…still she sneaked out with a poppy-cummed, offal-brained, cock up the ass loser whose sole intention was to turn her into a harlot not even Jesus Christ himself could save from stoning.
Horse tossed the book back into the box.
Renae’s mother had always hated him. She would write that about him.
But how, if she was dead?
Nah, some other writer did it. Still, talk about creepin’ the fuck out of a brother.
Horse caught a movement at the end of the alley. Not the guys in short pants. A man in uniform. Shit. He subconsciously knee-jerked at the sight of any uniform, thinking it was a cop. He instantly prepared for flight-fu or attack-fu.
Not a police uniform. It was old-fashioned. He’d seen it in movies about The American Revolution. This was red. The man wearing it gripped a musket, and shuffled a few bewildered steps. The half-light made the pollution hanging in the air fold in on itself like mist over a bog.
And he was covered in snow.
Horse blinked. The soldier disappeared. Hallucination or more gang spookshit? Like the two are separate, he snorted.
He looked at the building. The door’s rectangular brass plate reading X-IS-THE-DARK was the only indication of its business. Nothing about phone services—or even publishing. Provided, that is, the books had come from there.
He moved to one of the pristine shutters. He bent to pick up his paint and when he glanced up, the shutter already bore a painted message:
Here Find A Love With Which To Disfigure The Dawn
Had he written that? Dope was better than he thought.
This ain’t somethin’ of mine. Not my style.
Horse shook the can, spraying a line through the message. Sprayed again and again to obliterate it. Then he stood back and stared as his paint melted off in crimson steam.
The slogan remained.
In the meltdown, he saw burned women tangling…a hallucination? (Am I high?) Their bodies locked in tormented rhythms of third degree torsos… Wow, do I have a great imagination or what? Tongue stubbles waggling at gram-negative bacteria-infected G-spots suppurating lava…hairless ruptured wreckage rubbed tender septicemic blisters… hearts circulating boiled blood pumping bilge from a toxic lake…waxy fingernubs thrusted into and over blackened receptacles of sludge, caresses from melded fingers-flippers-paws grunting into grease lakes and oil slicks of pus.
In a word: Feverish.
Capital F.
F.
F.
Horse knuckled his eyes. He tried to turn away. Then he grinned. “Crybaby. Does it cover its eyes when it gets scared?”
The way Renae used to when he took her to the horror shows. Covered her eyes and yet, now, wasn’t she herself into a death trip?
Hell, he’d seen brothers stabbed so hard in the neck the wriggly trachea was speared on the knife as it exited. He’d seen friends gutshot, cut in half by a close-range sawed-off, spinal columns twitching and the body’s top half ruled by a not quite dead brain doing a sidewinder slide across the floor. He’d seen former girlfriends who’d aged so fast on drugs and whoring and being knocked up, then once they were full blown, they’d have a super-vac used for oil spill clean-ups put between their thighs to suck out the kids and entire placentas, scummy green uteruses and all, while the camera soaked it up.
Horse looked again…
(If you face your horrors, what do they become? Less than darkness—or only that: plain generic night. Average atrocity not as fearful as the risk of an OD. Some guys screamed as their brains fried or turned crystalline. But others just went to sleep and never woke up, rocked in the arms of Death as Lullaby Mother… Death always a woman.)
The building’s door opened. A female stood in the entrance, black hair like premature night cascading over her shoulders, highlighting the dark shadow cleavage amply revealed by her low-cut dress.
It was Renae. Man.
The dress wasn’t black as he’d’ve expected, always seeing her in black on The Goth Channel. It was red, steaming around her in early June swelter. Going to be such a hot summer. Her face was a pale pearl.
“Hi,” she said in a silver voice. She struck a provocative pose that jerked his dick up, practically tying a knot in itself. “How are you, Horst?”
His real—cringe!—name.
“Jesus… Ren, what are you doing here?” he asked, dropping the paint can.
She flashed perfect teeth. “I got a job to be close to you.”
She stepped inside and motioned for him to come in.
Horse grinned. He’d always known she’d return, desperate for him. Thirteen inches, what girl wouldn’t be? That cop she’d been screwing probably had some little swirly piggy’s tail.
He oughtta make her beg for it.
Naw.
The room was absolutely plain. No furniture. No windows either, strange since there were those iron shutters around the building. The walls, floor and ceiling were a uniform colorless nothing until—with her dark hair and red dress silhouetted—Renae stood in a ball of light.
She pouted, sexy natural cherry red lips. “Did you miss me?”
He nodded, amazed she could be twice as beautiful as the last time he’d seen her. Even more gorgeous than she appeared on TV. Funny, on The Goth Channel she didn’t seem to wear much makeup. Here she was tarted up real good. Maybe the place required its operators to lay the sex on thick.
Horse sure hoped, if she was coming back, that she made good money at X-IS-THE-DARK.
She drew him close. “How does this feel?”
“You shouldn’t even have to ask,” he replied, thinking of hitting multiple jackpots.
Horse put his hands on her breasts to squeeze—and sank up to his elbows in them.
Am I high?
Am I high?
High enough to fly to the Vatican and shit on the Pope’s head.
Horse let out a silly giggle. He tried sliding free but was pinned, her supple flesh suddenly hardened concrete. He tugged, panic festering. This was no hallucination of dust-crackle-crank. He was truly stuck.
Then he saw the mole on her jaw. A black X.
“Mrs. Hawthorne?” He exhaled the name, punched out of him.
She laughed, becoming one of the burned women he’d seen in the melting paint, pulling him to her smoky mouth.
– | – | –
Chapter 14
Captain Walch paced, irritated by snow’s soft sputter against windows and across the roof, a cat’s footsteps. The woman, in whose house he’d taken up this involuntary winter residence, sat on the floor, very much like a cat herself. The white dog curled next to her. Not that Walch cared or wondered why, but she often did this, even though the floor was cold.
She always wore slippers, too, perfect white ankles revealed just above the tops. Even when Walch made love to her and she wrapped her legs around his waist to pull him deeper, she wore them. Just once, he’d seen why—as she bathed. Her feet were deformed, very long toes (three to each foot), little heels. With the way some of the men talked, a superstitious fool might expect hooves. How long had it taken her to learn to move, to walk, so gracefully? He was surprised she didn’t hop.
In the village, two soldiers had fallen to the queer cabin fever the British suffered of late. She watched silently as he interrogated them:
One had been found standing in two feet of driven snow in the town’s middle, not far from the wild brush (now winter-barren) which served as their square. He’d been shouting about those he’d killed—but these kills were not a warrior’s brags.
“Most neighbors assumed they’d starved but I smothered ’em! Children asleepin’ in them streets. ’oo’s to care? ’oo ever spared ’em as much as a farthing or crust’a bread? ’oo gave a dog’s purple fart? I pinned ’em down an’ leaned in wi’ all me weight, barely a rustle til they didn’t move no more. Li’l bastards so thin, t’was like steppin’ on sparrows wi’ ’ollow bones. They mostly ’ad these twisted legs, an’ sores aplenty—like some a’ the
m women ’ere in the village, wha’ they got unner their skirts…”
The other man had fought a fellow soldier under the January skeletons of trees, with nothing but bare hands and teeth. No muskets, no bayonets, no knives from their belts. They even kicked off their patchy boots, barefoot in snowdrifts. This one had grabbed the other by the cold-shriveled bollocks, squeezing until they might’ve heard the poor fellow scream as far away as Boston, squeezing until bystanders heard them pop like a blacksmith’s calloused knuckles. Then when this virtually emasculated soldier fell to the ground, curled up like a baby, this one fell on him, pinned him back, and wolfishly ripped the soldier’s throat right out. He held him in his mouth, shaking him, shaking him until the killer and victim both began a frenzied blur of blood-white snow. With the body beneath him still in spasms and death throes, jugular blood making a hot geyser, he howled at the leaden sky. Gore made even darker the red on his British uniform. After this he cried, “Katrina? ’ow’s that, luv?”
Happening too frequently. Walch was at wit’s end.
“Hutchinson,” he asked the first, “was it true what you shouted about murdering those unfortunate children back home?”
“No, sir,” Hutchinson replied, eyes round and bloodshot. He seemed genuinely horrified when the sergeant dragged him by the collar, like a man coming off a drunk where he’d committed a grievous sin that he’d otherwise never have conceived of while sober. “I don’t got no idea why I said them things.”
“Why did you say you had?” the captain wanted to know, hands knotted behind his very straight back. “And whom were you telling about it? Did you think such confessions might impress some of the colony ladies?”
Hutchinson cast a furtive look upon the captain’s woman. A sly smile creased his face. “They likes it. Some of ’em cry an’ others laugh. No matter, they ‘ear and they all likes it.”
Walch glanced at the woman. Her eyes were sloe and sleepy, long dark lashes at half mast, mostly concealing the pupils, popinjay blue. He couldn’t read her expression. But he thought he heard her purring.
“What caused you to conclude that ladies would enjoy such tales?” he asked as he turned back to the first soldier.
Hutchinson’s grin widened, revealing brown teeth, dark gaps as in a battlement’s broken defenses. “You didn’t ‘ear ’em out there, Cap’n? Th’ wind were full of it. Makes me dood n’ bollocks tight, like when I’d find me a bit o’ softy bum wha’ curled up ‘side a woodpile, face of an angel…”
The man’s eyes narrowed to white slits. Walch arched an eyebrow, seeing the erection in the professed pederast’s trousers. He wasn’t surprised to see vermin serving in His Majesty’s Army. Recruiters didn’t care as long as a man could march, point, and shoot when ordered. The problem was that this was the eighth man to confess to killing and raping. Half were deeds committed here in the rebellious colonies—more or less sanctioned with a wink and an admonishment to discretion—but half were random, homeside. They weren’t performed here under the aegis of punishing Americans for treason.
The Captain focused on the second soldier. “Burton, why were you and Simmons fighting?”
The man breathed heavily, as an overstressed mutt would pant. He stood, shoulders hunched, head down, bloody tongue hanging out, then rolling back into the mouth as he smacked his lips. His jowls and second band of chin shook like a bulldog’s. It was hardly an expression of contrition. More as of sheer exhaustion. Blood saturated the front of his uniform. An observer might suspect he’d been seriously injured in his own right. Blood dried across his face, in his clumped whiskers and up both nostrils. It flecked his eyelashes and matted his hair. As if, after he’d savagely bitten Simmon’s throat, he’d proceeded to bury his face in the wound, slurping blood, inhaling it.
“Burton? Can you hear me? What were you and Simmons fighting about?” Walch repeated, insistent.
The soldier didn’t respond. The sergeant slapped him on the back of the head. “Answer the cap’n, you great lump o’ shite!”
The man slowly lifted his head, not looking at his commanding officer but peeking at the woman sitting serenely on the floor.
“Ask ’er,” Burton whispered, voice hoarse because gore slicked it.
“I’m asking you,” Walch told him firmly. “Reply at once or face having the sergeant-at-arms here beat it out of you. These are the gravest charges. Your answer is tied with your fate, depending on whether it was murder or manslaughter.”
Now Burton looked at him, blinking those bloody lashes until his eyes spilled. He could’ve been shaking a saint’s stigmatic tears. Yet he grinned as Hutchinson had, the mouth a wild animal’s. “They likes it. They see an’ they likes it.”
“Who does?”
“The ladies… Laughin’ and weepin’. Whatever you choose, what makes you warm inside. If you likes ’em t’ cry or you likes ’em t’ favor you. Can’t you ’ear ’em, Cap’n? Wantin’ us t’ dance ’em jigs?”
Suddenly Burton howled. The white dog on the floor did the same in flank-shivering sympathy, the landlady stroking its back, murmuring soothing words Walch barely heard yet would have sworn were a mixture of French, Latin and Greek.
This was the identical story told by every man who went mad—that they’d done it for the women. Eight soldiers of usual British military discipline who shrieked crimes or killed during brawls in the middle of this God-forsaken bog hole. Not for the usual reasons a soldier might snap: attacking a member of his own army, for stealing, slandering, or over a female. Burton’s same words from each of them—the fight had been for the women, not over a woman.
An educated man, Oxford-graduated, Walch didn’t believe a wit in the supernatural. At least not before hacking through the dense woods to arrive at this queer little patch of hell.
Had he heard them, too, laughing and crying? Maybe he had, while searching for revolutionary traitors-to-the-Crown, stumbling upon the town at dusk as loons storm-called from the bog’s other side…their lorelei of trills through the fir trees, and the dark red leaves on the oaks and maples which made even he tremble with a nameless apprehension…
Presently those maples were starkly bare, bits of syrup frozen in beads upon the bark like the orange pus from a tropical insect bite. (This most definitely wasn’t the tropics! How he wished he was in Jamaica…) Huge oaks had limbs like gnarled wrestlers. The firs sported red in branches rusty with winterkill. Stray willows had tiny leaves leaning down like strings of pearls.
And his men were being steadily reduced in competency and numbers.
If he didn’t act swiftly, there mightn’t be any remaining alive or sane to march out again when spring unlocked the sun and the melting began.
Walch turned his back on the pair of addled soldiers, striding resolutely across the floor toward the calm woman next to her pale hound, legs tucked under her and shawl draped around her shoulders.
“Why do they always declare that you know?” he asked in a low voice, not wanting the sergeant to overhear. “Don’t come to the erroneous conclusion that I will protect you. I must look after my men, first. I demand an answer. What do you know…?”
««—»»
Renae awakened with a start.
Another dream about the legend of Nubbing Cove.
There was something different in this one, though. She couldn’t remember… Most people didn’t recall everything they dreamed, even directly upon waking. Some never remembered anything and swore they never dreamed.
Yesterday had been a strange one at work. She’d interviewed a hot new Goth band who’d cranked a local hit out of their garage:
Contortion’s portions
spoken in a deadpan
’bout adult abortions
by the telephone man.
Do you want me to cheer?
Do you want me to cum?
Do you want me to cry?
’bout dead girls in the slum?
Pay me in the spilled blood
confessing in the night.
/>
Pay me in your darkness;
your voice puts out the light.
Ride the shock of sound waves
as you release the beast.
Call me with your crimes, love,
then join me at the feast.
The group’s name was Genatria, and they weren’t like the strange deather gangs, like the one she’d recently guested on the show where no one would talk, trying instead to kill each other. All in black and red, the band was excited to be on the program, animated as they discussed making a video to be produced by a filmmaker who shucked out gruesomes for Sunday’s Alternative Pulpit. Fuse had already shown interest in seeing it when it was ready.
“So does the song have anything to do with the phone sex-slaughter service currently advertised on late night TV? X-IS-THE-DARK?” Renae asked, innocently enough. Wasn’t this a reasonable question, considering the lyrics?
Shedu waved off-stage, angry, making a slicing gesture across his throat and vehemently shaking his head. He motioned to go to commercial. When the show returned, the question had disappeared. The members of Genatria hadn’t objected—but Shedu was livid.
Why?
“Sounds like a service promoting violence. I don’t want trouble with the authorities,” he’d lamely explained.
“Since when?” Renae asked him.
“Go to another topic,” he ordered.
Disturbed by Shedu’s unreasonableness and her dream, she wasn’t herself on her way out of the apartment the next morning. A flock of white birds was eating in the yard. She guessed somebody’d put bread out. But, no, they pecked at bodies of a cat and kittens. Getting into her car, a bird flew past and dropped an eye on the windshield, looking like a little red egg. Renae cried out, turning on the wipers which only popped and smeared it.
Now at the studio, Lenora stood beside her chair, gently shaking her shoulder. Had she fallen asleep at work? She never did that.
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