Duet for the Devil Read online

  Duet for the Devil

  by T. Winter-Damon and Randy Chandler

  Kindle Edition

  Necro Publications

  2011

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  KINDLE Edition

  Duet for the Devil © 2000 t. Winter-Damon & Randy Chandler

  Introduction © 2000 Edward Lee

  Cover art © 2005 Erik Wilson

  This digital edition January 2011 © Necro Publications

  Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  a Necro Publication

  5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771

  http://www.necropublications.com

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  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to an eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  — | — | —

  This book is dedicated to those libertine literary predecessors who dared flaunt their visionary excesses to the outrage of chaste Society’s timid, hypocrital flocks of sheep:

  Donatien-Alphonse-Françoise, “Le Comte de Sade”

  Isidore Ducasse, “Le Comte de Lautréamont”

  Charles Baudelaire

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Antonin Artaud

  Jonathan (Wayne) Latimer

  William S. Burroughs

  J.G. Ballard

  K.W. Jeter

  to those philosophers/adepts who have helped lead us down strange & stranger shadowpaths:

  William Butler Yeats

  Aleister Crowley

  Austin Osman Spare

  don Juan Matus

  Kenneth Grant

  Michael Bertiaux

  Peter Carroll

  to those film directors whose images unflinchingly subvert the limits of the “safe” & “sane”—conjuring forth the surreal nexus of The Dreamtime & “consensus reality” & nightmare logic:

  David Cronenberg

  David Lynch

  Dario Argento

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  John Waters

  to those inspired artists of the abattoir who lived out their own depraved & savagely transcendent dreams:

  Gaius Caesar, “Caligula”

  Gilles de Rais

  Countess Elisabeth de Báthory

  &, of course,

  “The Lord High Executioner,” Himself, “The Zodiac”

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  Introduction

  I write hardcore horror. I think I’ve done a pretty decent job writing the kind of horror fiction that, for the most part, I most like to read, and I’m quite proud of my “grossest” works, such as The Bighead, “Header,” “The Pig,” “The Dritiphilist,” and other projects collaborative and solo. I’m particularly tickled by some of the scenes that miraculously didn’t get cut by the mass-market editors back in the early ’90s. (Conversely, other scenes did get cut for being too “hard,” but that’s all right. I’ll find some use for those down the road.) But to return to the point, horror fiction of the hardest edge is something I’ll always hold near and dear to my creative heart. Hence, I’ve always been amused and flattered when fans, editors, small press publishers, other writers, etc., tell me that I’m the King of Hardcore Horror. I don’t think that I’m the King of anything except maybe chain-smoking and my own particular recipe for crabcakes. Still, I’m flattered by the readership response to the major fund of my work over the last ten-plus years. It’s a kick.

  Don’t misinterpret me. I like all kinds of horror, not just the gross stuff. Quiet, soft, implied, roundabout, the material from the old days—I dig it all. My favorite horror novel, for instance, is the late, great Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady Of Darkness, which can hardly be described as “hardcore.” Ramsey Campbell’s story “The Depths,” while not overtly explicit, packs an incredible hardcore punch—proof of a talent that far exceeds anything I could accomplish on my very best day. Jack Ketchum’s Off Season and Dick Laymon’s The Cellar are among the best examples I’ve ever read of the “hardcore” done with discipline and exemplary prose style. Other favorites of the harder edge include Joe Haldeman’s “Monster,” David Drake’s “Smokey Joe,” comic king Grant Morrison’s “The Braille Encyclopedia,” Clive Barker’s “Rawhead Rex,” and Doug Winter’s “Splatter.” To me, these works represent hardcore horror as an art form, just as entertaining—and just as important—as Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” or Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Certainly, Lovecraft too, projected horribly explicit images of the so-called “gross-out” in a time when more detailed delineation would have been censored or flat-out rejected.

  My view has always been that as society moves onward into new ages, readers become more interested (or more curious) about horrors of a more explicit nature in fiction. Why? Because the same curiosity develops around every other aspect of our society. Read the newspapers for proof. Compare Time magazine today with Time magazine thirty years ago, and you’ll see. This, I will always contend, is a HEALTHY curiosity about our lives and times.

  Detractors scoff, and always will. But that’s universal. Some people don’t want things to change. Like everyone from Cornwallis to the courts charging William S. Burroughs with obscenity. Like Tipper Gore and Jesse Helms. Thankfully, I’m sure, our society will evolve in spite of such counter-sensibilities. All men and women are entitled to their beliefs. But as time moves on, Tipper notwithstanding, our interest in the details of humanity becomes more explicit. Hence, our fiction becomes more explicit, too. This serves as a logical reflection of maturing psyches. We live now in an explicit reality. And good fiction mirrors reality.

  Several voices in the horror genre have readily lambasted me for my Constitutional right to compose fiction as I see fit. One such detractor bluntly called me an “asshole” for executing that same right. Boo hoo, I’m crying, see? Such sentiments only add to the compilation of my above objections. There’s this snobbish, self-aggrandizing, egomaniacal, auto-masturbatory, holier-than-thou, smirking cult notion that if horror is explicit, then it must be junk.

  The book you hold in your hands is proof of the opposite. Is it gross? Hell, yes. It’s grosser than anything I’ve ever written or ever read. It’s pornographically violent and pornographically sexual. It delves into taboos so mind-boggling that the likes of Richard Ramirez and Richard Speck would be jealous, and it does so with an eagerness of vision and an energy to offend. I welcome this, because that which offends us also provokes us…to think.

  This is the kind of book that cloistered critical minds will brand as the work of a misogynistic hack. Actually, it’s expressly the contrary. It’s a piece of ultimately wicked art. It’s a fictional foray into the purview of some of the things that most cause us to wonder about what we—as a society—are giving birth to.

  Serial-murder, sexual dementia, undiluted sociopathy, violence as pastime…and all the other details of the darkest trimmings of humanity’s heart.

  The very worst that our species has to offer.

  I’m very curious about that, and I think that a lot of you are too. I also think it’s a normal curiosity.

  Fiction provides a metaphoric mirror to our times. And as the 20th Century has ended now, the reflection grows more disturbing; hence, so does horror fiction.

  The ’60s gave us a man on
the moon, the ’70s gave us The Collected Works of Samuel Beckett, and the ’80s gave us the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Look what the ’90s gave us: crack babies and Yugoslav rape camps, Susan Smith, Munchausen Syndrome, Oklahoma City, Internet sites for torture enthusiasts, and OJ’s blood all over the goddamn place. We’ve got The New Heroin Look, and modeling agencies scouting anorexia clinics with six-figure contracts. Convicted murderers at the U.S. Naval Academy; U.S. Army servicemen in Okinawa raping a 12-year-old because they didn’t want to spring for cab fa re to the red-light district. Jersey rich kids murdering their 1-hour-old baby and leaving it in a dumpster, and Larry Singleton fileting a woman in Tampa several years after being paroled on “good behavior” (he’d previously raped a 15-year-old girl and cut off her arms at the elbows). Nine-year-olds gang-raping adult women in New York, 6-year-olds in Richmond, CA, beating a 1-month-old baby to death “for kicks,” another 6-year-old in New York whipped, burned with cigarettes, vaginally mutilated, forced to eat her own excrement—all by her mother who then shattered the little girl’s skull against the wall—and yet another 6-year-old, in Boulder, strangled in her basement the day after Christmas. Last but not least, we’ve got Columbine High.

  That was in the LAST century. But what will THIS century bring?

  I think that the most honest forms of fiction will certainly give us a clue.

  If you’ve ever wondered about what hell might be like, wonder no further. Here’s a solid glimpse. It’s the hell right next door. It’s the hell the next time you get a flat tire and someone pulls up to help. It’s the hell that might be waiting for you the next time you walk down the street.

  It’s the hell that’s, regrettably, an integral part of our world.

  Welcome.

  Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer meets L.A. Confidential meets Angel Heart. How’s that sound for a nice, cheery mix? This unparalleled novel will take you deep, deep down into the snakepit of a psycho’s soul.

  Are you up for the ride? I’m betting you can’t hack it.

  I sure as hell couldn’t.

  Edward Lee

  Seattle, Washington

  13 January, 2000

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  BEWARE

  the OMEN

  of the

  TWELVE

  SIGNS

  &

  the

  TWELVE

  HOUSES

  — | — | —

  0.

  the

  GREAT WHEEL,

  the

  CALENDAR ROUND

  (the four elements)

  (worlds of earth & spirit joined)

  “Gentle reader, being–as you are–

  a cautious man of uncorrupted tastes,

  lay aside this disobliging work,

  as orgiastic as it is abject.

  Unless you’ve graduated from the school

  of Satan (Devil of a pedagogue!)

  the poems will be Greek to you, or else

  you’ll set me down for one more raving fool.

  If, however, your impassive eye

  can plunge into the chasms on each page,

  read on, my friend: you’ll learn to love me yet.

  Inquiring spirit, fellow-sufferer

  in search, even here, of your own Paradise,

  pity me… if not, to Hell with you!”

  —Charles Baudelaire,

  “Epigraph for a Banned Book.”

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  1.

  ARIES

  (fire)

  “Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed

  In one self place; but where we are is Hell

  & where Hell is, there must we ever be

  & to be short, when all the world dissolves

  & every creature shall be purified,

  All places shall be Hell…”

  —Christopher T. Marlowe

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  2.

  TAURUS

  (earth)

  “…And humanity cries peace, and brings war. And humanity speaks of glory and a magnificent destiny, and leads deeper into death and degradation. And humanity is brimful of promises and so-called good intentions, yet behind it is a trail of abject failure and betrayal. And humanity is afraid for it and is steeped in evil.

  And as with all things, by its fruit shall we know humanity. And humanity’s fruits are foul, bruised and bitter, and rotten to the core. And humanity’s home is the earth, and the earth is Hell.

  Now there is nothing more evil in the universe than man.

  His world is Hell, and he himself is the Devil.”

  —Robert de Grimston, Founder,

  The Process Church of the Final Judgment

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  3.

  GEMINI

  (air)

  “Many bulls have surrounded me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.”

  “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me.”

  “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.”

  —Psalm 22: v. 12, 16, 20.

  “I am the demon from the bottomless pit here on earth to create havoc and terror.

  I am War. I am death. I am destruction.”

  —David Berkowitz, Son of ()Sa()m,

  (alleged) member,

  The Twenty Two Disciples of Hell

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  4.

  cancer

  (water)

  “THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAT

  WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN

  IN PARAD I (C)E AND THEY I HAVE

  KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES.”

  —The Zodiac

  (excerpt from 3-part cryptogram)

  “BY P BY

  F A G

  I U

  R R N

  E

  S L A V E S

  B D By

  Y R

  K I O

  N C P

  I E

  F E

  E”

  —The Zodiac

  (acrostic on taunting letter).

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  5.

  LEO

  (fire)

  “Satan Trismegistus subtly rocks

  our ravished spirits on his wicked bed

  until the precious metal of our will

  is leached out by this cunning alchemist:

  the Devil’s hand directs our every move—

  the things we loathe become the things we love;

  day by day we drop through noisome shades

  quite undeterred on our descent to Hell.

  …

  If rape and arson, poison and the knife

  have not yet stitched their ludicrous designs

  onto the banal buckram of our fates,

  it is because our souls lack enterprise!”

  —Charles Baudelaire

  “To the Reader”

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  6.

  VIRGO

  (earth)

  “… I’ve got 360 people, I’ve got 36 states, in three different countries. My victims never knew what was going to happen to them. I’ve had shootings, knifings, strangulations, beatings, & I’ve participated in actual crucifixions of humans. All across the country, there’s people just like me, who set out to destroy human life.”

  —Henry Lee Lucas

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  7.

  LIBRA

  (air)