Slice slinks across the room & sits at a vacant table. A butch lesbian wearing a d.i.l.d.o on a rope around her neck looks into his face, then quickly looks away. He can imagine what she saw there: saw him stuffing that d.i.l.d.o d.i.c.k down her f.u.c.king throat, f.u.c.king her with it till blood filled up the torn crater of her mouth. You ain"t butch enough to handle me, c.u.n.t. Choke on it, you half-human b.i.t.c.h.
The queen on the stool ends his epic by ripping off his blonde wig & spinning around on the stool to reveal a death"s-head mask on the back of his head. The audience applauds & cheers. Slice hawks up thick phlegm from the back of his throat & spits the blue glob on the floor, causing three punks at the next table to look in disgust at him & move to another table. Don"t you know artistic criticism when you see it?
The scent comes in stronger.
Something dark & powerful stirs in his belly & groin.
A prettyboy MC steps to the mike & says: "Ladies & gentlemen-Miss Phaedra Flame!"
The prey mounts the stage. The black sheen of her long hair, the black body stocking & black lip gloss accent her milk-white face.
A demonic grin sharpens the predator"s face.
Phaedra Flame holds up a slim red-bound book, & says, "These are my Torch Poems." She holds up a blowtorch in her other hand & a tongue of fire licks at the book. Then flames engulf the book, & she tosses it into a bucket of water. "I hereby proclaim the death of the printed word!"
The audience whistles & cheers. Mindless sheep.
"Now I do real poetry," Phaedra says with a sly smile.
From the Olympus of his heightened blue awareness, the new G.o.d Slice looks down upon the roomful of ragged mortals & savors the coming creation. Destruction in creation. Reductionist to the Nth. His artistic medium will be flesh/bone/blood. Each slaughtered lamb a work of art, impermanent like ice sculpture. Art that literally sends spirits soaring into the great unknown.
Phaedra is putting her body & soul into her impromptu scat poetry, moving with feline grace, slinky and seductive, speaking directly to the new G.o.d, though she is not consciously aware that she is doing so. "... hungry in the hamburger air, tossed aside like a used condom, wearing the emblem of a washed-out revolution, alone with my own b.l.o.o.d.y abortion ..."
Slice studies her every move, the jiggle of her full b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the quiver of her firm thighs, the pucker of her lips as she wraps them around every word. He is mentally outlining his artistic approach, planning the impetus of his strokes, finding cosmic inspiration in the poetry of her moving body.
The revelation hits him with such force that he is thrown back in his chair, his long hands dangling below the seat. He sees it all with crystal blue clarity: his handiwork must be exhibited for the ma.s.ses, not merely for the homicide police & the coroner. He will display his blood art, like human graffiti, to the public. Phaedra Flame will be his first message to the world. The more sensitive souls will see the meaning beyond the carved & flayed flesh. Perhaps a few will even glimpse the coming blue doom.
The demonic grin returns & remains on his face like a mask.
As he follows her out the rear door of 90 Night & into the poorly-lit parking lot, he suddenly feels fear. Not his own fear, but the wimpy emotion of that intruding mind from Mermaid"s Inn. The mind of the four-eyed professor, the one who inadvertently turned him into the new G.o.d.
Welcome aboard, Professor. Welcome to mindf.u.c.k. Come along & I"ll show you what I"m going to do to you. You"re in my orbit now.
He can feel the wimp squirm, taste his terror, sense his futile resistance.
You can"t hide from me, c.u.n.tface. You know that now. You"re just beginning to see my power.
Across town, the helpless one cringes.
You thought you could control me? Fat chance. We"ll do her, you & me, then we"ll turn her into raw art. I know you get off on death. Imagine the rush you"ll get when I do you ...
She bends to unlock the door of her battered bronze Toyota, & Slice puts the tip of the blade against the small of her back.
"Don"t make a sound-" he hisses.
Phaedra"s body tenses & her breath catches in her throat.
He steps beside her, putting an arm around her like a lover, shifting the knifepoint to the underside of her right breast.
"I loved your poems," he whispered. "They put me in an abstract mood."
He walks her to a garbage-filled green dumpster behind the coffee house.
"I"m going to do something very abstract," he tells her. "You"ll be the talk of the art world."
He leads her behind the dumpster & pushes her back against its cool surface.
"If you scream, I"ll slit your pretty throat."
He slits the thin material of her body stocking from the neck to the crotch, then peels it off her supple body.
"I smell your essence. I hear your blood rushing through your veins, wanting to come out."
He deftly works his fingers through her pubic bush & into the warm lips of her quim.
She tries to draw back from his touch, but her b.u.t.tocks are already pressed flush against the dumpster.
His zipper opens with a loud rasp & his ponderous p.e.n.i.s nudges against her dry slit.
"Please ... don"t ..." she whispers.
"You"re dry as a bone," he giggles, "but I can fix that."
He clamps his left hand over her mouth & runs the blade downward, over her belly.
"I"m going to f.u.c.k you," he says & jabs the blade deep into her v.a.g.i.n.a.
Professor feels a twinge of envy as the huge c.o.c.k slides deep into the bloodslick tunnel of ruined flesh. Had he been so well-endowed, he may never have gone through his various bookwormish stages of transformation, womanless through high school & college, through a series of bungled s.e.xual encounters with prost.i.tutes & s.l.u.ts who made light of his inchworm c.o.c.k, & on into the solitary pursuit of science. Had fate given this magnificent dong to him instead of this crazed s.a.d.i.s.t, then maybe he would not have summoned the succubus, in his LSD ritual of s.e.x & self-destruction, she who tipped him to the formula & possibilities of Li Di 1 ...
Envy, regret, &, now, revulsion-as he is trapped in the monster"s mind, bearing sick witness to the slaughter of the dying woman. Her mind screams in terror and disbelief as the blade slices off her breast.
A short-handled axe flashes in the dim light from a distant street lamp & strikes the woman"s shoulder, completely separating her arm from her body. A fountain of blood gushes from the severed socket, drenching you/her psychotic slayer & the litter-strewn pavement alike in the hot spill of her life-essence. She enters into numbing & merciful shock/you feel the center of her mind melting, dispersing randomly/each dripping direction going to death/butchershop chic/a little off the top ...?
Her head comes off with ease, though the axe keeps slipping in your blood-greased hands. Like the cries of a kitten down a well, the beheaded woman"s mewling echoes somewhere in your backroombrain, psychic screams from a locked corridor. Then dead silence. You start to hum a tuneless stream of bluenotes as you sculpt meat & bone. With your eyes ablaze with blue fire, it"s easy to work in the dark.
He/you/she/IT ... spiritflesh bliss blowing back eons ... back to the bigf.u.c.king bang!
From your angle-less corner of the blinding blue galaxy you feel her ghost fly away.
You work blind, by feel, by the sound of rending flesh & grinding bone, by the light of an inner blue radiance, out where interstellar radio messages bleed into curved mirrors & broken s.p.a.ce & time, keying a haunted memory of idiotic phone conversations breaking into your old reality like that CB breaker-breaker s.h.i.t coming out of your TV & making you want to find those rednecked motherf.u.c.kers & make them bleed like stuck pigs. Ah, sweet memories. Whose memories ...?
Bad to the last bone. Blistering blue heat bending mirrors, mirrors catching the bluenotes you hum as you do your best work. Monster art. Opening soon at your guerilla theater.
The satellite"s...o...b..t begins to decay as it pa.s.ses over Manila. Its inevitable entrance by fire into Earth"s dense atmosphere has not yet been calculated by those paid to monitor such things; when the Com-Sat"s demise is plotted, it will be deemed one more hunk of expensive s.p.a.ce junk likely to shed a minimum of dangerous debris upon the planet. Scant minutes later, the doomed satellite pa.s.ses high above & to the south of Hong Kong, &, eventually, over Miami, where Lucy Nation & Pynchon are coupling aboard her yacht h.e.l.lraiser, & several miles inland, where the squad car lurches to a stop in front of the coffee house 90 Night. If the satellite"s...o...b..ard equipment were still operational, its camera could snap pictures of the b.l.o.o.d.y, contorted corpse hanging by a rope from the roof of the coffee house, could zoom in on the horrified & sickened faces of some of the individuals in the crowd, gathered to bear witness to the bizarre abominations. But the Com-Sat is shut down, making its silent way to inevitable destruction somewhere over an ocean of the southern hemisphere, sometime after it flashes by the beaches of Galveston, its bulk visible only as a brilliant pinpoint above the extreme horizon where the sea meets sky ...
It was the biggest G.o.dd.a.m.n fly he had ever seen. Not a horsefly, not a green fly, but a G.o.dd.a.m.n housefly so big that Officer Robbins thought it must be a G.o.dd.a.m.n mutant, what with all the pollution & s.h.i.t in the air. & why was it, in unflylike behavior, still out making its rounds in the dead of night ...?
Now he"s staring into the b.l.o.o.d.y cavern that the fly disappeared into a moment ago. That"s what the gaping wound in the girl"s chest reminds him of-a raw cavern. Christ! It could be two girls, Robbins thinks, the way all the body parts are hanging there, oozing all that gore & s.h.i.t, the hand jammed up her a.s.s so it looks like she"s s.h.i.tting a f.u.c.king severed arm, & the head, oh Jesus, the head clamped between the thighs like she"s giving birth to her own f.u.c.king head. Some sicko had a field day with this poor babe. From what"s visible of her face she was probably a looker. Before the butcher worked her over.
A guy in a business suit steps up for a better look at the mutilated thing twisting a little on the rope as the salt-edged breeze from the sh.o.r.e seems to invest it with a momentary, mocking breath of pseudo-life.
"Get back," Robbins orders the wide-eyed suit. "Something drops off her, you get it smack in the face." He turns to the small crowd of onlookers & closet ghouls & says, "Everybody stay back. This ain"t a sideshow. Jesus!"
He lights a cigar & waits for the homicide boys to arrive. While he waits, he watches for that G.o.dd.a.m.ned mutant fly to come out of that b.l.o.o.d.yf.u.c.king cave.
Xipe.
Edward Lee.
"Xipe" first appeared in The Barrelhouse: Excursions into the Unknown, Winter 1993, and later published in his collection The Ushers and Other Stories by Obsidian Books, May 1999.
Edward Lee is the author of almost fifty books and numerous short stories. Several of his properties have been optioned for film, while Header was released on DVD in 2009; also, he has been published in Germany, England, Romania, Greece, and Austria. Recent releases include Bullet Through Your Face and Brain Cheese Buffet (story collections), Header 2, and the hardcore Lovecraftian books The Innswich Horror, Trolley No. 1852, Pages Torn From A Travel Journal, Going Monstering, and Haunter of the Threshold. Upcoming works include the novel Header 3, the Lovecraftian novella The Dunwich Romance, and the story collection Carnal Surgery. Lee lives in Largo, Florida.
The smile-vast, empty-oozed across the back of his mind. Pudgy hands reached out for him through a rain of blood.
Smith"s eyes snapped open. The ceiling was rushing past; he was flat on his back. Dark faces, like blobs, hovered over him. He heard casters squeal and bottles clink.
A voice, a man"s, exclaimed: "Dese prisa!" Smith had a pretty good idea he was going to die. The smile again, huge, empty-what was it? He closed his eyes and saw a muzzle flash, smelled cordite. He saw twin figures falling through dark. Then he heard a scream-his own.
A sign loomed: STAFF ONLY/PERSONAL UNICAMENTE. Doors parted clumsily. The gurney wheeled into a padded elevator, and at once the breathless, jagged motion ceased.
Images dripped back into his head: memories. Smith"s heart shimmied.
I was set up, he thought, astonished. That swine Ramirez, he must"ve turned. The guy must"ve gotten himself fingered and was trying to deal his way out. There"d been a fed in the room, hadn"t there?
More pieces fell into place: a clawing weight on his back, a window bursting, the unmistakable kick of a .38 full of hot loads. But Smith carried a Glock. Did I shoot a Justice agent tonight? With his own piece? And good luck to that sc.u.m Ramirez if he thought he could spin on Vinchetti"s network. Smith couldn"t remember a whole lot, but he was sure of one thing: Ramirez was dead.
The elevator hummed. Smith felt dreamy. "What hospital is this?"
"San Cristobal de la Gras, Meester Smeeth," said the blurred doctor. "We are taking you to where you will be safe."
Great, Smith mused. More Mexicans. But what could he expect down here? At first he thought they must be taking him to the jail wing, but then a nurse said in a warm whisper, "The government men do not know you"re here." She squeezed his hand. "We will protect you."
Smith felt exorcized. Vinchetti must"ve arranged this, must"ve paid off the right people to have Ramirez protected. Otherwise, Justice would be all over the place.
Thank G.o.d, he thought.
Then, in a jolt, he remembered the rest. The face behind the empty smile, and the name.
Xipe.
"It"s Xipe," said the barkeep.
Smith was staring at the tiny stone figure which sat atop the register. It was black. It looked like a Buddha with a feathered headdress. Squatting, it held its arms out and smiled.
"What?" Smith said.
The keep, rail-thin, enthused in a thick Mexican accent. "Xipe protects the faithful. He is the Giver of the Harvest, the Seer of Beauty and Growth. He is the Great G.o.d of Good Will. Like your severed rabbit foot, Xipe brings luck."
You look like you"ve had plenty, buddy, Smith concluded. La Fiesta Del Sol, like all the bars down here, was an erect dump. Sticky floors and walls, seamy light, jabbering Mexican music. A young G.I. fussed with two wh.o.r.es at a corner booth, but that was it. Ramirez always picked s.h.i.thouses like this. Perhaps they reminded him of home.
Smith was Vinchetti"s coverman; he handled the southern region of what the feds called "The Circuit," the mob-operated underground p.o.r.n network. Vinchetti said the southern region grossed a couple of million per year, a far cry from what they"d been taking before the advent of VCRs and x-rated videos; but then they weren"t losing anything anymore, either. n.o.body worked in loops and stills now; it was all video. A single 3/4-inch master could be duplicated a thousand times and sold to point-men for a thousand dollars apiece. From there they stepped on them any way they wanted, depending on the orders. In other words, the days of running truckloads of the stuff out of South Texas were long gone. Just a handful of masters kept The Circuit going for months. It was almost too easy, and risk free. Vinchetti"s plants in Justice, working with set-ups from Smith, gave the feds plenty of old stuff and overstock to seize, and a couple of wetbacks to bust. Justice thought they were effectively fighting underground p.o.r.nography, while Vinchetti lost nothing and made millions per year. The net was even safer from the distribution end; everything was mail drops these days, coded mailing lists and untraceable names. Even Vinchetti didn"t know who most of his point clients were, and on rare occasions when Postal agents busted a point at a drop, Vinchetti skated because the points didn"t know who he was, either.
The stuff, of course, was all made on the Mex side; the states were too hot, unless you were pure-a.s.s stupid like those Dixie Mafia lightweights or the Lavender Hill people. The Circuit dealt only in what the feds called "Underground"; real S&M, torture, snuff, and lots of kiddie. The f.u.c.king perverts stateside paid big money for "kp," as much as three bills for a 20 minute double dupe, as long as the kids were white. Smith made the buys and had the masters muled to San Angelo; Vinchetti"s dupe labs took it from there. Smith saw no shame in what he did. Supply and demand-hey, it was a free country, wasn"t it? The only real worry was getting the masters across the border, and that was Ramirez" problem. Smith didn"t know how the guy did it-he was either a very good mule, or a very lucky one.
Where the h.e.l.l is he? Smith thought. Lapeto was a ghost-town, like any of the notorious Texas border stops, a grim meld of rapid babble, dark faces, and sneers. The pop was 99% Mex, half or more wet. All that kept these little p.i.s.shole towns alive were the EMs from Lackland and Fort Sam. The kids would come here, rent rooms, then cross over to catch the donkey shows in Acuna and Fuente. For all Smith cared, the entire border could burn.
"I"ve never been robbed," the keep said. He was drying gla.s.ses, grinning.
"Huh?"
"Never been robbed like other bars, never been shaken. Never problems."
"Big deal," Smith sputtered.
"Is Xipe. He is good luck."
Idiot. Smith stared at the figure again. It smiled much like the keep, emptily. Smith didn"t believe in G.o.ds, stone or otherwise. G.o.ds were bad for business. "Another," he said, and hopped off his stool.
In the john, he scanned incomprehensible graffiti. Most of it seemed to lack Spanish extraction altogether. Xoclan, ti coatl. Ut zetl! Huetar, Coatlicue, ay! Me socorro! Someone had drawn a hummingbird eating the heads off stick figures. Smith grimaced and zipped his fly. A shadow swung behind him. He spun, shucked his Glock, and drew down ...
But it was only a trinket swinging from the light. A black plastic figure with pudgy hands and a big, empty smile.
Xipe.