Mom went straightaway into religious mania, seeking answers in God’s sometimes ruthless love. Dad became voiceless, unable to express his life’s horror, choosing to swallow it like a box of carpet tacks, like carbon monoxide.
Chaz spied scissors on his desk. Opportunity knocked. He’d cut his throat. He picked them up, running his finger along double edges. Not exactly razor sharp. He gingerly touched one point, sharp enough to prick the jugular. He shut his eyes tight, bringing cold metal to his neck.
Boy, think! This book chose you. WE chose you. Don’t you realize how special you are?
Voices. Cool as autumn sunsets. Soft as river rushes.
He paused, breaking out in a goose-flesh mountain.
“I don’t want to listen,” he said. “Ya already got me into trouble.”
This book is power. You don’t have to stay the way you are. You can change. Read on and you WILL change.
Chaz’s mouth tweaked. Yes, he’d seen strange things tonight, enough to make him suspect that magical thinking could be in order. In those amazing pages, where phenomena began, could power be far behind?
He set the scissors aside, picked up the book, opening it at random. There was one of T. Spunk’s photo-illustrations. In it a woman’s legs were patterned in a snake, snakes drawn around her in susurrus coiled and lethal undulation. For a nano-second he saw her, wide-eyed with terror, blood, green snot practically neon from knuckling. Purple hair? Dark anyway. He didn’t see her long enough.
It moved, like a video, a capella female voices in at least twenty different languages—half of them dead, and the hissing of more snakes than the few the original pic/drawings had. Water moccasins, copperheads, barba amarilla, the true fer-de-lance found only on the island of Martinique, the South American rattlesnake known as the cascabel (how did Chaz know these things?), the Mamushi, Malayan pit viper, Okinawan habu, boomslangs, black and green mambas, cobras, kraits, adders. There were elliptical pupils, single caudal plates, triangular heads, fangs. Writhing, squirming, orgiastic.
There was a female there, half-demon, moving in a slow tubed-roll across the bodies of the other serpents, dangerous, seductive as a single, very long-waisted torso.
Would Marty appreciate that she had no arms and legs? No, Marty had a penchant for stumps. She was smooth, no vestigials.
Text nearby drew Chaz’s fascinated gaze.
It was a spell. He didn’t know necrOmania seXualis had spells in it. Somehow he hadn’t made the connection, even though the title page did say it was a grimoire.
Milk a dead cow, bloated in flood waters. Strain the maggots and save them in a large jar where you must daily feed them on doves. To the milk add unbleached sugar cane, monkshood, dried apricot peels resembling desiccated human ears—or add desiccated human ears which resemble dried apricot rinds. Place this is in a tightly sealed bottle and put it in a dark, cool place to ferment for one year, Samhain to Samhain.
Chaz looked back at the illo. The snakewoman had turned more and now had small, yet beautiful breasts. It changed, yes.
But could he change?
The spell said nothing about snakes.
Chaz sneaked a peek down. He wasn’t fat. His skin shimmered, sleek, muscled. Getting leaner and meaner, his dick was long and hard. He’s never actually seen his penis before, under the sail of his gut. That is, not while looking down. He’d only ever been able to see it in a mirror. It always seemed so small, whether it actually was or not. Not faring well, compared to the rest of his girth. It had been truly overshadowed.
Not anymore. His stomach was a washboard, buttocks hard as steel, thighs and arms rounded with muscle instead of flab. His tits were gods. The jowls disappeared and chipmunk cheeks flattened into finely boned planes.
He was handsome.
Why couldn’t this’ve happened at the store? Rosie wouldn’t have turned him down. She’d have melted like a mint.
The erection grew longer. The weight leaving the rest of him must go somewhere, so it went to his penis. It grew to his knees, the member of some mutant gladiator, more… It was too heavy to stand up; gravity decreed it point downward. The tip touched the floor, its diameter four or five inches.
Liar liar, feel desire. Your dick is longer than a garroting wire.
Chaz’s head twitched, filled with heat. He read more of the spell, even if what happened to him didn’t have anything to do with the spell’s intent.
I salute 360 degrees of Your universe, Mother. I seek a new state of grace, my sins devoured down, demon within goddess. I wish to be cleansed and reborn free to begin again with the soul of promise this child should have had. Let it live through me and I through it.
Chaz groaned, penis tip moist. He looked down; the member had stopped growing. He turned to the mirror and saw the beautiful serpentine female slide across the floor, her lips parted, starting to take his length into her mouth. He didn’t see her when he looked away from the mirror. But he felt her, sucking him in, tongue soft and wet. Rising between his legs to swallow him down into the limitless throes of that throat. Blue eyes turned up to him, hair out from the scaled head, blond strands curling back. He knew this Rosie face.
She’d taken him up to where the swollen cock hung to his knees, sliding it inside as she came level with his hips, his two full fists of testicles as her lips grazed those, too.
Chaz was about to climax, in the flesh as well as in the mirror. He stared down at the reflection. Only there could he see the gorgeous Rosie thing, taking him deeper into her throat (for she was all throat!) than any human female ever could. A young male’s fantasy.
Then she opened her mouth wider and hissed. Misted blue. At first he didn’t realize it was flame. A standard primordial dragon…
Liar liar, dick on fire. Your balls are singing in the rattlesnake choir.
Chaz tried to scream. But when he opened his mouth only smoke emerged. His tongue swelled, black as a poison-engorged mamba. He looked down at his real body. The flesh bubbled, thickening with bursting blisters of water and blood, frothy as scalded cream boiling over in a pan. He puffed up and out until he was as big as before.
The torment went beyond what anyone who’d ever seen a burning—yet had themselves never burned—could imagine. As if he’d fallen into the viper pit, that snake tangle, and was bitten in a million places, fangs squirting sulfuric venom to bathe him in acid. It cooked inside him, roasting each organ up from the crotch. Seams burst along creases at elbows, the backs of knees, and between shoulderblades. His intestines melted like a long plastic straw on a barbecue, spilling like hot coffee out through the rectum which then also dissolved. He cried his eyes out (literally from their sockets in streams of runny salt taffy) before he collapsed to the floor.
Was he dead? Well… he was conscious enough on some level to hear the voices say Guilt is for liars!
««—»»
“No note but the cops say it’s suicide. He, like, drank alcohol or something, keeping a mouthful, then lit a match to his tongue. His parents found him but the room didn’t burn or nothin’, like in those spontaneous combustion cases on The Goth Channel. Anyway, everyone at school is talking, Rosie, about, you know, the fight he had with your dad. And the way we—me or Lysie or Rita—can’t hang around the store anymore. And, I mean, you’re virtually a prisoner at home, right? I mean, it’s obvious why he did it,” Hannah prattled over the phone to Roseanne, grounded for eternity.
“Poor Jizz Jizzum. Oh, that isn’t nice, considering… I should call him Chaz,” Rosie went on. “He wanted me so bad. Maybe I just should’ve done it, closed my eyes. Like, he’d be alive today. Imagine, a guy kills himself over you.” An unadorned fingernail tapped against the pink cell phone. They were short now, bitten to the quick.
She looked at herself in the mirror. A new Helen of Troy, face to launch a thousand ships. Or at least one hard-up, handjob, smitten boy into space with a supper of fire. She opened her eyes wide, parted her lips, tried to see her profile, turned back to three-quar
ters, lowered her lids to half-mast for the limpid look. Not as effective without mascara, which her mother confiscated, along with the eye shadows. She could keep translucent powder and one colorless lip gloss. But, God, she was still so pretty, a natural beauty. Lucky for her the gold toe ring was a gift from Granny. Otherwise they’d have taken it, too. Now she saw pink nail polish flecking the cuticle on the toe the ring adorned.
Was hers a face to die for? She wished that Jizz—Chaz, she reminded herself—had left a suicide note, a last romantic message to his unreachable beloved.
She smiled, mimicking an aggressive yet sultry star from some airhead, hip-grinding video she’d recently seen. Yes, she decided, it was a face to die for.
(He tried to rape me, she said more sternly to herself. The memory still infuriated her. He’d actually grabbed her breast and ass as if she were some cheap little…)
DON’T GO THERE, GIRL.
You just never suspect that much passion running deep in quiet boys, another part of her dreamily mused, charitably.
Chaz hadn’t tried to hurt her. He’d only craved her, loved her until he’d gone gonad-mad. And then finally couldn’t live without her.
God, would any of the guys who’d jiggled her bones, impaling her on feverish three-minute pricks, have felt as much? Would they have died for her? Could they ever die for anyone?
Could she?
– | – | –
Chapter 10
Marty Hardisty’s grandmother cried in the waiting area as he walked down the pine-and puke-scented hallway, sneakers sqeaking on frosty dull linoleum. Anyone would’ve thought his granddad was dead instead of in surgery, undergoing emergency bypasses to keep his heart ticking. Restless, Marty’s skinny legs cramped at the knees. What was he supposed to do, hold her hand? She wouldn’t want him to, afraid of what he might’ve touched earlier. Road kill… meat rotting in the garbage… himself.
Too much in the last week. First Chaz’s suicide. Then Mason Hardisty clutching his chest, making a noise like a worn tire rolling across a case of broken beer bottles.
When they’d heard about the pornographic horror found with Jazz’s roasted corpse—naked in front of the blackened mirror—the grandfolks explored Marty’s room again with a fine-toothed bulldozer. They pried up floor boards and ripped open the new mattress, checking for demonic contraband. They didn’t discover a single bloodthirsty thing, yet they adamantly refused to allow Marty to attend his best friend’s funeral.
“Kid couldn’t even kill himself normally. At least the other one just swallowed sleeping pills,” Mason Hardisty shouted when Martin wanted to send flowers. He shook a finger at his grandson. “What kind of headcase ignites a mouthful of lighter fluid? No one you need to be seen with, young man.”
“Going to his funeral isn’t ‘being seen’ with him,” Marty’d argued. “Besides, everybody knows. Won’t look right if I don’t show.”
His grandfather was sarcastic. “Won’t look right? Since when did you give a damn about how things look? Now you’re concerned with appearances? You should’ve been more careful choosing your companions.”
Marty’d been stricken. Chaz was the second best friend to off himself in less than a year. And that remark about Seuter having the decency to OD? Was there an acceptable way to commit suicide?
A local news team grabbed Marty at school to get a statement. Now the entire world knew their grandson had been pals with this nasty little creep, who might’ve gone psycho and started shooting people if he hadn’t first burned himself up. And the other one—whose stepfather was really a stepmother, who then went out to become the Triple X Slayer? They wanted to know if Marty ever noticed that Seuter Pittman had psychotic plans for the Glee Club. All these teenaged killers were into graphic scaries. It turned them into beasts. If his friends were that way, Marty was. Definitely a kid to keep under a magnifying glass, like a new strain of virus.
Gossip claimed the Hardistys owned a cache of weapons of mass destruction. Or were wife-swapping members of a space-alien sex club. Or descended from Nazis with Grampa as scoutmaster and Grandma as den monster to a pack of goosestepping baby chickenhawk brownshirts with very red necks.
Tonight Mason hustled his wife and grandson into the car to attend church. Middle of the week. They hadn’t done that in years, but it was overdue they got some ol’ time religion. Put the fear of God in ya, his granddad said.
It looked like rain in the distance. As Marty’s grandfather drove the Range Rover, his grandmother absently turned on the car TV. This was how she usually spent her evenings, watching the tube—even if going to the grocery store or out for a burger.
Some old black and white movie. Saccharine until Marty thought he’d barf up the catsup-smothered meatloaf and brussel sprouts with canned cheese he’d eaten an hour before. But his granny smiled contentedly.
“It’s New Moon!” she simpered. “Why, I haven’t seen this operetta in years. Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddie could really sing.”
“Good clean material,” Mason nodded, braking because there was slowing traffic ahead on the highway. “If they still made ’em that way, we wouldn’t have this insanity.”
Marty yawned, glancing up at the miniature television mounted above the dashboard. He noticed a cast member and it made him chuckle. “That’s George Zucco.”
His grandparents gave him the eye, grandfather asking, “So?”
“Dude died in an insane asylum screaming that the Great God Cthulhu was after him.”
Mason fumed. “Turn that off, Janis.”
She reached for the buttons. “I’ll just change it.”
Better. Old road movie. Not the MAD MAX type. Bing Crosby in a sarong.
Marty sneered. “Legend has it that Bing was a cruel control freak. Two of the three sons by his first wife killed themselves.”
“That’s a lie!” Mason hotly contested.
Janis coughed into her hand. “Actually, Mason dear, I remember…”
She turned the channel again. There was a light-hearted comedy taken from a popular stage play. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Yeah, popular like forty or fifty years ago. Marty rolled his eyes. Then his pupils twinkled.
“Hey, Jayne Mansfield! Know about her?”
Mason snorted, trying to see what the commotion was up ahead. Their side moved but it was like slogging through molasses. No traffic at all on the other side. He shrugged. “So she died in a car wreck. Lots of folks do—terrible, right? Maybe she was decapitated, maybe not. Blah blah blah.”
Marty chortled. “I was referring to the rumor that she belonged to the Church of Satan.”
Mason suppressed a curse word, instead muttering, “Lord, give me strength.”
They heard a thunder clap up the road. They also saw a bright flash.
“Lightning. Great.” Mason’s shoulders slumped. “Soon it’ll come down so’s I can’t see nothin’.”
Janis again changed the channel. A very youthful group sporting blond hair and tans sang in a tape of the 1960’s Beach Boys. Marty shook his head. Was it National Dust It Off and Bugger It Week?
His grandfather seemed pleased. “The Beach Boys were okay in my book. Not the woman-hating, cop-killing music you kids listen to these days.”
Marty snickered. “Even the one who was friends with Charles Manson? Supposedly had the whole Family living in his house for a while? The same house, by the way, where Sharon Tate and others were later butchered?”
“Janis, find something this kid can’t warp or else turn it off!” Mason bellowed. “There’s enough harm in the world. Why does he go looking for more?”
Marty’s grandmother touched the channel-selector button. There was a police drama where the detectives tracked a killer who gouged out victim’s eyes with a serrated dildo blessed by a narcosatanisto brujo in Matamoros, Mexico.
“Oops,” she said softly.
She changed it again. Yak yak forum, the topic being bitch mothers whose offspring thought they were werewolves. Oi, the th
ings ya found in their underwear next morning!
“Uh oh,” she murmured even lower.
Her finger stroked the button, lingering just above it. There was a show about pretty witches. Tap. Another about cheerleading vampire hunters. Tap. News with a woman who drowned her five children in a bathtub and another who kept her half-starved little girl locked in a closet for years. Tap. Cable show about a family of undertakers with skeletons in their closets.
“Shoot!” she muttered. Marty smiled, knowing she wanted to say shit!
Marty perkily remarked, “Thanks, guys. I definitely feel I got my dose of normalcy tonight. Nope, don’t need to hunt horror up. Don’t know why I ever did.”
Grandpa ground his teeth. Marty heard gnashing before Mason sputtered, “Turn that damn thing off! Can’t we just have some peace and quiet?”
Janis Hardisty bit her lips, hitting the off-button.
With the set off, they heard sirens. Now the pulse of red strobe became visible over and to the left of traffic. The lights shimmered and bounced off the undersides of low, dark clouds, hinting a spring thunderstorm was about to break. Clouds were tinged red… an accident on the other side of the divider.
Cars slowed to a crawl, both sides of the highway. Then the Hardistys saw the first vehicle—a foreign sports job upside down in the middle lane, tires smoking. A convertible, the soft top up because of the coming rain. The material shredded as the car slid after flipping, a torn flag appearing from under the wreck. They couldn’t tell if there was anyone in there.
They saw more wreckage. Flames, and fire trucks trying to get through the congested back-up. It was a fuel hauler, collided with a bus full of college students, shooting a fireball toward the sky. Both heavy vehicles had skidded, hitting at least six other cars, knocking them like toys across the lanes. One car even stood on its end in the HOV lane. Its driver’s side door was open and a man leaned out, hooked on the seatbelt. But the belt had sprung, and the guy reminded Marty of pictures of paratroopers hanged up in trees. The force of flames kept rescuers from reaching this person. The fire hissed closer, sidewinding across the asphalt in gassy ribbons. The man flailed, broken, unable to get free. Hysterical, he knew the fire would soon reach him and there was nothing anyone could do.
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