“Of course! Enjoy your discourse, dear friends,” Gormok invited. “Whilst I enjoy my meal.”
Rudy had to about carry Beth back to their bedroom. She was going pasty-faced, pale. “Rudy,” she fretted, “we have to get out of here while we still can! We have to call the police!”
“Don’t overreact, honey. He’s harmless.”
“Harmless!” Beth’s eyes came close to jettisoning from her head. “He’s eating Mona’s
liver!
You call that harmless?”
Rudy had a plan, but he had to play it out right. “Listen, Beth,” he said in a consoling, quiet voice. “Mona’s got no relatives or friends—hell, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend. She’ll never be missed. And she wasn’t doing well in school, anyway—”
“Rudy! You call the police right now!”
“All right, all right.” Rudy held up his hands, his hair sticking up. “I’m calling the police. See?” He picked up the phone and began to dial.
But not the police. Instead, he dialed 1-900 Sportsline. He listened a moment, tapping his foo. Then he hung up and smiled.
“Clipper won the bout in the sixth round.”
Beth went into a staccato burst of crying and screaming. “Rudy, you’re out of your mind! What is
wrong
with you?”
“Baby, it’s only because I love you,” Rudy, well, lied.
“I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for
us
. I want us to be married someday,
have kids, and all that.”
Beth sniffled, looking up. “Really?”
“Of course, honey,” he assured her and gave her a hug. “But I need you to have faith in me, okay? I want you to go to bed now. Just trust me.” He lovingly touched her cheek. “I’ll take care of everything.”
««—»»
Rudy did exactly that. First, he put Gormok back to bed in the basement. The alomancer, smiling calmly, said, “I’m sated now, dear Rudy. My curse is relieved, and now I can sleep. And I am heartily sorry for any inconvenience i have caused you.”
“Hey, Gor, don’t worry about it.” Rudy winced a bit, thinking of Mona’s liver. “These things happen all the time.”
“Until the morrow, then! And for now—sleep. For to sleep is perchance—to dream.”
“Uh…huh,” Rudy said.
When he went back up, this time, he locked the trap-door.
««—»»
Digging graves was hard work, harder than one might expect. Yet dig Rudy did, maniacally in his boxer shorts. He dug deep.
Inserting Mona’s internal organs back into her opened abdominal vault proved a trying task too, but at least it was unique…
And later, in the little moonlit backyard, with the crickets trilling and the grass cool under his bare feet, with the scent of the bay in the air, Rudy buried the fickle bitch.
««—»»
But one more task remained. Gormok said he was cursed to commit murder on any day that he performed a salt-divination.
That’s a big problem
, Rudy realized. He couldn’t very well have Gormok cutting folks up and eating their livers every time he gave Rudy the read on the next fight or ballgame, now could he?
So…
He crept quietly back down into the basement.
Gormok slept on, murmuring sweet Babylonian nothings.
Here goes,
Rudy thought—
—and raised the fire ax.
“Sleep no more!” Gormok quoted Bill Shakespeare as the great blade cut down. “MacRudy doth
murder
sleep!”
Blood flew like spaghetti sauce. Things thunked to the floor. But there was no other way!
Hell, I’m doing him a favor
, Rudy felt convinced as he chopped and chopped.
And chopped some more. Once he’d succeeded in severing Gormok’s limbs, he tied off each stump with twine.
What a day
, he thought when he was done.
IV
Beth, shrieking, pummeled up the basement stairs the next afternoon. “
What did you do!”
“Hey, didn’t I say I’d take care of everything?”
“Rudy! You turned him into a…a
torso!
”
“Yeah, well, he can’t hurt anybody now, can he?” Rudy rationalized. “And he doesn’t even care, as long as we keep him happy.”
Beth’s face crimped. “What do you mean?”
Rudy thought it best to change the topic. “Look!” he celebrated and waved a sheaf of $100 bills. “Our man came through again. Pimlico, baby! Afternoon Tea by a nose in the first! The odds were 32-to-one! Can you believe it?”
Beth, quite reasonably, went nuts. “Rudy! You bet
again?
He’s a murderer, for God’s sake! We can’t keep a murderer in our basement! Much less a murderer who’s a
torso!
”
“Sure we can.” Rudy placed the stack of bills in her hands.
Beth went lax, astonished. “This looks like about ten-thou—”
“
Eleven
thousand clams,” Rudy corrected. “And I already paid off Vito The Eye. We’re rolling from here, babe.”
Beth’s eyes stayed fixed on the money.
“But, uh, you see,” Rudy commenced with the bad news. His throat turned dry. “There’s a catch. Remember when I told you, ‘as long as we keep him happy’?”
“Yeah?” Beth replied.
««—»»
The catch was this:
That morning, Rudy had shown the head atop Gormok’s de-limbed body the racing journal as he held the fuming ashtray under the alomancer’s nose.
“Afternoon Tea, dear Rudy,” informed the happy head. “In the first tourney.”
Rudy didn’t argue, in spite of the odds. But since last night, a question had itched at him like stitches healing.
“Hey, Gor? Yesterday you said something like you had to commit a murder any day you do the salt thing.”
“Upon any such day I perform a holy alomance, yes,” Gormok affirmed. “Nergal, the abyssal prince, has cursed me as such.”
“What happens if you, uh, don’t commit a murder?”
“Then the gift of prophecy is lost to me. Forever.”
Balls
! Rudy thought.
Shit! Fuck! Piss!
“Unless,” Gormok’s head leaned up and added, “I am, as a substitute, properly relieved of the groin wheneverest such needs of passion call.”
Rudy’s gaze thinned. “You mean…”
««—»»
“No!” Beth wailed upon the revelation. “No no no!”
“Honey, come on,” Rudy urged. “It’s the only
way.
If you don’t, he can’t pick the winners anymore.”
“Rudy, read my lips!
I’m not going to have sex with a torso!”
Ho boy
, Rudy thought.
Women.
You ask them to do a little something and they get all bent out of shape.
Time to lay on the heavy bullshit
, he decided. “It’s for our future, sweetheart. It’s for our
children.
”
Evidently,
children
was the magic word. Beth pouted a moment more. She looked at him, pink-faced.
“Our…children,” she whispered. “I- I…”
Rudy hugged her, stroked her hair. “It’s the only way, honey. I wouldn’t ask you to do it, but
it’s the only way
. Don’t we want our children to have the very best?”
“Our children,” she dizzily repeated. “I guess, I guess you’re…right.”
Then she turned for the basement steps, began to descend.
That’s my little trooper
, Rudy approved.
««—»»
Little trooper was right—and then some. Rudy, being an investigative kind of guy, felt it only fitting and proper to make an observation or two, so he sneaked down a few minutes behind her and peeked through the slight gap in the door…
Good God!
he thought.
Most would deem this a reasonable thing to think when witnessing one’s fiancé engaged in the physical act
of love with a living torso. Beth wasted no time in the deletion of her garments, and, despite a rather disconsolate look on her face—just as reasonable—she commenced to her task with something that could only be described as a formidable resolve. She squatted over Gormok, who lay unsurprisingly motionless atop his blanket. This afforded Rudy a front-on view, and though Beth’s discomfiture was plain, she soon began to ease into the brass tacks, so to speak, of the project.
In the dim basement light, her face flushed, and her small, pretty breasts began to sway. Meanwhile, her companion gibbered sweet Babylonian gibberish in response to her attentions.
How does she do it?
Rudy wondered. This was, after all, a torso. Moreover, ha wondered next:
What is she thinking about
?
Now
there
was a question! What would any woman think about while slamming glands with a dismembered salt-diviner? Perhaps it was brute rationalization, but Rudy came up with the only answer his psyche would allow.
She’s thinking about me—
Of course. Who else could she be thinking about? Certainly not Gormok. In moments, Rudy became aware of a considerable hardness loitering at his groin.
My girlfriend’s humping a torso and I’m getting a woody.
And as he watched further, the image transposed…
He imagined himself in Gormok’s place, right there on the basement floor and shuddering in bliss as the slot of Beth’s womanhood slid hotly up and down over his cock. His crotch felt smoldering, his heart
raced.
Beth’s breasts bobbed vigorously on her chest as she stepped up the momentum. Up and down, up and down, hot and frantic, her hips began to locomote like a machine, until—
Aw, Christ…
“Sweet mercy of Ea!” Gormok exclaimed at the obvious brink of his crisis.
Rudy caught his breath, and realized that he’d had a crisis of his own, his libido relieving itself to the sheer exploitation of his underpants…
I just watched my wife-to-be get it on with a fat torso,
he realized.
And I spunked in my shorts.
He crept back upstairs, as bewildered as he was disgusted. But he did feel convinced of one thing at least: it was all for a good cause…
V
No, a great cause, an absolutely big time
wonderful
cause. Within a week, Rudy was
something he never recalled being: debt-free. Exit the ’76 clunker Malibu, enter his and hers Mustang GT’s. The 52” Sony TV was nice too, and so was the Adcom stereo and the $50,000-worth of new furniture.
And the new house. A spacious, skylighted A-frame off Bay Ridge Drive. It was the nicest house in the area that had a basement.
VI
Gormok remained surprisingly content, considering what Rudy’s greed had divorced him of. He jabbered and drank beer through a convalescent straw during the day, propped up behind pillows in bed, while Rudy cashed in at the track. Not once had Gormok’s divinations failed, and soon Rudy’s biggest problem was what to do with all the money. Beth, of course, had her ups and downs—the freedom to buy anything she ever wanted was a bit spoiled by the constant sexual service she was required to perform upon the libidinous torso in the basement. Eventually, she began to complain…
“That thing downstairs made me give it head today!” she spat at Rudy. “Did you hear me! I had to give
head
to a
torso!
”
Just like a woman
, Rudy frowned in thought.
You give ’em a good thing and they STILL bellyache
. “Honey, he’s not a
thing
. He’s not an
it
. You’re talking about Gormok—he’s our man.”
Beth gaped. “
Our man!
Then you go down there and fuck him! See how you like it! You go down there and blow
our man!
”
Rudy thanked the fates Gormok wasn’t gay. “Stop being selfish,” he told her. “Don’t we have everything we want?”
“Yeah, Rudy, we do, and that’s my point. We have enough now, so I shouldn’t have to do it anymore.”
Rudy looked up reprovingly. “Beth, there’s never enough.”
“Oh, so that’s it, huh?” Beth, who rarely wore anything other than panties these days (due to the mounting frequency of Gormok’s need), stomped exasperated around the kitchen table. “You think you’re going to spend the rest of your life cleaning out the goddamn racetrack while good old Beth fucks and sucks a dismembered Babylonian alomancer!”
“Don’t be vulgar, honey. It’s not like you.”