The Haunter of the Threshold (30 page)

“Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh...”

Your hand slides across your chest, through tacky sperm, to desperately touch your cross.
Help me, God,
comes your hypocritical supplication. But the cross has changed.

It’s now a pentagram.

You try to focus, to shove back the crushing urge to faint. More chains clink as you knee your way toward Sonia. On hands and knees, then, you look at the mangy bed—

And your heart slams in your chest.

For however long you’ve been dazed or unconscious, now you see what they’ve been up to.

You leap forward off your knees in an offensive reflex. Tiny warbling squeals can be heard leaking from Sonia’s gag as Shot Glass prepares a fair length of rope about the middle of Sonia’s stretched stomach.

He ties a knot—“Heh, heh, heh!”—then slips a wooden rod beneath it. Amid the madness, you think one word:
Tourniquet...

Clayton giggles as Shot Glass begins to turn the rod...

Your screams fly like glass shattering. Your ankles bleed from the metal fetter and you strain across the floor, useless. Half a turn of the rod sinks the rope into Sonia’s belly, like someone tightening a string around a beach ball.

“Crank it, Shot Glass! Crank it!”

“Give it
up!
” and then he casts the most evil grin at you when he slowly turns the rod further. You actually hear the rope creak.

You scream yourself senseless. “I’ll do anything! ANYTHING!

Just stop!
”

Shot Glass peers at her. “Anything?”

“YES!” you bellow.

“Hmm.” Shot Glass chews his lip, holding the rod to maintain the tourniquet’s tension around Sonia’s belly. “Would’jew, say, eat Clayton’s shit?”

Your mind wobbles. “YES! Just take that rope off her!”

He hesitates, reverses the rod till the rope hangs slack. “Okay, reddy-head, Yew got yew’re self a deal. But just so yew know. Clayton eats big so ya gotta figure he
shits
big.”

Clayton giggles uncontrollably now. Pantless, dirty, and fat, he thunks toward you, fingering his penis in exuberance. “Down on yer back’n open wide, reddy! I’se gonna shit right in yer purdy mouth!”

At least they’d cancelled their torture of Sonia. You lay back as instructed, open your mouth, but almost scream as Clayton crudely squats right over your face. The canyon of his shit-flecked buttocks lowers, then the vision trebles in horror when he widens that buttocks with his hands to lend a more concise view of puckered, pimpled anus.

“Clayton, try’n feed the turds direct inta her maouth. I’d be pleesed as punch ta see thet.”

“Shore thing!”

Open-mouthed, you wait. The abominable cleft now hovers only inches from your lips. When the even more abominable sphincter begins to dilate, you slam your eyes shut.

“Here she comes!”

Clayton’s anus squeezes out a stout, firm stool that—

“Eeeeeeeeeeee-YUH!”

—that miraculously slides right between your lips. When it lowers to the back of your throat, you have no choice but to sever it with your teeth, go tense, and swallow. The odor of the process can be imagined, but the taste?

You cannot think about that...

With each desperate swallow of each stool-segment, you only have time to re-open your mouth to admit
another
segment.

“Aw, noaw, yew’re cheatin’!” you hear Shot Glass complain. “The deal’s off if’n ya cheat! Curn’t just shalluh, yew gotta
chew...”

The entirety of your soul moans now, but you must do it. It’s the only way to save Sonia. You actually chew the next segment, your belly quivering in revolt to what’s being forced into it. It’s as though your whole face is trying to seal shut against the outrage, but you keep eating none the less; even your mouth shudders as it attempts to manipulate the warm, tight stools. One after another they descend from the hellish clough. Your tongue cannot help but detect corn, arcane grit, bean casings, and other mysterious fecal debris. All you can do is mush it up and gulp it down, your spirit screaming all the way.

“Ee-yuh, naow
thet’s
entertainment!” you hear Shot Glass roar.

After another grunting minute or two, Clayton’s bowels are relieved. He is kind enough to wipe his ass with the back of your limp hand but you’re essentially too mortified to really notice. You’re practically convulsant as you lay gog-eyed on the floor with a belly full of hot shit; you’re all too aware of its heat and the sense of grotesque
fullness
within you.

Your teeth are creamed with feces, your mouth lined with it. You’re helpless to stop the rich, horrendous stench that eddies from your mouth with every breath...

But I did it, by God,
you think.
I did it!

“Unlock these shackles and let us go now,” you demand.

Shot Glass stands up, parting his hands. “I always keep my promises. A man who durn’t keep his word en’t wuth nuthin.’ Clayton. Let her go.”

“Shore, Shot Glass.”

You look up expectantly, but then—

“Oh my God, you fuck!”

Clayton turns around and starts pissing hard in your face.

And Shot Glass begins to crank the tourniquet rod once more.

“You lying scumbag evil pieces of redneck FUCK!”

“Heh, heh, heh! Heh, heh, heh!” Shot Glass keeps cranking the rod. The rope constricts tighter and tighter against Sonia’s belly. Her body actually bows upward now, with only her heels and her shoulder blades touching the mattress. “Heer she goes, ee-yuh! Ee-yuh!”

Clayton can only maintain his giggling as he shakes the last of his piss off in your face. Then he goes to the bed and removes Sonia’s gag—

The scream that bursts from her throat cracks every window in the shack.

“Heh, heh, heh! Heh, heh, heh!”

The rope creaks, digging deeper.

“Pop the kid out!” Clayton cheers.

“YOU CRAZY PSYCHO WHITE TRASH SCUM!” you bellow.

Shot Glass now stands up to crank harder. He pulls against the rod like a lever that won’t quite give. Sonia’s shrieks sound like brakes with no pads but in between, Shot Glass looks at you and says, “Durn’t know what’cher all bent aout’a shape over no ways, reddy. This en’t nuthin’ but a dream.”

“Yeah,” Clayton agrees. “
Your
dream. Which means it’s just a bunch’a shit from
your
head.”

The rope keeps creaking. “But what ya gotta understand is that, here? In this place? The shit from your own head mixes with the shit out theer...”

You stare at the madman’s words. The revolting mirage from the outhouse—the man with the upside-down face—had said the same thing, hadn’t he, and as that idea occurs to you your eyes rove back to, first, Clayton, then Shot Glass. They’ve changed...as if their revelation to you has triggered an allegorical metamorphosis...

Their faces are upside-down, the effect of which only makes their sneering, shuck-and-jive, backwater grins all the more hideous. And their genitals—normal only moments ago—now sport maroon spheres for glans and scrotums like sacks of grapes.

“Clayton, heer it comes!”

“Git it! Git it!”

One other thing: their arms have transformed to stout, heavily suckered tentacles.

Sonia’s final shriek whistles through the air. There’s a long, loud
Crrrrrunch
and then a gush of splashing water. You look away just as Sonia’s belly begins to collapse.

“Heh, heh, heh...”

Shot Glass and Clayton jump up and down in monstrous jubilation, tentacles writhing. A baby begins to hack, and the last thing you see is Shot Glass’s inverted face moving closer and closer to yours, the upside-down grin widening, and he explains, “Waal, missy, theer en’t but one more thing I have ta say ta yew. Wanna know what it ‘tis?”

Your eyes feel lidless as you stare.

“Gub nbb shub naabl e uh bleb nuuurrlathotep...”

You scream so hard that blood sprays from your mouth and you—

—woke up in bed next to Sonia, glazed in sweat and shivering beneath the caul of granular darkness stretched across the room. Hazel could hear her heart thunking down.
Oh my God, another
nightmare...What the FUCK is wrong with me?

She lay still, recovering from the mudslide of detestable images still in her head.
Calm down, calm down, it’s all over...

She turned her head to the left and found Sonia sleeping contentedly. Then she turned her head to the right—

She could see the narrow door to the den; it stood open a few inches, and the desk lamp threw a widening wedge of pale-yellow light on the floor. Had she left the light on earlier, or had Sonia? The prospect made little sense, since Hazel would’ve noticed it before going to bed.

Something smelled
meaty
in the room, even with the overhead fans going. But her attention was snared not by the odd smell but by rapid, irregular
clicking
sounds which she recognized immediately.

A computer keyboard.

Her eyes widened where she lay, staring at the crack in the den door.

Someone’s...typing. On one of the computers...

There could be no doubt unless, of course, this was another dream...”Who’s in there?” she called out, but her voice sounded scratchy and feeble in the grainy dark. “I can hear you typing.”

“You don’t hear anything, Hazel,” a man’s voice replied quite nonchalantly. “So just shut up.”

The voice—she was positive—belonged to Frank.

“Frank, what are you doing in there? How come you didn’t wake us up when you got back?”

An annoyed sigh in between pauses of the keyboard. “Because I’m not back.” Then a chuckle. “I’m still up at the Gray Cottage. This is a dream, Hazel. Haven’t figured that out yet?”

Dream, my ass,
she determined then climbed off the bed...

She could do little more than
try
to get off the bed, however. She propped up on her hands, tried to swing her legs out but suddenly a horrendous pressure was pushing down on her. Was she having a stroke, a heart attack?
No,
she realized.
No symptoms, no pain. So
why—
It was as though the gravity of the space she occupied had increased tenfold. “Frank! This is fucked up!” she yelled, yet the brassy exclamation did not stir Sonia from her sleep.

Another chuckle from the den. “Hazel, the only thing fucked up in this house is
you.
”

“Asshole! Help me up!”

Her plea was answered only by more key-clicking.

What was he doing in there, even if this
was
a dream? And if truly a dream, then that would have to make it—what?
A dream within a
dream within a dream?
came the absurd consideration. Meanwhile, every muscle in her back and arms strained quite failingly against the increasing weight, pressure, or gravity; something invisible was essentially squashing her back down to the mattress. A moment later she lay flat on her back again, and she couldn’t move. The paralysis permitted her to move only her head, back and forth. When she snapped her gaze back to the right, her eyes flicked lower, to the floor before the den...

Wisps of black smoke seemed to be sifting upward from the floor.
Fire! The cabin’s on fire...,
but then in her scrutiny she realized it couldn’t be smoke.

Smoke didn’t smell like
meat.

“It’s not really smoke,” Frank elucidated from the den. “You can think of it as a gas-phase effluent...” The wedge of light swelled as the den door creaked open. A shadow stood huge in the wedge, then shrank quickly as Frank ambled out. He looked down at Hazel from the foot of the bed.

“It’s a conduction-flux, Hazel”—he grinned—“from the spells.”

The spells,
Hazel repeated the word in her mind. Even in her trepidation, she frowned at him. “Who do you think you are? Van Halen?”

Frank wore sunglasses in spite of the room’s meager light. “Hagar,” he said and laughed.

“And what’s this about spells?”

“Spells, Hazel—occult theorems that manipulate the angular invariants of the surface of the Shining Trapezohedron.” He leaned over and rubbed her bare leg. “You know what that is, don’t you? The Shining Trapezohedron?”