She smelled herself on the gigantic phallus, tasted herself a moment later. Opened wide, wider, could scarcely accommodate a few inches without her jaw cracking. What WAS it?, and she raised one hand, wrapped her fingers around it, felt firm flesh, muscle ...
And it slowly withdrew, teasingly, before she could identify what seemed so familiar, so alien, so tantalizing. Around her, far and near, came soft murmurs of approval, appreciation, acceptance.
Adam"s hands were at the back of her head, gently undoing the knot, and when the blindfold was drawn away she blinked into the light, forgot to breathe. Whatever she"d expected, it wasn"t this.
She found herself in the center of the old sanctuary, beneath soaring ceilings and the watchful eyes of suffering figures in the stained gla.s.s windows, some pocked with vandals" holes. Pews and pulpit were gone, in their place a cushioned playground for these thirty-plus members who had welcomed her, even though she wasn"t at all like them.
Elle looked straight into the eyes of the young woman sitting in the V of her outstretched legs. So this was her lover? There was a thin, wanton quality to her as she reclined on her haunches, meeting Elle"s gaze with a hunger almost masculine. It was a role she played well. Elle followed the contours of her body, from the small b.r.e.a.s.t.s to the slim hips, to the tapering length of her left leg. There was no foot, just the smooth bony head formed by her ankle.
At the moment, quite wet.
And she had no right leg at all.
Elle whirled, met Adam"s smile. His pride. And let herself be taken into his arms. At least he had them.
Not so, many of those around her. They were all missing bits and pieces, some more than others. Feet, lower legs, or the entire limb. A few, like Adam, had neither. Others had sacrificed arms along the way. A couple, she saw, were but heads and a single arm attached to naked trunks. They were smooth and they were sculpted, every one of them, and if they looked upon her with anything, it was with longing. Not to be like her again ... but to make her one of them.
"You do it to yourselves, don"t you?" she whispered to Adam. "These weren"t accidents."
He grinned, got Freudian on her. "There are no accidents."
"I don"t understand," but then, in looking around at them, an entire roomful of broken statuary, she couldn"t say she didn"t like it. Whatever their reasons, this was commitment, so far beyond the Inner Circle that she could never go back there.
"You will," Adam told her, then scooted off to new partners, as did the others. Recombinant pairs, trios, groups.
And she watched, a privileged witness.
They could do the most astonishing things.
Adam explained later, after the two of them had returned to his apartment. She was very quiet, cataloguing everything she"d experienced but finding that even in her vast erotic repertoire there was no place for this.
She drew herself together on the sofa, hands around a mug of coffee. Feeling loose inside, liquid, where muscles had stretched.
"How did it start?" she asked.
"How does anything start?" Adam said, then laughed softly to himself. "Transcendence. That"s what anyone wants out of life, isn"t it? Some way of getting past it. Or getting more out of it." He paused, changed gears. "Ever hear of the Gnostics?"
She seesawed her hand.
"They were several splinter groups from the early Church, a couple thousand years ago. Didn"t last long, by comparison. The party line condemned them as heretics. Progressive in their day, in a lot of ways. But then they had this self-loathing kick they were on. Since the material world fell short of the spirit, it was bad, themselves included. So, automatically, anything that created them had to be bad too, so their lives were spent showing contempt for it all, until they could return to the spirit. Each branch had its ways. The ascetics denied themselves everything. The libertines, they pleasured themselves and f.u.c.ked each other left and right. Overindulgence as the way to paradise ... people after my own heart." Adam winked. "And yours too, ma cherie?"
Elle smiled weakly; felt rubbery inside and out. "I don"t think my goals were that lofty."
"Oh mine neither, h.e.l.l no," he said, laughing. "Anyway. Even among the Gnostics there was a lunatic fringe. Most all of them had the idea that the body was a prison that kept the spirit shackled, but this fringe, they did something about it. Had a habit of cutting parts of themselves away to reduce the size of the prison."
She began to piece it together then, amputation in an erotic context: The less body one has to dilute pleasure, the greater must be its concentration in the flesh that remains.
"And so the two of those approaches got combined, over time?"
"I don"t know. Probably." Adam looked dumbfounded. "Who knows how anything really happens? It"s not like we trace ourselves back for centuries, nothing like that. It"s just something that someone stumbled onto awhile back, and found out ... works."
Languidly, Elle slipped from the sofa, wandered to a window, stared into the night. A sickly glow of sodium lights cast pools amid the blackened hulks of brick and steel, withered hives of isolation. How she hated it out there, its cold hard rot.
"Everything revives," she said, "if you give it enough time."
Their procedures were strictly of a back room variety, the amputations performed by a surgeon no longer allowed by law to practice his craft. Who still liked to keep his hands active. It was an ideal arrangement, and the discarded parts were safely burned in an industrial incinerator.
Elle had him begin with her foot.
She found that phantom pains were scarcely a problem when you had done away with something voluntarily. She grew new skin, and beneath it, it seemed, new nerves. It was an awakening, and while the world slept beneath snow, she was healed enough to give this new s.e.xual organ its first workout. Found she could come without a single touch between her legs.
At the bookstore sympathy flowed freely, especially from Jude, and they all remarked what a wonderful att.i.tude Ellen had in spite of her accident. She was deliberately vague on particulars, felt touched by Jude"s concern that it might now be more difficult for her to find a man, one who would overlook her handicap.
"If you have one tiny flaw," Jude said, "they can turn around and be such cold-hearted b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," and then she smiled nervously and checked herself in a compact mirror. Ellen a.s.sumed it was time for another nip or tuck.
And Elle, with her mind already made up to proceed, wondered how she would ever be able to explain away the rest of her leg.
She was up and around again by spring, the itch of healing and new growth mostly behind her. Spending most of her free hours at the former church, crutching her way about as she explored both edifice and companions. They were an insular group, came to be with each other even when they left their clothes on. Of course-who else could they talk to? They"d cut themselves apart in more ways than one.
She often lay with Adam in the dying light of afternoon, both of them washed in colors the sun picked up as it streamed through stained gla.s.s. Overhead, the Virgin Mary held a little lamb; its fleece was dark with soot.
"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said, "you didn"t wait for me." But there was no anger in it, and it made Adam smile, made him laugh.
He touched her face with his sole remaining hand, an act she would relish for however long it might last. Not forever. Elle curled in closer, pressed her mouth over the smooth pink stub that jutted from his left shoulder, flushing in pleasure as he gasped.
"Has anybody ever gone all the way?" she wondered. "Cut off everything?"
Adam nodded. "There"ve been a few."
She groaned, murmuring wordlessly with fantasies of narrowing herself to a focused bundle of overloaded nerves, a single vast erogenous zone. "I wonder what it"s like."
"I don"t know. But I get the idea that ... that it"s like being a G.o.d." Adam stirred, flexed; seemed to ripple with each caress of hand and mouth, breeze and dust mote. "By that time, you know, it"s up to everybody else to care for you. Take care of your needs. You"re mostly a receptacle by then."
"What did the others say about it? And where are they now?"
"They quit talking," he said. "And pretty soon ... they quit eating. But they still smiled."
They knew something, she thought. Or felt something the rest of us aren"t even close to yet ...
Yet.
She forced his hand down to her hip, the exposed stump hot, tingling. Raw and alive with promise. "I"ll be better at it than you will. When I get that far. I"ll feel more than you."
Said this with a tremor and a smile.
Could she cut herself down an inch at a time, feel gradations of pleasure with each successive chopping? If she lopped off a finger herself, would it be a new form of masturbation? Such paths to explore, down this avenue of the blade.
"We"ll just have to see about that," he said, "won"t we?"
And Elle wondered if she could convince him to hang onto that one last arm at least until she went in for her other leg, so that Adam might be the one to hold the scalpel for that first ceremonial incision.
That would be divine.
It would almost be something like love.
Every Last Drop.
John Everson.
"Every Last Drop" was first published in Bloodsongs magazine, Spring 1998, and reprinted in his collection Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions, Delirium Books, October 2000.
John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Covenant, Sacrifice, The 13th, Siren and The Pumpkin Man, all released in paperback from Leisure Books. Limited collector"s hardcover editions have also been released from Delirium, Necro and Bad Moon Books. He has had several short fiction collections issued by independent presses, including Creeptych, Deadly Nightl.u.s.ts, Needles & Sins, Vigilantes of Love and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions. Over the past 20 years, his short stories have appeared in more than 75 magazines and anthologies. His work been translated into Polish and French, and optioned for potential film production. For more on his fiction, art and music, visit www.johneverson.com.
I wrote a lot of erotic horror stories in the "90s for a variety of small press magazines, and "Every Last Drop" is one of my favorites. I think it really captured what can become an obsessive compulsion to follow the lure of the forbidden into the dark. I"d write about that theme again years later in my novel Siren.
His breathing grew ragged. In the shifting kaleidoscope of electric light, his grey eyes reflected obscene plays of color, did not shine out their own. The woman was tan, California style-no lines. Her lips were shiny pink, an erotic complement to the nipples of her bobbing brown b.r.e.a.s.t.s, currently matching-or more correctly, setting-the rhythm of his respiration. She flipped a strand of sand-blonde hair away from her face, ice-blue eyes flashing with l.u.s.t, sweat collecting on her forehead, lips pursed and moaning ...
The holovision abruptly went blank-blue, and Tony zipped up.
That was not your ordinary p.o.r.no-blonde, he thought in admiration. Most of the blondes they used these days were like plastic dolls-the parts were all there, but the energy, the spirit-the spark that sometimes transfigured a 3-D bimbo into an o.r.g.a.s.m-inducing fantasy-most just didn"t have it. They looked bored. They looked ... faceless. t.i.ts and a.s.s a dime a dozen-s.e.x G.o.ddesses were hard to find.
On the cyberbooth door he paused a moment to read the obscene graffiti. He didn"t know why, it was depraved and depressing and yet he always did. "Looking for black c.o.c.k to suck? Call 546- ..." "My wife screws you while I watch-ask for Leo (313) ..." "h.o.m.os go to h.e.l.l" ... "The perfect b.l.o.w.j.o.b: no names, no faces, no price, all privacy, unspeakable pleasure. c.u.m to Redroom Hotel #112 after 9 p.m."
He read the last one again and shook his head. n.o.body gave the perfect b.l.o.w.j.o.b for free. He couldn"t pay Loni to give him one anymore at all. Tucking in his shirt he pushed open the door and walked quickly out of the back hall of the peep show. Men paced in the shadows, faces illuminated by the orange glow of silently smoking cigarettes, looking for the newcomer to proposition, waiting for the booth they wanted to free up. He grimaced in disgust and left the place, nodding at the wrinkled, bored cashier watching a "d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e Show" rerun.
Back when Loni had first gone out with him, she"d been eager to please, spreading everything for him just about anytime. She"d never been nuts about f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o, but she serviced him dutifully. Their first couple years he"d nearly forgotten what the insides of these peep houses were like. Guys looking for anonymous s.e.x with other guys, just for thrills or because they were too scared to admit they were gay and come out of the closet. Here it wasn"t gay or straight, it was diversion. Businessmen on a lark, husbands on desperation runs. He wouldn"t let these desperate men touch him, but he had no problem touching himself. If you couldn"t get it at home, you had to go somewhere ...
Tony gunned the car and screeched out into traffic. He hoped Loni was in a good mood tonight-the blonde with the ice-blue eyes and pure-copper bod had left him wanting more. The new cyberbooths at the adult video store he"d frequented for years were great-but even though the women surrounded you like real life, you still couldn"t feel them. But thinking of that last scene made the crotch of his pants uncomfortable. He shifted in the seat and willed away an erection-which only served to increase its growth. Gripping his thighs together, he aimed the car onto the freeway and tried to relax. That place was supposed to relieve the tension, not create more, he grinned to himself.
Loni was not in a good mood.
"You"re an hour late and I"ve got to make that train," she fumed, shimmying out of her skirt in their bedroom. At 34, she looked good, he observed, better than when they"d met. Her chest, while not that of the G.o.ddess, was ample, if over-nippled. Her middle was potting out a bit but her hips always nailed his eye to their hidden valley, something which, at this particular moment, did not work in his favor.
"I"m changing Tony, you"ve seen it before. Go get something to eat."
He reached out to ma.s.sage her exposed behind. She slapped his hand away. "Go. There"ll be plenty of time for that next week. Right now I"m late and you"re p.i.s.sing me off."
Her dark eyes pierced the mental fog that arousal always drew around him. Loni grew easily irritated with his physical obsessions. Sometimes it was flattering; now it was in her way.
"Alright, alright," he grumbled. "Did you leave me anything?"
"There"s Chinese in the fridge, some spaghetti from last night. You"ll have to warm it up yourself. If I miss this train, there"s not another one until 11 and Angie will be sitting at the station waiting for me all night."
She finished pulling on jeans and drew a sweater over the bra strap Tony had been admiring from behind. She turned and caught him still staring.
"It"s only seven days. Go rent Vampy Vixens or something. I"ve gotta go. She slipped on a pair of black flats and grabbed her suitcase from the bed.
"I"ll call ya tomorrow. Now goodbye."
She pecked him on the lips and was out the door.
The ache in his crotch flared again as he realized that was all he was going to get for quite awhile. Shrugging in defeat, he shambled into the kitchen.
He decided on the Chinese, but after aimlessly poking through pea-pods and some mutant pygmy chicken, ended up re-Saran-ing most of it. He wasn"t hungry, d.a.m.nit, he was h.o.r.n.y! He tried watching TV, but none of the canned laughs took his mind off the vision of pink lips wrapping around his erect member, a halo of beach-blown hair teasing his legs.
On a sudden impulse he pulled out the telephone directory and looked up the address of the Redroom Hotel. It turned out, as he"d expected, to be in a run-down section of the city, maybe a half hour"s drive. He watched some more TV, knowing in some way that he was killing time.
Waiting. Waiting ...
... until the clock said 8:37. That would put him there around nine. Tony turned off the television and went to the garage.
Run-down is not the word for it, he thought as he pulled into the lot. The unlit sign (which was big enough that he still picked it out from a couple blocks away) didn"t exactly promise the Hilton, and n.o.body seemed to be around. Who knows how long that note had been markered onto the peep show door anyway, he admonished himself. It was probably put there by someone in town for a night or two who was since long gone. He stopped in the hotel courtyard and shook his head. This was asinine. He could get mugged, get AIDS-maybe this was the site of ritual sacrifices. The newspaper"d just run an article about the rash of them downtown this year.
A clomping noise broke the pensive silence; made him whirl around, his heart kicking in double time. A sudden wind blew a drop of cold sweat from his forehead into his eye. There, on the brown brick wall at the end of the courtyard, a shadow grew, larger with each staccato slap. The clicking was footsteps, he realized, and they were coming his way. Go back-go forward-he didn"t know which way to turn. And then, as the shadow reached gargantuan, grotesque proportions, its Dr. Frankenstein stepped into view-a short, Asian fellow carrying a briefcase and striding quickly towards the parking lot. He bent his head as he pa.s.sed Tony, seeming intent on not making eye contact. Tony relaxed and abandoning his thoughts of turning back to the car, decided to check and see if anyone was in room 112. He was here after all, and had a whole night to kill.
Night cloaked the courtyard sidewalk in shifting mystery. Bushes and weeds poked tendrils across the path, slowing his progress, their cold, tenuous gropings of his legs and belly made him shiver. The encroaching undergrowth made him wonder if this hotel was still in operation, but then, when he glanced around, he realized there were lights on in some of the rooms. The sign was out, the sidewalk beacons were unlit, but a blue glow poked through the curtains of the occasional occupied room. Upon reaching 112, his fears were confirmed. No light at all. He knocked anyway, and the door creaked open an inch at his attack.
"h.e.l.lo," he called through the black sliver of an opening. It was somehow darker in the room than it was outside. "Anybody home?" he drawled with mock levity.
There was no answer, only a heavy stillness that seemed to press against him like a smothering blanket. He wanted to turn and go home, but a stubborn duality drew him to stay. He wanted to see the room, why he didn"t know. It was not like there was going to be some tangible remnant of s.e.x-gone-by to see. Still, he pushed the squealing door open some more and stepped inside, his hand trailing along the wall for the light switch. He found it, flicked it, and nothing happened. Except the door slammed shut. Tony backed against the wall, eyes straining to make out something through the inky black air.