Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror (11 page)

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 god.

Welcome aboard, Professor. Welcome to mindfuck. 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, cuntface. 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 buttocks are already pressed flush against the dumpster.

His zipper opens with a loud rasp & his ponderous penis 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
fuck you
,” he says & jabs the blade deep into her vagina.

* * *

Professor feels a twinge of envy as the huge cock 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 sexual encounters with prostitutes & sluts who made light of his inchworm cock, & on into the solitary pursuit of science. Had fate given this magnificent dong to him instead of this crazed sadist, then maybe he would not have summoned the succubus, in his LSD ritual of sex & 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 bigfucking 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 space & time, keying a haunted memory of idiotic phone conversations breaking into your old reality like that CB breaker-breaker shit coming out of your TV & making you want to find those rednecked motherfuckers & 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 orbit begins to decay as it passes 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 space junk likely to shed a minimum of dangerous debris upon the planet. Scant minutes later, the doomed satellite passes high above & to the south of Hong Kong, &, eventually, over Miami, where Lucy Nation & Pynchon are coupling aboard her yacht
Hellraiser
, & several miles inland, where the squad car lurches to a stop in front of the coffee house 90 Night. If the satellite’s onboard equipment were still operational, its camera could snap pictures of the bloody, 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 goddamn fly he had ever seen. Not a horsefly, not a green fly, but a goddamn housefly so big that Officer Robbins thought it must be a goddamn mutant, what with all the pollution & shit 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 bloody 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 & shit, the hand jammed up her ass so it looks like she’s shitting a fucking severed arm, & the head,
oh Jesus
, the head clamped between the thighs like she’s giving birth to her own fucking 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 shore 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 goddamned mutant fly to come out of that bloodyfucking cave.

“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: “Desé 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 scum 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 God,
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 God 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 whores at a corner booth, but that was it. Ramirez always picked shithouses 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 porn 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. Nobody 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 pornography, 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-ass 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 fucking 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 hell 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 pisshole 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 Acuña and Fuenté. For all Smith cared, the entire border could burn.