Duet for the Devil Read online

  Frank Hawkes is a big man. A rugged man. Right now, he stands in his living room. He is clad only in a tan dress shirt of conservative western cut & a pair of pale blue boxer shorts & black “Gold Toe” socks (the quality kind, that all those upscale men’s stores seem to tout…).

  The long shirttail hem dangles against his hairy, muscular thighs, the fabric shifting, crinkling across his flesh as he stoops to lift the hand-tooled shoulder holster lying atop his coffee table. The table is heavy oak, styled in studiedly rough-hewn, folksy fashion—”country,” in the popular idiom.

  The out-sized holster is of mahogany-brown leather, freshly scrubbed with saddle soap & polished to a waxy luster. He slips the leather strap over his left arm, giving it a brisk tug. It slithers into place, comfortable & familiar, looped over his brawny, ex-tackle’s shoulder, & under the hollow of his armpit. Frank is a dick. A professional lone gun for hire. A private eye.

  But Frank is also a man with a mission…

  Suitcases are piled on the floor beside the couch.

  He picks up his .44 Magnum long-barrel from the coffee table, the scarred knuckles of his big right hand brushing momentarily against the stack of leather-bound photo albums.

  He spins the cylinder. Smooth. Well-oiled. & fully chambered with the embossed disks of six clean brass casings glinting reassuringly. He sights down that deadly-accurate length of barrel. The Pachmeyer grip of the pistol cradled in his grasp soothes him like the held hand of an intimate, a lover…

  He holsters the gun, then reaches for his pack of Marlboros. Digs out a smoke, & lights it with a practiced flourish of his 24-kt. lighter.

  Frank walks down the hallway, enters the bathroom, flicks on the light, & stares into the mirror. His eyes are hard, slate-grey, like cold North Atlantic waters. He gives the can of Gillette foamy Lemon-Lime a few brisk shakes, squirts an ample portion into his palm, lathers up, & begins to shave, his cigarette still dangling from his lips. The reflection of its burning tip momentarily flashes of exploding mortar shells—

  His mouth suddenly tastes bitter. He flicks his smoke into the open toilet bowl. It hisses savagely, then sputters out…

  [ 4 ]

  IN THE WAR ROOM…he sits Buddha-like & naked on the stone floor, the steel blade of the ceremonial sword bridging his loins raising a crop of goosebumps where steel teases flesh— His frosty eyes fall upon a Civil War battlescene wherein Walt Whitman contemplates a bloody pile of amputated limbs & human debris, then the eyes fall out of focus & the amputee-ghosts roam within the confines of the deadly silent room— The candle flames flicker in the ghost-stirred air & shadows lick the brick walls & awaken the soldier-spirits sleeping in other oil paintings— Uttering the ungodly incantation, he awaits the succubus, his ritual erection rising to kiss the blood-hungry blade of the sword, swelling in blood-engorged anticipation of her arrival & of the carnal pleasure/pain to follow— One of the nine candles loses its flame as it is snuffed out by wet invisible fingers & the succubus appears as a snaking tendril of white smoke, billowing, expanding, languidly forming itself into the shape of a lithe woman, her fingers swimming toward his thighs as smoke becomes supple flesh— Wordsmoke whispers from her perfect lips, a solitary puff: “Professor…” & she touches his thighs with a delicate spider kiss— ­He trembles as she lifts the sword from his loins— He whispers as she carves shallow designs in the flesh of his hairless thighs— He moans in tortured ecstasy as she laps blood from the precise etchings— “Come, Professor…”

  She straddles his blood-slick loins & draws him into her snug center & he is transported to a battlefield at the edge of the world where a bloodmoon looms over the chaotic clash of opposing armies, & the screams of fallen soldiers are hymns to the merciless gods of war— This is the place where Hell invades earth, marked by human spillage, exploding entrails, sacrificial cannon fodder, smoldering gore, headless torsos…glory of war & he explodes in a deathless profusion of semen & blood & the succubus sucks him dry, his soul shriveling geometrically with each thick spurt & beat of pulse—

  [ 5 ]

  The young girl in the gingham dress bends to place her lips against the jagged puncture wound in Truman’s shattered right kneecap. Her small pink tongue laves a snail-trail of warm saliva around the perimeter of the raw, gaping hole. Her lips part. Her tongue thrusts into the bloody wound, lapping the copper-tasting essence into her mouth like a thirsty kitten working at a saucer of milk.

  She raises her head at the sound of approaching footsteps.

  “Can I do him, now, Uncle Mal…?” she asks. Her voice trembles with excitement.

  “No. Not yet, Julie,” says the stocky man standing beside her, the one she had addressed as “Uncle Mal.” He is stocky. Not fat. Despite His obvious middle-age. He appears to be in His late forties. His brown hair is touched with more than a hint of grey. His “brick-shithouse” build dwarfs Him slightly. He looks perhaps five-feet-eight-inches. His exact height is five ten & a half.

  “Can’t do our thing, yet,” He says, His voice notable for its absolute control, its total lack of accent or inflection. “Not here. We’ll have to take him with us… at least for a while.”

  The elastic strap stretches, rumpling the hair of His temples slightly, as Mal removes His glasses, folds them meticulously, & tucks them into His jacket pocket. He wears black, “spit-polished” halfboots. Surgical gloves sheathe both hands. His left is knotted around the handle of a black leather attaché case. The scoped Winchester Model 70 He clutches in the other seems totally out of sync…

  “Quick, Snuff, take a look in his car,” Mal orders. “Bring me his keys—”

  The short, ferret-faced man with the shoulder-length, dirty blonde hair & scraggly Vandyke beard hurries to comply. His eyes are hidden behind the quicksilver flash of mirrorshades.

  The translucent latex of his surgical gloves stretches like a second skin as he yanks open the car door & peers inside the hermetic closeness of the DELTA 88. A rush of recycled, burger-&-grease-scented air whooshes out as he tugs on the chrome handle, & the heavy door swings open smoothly, easily…

  “Holy crap! There’s a whole shitload a’ Bibles in th’ back seat, Mal!” Snuff yells to the stocky man.

  “Well, haul them out & dump them—fast!” Mal orders. “We need the space for the three of us…”

  Snuff stuffs the ignition key & its companions into the pocket of his Levi’s. Then begins to quickly unload the stack of boxes from the back seat, hauling them off the road & stashing them in a deep rut thickly clogged with weeds, some hundred-or-so feet from the blacktop.

  Mal, meanwhile, removes a small vial of yellowish powder from the flat leather case strapped inside His shirt, against His chest. A tattoo in various shades of blue, a demonic, tentacle-faced figure with pitchfork & dangling noose, & the partial inscription, “LUE EVI,” barely shows through the gap in His opened shirt-front.

  “Get away from him, Juliette. Now. I need some room—”

  The girl’s face betrays her petulance, but she obeys immediately. She has learned from experience. Her body has the scars to prove His teaching methods.

  “Go help your father, Juliette. We must clear the road—­quickly, before we have company…”

  “& don’t forget to put on your goddamn gloves,” He adds. “No mistakes—ever!” The strong inflection that He places upon the word strikes the ear with its deviation from His normal monotone.

  This is the man-monster known secretly as “Maldoror” (a nom de guerre, self-chosen from the title character of Lautréamont’s notorious tale of a seductively Evil visionary who claims: “I set my genius to portray the pleasures of cruelty!”). He flicks the combination lock of His attaché case into the required sequence, & opens it. Visible among the contents is a peculiar object that appears to be a twelve-inch kitchen knife with a white-cotten surgical-taped handle, its blade sheathed within an odd, wooden, perhaps hand-made scabbard. This is His infamous Count Zaroff knife… He removes several items from within, arranging
them carefully upon the pavement. He expertly, precisely cinches twin tourniquets of surgical band-rubber around Truman’s lower thighs, staunching the bloodflow.

  His skill as a medic is professional.

  His IQ has been verified at 167.

  For a razor-edged eternity of seconds, a phantom finger somewhere deep within Maldoror’s backbrain punches a button marked “FASTFORWARD,” & the old tapes whir & chatter through mnemonic tracks, strobing like a video in frenzied blue:

  Three years of pitching decks, doing hardtime onboard the minesweeper, U.S.S. Lamprey… strange ports & stranger vices for the taking… UCLA, double major, pre-med & philosophy… mastering the power over life & death… twining snakes & skulls & scalpels… Plato’s Timaeus, Metaphysical Neo-Kantianism, Nietzsche & de Sade… 4.0… entrepreneur, penny-ante pusher of speed & coke, long before those joneses went au courrant…

  Maldoror’s fingers, like carbon-steel pawls, prise open the Bible salesman’s pain-clenching jaws. Then force the cloying ball of hard rubber between his splayed lips, wedging it between his bared incisors. The black leather strap is tugged viciously, gouging the flesh of cheeks & nape. The brass buckle is tightly cinched. The bondage device efficiently gagging & silencing the wounded man.

  “I advise that you refrain from vomiting, Bible Man—you just might strangle on your own puke…” Mal warns.

  Truman’s wrists are pinned behind his back. The steel rings of handcuffs click securely. The sound exaggerated in the stillness like a cell door slamming shut…

  Maldoror douses Truman’s lacerated, ruptured flesh with alcohol. The helpless victim’s body spasms with incendiary agony.

  Maldoror smears the yellowish powder of Sulfathiozole Sodium (purchased in a pet shop several states away…) into Truman’s open wounds.

  Maldoror rolls the man onto his side. Tugs the Bible salesman’s blood-drenched trousers down around his knees, exposing the fishbelly-white expanse of blubbery buttocks…

  The wicked needle of a hypodermic glistens like a thorn of flame in the slanting rays of mid-afternoon sun. Maldoror inserts the tip into a half-empty vial of Demerol. Carefully calibrates a heavy jolt. Brandishes the apparatus in an upthrust angle. Flicks the cylinder with the sheathed nail of His middle finger. Depresses the plunger gently, seemingly fascinated by the spritz of opiate-like drug as He bleeds off the lethal pocket of air…

  With practiced skill He slides the needle into the exposed skin of the Bible salesman’s right buttock & rams the plunger home, watching with obvious excitement as the fluid is injected into the underlying musculature…

  The tape unwinds again within the stocky killer’s brain.

  A fellow student bribed—coke for his cravings bartered for access into Legrand’s Funeral Parlor, where the user works as attendant…caught in the act of sexually violating a sixteen-year-old blonde’s al­ready-raped-&-mutilated corpse…

  Maldoror unzips His trousers, freeing His throbbing erection…

  Old Man Legrand—staring horrorstruck at this grossly obscene spectacle of the cadaver-rutting Beast spinning out His throes of morbid ecstasy…

  Maldoror begins, openly, to masturbate Himself …

  Fear of lost business silencing the scandal…

  But George Brittain, the soon-to-become mystery killer, the proto-Maldoror, drops out & goes subterranean until He no longer fears reprisal…

  [ 6 ]

  Frank Hawkes stands before the elevator door, his broad shoulders hunched slightly as his huge hands clutch the collective handles of his cluster of bulging suitcases.

  Elijah waits beside him. Elijah, silent & observing. Elijah, whose role as sole companion is a destiny of riding the endless blacktop ribbon to oblivion, as they seek to unmask the ever-shifting face of the one Frank has long-since termed, “The Beast.”

  Once, Frank sought justice. Once, Frank entertained the fleeting fantasy of a trial proscribed by law & carried out in due accordance with its statutes.

  But that was once, & this is now. & daydreams of justice have transformed themselves into the wakeful nights & waking nightmares of obsessive Vengeance, into an endless highway rolling onward towards Redemption or Apocalypse. Vengeance, swift & sudden as Kansas lightning. Imagined against a yellow-grey sky, upon a plain that stretches beyond the limitless horizon, as the clouds boil & break like Perdition’s surf above, & the cyclone’s gyre begins its awe-ful, tortured doom-course. The Endless Battle, the barbaric perceived it….

  Or the One Leg of Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Night Sky, to the inventive Aztecs: Tezcatlipoca, protean bringer of black magicks, introducer of human sacrifice, his nagual, his animal guise, the jaguar, its spotted pelt the starry sky…

  Frank’s pursuit of his elusive quarry has long crossed the threshold that separates the mundane from the mythic. He has opened doors that cannot be closed. Perhaps it is the Celtic Wi1d Hunt that sweeps Elijah & him along, but a Wild Hunt where Hellequin seeks Hellequin in an eternal maze of smoke & mirrors.

  But this he fails to recognize…as yet. As for the future, he has not looked into the cards.

  As for the past, it is one blur of roads & towns & cities without ending, of face-upon-face-upon-face—some grave-cold, already ravaged by the Beast, some etched with pain by the proximity of the Angel of Abominations, by the Annihilating Angel’s passing, most but blank pieces in a greater puzzle.

  As for the future & the mythic nature of his quest—Frank Hawkes perceives it as The Final Showdown.

  As for now, his shadow looms against the elevator’s waiting door.

  [ 7 ]

  The moon burns silver—a pox-scarred corpse-rind of a face.

  The moon burns red—like a festered wound or the eye of Hell, or, perhaps, in some opium-sweating dream, the yawning cunt-mouth of the Whore of Babylon.

  The moon burns blue—flickering hypnotically, provoking the perverse, seducing all who watch into the deepest depths of fevered melancholia, depravity & morbid lust.

  A man searches the night alleys for a phantom legend. The whisper of the sea is close at hand. The alleys twist & disappear. These are the blackest shadows of a city/town/village soul-sick & Evil-rumored, cankered with the traffickings of grossest blasphemy & vice. He has searched through many alleys, through many towns, through many lands. In this particular cesspool of rat warrens & wharves, of taverns & tattoo parlors & slut-mills & shooting galleries & gambling dens, he searches for the ultimate, elusive place of tainted & forbidden pleasures—a place where torture & death are bought & sold…

  It may be Algier or Tunis, where the flesh is bartered on the block, where ru’ asa’ rule & nurture pain-as-art, circa 1649.

  It may be Jamaica, 1716, the pirate stronghold of Port Royal.

  It may be Shanghai or San Francisco, 1856 (fourteen-hundred murders in three years…), the smoke of opium coils in the breeze.

  It may be Marseilles, the waterfront in 1857.

  It may be London, 1865, in the slums that infect the quays & banks of the Thames, where the Beggars’ Banquet meets.

  It may be Canton, white slaves & yellow, city of sanpans & secretly-sold children, the year: 1905.

  It may be New Orleans, the funk of Blues whispers of sin & sex & Mary Jane & needles, 1927.

  It may be Havana, 1948, haven of the decadent, its trade in gambling & blue films & whores.

  It may be Saigon or Copenhagen, 1980, child-sex & S&M.

  A single thread connects all these, a certain rumored visitation…

  Of an evil that transcends the boundaries of Space & Time, weaving a haunted spell of perversity & pain, then disappearing…

  A man searches the night alleys for a phantom legend. The ultimate snuff parlor, the place known always (although in the lingo of a hundred tongues translated…) as “THE MERMAID’S INN.”

  [ 8 ]

  Maldoror groans, & shudders out His lust, ejaculating onto the Bible salesman’s nakedly exposed thighs & buttocks…

  Subterranean in Tijuana, 1967—a tavern
offering pleasures to whet the bizarre appetites of even the most jaded of the forever-damned…

  His fly rasps shut.

  “& Onan spilled his seed—right…?”

  “Well, look what they’re up to—” Maldoror points to the relatively open stretch of meadow, where Snuff & Juliette are standing side by side. “A bit of desecration, eh?”

  The young girl holds her father’s bobbing penis, directing the stream of stinking urine that he voids into the weed-choked rut, splattering the Holy Scriptures with his tainted piss…

  “Quit fiddling & farting around, you two. I need some help here…” Maldoror commands.

  The ferret-faced skell from Hell steps quickly to aid the serge-suited Maldoror, Medic of Mutilations. Snuff strips off the navy-blue windbreaker that he wears unzipped to midriff & hands it to Julie. The muscles in his wiry arms are tight knots tugging at the deadweight bulk of the trussed Truman. The sleeves of his black T-shirt ride up with his exertions, exposing a jailhouse tattoo on his left arm emblazoned, “666.” His right arm bears a circled “A”: the universal signature of anarchy…

  Exposed also is the custom twin-shoulder nylon webwork that holsters a Cobray M-11/9mm, semi-auto pistol (hotrodded to full…), left-slung, & the carefully balanced pair of Velcro’d three-cell magazine pouches. Ninety-six rounds per side…

  Julie carries her shoes & suitcase she has retrieved from its cache-place near the thicket of fiery maples lining the road.

  “You know, Bible Hawker, you & I have a lot in common. You peddle Salvation, while I, long ago, gave up My chosen career—to become the Door-to-Door Death Salesman…” Maldoror taunts.