Trigger Warning: Extreme Horror: Contains Strong Sexual Content, Violence, Drug Use, and Language. (5 page)

I couldn’t even look at him. He scared me. So I just stared at the floor: black with glittering specks. So many specks. What were they?

The ape-man touched my thigh and my body stiffened (but not in the way his body did).

“I once gave a girl such powerful orgasms that she killed herself just to make it stop. She thought her head was going to explode.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“She stabbed herself through the heart with a knife as she came.”

Cocky, lying piece of shit. “Oh,” I said, pretending to be impressed, putting a hand through my blonde hair—ape-men love that shit. “I don’t want an orgasm…that powerful.”

I was shaking, hoping he didn’t notice. It would only heighten his arousal, his predatory instinct.

The ape-man moved his hand farther up my thigh, leering at me.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

I quickly got up and left—hoping he wouldn’t be angry enough to rape or murder me, as the ape-men often do when you deny them.

“Hey, where are you going, bitch? I paid good money for your pooty!”

Outside, the big neon lights hummed: PUSSY CATS.

I hurried across the parking lot in my pumps, some ape-men that were just entering the club hurling cat calls at me: “Hey, bitch, wanna suck my dick?” Clever as ever. But I won’t lie: the cat calls shook me up. My heart was already pounding from the encounter with the ape-man in the suit, but the cat calls triggered further distress and anxiety: flashbacks.

My first boyfriend pinning me down on his bed as some obscene cartoon blared from the TV, his dirty ape-boy fingers squeezing my breasts (no intimacy or gentleness, just rough and angry, full of hate), and me, just lying there, taking it, afraid to speak up, as his pet rats (Tyler Durden and Patrick Bateman; always outside their cages for some damned reason) nibbled at my toes, making me feel even more violated. Later, he blamed me. Told me I should have stopped him. Broke up with me because I
made
him sin and now he had to ask Jesus for forgiveness. I told him if he loved Jesus so much he could get on his knees and suck his dick.

Scared out of my mind, my kneecaps knocking together, somehow I kept myself moving across the blacktop in those pumps—which were killing my ankles, btw.

The air was humid, wet, felt like rain coming. That’s probably why I had mascara running down my cheeks…then realized I was crying.

Like a fucking baby.

Oh God, suck it up. Suck it up, girl, I told myself.

But no. That’s what the ape-men wanted. They wanted us bitches to just suck it up, get over it. Shut up.

But I wouldn’t.

Fuck them.

Fuck them in their hairy ape-men assholes.

An ape-man started hollering obscenities, then threw his head back with loud obnoxious laughter. I glanced over my shoulder, hoping to God it wasn’t the ape-man in the suit with the slick hair. It wasn’t. Just some asshole with his ape-men buddies.

On the street corner was a phone booth (one of the few left) and I quickly shut myself inside.

I refused to buy a cell phone—too much money, and I needed that money for my girls (and my junk fix—the only thing that could calm my anxiety in this cesspit ape-man world). Of course, now I was probably out of a job. My boss wouldn’t be too happy that I walked out on a client. Maybe I could be a waitress.

I put two quarters in, dialed a number with shaky fingers. The other line rang, but there was no answer.

“Come on, come on, come on, Sis. Pick up. I need a ride.”

I hated the anxiousness in my voice—it made me even more anxious.

KNOCK KNOCK—on the glass of the phone booth.

I nearly screamed into the receiver and jumped out of my pale skin.

I feared it was the ape-man in the suit…but worse: a bunny-man, waving at me behind the glass.

“Fuck off, weirdo!”

The phone booth slid open and I screamed, dropping the receiver. The Bunny stabbed me in the neck with a syringe and pushed down on the plunger: a stinging filled my veins. Goddammit, it hurt.

I had heard about sick fucks injecting people with HIV and felt my heart stopping and then the sound of a river rushing in my head and I—

…NOW

…woke up in a cold torture chamber with an ape-man who is going crazy.

“Let us out of here, you sick fuck,” he’s screaming.

“Shut the fuck up!” I yell back.

He looks at me, starts toward me. I quiver; afraid he’s going to hit me, rape me, kill me.

“This isn’t my fault,” he says (of course, it’s not; that’s what all the ape-men say: “I can’t help it; you’re giving me blue balls; you tempted me; waaa, waaa, waaa!”)

“This is obviously the work of a psychopath,” the ape-man continues. “Trying to get a point of morality across through sick immoral acts. Richard Harris was the same goddam thing.”

“Who the fuck is that?”

“A serial killer—cut prostitute’s eyes out, replaced them with big black buttons. Said he did it because they were sinners.”

I like how the ape-man mansplains it to me like it’s something new or intriguing, but it’s just the same old ape-man bullshit. Shut the fuck up.

“Let me guess,” I say. “He sexually violated the women before he killed them.”

“Yeah,” the ape-man says. “Have you heard of the case?”

No, it’s called not being a fucking idiot. Dickhead.

I say, “No.”

“He blamed the hookers; said they led him into temptation. So he killed them.”

No shit, ape-man. Sing me a tune I haven’t heard.

“There’s no escape,” I whisper. “We’re going to die.”

“No!” The ape-man screams, startled by reality. “We’re getting the fuck out of here! One way or another!”

“What’s your sin?” I ask him.

The ape-man glares at me. “None of your goddam business.”

“Yeah, actually, it is. It’s the reason we’re down here.”

“No, it’s not! We’re both down here because we both did something stupid! We’re stupid! You’re stupid, and I’m stupid!”

“Why are you stupid then?”

“Why are
you
stupid?” the ape-man shoots back.

I wipe mascara off my face and look down at the floor.

“You’re a whore, that’s obvious,” the ape-man says.

I don’t want to (I want to fire back, tell him he’s a dirty filthy good-for-nothing ape-man), but I start crying.

He doesn’t care and ignores me, like ape-men are wont to do.

Robert

A fucking whore just like fucking Angela.

I should’ve never got involved with that fucking slut. It had to have been her. She’s the only one I’ve ever told. I don’t know why I told her more than I told my own fucking wife. Because she asked, I guess. She wanted to hear the fucked up shit.

Angela’s fucking crazy, obsessed with sex and murder. This is probably her idea of foreplay. She probably wants me all for herself. Probably had my wife murdered. Now I’m stuck in a death chamber with
this
slut.

This isn’t my fault, goddammit!

I try to pray but I can’t. I don’t even remember the last time I prayed. I stopped caring about god a long time ago.

A steel door on the opposite end of the room slides back—I never even noticed it. Am I blind? Or did it just materialize out of nowhere? Am I losing my fucking mind?

Jennifer starts weeping again and I want to bash her fucking face in.

The Bunny enters the room, giggling. (What else is fucking new?)

“Tick-tock, tick-tock. At dawn, the sinners die,” the Bunny says.

“I need to take a piss,” is what I say.

“Okey dokey, artichokey.” The Bunny steps aside, gesturing outside the chamber. Must be a trick. That thing can’t actually be letting me out. “There’s a bathroom down the hall to your left.”

I move toward the Bunny, shaking, sweating, sick with anxiety…and slowly inch past…it. The Bunny stares at me (wide dead eyes). I squint, trying to peer into the mesh…but see only darkness: no face, no human of either sex. It giggles and I nearly scream my fucking head off…but somehow, hold it in.

Outside the chamber, I move into a long corridor: dark, except for a sick green light that tints the walls from an unknown source. Though judging from the way the green light shimmers (like the reflection of a swimming pool on a low ceiling), it’s from a body of water.

“Don’t run away,” the Bunny calls after me, “or your torture will be ten times worse.” This, of course, sends the Bunny into a fit of mad giggles, which echo off the dripping stone walls.

I shudder; continue down the corridor, splashing through puddles, cursing as the wetness soaks through my socks and shit-water squishes between my toes. My footsteps echo all around me as I step back onto solid concrete. I can’t quite judge how long the corridor is by the echoes, but I assume there are connecting corridors, maybe even mazes of them—like some sort of horrible labyrinth holding Minotaurs…except, we
are
the Minotaurs.

I spot a rusty steel door (embedded into the stone wall) with the words BAFROOM scrawled on it (in blood?) and slowly reach for the copper handle, which has turned a pale green—probably from exposure to moisture.

Not surprisingly, the door
squeals
open.

It’s dark in here. Again, the only light is the ghostly green glow that haunts the rest of this labyrinth. I search the ceiling for green bulbs, a window, anything to let in that ethereal light…but find nothing but more and more concrete.

The
bafroom
itself is a shithole (pun not intended): the tile floor cracked into chunks. Two out of the three porcelain sinks smashed and dripping shit-water and all three with rusted spouts and handles. The soap dispensers full of black grime and…maggots?
Jesus Christ
. Blood-spotted paper towels and blood-filled syringes litter the floor. I feel like I’ve contracted a disease just by walking in here.

No urinals, only a stall with
BATTERY ACID
scratched into the peeling grey paint. (When I was young, I always pissed in the stall anyway. I valued my privacy).

The stall door is broken off (so much for privacy), hanging out in a dark corner against one of the smashed sinks. And I’m thinking
there must be a way out there must be a way out for god’s sake I’m out of the fucking chamber!

Your torture will be ten times worse. Hehehehehe.

I pull my limp dick from my pants—so hard and throbbing hours, days, months? ago, when I was with Angela. (
That fucking whore!
)

I look down into the steel mouth of the toilet…

…a severed penis.

Floating there in the brown water.

I suck in a cry of terror and I can’t piss. No matter how hard I try I can’t get my bladder to loosen. It’s full, so full it hurts, but I can’t. I bite my lip, crying, trying not to look at the dick floating in the dirty toilet water like a long white turd.

I claw at the stall, which has drawings of cut-off penises carved into the paint (blood gushing out the aft ends), and slowly start to urinate, but it goes all over the floor, the seat, anywhere but the bowl…

…I bite down harder and my lip bleeds and I piss straight into the steel mouth and I can hear it hitting the murky water, and then the sound muffles, like rain on the roof, and when I open my eyes, I’m pissing on the cut-off dick and it’s bobbing up and down in the shit-water.

Erica

Lying on a bed, my shattered wrists and ankles bound to the bedposts, a dirty handkerchief tied tightly around my head, the filthy cotton violating my mouth…I try uselessly to bite through it. It tastes like gasoline and oil.

I’m crying, twisting in the restraints (which only reignites the screaming pain in my broken bones), my brain spinning, my soul plummeting…into the darkest of voids. I’ve never known such fear. Even when my ex used to tie me up and I didn’t know what he’d do to me, I never felt such fear. Sometimes he’d be gentle…other times he’d burn me with cigarettes, call me a cunt, slap and hit me. He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He made Christian Grey look like a Mormon missionary. You never knew who you were going to be sleeping with that night. Part of it was thrilling, but mostly, it was scary and I was afraid to leave him. Afraid he’d rape and kill me. But for fuck’s sake, he’d already been doing the former for years, hadn’t he? But maybe I deserved it because I didn’t say no. My daddy always said that a boyfriend couldn’t rape you, because a boyfriend had the right to fuck you whenever he wanted. Told me that if you got a man started, you had to finish him. Told me that you couldn’t kiss a boy without him fucking you. That’s why I never kissed a boy until I was 19. But I guess daddy was right. When I kissed Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde fucked me…and I let him, because it was my fault for starting it.