Shudder (14 page)

Anton sat in his office, his window open, the air conditioner compensating the chilly fingers of the outside air, and already melodiously stoned-or, rather, ‘buzzed'—he was traveling in the endless realms of the web, and so far had smoked only his eighth cigarette.

The implied friendly disapproval with which Dave had watched him smoke cigarette after cigarette had made him vow to himself to cut them in half. So far, he
had
more or less smoked half his daily dose.

Slightly on edge, but still completely in control.

He was examining the most viewed videos in every category in the five main porn portals on which most of the nighttime web traffic of the city converged.

The majority, about sixty percent of the consumers, still went for the traditional porn scenarios. These were structured along the same self-perpetuating plots since time immemorial.

One man or a group of men kiss a woman and lick her pussy and ass. Then she sucks their dicks. Then they take her vaginally and anally. Then they come on her face or on her outstretched tongue.

A little fisting here and there, as a bow to contemporary trends, some piss play in about two thirds of the flicks, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The sixty percent were still mainstream but the other forty percent...

They were almost evenly divided between intense sadomasochistic gay porn and intense sadomasochistic heterosexual porn.

Dildos for example, had grown considerably in length and breadth in the last decades.

Anton remembered how only yesterday, which, for a man his age was roughly fifteen years ago, only two or three actresses matched the ravenous male gay anuses size-wise.

Only a special dozen could not only swallow the longest penises to the balls, but also allow them to slide in and out for more than fifteen seconds without vomiting.

Today, a two and even three-foot long soft gelatin dildo slithered into almost every female anus in front of the cameras of small budget companies. Vomiting was no longer a mere side-effect-sometimes it was the main attraction.

‘Snakers', as these girls were called. They all claimed to be ‘snaker-shakers'—women who orgasm from the presence of the long snake.

A minute of relentless pounding of the throat was no longer a one of a kind circus stunt. Everyone was a ‘pelicanna' or a ‘giraffa' these days.

Anton lit another cigarette, conveniently forgetting that his next one should be in only half an hour, and reflected on the elastic properties of the impossible, and of the human orifice.

Even medical authorities would have judged two feet of dildo up the colon impossible. That is, before the advent in the 1990's of gay fisting clips in which muscular arms disappeared all the way up to the shoulders in cave-like entrances in plain sight of the whole world.

Then came a time when skeptics said that only men had the internal structure capable of accommodating foreign bodies of such formidable size. Women were not built for such intrusions.

Then it turned out that they were.

Both genders could be a ‘Kangarass', although only one could be a ‘Kangapuss'.

A soft twelve inch dildo down the throat had also been in the province of the chosen few ‘Giraffa Queens', before another generation came, which had learned to stuff more than thirty inches down their throats, all the way, through the various internal sphincters, into the stomach.

Completely logical in hindsight, was this not how medical cameras entered the stomachs of patients with suspected ulcers? He remembered his own sagging jaw and bulging eyes the first time he had ran across such yoga-like self-infliction.

Still, he mused, in spite of the growing popularity of these impossible games and their easier to perform satellite activities, not everyone had the time and the drive to learn to take huge things up the back entrance and down the gullet.

While on the other hand eating and drinking bodily refuse did not depend on developing extraordinary physical capabilities. It depended only on learning to convert disgust into arousal. Could this be an additional explanation for the growing popularity of the brown lipsticks and the acrid yellow soda pops?

After all, was this not what arousal was for, in a masturbation context: the ability to convert anxiety-producing stimulus into controlled excitement? A pill with which to sugarcoat the pressures of the world? That strange tendency of the psyche to use the magic medicine of the homeopathic like-for-like compulsive neurotic rituals, to keep the personality from collapse.

Or from radical change, which the subconscious regulators tend to regard as the same thing.

What better way for a girl to deal with the fear of gang rape, than imagining being gang raped while masturbating?

Anton thought of plenty better ways, but this one was logical in that it followed the direction of least resistance, a spontaneous magical attempted self-cure.

In that train of thought, what better way for a man to deal with the subconscious fear of the huge penis of authority, than to put a huge dildo up his butt while playing with himself? It was also the perfect neurotic medicine for women who have decided to compete with men by becoming quasi-men.

What better way to deal with a life which demands so much from you, that you can only get small gasps of air, than to choke yourself with a belt or a bag, while stimulating the clitoris or its bigger brother?

This new fad of gratefully eating shit, trying to work up a swallow wallow frenzy in yourself, was this not—

Anton's eyes widened. All periphery thoughts receded as the computer monitor transfixed his attention.

While he had mused, his eyes had automatically scanned the messages in a pedo-fantasy forum, which professed to deal only with cartoon depictions of children impaled on huge cocks. Of course, any cock looks huge near a child and this, to Anton, was half the answer to the whole issue.

Now, on the fourth page of the comments in this forum topic, he saw a suspicious link. It was suspicious, because it was hidden inside the text, not underlined, not standing out in any way.

He only caught it because of his automatic habit of moving the mouse in concentric circles all over the screen. The little arrow turned into a hand for a second somewhere...there.

He pressed the link. Another page appeared, with a lot of gibberish and photos of underage girls and boys lying on a beach. Various commercial banners popped up.

Clever, most people would think this page to be a dead-end, a dud to lure people into seeing advertisements.

Anton scanned the gibberish and finally found the real hidden link, which was the letter ‘i' in the word ‘little'. He pressed it.

A blue page loaded, but full access required a password.

With a sigh, Anton activated the break-in program, which Deus had designed for him. A small counter appeared. Eight minutes until the break-in.

He sucked the last pleasure from his cigarette and put it out in the longship ashtray.

Small flakes of ashes were lying around it. He picked up the ashtray and blew at the surface of the desk. The flakes jumped up into the air and then slowly parachuted to the floor.

Waiting for the program to eat its way through the site's defenses, he skimmed over the news.

Ah, a thematic coincidence with his own musings, a group representing the rights of ‘fecalists', was challenging the medical-solidarity logic, by which they were pronounced misfits by the health ministry.

Anton first pressed the link to Minister Fischhof's statement, to get the back-story. The official stance turned out to be, surprisingly, not completely illogical.

The core thesis was, that “while everyone has the right to indulge in whatever consensual play they deemed pleasurable,” playing with feces was an unreasonable and selfish act, since people who ingested feces were “more likely to fall ill, more likely to take antibiotics on a regular basis, more likely to be hospitalized and thus more likely to put an unreasonable strain on the National Health System.”

Now Anton returned to the retort of the fecalists.

According to their take on the matter, far from being more susceptible to illness, they were, to the contrary, with much more robust immune and digestive systems, precisely as the result of the ingestion feces.

“For too many generations,” they said, “we have been prone to fall ill at the slightest infection and be slaves to various allergies, because we have turned away from nature, and created artificially clean environments. Our immune systems have gone weak from living in all that cleanness.”

Scat play then, was implied to be the perfect way of regaining the natural balance and fortifying the organism.

Not bad, not bad.
Anton grinned to himself, ever ready to acknowledge an interesting argument. Especially one that smacked of contemporary magic sensibilities. That would surely get them some attention.

The scat lobby was still weak, so far worldwide only the mayor of Copenhagen had admitted to being a fecalist. A Welsh MP had also made hints.

More people would follow soon, if his experience in these matters counted for anything. Actors and musicians had already started coming out. Doris, the scandalous singer, was already covering his face with chocolate on stage in his last year's tours.

Five years from now the first members of the clergy would be confessing publicly and explaining humbly how they hadn't really meant to count the practice as a sin, if one gets one's translations and interpretations right.

Anton heard a
ping
and opened the window to the blue site. The break-in program had broken in.

The site was called
Twinker-Belles
, as the rainbow colored letters at the top announced.

The clips and pictures that were visible looked far from harmless.

Anton lit another cigarette, braced himself, and played a clip to make sure.

A boy of about eight, dressed as a little sailor, was opening the cheeks of his buttocks with an obliging smile, while a clown in a rainbow wig was unzipping the zipper of his red pants.

This was happening in a brightly colored room with flowers and ponies drawn on the walls.

Anton exhaled two uneven jets of smoke from his nostrils, suppressed an urge to double up in hysterical coughing, and dialed the number of his contact in the police.

How she had squirmed, oh how deliciously the old slut had squirmed. Even after his overwhelming orgasm, the ringing in his ears had not yet subsided completely. His legs didn't shake only because he willed them not to.

He was no longer Mike; there wasn't anyone in front of whom to feign that identity anymore. He was just himself.

Joshua.

Wizard.

Master.

He could not afford to take off his latex costume here, so he buttoned up his long black coat directly over it. Then he approached the bed and looked at the lovely body one last time.

In the end, she didn't have enough of her own shit to enable him to kill her with it and bananas just weren't the same thing. It would have felt like cheating. A wise man can always find another authentic way, though. Fortunately, she did have more than enough cling film in her kitchen.

Joshua breathed in the smell of deep lust and grinned. This ride had, in a way, been his best yet.

Since he had tied her wrists to her ankles, not to the legs of her bed, she had really moved, oh how she had moved. He had felt like a cowboy on a rodeo, trying to stay on top of her and keep his dick inside her, as she wailed, and alternately blew up bubbles in the cling film from her inner reserves of air, and then vacuum-stuck it to her face, as she tried to take a breath.

It was even better than the annual Bonding Rite.

Well, not better as such
, he corrected himself quickly,
but certainly more intimate.

He squeezed her breasts one last time. They were fantastic. A notion appeared out of nowhere: he could cut them off and take them with him. Perhaps even eat them? He bent over the body and opened his mouth, imagining how the flesh would fill his mouth and yield to his teeth.

He straightened up abruptly, dismissing the idea. That would be simply crazy.

Joshua squatted by his magic bag and took out the one thing that he always took out last: the portable vacuum cleaner. He quickly sucked away the possible invisible particles on and around the bed.

There was always a chance that a hair, or a skin flake, or a piece of spit or sweat would give him away. He knew that was highly unlikely. He was, after all, a wizard. Fate was his ally, as long as he didn't break the sacred rules.

Then it was time to go, to take care of business. He was an important man and without him, the business would not survive. Many customers depended upon him, so fun and games were all very fine, but he had to remember his duty.

A real man never allows his pleasure to disrupt his duty.

He went out of the bedroom, down the stairs and out of the front door. He stopped himself just in time from pressing it shut. With a decadent giggle, he left it slightly ajar.

It was already nighttime.

As he walked, his footsteps echoed in the crisp chilly air. He whistled to his car and it lit up with subtle ka-chinks of the doors unlocking.

A young man walked past, looking straight ahead of himself. As he passed by Joshua, the sound of machine-gun electronic drums and squeals and beeps flared up for about ten seconds, before quickly receding.

One of the youth's earphones was dangling, a tiny music spewing butt plug, while the other tiny butt plug was presumably deep in his ear. Just like mental fashion dictated.

Joshua climbed into his car, flipped on the swanky interior light and looked at his notebook, to remind himself of where he had planned to go this time.

To the north industrial zone.

He turned the ignition key and switched on the surround system. An expansive pop opera stimulated his glands, catering to his sophisto tastes, and he whistled softly to himself as he drove past increasingly ugly neighborhoods, until night really descended all around him, signifying that he had finally left the city limits.

He made a slow careful turn to get off the paved road, which would otherwise take him to a suburban cluster of lights, and continued out into the prevalently dark, very scantly illuminated, rust belt country.

The giant former cement factory was rusting behind its forbidding walls for decades, but near it was a smaller island of decay, a half-dozen scattered buildings of a former dairy.

He reached the abandoned settlement and parked his car amidst the weeds and saplings that patiently worked at widening the cracks in the overgrown concrete slabs on which countless workers in rubber boots had walked decades ago.

A chain-link fence, torn and collapsed at half of the perimeter, outlined the territory of the derelict buildings.

The perfect place.

Joshua had fantasized of using it as a murder site when he first found it, but using it as a vehicle disposal site would be almost as fitting.

In fact, completely fitting—keeping in mind that the disposal was the final act of a drama, the culmination of which was a lovely, magical killing.

He got out of his car, took the grenade from his coat's pocket, and after pulling the pin he placed it quickly but carefully below the car's fuel tank. With a grin, he jogged away athletically.

He was behind the central building of the former dairy when the dense sound wave of the car blowing up ripped through the air, like the echo of an apocalyptic pinball bouncing back and forth between from the peeling walls all around.

So it seemed to him.

Exhilaration like from a hit of Bursters made his skin tingle all over. He wanted to wriggle in pleasure on the ground.

He didn't, of course. He was in control.

After the flash and boom of the explosion, darkness and night sounds flooded back in, except for the crackling and jerking residual tongues of flame, invisible from his position, but no doubt enveloping the carcass of the Toyota. He saw the flickering shadows dance in reflected glow.

The night autumn air whispered soothing promises to Joshua. Now was the time for a brisk walk.

A walk, no need for running.

The city police were just sufficiently understaffed to be able to arrive here in twenty minutes at the earliest, if anyone saw or heard anything at all.