Nasty Stories Read online

  “Would you get the door, dear?” Trish asked. “It’s probably just the headman.”

  He bit back his question as she continued to write. She smiled nastily, but perhaps at her own latest triumph of composition. Although he couldn’t imagine what she had actually said, he had most likely misheard.

  “There’s a check for him by the door,” she said, “under the vase.”

  The headman: did the denizens of this different world live in tribes? Or had she meant Head Man? Contrary to common sense and political correctness, was he about to confront God Himself? Perhaps he had died overnight and now faced the Last Judgment. If that was so, a check seemed inappropriate. He found the check by the front door, however, made out to Capital Distributors for the sum of forty-one dollars and twenty-eight cents.

  “Another lovely day, Mr. Moran,” said the man in a stained apron who proffered a bill.

  “Lovely,” Arthur repeated mechanically, his eyes fixed on the net bag in the tradesman’s other hand, which contained three severed human heads.

  LOVELOCKS

  Caleb Hopkins would have kissed the Devil’s backside to win Abishag Barebones, but she laughed.

  “The Devil, Goodman Hopkins? This is 1690. In London, they scoff at talk of witchcraft.”

  “This is Massachusetts.”

  She sighed. “If I doubted that, one look at you would disabuse me.” She scraped the mud from her boots at her door. “Oh to be in England, now that April’s there!”

  “Did you just make that up?”

  “No, it hasn’t been written yet.”

  He flung himself to his knees. “You are a witch! Admit me to your coven, take me to your debaucheries in the woods where you dance naked with demons!”

  The door opened to disclose Preserved Barebones, Abishag’s horrible father. “The tongue is an unruly evil, and no man can tame it,” he intoned. “However—” he kicked Caleb in the face and sent him sprawling.—“one must try. Such talk is dangerous, Goodman Hopkins.”

  Pain devoured the world, but Abishag destroyed it by shielding him with her voluptuous body. He felt her warmth, smelled her breath. The pressure of her breasts stopped his heart. “Caleb’s not dangerous, father! He’s merely a ninny.”

  “If you believe anything is more dangerous than a ninny, child, then your two centuries—I mean decades, of course, your two decades on earth—have been wasted! Come inside and leave that malodorous refuse to the hogs.”

  Her lips! They were inches from his face, her attention was diverted. He mashed his mouth to hers. Like a lonesome leech, he had found his one true place, and all thought evaporated as he sucked. Preserved plied his vengeful foot once more, this time most intimately.

  Caleb shrieked, gabbled for air, gripped something that tore. Abishag wrenched herself free. Somewhere in a world where happy people anticipated more than a moment of life, a door slammed.

  He came to himself clutching a fistful of black hairs that he had torn from the head of his beloved. He’d show her! He had harkened to Old Zuvembie, the Adams’s slave, and he knew something about witchcraft. He would bind her to his will.

  He hobbled home and pried up the loose floorboard behind his bed. Beneath it lay female figurines that he molded from clay to help him court naughty thoughts. The latest had been formed on his notion of Abishag, although they suffered from his woeful inexperience. He sat down at a table by the fire with the likeliest figurine and the hair, pasting it on with spit. He was ignorant of devilish details, but he hoped his intention would satisfy the Prince of Darkness.

  Two hairs, three—but where were the rest? He’d treasured a handful against his breast on the way home. A draft must have blown them from the table.

  He knelt to examine the floor. Dust kittens deluded him. The firelight made strange shadows dance. “Have pity, Satan,” he prayed.

  It worked! He spotted a black clump. But when he crawled forward the mass unraveled into separate strands that wriggled every whichway. He tore his nails in his haste to gather as many as he could.

  He must have picked up a splinter. He was afraid to open his hand and examine it lest the lively hairs escape, but he could stand the pain no longer. He opened his hand and screamed when he saw a strand boring voraciously beneath the nail of his index finger.

  He could still grip the end, perhaps, and pull it out, but his left hand wouldn’t work. He screamed again, for the hairs in that hand were winding around his fingers to bind them. He forgot the pain under his fingernail as they tightened and bit into his flesh like wires.

  The hairs writhed all over the floor now, but they converged on him with purpose. He stamped furiously, but this had no effect as they crawled onto his boots and squirmed up his legs. When he opened his mouth to scream for help, they slipped loathesomely into his mouth to bind his tongue and stop his throat. He ran, smashing his way through the door, when the hairs at last scaled his legs to penetrate his private parts.

  “I saw him bumping down the street on his hindquarters like a dog with worms last night,” Preserved Barebones said when Caleb’s strangely riddled body was discovered. “I let him be, assuming he was enjoying a religious ecstasy. He was a good man.”

  Everyone said amen to that except Abishag, who was home nursing a headache.

  FANTASIA ON ‘LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD’

  Once upon a time there was a Disnoxious forest called Wallace Wood. You are in it.

  A path bisects the mossy rise directly ahead. To the right foreground an ithyphallic oak screws its twisty roots way down deep, the way moist Mother Earth likes it. Flowers like fireworks burst in the sunlight, while the shadows hide toadstools like demons’ dildos.

  This is a crossroads, and a cockahoop sign points every whichway to Waterish Witchland, the Spahn Ranch, Castle Perilous and the Bates Motel.

  Nothing much is happening. Cowslips helix through the still air, which is hot and damp and green. You start to notice disturbing details, like the evil glint in the eye of that adorable squirrel. The fluffy bunny-rabbit snuggled among those ferns looks carniverous.

  Son of a bitch! How did you miss that? He is—no, not the troll, see, blending into that mass of shadows to the extreme left? Hairy fucker. Teeth. Dick down to his knees. Do wolves have knees? If this was a war you would be dead, because he is looking right at you.

  I think he knows you.

  Thank God, he looks away, all ears, up the path. A couple minutes later, you hear it, this thin silver voice. Some asshole once said that Emma Kirkby “sings like a bird, and isn’t it a shame she can’t sing like a human being?” This sounds like Emma, only much younger.

  She sings:

  “Put another Hebrew in,

  In the crematorium,

  All I want is lebensraum

  And Adolf, Adolf, Adolf!”

  (This takes place in Quasigermania, where Cause can be visibly pregnant with Effect. By far the Grimms’ greatest fairy tale was the one about a homogenous German people with an ancient folk tradition.

  (Aside to those who are itching to tell me that “Little Red Riding Hood” was one of the Perrault tales that the Grimms didn’t steal: Go fuck yourselves.)

  Over the rise skips this delicious piece of jailbait. I can say she is pink and plump and young, but that doesn’t really put you there. Look at the back of your own hand. The skin is not squeaky-tight over firm flesh, is it? (If it is, give me a call.) Maybe it is grayish in hue, with snaky veins and loose skin, freckles, scars, Christ-knows-what, just like mine. I won’t suggest that you go check out your face in the mirror, but I can imagine. To put it bluntly, she is everything you are not; and everything you probably never were.

  To that poor wolf, she is as far removed from his sphere as God is from ours. He loves her in much the way that we are supposed to love God. But at the same time he wants to knock her down and stamp on her face and ram his dick so far into her cunt that it cores her brain. Then he wants to eat her. Afterward he will play with her bones like Tinkertoys and maybe
jerk off with her bloody scalp.

  Look what happened to God, after all, the last time he had the nerve to show his face in this hellhole.

  Red flirts and skips and flips. God, those dimpled knees, those pudgy thighs! Her high-spirited gait—if you were in that wolf’s position, you would note with approval her disdain for underwear. He finds himself quoting The Song of Solomon: “Her ass it is comely; yea, she is a dynamite piece thereof.” That near-invisible floss around her pussy might tickle his tongue, but he can’t technically call it hair. Wolfspice, he calls it, in a creative burst. He puts on his most charming, Ted-Bundy smile and steps out in her path.

  This scene poses difficulties for the explicator. She has been warned not to talk to strangers, but never mind that, these rotten kids never do what you tell them. But doesn’t she notice that he is covered with fur? That his dick no longer hangs down to his knees? That he is not even a human being? No, she thinks he is kind of cool. I believe she doesn’t run screaming away for the simple reason that he is different from her parents, and that means a lot. As any tot can tell you, kindredness is next to ghastliness.

  She tells him about her ailing Grandma, and he peeks into her basket to see a gallon of muscatel and two pints of codein cough syrup. These goodies, she says, should keep Grandma stoked for another twelve hours.

  His behavior is curious, too. Why doesn’t he just grab her and drag her behind a tree? Even if Grandma is an added attraction, he could always drop by and skim her off later. But house is the key word here. A folk-wolf, a serial wolf, can’t just whack people in the woods, he needs a house with thick walls and disingenuously staring windows, an inviolate castle that will keep the cops out (unless they happen to be looking for drugs). He needs time to prepare and savor his meal.

  The blessings of affordable housing for all are not unmixed.

  He detains her with chitchat, learns that she is related to the Hoods of Sherwood Forest on her fairy godmother’s side. He in turn boasts of his descent from a Romulan princess and Uncle Remus, and he points out the tracks of the noble house of Lupus on the eponymous disease, on the lupanar, the Lupercal and the lupine. He overdoes it. When he mentions the pair of tickets he has for a Spiteful Deaf concert, she politely declines.

  She doesn’t tell him that he has really blown it with his enthusiasm for moldy, beer-bellied beardos who are just one toke away from shit-kicker music. She merely says, “We have nothing in common.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he replies.

  He is by definition a passionate creature. About to abandon his careful plans and absorb her into his cellular makeup, he notices the perilous proximity of two woodcutters, who are gathering faggots. They do this by striking manly poses against trees, their shiny axes over their muscular shoulders. One wears a T-shirt that reads, “My Favorite Beetle was Gregor Samsa.”

  * * * *

  Grandma’s oversize T-shirt reads, “You Wouldn’t Kick Me Out of Bed, Would You?,” and it is bunched up over her hips as she sprawls in an easy-chair, her legs hooked over the arms, and masturbates in a desultory way while sipping Gallo (“Look for the signatures of Crazy Joe and Albert the Blast!”) and listening to a scratchy old Howlin’ Wolf lp.

  No, I don’t think you would. She has the kind of appeal—a blend of nostalgie de la boue, necrophilia and knock-down-drag-out-slambang sex—that Gloria Grahame exuded when she last sleepwalked across the screen. The bee-sting mouth is there, the blond ringlets. The shape of a young woman is there, too, but now it is rendered not in springy flesh but soft havarti. As for her cunt, so prominently featured in our tableau, it suggests a model of the Mindanao Trench sculptured in exsanguinated cod-liver. Even the most filthy-minded schoolboy would be distracted from this unsavory gash by the glitter of the cubic zirconium ring on the third finger of her right hand as it slowly slides.

  This is a homey and old-fashioned place, not one of your slap-em-up-’n’-fuck’m tract-houses, designed as hutches for consumers to breed pyramid-franchise-sellers and parenticides. I myself wouldn’t mind living here, even with Grandma. The beams actually hold up the ceiling and the fireplace works. The overstuffed furniture—and I bet you could find fifty bucks in change among the cushions, maybe an Indian-head penny, maybe Jim Morrison’s lost ID—looks comfortable, and the souvenir pillows from Atlantic City and Old Orchard Beach have cradled many a greasy head. The gardens beyond the mullioned casements are untended, the forest presses in, but only the worst sort of fussbudget would fault the chaos of green leaves and yellow sunlight.

  I would get rid of the Elvis doll on the mantelpiece, and I would at very least turn off the TV set whose horizontal and vertical holds are both broken, but I can’t think of any other necessary changes. The house smells bad, but one might empty the ashtrays that have spilled onto the floor, sweep the Chinese takeout from under the sofa and give Grandma a bath.

  In no collection of Famous Last Words have I ever seen the most popular words of all, the ones we use over and over again: Who is it? We said it to Albert DeSalvo, we said it to Heinrich Hoover and J. Edgar Himmler, we have always said it to the Big Bad Wolf. You would never catch Jesse James or Brian Boru or Hereward the Wake saying these words, which is why they stayed alive long enough to make a splash. If you want to be remembered as a hero, know who it is without asking.

  But Grandma, poor, dumb Grandma....

  Who is it?” she calls.

  “Wolfgang Amadeus Canis-Lupus,” comes the reply. He has a nice voice, and this impresses her enough to make her jerk down her T-shirt, fluff out her curls, hide her wine and, with a glance at the crazed pier-glass beside the door, open it, the idiot.

  Now, having seen the Wolf, she has second thoughts. “I’m not feeling well,” she says.

  “Then let me do it for you,” he says, and he slithers past the door.

  “No, you can’t come in, the house is a mess.”

  “It drives me crazy when you talk clean.”

  He is in the house. She is lost. She knows it. It is nowhere near midnight, but her coach has just turned into a pumpkin. How many million, million victims since Abel have known this moment: this is real, this is no fairy tale, I’m dead? God, meanwhile, has been jerking off on some cloud, too busy listening to hymns of praise to hear all the screams. We can get mad about it, we can track down the killers, but what good does that do? All our vengeance could never extract from them the singular horror of a scared innocent.

  To the real wolves, the ultimate kick is death. Not the secret, brief and squalid death of their victims, but an interminably attenuated opera, sung in legalese and scored for camcorder and printing-press. The pop stars of journalism and literature will bond with them like scum with a stagnant pool.

  Yes, goddamnit, Grandma is an innocent. When the Wolf says, “I’m gonna eat you like you’ve never been eaten before,” she thinks that this may not be as bad as she had feared.

  But it is. Oh, it is.

  * * * *

  So here we have the Wolf, lying in bed in this T-shirt that says, “You wouldn’t, etc.,” and what are we to make of Little Red Riding Hood’s behavior? Of her stupid remarks? What big eyes you have?

  Tearing up and eating a human being is a messy, smelly business. At very least, there is going to be some blood on the carpet, some—to quote a noted expert, Charles Manson—“hair on the walls.” Even if we arbitrarily put Grandma at 120 pounds, that is a lot of weight for one wolf to consume. And that 120 includes stuff that even a wolf wouldn’t want to eat.

  But we can get past that. By all accounts, John Wayne Gayce’s house stank; and so did Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment. But they were still able to lure their chosen guests inside.

  And in this bloody house, with a few gnawed bones lying around, maybe a cast-iron liver steeped in wine that even a wolf couldn’t stomach, a house that smells truly foul, the granddaughter of the victim hops into bed with the murderer; and believes it is her grandmother. Even though she has seen him before. And knows, presumably, what he
r grandmother looks like. Okay. Unlike Grandma, she gets what’s coming to her.

  We needn’t go through all that what big, etc., stuff. Make up your own routine. We know that the Wolf rapes her, kills her, eats her. The bed, when he’s finished, is a mess you wouldn’t believe. At this point he nods off. The one thing these wolves have in common is total faith in their own invulnerability. No man of woman born can harm Macbeth.

  He is wrenched from sleep by a knock on the door. And guess what he says: “Who is it?”

  Bang! The door implodes, and here the wolf in his Grandma-drag faces the woodcutters.

  “We thought we heard a boy screaming,” says Kevin.

  “No, no, it wasn’t a boy!”

  The bit of an ax, used deftly as a razor, creases his belly. “We have ways of finding out,” says Bret.

  “No!” the wolf shrieks. “You really think you’re going to bring Grandma and Red back by cutting me open? Even if you could, what have you got? Coupla dumb broads, a drunken hypochondriac and a snotty kid who never listens.” He adjusts his T-shirt so the guys can read the message. “I’m all man, more or less, with a dick down to my knees, assuming I have knees.”

  “You know, you could do wonders with this place, with a little effort and ingenuity,” says Kevin, throwing some bloody rubbish out the window.

  “To your knees?” says Bret, using his ax to lift the T-shirt.

  * * * *

  Cut to the woodcutters’ hangout, where Bret wears aviator goggles and a “Fucka-Wolf 190” patch on his bomber-jacket. Perhaps contemplating a visit to the real world, c. 1930, Kevin is wearing an authentic Sturmabteilung uniform and thinking how stunning he looks. He kicks a few stray elves for practice.

  Between them simpers a creature in a gingham pinafore, an auburn, pigtailed wig and ruby slippers. Not even rhinoplasty has eliminated all suggestion of a muzzle, and those hot-waxed knees still look kind of funny. It murmurs to the stuffed Alsatian it hugs, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Quasigermania anymore.”