by John Everson
Deadly Nightlusts: A Collection of Forbidden Magic
by John Everson
FIRST EDITION
DEADLY NIGHTLUSTS A COLLECTION OF FORBIDDEN MAGIC
Published by Blasphemous Books, an imprint of KHP Publishers
blasphemousbooks.com
This collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This work, including all characters, names, and places: Copyright 2010 John Everson
All rights reserved.
"Pumpkin Head," originally published in Grue, 1999
"A Lack of Signs," originally published in Vigilantes of Love, 2003
"Green Apples, Red Nails," original to this collection, 2010
"Star on the Beach," originally published in Peepshow Vol. 1, 2004
"To Earn His Love," originally published in Crossroads Magazine, 1995
"Sacrificing Virgins," originally published in The Dead Inn, 2001
"Body & Blood," originally published in Lords of the Abyss, 1995
Cover design: Copyright 2010 K.H. Koehler
Cover photo by Carlotta Carano: http://spectralfairy.deviantart.com/
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of both the publisher and author.
Acknowledgments:
Thanks to editors Pat Nielsen, Glenda Woodrum, Peggy Nadramia, Shane Ryan Staley and Paul Fry for originally publishing these dark dreams of mine in their magazines and anthologies! And thanks to S.D. Hintz, Jerrod Balzer and K.H. Koehler for bringing these tales back from the dead.
Foreward: Looking Back
Fifteen years ago, the world was a really different place. Most people didn't have a personal email address (or carry cell phones, for that matter). Most didn't "surf the net" with any frequency, because the World Wide Web was a fledgling thing. Those of us who wrote short horror fiction went to the magazine stands each month, constantly searching the ads at the back of Writers Market and other publications for announcements about small press magazines that were looking for the kinds of weird tales we were typing up on our floppy disc-driven computers (yep - my computer back then didn't have an actual hard drive... it worked completely off a 3.5 inch floppy disc!).
It was like discovering a secret society each time you found a new small press magazine out there with some obscure P.O. Box, and you really treasured those 'zines when you found them. They were the only connections many of us had with any other people who shared our niche interests in the bizarre. Horror readers and writers were really remote islands to themselves.
If you stuck with it, you slowly uncovered a network of magazines with their small but loyal fan bases all around the country; digest and full-sized magazines that were printed and side-stapled in someone's garage. Most of them were distributed to only 50 or 100 people... but it was still a challenge and a victory to get a story accepted for publication.
That was the atmosphere that I started out in; it was really the heyday of the small press magazine. In the early to mid-'90s, I published dozens of stories in them, some of which were collected in my first couple of short fiction books, Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions and Vigilantes of Love. Some others from that period I've recycled and had reprinted over the past few years in anthologies that reached ten times more people than the stories did when they were first released. But I still have some tales sitting on my computer hard drive that appeared only once in a tiny magazine and have never been seen by more than a few dozen people since.
When S.D. Hintz and Jerrod Balzer approached me about doing something with their new press, I thought that perhaps there was still a story or two in the "vault" that might be worth digging up and giving a new life. I found a couple pieces they liked, including "Star on the Beach" a story that originally appeared in a small British anthology. I also dug up "Sacrificing Virgins," which I'd written 10 years ago for an early Delirium Books anthology called The Dead Inn and "To Earn His Love," a story that had appeared in 1995 in a tiny digest magazine called Crossroads. The latter were both tales that I've always wanted to get into wider circulation.
Then I suggested adding another story that had only appeared in my Vigilantes of Love collection, just to round it out a bit. And then they suggested including "Pumpkin Head," one of their favorite stories of mine (which is the only one in this collection that has seen a lot of exposure). And then I sent them "Body & Blood" after a conversation about the mission behind their new imprint Blasphemous Books; I remembered this old piece that had only seen print in one of those wildly indie, side-stapled anthologies of the '90s called Lords of the Abyss. I'd be shocked if more than 75 people ever saw that anthology, or the story. I hadn't read "Body & Blood" in years, and really wasn't thinking that we'd put it in the book... but I thought my new editors would get a kick out of the "blasphemous" theme. They did... and wanted it in the collection.
Then I saw the cover art that was proposed for this book, and instantly had a story idea pop to mind about the seductive woman, and green apples, and those nails, red as blood... and the story's theme of the past catching up to the present seemed right for this book, which really is about unearthing forgotten moments. And so somehow, this short "double feature" release grew to be a seven-story collection.
Some of these tales may be a little rougher around the edges than my work is today, but I hope you'll enjoy them regardless. They come from a writer I once was, and remember fondly, along with those secret small press magazines that lurked on the other side of P.O. Boxes around the country. They come from places that I've been along the way. Places of forbidden magic. And deadly nightlusts.
Tread softly.
John Everson
Naperville, IL
October 24, 2010
Pumpkin Head
Jack's hands trembled as he traced a small circle on the slick skin of the pumpkin, using a magic marker and the bottlecap he'd lifted from his mom's medicine cabinet. It looked to be about the right size.
A gibbous moon shone in garish relief off the night-polished hides of hundreds of orange globes, but Jack's chosen pumpkin was special. He'd picked it for its size as well as its seclusion. Somehow, this particular vine had crept over the irrigation ditch and nurtured its offspring well away from the others under the shade of a gnarled elm.
The tiny circle drawn, Jack opened his pocketknife and with quick, short thrusts turned his drawing into a hole. His heart began pumping with growing volume as he completed the first stage of his violation.
"You've got to try this!" Tom had told him in a whisper the previous week after school. Exhaling a cloud of Marlboro smoke with practiced disdain for anyone who might be staring his way, Tom had laughed. "It's so twisted, it's great. You just have to make sure the hole's not too big, or it won't work."
At first, he'd figured Tom had to be making it up. Nobody would try that! Totally gross. But every time he thought about it, he got a funny feeling inside; the idea attracted him. And so tonight, under the chill wind of an October moon, Jack stood coring a pumpkin. This is stupid, he thought for the hundredth time. This is warped.
But after taking a furtive glance around the pumpkin patch behind him, silently amazed at the endless rows of orange basketball shapes stretching to the black horizon, Jack unbuckled his belt and dropped his jeans to the ground. A cold knot twisted his stomach at the realization that he was going through with this perversion, and a countering hot stab of anticipation drove through his heart and gro
in. With a shiver and a shrug, he shoved his underpants past his knees and, goosebumps popping out across his bare lower body, knelt next to the pumpkin.
Gripping the rough, wrinkled skin of the dead vine atop the gourd, Jack guided his straining penis into the newly sawed receptacle. He gasped aloud at its touch. He was afraid at first - would the hole be large enough to receive him? Would he be trapped inside? Would he catch some weird pumpkin disease - orange genital warts?
But none of these concerns stopped him from pressing through the gently resisting cavity. It was cold, sticky. He imagined his favorite pin-up girl lying there in the leaves and brush before him. She'd be warmer, he thought, but sticky too. Would she feel like this? He stifled a moan as he pressed into a new area of slimy seeds and pumpkin hair. Jack moved close to embrace all of the warty hide of the pumpkin as its jellied hairs tickled and caressed his member inside. It felt as if it was moving with him, pulling at him to stay as he arched away. He'd cut the hole just right. It was tight enough to grip him like a woman. Or, as good as he thought a woman might. A woman filled with cold slime and seeds, he laughed, the thought driving him to cleave hard to the lined sides of the gourd. He uttered one more involuntary gasp of pleasure as the tremors of release rocked him and left. And then clammy fear at the extant of his depravity gripped him. What had he done here?
Rolling away from his vegetable mate, he yanked his pants up, not even bothering to wipe off the commingled strands of orange and white mucous. It gelled in the hair on his groin and belly, a sticky accusation of his strange and darkly pleasurable fornication. He tucked two pumpkins under his arms as he stole away from the quiet field on the edge of town.
"Where'd you get those?" his mother yelled as he went dashing through the kitchen with his stolen treasures. "Don't take them upstairs, they'll rot! Jack!"
Depositing the pumpkins safely in his room, he returned to the kitchen to assuage his mother. The trick with her was to get things settled before she got talking about it. Then she wouldn't bother forcing him to change.
"I'm gonna carve them up there," he announced, staving off her objections. "Halloween's in a couple days, and they won't rot before then. If I leave them outside, kids'll kick 'em through the street."
She looked uncertain, and he pressed his advantage. "I'll clean up everything, don't worry."
* * *
That night, after turning out the light, Jack ran his hands lightly over the smooth, bumpy skins of his pumpkins. Their texture drove a shiver through his body. His groin jumped. Whitely naked and bent beneath the moonlight glinting through his bedroom window, he kissed his pumpkins goodnight, and then dove guiltily into bed. His saliva glittered in beads on the dark orange skins.
* * *
Jack had thought he'd share his experience with Tom if he went through with it - after all, it had been Tom who'd clued him in, right? But when he got to school the next day and saw his friend's cynical sneer as he joked about getting a piece of Mary Scott, Jack realized that he and his pumpkin queen were a private item.
That night, with the bedroom door locked, he once again traced the bottlecap on a pumpkin and punched through its pale pulpy hymen. His hips moved faster, sliding the pumpkin and himself across the floor as he fought to stay with his new lover. But as he stifled a grunt of orgasmic reaction, it was his first pumpkin that he found himself thinking of.
The next night he found himself fidgeting at the dinner table. Meatloaf and carrots with cauliflower covered his plate. The orange and white of his vegetables lay in front of him, reminding him of his newfound carnal pleasures. And it excited him. He was dying to get away from the table to lock himself away for precious moments with his pumpkin. But when he finally got there, when he'd carved a new hole and sluttishly spent himself, once again he found himself craving the attention of his first, the monstrous pumpkin queen whose insides had seemed to suck him to ecstasy that first time. Tucking his gluey dick back in his pants, Jack quickly scooped and finished carving his first pumpkin. He had to have some evidence for his rush to get to his room.
"Oh, that's very, um, niiice, Jack" his mom said as he showed off his newly carved pumpkin. She looked puzzled. "I thought it was supposed to be scary, though, hon."
"So, this one's a happy pumpkin," Jack shrugged and went back upstairs to clean up.
* * *
He got two more rides - one after school and one after dinner - out of the next pumpkin before carving it up into a face which his mother, in utter puzzlement, pronounced beautiful. In years past, Jack's pumpkins had always held a certain demonic terrorism in their fangs and slanted eyes. But these - she stared at the two demure smiles on the orange globes on the kitchen table - these were... coquettes.
* * *
"I'm going trick-or-treating for awhile," Jack announced, letting the door slam behind him before there could be protest. She thought he was too old to go, but why should the little runts get all the free candy? He'd borrowed Tom's football jersey and helmet and set off. It was a windy Halloween, and an earlier rain had set a bone-slathering chill in the air. Leaves rustled and dropped wetly all around him as he worked his way block by block to the end of town. The moon was small and piercingly white by the time he admitted where he'd been edging his way to. At last he called off the charade. Breaking into a run, Jack sprinted with a shopping bag full of candy the remaining four blocks to the pumpkin field. He'd thought about her - his first, his pumpkin queen - all through school. The gourds he'd brought home simply hadn't fulfilled him like her. He prayed she was still there. He prayed she hadn't rotted from the hole he'd gored into her side.
The pumpkin field was a dismal sight on Halloween night. Only the rejects were left: misshapen, rotted, too-small pumpkins littered the field, seemingly in large numbers; but the deep dark depressions where their brethren had but recently rested betrayed the extent of their abandonment. Jack loped through the field, heading toward the back ditch, anxious to reach the shelter of that crooked elm.
But she wasn't there. At first he thought he had the wrong tree, but then he saw the telltale deep depression she'd left, and his own rutted kneeprints beside it. Who would have taken a pumpkin with a hole right in the middle of her best side? he wondered, and sank to the ground. How, HOW, had he become such a perv that he was lusting after a pumpkin? But, she'd been right here, so cool, so... good!
"Looking for someone?"
The voice at his back startled him to his feet.
"No, no," he stammered, as he stared at the girl before him. She was naked, entwined in a vine that stretched from her belly to the ground beside him. She stepped closer, and his breath caught. She was orange. The deep, mottled orange of ripe pumpkin. She exuded a musky vegetable odor as she stepped closer and ran a warted finger up his face to poke into his open mouth.
"There was a pumpkin here," he said, pulling away and pointing to the hollow on the ground. The hollow near where her vine was embedded in earth.
"Yes," she answered, her voice a husky rustle of summer and seed. She touched him again, and he saw then that her skin, though smooth, was marred occasionally by dark warts and dimples. Wet-looking translucent strands of hair hung from her head and her crotch. He guessed that hair would be cool and sticky. As she wrapped her arms around him in askance, he found that he'd guessed correctly.
"You were looking for my mother," she whispered like the wind in his ear. Her tongue, cool and wet, traced designs on his neck before she said, "That means you are the man who raped her. You are my father."
At that, she dropped to his waist and began tugging at his belt. "I will be the woman my mother could never have been for you," she promised, and slowly he began to aid her in releasing his clothes. Common sense told him this was not what it seemed; pumpkins did not have human, albeit orange and warty, children. Girls did not give blowjobs to strange boys in fields. But here she was, and her cool touch was driving him to fever. He let her crawl across his skin. Her slimy kisses stuck to his flesh like fruit pulp. His coc
k was so erect it was painful. He'd never been so aroused. Her breasts were hard, tipped by dark brown warts. And her hair was entangling itself on his body, ripping loose from her in sticky heaps. He felt it on his crotch from the pressure of her own, it was hidden in the crease of his neck like chilled sauerkraut.
And then she pulled back. Stretching out across the dirt where just days before he'd had her mother, she showed him the oval valley between her smooth, lightly creased legs. "You can have this," she promised. "I'll be better than my mother. But first, you'll have to cut my cord. She held the browning vine up from her belly, and with squeamish understanding, he dug through his discarded clothes for his pocketknife. Flipping open the blade, he held it as close as he could to her belly, and began sawing. She stiffened as he did, but said nothing. A clear, sticky fluid flowed across his knife and onto his hands, and it was over.
"Now," she said, her voice a rasp of longing. "Seed me, fertilize me, water me." In her tone, those words sounded like the dirtiest night talk Jack had ever heard. Without pausing to close his knife, he tossed it away and pressed his legs to hers.
This is like the first time, he thought as he bucked on top of the cool pumpkin girl. Her eyes glittered blackly in the moonlight beneath him as he kissed her hard lips, ran his tongue along the pulp ridge of her teeth. She sucked his heat into her, her natural frigidity only driving him to a hot wash of orgasm.
"Yes," she wheezed as he came at last, panting and flopping atop her like an epileptic. And then, as Jack looked to see if his lover's eyes were as satisfied as his own, he saw that her hunger had only just begun. "We will fertilize hundreds of seeds together, my love," she promised, encircling him in a grip of orange rind as solid as wood. He struggled, kicked, screamed. But there was no escaping the grasp of the pumpkin queen as in a flash, her arms and legs sealed around him and they began to roll as one downhill.