The Haunter of the Threshold (9 page)

“If it’s a ripoff of Irving, dear, then Irving’s tale is a ripoff of Goethe.”

“In which case, Goethe’s
Faust
was a ripoff of Christopher Marlowe, so there.”

“Fitzgerald said it best, I’m afraid. ‘Minor writers borrow, great writers steal.’”

Hazel’s eyes thinned. “You sure that was Fitzgerald and not Wodehouse? Or—no!—Samuel Johnson.”

“Who cares? We’re almost there!”

Once they passed the turnoff for Laconia, they veered down a wooden fork and suddenly felt as though the forest were swallowing them. First they passed a deer-crossing sign, then another sign read, WELCOME TO BOSSET’S WAY. POPULATION: TOO FEW TO COUNT.

“I love it!” Sonia exclaimed.

“Yeah, and get a load of
this
place...”

Hazel slowed to an idle by a long, single-storied tavern constructed from planks of withered timber. The place seemed shoved back into the forest. BOSSET’S WAY WOODLAND TAVERN, read a rickety sign. Mostly pickup trucks filled the dirt-paved lot. As they looked on, an older pickup truck with odd rounded fenders parked, and from it stepped an imposing man well-over six feet. Shaggy, cropped brown hair crowned a head which sat on shoulders that seemed a yard wide; muscles bulged through a sweat-streaked gray T-shirt, and tight, faded jeans looked about to split from the pillar-like legs that filled them.

“I guess that’s what you call a woodsman,” Sonia commented.

“Would you
look
at that Paul-Bunyan-looking muscle-rack!” Hazel enthused. “I’d do him in a
heartbeat!
”

Sonia looked outraged. “He’s literally twice your size, Hazel. He’d split you in two.”

“Shit. I’d take his business till he couldn’t see straight. He’d be crawling home to his mommy, I’d fuck him so hard...”

“Hazel, sometimes you really are too crude. You talk like a guy. And, besides, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve got a boyfriend.”

Hazel smirked. “He’s a
casual
boyfriend. I’m not married, you know–” She winked. “Or engaged.”

“Well maybe you should be. It might clean up your mouth
and
your mind. Honestly, you talk about sex more than any woman I’ve ever met. You absolutely
dwell
on it, and it’s not healthy.”

You think I don’t know that?
Hazel thought in a sudden despair.
I’m NOT healthy. And my only cure is YOU...”
Hey, I’m allowed to daydream, aren’t I? And don’t tell me you don’t.”

“I don’t need to. I’ve very
into
Frank. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted sexually.”

“Great, but you fantasize
sometimes,
for Pete’s sake. Everybody does.”

Sonia reluctantly tilted her head. “Well, of course, sometimes, sure. But not very often.”

“Thank you.”

Next, they both noticed another sign: FRESH FISH, MUSSELS, GAME - THURSDAY NIGHT - FISH-FED PORK ALL-U-CAN-EAT!“Fish-fed pork?” Hazel questioned. “That sounds interesting.”

Sonia winced and mouthed
Yuck.

“There’s your
regional
cuisine,” Hazel said, “but that’s fine with me. I like trying new things.”

“Hazel, they’ve probably got moose on the menu!”

“Like it or not,” Hazel insisted, “we’re going to be eating in that place soon. We’d be silly not to just for the sake of sensibility.”

“Whatever you say,” Sonia murmured, but then she looked for some reassurance into her purse and smiled at a box of Pop Tarts.

BOSSET’S WAY LANE, read the next sign. Sonia was following the Mapquest directions when she blurted, “Take a left here!”

A slight incline took them deeper into the woods, then the road gave over to runneled dirt. After pulling round a deeply shaded cul-de-sac, Hazel stopped.

They both stared at a dark-planked cabin. Its slat-shingled roof slanted sharply upward. Crude wooden shutters flanked painfully narrow windows, while darker wooden planks comprised the front door. Most of the edifice had been overcome by ivy and the rearward trees, to the extent that it seemed an outgrowth of the woods, that or a foreign object it wished to expel.

“Is that it?” Hazel asked, puzzled.

Sonia pointed to a cumbersome metal mailbox. WILMARTH, H., it read in hardware-store stick-on letters. “I guess this is the place.”

Hazel excitedly jumped out of the car. In spite of the shade, a dense humidity enveloped her. Aside from above the cul-de-sac, no sky was visible due to the tree-cover, and most of the trees—white pine, she thought—were at least a hundred feet high. Only from one precise vantage point could she actually see beyond the all-pervading trees: a narrow lane over open space that followed the property’s slight inclination and showed a wedge of open fields, the edge of a significant lake, and what looked like it might be a town.

“Oh my God, it’s so hot and muggy!” Sonia moaned when she struggled out.

“It’s like a rain-forest effect,” Hazel supposed. She offered Sonia a hand. “All these trees are so high and close together they seal out any breezes. The summer heat makes the moisture condense and rise, but it’s got no place to go.” But Hazel didn’t mind a bit. To her—being a life-long New Englander—heat and humidity was a treat after the nine months per year of cold weather. It made her feel vibrant, prickling with youth.

Sonia pointed in horror. “And what-what-WHAT...is
that?
”

“I haven’t seen one of those since Girl Scouts!” Hazel delighted of the narrow shack off to the cabin’s side.

“That’s not a—”

“It’s a good old fashioned outhouse, Sonia. With all our education, with all our intelligence, our college degrees, our sophistication, and our quest for knowledge,
this
is what it’s all led to. We get to shit in a hole in the ground.”

“Oh my
God
...”

“And that must be the runoff from the spring,” Hazel noted of the obtrusive lengths of gutter-pipe which branched out of the cabin’s foundation; they veered into a small ravine at the wood’s edge. “There’s probably a storage keg or spring barrel inside. Tubing behind the house leads from the spring to the house, and the overflow runs down the gutter into the woods. Even in the winter, the water won’t freeze ‘cos it’s always moving.”

“Peachy!” Sonia snapped, still appalled by the outhouse.

“And now that I think of it...” Hazel began to approach the outhouse. Was it so old it was actually
leaning?
“After three hours on the road, this girl’s got to take a mean tinkle.”

“So do I , but-but...not in
there!
”

“I didn’t know you were such a princess,” Hazel chuckled and swung open the latrine’s wooden door.

Not too bad.
She expected more of an odor, but then she remembered how little this receptacle had been used. Frank had only been here a few days, and before that there’d only been Henry Wilmarth off and on. She eyed the crude hole cut in the wooden bench that sufficed for a toilet seat.
Mostly...dead man’s shit down
there,
came the coarse thought. The door swung shut, leaving only a malformed beam of light coming in through the cliched, sickle-moon-shaped hole in the wall. She dropped her shorts and sat down, waited a moment, then her bladder began to void. She listened, and her brow popped up at the lengthy string of seconds that ticked by before she heard the stream finally hit bottom.

She chuckled at an absurd notion: as she sat there, a hand reached up from the waste pit and cupped her pubis. Then another notion: she looked down into the pie-wedge between her legs and saw a face gazing raptly upward...

Idiotic!
she thought, laughing to herself.

But it didn’t take long for these fleeting notions to trigger something else: fantasies. Not
typical
fantasies.

Hazel’s
fantasies—

—with a great
Crack!
the outhouse door is torn from its hinges. You freeze where you sit, staring up in horror at the enormous silhouette now standing in the doorway. When your jaw drops to scream, your breath stays in your chest and no sound comes out. It’s a wide-shouldered, column-legged man with shaggy hair who’s stepped in as you remain sitting helplessly with your shorts down.
The man from the tavern!
you realize. The one Sonia had called the “woodsman,” because that’s what he looks like: a mass of sculptured human muscle and dense brawn, so tall he has to duck to enter. His intent is clearly premeditated, for his penis is already out of his opened jeans—limp but lengthy, and
fat
—hanging there like a raw pork loin. When he sees the fear in your eyes, the penis begins to fill with blood and rise in increments. When you try to lunge past him—

Thunk!

—his ham-hock-sized fist snatches you by the hair and bangs the side of your head against the wall. The heavy, head-spinning daze drops you to the floor. Your feet are lifted up and your shorts are pulled off. Then you hear another
Crack!
and when your vision clears, you notice that this behemoth has torn the “bench” out of its mounts, nails and all, leaving a rectangular hole full of malodorous darkness. His hand grabs your hair again and hauls you to your knees.

Finally, he speaks, in a voice like wet mush. “Do everything I tell you or I’ll dislocate your hips and drop you down there. You’ll die in shit, which is what you deserve.” Fingers fat as hot dogs pluck the tiny cross around your neck and snap it off.

Dizzy, you gaze up. The violence has hardened his penis to something the length and width of a cucumber, with a maroon glans like a baby apple. The tiny piss-slit shimmers with drool.

“Open my pants and pull out my nuts.”

Your hands shake, reaching forward, then dig in...
Oh my God,
you think as you lift the scrotum out...

It’s not human, it can’t be. In the sun-threaded darkness, you see that you’re holding a hot, fleshy mass that is not characterized by two testes; instead it’s more like a bunch of grapes sheathed by skin. Each individual “grape” is easily discerned beneath the vein-webbed covering.

All the while, the stout, slightly lopsided erection throbs in your face.

“Put lots of spit on my cock,” the slopping-like voice orders next.

You make the mistake of saying, “Whuh—what?” and the human monster works his fingers to either side of your trachea. You shudder on your knees, tongue sticking out; it seems like he’s trying to wretch out your throat, and what’s worse is the ease with which he’s doing so.

At last, you hack, “I’ll do it! I’ll do anything you say!”

The fingers retreat and all at once you’re leaning forward, spewing saliva all over his cock.

“More. On the knob.”

Your fear, by now, has sucked so much gummy sweat through your pores. You’re stifled by the heat, and
terrified
because it’s so difficult to summon saliva. You suck frantically at the insides of your cheeks, and just as his hand moves back to your throat, you’re able to release a sufficient amount of spit on the corona.

There is no hesitation when his hands hook under your clammy armpits and you’re lifted of the floor. Your back
slams
against the wall.

The slush-voice: “Pull your knees up.”

You obey the order instantly, and an instant after that his spit-slickened, fl abbergastingly large cock bumps into the egress of your sex, then
pushes
. You feel the channel spread so wide it hurts. When the erection slips in to its entire length, your teeth clack together. Your vagina has easily accommodated many large penises but never—
never
—one
this
large.

“Are you scared?” he gushes.

“Yes!” you sob.

“But you really
like
this. This is what you
really
want. An ungodly cunt like you?”

The cock drags in and out of you as his pelvis pumps with a machine-like rhythm. It begets a wet clicking sound. You swear you can feel the end of it up about where your navel is.

“You should’ve done like your daddy said,” the slush-voice remarks next, and begins to splatter laughter.

You scream, then, loud as a train whistle when you finally look at his face.

It’s not the woodsman–oh, no. The face is upside-down: an eye on either cheek, a toothy mouth and fat lips on the forehead. His ears are pointed.

“The devil told me all about you...”