The Jar and Other Stories, page 10
John peered into the passenger compartment and saw a stately high-collared woman fanning herself with a fan fashioned from the severed, mummified hand of a Deep One. (The webbed fingers provided a very effective “fan” function.) And even from this low angle John could tell that her bodice was of the topless variety, and—
Damn, that chick is packing a pair of tits like Lisa Deleeuw—er, at least before Lisa Deleeuw croaked from AIDS… John cast an inquisitive glance back up to the butler. “And she wants to see me, huh?”
“Of that I can answer most affirmatively, sir,” said Hollingshead the Brit butler. “And it is highly likely to behoove you, sir, to consent to meeting her. She is well known to give large sums of cash to the poor.”
John was up and at ’em in a split-second. “Sounds good to me. I don’t think I have anything on my schedule today.”
“Very good. Follow me, sir.”
The butler pulled down a fussy hinged step, then John loped up into the carriage where he got to eyeball the “duchess” with a bit more clarity. The awesome breasts, he could see now, had been surgically attached—such was the case for a majority of titled females—and the rest of her was a cosmetically augmented brick-shit house as well. Her face was particularly captivating; it was covered with metal studs, each inlaid with a variety of semi-precious gemstones—citrines, tanzanites, and agate—all valueless in the Living World but in Hell each stone had more value than the ten Hope Diamonds. The highly polished stones, in other words, made the Duchess’ face sparkle fabulously, almost like a disco ball.
“You poor, dear man,” said the Duchess. “When I saw you there in your destitution, I knew I just had to stop. No one should have to exist in such an impoverished state. Have you eaten?”
“Well, no, ma’am, not in a long time,” John said, now sitting opposite her in the cushioned seat. The woman’s legs were as perfect and pristine as a top-shelf model’s, barely covered by a luminous, incarnadine skirt that looked diaphanous. John relished the memories of a time when legs like this would be wrapped around him every day as the camera rolled and his world-famous cock banged away.
The ornate woman offered a tray of chocolates, each embossed with the sigils of Baphomet, Belial, and the Ardat-Lil. John stuffed a few in his mouth and nearly swooned from the luxuriant taste and texture. “Oh, these are great! It tastes like real chocolate from the Living World!”
“Indeed, they do, dear man. My Occult Chocolatiers work hard preparing them for me. Help yourself to as many as you like, and do tell me a bit about yourself as we make our way back to my chateau. There I will procure for you a million Hellnotes to assist you in your plight.”
“Wow! Thanks, ma’am! That’s very generous of you!” But what could he tell her about himself? He figured the truth couldn’t hurt, right? “Well, let’s see. My name’s John, I was born in Ashville, Ohio, and, uh—” John paused for further thought and decided it best to skip the part of his porn fame. “I was also a Vietnam war hero.”
“Oh, how interesting!” exclaimed the Duchess. “I was born in a nice little place called Renton, in Washington State. Not too far from Seattle.”
John nodded, still stuffing chocolates into his mouth. But suddenly he stalled. “Renton? I’ve heard of it—”
“Yes, there’s a big Boeing factory there,” the Duchess added; however, something was odd. Was she actually smiling ever-so-slightly?
“Oh, now I remember! My first wife, Sharon, was born there, but I’ll tell ya, she was a class-A bitch and duller than dishwater. Fucking her was like fucking a bag of sand and she had no idea how to give head.”
“Ah, Sharon, you say? As in Sharon Gebanini?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” John replied. “Did you know her?” but by then John’s motor functions were slowing down and he was suddenly very tired. Wait a minute… What the fuck?
The Duchess was now removing the jeweled studs from her face. “You should be feeling it now, John. Those chocolate-covered nether-berries have been Hexed by a paresis spell…”
John gulped, and then sidled over on the seat. And she wasn’t kidding; John was fully conscious, but now he couldn’t move a muscle.
“I didn’t just know her, John,” said the Duchess. “I am her,” and this fact was at last revealed when she’s removed the last of the studs to show her true face.
John’s eyes bugged. It was her all right—looking just as cute as she’d been in 1964 when he’d met her during his short-lived job as an ambulance driver. “Sharon! Honey! I can’t believe it! It is you! I’ve missed you so much! You know, you were the only girl I ever really loved—”
“Save it, John,” she said quite calmly. “A Class-A bitch, huh? Duller than dishwater? I was your meal ticket for years because you couldn’t keep a job and wouldn’t even try! I fed you, clothed you, and drove you all over town to buy drugs, and all you ever did for me was stick that giant dick in my ass every night until you threw me over to do porn! That’s all you ever were, John. A great big dick!”
John was dumbfounded. “But, honey! I don’t even have a dick anymore. They-they-they stole it from me. Some demons mugged me and stole it!”
“Once a pathological liar, always a pathological liar,” the Duchess chided. “Nobody stole it from you, you sold it. And when my confidantes at the Annex called me, I bought it immediately, for ten thousand Hellnotes!”
“Shit, all I got was seventy!” John babbled, now limp where he lay. “And then a cop stole that! Seriously, sweetheart! I’m a victim!”
“Oh, poor baby. Poor John lost his dicky-dick, his only real identity. I knew it was the right move to sell my soul to Lucifer, ’cos he made me a Grand Duchess the instant I died. Then I devoted my eternity to exacting my revenge against you, you two-bit lying junkie cock-hound motherfucker.”
John tried to act dismayed but wasn’t pulling it off. “Honey? Revenge? But I love you, I always have!”
“And after I bought your world-famous cock, I hired the best surgeon in the Boniface District to sew it on me, and…wouldn’t you know it?”
It was with a dramatic slowness that the Duchess raised the hem of her elaborate skirt to display her bare groin, which was now occupied by the preposterously large genitals that had once proudly belonged to John Curtis Holmes.
“Look familiar?” asked the Duchess. It was hard, of course, and its devilish new owner flexed it a few times for effect. It bobbed like a springboard.
The Duchess didn’t tarry while pulling down John’s bellbottoms and arranging him appropriately, belly-side down, on the carriage floor.
“Sweetheart, please!” John sobbed. “Let’s talk about this!”
The Duchess slapped that huge hard tube of meat repeatedly on John’s scrawny buttocks. “For all the times you fucked me in the ass and all those other poor girls…now I’m going to fuck you in the ass…with your own cock…FOREVER…”
John’s mewls of objection only stoked the Duchess’ desires higher. But when that big glans was jammed right up against John’s sphincter, she began to have a little trouble effecting the necessary insertion. “Oh, Hollingshead! Be a dear and fetch me the shoehorn…”
6-Thirteen
“So how do you know all this stuff?” Westmore asked when he went through the traffic light where the old Henry’s Liquor used to be.
She’d contacted him because she’d seen his piece on the paranormal investigation at what had been dubbed the Central Avenue Murder House. No ghosts had been revealed but Westmore did have to admit seeing an odd shadow in the room where the guy had decapitated his wife (he later put her head on the aerial on her lover’s car). Westmore had needed to write something feisty so he’d picked that location in which had occurred not just the sensational head-chopping but a hanging and a baby microwaved. He’d so been hoping that the paranormal team would fake some findings but…no dice. There was only the “shadow,” which he’d played up as the possible “revenant” teleplasm.
He was pretty sure he didn’t believe in the supernatural, though. Plenty of people did, however, so it gave him something to write about and keep his editor happy. Now he was driving his Prius around the middle of Dannelton, where there was still wreckage from that mini-quake they’d had last month. The upscale psychiatric center had been demolished, and there it sat in a pile just off Clay Street, not even half cleared. Some rowhouses had collapsed as well, and several residents had been killed; several cops and firemen had died too. Backhoes, bulldozers, and cranes were still clearing debris, even at this hour—after 11 p.m.—the sound of their engines and ubiquitous beeps filled the air. The only illumination came from the work crews’ generator-powered lights, since the quake had leveled all the street lights.
“Huh?” she said, staring intently through the passenger window. Her name was Nia. She was probably thirty but looked late-forties, a former meth addict and not-so-former prostitute.
“Come on,” Westmore said. “You promised to prove to me that Hell really exists if I agreed to write an article about it. You’ve mentioned grimoires and old church theses that I’ve read about, plus codices and ancient manuscripts that I know exist, so all the time I’m asking myself ‘What’s the deal?’ How does a girl like you know about things like that?”
She grinned from a once-pretty face. “A girl like me? A street hooker, a hype…”
Shit. “That’s not what I meant. I—”
“I told you, I’ll take a piss test. They sell ’em in Walgreens now, but you pay for it. The fuckin’ things cost eighty bucks. What a racket, huh?”
“Everything’s a racket,” Westmore murmured, turning onto another dark street.
“Anyway, I’ve been clean for five years.”
“No offense, but that’s hard to believe. If you’re off drugs, why do you still work the streets?”
Nia laughed. “Same reason you write for a shitty paper. To make money. What, if a girl turns tricks she’s automatically a junkie? Man, you’re ignorant. I work the street so I can continue with my studies.”
“Your studies?”
“Yeah. A minute ago, what did you ask me?”
Westmore had to admit, now, that there was something about her that aroused him. What was it? The soap she used? The way the harsh generator light shone through her auburn hair? She wore very high cutoff jeans which demonstrated what any cameltoe afficionado would call a jackpot. “Oh, I asked how you happen to know about this stuff, all this occult stuff.”
“Because I’m an occultist,” she said very calmly. “I’ve studied this stuff for a long time. I’ve read the Book of Eibon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Eltdown Shards, Fuga Satanae—”
“So you said in your email,” Westmore said and smiled. “I looked all that shit up. It’s all fictitious. It’s a bunch of bullhockey that horror writers from the Twenties made up.”
Nia laughed, shaking her head. “Man, you’ve really fallen for it. Translations of all that bullhockey are on the Dark Web.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s real!” Westmore almost yelled.
“Then how did I get off meth without rehab? Even a quality rehab is statistically less than ten percent effective for meth. What, willpower? Just Say No? I found an Abstinence Spell in the uncut version of Remingius’ Daemonolatreiae Libri Quattuor. And here I am”—she smiled at him, showing perfect white teeth—“drug free and raring to go.”
Her eyes sparkled with an enthusiasm Westmore used to see in his own eyes.
But not any more.
“And I’m supposed to believe an…Abstinence Spell got you off drugs?”
When she shrugged, her pair of cupcake-sized breasts pushed together in the V of a black diaphanous top. “You can believe or disbelieve what you want. But I could use the same spell to make you quit smoking and drinking.”
“How do you know I smoke and drink?” he asked, chuckling. “Wait, let me guess. You’re psychic too.”
“No, but your car smells like one of those Smoker’s Station things, and there’s a fucking six-pack behind your seat.”
She got me there… “And speaking of that…” Westmore parked in a lightless lot with cracks in the asphalt from the quake. In parts, whole chunks of asphalt were shoved up, in great ragged wedges, revealing the soil and clay underneath.
“I knew it!” Nia laughed. “Here it comes! How much for a blowjob…”
Westmore sighed. “That’s not why I parked here—”
“Twenty-five’s the going street price,” she said. “But for you? Fifty.”
“Terrific,” Westmore sputtered. There must be something about me. “I pulled in here because I can’t drive while trying to pay attention to what you’re saying. Plus”—he reached behind him—“I want a beer.” He produced a bottle of Peroni. “Could you please get my opener out of the glove box?”
She opened it and froze upon seeing his Webley .455 sitting there. “You know what they say about guys who buy big guns?”
Westmore rolled his eyes.
“And do you have a permit for that thing?”
“Of course, this is Florida. You can get ’em from vending machines.”
She handed him the opener and he opened the bottle. He reveled in that fresh European-lager aroma, which put him immediately in a better frame of mind.
“Really? Open beer in the car?” she said. “What if a cop sees you?”
“I know most of them,” Westmore sluffed; in fact, he waved to a cruiser that slowly passed them and disappeared into the darkness.
“Okay,” he began. “You say it wasn’t an earthquake that hit this place last month—”
She was gazing out at the broken walls, downed trees, and collapsed houses. Backhoes, with their incessant beeping emptied chunks of rubble into waiting dump trucks. “It wasn’t an earthquake; that’s what they want you to think. Truth is, they—the authorities—don’t really know what happened here.”
“But you do?” Westmore said.
Her hand went out the window to gesture at their immediate surroundings: a perimeter of wreckage. It reminded Westmore of pictures from history books of Berlin in 1945. Damn. This place really got hit hard. For some reason, in the urban darkness, the place looked many more times worse than in the day.
“Last month, this ruin that we’re sitting in experienced the most important satanic event, maybe, in history,” she informed him. “I didn’t say seismic event, I said satanic. That event was the result of a process called a Trans-Dimensional Spatial Merge—”
“Ah,” Westmore mocked. “One of those…”
“You asked, so don’t be a dick. It’s the pinnacle of Hellbound occult technology that’s taken thousands of years to develop. It’s still not perfected but they’re getting close, and they’re coming up with new tricks pretty regularly. With the help of Warlocks, Bio-Wizards, and a whole lot of sacrificial energy, Lucifer’s engineers are able to cause this Spatial Merge. For a very short period of time, and encompassing a very small tract of land, they’re able to transpose a given perimeter of Hell with a given perimeter of the Living World. These two perimeters share the same space for exactly six seconds, and then switch. They trade places. Get it? What’s there comes here, and what’s here goes there. It gives Satan the chance to directly fuck with Earth, a place God created to be separate from the Prince of Darkness’ domain. It’s Lucifer’s chance to give God the finger.”
Westmore made snoring noises, pretending to be asleep.
“Oh, fuck you,” Nia said, rankled. “If you’re not gonna take this seriously, then it’s a waste of my time. Just take me back.”
Westmore chuckled. “Sorry, I was just kidding. But in all honesty, I don’t believe any of this. Who would? So it’s a waste of my time too.”
“Yeah?” Her sparkly eyes leveled on him. “And what would you be doing instead?”
Westmore stalled. “Well, I don’t know. I could be out with friends…”
She seemed bemused. “You’re hardly the life of the party. I’ll bet you don’t really even have friends.”
Westmore’s mouth opened to object, but then closed again.
“So you’ve got nothing to lose,” she went on, “and everything to gain. You’ll get to witness a Spatial Merge. The article you write will be read all over the world. It’ll be your greatest achievement as a writer. You’ll be famous.”
Westmore couldn’t see himself as famous; he doubted that he would handle it well. “All right, I’ll pretend that I believe you. So a Spatial Merge is like—what?—a bait and switch between Hell and here?”
“Exactly,” she said. “Say you take a shovel full of dirt from your yard and your neighbor takes a shovel full of dirt from his yard, then you walk across the street, put your dirt in his shovel hole, and he puts his in yours.”
Westmore’s brow raised. At least she’s got an imagination… “And this happens tonight…when?”
She looked at her tiny watch. “About a half hour. The Merge will begin at exactly six minutes after midnight.”
“And it will affect this same area, the area of the quake?”
She held up a finger. “Not a quake, a Spatial Merge. And, yes, it’ll happen here, the same place as the last Merge. Why here? Because at least three trance-channelers online have said so.”
“Trance-channelers, huh?”
“Yeah, dick. Same people who predicted the last one, right down to the minute.”
Westmore nodded sarcastically, panning a glance through the windshield across the entirety of the block or so that the quake devastated. “So Satan wants to switch Hell stuff with downtown Dannelton? It’s not even that much space—”
“Each Merge encompasses fifteen point two acres,” she said and grinned at him. “That’s six hundred and sixty-six thousand square feet. Get your yardstick and go measure. That’s how big this disaster area is.”
