Duet for the Devil Read online

  “I’m hot.” Julie purrs. “Y’ gonna do me, now, Daddy…?”

  “Get your ass in the car. Right now. & quit shaking it in front of your old man when he’s supposed to be helping Me—”

  The heavy car door slams.

  “Looks like the fat fucker’s crapped hisself, he’s so goddamned scared!” Snuff says.

  “Systemic trauma. Shock from the injuries.” Typical Maldoror answers.

  & Snuff & Maldoror lower the blood-&-feces-stained bulk of Truman Gilmore down into the dark, coffin-like vault of the opened trunk of the Olds.

  “Well, Bible Man, welcome to the remake of The 120 Days of Sodom,” Maldoror chuckles harshly.

  The lid of the trunk thuds shut with the finality of a death certificate.

  [ 9 ]

  The rumbling increases from above.

  The bell chimes.

  The twin doors jerk open, as if the two halves are tugged by giant hands.

  Frank & Elijah step into the waiting cage, its smoked glass walls replicating their images into infinity. A common enough act. But, at its most primitive, an act of faith, trusting their frail flesh to the god in the machine. An act that most likely would reduce the staunchest soul among a warband of Apapocuva-Guarani cannibals to terror tremors. A close-walled cage, suspended by unseen cables within a shaft equally invisible to the passenger or prisoner within. Great magicks, these, as the cage quivers, there is a deep-timbered hum, a sudden lurch of floor beneath their feet, & a giddy sensation of descent…

  The DOWN lamp in the now abandoned hallway flickers red like some embered eye of Hell.

  With the lurch comes a rush into the depths of memory—

  Yes. Into the pit of beckoning madness…

  California, Land of Flower-Power Dreams…

  October 30, 1966: a young girl, a cheerleader, studying late at the library of Riverside City College is slashed to death, nearly decapitated, by the unleashed fury of her assailant, His Timex wristwatch torn loose & left behind. Evidence. Among other evidence. But even now, the case remains officially unsolved. A potential link a macabre poem carved into a desktop, its signature, “Z”…

  December 20, 1968: a seventeen-year-old student & his female companion, still sweet-sixteen, are shot to death while parked on Lake Herman Road, a desolate, secluded stretch well-known as a local lover’s lane. Two youngsters & a Rambler station wagon, riddled with bullets, pooled in blood. Nine bullets with a “six & six” land-&-grooving pattern. A stocky man in a windbreaker, the mysterious killer who vanished somewhere into the well of the Great Night, unapprehended…

  July 5, 1969: a twenty-two-year-old wife & waitress—already once-divorced, party girl & frequent date of off-duty cops, apparently still searching for her inner self, unable to accept her chosen role—is pursued through the city streets of downtown Vallejo by a sinister, light-colored car. It is near midnight, & the Hellride leads her & her male companion farther, ever farther, out into the deserted countryside. Out onto yet another local lover’s lane, to the shadowed parking lot of the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course. She is shot to death. Nine rounds from a 9mm Luger emptied into her yielding flesh. Her friend seriously wounded. By a stocky man in a Navy-style windbreaker. By a man who called the local police station half an hour later to confess His guilt as slayer in this “double homicide,” as well as that of the year before. Clues of an ex-husband that she feared—married under the assumed name, “Phillips,” in January 1966, five months following his discharge from San Francisco’s Army Presidio. Now believed residing somewhere in Mexico. Clues of a man who tracked & tormented the slain girl with His frequent & unwanted public presence. Yet no one could offer a positive identification. As if He were some phantom. A phantom with possible links to the Virgin Islands, where she & her ex-husband had honeymooned, with possible links to drug deals & previous murder. To the occult. Thirteen cents in change found in the purse of the deceased.

  July 31, 1969: Three separate segments of a cryptic cipher code are mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner & the Vallejo Times-Herald.

  August 7, 1969: a three-page letter to the Vallejo Times-Herald. The mystery killer now known as “Zodiac” has at last announced His reign of terror that shall claim uncounted lives…

  September 27, 1969: two Pacific Union College students are ambushed at Lake Berryessa. A stocky man wearing a mock-medieval executioner’s-type hood & tabard with crossed-circle emblazoned on the chest. Held at gunpoint. Bound with lengths of clothesline. Both stabbed repeatedly with a peculiar, foot-long blade—described as “maybe a bayonet or breadknife.” The boy survives. The girl dies of twenty-four wounds—ten in her back, one full-length into her chest, one each into her breasts, her groin & abdomen, the other nine piercing her side. A message scrawled in black felt-tip pen upon his white Karmann Ghia’s door. An eerie phone call to the Napa Sheriff’s Office: “I want to report a murder—no, a double murder… I’m the one that did it.”

  October 11, 1969: a cabbie shot execution-style by a stocky man, nearby the Presidio. Two days later a letter follows, along with a bloody scrap of the slain man’s shirt enclosed…

  The images flash through Frank’s mind, like signposts on an endless, forward-racing highway.

  Reality is a brief jolt of arrested motion, as the elevator lurches to a halt.

  The doors slide open, & he & Elijah stroll out into the subterranean parking lot of his homebase Chicago highrise apartment.

  [ 10 ]

  He moves through the tinted smoke as though walking underwater, buoyed by something unseen in the thick atmosphere, for he is as yet unburdened by the weight of history (his story or someone else’s?). He detours around the dock workers’ game of poison darts & approaches the bar which resembles the prow of a miniature ship. The cadaverous barkeep looks at him with dead eyes, & says, “What’s your pleasure, mate?” He gives the question deep consideration, formulates his answer but doesn’t dare speak the unspeakable—not yet, not while he still walks on sea legs. Instead, he orders a glass of ale & pays for it with one of the gold coins he took from the damp pocket of the rotting corpse he stumbled over in that fog-choked alley an hour ago. The barkeep sniffs the coin, then bites it.

  “Dead man’s gold,” he mutters as he moves stiffly to the other end of the bar to refill the mug of a big man with a hairless head of assorted tattoos.

  An amplified voice echoes above the din of THE MERMAID’S INN: “Hold on to your family jewels, mates. Here’s the exotic Barnacle Belle!”

  The lights dim & two spotlights, one azure & one cobalt, cut through the smoke, their shafts meeting in an inverted “V” on the dancer who revs her hips to the raunchy music. What appear to be barnacles are attached to her otherwise-naked body. Hoots & half-demented howls arise from the crowd as Belle goes into her bump-&-grind routine. With movements in near-perfect sync with the hypnotic tune, she begins to strip the barnacles from her body, leaving bloody wounds in her flesh.

  “Fucking impossible,” the man says, banging his mug of ale on the bar.

  “Nothing’s impossible here,” says the barkeep, looking more & more like a holocaust victim.

  [ 11 ]

  Two-lane blacktop boils away in the wake of the big white Delta 88, a swirling of flame-hued autumn leaves marking their slipstream…

  Maldoror has drawn on a pair of supple black leather gloves, masking the surgical gloves of micropore that He wears beneath.

  He eyes the speedometer carefully, keeping the stolen automobile just a cunt hair below the posted legal limit.

  Snuff worms his hand down deep into the tight-stretched slit of his denims’ right hip pocket, digs out a miniature silver coffin (the kind Goth shops sell as earrings…), & prises open the hinged lid with the edge of his thumbnail. He chuckles to himself as the sight of his elastic-gloved thrust of thumb reminds him of a condom sheath bagging an upthrust erection—

  His own penis gives a sympathetic lurch at the keyed suggestion, the bare-skinn
ed flash of his daughter’s thighs in the rearview mirror, & juxtaposed images of the bloody, ragged bullet wounds in the Bible salesman’s shattered kneecaps & the sun-glinting blade of the axe raised in a high-swung arc, then curving sinuously downwards flashing deathpromise with a singing keen as he drives the razor-sharp wedge of the blade into the shattering pumpkin-flesh of that balding, overall-clad farmer’s skull, splattering bone & brains & blood, cleaving downwards through neck & vertebrae, splitting torso & abdomen like a rotten stump, the impetus of the blade halted only by the jarring crunch as finely honed steel impacts pelvic girdle…

  Snuff holds the miniature coffin carefully in his left hand. With the fingers of his right, he reaches down into the front of his T-shirt & draws out a tiny silver spoon. It is delicate, sensuous in its motif: styled in high Art Nouveau, the tip of the handle a beautiful girl’s face, framed in a swirling cascade of hair that twines down the slender length to encircle the hollow of the bowl.

  The spoon dangles from a silver chain looped around his neck. Rays of westering sunlight glint on its smoothly polished surface…

  Snuff’s eyes fix on the image reflected in the rearview mirror:

  The soft curves of his young daughter’s face, tanned to a rich, olive-brown, the flesh warm & radiant where the sunlight teases across her left, westward-exposed side, darkly, mysteriously cool on the right, the shadowed side. Equinox. The word enters his mind through chance associations. One of those many occult-sounding words that Mal frequently uses, invests with the magicks of His bizarre structure of beliefs, leaves floating in only half-perceived meaning in His henchman’s well of subconscious memory…

  Snuff thrusts his fingers into his right hip pocket, tugs out the flattish disk of a woman’s compact, faux tortoiseshell, flashes on the memento’s former owner, a lovely, deliciously long-legged, twenty-two-year-old redhead (dead these seven, eight…? years), who had suffered with such exquisite agonies before he had slashed her swanlike throat to bloody ribbons…

  Juliette’s lips pout seductively, invitingly, as she applies a fresh glaze of coral lip gloss to the flaring, peevish set of their precocious, naughty-little-minx-Lolita-wickedness, their promise of XXX-rated expertise…

  Snuff flips open the compact’s lid. Stares into his own hollow-eyed mask of seething hungers. Exposes the 24-kt. razor & tiny, flute like straw that are prized fetishes of his fastlane addiction.

  His face is reflected, distorted by their slanted planes & curves into demonic caricatures of inner self…

  In the rearview mirror, his daughter’s dark hair cascades about her slender shoulders, like ravens’ wings swirling, fluttering in a world half sunfire half shadow…

  [ 12 ]

  The gunmetal silver Stingray is nosing almost due south, on Interstate 75. Warren “Frank” Hawkes just passed Gainseville about half an hour ago, & he’s scanning the road signs carefully—he doesn’t want to miss the turnoff east to Ocala.

  The T-top of the Stingray is open, & Frank’s dark, silverstreaked hair is ruffled by the slipstream rush of humid air.

  His companion’s hair is breezeblown, also, as he thrusts his face forward into the wind, leaning out of the passenger window. He doesn’t mind a few stray bugs squashed up his nose at a cumulative speed well in excess of seventy m.p.h. He doesn’t mind the way his ears flap in the breeze, either. After all, it’s a pretty good buzz for a redbone hound.

  Frank digs into his almost-empty pack of smokes. Cellophane crinkles & crackles as his large yet agile fingers pry out another Marlboro. Only five more left, he notes, better restock ASAP… He punches in the knob with its generic neo-hieroglyph denoting “LIGHTER” until the coil glows yellow orange, then brushes its searing surface to the tip of the cigarette clenched between his lips with a steady nonchalance that telegraphs “habitual” & the inferred, “chain smoker,” like a cocksure heavyweight going for a KO in the first two rounds…

  Frank drags deep. Senses the satisfaction of tinder-dry tobacco smoldering to grey-white ash, the acrid bite of smoke pulled in a forced downdraft through his throat into the empty caverns of his lungs; then exhaled with slow, pleasurable deliberation.

  “Damn, Elijah, sure wish I had a cold Bud right now!” he muses to the dog.

  For just a moment, he allows himself the luxury of savoring his petty indulgences. Not bad for a kid from Wichita, he thinks, the flash of déjà vu strong as he does so. The gold sparks on his wrist in the September sunset’s fire as he flexes just enough to scope the dial of his vintage Rolex Daytona: 5:57. The massive span of his left hand’s scarred fingers is wrapped easily around the wheel, guiding the sleek, bulletlike bulk of every teenage all-American boy’s automotive wet dream through the steady stream of freeway traffic past the b1ur of whiteline & billboards & road signs.

  To another rendezvous with the aftermath of violent death:

  News of a brutally murdered eight-year-old black girl. One Stephanie Jefferson. Reported missing. Discovered two weeks later in a drainage ditch behind a junkyard. Her nude body (or at least what was left of it) barely concealed beneath a couple of discarded truck tires. Sexually violated: before or after death…? The condition & decomposition of her corpse made it impossible to answer accurately. Ninety-plus-degree weather & high humidity. The profusion of native insectivora. But undoubtedly the work of a sexual sadist. She was found hog-tied & hog-butchered. With the marks of burns still visible upon her rotting flesh…

  [ 13 ]

  “There’s always room at the Inn,” says the emaciated man behind the cobalt quicksilver shades (just a moment ago, his dead eyes stared nakedly exposed—or was it an illusion…?) He leans against the brick wall with a go-to-Hell nonchalance.

  “You the innkeeper?” asks the snuff seeker, impatiently rubbing the stubble on his chin.

  “They call me ‘Professor,’” he says with a snarl-like twist of thin, bloodless lips. “The Inn needs no keeper. It keeps itself. I keep tabs on the comings & goings of mindless mortals. Scum like you make your pitiful marks on the world, & I mark it down in the Devil’s history book. I’m Bachelor of Battles. Ph.D. of Death, & I can show you a fine fucking time if you possess the proper mettle.”

  “You know what I’m after?”

  “Fucking A, Jack. You’re all after the same sad shit.”

  The man reaches down for his boot knife & thrusts the blade against the Professor’s throat. “How’s this for the proper metal? Now, you listen to me, Doctor of Death. They call me ‘Slice.’ I’m sure you can guess why. Now, where’s the real action in this joint?”

  Professor smiles, showing stained teeth, & spits: “Go ahead, cut me.”

  Slice notices two disturbing things: the man has a bulging erection, & he is chained to the brick wall. Shifting his strategy, Slice says, “Tell me where the snuff stuff is, then I’ll cut you.”

  “The door at the end of the hall takes you down to the catacombs.”

  “Okay, Doc. A deal’s a deal.” He carves a bloody crescent in Professor’s pale cheek, then knees him in the groin in hopes of spoiling the pervert’s pleasure.

  Professor retches & heaves a stinking stream of bile. His blue-tinted glasses dangle from one ear, & the stare of his unfettered milky eyes follows Slice down the dim corridor. In a clotted voice he shouts: “We’ll do business again, Pilgrim!”

  Slipping his blood-whetted knife back into his boot, Slice opens the heavy wooden door, & descends groove-worn stone steps in darkness. The air is damp, stained with the slaughterhouse scent of bloody death—this not lost on his twisting, tumescent member, nor is it lost in that cavernous pit of carnal hunger, dark & inexplicable, that squirming serpentine nest of overpowering lust for pain-pleasure & death-the-mystical-doorway to some godless eternity—

  Loose the serpents upon this ignorant imperfect world! Free these conscious-stricken monkeys from their carnal confusion & stupid scams. Let Death be the pure, expertly-cut diamond of rare truth! The onomatopoetic ontology of orgasmic onus, omnivorous pussy, opaq
ue ooze of penile emission, onrushing onslaught upon your one-horse philosophy—say OHM, O ye outlaws & outlanders, OHM to that Olympus of electric orgies, amen. ahmen. O Man. Omen, muthafucker.

  He enters the first chamber beneath the Inn, & joins a small clot of Evil-smelling spectators, zombies by their eyes & outfits, huddled around a woman with no arms & no legs. Her hideous stumps were long ago cauterized by the house dick, who still speaks the hardboiled lingo of those Chandleresque detective tales from America’s era of flagging innocence. The woman wears only a spike-studded collar around her neck & the collar is attached to a wall by a ten-foot chain. As the first stiff crawls between the stumps of her thighs, she begins to jabber like a tongue-tied idiot. Slice smiles with the realization that her tongue has been reduced to a tiny stump of muscle. The humping corpse pumps her with the graceless passions of the dead, & the woman’s bum bounces on the stone floor like a fleshy basketball.

  “Cute,” muses Slice, “but not my cup of tea.” He approaches the house dick, who stands by the wall with arms folded across his blood-spattered tie. “So where’s the snuff stuff?” asks Slice.

  The house dick cracks a crooked smile & spouts. “I had you pegged as a pattycake pansy, but I see now you ain’t like them other zipless zombies. Follow me, pal.”

  He follows. Down a brick, bowel-like corridor. Tagging along like a hungry stray dog behind the dick. Two brutes seize him, one on each arm, & throw him against the wall & clasp manacles on his wrists. Slice tries to fight them off but his arms are now chained to the wall & the brute with the shaved head & mascara & purple eyeshadow punches him in the gut.