The Haunter Of The Threshold

by Edward Lee

  Shot Glass winks, then turns on the bilge pump.

  The motor screams. Sonia’s body goes rigid as she arches her back on the bed, trying to scream through her gag. Shot Glass and Clayton’s wicked laughter can barely be heard over the pump motor’s rising, insane whine. Shot Glass pushes down on her belly while Clayton pushes the nozzle in deeper.

  “Git aout’a theer! Git aout!” Shot Glass hoots, then turns the machine on HIGH.

  The motor’s scream is now deafening. It is a sound truly forged in Hell. Sonia squirms on the bed, balloon-cheeked as the industrial suction works harder against what can only be her cervical cap.

  “Stop it! Stop!” you scream over and over till your eyeballs are fit to eject, but even from the bottom of your lungs, your pleas cannot be heard over the motor’s scream.

  Whole minutes go by like this...

  Finally, Shot Glass and Clayton cast incredulous expressions when the bilge pump cuts off and the insane whine grinds down to nothing.

  Clayton scratches his beard. “What happened?”

  “Bilge pump’s motor burnt up!”

  “Dang! Bitch’s pussy done wore it out!”

  Shot Glass shakes his head, drags the nozzle out, and looks perplexed at it. “Didn’t even bust her water. En’t that somethin’?”

  “Shore is, Shot Glass!”

  Sonia’s eyes are insanely wide now as she shudders on the monstrous bed.

  Thank God! you think. But—But what now? “There, you’ve had your fun! Now let us go! I’ll give you money, I’ll give you the car–anything, just let us go!”

  “Heer thet, Clayton?”

  “Shee-it!”

  Shot Glass goes to the counter, then reappears with not one but two lamps, each with shattered bulbs.

  Oh my God NO...

  “En’t never seed a baby come aout afore,” Shot Glass said. “So’s weer gonna make yew’re friend have aout with it.” He holds up the lamp-ends. “One way’re another, that kid’s comin aout. ”

  Then the madness resumes. Sonia begins to flipflop on the mattress as Shot Glass and Clayton each wield a lamp, bearing the live lead-stems to her nipples. You hear the familiar Zap! followed by a crackle. Sonia’s teeth can be seen grinding her gag. After a while, tendrils of smoke trail up from the tortured areolae. “Naow thet we got’er primed,” Shot Glass remarks, “let’s do daown heer.”

  You scream and scream and scream as they begin to alternately zap Sonia’s navel and clitoris.

  Zap!

  crackle...

  Zap!

  crackle...

  Zap!

  crackle...

  Repeatedly, they hold the lead-stems down for several seconds, which causes Sonia to convulse and actually sizzle. Her hair stands on end, and even the tuft of her pubic hair swells out from static. Then they begin to zap all around the circumference of her swollen stomach.

  By the time they stop, you’ve screamed your throat raw. Sonia lay still alive, shuddering with her eyes peeled open. Her eyes’ whites have long-since turned red from hemorrhage.

  Shot Glass now appears annoyed by their repeated failure to effect miscarriage. “This bitch’s womb is tougher to crack than a fuckin’ floor safe, Clayton. I durn’t understand it.”

  “Shore is one tough cunt.”

  Burn marks pock Sonia’s belly. There’s an awful redolence in the room which can only be seared skin and burnt labial flesh.

  “Lemme just go get the twenty-pound sledge,” Clayton offers. “Shee-it, we’ll beat the kid out of her.”

  “Please please please, just STOP!” you rasp. “Why are you doing this?”

  Shot Glass frowns over at your query. “Why we doin’ it? What’cha think, missy? Weer doin’ it ‘cos it’s fun! ”

  Then they both begin to cackle again, Clayton actually flapping his penis up and down in amusement.

  “New, the sledge en’t special enough, Clayton—”

  “Special?”

  “Ee-yuh. Got no style, yew know?”

  “Style?”

  Shot Glass rolls his eyes. “Clayton, any ole moe-ron cud think’a thet! We need sumpin’ en’t been done afore. Hmm...” He swigs some beer in rumination. “Aw, I got a ideer!”

  “Please my God I’m begging you would you PLEASE not do this! Do it to me, not her! Just PLEASE let her go—”

  “Clayton, I’m sick’a heerin’ that ‘un. En’t nothin’ wuss than a sassy bitch with a laoud moauth. Haow ‘boaut shuttin’ her up?”

  With surprising agility, Clayton thumps over and—

  Smack!

  —sweeps a rank bare foot right across the side of your head. You topple over, your chains straining and your senses shatter like a window.

  It’s mostly a grainy veil of semi-consciousness that cloaks your mind now. “Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh,” you keep hearing. You hear your chains clink as you attempt to drag yourself forward. When you try to keep your eyes open, they keep dragging shut.

  “Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh...”

  Your hand slides across your chest, through tacky sperm, to desperately touch your cross. Help me, God, comes your hypocritical supplication. But the cross has changed.

  It’s now a pentagram.

  You try to focus, to shove back the crushing urge to faint. More chains clink as you knee your way toward Sonia. On hands and knees, then, you look at the mangy bed—

  And your heart slams in your chest.

  For however long you’ve been dazed or unconscious, now you see what they’ve been up to.

  You leap forward off your knees in an offensive reflex. Tiny warbling squeals can be heard leaking from Sonia’s gag as Shot Glass prepares a fair length of rope about the middle of Sonia’s stretched stomach.

  He ties a knot—“Heh, heh, heh!”—then slips a wooden rod beneath it. Amid the madness, you think one word: Tourniquet...

  Clayton giggles as Shot Glass begins to turn the rod...

  Your screams fly like glass shattering. Your ankles bleed from the metal fetter and you strain across the floor, useless. Half a turn of the rod sinks the rope into Sonia’s belly, like someone tightening a string around a beach ball.

  “Crank it, Shot Glass! Crank it!”

  “Give it up! ” and then he casts the most evil grin at you when he slowly turns the rod further. You actually hear the rope creak.

  You scream yourself senseless. “I’ll do anything! ANYTHING!

  Just stop! ”

  Shot Glass peers at her. “Anything?”

  “YES!” you bellow.

  “Hmm.” Shot Glass chews his lip, holding the rod to maintain the tourniquet’s tension around Sonia’s belly. “Would’jew, say, eat Clayton’s shit?”

  Your mind wobbles. “YES! Just take that rope off her!”

  He hesitates, reverses the rod till the rope hangs slack. “Okay, reddy-head, Yew got yew’re self a deal. But just so yew know. Clayton eats big so ya gotta figure he shits big.”

  Clayton giggles uncontrollably now. Pantless, dirty, and fat, he thunks toward you, fingering his penis in exuberance. “Down on yer back’n open wide, reddy! I’se gonna shit right in yer purdy mouth!”

  At least they’d cancelled their torture of Sonia. You lay back as instructed, open your mouth, but almost scream as Clayton crudely squats right over your face. The canyon of his shit-flecked buttocks lowers, then the vision trebles in horror when he widens that buttocks with his hands to lend a more concise view of puckered, pimpled anus.

  “Clayton, try’n feed the turds direct inta her maouth. I’d be pleesed as punch ta see thet.”

  “Shore thing!”

  Open-mouthed, you wait. The abominable cleft now hovers only inches from your lips. When the even more abominable sphincter begins to dilate, you slam your eyes shut.

  “Here she comes!”

  Clayton’s anus squeezes out a stout, firm stool that—

  “Eeeeeeeeeeee-YUH!”

  —that miraculously slides right between your lips. Whe
n it lowers to the back of your throat, you have no choice but to sever it with your teeth, go tense, and swallow. The odor of the process can be imagined, but the taste?

  You cannot think about that...

  With each desperate swallow of each stool-segment, you only have time to re-open your mouth to admit another segment.

  “Aw, noaw, yew’re cheatin’!” you hear Shot Glass complain. “The deal’s off if’n ya cheat! Curn’t just shalluh, yew gotta chew...”

  The entirety of your soul moans now, but you must do it. It’s the only way to save Sonia. You actually chew the next segment, your belly quivering in revolt to what’s being forced into it. It’s as though your whole face is trying to seal shut against the outrage, but you keep eating none the less; even your mouth shudders as it attempts to manipulate the warm, tight stools. One after another they descend from the hellish clough. Your tongue cannot help but detect corn, arcane grit, bean casings, and other mysterious fecal debris. All you can do is mush it up and gulp it down, your spirit screaming all the way.

  “Ee-yuh, naow thet’s entertainment!” you hear Shot Glass roar.

  After another grunting minute or two, Clayton’s bowels are relieved. He is kind enough to wipe his ass with the back of your limp hand but you’re essentially too mortified to really notice. You’re practically convulsant as you lay gog-eyed on the floor with a belly full of hot shit; you’re all too aware of its heat and the sense of grotesque fullness within you.

  Your teeth are creamed with feces, your mouth lined with it. You’re helpless to stop the rich, horrendous stench that eddies from your mouth with every breath...

  But I did it, by God, you think. I did it!

  “Unlock these shackles and let us go now,” you demand.

  Shot Glass stands up, parting his hands. “I always keep my promises. A man who durn’t keep his word en’t wuth nuthin.’ Clayton. Let her go.”

  “Shore, Shot Glass.”

  You look up expectantly, but then—

  “Oh my God, you fuck!”

  Clayton turns around and starts pissing hard in your face.

  And Shot Glass begins to crank the tourniquet rod once more.

  “You lying scumbag evil pieces of redneck FUCK!”

  “Heh, heh, heh! Heh, heh, heh!” Shot Glass keeps cranking the rod. The rope constricts tighter and tighter against Sonia’s belly. Her body actually bows upward now, with only her heels and her shoulder blades touching the mattress. “Heer she goes, ee-yuh! Ee-yuh!”

  Clayton can only maintain his giggling as he shakes the last of his piss off in your face. Then he goes to the bed and removes Sonia’s gag—

  The scream that bursts from her throat cracks every window in the shack.

  “Heh, heh, heh! Heh, heh, heh!”

  The rope creaks, digging deeper.

  “Pop the kid out!” Clayton cheers.

  “YOU CRAZY PSYCHO WHITE TRASH SCUM!” you bellow.

  Shot Glass now stands up to crank harder. He pulls against the rod like a lever that won’t quite give. Sonia’s shrieks sound like brakes with no pads but in between, Shot Glass looks at you and says, “Durn’t know what’cher all bent aout’a shape over no ways, reddy. This en’t nuthin’ but a dream.”

  “Yeah,” Clayton agrees. “Your dream. Which means it’s just a bunch’a shit from your head.”

  The rope keeps creaking. “But what ya gotta understand is that, here? In this place? The shit from your own head mixes with the shit out theer...”

  You stare at the madman’s words. The revolting mirage from the outhouse—the man with the upside-down face—had said the same thing, hadn’t he, and as that idea occurs to you your eyes rove back to, first, Clayton, then Shot Glass. They’ve changed...as if their revelation to you has triggered an allegorical metamorphosis...

  Their faces are upside-down, the effect of which only makes their sneering, shuck-and-jive, backwater grins all the more hideous. And their genitals—normal only moments ago—now sport maroon spheres for glans and scrotums like sacks of grapes.

  “Clayton, heer it comes!”

  “Git it! Git it!”

  One other thing: their arms have transformed to stout, heavily suckered tentacles.

  Sonia’s final shriek whistles through the air. There’s a long, loud Crrrrrunch and then a gush of splashing water. You look away just as Sonia’s belly begins to collapse.

  “Heh, heh, heh...”

  Shot Glass and Clayton jump up and down in monstrous jubilation, tentacles writhing. A baby begins to hack, and the last thing you see is Shot Glass’s inverted face moving closer and closer to yours, the upside-down grin widening, and he explains, “Waal, missy, theer en’t but one more thing I have ta say ta yew. Wanna know what it ‘tis?”

  Your eyes feel lidless as you stare.

  “Gub nbb shub naabl e uh bleb nuuurrlathotep...”

  You scream so hard that blood sprays from your mouth and you—

  —woke up in bed next to Sonia, glazed in sweat and shivering beneath the caul of granular darkness stretched across the room. Hazel could hear her heart thunking down. Oh my God, another nightmare...What the FUCK is wrong with me?

  She lay still, recovering from the mudslide of detestable images still in her head. Calm down, calm down, it’s all over...

  She turned her head to the left and found Sonia sleeping contentedly. Then she turned her head to the right—

  She could see the narrow door to the den; it stood open a few inches, and the desk lamp threw a widening wedge of pale-yellow light on the floor. Had she left the light on earlier, or had Sonia? The prospect made little sense, since Hazel would’ve noticed it before going to bed.

  Something smelled meaty in the room, even with the overhead fans going. But her attention was snared not by the odd smell but by rapid, irregular clicking sounds which she recognized immediately.

  A computer keyboard.

  Her eyes widened where she lay, staring at the crack in the den door.

  Someone’s...typing. On one of the computers...

  There could be no doubt unless, of course, this was another dream...”Who’s in there?” she called out, but her voice sounded scratchy and feeble in the grainy dark. “I can hear you typing.”

  “You don’t hear anything, Hazel,” a man’s voice replied quite nonchalantly. “So just shut up.”

  The voice—she was positive—belonged to Frank.

  “Frank, what are you doing in there? How come you didn’t wake us up when you got back?”

  An annoyed sigh in between pauses of the keyboard. “Because I’m not back.” Then a chuckle. “I’m still up at the Gray Cottage. This is a dream, Hazel. Haven’t figured that out yet?”

  Dream, my ass, she determined then climbed off the bed...

  She could do little more than try to get off the bed, however. She propped up on her hands, tried to swing her legs out but suddenly a horrendous pressure was pushing down on her. Was she having a stroke, a heart attack? No, she realized. No symptoms, no pain. So why— It was as though the gravity of the space she occupied had increased tenfold. “Frank! This is fucked up!” she yelled, yet the brassy exclamation did not stir Sonia from her sleep.

  Another chuckle from the den. “Hazel, the only thing fucked up in this house is you. ”

  “Asshole! Help me up!”

  Her plea was answered only by more key-clicking.

  What was he doing in there, even if this was a dream? And if truly a dream, then that would have to make it—what? A dream within a dream within a dream? came the absurd consideration. Meanwhile, every muscle in her back and arms strained quite failingly against the increasing weight, pressure, or gravity; something invisible was essentially squashing her back down to the mattress. A moment later she lay flat on her back again, and she couldn’t move. The paralysis permitted her to move only her head, back and forth. When she snapped her gaze back to the right, her eyes flicked lower, to the floor before the den...

  Wisps of black smoke see
med to be sifting upward from the floor. Fire! The cabin’s on fire..., but then in her scrutiny she realized it couldn’t be smoke.

  Smoke didn’t smell like meat.

  “It’s not really smoke,” Frank elucidated from the den. “You can think of it as a gas-phase effluent...” The wedge of light swelled as the den door creaked open. A shadow stood huge in the wedge, then shrank quickly as Frank ambled out. He looked down at Hazel from the foot of the bed.

  “It’s a conduction-flux, Hazel”—he grinned—“from the spells.”

  The spells, Hazel repeated the word in her mind. Even in her trepidation, she frowned at him. “Who do you think you are? Van Halen?”

  Frank wore sunglasses in spite of the room’s meager light. “Hagar,” he said and laughed.

  “And what’s this about spells?”

  “Spells, Hazel—occult theorems that manipulate the angular invariants of the surface of the Shining Trapezohedron.” He leaned over and rubbed her bare leg. “You know what that is, don’t you? The Shining Trapezohedron?”

  Hazel was about to say yes, was about to tell him that she’d found it and locked it in the car, but then retracted the affirmation without knowing why. Instead, she credulized the lie with an incomplete truth. “Oh, that red gemstone on Henry’s computer. File Number 1. I saw the picture of it. What the hell is it?”

  “What the hell is it?” he murmured. He wore khaki pants, loafers, and a short sleeve shirt with the tails out. His hair look disheveled, and overall he appeared tired and dirty. “You don’t need to know because you would never understand. You’re a lit-head and a sex-maniac.”

  “Thanks...”

  “Henry chickened out, just like my father. So he threw it away, the asshole. The system works in sequences of 33, but without that crystal we only have 32. It reduces the power-quotient by ten to the 32nd power.”

  Hazel smirked her confusion. What’s he talking about?

  “Don’t you see? Henry knew he was screwing us over. That’s why he got rid of it.”

  Hazel sighed nervously. “Frank, this doesn’t feel like a dream. It feels real.”

  “Three cheers to God, then, hmm? For creating the human mind and all its ten trillion synaptic connections. Quite a piece of work, to be able to do all those things and still produce dreams with such clarity, such accuracy, and such sheer authenticity that we don’t even believe they are dreams.” His hand slid up the inside of her thigh, played through her abundant pubic hair, then gave her crotch a squeeze. “Did that feel real?”