Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror (21 page)

But he wanted it so badly.

I enter the jaws of death.

I become the jaws of death.

After all, the wolves frolicking amid the pieces of their kills had fucked one another. It hadn’t repulsed him then.

Even the most brutal touch was still a touch in a wasteland of isolation. And it had to hurt for he was sixteen and a virgin. And they were creatures addicted to very rough play.

Milo began to unfasten his trousers.

“No,” said one of the men. “Not that way. The newest member of a pack must always submit.”

They dropped their robes and stood, erect and ready in a gauntlet of anxious animals. Milo understood and sank to his knees before the first in line.

The freak women began to have sex with each other in an orgy of frustrated, voyeuristic passion. Skeletons rattled rocky pubes against the balloon faces of the fat women. Beards at both ends speckled with wet musk and occasional menstrual juices. Stumps thick as dildos vibrated with song. Lizard Lady’s gills were opening and closing in a frenzy. The fetus of an aborted hermaphrodite in a jar was jiggled from its shelf as two entwined two-faced prodigies kept bumping into the table it sat on. It smashed to the floor and the enraptured women kept right on rolling over the top of it, the baby’s elastic body pulping and the glass shards making them cry out in gurgling pleasure, embedding in their buttocks.

The men rocked above him. Their unusually long, black, curved fingernails raked his scalp and shoulders as he sucked them. He felt his blood coursing down his face into his eyes, flowing across his shoulders. He had his own erection, not from the act he was performing—but from the rust of his own blood, the scorch of it on his flesh. Its scent filled his nostrils as it crept down his face and he sucked it in great red drops, pulling it back into his head. He couldn’t help but revel in it for this was touching. It was any kind of touching at all that made people and beasts aware that they were alive. He’d always wanted to be loved, and violence was a sort of love—a bond in contact between two participants intent upon release, upon getting dirty with the night. There was a grace in fury and a gift to be given with each outrage. Milo heard the man above him howl in inarticulate orgasm.

He tried to swallow the bitter semen but couldn’t. It wouldn’t go down. He tried to spit it out before sliding down to the next in line but it wouldn’t be dislodged. He sucked until the next man came, then moved on to the next. He growled as he cupped his mouth around each shaft, snarling with the impulse to bite down at the most explosive of the meat. But he restrained himself.

Soon I’ll be able to actually run with them …

But when he’d done them all—wiping at his chin, still unable to swallow or spit out their seed—Milo looked back to see that all the men were dead. Their faces were peaceful as if they were sleeping. They did not have the strained, sweaty faces of a mob that has been satiated with oral sodomy. The freak women were cradling the slightly shriveled bodies and smiling, cooing to them like the men had been husbands and sons who’d fallen in a worthy battle.

“You’re the king of the wolves,” the ladies told him through their happy tears.

Milo ran out of the tent, choking on the mouthful of semen.

He didn’t go home. He collapsed in a field somewhere, exhausted, scratching at the tattooed skin, feeling the teeth press firmly against him, closing him in, hard as a kiss with open mouth and bared fangs.

The moon had risen by the time he woke up again. He stretched in the darkness and thought at first that his tattoos of teeth had gone black. But he rubbed it and it ruffled. It was hair sprouting all over him, tickling its way around his genitals and into the crack of his ass, filling the hollows of his armpits, flowing down his thighs. Itchy loving fingers crawled across his belly. His snout jutted forward and he thought he heard his nose bones cracking. His jaws became cavernous with wicked fangs.

He exulted and sniffed the air for signs of life somewhere, for the delicious odor of blood and the sound of a quickened heartbeat.

Inside him, the semen of the werewolves ceased to choke him. It coated his tongue, slimed his gums. He grinned like a maniac in the moonlight, that being what he was. Grinned as he ran off to hunt and to rip to pieces and feed, knowing that the spirit wolves were going with him, riding in his mouth. Wherever he roamed and whoever he slaughtered with his terrible love, they would dream in death of his exploits.

“Godflesh” first appeared in
The Hot Blood Series: Stranger By Night
, 1995, edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett.

‡

Brian Hodge is the author of ten novels, over 100 short stories and novellas, and four full-length collections. Recent books include his second crime novel,
Mad Dogs
, and his latest collection,
Picking The Bones
, a 2011 release from Cemetery Dance Publications. He’s also been busy lately converting his backlist titles into multiple e-book formats. By the time this sees print, he’d damn well better be done with his next novel, a sprawling thing that seemed to never want to end. He lives in Colorado, where he also indulges in music and sound design, photography, organic gardening, training in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and mountain air.

Connect with Brian through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter), or follow his blog, Warrior Poet (www.warriorpoetblog.com).

† † †

The seeds of this story were planted by one of Feral House’s classic books. Their second edition of Apocalypse Culture contains a fascinating article on various spiritual applications of gluttony and anorexia in history, plus select Gnostic groups’ penchant for amputating whatever they could spare. It also referenced porn actress Long Jean Silver, whose missing foot inspired one of the story’s tenderest moments. I’ve since had occasion to view one of her taped performances, an experience I can’t particularly recommend, but if you insist, it’s … memorable. Not long after the story’s original publication, I was contacted by a representative of an amputee fetishist society in Chicago wanting to know one thing: “Do you have any MORE stories like this?”

Being as she was a woman who prided herself on walking her own deliberate path, imagine, then, the irony: Her horizons were forever broadened by the ecstatic man with no legs. She was Ellen by day, and knew the aisles of the bookstore as well as the creases in her palm, the smoky gray of her eyes, the finely-wrought lines that inscribed the corners of her mouth and lent it warmth and wisdom, as if etched by a loving sculptor. She walked the aisles with her modest skirt brushing against her knees and could smell every page along the gauntlets of spines. For the patient customer it was a trip well rewarded. Every book should be so matched to a loving home.

There had been nothing different about that day right up to the very moment they left the bookstore, she and Jude letting the evening clerks take over. With that taut facelift, Jude could have been an older sister, or so she thought. Thought she knew what made Ellen tick. A common mistake, but then Jude’s idea of a deep read was Danielle Steel over Jackie Collins. Jude already had the endings worked out for most anyone she could ever meet.

They left together for the parking lot down the street. The bookstore’s neighborhood was like much of the city itself: old and charmingly crumbled by day, not a place most would want to walk alone at night. The peeling doorways, the odd bricks set just out of step with the others, the derelict and sagging smokestacks and chimneys … they hooked strange shadows that worsened as day dwindled into evening, and the shadows gave birth to night people.

They joined the flow, Jude’s brisk footsteps clicking at her side. Urban minnows, that’s what they all were, and god forbid anyone should fall out of step. Were it not for nights, Ellen knew she would one day tear out her hair, an allergic reaction to this sunlight world and the pre-fab molds it demanded.

“… and then do you know what that little doofus asked me?” Jude was saying. “He asked, ‘Do you have
The Old Man and the Sea
in Cliff’s Notes?’ I told him the original was barely a hundred pages, so why didn’t he read that, and he just looked at me—”

They approached a break in the buildings, the mouth of an alley that gaped back like a dirty, leprous throat. Yet inviting, all the same, with mysteries lying just behind those crusty locked doors. Back rooms often tweaked her curiosity.

“—just
looked
at me, like I’d suggested, ‘Here, why don’t you bite this brick in half.’ So I said, ‘Listen, I can summarize it for you in fifteen words or less: Man catches fish, man battles fish, man loses dead fish to hungry shar—’” Jude froze, except for her arm, as she began to point along the alley. “Oh. My.
God
.” Her arm recoiled back to her side. “Don’t look, Ellen, just don’t look.”

It was the wrong thing to say, and too late anyway. Ellen wouldn’t have missed anything that got Jude to interrupt herself.

The man looked to be in his early forties, and she’d never have mistaken him for one of the street people, one of those who cruised around in their wheelchairs with sad stories of cause and effect: car wreck and loss of livelihood; war wounds and loss of stability. From this distance—say, twenty feet along that wall?—his clothing looked neat and new, his hair well-barbered. He might have been any reasonably attractive man who’d made the best of his life after losing both legs at the hip.

Then again, he
was
masturbating. In his wheelchair. It did not look as if he were merely adjusting his crotch. He was wholly absorbed in the act—heart, soul, and both hands.

“He’s—he’s right out in the open!” Jude said, adding her disgust to that of the less self-absorbed passersby. “I … I don’t think he’s even aware anybody’s watching!”

No. No, he wasn’t, was he? His exultant abandon—Ellen found this the most fascinating aspect of the display. His choice of locale and timing may have been awry, but she saw on his face more passion and ecstasy than she’d noticed on the faces of last week’s eight or ten lovers combined.

A Mona Lisa smile brushed her lips, unnoticed as Jude yanked at her arm.

“Come on, come
on
,” said Jude. “A nice proper thing like you, a sight like that can scar you for years. I had a neighbor? Liked to show himself to other neighbors? To this very day Sylvia Miller gets nauseated by the sight of knockwurst.” Jude shuddered. “If only I had a bucket of water, I’d douse that pervert’s fire. You shouldn’t have to see things like that.”

If you only knew
, Ellen thought, and let Jude believe she was saving her from something she’d in fact watched maybe two thousand times before.

Ellen could be kind that way.

And the days took care of themselves.

* * *

By night, Elle. Just Elle.
“What’s in a name?”
Shakespeare had asked, and she’d decided plenty. With the lopping off of a single letter she had created an entirely different life.

She even felt different when that was what others called her, what she called herself. “Ellen” was safe and respectable, a fine name to endorse on the backs of paychecks. But “Elle” rang with mystery and resonance, conjured a slick wet alchemy of surrender and seduction.

For years now that name had been eagerly welcomed by the sort of clubs that are frequented only by those who knew where to find them; whose new members arrived only by invitation and discreet word of mouth; where no one was ejected to the streets for improper conduct, because everyone there knew precisely what everyone else had come for.

Her beauty and willingness to experiment were prized. She was almost tall, not quite. Her raven hair, when unbound, contrasted with her pale luminous skin and ripe lips in delicious nocturnal severity. She had a twenty-three-inch waist but could corset it down to eighteen. Men and women alike loved to wrap their hands around it, or nuzzle over the smooth tight curves on their way to the drenched heat between her thighs.

Tonight’s lovers were no exception, at times all six hands caressing her tiny middle, some lightly tender, others rough and groping with urgency. The club’s name was the Inner Circle and variety was everybody’s spice.

She’d spent the past couple hours as part of a foursome, one of her preferred configurations. Two men and two women—she found a perfect symmetry there, something intended by nature, along with the four winds and seasons, the cardinal points of a compass. The Inner Circle offered an orgiastic central room aglow with gauzy mood lighting, or more private quarters with plenty of cushions and sprawl, and they’d opted for the latter.

She filled her mouth with Daniel while Mitch filled her from behind; she cradled Jill, kissing her deeply, as the men traded off between the women’s legs; she and Jill tongued one another’s feverish clits while Daniel and Mitch were yet locked inside them; Jill straddled her mouth while holding her ankles wide … and in Elle’s broad experience you usually needed more men, because their glands betrayed them and they wore out so much sooner. Still, they gave their all, and she drank it with her mouth, cunt, anus. She cried out loudly, in cycles, pulled the others into her singly, as pairs, all three. She made a dinner of semen, a dessert of the musky dew on Jill’s swollen and petaled cleft.

And there was always so much silence when bodies fell still, unable to give or take any more. It always felt as if the world had just ended, and they all lay naked and wet in the ashes.

“You’re ravenous,” Daniel told her. Blond, well-toned, he lay in a sweaty half-curl near her side, reaching over with one finger to probe beneath the edge of the black corset. Jill and Mitch lay in their own raw exhausted tangle a few feet over. “I’d like to see you again.”

“You might,” she said. “I’m no stranger here.”

“So I understand.” Grinning, he elbowed closer, crawling like a soldier. “How long’ve you been coming here? Double entendre not intended.”

“Look, you don’t have to engage me in conversation, all right? I fucked you tonight, and I’ll probably fuck you again.”