The Bighead

by Edward Lee

  Charity grabbed her aunt’s arm. “What—happened?”

  Annie’s eyes gazed forward, as though the lids were stitched open on the memory. “There was a man…” Her voice waved. “A man come outa the woods behind the abbey…”

  (XIV)

  It happened so fast. One moment she and Sissy were strolling along by the lake, and the next moment…Sissy was screaming.

  It was fate that the man had chosen Sissy rather than Annie; at first all Annie could do was stand pinned to a tree and watch in horror, paralyzed. The shadow loomed, engulfed her sister like a cloak, tore her clothes off her body in one motion.

  The hulking figure’s body pinned Sissy to the ground, raped her right there on the lake’s mucky shore. Each thrust of the rapist’s hips sent a scream exploding from Sissy’s throat, a sound like a cat on fire. In the dim light of the winter dusk, all Annie could see of her sister were her arms and legs jutting out from under the man’s humping body. But soon Sissy’s screams ground down; she lost consciousness. Yet the sick wet sounds of rape continued as the assailant’s hips pumped onward, in and out, in and out, for what seemed forever.

  A guttering grunt rose up. The rapist withdrew a softening penis that looked large as a tube of cookie dough. Sissy lay still beneath him—Annie thought she was dead until her head lolled once and her eyes fluttered. But it was then that Annie’s paresis broke.

  The figure stood up, was beginning to turn—

  Annie screamed and ran off into the woods.

  (XV)

  “Yer mama was raped, hon,” Annie went on. “Right there in the mud. Raped worse than you’d ever think rape could be. I shoulda done somethin’, I shoulda tried to fight him but—but I was just too scared. So I ran, I ran all the way back to town an’ stormed into the old Sallee Place. It was the grace’a God that a lot of the townsmen was there, havin’ a card game, Wayne’n Brian, Johnnie Pelan, the Ketchum boys, and that nice bearded fella, Davy Barnett, I think his name was. I told ’em what’d happened and they was outa there like gangbusters, grabbin’ their rifles’n shotguns an’ tearin’ down to the abbey fast as they could…”

  (XVI)

  Annie followed them, barely able to keep up, her lungs aching. It was close to full dark when they got to the lake, and sure enough, he was still there, having another go at Sissy, humping her nearly to death in the mud. The men’s exclamations were not surprising. “Tarnations!” “What’n holy hail?” “Punch’m up fulla holes, boys! Ain’t no sick som-bitch gonna do this ta one’a our womanfolk!” The figure rose halfway when the shooting started, ear-splitting claps in the night. One volley after another until the bullets picked it up and dropped it dead. But Sissy—

  (XVII)

  “They killed him, they did, but yer mama—” Annie’s choked out sobs broke into full crying. “Yer poor mama was so tore up from bein’ raped. Tore up real bad, you know, down inner private place. We got her back the house and Doc Nutman come over, said it were a miracle she was still alive. But she never really recovered. Partial comatose was what the doc said. Fer the next nine months Sissy just lay in bed, never sayin’ a word. Just starin’ at the wallpaper’n gittin’ bigger ever day.”

  There. Finally. After all these years, Annie had finally had out with the truth of that horrid December night, and the even more horrid scene that took place nine months later. Wasn’t fair that Charity should learn what really happened to her mama like this, but sometimes that’s just how things worked out.

  Annie drove the truck up off the Route, up the entry road. She thought that telling the truth would make her feel better, but it didn’t.

  It didn’t, she knew, because there was still a little more truth to tell. The fine details she could never tell.

  And before she could even think of it anymore, the abbey’s odd brick front shone grainily in the headlights.

  — | — | —

  TWENTY-ONE

  (I)

  chink! chink! chink!

  A familiar sound to Alexander, and with each report, he took another step down, shirtless, his black cleric slacks still damp with—

  chink! chink! chink!

  —lake water.

  Zombified, that’s how he felt, walking back up the trail and through the lamp-lit abbey the same way he’d walked back to the firebase, coming in from beaucoup shit with Charlie Comm in the field. The man with the thousand-yard stare…

  No, nothing would surprise him now; hence it came as no surprise at all, once he descended to the basement, to discover the identity of the pick-ax wielder.

  Jerrica.

  “Jerrica?” he asked.

  She remained stark-naked but maniacal now—

  chink! chink! chink!

  —as she heaved the pick ax time and time again into the gouged wall, bits of mortar and brick exploding out of each strike, spraying her cheeks, stinging her face, all to no effect.

  The lit elements in the alcohol lamps looked like phosphoric halos. The strange light licked the priest’s face, his bare chest.

  “Jerrica!”

  chink! chink! chink!

  She didn’t hear him, her task all consuming. She’d made quite a bit of headway, though: she’d perforated the wall completely, and was now digging out around the rim of the hole.

  “JERRICA!” his throat belted out the name.

  chink—

  She stopped mid-swipe, turned. Her big blue eyes shined wide-open.

  Her nudity raved in the alcohol light.

  “Where have you been?” came her coy, meek query.

  “I think you know,” her answered, stern-voiced. “I saw you, Jerrica. I saw you coming out of the lake.”

  Her grin shone brightly as the lamplight, brightly as the profuse sweat on her naked body. “What’s wrong with a quick skinny-dip, huh, Father? I was…hot.” One hand idled up her flat belly, daintily touched a breast.

  “This place is haunted,” she said.

  Haunted, he thought. Maybe it was. Maybe it really was.

  “And I’ve seen the ghosts, Father. Your…nuns.”

  Alexander’s eyes fixed. Evil, he deduced. Yes, there’s something evil here, I can feel it. And whatever it is—it’s got her…

  “Abbess Joyclyn? And the Sister Superior? I’ve seen them, I’ve talked to them. They really got the hots for you, Father.”

  Alexander gulped as if swallowing sand.

  “But then,” she finished, her grin knife-sharp, “so do I.”

  Christ. Get back to the point! “I saw you coming out of the lake. So I went to the bell tower; I looked out. And I saw it, Jerrica. And you know what I did then?”

  “You probably jerked off,” came the naked blonde’s reply. “Thinking about me. Thinking about how bad you wanna fuck me.”

  “Not quite.” He plucked up a pack of cigarettes from the floor, lit up. “I went for a little swim myself.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, I saw it, and you saw it too.”

  Her wicked grin flattened. “Did you touch it?”

  What a question. Odd. But no, no, he actually hadn’t, had he? He swum up to it, fighting bizarre currents, saw it, then was pushed away. “No, “ he said.

  “You should have, like I did. There’s something still alive in there, some…power. I don’t know. But it made me see a lot of things. It gave some of its power to me—” She gestured the pick ax leaning against the wall, then the wall itself. “—for this.”

  “What is it?” his throat ground out the words. But he guessed he already knew: things he wasn’t comfortable with, things he was supposed to even believe in but didn’t want to acknowlege. ’Though shalt worship no other God but me,’ his faith slapped him. Who knew, though, what he believed in now, if anything.

  “I believe in God,” he affirmed. “Nothing else.”

  “But you believe in devils too, you told me in the bar. If you believe in God, you must believe in His counterparts.”

  “Yes!” he shouted. “Yes, devils, yes! D
emons! Lucifer! The Morning Star and the Fucking Lord of the Air and the Lord of Lies—YES!” The priest’s teeth ground. “But…they’re not…supposed…to be…here!”

  “Open your mind.” Now both her hands caressed her breasts. The big dark nipples distended. “Don’t be so draconian. Not all devils stay in hell.”

  The sentence ran echoes in his head as she neared. Her bare footfalls encroached, her grin cut so lewd now, her sex aglint. He just stood there and watched her and did nothing.

  She grabbed him by the throat, hauled him to the dust-caked concrete floor. He tried to resist but found her strength paranormal, emboldened by whatever manifestation of evil she had encountered in the lake. Her body, at once, was all over him, her vigorous sweat sliding along with her fine skin across his face, his tensed chest. Sixty-nine, some obscure thought mocked, the beast with two backs. He read it in National Lampoon or some shit. She opened his lake-damp pants, exonerated his cock, while the light fur of her sex sat on his nose. He pushed up, for all he was worth, but nothing happened. He might as well have been pushing against the back deck of an M60 tank.

  “Priest,” she moaned. She grabbed his balls, squeezed them so hard he flinched. Her thighs spread over his face. “Lick my ass,” she commanded. “Lick my ass like a good little priest or so help me I’ll squash these two little peanuts to pulp.”

  The grip tightened; his body flexed at the threatening pain. And out his tongue came, ever so dutifully, and began to lick the flesh-crevice of her buttocks.

  He smelled the scent of creeky lakewater, stiffened by bristly ass-sweat. He tasted salt, grime, pasty skin.

  “Suck it.” His balls in her hand could’ve been starfruit; just a little more pressure and they would burst to seedy mush. “Stick your tongue in. All the way in.”

  Her anus opened, a willing aperture. Now it was more than salt he tasted, it was the remnants of her last defecation, the reeking, digested oddments of Aunt Annie’s funnel cakes and molasses and squirrel pasties and soda-baked biscuits. He was tasting her shit.

  “Now suck it, suck it out. Suck my shit out of my ass, suck it into your mouth and swallow it or I’ll pop your balls and gouge out your eyes and haul your guts out. Where’s your goddamn God now, you pious fuck? Suck my shit or I’ll strangle you with your own intestines.”

  Alexander believed her, his balls about to crack in her clench. And you know what he did then? The man of faith? The man without fear in the grace of God?

  He did exactly as she instructed. He sucked her shit.

  He sucked it right out of the blossomed pucker. He thought of a soft ice-cream machine with its tap open, only this ice cream was warm, vaguely sweet and salty at the same time. And he swallowed it, just like a good little priest.

  “Yeah,” she breathed. “You little kinko. First you drink nuns’ piss, and now you’re eating a coke addict’s shit. Taste good, Father? Better than rectory food?”

  Now her own face now crooked down into the cleft of his ass. The vertebra of her neck seemed to come unattached, so she could wrench her mouth down further at an angle that would only be described as impossible. But further impossibilities ensued: her tongue.

  Her tongue burrowed into his anus, then seemed to elongate like hot, pink taffy. First it slithered up, a supernatural snake trailing up his large intestine, deep, deep, up into the heat of his waste. Eventually he could feel it squirming in his stomach, whereupon it retracted, reverted to a globulous pad that cupped his prostate, sucking, sucking, until her mouth had successfully morphed into his rectum, to suck the intricate gland like a cock. Her hand released his testicles, rose to the shaft…

  All it took was three or four strokes and out it came: twenty years of celibate semen jettisoning feet into the air. It looked, in fact, like white yarn shooting out, landing on his heaving stomach, in her wet blonde hair, on the floor. And next… Next, she was licking it all up.

  “That’s a good, good priest. So much cum!” she rejoiced. “Priest cum is so much thicker, it’s like cottage cheese, and it tastes so much better!”

  Alexander turned his head and soundlessly puked, urping up the ration of her shit that he’d seen fit to swallow.

  “And now the real fun begins,” she promised, her voice hot as a car hood in August, her blood-filled tits swaying. “Your priestly cock hasn’t been in real pussy for how long? Since college? Since all those Viet Nam whores? Must be twenty, twenty-five years.” She expectorated on his half deflated cock, slicked it up with spit; it hardened instantly. Then she was straddling him, and her hand clamped his throat like a steel cusp, squeezed so hard he thought he’d surely pass out. “You’re gonna fuck me now, Father.”

  He couldn’t speak, of course, but nor could he even think, as though her supernatural hand were also squeezing off his thoughts. Then her free hand grabbed his penis, prepared to insert it—

  BAM!

  —when the door at the end of the hall broke down.

  (II)

  “Where—where are they?”

  “God, this is one creepy place,” Charity observed. They’d parked the truck, entered the abbey. She knew they were here because both Jerrica’s Miata and the priest’s old Mercedes were parked out front. But the main hall was so dark. Only a pair of silent alcohol lamps lit the corridor. Several rooms passed them; when they looked in they saw only file cabinets, stripped beds, night stands covered literally by inches of dust. “They ain’t here, Charity,” Annie proclaimed. “We best git out.”

  “No. We’re not leaving till we find them. Dead or alive, we’re not leaving…”

  “They must be outside then. Come on.”

  Charity followed her aunt back out the way they came.

  (III)

  wing!

  That was what it sounded like: a hard, solid whack with a bell-like ring behind it—

  Jerrica fell off.

  Two figures loomed in the lit shadows. Chuckles cracked. Black silhouette hands rubbed together in feisty eagerness.

  “Told ya we’d find ’em, Dicky!” And then—

  wing!

  Alexander went numb. He knew now what they’d hit Jerrica in the head with: a tire iron, the same thing they just hit him in the head with.

  The two kids from the bar, he struggled to think. But that was about it. He was fading in and out.

  “I’m gonna cornhole me this city blonde so hard she’ll be pukin’ my peckersnot!” one voice reveled.

  “Aw, come on, Balls. This ain’t no good. We’se gonna git caught and then they’ll’se throw us in the joint where we’se gonna get butt-fucked by niggers ever night.”

  “Hail, yer such a pussy, Dicky! We ain’t come all this way just ta leave.” A dark face floated above the priest: the long hair, the tractor hat, the goatee and the leering grin. It looked like Lucifer. “Hey, holy man, ya wanna know how we found ya?”

  Alexander couldn’t answer. He was beginning to suspect that the blow to the head might be fatal, that this was the Golden Hour right now. Fractured cranial vault, subdural hematoma… I could be dead in minutes. But would God let that happen? Christ, after all I’ve been through in my life, I’m gonna die at the hands of two redneck dopes? It didn’t seem fair.

  Help me God, I beg of Thee. Hear my prayer.

  “Cut his cock off, Dicky! Make him eat it!” Balls threw the fat kid a buck knife. “Then cut his throat slow. Meantimes, I’se gonna have me a party with this blond city bitch here.”

  The priest’s eyes moved; a gruelling sideglance showed him the scene. The fat kid was reluctantly opening the knife while his colleague, jeans down to his knees, was vigorously sodomizing Jerrica. And he could discern this too: Jerrica was dead.

  The tire iron had lain open the side of her head. Pieces of brains were falling out of the hole…

  “You are in a world of shit, man,” a familiar voice addressed him. A man’s voice, but the priest knew it wasn’t either of the rednecks. Alexander squinted upward, ordered his eyes to focus beyond the ramrod pain
in his head, and he saw who had spoken the words.

  It was his lord, Jesus Christ. The King of Kings.

  (IV)

  COME. COME. COME.

  The words were like a creak in her head, a hinge keening. But Charity had heard it before, hadn’t she?

  “Did you…hear that?” she asked.

  Aunt Annie frowned at her. “Hear what? I don’t hear nothin’, hon. Come on, we gotta find ’em, so’s we kin git outa here.”

  They descended the ridge and now stood at the shoreline of the lake. The moon turned the lake into a great mirror; from all around them came the throbbing cascade of crickets.

  COME.

  No, Annie wasn’t hearing it. Just me, only me, Charity realized. Why? Something was calling her but what? It even began to occur to her that she was being beckoned specifically to this place…

  But why should she think that?

  More heat lightning flashed, then:

  COME.

  The voice seemed to be issuing from behind them, from the abbey itself atop the ridge. But there was something about the lake, though, some arcane curiosity itching at her…

  They’d walked half the circumference of the lake yet couldn’t find hide nor hair of Jerrica or the priest. “What’s this?” Charity asked, pointing. All wall of stones melded with crude mortar seemed piled up between against the still, shiny water.

  “A dam-plug,” Annie answered with little interest. “The lake been dammed up since before anyone can remember. Some say it were the Conoye Indians who done it a thousand years ago, and that something evil were built there even longer ago than that. No one knows who built it, and no onew knows ’zactly what it is, just that it’s cursed is what they say. So don’t git near that plug. Old as it is it could break.”