The Haunter of the Threshold (3 page)

The evil drone is fading all too slowly. Your cognizance struggles to understand him. When you see his crotch in your face, you smell your own excrement wafting off it: a rich, fresh funk. Your hands shake when you carefully slip the condom off and empty its contents into the toilet.

“Now...” His voice is back to the cool, calm monotone. “Eat the cum out of the toilet.”

Dizzily, you look up at him. Your lips tremble as if to speak, but then the pistol is shoved into your face again.

“The thing on the end of my gun is called a chambered sound-suppressor,” he tells you. “You know, a silencer? Like in the movies? The gun’s loaded with sub-sonic ammunition. If I squeeze this trigger, there’ll be no noise. No one will hear the sound. Do you understand?”

Wobbling on your knees, you gulp, manage to nod, then lower your face into the toilet.

It is an act completely subconscious, however, when your hand flies up to your chest to hold back the cross, so it will not depend into the water.

You see the sperm floating there, the milk-white coagulation. You think of a piece of twist pasta. Only now do you remember that after you urinated you didn’t flush, so not only will you have to eat his sperm, but you’ll have to eat it out of toilet water tinted by your own piss. You stick your lips out like fish lips, lower more, and suck.

You get it on your first try, slurping the lump into your mouth and swallowing.

When you lift your head out, he bends over to inspect. “Hmm. Good,” he says in more of the same cool voice, but then it is with his most aggressive violence yet that he grabs your throat and hurls you into the bathtub. Your elbows, knees, and head all
thunk
against the inside of the tub.

“Put the stopper in the drain,” he orders. His penis is still hanging out, withered as if exhausted, and wriggling as he speaks, “then lay on your back.”

You don’t even attempt to understand. The pain in various areas throbs when you turn around in the cramped tub and incline yourself. For one second, you dare to look up. You see him there, standing, gun hovering.

Feebly, you whimper, “I—I’m on my back now...”

“I can see that. Just be quiet. Now pull your knees back to your shoulders, all the way back as far as you can.”

Here is another unwitting opportunity to please him. From first grade to twelfth you were a gymnast. Your nimble physique, spry form, and double-jointedness left you perfect for this mode of athleticism. With almost no effort, you bring your knees back and slip them fully behind your shoulders.

“Wow, that’s cool,” he remarks.

But then he begins urinating on you.

You tense in the contorted position; the initial stream hits your belly with such force, it stings. Then he rakes it across your nipples, and they constrict. His urine feels piping hot. You seethe through your teeth when he zigzags the stream back down your belly, then roves it up and down over your vaginal groove. He seems to be trying to piss
into
you from a distance.

“The reason I had you stopper the tub is because I don’t want it going down the drain,” he says, half-focused on his task. “When I’m done pissing, you’re going to drink it.
You’re
the drain. Get it?”

I’m the drain,
you think.

But what will come after that?

You’re being showered on. Your flesh is someone’s yard being sprinkled, and you writhe beneath it all.

“Put your hand between your legs and open your pussy...”

When you do, the stream begins to separate the folds of your vagina.

“Now masturbate,” he says next.

The word, oddly,
clunks
in your head.

“You heard me.” A bit more gruff. “Masturbate.”

Again, the word
clunks.
It’s like a bad chord tainting competent music.

“You deaf? Masturbate! Masturbate while I’m pissing on you!”

The last
clunk,
then the muse shatters like safety glass.
You’ve
got to be kidding me!
you think, and then you unlock your knees from behind your shoulders, slouch up, and eye him with a sigh and look of either disgust or grievous disappointment.

“Damn it, Ashton!” you yell. “That’s not in the script! You messed it all up again!”

The stream of urine dwindles. The intruder pulls off the false beard and goes, “Huh?”

It was done. Just like that. The build-up had been near-perfect, but then he had to go and wreck it all.
I didn’t even get to come,
she griped to herself.

Hazel Greene hopped up in the tub and yanked the stopper chain. A dull vehemence beat headache-like behind her eyes as she cranked on the shower.

“I followed the script!” insisted the “rapist,” who was actually Hazel’s boyfriend–er, her
semi-
boyfriend, she thought of him as–a grad student named Ashton Clark.

“You screwed up the
words,
Ashton.” She twirled in the shower spray, plunged her face in, then began to lather up with this neat body wash she’d found that smelled like blueberry muffins. “The words, the words, the words.”

Ashton stared at her.

Hazel shook her head, which was now an aura of bubbles. “Ashton, a rapist would never say
masturbate.
He’d say ‘frig yourself, bitch,’ or ‘Play with your pussy’ or ‘finger your snatch’. Something like that.”

“Oh for shit’s sake!” Ashton flung the dollar-store beard in the waste can, put his penis back in his pants, washed his hands, and stormed out of the room.

Oops,
Hazel thought.

After she’d dried off, she traipsed into the living room, wearing only panties covered with orange Smiley Face bats and a towel wrapped about her head. With a cat-grin she came up behind him in the chair and began to rub his shoulders. “Ashton, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to criticize you–”

“Oh, no, not at all,” came the obvious sarcasm as he looked coldly at the TV. “I feel like such a loser that I didn’t get your precious
script
right again.”

“I over-reacted,” she whined, “I’m
sorry.
You were really getting me into it—I thought it would be the best ever, but then—”

“I said the wrong words,” he finished with a smirk. “Christ, the things I do for women. Makes me wonder about myself; I must be co-dependent or something. Next you’ll be wanting me to take acting lessons, just so you can have a better time.”

“You seemed to have a good time,” Hazel almost snapped back. “You came, didn’t you?”

“Hazel, I had to force myself.” He laughed sardonically. “I had to think about doing you missionary-style. Shit, what ever happened to the good ole slow comfortable screw, huh? I guess people just don’t do that anymore, do they? It’s blasé. I guess I’m just not
hip
‘cos I’m not into all this sexual perversion and deviation stuff.”

Now Hazel pouted. “It’s just a game, Ashton. Lots of couples do it. It’s just innocent role-playing.”

He gawped at her. “Hazel, Dungeons and Dragons is role-playing. Choking a woman and pissing on her in order to fulfill her addiction to rape-fantasies is something else altogether.”

He just doesn’t understand,
Hazel thought.
He’ll get over it.
“But this time it was really intense. Maybe
I’m
the one who should be an actor. I really was able to assume the mind-set of a rape victim. Never once did I—”

“Wait, wait,” he said holding his hand up as a commercial ended. “I want to hear this. It’s more about that guy who survived the Mother’s Day Storm.”

Him again,
Hazel thought.
Frank’s friend.
She sat on the edge of Ashton’s chair and began to pat her hair dry. What the news had dubbed the Mother’s Day Storm was still mystifying the meteorological and scientific community. It happened two months ago, shortly before dawn; the entire downtown area of St. Petersburg, Florida, had been ravaged by what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Hurricane Center had determined to be some manner of fluke storm activity, something described as a spontaneous confined array of multiple-vortex tornados. 2,900 people had died, with several times that injured, making it the country’s worst natural disaster since the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. This man that Ashton was watching had been the only survivor from the “ground zero” point, where all of the vortexes had apparently touched down. Billions of dollars of damage had been done, several “storm-proof” high-rises had actually collapsed while dozens more had blown out all their windows and had their entire contents sucked out. Occupied apartment complexes were flattened, and even the famous St. Petersburg Pier was torn from its steel-and-cement moorings and broken into chunks. A harrowing tragedy, yes, but like many young people, Hazel regarded it with a distanced detachment. Indeed, like rape, hurricanes, tornados, tidal waves, etc., were things that only happened to other people.

“There he is,” Ashton said of the picture flashed on the national news, news: that of a fiftyish man with solemn, intelligent eyes and a gray-touched goatee. “Wilmarth. Did you know he taught here?”

“Yes, Ashton,” Hazel droned, bored already.
I guess I should
have more compassion,
she realized of her aloofness,
like my father
always said.
“Didn’t I tell you? Frank Barlow knew him very well.”

“Frank–oh, you mean, Professor Barlow, the head of the geometry department?”

“Yeah. Sonia’s fiancé.”

Ashton smirked, like he always did whenever Hazel referred to her best friend, Professor Sonia Heald, by her first name. “Yeah, the fastest way to earn the title of fiancé is to knock a woman up.”

Hazel slapped him— not quite as hard as she would’ve liked–on the shoulder. She changed the subject’s tangent, jabbing her finger at the TV. “So, what? The guy died a few days ago, right? Was he murdered?”

“Maybe if you’d stop talking, we could find out,” and then Ashton turned the volume up. A blond newscaster who looked more suited for Hooters employment was informing: “—hours ago when the Belknap County Coroner’s Office ruled suicide as Professor Henry Wilmarth’s official cause of death. Wilmarth, a professor in high-standing at Providence, Rhode Island’s Brown University, was found dead on his property four nights ago. Local police initially believed that Wilmarth had been murdered, as his lodgings were found ransacked upon the discovery of his body. Today, however, we know that Professor Wilmarth took his own life by hanging himself. Wilmarth miraculously survived last May’s massive multiple-vortex tornado system which killed nearly 3000 residents in a fifteen-minute period and damaged or demolished a several-square-mile perimeter of the city of St. Petersburg. Shortly before sunrise on May 12, Wilmarth had been sitting on a bench in a park-area known as Mirror Lake, and witnessed the entire storm from all directions. He’d undergone treatment for shock immediately afterward, and later, trauma therapy.” Now the screen showed an aerial of “ground zero.” Trees were uprooted, buildings either crushed or roofless, car-sized chunks of rubble lay scattered everywhere save for a modest circle of land near a pond. A graphic arrow appeared on the screen, pointing to that circle, with the legend, WILMARTH’S POSITION DURING THE STORM.

“Good God,” Ashton gasped. “Every time they show this, it looks worse. It looks like Berlin after the Allied bomber offensive.”

“All but that little area where Professor Wilmarth was sitting,” Hazel remarked with fading attention. “Talk about lucky...”

The newscaster went on, “Wilmarth commented very little about his eye witnessing the storm, only to say, ‘It wasn’t a tornado cluster. Of that I’m certain...’”

More shots of the city’s destruction flashed. “Experts at the U.S. Meteorological Center estimate that the destructive energy released in these several square miles may have equaled all of the force combined during the April, 1974, Super Outbreak that tore through 13 states from Ohio to North Carolina, produced 148 twisters, and killed over 300 people.”

“All that power,” Ashton muttered, “packed into just a couple square miles...”

“It’s too depressing,” Hazel complained and switched it off. “And they show it over and over again. I don’t know why they do that. Like Katrina, and the tsunami several years ago.”

“Hazel, how can the daughter of a Christian minister be so apathetic? It was a tragic event. It’ll take years to repair all that damage,” Ashton said.

“I’m not denying that! I just don’t understand why they have to show it over and over. It’s like the media’s rubbing our faces in it. Christ, it happened months ago.”