What’s happening to me?”
Her voice had suddenly grown a few octaves sharper. Her breathing, barely audible to this point, became rushed and heavy panting.
“I don’t understa—oh! Oh! What’s—wha-wha-what’s—oh! Oh, my God, oh, OH! That—oh, Christ, yes, yess, that, that! Jesus God, YES!”
There was a sudden rush of frenzied noises: clothes being ripped, undergrowth rustling as if she were thrashing around, groans and moans and sharp little yipping cries even a Vestal Virgin would know were sex noises. And a steady, rapidly increasing noise like dozens of cats hungrily lapping milk.
Her voice was hardly recognizable as human now, escalating to a shrieking pitch that seemed as much pain as pleasure.
“Yes, yes, yes . . . ahh, ahh, ahh . . . do that, do it, do it, faster . . . lick me, lick me, I . . . oh, I’m going to . . . oh, Jesus, I’m going tooo exx-plode!”
And she did, a banshee cry welling up so loud that, even on the tiny speaker, it seemed to fill the office.
The recorder went silent, and I thumbed it off again, watching Breaux.
He looked shell-shocked. I watched him return to his chair and slack into it, scrubbing his face with his hands as if trying to wake up. For a minute he refused to even look at me, studying his office as if seeing it for the first time. His eyes went first to the framed prints of Louisiana shore birds lining one wall, then to the old print sampler he’d swiped from a now defunct Basin Street brothel: IT TAKES A HEAP O’LOVIN’ TO MAKE A HOME A HOUSE.
“She could’ve faked this, Cap,” I finally remarked. “Publicity, whatever. If she did, she’s one hell of a porno actress.”
Breaux mopped his glistening face with a handkerchief.
“The best,” he conceded. “Christ, I got a Viagra hard-on just listening to her.”
He looked at me, and I could tell he didn’t think she faked any of it.
“It’s like the way you never confuse TV voices with real people talking,” he told me. “There’s just this difference you can always tell. Same with fake sex noises versus real. Neal, am I fucking bonkers here, or did Miss Libby get her little muff licked eight beats to the bar?”
“There’s one last recording before the tape goes silent.”
I flicked the recorder on again and fast-forwarded past some empty tape.
“Though few of us can name it, we all search for something transcendent, something that takes us out of ourselves. Sex, when it works right, is the ultimate no-mindedness. For me it has never worked right. Until now. Until this place. Until . . . you. Now I have sloughed my old self as surely as a snake sloughs its old skin.”
I turned the recorder off, watching Breaux closely.
“Very weird,” I volunteered.
“I know that’s real,” he agreed. “Shit! I’m fed up to here with that freakin’ swamp. At least a dozen people have disappeared there over the past ten years. And each time the department takes it in the shorts.”
“French Emma’s curse,” I said, mainly just to piss him off. And I succeeded. I watched a vein over his left temple swell until it looked like a hyperventilating worm.
“You sorry-ass dipshit,” he growled at me. “Since you think it’s so funny, Sergeant Savoy, I want your ass in that swamp tomorrow. You know that area, check it out good. And keep this fucking recording under wraps. I shit thee not – if the media bozos get hold of this, I’ll have your guts for garters.”
“French Emma’s curse” is part of the tourist-oriented local mythology in southeastern Louisiana. French Emma Johnson was rumored to be an avid practitioner of Obeah, sometimes called Cajun Voodoo, a hybrid of African and Southern American black magic. She was also the most notorious “landlady” in Storyville, the infamous yet legal New Orleans tenderloin that thrived, adjacent to the French Quarter, between 1898 and 1917, when the U.S. Navy razed it as a public-health menace to the military.
Emma’s “sporting house” was the first to be leveled. Not only did she lose a fortune in this raid, she became the whipping girl for the blue-nosed crusaders. She was literally run out of town after her head was shaved to shame her. Forced to flee penniless into Honey Island Swamp, she reportedly laid a strange curse on her tormentors: “Long after my bones rot in this swamp, the siren’s song will endure like an angel with savage weapons.”
Of course the voodoo angle wa
s a crock, and I never met one local who seriously believed it. But there was no denying that Shrieking Swamp, the remote heart of Honey Island, had become a black hole into which people simply vanished forever, prompting the rubes to make up the “cry of the loogaroo” crap. There was never even a hint of any crime, and because the area was a virtual sinkhole of quicksand pockets, it was natural for the authorities to assume accidental deaths with no hope of recovering bodies.
But Libby Mumford’s bizarre tape recording suggested it might not be that simple.
Her strange final message to the world, complete with sounds of orgasmic overdrive, had lit a fire under me to solve this long-standing mystery. Ever since I was a kid I had hunted and fished along Honey Island’s meandering bayous, so I had no trouble guiding a borrowed pirogue deep into the dark, tangled swamp. A pirogue’s shallow draw and flat bottom allow it to float in only inches of water, and there’s no current to fight in a swamp, only mudbanks and submerged tree roots.
The sun, only rarely visible through the dense overgrowth, nonetheless seemed to remain stuck high in the sky as if pegged there, radiating a merciless furnace heat. Thick humidity clung to my skin like wet cloth. Eerie fingers of sunlight poked through the thick canopy of trees, and I became almost hypnotized by the powerline hum of insects, the only sound besides my paddle slicing through the dark, still water.
“Libby! Libby Mumford!” I called over and over into a megaphone.
But my words simply disappeared like stones into a well, and after a while I gave up calling her name – each time I disturbed that breathing stillness, I felt like I was shouting swear words in church.
Uneventful hours ticked by until at last I was following the final bayou that snaked through Shrieking Swamp on its eastern edge. I decided to paddle through the next dog-leg bend, then head back to my car for the hour-long drive back to New Orleans. I was halfway through the bend when I heard it – a keening, ululating noise I couldn’t even find the vocabulary to describe.
You really can be “shocked to the marrow,” just as surely as your blood really can carbonate with fear as mine did at that moment. The noise did not seem human or animal, but hell-spawned and demonic, and yet it literally and instantly aroused me, my erection so hard that it throbbed painfully against my restraining jeans.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4 Page 13