by Denise Dietz
The moon’s spotlight shone on Tenia. “Satan and Asmodeus,” she said, after raising her hands and signaling for silence. “I beg you to accept the sacrifice of this woman whom we now offer to you, so that we may receive the things we ask for.”
“I wan’ wha’ I assed for,” the drugged woman slurred.
“The things that we and she ask for,” Tenia amended.
In a low voice, Aretha’s companion said, “I know who Satan is, of course, but who’s Asmodeus?”
“My dear Mary-Magdalene,” Aretha said. “According to Hebraic legend, he’s the king of the demons, and he’s usually represented pictorially with three heads, goose feet, and a snake’s tail.”
I didn’t know that.
S.B. Eisenberg, the author of Forever Asmodeus, had conveniently disregarded that little tidbit, probably because it would have been a tad gauche for a three-headed, goose-footed, snake-tailed demon to blend in with a crowd.
“Tenia will now give everyone a White John,” Aretha said.
The novice witch, Mary-Magdalene, said, “What’s a white john?”
“The host, my dear.”
“Host?”
“The Eucharist bread.”
“What kind of bread is that?”
“Communion, Mary-Mag. A spiritual communion with…hush! Forget the White John. Here comes the best part.”
I heard a vicious dog-growl, and darted a glance toward the gray cat…who serenely paw-washed its whiskers.
Some shrubbery separated. A black and tan rottweiler appeared, followed by a tall, naked, skeletal man. The man’s legs were reedy, but the penis that dangled between his thin thighs looked to be the size most guys like to brag about. His gaunt face was bland ‑‑ balding forehead, sparse eyebrows, bifocals, and nondescript nose. A salt and pepper mustache garnished his upper lip. He didn’t have goose feet.
The dog growled again. The skinny man held up one finger and the dog sat. “Stay, Dashwood,” the man said.
“Daniel named him Dashwood after Sir Francis Dashwood,” Aretha told Mary-Magdalene. “Sir Francis was the leader of the Hellfire Club.”
Mary-Magdalene said, “Ooooh, could I join that club?”
Aretha said, “Sure, once you find a way to travel back to the eighteenth century.”
The skinny man, in all likelihood Daniel Pearlstein, walked over to the drugged woman, who wasn’t cross-shaped anymore. Her fingers had begun kneading her breasts and pinching her nipples.
“Somebody tie her arms down,” Tenia said. “Sorry, Daniel.”
“That’s okay,” Daniel said, his voice raspy. “That’s okay, Tenia. Leave her alone.”
“But it’s not part of the ritual.”
“Fuck the ritual,” Daniel said.
The drugged woman pressed her palms against the ground and pushed. She didn’t rise very far, just far enough to glance around. Momentarily, her gaze seemed to perforate my tree, and I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. The woman looked familiar. Very.
Daniel shoved her back to her prone position and licked his lips. His cock was firm, turgid, dilated with blood, and his face didn’t seem bland anymore.
Aretha, Mary-Magdalene, and a handful of other witches began to masturbate.
Mary-Magdalene had an orgasm, and she resembled…more than resembled…the woman who’d recently graced my Cosmo cover.
Holy shit! Mary-Mag was Jem’s model girlfriend.
Discarding her robe and clothes, Tenia slurped down something from a golden chalice, spilling half the blood-red liquid on her porcine belly. As she dropped the chalice and fondled her pendulous breasts, a witch knelt, encircled Tenia’s butt, and lapped at her belly.
Christ, I’d witnessed enough. More than enough.
I must have seen what I was supposed to see because I didn’t feel like a shackled Houdini anymore. And the witches were so preoccupied, they wouldn’t have noticed me if I stood on my head, played an accordion, and sang The Yellow Rose of Texas.
All of them were naked. A few danced lewdly. But most watched Daniel Pearlstein mount Dawn Sullivan.
Dawn writhed and Pearlstein had trouble penetrating and I suddenly recalled the gas pump’s nozzle.
This time, when I turned and ran back to Yoda, no gusty wind tried to stop me. I snatched up my Stetson and, as if greased, slid into the Toyota.
Dancing the hora on Yoda’s gas and clutch pedals, I sped back to Clear Lake City. My thoughts were both fragile and convoluted ‑‑ like a spider spinning a web.
Spider! I thought about my stupid spider dream. And my encounter with the snake. Somehow, the two were connected.
I felt a chill and turned on the car’s heater. It didn’t work. Why was I not surprised?
“Okay, Frannie,” I murmured, “let’s take this step by step, logically.”
One, I had begun reading books about witchcraft and magic and had subconsciously memorized incantations. Two, I had fallen asleep while watching Fiddler on the Roof. Three, the snake wasn’t Tenia’s snake ‑‑ authentic or real witch, she couldn’t know I’d grace her Black Mass with my presence. Hell, I didn’t even know for sure. If Rick hadn’t loaned me Yoda…I mean, I couldn’t take a bus. There’s no bus stop for “Middle of Nowhere.” I could have hailed a taxi, I suppose, except the cabbie wouldn’t have hung around to drive me back once he saw the mailbox balloons and the thirteen Wendy Witch wannabes.
Logic, Frannie. Stop being a smartass and stick to logic.
Texas was chock-full of rattlesnakes, and they weren’t all in politics.
Rattlesnakes basked in the sun, but where did they go when the sun set?
They slithered underneath rock piles.
I had been using a rock pile as my toilet.
The demon had appeared to rescue me from the snake. Summoned by my incantation?
While I was in my “fugue,” he ‑‑ the demon, not the snake ‑‑ had called the shots. He had piloted my haircut. Because he didn’t want the witches to spot my telltale, gold-metallic hair.
He had forced me to witness the Black Mass…and Dawn Sullivan.
But why? That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
Or, with inflation, the million dollar question.
Shit! I had to pee again. Rocks were out, I thought with a shudder.
Peering through the windshield, desperately searching for a safe rest area, I finally stopped stomping Yoda’s gas pedal.
MADISON’S COTTAGE- LOS ANGELES, 1999
Victor Madison stared at the plump scarecrow.
He knew from his research that her broom-textured, straw-yellow hair had once been pumpkin orange, sea-green, Prussian blue, and puce. Hell, her split ends still looked as colorful as Joseph’s biblical coat. He also knew that she’d made an appointment to visit a cut-rate cosmetic surgeon.
Today, however, she’d compromised with cosmetics. Black kohl masked the circles beneath her hazel eyes, navy blue mascara spiked her lashes, and rose-colored pie wedges slashed her cheekbones.
In an effort to look younger than fifty-six, her pierced ears sported a total of fifteen earrings. Her left wrist boasted a snake tattoo ‑‑ with fangs ‑‑ and the same tattoo artist had engraved a crimson-pigmented Pegasus above her right breast.
As a guest on CNN’s Larry King, Victor had said he liked Disney because every single animated feature included elements of hostility and terror. Taking his words to heart, Stefani Bergen (real name Stevie Eisenberg) had stuffed herself into tight jeans, emblazoned with Mickey Mouse. A night chill permeated the air, yet she wore a cotton spaghetti-strap T-shirt. As Victor watched her raise a glass of champagne to her glossy red lips, 101 Dalmatian puppies romped across unfettered breasts that should have been fettered, and if she said the goddamn bubbles tickled her nose one more time, he’d kick her abundant butt out the front door.
Except he couldn’t boot her from his cottage. Because, damn it, he needed her.
“I drank a whole bottle of champagne all by myself as soon as I f
inished the book,” she said, “but it was cheap shit. This stuff tastes like a million bucks” ‑‑ she paused to giggle ‑‑ “and it tickles my nose.”
“Would you like another hundred thousand dollars’ worth?” he said sarcastically, retrieving the Dom Perignon from a Sterling ice bucket.
“I really shouldn’t.” As she extended her glass, her expression turned coy. “And I don’t mind being tickled, if you know what I mean.”
Yes, he knew what she meant. From the moment she’d swiveled her hips into his living room, he could see the word “groupie” branded across her forehead, as if printed with visible rather than invisible ink.
First, she’d scrutinized the framed photos on his wall. She hadn’t been turned on by Victor, circa 1986, schmoozing with Ronald Reagan. But she’d practically creamed her jeans over pictures of Paul Simon and Victor, Paul McCartney and Victor, Paul Newman and Victor, The Stones and Victor, and Redford and Brad and --
She had tapped her fake fingernails against the non-glare glass that protected a British rock group. “I made it with him,” she said. “We fucked in Philadelphia. Well, I think it was Philly. I remember eating Philly cheese-steak sandwiches before we ate each other.”
Then she had arched one hoop-earring-embellished eyebrow, as if she hoped he’d ask for references. When he didn’t respond, she said, “I made it with Charlie Sheen…we ate hoagies…and the Grateful Dead and Robert ‑‑”
“Do you need to use the bathroom?” he had asked, cutting her off at the pass. “There’s a whole wall of celebs above the bidet.”
And yet, despite Stevie Eisenberg’s abrasive language, despite her brash bravado, she possessed an impressionable insecurity.
Victor knew her background, had in fact made it a point to find out everything he could before their tête-à-tête. Just like his father, hers had been an unemployed, part-time drunk. Her mother had divorced and remarried, but Stevie left home at sixteen when her stepfather, playing Jack Nicholson in The Shining, broke down a locked bathroom door and violently raped her.
She, in turn, had knifed him.
Fleeing to Colorado, she married a man who combined the worst qualities of her father and stepfather. When he tragically burned to death, no one could prove that Stevie set the fire. As a matter of fact, she elicited more sympathy than suspicion, since the flames seared her left leg, leaving her with an ugly scar and a permanent limp.
Victor employed the best private detective agency in the business, yet her trail over the next several years had grown colder than the ice-swan centerpiece at Peggy Mostel’s bas mitzvah. Ostensibly, Stevie traveled throughout the country, following the Grateful Dead.
Then, all of a sudden, she re-emerged in Denver.
Renting a small apartment, she worked as a pet groomer. Nights, she wrote romance novels. On her wall, she thumb-tacked a map of the United States. Starting with Colorado, she set each of her books in a different state. By the third state, she’d made her first sale.
Her heroines were young, beautiful, un-scarred. Her heroes were handsome and sensitive. Her love scenes pushed the envelope, but never quite broke the seal. She won a Lifetime Achievement Award from Romantic Times magazine and a couple of Romance Writers of America plaques. Then she married the stud who’d posed for three of her book covers and they moved to Los Angeles.
She could deal with her husband’s bar bills and gambling debts, but when she found him screwing everything but the dog (and she wasn’t sure about the dog), she paid him off and kicked him out. The divorce drained what little remained of her savings.
Depressed, she gave away the dog and dyed her hair magenta. Her publisher, who didn’t give a shit about clinical depression, told her to meet her deadlines or send back the advance payment, and would she please stop giving her heroines nervous breakdowns. Ultimately, Stevie severed all ties with her agent and publisher.
By then, she was pushing fifty-five. In a Playboy interview, she boldly and incautiously admitted that she could no longer write about “vapid virgins with secret babies, who have multiple orgasms at the first sight of a fucking cowboy.” The remark didn’t make her universally loved, especially among her fellow romance authors, and she spent the next thirteen months hibernating. When she finally came up for air, her hands were suspended above her keyboard, and she had just finished typing THE END on the last page of a 1,507-page horror novel.
Which was why Victor needed her. To put it bluntly, his last two films hadn’t broken any box office records. If he didn’t produce another hit movie soon, they’d be saying Madison who?
Throughout his musings, Stevie had sat motionless, quiet as a mouse. Her bravado was gone, along with her coy expression, and nothing but her raw, almost anguished, vulnerability remained.
“So what do you think?” she said. “Will Hell Hath No Fury fly?”
“Do you want strokes or an honest opinion, Ms Eisenberg?”
“Call me Stevie, please, and I want the truth. My bank account is overdrawn and there’s barely enough ink in my printer to print a query letter. Not that those bastards in New York have sufficient balls between them to play a game of tennis.” She gave him a tight-lipped smile that was 90% Elvis. “Sorry, sir. I really shouldn’t bad-mouth ‑‑”
“Madison. No first name, just Madison, and I hate being called sir.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, Madison.” She nodded toward a couple of reams of paper, stacked neatly on top of a Chippendale table. “Okay. I sent you my manuscript un-repped, which isn’t fucking de rigueur, and ever since I got here we’ve made small talk…I’ve made small talk. I know you don’t like me, and you don’t want to fuck me, so you must like my book. Am I right, or am I right?”
“I think it shows promise,” he said.
“What?” Rising from her chair, she limped over to the antique Singer sewing machine that Cat Sands had found at a flea market and turned into a coffee table.
“I think it shows promise,” Victor repeated. “Which word didn’t you understand?”
“Fuck you, sir.”
Surprised, he said, “That was supposed to be a compliment.”
“Well, you can stick your compliment up your ass, sir. I showed promise when I submitted my first manuscript. Which, for your information, became my tenth book. And when it was published, I hadn’t changed one fucking word.”
“Sit down!” Grasping her by the shoulders, he steered her back to the chair. “How dare you play the brat with me? One more fucking word and I’ll summon my driver. He’ll dump you off in front of your trailer. Which, for your information, has been rented, following your second eviction notice, and the new tenants move in next week.”
Sinking into the chair, she reached for her champagne glass.
“Put that down. I don’t care how drunk you get, lady. I don’t care if you chug the entire bottle and puke your guts out inside my celebrity-infested bathroom. But you won’t drink another drop until I finish what I have to say. Is that perfectly clear?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Your book shows promise, Stevie, but it’s too long and you use the word ‘fuck’ every other sentence. Your male characters react like a herd of horny romance heroes, your teenage girl is a spoiled brat, and her mother is unbelievably stupid. In fact, the mother is one big cliché. I understand Yiddish, but your average reader won’t.”
“Now just a min ‑‑”
“Shut up! The only feasible character is Asmodeus. He’s brilliant, well written, well developed. In fact, he could have been in the room with you, looking over your shoulder, spinning the planchette on your Ouija board.”
“I don’t own a fucking Ouija board!”
“Take it easy. That’s another compliment. I didn’t mean to suggest…what’s the matter now?”
“I thought I saw something. Bugs. I hate bugs.”
Victor hunkered down. “Please don’t pull that shit with me. I know you have a drinking problem, Stevie, but you haven’t reached the I-see-bugs stage yet. And if
I have anything to say about it, you never will.”
Tears brimmed, then overflowed. “Do you want to option my book?” she whispered.
“Yes. I have the papers all prepared and notarized, ready for your signature. But you won’t see one penny of the option money, my dear, until you revise your manuscript. From scratch.”
“I can’t. I told you. I’m out of ink. I don’t even have the electricity to run my printer, or my computer, because I didn’t pay the bill.”
A shiver coursed through Victor as he remembered another city, another room, another lifetime. His sister Peggy lay bleeding to death and his mother told him to call an ambulance and he said he couldn’t because he hadn’t paid the phone bill.