by Harvey Click
He dropped his keys at the door and crushed the flowers as he reached for them. No more séances and no more gruesome threesomes, he told himself. And no more sex. Not until we’re both over this craziness and grief and can sort things out.
As he opened the door, he smelled something red and raw inside. He stood and sniffed and listened, and all his alarms went off. Something was wrong, Toya was sick . . . or something. He felt fearful as a child and was afraid to call her name because the bogeyman might hear.
Leaving the door open, he tiptoed to the living room with his three paper grocery bags rustling like loud sharp whispers. Place was dim and chilly, one lamp on low and the glass deck door wide open, probably she was out there in the tub and hadn’t noticed how cold it was getting, probably everything was all right and the smell was just his sinus infection acting up, but for some reason he still didn’t want to make any noise.
Then he saw the wet drops on the carpet, dark trail of blood leading from deck to kitchen, and he stood there frozen with his grocery sacks whispering in his arms. He sniffed and listened and crept farther into the living room so he could peer into the kitchen. No light in there except the weak florescent tube flickering blue above the sink, but he saw some kind of mess on the table. It looked like a juicy round watermelon with the top hacked off, but watermelon was out of season. As he moved closer the raw red smell grew stronger, and then he saw what it was on the table.
His heart banged hard, blurring his vision. One of the sacks slipped out of his hands and hit the floor with a clatter of tin cans, and then something bashed the back of his head.
When he came to, he was lying on the kitchen floor and a woman with angry green eyes was kneeling above him. She was wearing bloody white gloves and the barbecue apron Linda had bought for him, cartoon of a fat grinning chef pulling down the back of his pants and pointing at his hairy butt. “Next one who complains about my cooking can eat rump flambé!” the caption read.
Mark’s head hurt, but his feet and hands and arms hurt worse, unbelievable pain. The woman was doing something horrible to them and talking to herself while she did it.
“Go ahead and screw my brain, that’s okay,” she said. “There’s nothing I like better than a good hard screw.”
She had the power drill that he kept in the basement, and she was shooting six-inch deck screws into his hands and arms. She was fastening him to the kitchen floor.
“You awake now, Mr. Manly Man, Mr. Cock of the Roost?” she said. “Good. I want you to feel what it’s like to get screwed.”
He tried to move his legs, but wrenching pain told him that his feet were already screwed to the floor.
“This is called the missionary position,” she said. “Screwer on top and screwee pinned beneath. All good Christians need to learn this position because it’s holy in the eyes of God.”
She shot another screw through his wrist, and he tried to yell but there was a dishtowel stuffed in his mouth.
“Ooo, I can see you’re getting off,” she said. “You like feeling my long hard thang stuck in your quivering love-hole, don’t you? It makes you all wet and gooey.”
Memories blurred together like a dozen movies projected on the same screen at once, cowboy’s face puffing on his little pea-shooter blowgun, Linda’s face staring like a frozen mask behind the bug-splotched windshield of his truck, Toya’s face trembling with séance-seizure, Linda’s face superimposed on Toya’s face flushing sweaty with sex heat, green-eyed killer’s face snarling with psychotic fury as she reached for another deck screw.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You think I won’t respect you in the morning. Ah, but it’s not just your body I love, my dear, it’s your brain.”
She stuck the screw point into his right ear and pulled the drill trigger.
He heard her voice clear but distant like a broadcast from another planet. He was floating above his body, and that wasn’t so bad. He was used to floating above his body. Up there against the ceiling, nothing hurt. He watched her cut open the crotch of his trousers with a knife.
“Don’t keep your sausage in your pants like that,” she said. “Let’s get that porker up and grunting.”
He watched her slice open his scrotum like a purse and pull out his money, two fat purple coins. He watched her dig out his eyeballs and stick his testicles in the sockets.
“There, how do things look from the male point of view?” she asked. “See any good hot bitches ready to party? Get that mojo working, boy.”
She kept talking, eyes flaring with hot green fury. He moved away from the scorching heat and began his second long journey through the tunnel. This time he knew the door was locked behind him and there was no way to turn back.
***
Garrick Haldan watched through his listening shells while Kat sculpted Mark Burton into an emblem of the New Society. At last she took off her bloody apron and left.
She got in Emily’s white Honda, and while the two women drove away Garrick slipped off his shells and checked his middle-aged-businessman mask in his rearview mirror. It looked pretty good if you didn’t look too close, and no one was likely to look at all. He hid his long hair inside a hat, put on a pair of tinted glasses to hide his strange eyes, and got out of his van. With his overcoat and briefcase, he looked like a bill collector, the last kind of person these over-borrowed condo fools would want to notice.
Fortunately Kat hadn’t locked Burton’s front door. Garrick pulled on a pair of gloves, went to the kitchen, and eased past Mark’s body. Toya’s butchered head still sat on the table, top of her skull upside-down like a fruit bowl full of cherries, and the smell of insecticide was strong. The dead worms were half melted from the poison.
Garrick took a flashlight from his briefcase and used it to examine the table and floor, hoping to find some live ones. At last he spotted a few of them crawling on the underside of the tabletop. He got a specimen jar from his briefcase and captured the worms, being very careful not to injure them. With a sharp kitchen knife he carved out a sizable chunk of Toya’s undigested brain tissue and dropped it into another jar. He shut his briefcase and quickly left.
He was so excited while he drove home that his face became hot and started to itch beneath the mask. Maybe Father would be pleased with him at last.
***
Emily drove with the space between her eyebrows bunched up in a knot. The knot was fear, and Kat liked to see that in a face.
“I was so worried about you in there,” Emily said. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”
“You understand, don’t you, that I’m First Avatar now?” Kat asked.
“Gee, yeah, I guess you are. Congratulations, Kat. No one deserves it more than you.”
“Let me get this straight,” Kat said. “You know I’m First Avatar, but you keep calling me Kat. Does that mean you’re on a first-name basis with God on earth?”
“No, gee, I didn’t mean . . .” Emily’s fear-knot bulged like a blister.
“If I ever hear you call me Kat again, you better damn well hope you’re God’s equal. From now on you’ll address me as Shakti or Great Mother.”
“Yes, Great Mother. Really I didn’t mean any offense, Great Shocky, I was just…”
“Pull into that rest area,” Kat said.
Emily pulled in and parked.
“Now get the wax out of your ears and listen,” Kat said. “Three days from now will be judgment day, and any word I say will be the word of God herself. Do you want God to say good words about you or bad words?”
“Good words,” Emily said.
“Then you better learn how to pronounce my name. Say Shakti.”
Emily tried but didn’t get it right, and Kat had to slap her.
“Maybe you think I was picked by accident,” she said. “Is that what you think?”
“No, I always knew you were the one, really I did.”
“Then say my name again real slow.”
Emily didn’t make the t sharp enough,
and Kat had to slap her again.
“Shakti never intended Toya Jones to be First Avatar, she was just a carrier,” Kat said. “I was chosen before I was born. This is my destiny. Do you believe that?”
“Yes, Great Mother.”
“Then say my name like you believe it.”
Kat kept smacking her even after she learned to pronounce the name just right. Tears made Emily’s face warm and slippery and nice to slap, and her blue jeans were wet with pee. Kat liked the smell of fear in a lover’s crotch, and it was hard to stop hitting her.
“Let’s go in the bathroom, Great Shakti, and I’ll prove that I love you.”
Kat had been waiting to hear that. She kissed Emily hard and sucked her bleeding lip.
“Silly thing, all you can think of is sex,” Kat said. “But if it will make you happy.”
They went to the rest room. Kat unlocked her chastity belt and sat on the toilet lid while Emily knelt and worshipped. The smell of urine and used tampons reminded Kat of high school locker rooms, girls with pimples snapping towels on bare girl asses, soft baby-fat thighs slippery with soap, high school homecoming queen squirming naked in a dugout late one summer night learning the kind of love her boyfriend couldn’t teach her, Toya Jones twitching naked in the hot tub drooling pink foam, luminous blue eyes watching with machine calm, Mark Burton’s purple testicle-eyes staring out of bloody red sockets, something horrid writhing out of the bloody skull-bowl on the table like living rice pudding, maggots wriggling over a tangle of veins and digested brain chewing their way down to the stem, Emily’s mouth licking and slobbering with frightened determination, glassy machine homecoming-queen eyes blinking and staring in a dugout late one summer night, and Kat’s orgasm was intense but unpleasant like a hemorrhage in the loins.
Emily drove without speaking the rest of the way to Cincinnati. She wasn’t very pretty or smart, but Kat liked the ball of fear between her eyebrows. New Society had plenty of pretty smartasses trying to claw their way to the top, and she was going to have to sort them out from her loyalists. A good ball of fear between the eyebrows was one way to tell the difference. She planned the speech she would make as First Avatar: One nation of sister-gods, one world of wise women, one perfect ovarian village, and all sisters who obey me are equal. Sacrifices must be made, like all the dope you’ve been shooting and snorting instead of selling. Men will be locked up and milked for sperm, but I better not say that just yet.
Emily parked behind the gallery, and Kat silently practiced her speech while they climbed the stairs. But there was hardly anyone up there to hear it. Bert was sitting at the desk, and three sorry-looking smack freaks were shooting up on a cot.
“Where is everyone?” Kat asked.
Bert gave her a don’t-bug-me look, chewing gum like a bored cow. “Three whole carload be off chasing the cowpoke,” she said. “Ain’t that what you was wanting, three whole carload looking for one skinny-ass ol’ cowpoke?”
“Let me get this straight,” Kat said. “There’s a search in progress, and everybody else just went to the movies.”
Bert shrugged. “They all got the sniffle or something. You know how they get sick when they smell a little danger.”
“Get on that fucking phone and get every one of them up here right now,” Kat said. “In twenty minutes I want to see every asshole up here that I’ve ever seen scarfing up my free dope.”
Bert snapped her bubble gum and smirked. “Here all this time I be thinking that dope belong to Cypher,” she said.
Kat reached across the desk and grabbed the front of Bert’s blue work shirt. “From now on no one uses that name around here,” she said. “In case you haven’t heard, I’m God on earth, and my name’s not Cypher.”
Bert kept smirking even though the shirt collar was tight around her neck. “Maybe that why Rebus want to see you,” she said. “Maybe he want to see God and say his prayers or something. He back there behind the lead partition.”
Kat felt like making an example, but she needed Bert to man the phones until the Ryver problem was solved. She went to the partitioned-off corner where Burne dangled from the ceiling stinking of shit and sickness. Rebus was a flicker of motionless faces hanging like a dim brushstroke in the high shadows.
“In case you haven’t heard, I’m in charge now,” Kat said.
“Cypher says your conversion will take three days,” Rebus said. “In the interim, you are not to be considered infallible. If you give an order that I question, it will have to be okayed through Cypher. That is his word.”
“Don’t give me this he-his-Cypher shit,” Kat said. “My first order is that I don’t want to hear the name Cypher anymore. From now on the name is Shakti and the pronoun is she. My second order is that you can forget about this three-day interim because if anybody fucks with me now I’ll remember it in three days, if you catch my drift.”
“Time will tell,” Rebus said, too arrogant to make his flickering mouths move when he spoke.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“In three days you’ll no longer be your lovable self, will you?”
Something dripped on Kat’s shoulder, and she looked up at the carcass hanging above her like an oozing testicle in an iron-web scrotum. The colostomy tube wasn’t properly fitted, and runny shit was dripping from the incision.
“Burne, you’re such a naughty boy” Rebus said, and his shuffling faces stretched into a sardonic sneer. “Don’t you know it’s not nice to poop on God.”
Kat grabbed the broom and bashed the reeking ball like a piñata. It whimpered and swung and squirted a thin stream of yellow shit.
“Here’s another thing that’s going to change,” she said. “From now on, I interrogate Burne because you don’t know how to ask questions. If you want honest answers, you got to make the questions hurt.”
She dropped the broom and nearly fell. Something had made her dizzy, maybe the smell or tilting her head up.
“Oh dear, I can see you’re not feeling well,” Rebus said. “The elixir will keep Burne alive for many pleasant months to come, but in three days you’ll be a walking corpse speaking someone else’s words. Congratulations on your promotion.”
Thin scraps of sarcastic comic-strip mouths grinned motionless in the dark ceiling corner, and then Rebus was gone. Kat left Burne’s cubical and saw Emily and Bert whispering at the desk. When they noticed her, they pretended they were talking on the phones.
“How’s this search going?” Kat asked. She was so dizzy that she started to fall and had to grab the side of a cot. “They found Ryver yet?”
“Nope,” Bert said. “They say he be off somewhere east of Columbus, but I think they getting a little turned around.”
“You tell them if they fuck up they . . . they . . .”
Kat tried to put some authority in her voice, but it wasn’t easy when she was leaning over a cot and couldn’t remember what she wanted to say. Her thoughts were getting turned around like the idiots hunting for Ryver. She heard Bert chuckle as she pushed herself up.
“You organized this search, and if anything goes wrong it’s on your head,” Kat said.
“Yes ma’am, that why I be sitting here doing my job,” Bert said. “But it ain’t easy hearing the phone with everyone talking at me.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. From now on you call me—”
“Oh yeah, right, Emily told me.” Bert smirked and cracked her gum. “The Great Mutha, something like that.”
Kat leaned on the desk and swallowed a mouthful of bloody vomit. “My name’s Shakti, and I want to hear you say it.”
Bert made a sound halfway between jeesh and piss, and the knot in Emily’s forehead pinched tighter while she pretended to listen to a phone. Another phone started ringing, and it made Kat’s head swirl pink like blood in a hot tub. She turned and puked on an empty cot. She heard Bert say something behind her back and heard Emily whisper, “Bert, you better shut up.”
Kat cleaned her chin with an army blanket. �
�What’s that you said?” she asked Bert.
“I didn’t say nothing.”
“Yes you did. Now say it louder so everyone can have a good laugh.”
Bert snapped her gum and smirked. “I said Shocky’s just the name Cypher like to call himself when he put on lipstick and a dress. Everybody feel a little queer sometimes.”
Kat tried to hit her, but Bert caught her wrist and held it in a brawny grip. “Now ain’t that too bad?” she said. “The missis don’t like the way this slave pick cotton.”
There was a flash of steel, and Bert’s throat gaped open. Emily screamed in short sharp shrieks like a fire alarm until Kat slapped her face, and then the big room was suddenly soundless. Even the three silent junkies huddling on their cot got quieter.
“Anybody else feel like laughing?” Kat asked.
Bert fell out of her chair and flopped around on the floor like someone choking with laughter, grinning throat gurgling blood and her eyes staring wide at the funny woman with worms in her brain. Kat kicked the side of her head until she stopped convulsing.
Silent junk eyes stared from the cot too loaded to be scared while Bert’s crushed ear leaked blood on Kat’s shoe. She wondered if anyone in the Lost Society could feel the terror she felt tonight. Then she saw the hard knot of fear between Emily’s eyebrows and remembered why she loved that silly face so much.
“Get on the fucking phone and find out what’s going on,” Kat said.
“Yes, Great Mother.”
Emily sat in the vacated chair and picked up the bloody receiver. “Anybody out there?” she said. “Hello?”