She kissed him. He tasted milk.
“I’m at your command, moon goddess. Your sex robot potent zombie slave groveling slavering tongue-flicking servant with no will of his own but certain body parts programmed to respond instantly to your every desire,” Eddie told her, hand over his heart. He did that cute trick of turning his tongue sideways until Renae saw the tip waggling vertically at her. Suggestive of but one thing, it never failed to make her laugh.
She commanded, “Give that here.”
««—»»
Eddie wandered into the bathroom to wash his face. Renae heard as he rinsed his mouth, vaguely smelling cinnamon. She picked up a guide to check out the tube. The new series, Death See, was on. She’d seen an ad promoting a show of Thelonious Spunk’s photo art.
“Can they do that?” she asked as Eddie returned. She handed him the guide. “Isn’t that evidence?”
Eddie tossed the magazine aside. “Didn’t waste any time, did they? Anyway, they aren’t using casefile pics. They found stuff published before Calia Abrams cut off her breasts and took a different path along her walk on the wild side.”
He turned on the loft’s television and choked. Strips of sequence shots taken of Sandra Dickens. Spunk/Abrams had used a second camera to take a stream of 1/500-second pictures for the Rube Goldberg-ish machine built to strike off Sandra’s head. The photograph Spunk took of the head flying forward had been done separately. Death See ran the strip quickly to create a sort-of video of the machete swinging out and decapping the vic. They ran it forward, backward, forward in excruciating slo-mo, hair and blood arcing. A camera-tech computer trick about thirty or forty years old. They indulged it by showing it for a good minute in replay.
“How did they get that? It’s only been a week since we got it,” Eddie complained, vein throbbing in his forehead.
“Paid a bundle for it?” Renae suggested. “That’s even grosser than that the shot of that bird exploding when hit by a baseball. Did you see that a few years ago? They ran it and re-ran it on the news, smirking their asses off. Of course, Death See might have come by it legally somehow.”
Eddie knew these jerks were also grinning. Death was ultimate product. He considered Goths being into grief, wondering if this might be superior to those who seemed incapable of mourning anything.
He felt defeated. “What the public wants, sitting in living rooms, getting a taste of what it’s like to kill by seeing it at the ends of their snotty noses.”
Renae rolled onto her stomach in a way so she could reply yet still see the TV. “To kill? You don’t consider it a taste of what it’s like to die?”
Eddie sat on the bed’s edge, shrugging his shoulders.
“Not in my experience. Maybe it’s because we don’t hunt our food anymore, but the urge to participate in some capacity in nature’s death ballet is still in the racial memory. It’s definitely from the viewpoint of the living—at least the survivors.”
She sat up, tucking her long legs under her. She ran fingers through her hair to untangle it.
“Have you ever wondered what it feels like to kill people?” she asked, staring off toward a wall where a framed poster for Parts hung. It visibly clashed with the strange combination of Warhol, Utrillo and Renoir that Eddie favored.
“I have killed people,” Eddie replied wearily as his brow furrowed. Tonight his hooded dark eyes were reminiscent of old photographs of the famous writer for whom he’d been named. “Sometimes it works out that way. It’s either me or a guy on crack. Reasonable force versus early retirement in a one room condo six feet under.”
The show zeroed in on a combination photo/drawing of a creature that looked like Barnum’s Figi Mermaid. Only it had two fistfuls of dead bunnies.
“That’s not in necrOmania seXualis,” Eddie muttered.
“I don’t mean on the job,” Renae clarified. “Not self-defense. I mean, have you ever wondered what it would be like to be them? To try on their psyches like a suit of rattlesnake skin and feel what they do?”
She glanced at the opposite wall where a poster for The Nietzsche Worm hung, Renae’s third film. Reluctantly she kept it up because it was collectable, worth bucks on the Internet. She’d played a Paraguayan streetwalker flayed alive by the raised up corpse of Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer had allegedly ended up in Argentina, but he’d been exhumed and doing the bidding of an evil Chilean machi.
Renae’d been glad to be dispatched early in that film. The plot was confusing, with Nietzschean zombie supermen and preachers of death. She didn’t need to get a taste of what it felt like to die—not from visual example. She’d done plenty of it.
“No sane person would want to.” Eddie looked across his shoulder at her, then turned to see what she was looking at. The Nietzsche Worm wasn’t a memorable film. If the philosopher were alive today, he’d sue the pants off the producers.
“Actors put themselves inside a character’s head. Don’t cops put themselves into a killer’s mind to guess the next move? Profiling. Figuring out what makes them tick.”
“So police and performers aren’t sane. By definition and job description, they must be abnormal.”
“At what point do you put yourself inside their heads, be it character or perpetrator, and begin experiencing bloodlust? When do you finally imagine twisting the knife or letting the hammer fall… and enjoying it?” Renae inquired, hand miming twisting a blade, then a ballpeen smashing a head.
Eddie wagged a finger. “That crosses a precarious line.”
She pouted. “You can only truly cross that line by doing the deed, outside fantasy. Up to that point, it’s merely vicarious. Harmless.”
Eddie shook his head. “Ren, if you saw the stuff I see daily, what people do to lovers, parents, kids… to total strangers. It’s sickening. The crap in horror stories isn’t farfetched anymore—if it ever was. It’s nonfiction. The only parallel that comes close is a sense of deja vu. We’ve been here before; we’ve seen it happen. Watched the blood and torture, maiming and senseless misery. Suddenly you realize there’s nothing harmless about it.”
Eddie stretched out beside her on the rumpled bed, head on a pillow, hands joined above at rest. Renae got up and moved across the floor to the dresser, averting her eyes from the mirror. She began to brush her hair to work out the tangles. Must look like a rat’s nest, she thought. Not that she could see it.
She continued, “But what about us who aren’t police, who see it only on the news or on shows like this trash? We view reports—and see them scripted as episodes of the most popular series—on ritual homicide, child rape, mutilation—and we wonder how they could do that. What kind of mind does it take to dream up such atrocity, then commit it? We can’t go far enough to do it because most of us aren’t monsters, whether we were abused at home or not…” Her breath caught in her throat. She swallowed before going on. “…whether or not we suffered major traumas. But maybe we can imagine the crime, play it in our heads like a sick personal movie. Perhaps by doing this, we’ll understand what it takes to commit grossly depraved violence. With that understanding we get the power to fight it, recognizing the triggers. To stop ourselves and, better yet, stop those triggers with that old saying: That way lies madness. Yeah, then this mental acting out of brutality could be harmless, even good for us. Thanatonic Therapy. Call Dr. E-Phil. Get it? E? Phil? Evil?”
Renae straightened Eddie’s clothes where he’d carelessly dropped them on a chair. He shut his eyes, ignoring the obnoxious pun as he mulled over her ideas. “You could write a how-to book on corrupt fantasies and how they make one a better all-around psycho. I PRETEND I’M NOT OKAY AND YOU PRETEND YOU’RE NOT OKAY AND TOGETHER WE’LL BE FINE AND MAKE THE WORLD A SANER PLACE TRA-LA.”
She tiptoed back to bed and had Eddie chained to the brass posts with his own cuffs before he knew what was going on. Or he’d known and was pretending.
“Hey! What the…” Playing the game.
“I can do anything to you I want,” she purred as she glide
d around the bed. “I could take your belt and whip you.”
She brandished it, plucked from his cast-off pile when she’d removed the cuffs from his pocket.
“I could wrap it across your mouth and behind your head like a gag. I could buckle it tightly around your balls.”
Eddie challenged, “You gonna talk or do?”
Smartly she lashed the belt across the soles of his feet. Eddie yelped, startled, feeling the sting up to his hips.
“Wouldn’t that be crossing a precarious line?” she taunted. Yet Renae felt badly when she saw welts rise on his feet.
“Then what are you going to do?” Eddie asked, biting down on an imaginary bullet he pictured as her left nipple.
“I’ll be back. Think about it while I’m gone. What could I do?” she teased, then went silently down the stairs. She returned within a few minutes, naked, carrying a tray of her special ice cubes. He knew because they were pink. She made small cocktail ones out of cayenne pepper sauce mixed with water, frozen for her Bloody Mary’s.
She ordered him to spread his legs.
His eyes grew wide. “No way.”
She struck him across the thighs with the belt. He spread. Renae screwed a cube into his anus. Then she inserted another.
The ice melted within the heated cup of his rectum. Cayenne stung.
“Imagine you’re some stranger I picked up in a bar,” she suggested, breath against his ear, running another cube across the soft head of his penis.
“Aowh! That burns like a sonofabitch!” He thrashed his hips and moaned, trying to wriggle away. She grabbed his prick and balls to hold him still while she inserted yet a third cube. Cold pink water trickled onto the sheet. It resembled diluted virginal blood.
“Are you hot, baby?”
“Cut it out, Ren. It isn’t funny,” he snapped. “Let me out of this.”
He jerked his hands against the cuffs. Then he stared, surprised, at the growing proportions of his erection, even as his eyes poured tears.
Ordinary, first-level bondage stuff. What a big baby he was!
Her black hair fell against his belly. Renae bit him, gently but firmly, on the swelling cock’s tip, nibbling by millimeters with just the edges of her teeth all the way down the base of the shaft. Then she nibbled her way back up to the tip. The teeth marks left were visible yet didn’t break the skin.
She ran her tongue across her teeth and then her lips, her pose vulpine through her hair’s dark mantle. “I have power over you,” she declared.
Eddie didn’t doubt it. He shivered uncontrollably with spiced ice melting up his ass, a frigid scorch—and with the intense arousal of her teeth, the corridor of her mouth, the vapor of her perfume steaming from swaying breasts. She sat up and spread her own legs, inserting several ice cubes into her vagina, pushing them up with red nails. She winced from the combined cold and heat. She poised, slinging one long leg to either side of his hips, hovering. She held a cube in each hand, clutched between thumbs and forefingers. She rubbed these over his nipples as she lowered herself, impaling, submerging him inside her.
I hope this isn’t dangerous, Renae thought, worried about the sensitive internal tissues.
Spanish Fly used to be given as an aphrodisiac because it irritated genitals, creating an awesome itch that made seeking the right scratch a fanatical quest. But it could also cause bloody discharge—even death. She wasn’t using caustic, pulverized beetle wings here. Just a bit of hot sauce in water.
Hell, we digest it AND pass it. Can it be that bad? When it feels so awful and so fine? It’s not even full strength.
Renae heard Eddie’s gasp as she slid down his prominent shaft. Then he clamped his jaws shut with the noise of a metal trap being sprung. He gasped again, a raspy exhale, mixed with sounds of sweat popping from every desperate pore. Surely not for real. But that’s what this was about. An exercise in imagination.
Renae rocked as he bucked and shivered. She shook, too. From the ice’s chill and especially from the cayenne’s burn. Branded a sadistic whore, poker rammed between her legs.
A true Goth, she was always enamored by Dracula’s story. How darkness, beautiful and eternal, swept you into a starry grave. But the fantasy she passed into was impalement by the historic Prince Vlad, set upright with the rest of the Saxon victims at Brasov, writhing if still alive or sagging on slippery stakes if dead. Vlad had the points rounded so that the original impalement didn’t immediately kill the victims, but let them slowly grind downward. When she shut her eyes and concentrated on Eddie’s thermal hardness and the shrieking of her own incinerating vaginal atoms, she saw Vlad Dracul enjoying his breakfast beneath where she suffered on her wooden stake. Slimy with her blood, it gave not an inch, supporting her in relentless space no matter how much she wanted to shrink—unfeeling—back to earth. Toward heaven was a dreadful place to perish, spitting and jerking as the Wallachian devil feasted. Everywhere along the crenelated castle wall were blunted spikes down throats, up cracked-pepper rectums, skewered through every part from bowels to eventually brains. You could linger hours or even days.
He’s fucked us all, she thought in her moment, a vivisecting rapture through bodily portals, toward points of a fractured, betraying light.
If she ever reached any of these illuminated tunnels, who would await her spirit?
He would. In all past and present forms. Future, too. From the quintessential blend of beast and hero, to avenging archetype, to every beguiling face to stamp his imagined character in celluloid.
Below, an emissary dared complain of stench. Vlad lost his temper. She watched soldiers strip the man, hold him with buttocks spread, turn a pole into his backside. The prince nodded approvingly as they hoisted the offender upright, stake firmly planted in the soil.
Vlad laughed. “You may have the tallest stake of all. Up there the stench cannot reach you. See how accommodating a host I can be?”
The emissary bore a remarkable resemblance to Eddie.
Actually he looked like Eddie’s famous namesake.
His lips moved and, below, she heard murmured these lines from Poe’s poem, “Tamerlane”: “‘Halo of Hell! and with a pain not Hell shall make me fear again—’”
Her head slumped to her chest as she watched the evil warlord sup, looking up to gaze fondly at her tortured eyes.
But three colors in existence: black, gray, and red, all in sharp relief, surreal with grief.
Vlad rose from the table, dragging his chair carved with dragons. He climbed up and caressed the insides of her bloody thighs. He ran his fingers, greasy with his meal, up to stroke her clitoris, inserting a finger into her vagina. She slipped farther down the shaft with a scream of outrage and orgasm as Vlad became Eddie.
Then Renae and Eddie changed places. He hung above, expression one of transcendence through agony, Christ-like. What was impalement but crucifixion’s nasty joke? She sat beneath, stuffing food into her mouth, towered over by dead and dying stretched around by impossible thousands. She contemplated how many trees had been cut down to make so many sharpened stakes. Wandering this skinbag forest, coming up to this one and that one to study the expression on a particularly ghastly or lovely face. Blood dripped into her eyes and she saw the world through a haze of rose.
She heard the wailing of a small child, its face a cherub’s from a church’s golden fresco. She felt a momentary kindness. “That one has suffered enough. Put it out of its misery.”
She snapped her fingers as she bit into an apple, hearing a soldier draw his sword.
Renae opened her eyes, shocked, uncoiling quickly from the vision. She banished the flavors of roasted meat and black bread from her mouth. Noticed that the hot droplets she felt in her eyes weren’t blood but tears, from pain pistoning between her legs, blistering labial lips, slick vaginal walls, boring through delicate layers with sulfuric intensity.
The ice in her fingers had melted, and she worked the solid kernels of Eddie’s nipples as if thumbing rosary beads in penitent conte
mplation. The ice up his rectum and in her cunt had likewise melted, but burning persisted. The couple abruptly came together. Both sobbed.
Renae hurriedly dismounted and hunted for the keys in Eddie’s clothes to unlock the cuffs. They both made a mad, bowlegged dash for the shower.
««—»»
“I didn’t know you had that in you?”
“A cruel streak?”
“You like inflicting a little feminist pain?”
“Little is right. Nothing a jar of burn cream apiece wouldn’t soothe. Really, I didn’t suspect it would hurt so much.”
“I have to sit on this ass all day tomorrow, both at the precinct and in the car. What if I have to run somebody down?”
“I said I was sorry.”
Eddie laughed, delicately rubbing another dollop of aloe vera over his swollen nipples. He looked like he had man-boobs. Then he gently salved his asshole and scrotum.
“You’re right. It was mildly sick. If this is as mean as you get, honey, I’ll never be arresting you. I’ll just hide the cuffs and hot sauce.”
Renae winked. “How much I did wasn’t the point. It was what went on up here.” She pointed a finger at her head.
Eddie made a face. “I don’t even want to hear this.”
She told him anyway. He listened without interrupting, yet his hooded eyebrows raised. Damn, if he didn’t go with a military haircut and a close shave, his resemblance to the original Edgar Allan Poe would be unnerving.
(How they had met: Eddie was working undercover, his hair and whiskers grown out. Renae had coyly approached him to the bone-granulating percussion of a band in a Goth bar—The Cowl, as a matter of fact—and begged him on her hands and knees to let her interview him on one of her Goth Channel spots. He’d politely refused, yet got her number to call her after the case was solved.)
Eddie was especially put off now by her description of him as the emissary being hoisted up higher than the other victims. Then as she sat in Dracul-mode, dining under him on stinky chicken.
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