by Ryan Harding
Sammy might have noticed, but a succession of thumping noises overhead mercifully distracted him and grabbed his attention. “I’ll be right back,” he offered and stormed up the staircase.
When he was out of earshot, Von grabbed a handful of Greg’s shirt. “Do you need a written invitation before you’ll use your brain?”
“What?”
“What were you just about to say? That you thought we were getting five million dollars, not three?”
“Well, aren’t we?”
“Yeah. And how much money do you think Sammy’ll want if he finds out?”
“He don’t deserve any of it . . . you and me are the ones doing all the work!”
“Exactly. But a man with Rochester’s money can pay to create a lot of problems for us. Like . . . hell, I don’t know, ninjas and shit.”
Greg gave this possibility a moment of reverent silence.
“So we might need his help after all. And we need his house to arrange the ransom. We don’t want to be seen anywhere near our homes, just in case.”
“But what could Sammy do against ninjas?”
Von considered this and shrugged. “This is Doctor Butcher we’re talking about, Greg. Those invisible bastards could be pissing throwing stars for the rest of their lives, which probably wouldn’t be very long if they try to get between us and that money.”
Greg looked up the stairwell, listening for Sammy. When he didn’t hear any sign that he was returning, he said, “I’ve got a better idea.”
Von was skeptical, to say the least.
“What if we kill Sammy?” Greg whispered, so quietly Von almost didn’t hear him.
“Say . . . that ain’t half-bad,” Von considered. “We get Sammy, we can cut him off and have a replacement dick. Rochester won’t be able to tell the difference.”
“Hey, that didn’t even occur to me,” Greg admitted.
“Then we can have his house at no charge, and we don’t have to share any of the money with him.”
“I didn’t think of that either! That’s even better!”
“Then why the hell did you suggest it in the first place? You must like killing other guys and dominating ‘em. Sammy’s right, you probably are gay.”
“The hell you say! I was thinking with Sammy out of the picture, we’d have Slut Necro Lambda and all those whores downstairs all to ourselves! That’s just as good as five million dollars, you ask me!”
“Slut Necro Lambda,” Von repeated with earnest reverence. “Man, I could certainly use some more of that backdoor action, no doubt about it.”
Greg grinned. “Now who sounds like the damn queer?”
At that moment, they heard more noises overhead and what had to be Sammy’s voice, the words inaudible but apparently forceful.
“Did he move all those twats up to the attic?” Von asked.
“I doubt it. I think I can hear ‘em crying in the basement.”
“Hmm. Maybe we should go find out, don’t you think? He shouldn’t be keeping any secrets from us. We’re supposed to be partners.”
Greg nodded. “You got that right, son. We can’t abide by no traitor. I’ll tell him that when we slash his throat for him.”
Von gestured to follow and began to quietly ascend the stairs.
Horace followed the Nova to a secluded two story home on an unmarked and unpaved road off Connelly Trail. The woods were thicker here, and it looked like the kind of place where toothless bumpkins would command you to squeal like a pig before bending you over and breaking you off. At this point, he was quite confident that the worst that could possibly happen to him had happened to him, and any subsequent cuts, bruises, and ass-poundings would be trivial at best.
When you had to crack the window of your Rabbit because the mephitic fetor of your crispified cock stump was nauseating you virtually to the point of unconsciousness, you didn’t have much further to fall. It triggered a very old memory from his childhood, an evening when his mother had melted a plastic ladle in the dishwasher, creating an overpowering olfactory assault so abominable that he’d had to seek refuse in the basement to keep from puking.
He stopped a hundred yards from the house, his headlights extinguished. He’d go the rest of the way on foot and hopefully get the drop on them. He had to wait for his eyes to adjust, although it still didn’t afford much definition to his environment. Out here was the kind of true darkness of night unknown to the city, away from all the street lights and neon, with even the stars blotted out by the heavy canopy of the trees overhead. The orange glow from the windows ahead was his only guiding light.
Was this even their house? Was his manhood being utilized in some form of ritual satanic abuse? Were they perhaps religious fanatics exacting the vengeance of their god on the “impure” heathens who sought the earthly pleasures of the flesh?
If so, it might be time their little sect learned the doctrine of an eye for an eye . . . and a life for a cock.
They found the Divided Man midway through the ascent. Greg saw him first and stopped cold. His hand seemed to have a mind of its own as it reached out and tugged at Von’s sleeve, never turning his head from the sight. Von was more eager to get upstairs and find out exactly what was so secretive that Sammy couldn’t tell them about it, and almost pulled a “Jump back, boy, you’re botherin’ me,” on him. Greg, however, was insistent, and Von finally peered back around the corner of the room they’d just passed on the way to the attic stairs.
“The hell?” Von asked. In that moment he wouldn’t haven’t been able to say why they had been so determined to get to the attic, or what the hell an attic was in the first place. Greg was still stretching his sleeve to get him to look, but he didn’t notice (neither, for that matter, did Greg).
It was the parents’ bedroom. Von always assumed Sammy’s mom and dad were both dead, especially considering the extent of their son’s homicidal forays into surgical possibilities. The evidence on display didn’t disprove his theory, but initially it appeared like a locked room aficionado’s wet dream. Cast randomly on the carpet were a lady’s undergarments (pock-marked with dried droplets of menstrual blood) and a tube sock with no equal. Beyond those, statuesque against the far wall was the upright body of a man. A network of wires had been run through an eyelet from the ceiling to keep the body in a standing position. The wire work had turned him into a puppet of flesh, bone, and organs. His torso had been cleanly divided from throat to stomach, the corner flaps of the skin held aside by surgical clamps. This strategic sculpting allowed for a view of the man’s entrails, which remained stationary against the demand of gravity due to its slightly slumped position, unmolested by any incisions or perforations. Their arrangement seemed as aesthetically-conscious as the objects in a still-life drawing, a measured integration of reds and yellows.
His sex organs had not been surgically inspected.
“You know what this means,” Von whispered.
Greg nodded. “Sure do! Sammy’s a homo, son!”
Von barely refrained from slapping him. “It means we have a placement for Rochester. We won’t have to cut Sammy out after all.”
Greg considered this a moment, then nodded again. His attention fell on the sock and he stooped to pick it up, apparently already distracted from the wonder of the Divided Man. “You ready for Sock Puppet Theater?” he asked mischievously. Before Von could tell him to put a sock in it, Greg forced his hand into the sock, already bending his wrist to form an elongated mouth with his hand.
He frowned instantly. “Yuck . . . it’s all wet inside.”
“Three guesses why, and the first two don’t count, slick.” Von gestured to the soiled panties discarded on the floor.
Greg looked at him blankly.
“Why the hell else do you think a man would leave a sock lying around on the bedroom floor, you ijit?” Von asked rhetorically. Then, because he understood the futility of asking Greg to make a mental leap of any kind, he answered anyway. “Sammy was filling it up with his rocket sau
ce, son!”
“Shit!” Greg palmed his forearm and yanked the sock away like someone trying to haul a tablecloth away without upsetting everything on top of it. The sock dropped to the carpet inside out, and Greg jumped back from it like it was a rattlesnake. He wadded up a bedspread and dried his arm off, never taking his eye away from the sock, as though terrified that it would jump up and try to pull itself back up his arm.
Von chuckled, but as quietly as he could, still listening for the sound of Sammy’s returning footsteps. They hadn’t heard anything from the attic for a few moments. He dug the Swiss army knife from his pocket and recoiled at the feel of the moist clumps of Rochester’s original tool. “I got the last one, boss man. This is all you.”
Greg accepted the knife a bit uncertainly.
“Get crackin’, man,” Von said. “He’ll be back any minute now. I’ll keep a look-out.”
Greg extracted the knife blade and walked over to the strung-up cadaver. This close up, he noticed the eyes were open. The lids had been removed. That was a trademark Sammy maneuver, just in case Greg had any shred of hope left that Sammy had nothing to do with this objet d’art displayed in the bedroom. He and Von had been up here before, but the door had always been closed. They’d never paid it any mind. Greg started trying to remember if there were any other doors that had always been closed to them in the past.
Just the attic.
He knelt before the Divided Man, thinking it was pretty sick of Sammy to have some naked dude with his guts on display. That girl with the dog head and tail, that would have been far more appropriate.
“Hurry!” Von commanded from the doorway. “He could come down any second now!”
Greg winced as though the tube sock misadventure was happening all over again. He reached for the man’s groin and grasped. The effect was instantaneous—the slop of immobile entrails squirmed free, a minor avalanche of the digestive tract right over Greg’s hands and into his lap. He sprang back, dropping the coils which had slickly gathered over his thighs onto the shag carpet with a surprisingly heavy slapping sound.
Their eyes both shot up to the ceiling as though it would dematerialize to reveal Sammy. When it did not, Von jabbed a finger in Greg’s direction. “Get your ass back over there and find it!”
Greg gave him a helpless look, like a little kid whose trail of bread crumbs had been eaten up by the ravens.
“Now!” Von snapped, somehow managing a scream at whisper level. He wasn’t sure Sammy would go ballistic over this, but since Sammy kept the Divided Man a secret, there might be some sentimental value attached to him. He’d undoubtedly notice the “alterations,” but maybe not before they were a few million dollars richer. And if he blew the whole episode out of proportion, they still had the option of killing him. They just better make sure that they got it right, because they would probably only get one shot at it. And obviously the guy wasn’t above surgical liberties with the male figure after all.
Greg had to step into the pile of entrails to get close enough. They squelched under his shoes. His left foot nearly slid out from under him as he tested the terrain like someone on a frozen pond. A length of intestine burst under his inquisitive weight. He reached into the obscuring mess still attached to the abdominal cavity. Everything felt like wet snakes. He had to extend his fingers and specifically pull aside various coils like vertical blinds, trying to uncover the crotch again. Finally irritated, he grabbed a fistful and yanked them like the starting cord to a lawnmower. They tore and spattered him with digestive juice. He tossed them over his shoulder and grabbed another handful. One of the cords holding the cadaver upright snapped. The Divided Man started to tilt, unbalanced, so Greg held him up with one hand as he withdrew more yellowish ropes from the other. He found what he was looking for, and then had to lean up against the body to keep it situated as he carved. It went easily, having expired soft. Greg closed his hand on it and stepped out of the gut pile. The body collapsed, its arms draping over Greg as though hugging him.
“Mission accomplished,” Greg reported, pushing the cadaver away from him. It struck the ground, face up.
Von shook his head. “You know what you look like?”
Greg gave himself a quick once-over. “No, what?”
“You look like a guy who just stepped in a heap of guts, tore some more out for good measure, and then sliced off a dead man’s wang with a Swiss army knife.”
“So you think Sammy’ll notice?”
“Only if he doesn’t fall down the stairs, break his neck, and die before he sees you again.”
As if on cue, the attic door slammed shut overheard and footsteps on the steps announced Sammy’s inexorable return. He did not fall down the stairs, break his neck, and die. He walked past the room, stopped, backtracked, did a visible double-take, and began to take inventory of the extensive damage.
The first thing he said was, “Why is that tube sock inside out?”
“Uh . . . it was like that when we got here,” Greg offered, the picture of innocence if that picture had a cracked frame. And no picture.
“Yeah,” Von agreed, painfully aware that they didn’t actually formulate any plans on how to take Sammy out. They had acted under the assumption that they would acquire the genitalia and then simply become the vessels for divine inspiration. They had a Swiss army knife between them and no powers of telepathy to coordinate exactly what to do with it.
Sammy had moved on from the tube sock to the mess of gore beyond it.
“The body was already like that, too,” Von said. “When we got here, I mean.”
“Uh huh,” Sammy said without tone. “Funny how that worked out, seeing as how it was perfectly fine when I walked past a few minutes ago . . . the body perfectly upright, the entrails neatly in place . . . the tube sock correctly oriented.”
Von remained silent, waiting for his associate to volunteer a predictably pathetic excuse. Greg did the same. An awkward silence stretched its legs.
“What’s that you got in your hand, Greg?” Sammy finally asked.
Greg hadn’t looked this surprised since his sister caught him masturbating in the shower (but slightly less so than when she’d hopped in and taken over the shucking responsibilities for him). He struggled for a good answer. What he found was, “Just . . . just some . . . gum. Like you . . . chew?”
Sammy smiled. “So chew then, Greg old buddy. Don’t let me stop you.”
“Yeah, Greg,” Von agreed. “Chew.”
If he’d been lost in the forest before, he was going into the oven now.
“Greg, you have the rare distinction of running over one man’s junk and disemboweling a cadaver while trying to procure a changeling penis, all within about 30 minutes,” Sammy said. “And you ruined a work of art in the process. So if you don’t start chewing in the next ten seconds, I’m going to tear you a brand new asshole, ‘son.’ And I will use all my surgical know-how to make sure that you live long enough to use it, too.”
Greg chewed. It may not have even been the most unpleasant experience in his life from the layman’s perspective (lest we forget other extracurricular activities with corpses, though female, whose every orifice he had lunched on, and ravenously at that), but it was altogether more humbling.
“Oh, hell,” he said between mouthfuls. “It’s . . . it’s really chewy, guys . . . Christ on a unicycle, it’s so damn chewy …”
It was not hyperbole. His jaws worked mechanically, piston-like, to conclude this humiliation fast enough to break the sound barrier, but the morsels resisted. They bred in his mouth, tough as gristle with the texture of the fat on a steak. He could almost visualize each part as he chomped . . . the shaft, the head, the urethra, the veins, the erectile tissue. His own size seemed to wilt between his legs with each bite.
He cried as he ate.
“Fantastic,” Sammy complimented. “You took it like man, Greg. I didn’t think you had it in you . . . although I guess you do now, don’t you? So now that I trust you two dopes have
been exorcised of your little substitution fantasy, you can get your asses on the horn and start making demands to Mrs. Rochester. Unless vibrator companies have jumped into the telemarketing biz, you’ll be the most welcome call of the night.”
Greg’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He gagged miserably, but held it down.
“Hurry up and swig some Listerine, dickbreath,” Sammy said. “The time is later than you think.”
Part III: Embryonic Necropsy and Devourment
“Make sure you dumbasses hit star-six-seven when you call,” Sammy admonished.
Von stood at the kitchen counter with the portable phone in his hand, reading over the “script” in front of him. Greg had prepared it, which in retrospect probably wasn’t the best idea. Somehow it had seemed more important for Von to watch the latest installment of a porn series called Gaping Anus the other night rather than iron out the script with him. It was the 24th volume, but he had to hand it to them—they were finding ways to keep it fresh. You never knew which gal would start out with a nickel-sized rectal circumference that wound up more like the ball from a shot put three hours and forty-seven minutes later. It seemed like 4 hours well spent. All Greg had to do was incorporate the points he had outlined. He now understood that the word Greg should have stood out to him more in that scenario.
“Haven’t you ever heard of punctuation?” Von finally asked, disgusted.
“Let me see that,” Sammy said and snatched it away. “I don’t know why you wasted your time coming up with this thing. You’re trying to ransom her husband’s junk, not sell her a magazine subscription.” His brow crinkled as he read it for a few seconds, frown deepening. “He’s right, Greg. It’s not exactly Hemingway. This ain’t even Flowers for Algernon. If you tried to read this to Mrs. Rochester word for word, she’d tell the police they oughtta narrow their search to guys with Down’s syndrome.”
“Or a retard,” Von said.
Greg made no reply. He stood by the refrigerator, wincing at the sour taste in his mouth. Vomiting would be worse than the actual eating, though; all those masticated chunks of penile debris resurrected. The thought was horrifying, and the prospect felt more and more likely with each slosh of his disturbed stomach juices. He had to eliminate the taste.