The Bighead (41 page)

Her grin shone brightly as
the lamplight, brightly as the profuse sweat on her naked body.
“What’s wrong with a quick skinny-dip, huh, Father? I
was…
hot.
” One hand
idled up her flat belly, daintily touched a breast.

“
This place is haunted,”
she said.

Haunted,
he thought. Maybe it was. Maybe it
really
was.

“
And I’ve seen the ghosts,
Father. Your…nuns.”

Alexander’s eyes
fixed.
Evil,
he
deduced.
Yes, there’s something evil here,
I can feel it. And whatever it is—it’s got her…

“
Abbess Joyclyn? And the
Sister Superior? I’ve seen them, I’ve talked to them. They really
got the hots for you, Father.”

Alexander gulped as if swallowing
sand.

“
But then,” she finished,
her grin knife-sharp, “so do I.”

Christ.
Get back to the point!
“I saw you
coming out of the lake. So I went to the bell tower; I looked out.
And I saw it, Jerrica. And you know what I did then?”

“
You probably jerked off,”
came the naked blonde’s reply. “Thinking about me. Thinking about
how bad you wanna fuck me.”

“
Not quite.” He plucked up
a pack of cigarettes from the floor, lit up. “I went for a little
swim myself.”

“
Oh, really?”

“
Yeah, I saw it, and you
saw it too.”

Her wicked grin flattened. “Did you
touch it?”

What a question.
Odd.
But no, no, he
actually hadn’t, had he? He swum up to it, fighting bizarre
currents, saw it, then was pushed away. “No, “ he said.

“
You should have, like I
did. There’s something still alive in there, some…power. I don’t
know. But it made me see a lot of things. It gave some of its power
to me—” She gestured the pick ax leaning against the wall, then the
wall itself. “—for this.”

“
What is it?” his throat
ground out the words. But he guessed he already knew: things he
wasn’t comfortable with, things he was supposed to even believe in
but didn’t want to acknowlege. ’
Though
shalt worship no other God but me,’
his
faith slapped him. Who knew, though, what he believed in now, if
anything.

“
I believe in God,” he
affirmed. “Nothing else.”

“
But you believe in devils
too, you told me in the bar. If you believe in God, you must
believe in His counterparts.”

“
Yes!” he shouted. “Yes,
devils, yes! Demons! Lucifer! The Morning Star and the Fucking Lord
of the Air and the Lord of Lies—YES!” The priest’s teeth ground.
“But…they’re not…supposed…to be…here!”

“
Open your mind.” Now both
her hands caressed her breasts. The big dark nipples distended.
“Don’t be so draconian. Not all devils stay in hell.”

The sentence ran echoes in his head as
she neared. Her bare footfalls encroached, her grin cut so lewd
now, her sex aglint. He just stood there and watched her and did
nothing.

She grabbed him by the
throat, hauled him to the dust-caked concrete floor. He tried to
resist but found her strength paranormal, emboldened by whatever
manifestation of evil she had encountered in the lake. Her body, at
once, was all over him, her vigorous sweat sliding along with her
fine skin across his face, his tensed chest.
Sixty-nine,
some obscure thought
mocked,
the beast with two backs.
He read it in National Lampoon or some shit. She
opened his lake-damp pants, exonerated his cock, while the light
fur of her sex sat on his nose. He pushed up, for all he was worth,
but nothing happened. He might as well have been pushing against
the back deck of an M60 tank.

“
Priest,” she moaned. She
grabbed his balls, squeezed them so hard he flinched. Her thighs
spread over his face. “Lick my ass,” she commanded. “Lick my ass
like a good little priest or so help me I’ll squash these two
little peanuts to pulp.”

The grip tightened; his body flexed at
the threatening pain. And out his tongue came, ever so dutifully,
and began to lick the flesh-crevice of her buttocks.

He smelled the scent of creeky
lakewater, stiffened by bristly ass-sweat. He tasted salt, grime,
pasty skin.

“
Suck it.” His balls in her
hand could’ve been starfruit; just a little more pressure and they
would burst to seedy mush. “Stick your tongue in.
All the way in.”

Her anus opened, a willing aperture.
Now it was more than salt he tasted, it was the remnants of her
last defecation, the reeking, digested oddments of Aunt Annie’s
funnel cakes and molasses and squirrel pasties and soda-baked
biscuits. He was tasting her shit.

“
Now suck it, suck it out.
Suck my shit out of my ass, suck it into your mouth and swallow it
or I’ll pop your balls and gouge out your eyes and haul your guts
out. Where’s your goddamn God now, you pious fuck? Suck my shit or
I’ll strangle you with your own intestines.”

Alexander believed her, his balls
about to crack in her clench. And you know what he did then? The
man of faith? The man without fear in the grace of God?

He did exactly as she instructed. He
sucked her shit.

He sucked it right out of the
blossomed pucker. He thought of a soft ice-cream machine with its
tap open, only this ice cream was warm, vaguely sweet and salty at
the same time. And he swallowed it, just like a good little
priest.

“
Yeah,” she breathed. “You
little kinko. First you drink nuns’ piss, and now you’re eating a
coke addict’s shit. Taste good, Father? Better than rectory
food?”

Now her own face now crooked down into
the cleft of his ass. The vertebra of her neck seemed to come
unattached, so she could wrench her mouth down further at an angle
that would only be described as impossible. But further
impossibilities ensued: her tongue.

Her tongue burrowed into his anus,
then seemed to elongate like hot, pink taffy. First it slithered
up, a supernatural snake trailing up his large intestine, deep,
deep, up into the heat of his waste. Eventually he could feel it
squirming in his stomach, whereupon it retracted, reverted to a
globulous pad that cupped his prostate, sucking, sucking, until her
mouth had successfully morphed into his rectum, to suck the
intricate gland like a cock. Her hand released his testicles, rose
to the shaft…

All it took was three or four strokes
and out it came: twenty years of celibate semen jettisoning feet
into the air. It looked, in fact, like white yarn shooting out,
landing on his heaving stomach, in her wet blonde hair, on the
floor. And next… Next, she was licking it all up.

“
That’s a good, good
priest. So much cum!” she rejoiced. “Priest cum is so much thicker,
it’s like cottage cheese, and it tastes so much better!”

Alexander turned his head and
soundlessly puked, urping up the ration of her shit that he’d seen
fit to swallow.

“
And now the real fun
begins,” she promised, her voice hot as a car hood in August, her
blood-filled tits swaying. “Your priestly cock hasn’t been in real
pussy for how long? Since college? Since all those Viet Nam whores?
Must be twenty, twenty-five years.” She expectorated on his half
deflated cock, slicked it up with spit; it hardened instantly. Then
she was straddling him, and her hand clamped his throat like a
steel cusp, squeezed so hard he thought he’d surely pass out.
“You’re gonna fuck me now, Father.”

He couldn’t speak, of course, but nor
could he even think, as though her supernatural hand were also
squeezing off his thoughts. Then her free hand grabbed his penis,
prepared to insert it—

BAM!

—
when the door at the end
of the hall broke down.

(II)

“
Where—where are
they?”

“
God, this is one creepy
place,” Charity observed. They’d parked the truck, entered the
abbey. She knew they were here because both Jerrica’s Miata and the
priest’s old Mercedes were parked out front. But the main hall was
so dark. Only a pair of silent alcohol lamps lit the corridor.
Several rooms passed them; when they looked in they saw only file
cabinets, stripped beds, night stands covered literally by inches
of dust. “They ain’t here, Charity,” Annie proclaimed. “We best git
out.”

“
No. We’re not leaving till
we find them. Dead or alive, we’re not leaving…”

“
They must be outside then.
Come on.”

Charity followed her aunt back out the
way they came.

(III)

wing!

That was what it sounded like: a hard,
solid whack with a bell-like ring behind it—

Jerrica fell off.

Two figures loomed in the lit shadows.
Chuckles cracked. Black silhouette hands rubbed together in feisty
eagerness.

“
Told ya we’d find ’em,
Dicky!” And then—

wing!

Alexander went numb. He
knew now what they’d hit Jerrica in the head with: a tire iron, the
same thing they just hit
him
in the head with.

The two kids from the
bar,
he struggled to think. But that was
about it. He was fading in and out.

“
I’m gonna cornhole me this
city blonde so hard she’ll be pukin’ my peckersnot!” one voice
reveled.

“
Aw, come on, Balls. This
ain’t no good. We’se gonna git caught and then they’ll’se throw us
in the joint where we’se gonna get butt-fucked by niggers ever
night.”

“
Hail, yer such a pussy,
Dicky! We ain’t come all this way just ta leave.” A dark face
floated above the priest: the long hair, the tractor hat, the
goatee and the leering grin. It looked like Lucifer. “Hey, holy
man, ya wanna know how we found ya?”

Alexander couldn’t answer.
He was beginning to suspect that the blow to the head might be
fatal, that this was the Golden Hour right now.
Fractured cranial vault, subdural hematoma… I could be dead
in minutes.
But would God let that
happen?
Christ, after all I’ve been
through in my life, I’m gonna die at the hands of two redneck
dopes?
It didn’t seem fair.

Help me God, I beg of
Thee. Hear my prayer.

“
Cut his cock off, Dicky!
Make him eat it!” Balls threw the fat kid a buck knife. “Then cut
his throat slow. Meantimes, I’se gonna have me a party with this
blond city bitch here.”

The priest’s eyes moved; a gruelling
sideglance showed him the scene. The fat kid was reluctantly
opening the knife while his colleague, jeans down to his knees, was
vigorously sodomizing Jerrica. And he could discern this too:
Jerrica was dead.

The tire iron had lain open the side
of her head. Pieces of brains were falling out of the
hole…

“
You are in a world of
shit, man,” a familiar voice addressed him. A man’s voice, but the
priest knew it wasn’t either of the rednecks. Alexander squinted
upward, ordered his eyes to focus beyond the ramrod pain in his
head, and he saw who had spoken the words.

It was his lord, Jesus Christ. The
King of Kings.

(IV)

COME. COME. COME.

The words were like a creak in her
head, a hinge keening. But Charity had heard it before, hadn’t
she?

“
Did you…hear that?” she
asked.

Aunt Annie frowned at her. “Hear what?
I don’t hear nothin’, hon. Come on, we gotta find ’em, so’s we kin
git outa here.”

They descended the ridge and now stood
at the shoreline of the lake. The moon turned the lake into a great
mirror; from all around them came the throbbing cascade of
crickets.

COME.

No, Annie wasn’t hearing
it.
Just me, only me,
Charity realized.
Why?
Something was calling her but what? It even began
to occur to her that she was being beckoned specifically to this
place…

But why should she think
that?

More heat lightning flashed,
then:

COME.

The voice seemed to be issuing from
behind them, from the abbey itself atop the ridge. But there was
something about the lake, though, some arcane curiosity itching at
her…

They’d walked half the circumference
of the lake yet couldn’t find hide nor hair of Jerrica or the
priest. “What’s this?” Charity asked, pointing. All wall of stones
melded with crude mortar seemed piled up between against the still,
shiny water.

“
A dam-plug,” Annie
answered with little interest. “The lake been dammed up since
before anyone can remember. Some say it were the Conoye Indians who
done it a thousand years ago, and that something evil were built
there even longer ago than that. No one knows who built it, and no
onew knows ’zactly what it is, just that it’s cursed is what they
say. So don’t git near that plug. Old as it is it could
break.”