Five years ago when Milo was only thirteen he cut his mother"s old bear rug into strips and then sewed these pieces to his flesh. It had taken the better part of one night of suppressing his cries of pain as he threaded the needle time and again with thick woolen thread and pushed it through in loop after loop to secure the fur to his body. It had become quite slippery with his blood but this only served to give it and him a magical sheen when he looked into the mirror afterward.
I have entered the pelt of an animal.
I have become the beast.
Then he ran away to join Fatima"s Freak Tent outside the city limits. All the comely mutant ladies welcomed him, clucking and t.i.ttering with a singsong babble of delight. They touched him with their stumps and flippers, ran their bearded cheeks across his beardless ones, held fast his gasping face between their b.r.e.a.s.t.s that were either skeletal or mammoth mounds of perfumed fat. They cooed over Milo"s ruined flesh and counterfeit hide, crawling around him on all fours, proclaiming, "You are the king of the wolves!"
Then his mother came to drive him home before her with a stick, haranguing him every mile of the way.
If only she"d beaten him with her own hands, scratched at him until he bled. But she never touched him.
Had she ever touched him? Milo couldn"t remember the feel of her hands ever. She pushed food at him, had even pushed the bottle toward him when he was a baby. Had left him, naked for days at a time, in his own excrement, before finally hosing him down.
But she must have touched him at some time. To teach him to walk, to take care of himself so that she wouldn"t have to make contact. He didn"t remember.
Had he wanted to be an animal? He"d seen the tantalizing women of Fatima"s and he needed to be touched. He had always been too perfect. Milo wasn"t only a handsome boy, he was a flawless beauty. It might have made him popular in his exquisiteness if it hadn"t been such a dark beauty, so keenly edged that he seemed to have been carved from dark bone. And it would likely have helped his cause if he"d been willing to speak to people. But Milo mostly growled at folks, deep within his velvet throat like a beast. Most people around probably didn"t know he could talk. And he never talked to his mother. What would he say if he did? Touch me! Hold me? Use your fists and teeth until I am raw with you.
His mother hissed, "Devilchild."
She"d left him on a dozen different doorsteps when he was an infant but the sheriff had always made her claim him. Why hadn"t she left him at Fatima"s then where he"d been so immediately accepted-even if he"d had to alter himself to do so? Was it because she"d become accustomed to brutalizing him from a distance? Had this granted her an outlet and an excuse for the ruin her own life had become?
Milo sat crosslegged before the mirror, b.u.t.t naked on the cold floor, watching as his punctured skin slowly healed without scarring. No, he was too gorgeous for the holes to stay cut into his flesh. He wished the marks had remained, that he was pocked forever, for perfection marked him as being apart from all else. It made him furious, sitting there scratching himself, raking the elegant half-moons of his nails over his arms and face, desperate for touch, for sensation. Sometimes the need to be handled grew so frantic that mauling became a parody of contact. He dreamed of being torn apart by animals and that had to be a symbol of closeness burned in effigy. He healed, every time. The king of the wolves slunk ignominiously from Milo"s sad life.
Fatima"s special ladies turned away from him without recognizing him at all when his Uncle Rabe treated him to the carnival a few months later. They paraded their luscious deformities on the simple, ramshackle stage, shaking jelly mounds of flab or being wheeled on geek carts or doing perverse double-jointed calisthenics as they stared blankly into s.p.a.ce. Smiles were frozen on their faces, refusing to acknowledge his presence at the foot of the stage, pleading up at them, craving a grope of their voluptuousness, wishing for any tidbit they might deign to grant this miserable, lonely boy.
Could it be that they had known who he was but realized that he wasn"t one of them after all? He wanted to rea.s.sure them that he hadn"t been laughing at them. It hadn"t been a charade.
"I wasn"t mocking you, Lizard Lady," he whispered as the pucker-fleshed damsel wriggled by. "I love you. I only want to stroke and be absorbed by your travesty."
She didn"t look his way but did seem to slow down as she slithered past him in the procession.
"You say something, Milo?" Rabe asked in surprise. He"d never heard the kid speak before.
Milo growled a response, felt it itch in his throat.
Two years ago on Milo"s sixteenth birthday he went to Caine"s Tattoo Parlour and had himself covered with teeth. There were trenchant wolf sabers and yellow canine needles, b.l.o.o.d.y fangs, gleaming feral thorns, bared in snarling grimaces and in wide-open attack. His whole body became a dangerous mouth.
"Look like yer bein" et alive," his mother scoffed as she spat.
Grrrrrrrrrrroooowwwwwwwwwwlllllllllllll, he replied.
Was he being eaten or was it protective camouflage?
I enter the jaws of death.
I become the jaws of death.
Was to enter them the same as being?
Milo began to lift weights until his slender Adonis form put on coils of muscle, stretching the threatening shows of teeth into rictuses of animal agony, throes of creature pa.s.sion. Biceps and triceps oiled and flexing, he bristled within his cage of fangs. He could feel the grazing by their rotted but powerful enamel against his skin. He would wake in the night straining against a dream of violence to find that some had broken the veneer of his flesh to leave Milo speckled in hot blood.
"This is interesting," he said to himself, smiling as he licked the blood off, reconsuming it. He turned his elbows back, his knees back as he"d seen Fatima"s ladies do. He cleaned his genitals as well as he could, shaking flecks of spittle from his lips. It was a dusky flavor, copper and salt like the bodies of the freak women.
He imagined that the spirits of the beasts who owned the many teeth that had been inscribed in his skin crept up in the shadows of the night to claim their stolen jaws. Then they fled to hunt under a savage moon that didn"t even need to be full like the stories said. A full moon was all right because it represented a haunch of meat, but a sliver of a crescent was just as well for it more nearly resembled a tooth. On slick ground they pursued the terror-stricken people and animals that Milo saw in his nightmares. And when they would catch their prey, oh, how they teased them, circling with wordless growls deep inside erotic throats. Reaching in to slash some meaty but otherwise non-mortal area, circling, biting, and bellowing thunder to the sky, laughing a jackal"s laugh even as they showed a wolf"s prowess. They then lunged to shake the soft, living bodies until riven meat steamed.
And Milo dreamed it, knew well what these spirit wolves were up to as they playfully snapped at squirts of arterial blood that took to the air like battalions of scarlet b.u.t.terflies. As they rolled in the ribbons of ropy intestines like puppies with yarn b.a.l.l.s. As they grew so aroused by the peppery carnal odor of carrion matted into one another"s fur that they mounted each other indiscriminately. They licked each other"s furry b.a.l.l.s and a.s.sholes, domineered and submitted with howls of rage and rapture. Milo knew because he had worn the images of their fangs. The spirit wolves had taken their fangs back, and his spirit rode in their mouths as they committed their carnal crimes with the unbridled compa.s.sion of the predator. The graphic layers of carca.s.ses spread open, the rutting, even ravishing the fresh corpses of the kill left Milo whining in his sleep, feverish from the ecstatic sensations of brute manipulation.
He"d wake up, feel the press of fangs on his flesh, the heat of blood across his skin that seemed to be more in evidence as each night pa.s.sed. He was intoxicated by this rush of what had always been forbidden to him-contact. Even if it was brutal butchery. He had been there and tasted every sc.r.a.p of gore, aching with its burn, savoring the pheromones of carnage and s.e.x as they released like bubbles of boiling sugar. Had awakened close to his shroud of teeth, sticky and flushed.
Then one night upon opening his eyes he found a bloodied half of a breast on the sheets, the nipple bisected raggedly and the lymphatic glands trailing in uneven tendrils. Milo leapt up and raced to his mother"s bedroom. He had to peek through the keyhole because she"d always kept the door locked against him. But he might have gotten in through her window, mightn"t he? Had he murdered her at last, torn her callous body apart with his bare hands while he"d been dreaming of mercurial moonlight and the delirium to be found in galvanic homicide?
Her snore told him she was all right. He could see her flopping on the mattress and snorting, the sour stench of cheap whiskey gusting across the room. Milo shook his head in relief and confusion. Whose breast was it?
He searched the house and the yard. There were no other body parts. Was the blood on his skin not his own?
The next night the spirit wolves came to reclaim their teeth. He rode upon their tongues, clinging to the ball.u.s.trades of their honed incisors as they raced two counties over to kill three horses in a bluegreen pasture. The horses" eyes bulged as they reared, trying to defend themselves with their hooves. Wolves jumped onto their backs to sink lethal fangs into their necks and skulls. They screamed almost like people did. The phallus of one stallion had been as tough as an old boot, but the foal inside one of the mares was as tender as b.u.t.ter.
The dream faded and Milo struggled to wake up. He saw shadows leaving his room. He staggered out of bed and began to follow. Out in the yard their shapes humped, twisted, bent tortuously. And then they became men. He gasped. Were they not wolves in the spirit? Had they always possessed real flesh and bones?
Milo followed as they went beyond the edge of town, to Fatima"s. Looking through a slit in the tent, Milo observed the freak ladies bathing the men, rubbing them down with fluffy towels, wrapping them in silk robes. They patted and caressed the men but never kissed them, never spread their legs for them. Their slavish devotions consisted only of touching, as they had been doing with Milo when he"d visited the tent years before.
Did the women know that these creatures had just been slaughtering livestock this night, human beings on other nights? Couldn"t they smell the meat and blood on them?
He growled in the back of his throat, thinking. Yes, the women knew. And it didn"t matter. They must have thought he was one of these when he"d run away to Fatima"s when he was only thirteen, a bear rug st.i.tched to his skin.
Or maybe they had only been humoring him, recognizing him as a would-be cub, a fledgling beast.
Milo inhaled sharply, frightened of what he was going to do next. He flexed his muscles to give him courage and then boldly walked into the tent. The women cried out in surprise and alarm to fall back to positions behind the furniture. The men jumped to their feet, eyes faintly red at the edges, black at the centers, like moons emerging from full eclipse.
"I know who you are. I wish to become one of you," he stated as if this was reasonable. Did he not wear their power on his skin in tattoo? Had he not ridden to their places of slaughter with them in the shadows of his nightmares?
The men glanced at each other, then turned back to him and grunted.
It made him angry that he"d broken his usual silence to speak to them. And they wouldn"t speak back to him.
"Will you not help me?" he demanded.
One of the men stepped forward, wetting his lips from a cup of wine.
"We can"t bite you," the man said with slurring, lispy words. "We have no teeth."
The men laughed, pink gums poking out in the half-light from the tent"s lamps.
The freak women t.i.ttered behind the furniture, peering up shyly to stare at Milo.
"Please help me," Milo pleaded. "I want to live your life. I need to live it. It is the only touching I have ever known."
One of the men rubbed a stubbly chin. "There is one way," he replied tentatively. "Not just saliva carries the germ of the were. s.e.m.e.n does, too."
Milo started as if he"d been slapped. He imagined bending over a table so that each of these men could take their turns ramming their hardness into his r.e.c.t.u.m, until they were spent and he was contaminated. And by the nasty leers on their faces, he knew he would have to endure all of them, not just the one it might take to grant him their shifting powers.
But he wanted it so badly.
I enter the jaws of death.
I become the jaws of death.
After all, the wolves frolicking amid the pieces of their kills had f.u.c.ked one another. It hadn"t repulsed him then.
Even the most brutal touch was still a touch in a wasteland of isolation. And it had to hurt for he was sixteen and a virgin. And they were creatures addicted to very rough play.
Milo began to unfasten his trousers.
"No," said one of the men. "Not that way. The newest member of a pack must always submit."
They dropped their robes and stood, erect and ready in a gauntlet of anxious animals. Milo understood and sank to his knees before the first in line.
The freak women began to have s.e.x with each other in an orgy of frustrated, voyeuristic pa.s.sion. Skeletons rattled rocky p.u.b.es against the balloon faces of the fat women. Beards at both ends speckled with wet musk and occasional menstrual juices. Stumps thick as d.i.l.d.os vibrated with song. Lizard Lady"s gills were opening and closing in a frenzy. The fetus of an aborted hermaphrodite in a jar was jiggled from its shelf as two entwined two-faced prodigies kept b.u.mping into the table it sat on. It smashed to the floor and the enraptured women kept right on rolling over the top of it, the baby"s elastic body pulping and the gla.s.s shards making them cry out in gurgling pleasure, embedding in their b.u.t.tocks.
The men rocked above him. Their unusually long, black, curved fingernails raked his scalp and shoulders as he sucked them. He felt his blood coursing down his face into his eyes, flowing across his shoulders. He had his own erection, not from the act he was performing-but from the rust of his own blood, the scorch of it on his flesh. Its scent filled his nostrils as it crept down his face and he sucked it in great red drops, pulling it back into his head. He couldn"t help but revel in it for this was touching. It was any kind of touching at all that made people and beasts aware that they were alive. He"d always wanted to be loved, and violence was a sort of love-a bond in contact between two partic.i.p.ants intent upon release, upon getting dirty with the night. There was a grace in fury and a gift to be given with each outrage. Milo heard the man above him howl in inarticulate o.r.g.a.s.m.
He tried to swallow the bitter s.e.m.e.n but couldn"t. It wouldn"t go down. He tried to spit it out before sliding down to the next in line but it wouldn"t be dislodged. He sucked until the next man came, then moved on to the next. He growled as he cupped his mouth around each shaft, snarling with the impulse to bite down at the most explosive of the meat. But he restrained himself.
Soon I"ll be able to actually run with them ...
But when he"d done them all-wiping at his chin, still unable to swallow or spit out their seed-Milo looked back to see that all the men were dead. Their faces were peaceful as if they were sleeping. They did not have the strained, sweaty faces of a mob that has been satiated with oral sodomy. The freak women were cradling the slightly shriveled bodies and smiling, cooing to them like the men had been husbands and sons who"d fallen in a worthy battle.
"You"re the king of the wolves," the ladies told him through their happy tears.
Milo ran out of the tent, choking on the mouthful of s.e.m.e.n.
He didn"t go home. He collapsed in a field somewhere, exhausted, scratching at the tattooed skin, feeling the teeth press firmly against him, closing him in, hard as a kiss with open mouth and bared fangs.
The moon had risen by the time he woke up again. He stretched in the darkness and thought at first that his tattoos of teeth had gone black. But he rubbed it and it ruffled. It was hair sprouting all over him, tickling its way around his genitals and into the crack of his a.s.s, filling the hollows of his armpits, flowing down his thighs. Itchy loving fingers crawled across his belly. His snout jutted forward and he thought he heard his nose bones cracking. His jaws became cavernous with wicked fangs.
He exulted and sniffed the air for signs of life somewhere, for the delicious odor of blood and the sound of a quickened heartbeat.
Inside him, the s.e.m.e.n of the werewolves ceased to choke him. It coated his tongue, slimed his gums. He grinned like a maniac in the moonlight, that being what he was. Grinned as he ran off to hunt and to rip to pieces and feed, knowing that the spirit wolves were going with him, riding in his mouth. Wherever he roamed and whoever he slaughtered with his terrible love, they would dream in death of his exploits.
G.o.dflesh.
Brian Hodge.
"G.o.dflesh" first appeared in The Hot Blood Series: Stranger By Night, 1995, edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett.
Brian Hodge is the author of ten novels, over 100 short stories and novellas, and four full-length collections. Recent books include his second crime novel, Mad Dogs, and his latest collection, Picking The Bones, a 2011 release from Cemetery Dance Publications. He"s also been busy lately converting his backlist t.i.tles into multiple e-book formats. By the time this sees print, he"d d.a.m.n well better be done with his next novel, a sprawling thing that seemed to never want to end. He lives in Colorado, where he also indulges in music and sound design, photography, organic gardening, training in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and mountain air.
Connect with Brian through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter), or follow his blog, Warrior Poet (www.warriorpoetblog.com).
The seeds of this story were planted by one of Feral House"s cla.s.sic books. Their second edition of Apocalypse Culture contains a fascinating article on various spiritual applications of gluttony and anorexia in history, plus select Gnostic groups" penchant for amputating whatever they could spare. It also referenced p.o.r.n actress Long Jean Silver, whose missing foot inspired one of the story"s tenderest moments. I"ve since had occasion to view one of her taped performances, an experience I can"t particularly recommend, but if you insist, it"s ... memorable. Not long after the story"s original publication, I was contacted by a representative of an amputee fetishist society in Chicago wanting to know one thing: "Do you have any MORE stories like this?"
Being as she was a woman who prided herself on walking her own deliberate path, imagine, then, the irony: Her horizons were forever broadened by the ecstatic man with no legs. She was Ellen by day, and knew the aisles of the bookstore as well as the creases in her palm, the smoky gray of her eyes, the finely-wrought lines that inscribed the corners of her mouth and lent it warmth and wisdom, as if etched by a loving sculptor. She walked the aisles with her modest skirt brushing against her knees and could smell every page along the gauntlets of spines. For the patient customer it was a trip well rewarded. Every book should be so matched to a loving home.
There had been nothing different about that day right up to the very moment they left the bookstore, she and Jude letting the evening clerks take over. With that taut facelift, Jude could have been an older sister, or so she thought. Thought she knew what made Ellen tick. A common mistake, but then Jude"s idea of a deep read was Danielle Steel over Jackie Collins. Jude already had the endings worked out for most anyone she could ever meet.
They left together for the parking lot down the street. The bookstore"s neighborhood was like much of the city itself: old and charmingly crumbled by day, not a place most would want to walk alone at night. The peeling doorways, the odd bricks set just out of step with the others, the derelict and sagging smokestacks and chimneys ... they hooked strange shadows that worsened as day dwindled into evening, and the shadows gave birth to night people.
They joined the flow, Jude"s brisk footsteps clicking at her side. Urban minnows, that"s what they all were, and G.o.d forbid anyone should fall out of step. Were it not for nights, Ellen knew she would one day tear out her hair, an allergic reaction to this sunlight world and the pre-fab molds it demanded.
"... and then do you know what that little doofus asked me?" Jude was saying. "He asked, "Do you have The Old Man and the Sea in Cliff"s Notes?" I told him the original was barely a hundred pages, so why didn"t he read that, and he just looked at me-"
They approached a break in the buildings, the mouth of an alley that gaped back like a dirty, leprous throat. Yet inviting, all the same, with mysteries lying just behind those crusty locked doors. Back rooms often tweaked her curiosity.
"-just looked at me, like I"d suggested, "Here, why don"t you bite this brick in half." So I said, "Listen, I can summarize it for you in fifteen words or less: Man catches fish, man battles fish, man loses dead fish to hungry shar-"" Jude froze, except for her arm, as she began to point along the alley. "Oh. My. G.o.d." Her arm recoiled back to her side. "Don"t look, Ellen, just don"t look."
It was the wrong thing to say, and too late anyway. Ellen wouldn"t have missed anything that got Jude to interrupt herself.
The man looked to be in his early forties, and she"d never have mistaken him for one of the street people, one of those who cruised around in their wheelchairs with sad stories of cause and effect: car wreck and loss of livelihood; war wounds and loss of stability. From this distance-say, twenty feet along that wall?-his clothing looked neat and new, his hair well-barbered. He might have been any reasonably attractive man who"d made the best of his life after losing both legs at the hip.
Then again, he was masturbating. In his wheelchair. It did not look as if he were merely adjusting his crotch. He was wholly absorbed in the act-heart, soul, and both hands.
"He"s-he"s right out in the open!" Jude said, adding her disgust to that of the less self-absorbed pa.s.sersby. "I ... I don"t think he"s even aware anybody"s watching!"
No. No, he wasn"t, was he? His exultant abandon-Ellen found this the most fascinating aspect of the display. His choice of locale and timing may have been awry, but she saw on his face more pa.s.sion and ecstasy than she"d noticed on the faces of last week"s eight or ten lovers combined.
A Mona Lisa smile brushed her lips, unnoticed as Jude yanked at her arm.
"Come on, come on," said Jude. "A nice proper thing like you, a sight like that can scar you for years. I had a neighbor? Liked to show himself to other neighbors? To this very day Sylvia Miller gets nauseated by the sight of knockwurst." Jude shuddered. "If only I had a bucket of water, I"d douse that pervert"s fire. You shouldn"t have to see things like that."
If you only knew, Ellen thought, and let Jude believe she was saving her from something she"d in fact watched maybe two thousand times before.