by Harvey Click
“Remove your clothes and kneel on all fours in a supplicating position to give proper respect to the powers you will call on. Then pour the vinegar over your head, making sure you rub it into your hair. Then smear the honey lavishly on the entirety of your bottom parts, meaning your butt and your privates. Be careful not to get it anywhere else, except on your hands of course. Then perform the ritual I just described. Can you remember all of this?”
“What’s the vinegar and honey for?”
“Honey represents not only Holly’s eyes, but the inner sweetness you seem to perceive in her, perhaps erroneously. Obviously vinegar represents her current mood, and I suspect it may very well represent her frequent and defining mood, the mood you’re likely to see many times again, day after day, in the long years to come.
“Obviously her mood relates to her head, and that’s why the vinegar goes on your head, while the honey relates to her, um, her bottom parts, those parts that no doubt attract you far more than her head. By anointing yourself with these two substances, you symbolically and magically become Holly for the duration of the ritual, therefore giving you great power over her, because who has more power over Holly than Holly herself?
“Now, here’s the coup de grace,” and he handed Jason a small medicine vial filled with pale liquid. “This is a very potent love potion. Only a small amount is needed at any given time, just a little bit dabbed behind your ears like cologne, and any woman nearby will be attracted. For obvious reasons you should avoid wearing it around any woman other than Holly.”
“Gosh,” Jason said. He put the vial in his jacket pocket and the two pieces of paper in his duffle bag. “Thank you, Mr. Drew.”
“I’ll call Rue Anne and tell her you’re on your way,” Drew said. “Now remember, because this is very important. The ritual must be performed exactly as I described, with absolutely no mistakes. If you make any blunders the spell could backfire quite horribly, and God alone knows what might happen.”
“I’ll do it just right,” Jason said.
“Good. I’ll see you tomorrow morning precisely at 10:00, and this time be prompt.”
As Jason was shutting the door behind him, he thought he heard Drew whisper the name Jasper.
Part Three
Easy Is the Way
Chapter Seven
Crossing the Oval on the way to Rue’s house, Jason decided to sit for a few minutes on the same bench where he and Holly had been sitting just a couple hours before. He started rerunning the whole painful conversation through his head, like poking around at a sore gum with his tongue. He was still stunned by the way her attitude toward him had changed so drastically, though to be honest he had to admit he’d heard that same uppity schoolteacher voice more than a few times before.
Well, that’s all gonna change right quick, he thought. Abracadabra and kiss my sweet ass. We’re gonna see who gets the last laugh now.
In his duffle bag were a bottle of cider vinegar and small jar of the darkest honey he could find, a buckwheat variety, and he thought it was a good match for her dark brown eyes. He reached in his jacket pocket for the vial of love potion and unscrewed the top to have a sniff. It smelled to him like Old Spice aftershave mixed with something else, maybe a splash of Heaven Hill, but then maybe that was what love potions were supposed to smell like.
He couldn’t resist putting a tiny dab behind each ear, just to test it. The moment he did, he heard a vaguely familiar voice exclaiming, “You deplorably misconstrue the metaphysical ontology of material conditionals as intentional objects. Hmm, hmm?”
Jason looked to his right and saw the two bearded men he’d seen in the library restroom. They were rushing toward him with alarming speed, and for a moment he was afraid Drew had messed up the potion so it was attracting the wrong sort of person, but fortunately the two beards rushed on past him, quarreling the while.
Soon an attractive young woman came strolling past his bench, and he tilted his ear toward her, hoping she would catch a good whiff and smile at the very least, but she walked on by without even glancing at him.
Maybe she wasn’t close enough, he thought, with all this breeze out here and all. He resumed his trek, and before long he noticed another young woman sitting on a bench reading a book. When he got there, he knelt right in front of her, just a couple feet away from her nose, and pretended to tie a shoelace. She kept on reading so he pretended to tie the other shoelace, but that didn’t do any good either.
Finally he stood up and said, “Nice day out here, ain’t it?”
“Fuck off, dickhead,” she said.
It was a long walk to Rue’s house and he bought a big bottle of Coke on the way, thinking it would give him an excuse to avoid her iced tea. She opened the door as soon as he knocked and gave him a tight-lipped expression that maybe was supposed to be a smile or maybe her teeth hurt. Today she was wearing another dress just as long as the purple one, but this one was dark green.
As soon as he stepped in, he noticed there were no longer any books on the stairs. Then he noticed his missing clothes were stacked on her sofa—socks, underwear, jeans, gray shirt, all of them clean and neatly folded.
“Thank you for washing ‘em, ma’am,” he said.
“Don’t call me ma’am. My name is Rue.”
“Sorry.”
“Mingo won’t be bothering you again,” she said. “I had the locks changed this morning.”
While he was stuffing the clean clothes into his bag, he glanced up at the mask on the left, the one that hadn’t yet started its transformation into a monstrous swine, and he realized it was a perfect likeness of Mingo.
“Are you hungry?” Rue asked.
“Nope. I already ate.”
“Then let’s get started.”
He followed her into the studio, where there was already a blank canvas set up on the easel, and she lit some incense in a fancy brass burner. It looked nothing like the kind of stick incense Holly liked—this was a hard lump like a piece of coal. It didn’t smell like Holly’s incense either—it smelled sweet but heavy and dark, sort of like licorice candy mixed with rotting leaves.
“Take off your clothes,” Rue said.
“Huh?”
“You’ll be posing in the nude,” she said. “Don’t worry, nobody can see through these drapes on the windows.”
“You didn’t say nothing ‘bout being naked.”
“What’s the matter, hasn’t a woman ever seen you naked before?”
“Plenty of ‘em have,” he said, “more than I can count. It’s just like, I mean, I dunno, I guess I don’t want my private parts hanging up on a wall for everybody to gawk at.”
“Don’t worry, this will be a portrait. Nothing below your shoulders will show.”
“Then why do I haveta be naked?”
“It’s for the ambience, Jason. I don’t just paint your likeness, I paint your essence. And your essence is the whole of you, not just your face. Here, if it makes you more comfortable I’ll undress too.”
Before he could respond, she unzipped her long dress and let it fall to the floor. She hung it neatly over a chair and pulled down her skimpy green panties with her back to him. Her legs were long and slender, and though her butt was slim it had all the curves it needed to interest him. It was nothing like Holly’s butt, which contained considerably more flesh than it needed and tended to jiggle and wobble when she walked around naked.
When she turned to face him he was surprised to see that her groin was shaved bare, a marvel he had never witnessed before. He quickly looked away, though his eyes didn’t want to.
“Undress,” she said.
He did, letting his clothes fall in a heap on the floor, and then he sat in the wooden armchair near the easel. Rue threw on a white paint-dabbed smock but didn’t bother to button it. She sat on her stool with her legs well apart, and only with effort could Jason force his eyes away from her groin.
As a consolation, he allowed them a generous perusal of her breasts while she was
preoccupied with squeezing paint onto her palette. They were small and uplifted with hard nipples that jutted out like little pink berries—nothing like Holly’s breasts, which were large and already rather saggy with flat brown nipples as big around as oatmeal cookies.
Rue told him to turn a little more toward her and lift his face just a bit, and when he was seated just right she began to paint with her left hand. Jason soon allowed his eyes to look where they wanted, and she didn’t seem to notice or care that he was staring at her smooth groin.
After a while she said, “There’s something weird about your left foot.”
“I got what they call a hammer toe,” Jason said. “It don’t cause no problems though.”
“I hate physical defects, but I guess I can ignore it,” she said. “But the next time you pose I want you to keep your socks on.”
A few more minutes went by, and she said, “You don’t have any other defects, do you?”
“I’m half blind in my right eye. I don’t know if that counts.”
“Certainly it counts,” she said. “It’s a serious defect, but I guess I can ignore it.”
He forced his eyes away from her groin for a moment to look at her face. Her smooth black hair fell behind her slim left shoulder, but on the right side it hung down the front, obscuring one breast, half her face and one green eye. Her face was thin but not too, and her painted red lips didn’t need to smile to look tempting. Every once in a while she licked her top lip as if she had just eaten something tasty, or was about to.
After a while she said, “Sexual arousal releases a powerful spiritual energy because it awakens the Kundalini Shakti, the sleeping serpent at the base of the spine. When the artist and the model both release this energy simultaneously, the painting can truly come alive. You might say the painter and the model are engaged in an act of artistic coitus, and the painting is their living offspring.”
“Don’t know what you mean,” Jason said.
“You know perfectly well what I mean. I like to touch myself when I paint, and I want you to do the same. I want you to jack off. You’ve had an erection for the past half hour, and I know you’re just dying to touch it.”
She stuck her right hand between her legs and began to play with herself. Jason stared with his mouth hanging open. He tried to imagine Holly doing this in front of him but couldn’t. Holly wasn’t prudish exactly, but she was determined to always maintain her “dignity,” as she called it, and whenever he’d tried to talk her into something “trashy,” as she called it, she always said in her schoolteacher voice that she wouldn’t “lower” herself to that level.
“What are you waiting for?” Rue said. “Didn’t I just explain to you about Tantric energy? It’s all perfectly scientific and wholesome, so there’s no reason to feel embarrassed. Now go ahead and play with yourself, pull your pud, polish your rocket. Give me your essence, your creative juice, give me your succulent artistic sap!”
“I can’t do that,” Jason said. “They’s a woman I love, and she’d be madder than a polecat.”
Rue took a quick sarcastic look around the room. “I don’t see her standing here, do you?” she said. “Now do what I said—choke your chicken, beat your meat, yank your crank.”
She went on and on, using phrases Jason had never heard before. It began to sound like a church chant, with the devilish grandfather clock in the next room slowly ticking out the rhythm and the air heavy with incense, and Jason realized he was doing what she wanted. He wasn’t going at it vigorously the way he might be if he were alone, he wasn’t really pounding the pestle as she put it, but he was gently caressing himself, and it felt good. His penis felt bigger and harder than he’d ever known it, and the veins seemed ready to burst.
“Bang your whang,” Rue was saying, “spank your shank, whack your whale, jiggle your joker, drub your nub, shake your snake.”
Jason kept shutting his eyes and trying to think of Holly, but a moment later he’d open them again and stare at Rue. He tried to think of all the places where he and Holly had made love. They’d done it once in a tree house in Hempy’s back yard, and many times they’d done it in the backseat of the old Chevy up on cinder blocks in his pa’s back yard. He tried to remember how exciting those times had been, but instead he kept remembering how a rusty spring sticking up through the seat would always jab his knee at the wrong time.
“Ding your dong, tickle your pickle, yank your crank, flog your log, shake your shaft, wiggle your weenie,” Rue was saying.
The best place had been the deserted barn on a twisty back road nobody lived on. It was set far enough off the road they could easily see or hear through the broken slats if anyone was coming, though no one else ever seemed to come there, so they were free to walk around naked or play games before they had sex. Jason liked games, liked playing doctor with a full body exam or playing strip poker with interesting rules, like the rule that whoever got naked first had to play for favors instead of clothes. The only problem with playing poker was that the favors Holly requested were too tame and the favors Jason requested were usually too “trashy,” as Holly called them, and she didn’t want to lose her “dignity,” as she called it, and “lower” herself to that level.
Rue stuck her brush in a jar of linseed oil, came over to him and, without saying a word, knelt on the floor and put his penis in her mouth. Jason suddenly realized that the love potion behind his ears was making her do this, and he almost felt guilty for having this kind of control over her—almost. He decided as soon as he earned some money he’d pay Drew whatever he wanted for a nice big supply.
Now he gave up all efforts to think of Holly. Holly had used her mouth on him only a few times, and then only for a minute or two, and then with about as much relish as a child swallowing bitter medicine. Certainly she had never done anything comparable to what Rue was doing right now with her slippery lips and the talented tip of her tongue and her sharp red fingernails, which were tickling and teasing some nerves in his groin he’d never even known about before.
A minute later Jason tried to warn her that she’d better move her mouth away because he couldn’t hold off much longer, but she just pushed him in deeper, and when he exploded in her mouth she kept slurping and swallowing as if she couldn’t get enough.
Finally she stood up, licking her lips. She took his hand and led him upstairs without speaking, and in his bedroom she pulled him down on top of her. She turned her face away when he tried to kiss her red lips, but she allowed him to kiss her neck and breasts and belly. She had a strange but appealing woodsy fragrance, more like herbs and spices than perfume, and her fingers felt chilly like carrots pulled from the garden in October.
His mouth found her groin, and she gently scratched his back while he licked her. She tasted nothing like Holly; she tasted like nutmeg and ginger, like gingerbread with a sweet creamy icing. When she came her whole body jerked and bucked, and her long fingernails dug deep into his skin.
A moment later he was inside her. Her body felt cool and sleek and slim, and it worked just as hard at lovemaking as his did. Holly would just lie there with a tolerant expression frozen on her face as if she were bravely putting up with the unpleasant probing of a doctor, but Rue thrashed and bit his lips and scratched and climbed on top of him and then rolled him up on top again and moaned softly like a bobcat.
Jason finished and rolled onto his back, exhausted and contented and thinking he would sleep for a very long time, but a few minutes later he was mounting her again, and then pretty soon she was mounting him, and they did this three or four more times as the hours slid by till at last all the succulent sap was drained from his body and his mind, and he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Chapter Eight
Rue was no longer in bed with him when Jason awoke in the dark room. He tapped on her bedroom door and called her name, then padded down the stairs naked and glanced through the rooms until he was satisfied she was gone.
The grandfather clock said 11:50. He sw
itched on the light in the studio long enough to have a quick look at the portrait. It was unfinished and the oils were still wet, making his likeness glisten like a fetus, but even in its embryonic form his face already looked amazingly lifelike, the creamy skin of each smooth cheek blushing with pleasure as his pale blue eyes stared intently at—and when he remembered what they’d been staring at, his groin stirred again with excitement.
He collected his clothes and tennis shoes from the floor where he had shed them and brought them upstairs to the bathroom along with his duffle bag. He turned on the light, shut the door, and got out his magical materials. Drew had said the pink construction-paper amulet should be in the room but out of sight, so he tucked it in a corner beside a hamper. He wanted to be able to see the piece of paper with names and words written on it, so he used a drop of honey to glue it to the rim of the cast-iron tub just above the faucet.
He climbed into the tub and poured the whole bottle of vinegar over his head, rubbing it into his hair and all over his face. He smeared his butt and groin with the buckwheat honey and knelt on all fours in a supplicating position, just as Drew had said, his nose nearly touching the bottom of the stained tub and his sticky rump thrust high in the air.
Drew had told him the words must be pronounced very clearly and loudly, so he yelled, “Nades Suradis Maniner!” good and loud, and then he yelled out Holly’s name.
“Is that you, Jason?” a female voice called softly.
A deep chill froze him in place with vinegar dripping into his eyes and his butt sticking up high in the air. The voice had come from somewhere down below, maybe calling up through the drainpipe from the depths of hell.
“Rue?” he asked, his voice weak with fear.
“No, it’s not Rue.”
Jason remembered Drew had said the ritual must be performed exactly as described, with absolutely no mistakes. Any mistake could cause it to backfire into something horrible. And already he had made a mistake—he’d said the name Rue when he was supposed to say something else.