He heard bones crack, flesh tear.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Guy said, standing beside him and looking at the orgy. “It’s all so … romantic, don’t you think? Art and death and, hell, even audience participation.” He giggled.
Tony took another step towards the mob, then stopped when he felt Guy’s touch on his arm. It was not a solid touch; Guy’s fingers felt like a cold breeze blowing against his skin.
“She’s not there,” he said, suddenly serious. “That’s not her game.”
“What is?” Tony asked.
“Is that what you want to know? Or do you want to find out what yours is? I can show you that, too.” He stroked Tony’s arm, and the cold tightened his skin, seemed to burn in the bone of his arm. “Want to be a player, Tony?”
Tony groaned as the emptiness reached for him. He wanted it, he wanted Lisa. “Lisa,” he croaked, trying to hang on to the crumbling edifice of his past desires and pleasures while his future called to him.
Guy tsked. “Well, you never really were the truly adventurous type, Tony. You would never have found Painfreak on your own. Not like Lisa. She’s been on the scene since she was fifteen. She never told you? I used to see her around, when I was still around. Surprised the hell out of me when she latched on to you. Last chance romance, I think. One final try at a normal life with a guy who could give her at least a little action. Oh, what would my old therapist say? An abused child, obviously. Running away from something terrible, running back into it from the long way around. Dear, dear, the story of all our lives, I’m sure.”
Tony pulled his arm away. “Fuck you.”
Guy came up next to Tony, careful not to touch him. “Say something like that again,” he whispered into Tony’s ear, “and it might come true.”
Tony stepped back and glanced to his left and right, looking for a direction to walk in. He shivered from the cold Guy had brought with him, and the cold in his words.
“No? Turned down again? Right. I really tried to seduce you once, didn’t I? After we graduated?”
“You tried to move in with me when I got my own place,” Tony replied. He remembered the panic in Guy’s voice as he had offered himself, promised to do whatever Tony wanted, just so they could continue being together, continue playing their games. Fear had leaked from every pore in his body, as raw and powerful as Tony’s own when Lisa left him. Graduation, expectations of the adult world, Tony moving out had all sharpened the edges to Guy’s panic. “I kicked you back into the elevator,” Tony continued. He had had his own panic, his own burgeoning emptiness, to deal with. “To make up, you took me out to Painfreak.”
“My shrink’d say that was a very hostile move. Couldn’t get to you, so I brought you here for Painfreak to seduce you. Damn, but I wish I could remember that elevator scene. I wonder what I used on you. No, no, don’t tell me. Imagining it will entertain me to no end, at least until your next visit. Maybe then I’ll ask you to tell me about it.”
“I’m never coming back here after I get Lisa out.”
“Of course you’ll be back. What else are you going do when Lisa’s gone?”
Tony recoiled, looked away from Guy. He moved off in a random direction, searched out the next fire, headed for its flames. Guy caught his arm, and the cold staggered Tony. Painfreak’s bone mark glowed on Tony’s hand.
“Don’t go off half-cocked, lover. You’ll miss her moment as a player. Here, let me show you.”
Guy pulled on Tony’s arm, dragged him past women pounding on the bodies of men stretched out and tied down to the floor with wild, dancing steps; past a woman bound, blind, gagged, being raped by another woman with a dildo strapped across her sex; past men wrestling one another in shallow pits, breaking each other’s limbs, biting off pieces of flesh, licking the blood spilling from their mouths; past a man with a bloody machete across his stomach, reclining among the severed heads of women and busying himself with pulling out the tongue from one head’s mouth and running her blue lips across his skin.
Lisa was not among any of the women.
Guy stopped before another pit, but held fast to Tony’s arm. Below, two naked women approached a nude fat man whose spread-eagled limbs were held fast by manacles to stakes. One woman sat behind his head and secured it between her thighs. Her leg muscles bulged as she applied pressure, and he twitched and choked as his eyes widened. The other woman settled herself on his face, covered it completely, and began to move her hips.
“Lisa,” Tony whispered. He leaned forward, but Guy’s cold grip kept him frozen in place.
Lisa looked up as her hands massaged her breasts and she thrust her hips harder into the face trapped under her. Her eyes saw through Tony, as if he were as much a ghost as Guy. Sweat filmed her body. A smile, sweet and self-involved, danced across her lips. The fat man’s body jerked, spasmed. His hands grasped at something elusive in the air. His back arched and a desperate, muffled moan escaped from the pit. Lisa threw her head back, gasped. The fat man collapsed, and his body slackened. Lisa jerked forward and cried out. She slid off the man’s face and fell to the ground, eyes closed, smiling to herself. The other woman raised her hips, twisted her legs over until the man’s neck cracked, then released him. She moved over Lisa, straddled her, closed her thighs over Lisa’s face.
“Lisa,” Tony called out. His voice was still a whisper, Guy’s hand still served as a cold anchor.
Lisa’s hands fluttered in the air. Her legs twitched like caught fish thrown on a dock. The woman bore down, hunched forward, used her hands to keep her thighs pressed closed over Lisa’s face. Lisa’s struggles weakened until her last feeble movements finally subsided. The woman remained over her, locked in a tight embrace.
“Lisa,” Tony cried out as he fell to his knees.
The woman rose, took Lisa by the feet and dragged her up a ramp. She was heading in the direction of the machete man when Tony lost sight of them. He realized then that Guy had released him and had vanished. There was only the cold ache in his bone and muscle to remind him of the ghost’s hand.
“Come along, dear,” an old woman’s voice said behind him. Someone tapped him gently on the shoulder.
“I think you’ve had enough for one night, young fella,” an old man said, slipping his arm under Tony’s and helping him to his feet. “Time for you to go home. There’s always tomorrow night, you know.”
The old, well-dressed couple who had been watching him throughout the evening bracketed him as he stood up. They each hooked an arm around him and helped him walk away from the pit. The woman’s diamond bracelet bit into his flesh. Tony felt like a child being taken home from a hard day at the playground by his grandparents. Would there be milk and cookies in the kitchen? Bedtime stories tonight?
Tony tried to remember his grandparents, and found that he could not.
The elderly couple guided him back to the cavern entrance, took him through the sound baffles, helped him maneuver through the dancing crowds in the outer club. At the steel double door entrance to the club, the couple released him.
“You come right back when you’re feeling better,” the woman said. She smiled, and cracks widened in the caked make-up covering her face.
“We’ll be here another couple of nights,” said the old man. He patted Tony’s shoulder in an amiable, fatherly way. His breath was stale, like the air in a den abandoned by a predator. “Of course, you can always come along when the place moves. There’s always a need for help. Lots of turnover, you know.”
The couple looked to each other and laughed as they gently pushed him to the doors. Tony leaned against metal, felt it give, and found himself in a hallway under a single bright light bulb.
There was the taste of ash in his mouth as he made his way back to the loading docks. Exhaustion made him rest for a few moments on the stairs, but the faint echo of Painfreak’s dance music finally drove him on. He passed no one on his way out to the loading dock, where the rain had stopped and dawn had lightened the sky. The ground was
still wet, the air humid. Tony glanced over his shoulder at the warehouse entrance. The two doormen returned his gaze. Behind them, Guy hung upside down, suspended by his feet on a length of chain, swinging back and forth like a clock pendulum.
“Do you feel it?” Guy asked, his voice pitched high, almost hysterical.
And in that moment, the emptiness within him opened up like a bottomless well. Tony felt himself standing by the well, leaning out over the edge, wind whistling by his ears. He licked his lips, searching for the taste of blood. His erection strained as if it wanted to break out of its confines and search for satisfaction.
“You want it?” Guy teased. “Tell me what that’s like, to want it. To want the nothingness. The extinction. Tell me first, what that emptiness is like. It’s so hard when you’re in it to understand. Tell me what the void is like, from the outside. Then tell me what it feels like to want it.”
“Tomorrow night,” Tony answered, his voice quavering. After you show me the games I’ll really like. After I become a player.
“Tomorrow night, sir,” the Asian doorman replied, with a slight bow. Guy was gone.
Tony went back to his car and drove home. He did not bother picking up his mail or answering his telephone messages. Though his fear was gone and he was tired, he still had trouble falling asleep. Excitement kept him up, until he began to relax as he gently stroked the back of his left hand with his thumb. Slowly, he fell asleep while caressing Painfreak’s invisible marks on his flesh.
Lover Doll
Wayne Allen Sallee
* * *
“Lover Doll” was first published in Little Deaths, edited by Ellen Datlow and published by TOR in 1994.
‡
Wayne’s most recent collection is Fiends By Torchlight, which was published by Annihilation Press in 2007, and one of the original stories, “High Moon,” will be reprinted in Best Horror of The 21st Century: The First Decade (Wicker Park Press). “Rail Rider” appeared in J. N. Williamson’s The Illustrated Masques (Gauntlet Press), and his novel, The Holy Terror, and a collection from 1995, With Wounds Still Wet, are available on Kindle (CrossRoads Press). His meta memoir, Proactive Contrition, and Can I End Now? are both exclusive works published in Germany by Blitz Verlag. He is currently writing a crime novel, City With No Second Chances, and a series of dystopian stories with their beginnings set in the recent future fraught of our current political climate. His website is www.wayneallensallee.com and his blog is www.frankenstein1959.blogspot.com.
† † †
This is my favorite story in that the first part is almost entirely true, drawn from my childhood in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago.
* * *
She is asleep.
It is Memorial Day 1994, and perhaps it is fitting that I dwell on my past. Our past.
I stare out the window, the one facing east. Where dawn will eventually take away the night with cancerous washes of summer sun and lake breezes. The plasma-coloured digital clock blinks in three-second intervals. It is 4:57 a.m.
Celandine snuggles a little closer to me, caught up in her REM dreams. She tells me that she dreams in black and white. We rent an apartment on Wolcott Street, a common area for gangster films shot here in the forties and fifties. I dream in colour, and in my dreams, it always seems to be the hours before dawn. Like now. Streets deserted. My mind alert. I can hear my heartbeat in my nostrils, in my ears.
Celly has the sheets pulled down to her waist. She sleeps in the nude. I wear shorts and an old t-shirt. I hear soft snoring, a peaceful sound. Soft waves hitting the shores of Fullerton Beach.
I look over, recognizing the sound. More nasal than Celly’s.
The vestigial twin growing out of my lover’s ribcage is the one who is snoring.
The gentle sounds bring back memories.
I. 1959 Babies
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places—Hemingway
Crystal Street in those days was a world removed from the gang territory it is now. There were no burned-out tenements, no need for orange signs in each window of the three-flats telling passers-by that they were treading through a Neighbourhood Crime Watch Zone. There were social clubs. But we all saw The Blackboard Jungle and knew things were on the verge of change.
My parents were living off Crystal and Washtenaw when I was born. It was a Polish neighbourhood, the kind where nobody ever moved. They just died, and after that, their sons and daughters stayed until they married and moved to a bigger house in Bucktown or Logan Square. Or maybe they died as well.
The summer of 1959 was sweltering. I recall hearing this much later in my life from relatives who had gone to the World Series game to see the White Sox. It was ninety-eight degrees on my birthdate, September ninth.
My mother and two of her friends from the radium watch plant she worked at—painting the dials with the luminous ink, in ten-hour shifts—had gone up and down Division and Milwaukee to the shows to get out of the heat that summer. The Banner, The Royal, the Biltmore; they were all air-conditioned.
My mother had to work into her second trimester; back then, my father was pulling in barely enough to feed a family of two working as a security guard at RB’s, a now-defunct department store on Milwaukee. I fondly remember getting a Whamm-O Monster Magnet and a Rock-’em Sock-’em Robot from the store in honour of kindergarten graduation.
My father let me pick out whatever I wanted, and by the time I was six, the word monster was embedded in my brain.
My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck when I was born, and I’m certain my mother’s exposure to the radium didn’t help. (The factory was eventually closed, after many years of court battles; if you stand on Ogden Avenue overpass, you can still look down and see the ghoulish lime-green glow in those windows that haven’t been painted black.)
In September of 1959, my mother and her friends went to the Biltmore on Division to see the premiere of Ben Hur. I’ve been told that she went into labour with me then and there.
The ambulance made it to Lutheran Deaconess in time. When I made my entrance into the world, my face was blue and there were traces of blood coming from my nose and ears. To give you an idea of how limited we were medically just thirty-five years ago, all the doctors could really tell my parents was that I had a degenerative muscle disease caused by trauma to the womb.
My mother blamed herself for many years.
When I was in grade school, one of the class trips was to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in Oldtown, where there was an exhibit of freaks from the Barnum & Bailey circus. Freaks was actually Phineas Barnum’s get-rich-quick term. His partner later referred to people like me and Celandine as “human curiosities.” Me with my bulging head and wrap-around eyes, Celly with the second head sticking out of her ribcage.
One of the displays was for Tom Thumb. His mother truly believed her son’s diminutiveness was caused by grief she held over her puppy drowning while she carried Charlie, the boy’s real name. I went home and told my mother this story, how Tom Thumb became rich and married a woman who told him he was just as beautiful as she, so that my mother needn’t worry about me.
My mother smiled sadly when I told her this, and now I realize it was because she knew how my adult years would hurt me, and that my coming school years would only foreshadow this hurt. She smiled the way one does when they are recalling that the person they are talking to used to be so young and tiny. The sadness of the first recognition of mortality. My mother expected the worst. And so I would still hear her cry at night.
But the school I went to was Childermas Research, one of the Cook County clinics.
During my first year of classes, I met Celandine Tomei. Some of the other children and their parents whispered about her.
The ages of the children in class varied; some learned slower, others had inhibited body functions and needed to be taught with much patience.
Celly was a 1959 baby, just like me.
She was the
first girl I ever saw naked.
* * *
Childermas Research was one weird fucking place. You entered this maze of buildings at Eighteenth and Honore, passing a little sliver of what looked like a Philadelphia rowhouse; this building that was the burn ward for the entire county, and the Lighthouse For The Blind. On the northeast horizon, a huge pair of red neon lips, advertising Magikist carpets, beckoned.
The classes of reading and spelling lessons weren’t too difficult; our rehab sessions reflected our needs. The therapists were great. Vonnie Llewellyn and Ron Szawlus had the patience of saints, I swear. Rehab mostly consisted of coordination exercises, games to make each person use their right and left sides independently, or in tandem.
What was weird about Childermas was my classmates. Not all of us were allowed out on class trips, like the one to Ripley’s. Sometimes I felt as if it was a prison. I was never treated badly, but I felt as if all of us were being manipulated in some way that I could never hope to comprehend.
Juvenile Rehab—where we were—was Room 18, big black numerals on an orange door. Room 20 should have housed the burn ward, but there were people of all ages in there, hooked up to various machines. I heard several orderlies grousing about having to work the Pain Detail, which was kat-corner to Room 20. A blank blue door.
I never saw any of what went on in that long corridor of sub-rooms. But I heard the screams. Several times over the years, I have vomited into my palm or my garbage can, whichever is more convenient, when I recall those damnable, high-pitched, keening screams.
Once it had nothing to do with memories. In a medical magazine, I came across photos of stillborn thalidomide babies like Celandine.
One of these “stillborn” children was nothing more than a nerve column wrapped around bone in the placenta.
Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror Page 13