Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror (35 page)

“Fran?”

The voice catches you in a net of fragility. You glance back at the gurney, and the languid corpse-like form lifts its skull. Unnaturally bright eyes—familiar—peer into yours from deep in their sockets, as if beckoning.

“Kevin?”

“I’m Fran now,” he tells you, and your body jolts with this confirmation. “I need you for the reinventing.”

It
is
Kevin, or what is left of him. Instantly you move beside the gurney as if it is a coffin. He has no hair, no eyebrows, lashes, no finger- or toenails. His body is covered with pale stitches, like a rag doll repaired too many times.

“What’s … happening to you?” you ask.

“Ecstasy,” he says, his voice more feminine than masculine, the tone otherworldly.

“Drugs—”

“No. True ecstasy.”

You stare at his body, breasts plumped like white plums, his penis gone, replaced by … by … nothing! This is disturbing, but what leaves you unable to speak is his once thick-fleshed frame, now lighter than air, an exoskeleton.

“I’m thinner than you are,” he whispers with a smile so grotesque you shudder.

You can only shake your head, confused, horrified, resigned in your failure.

Suddenly, as if they are meant to distract, you notice the apparatus—clear tubes removing blood, suctioning fat from the body, washing out the intestine’s contents. You watch as one of the attendants pulls skin together over Kevin’s stomach where fat cells have been suctioned out, cuts the flab, stretches the skin taut, sutures …

“My stomach is stapled now, so I don’t need to eat,” Kevin whispers, eyes gleaming.

“What? … why? …” But you can no longer form sentences.

“To be you,” he says, the words so simple. The message clear as a crystal bell. This is your nightmare, your legacy. What you have created in your own distorted image. What you cannot show the world but what Kevin displays on your behalf. You gave him permission to reflect your darkness. Now that you see yourself with clarity, you cannot bear the sight.

He stares at the ceiling as if seeing God, as if he is ascending, and your eyes fill with tears.

Didi gently pulls the coat from your ravaged body, your clothes, then fingers find you through all your barren openings, filling them with black fire.

At long last, the heavy basket slips from your grip. Finally, you descend.

“Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” was first published in
Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories From the Edge
, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Nancy Holder, ROC, 2005.

† † †

I originally wrote this story in 1992 for an anthology titled Shock Rock, edited by the Hot Blood team of Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. They like the story and accepted it, but a month or so later, I received word that Pocket Books’ lawyers were not so thrilled. I was never sure whether they thought the story was obscene and thus open to prosecution, or whether they were afraid that Madonna, who had just come out with her Sex book, might be in the mood to sue. Either way, they banned the story. Three years on, after several rejections in the interim, Poppy Z. Brite accepted it for her anthology Razor Kiss. Unfortunately, she soon got word from the lawyers that they could not allow her publisher to include my story, and I received notice that once again the piece was banned.

Finally, a full decade later, “Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” appeared in the anthology Outsiders, thanks to editors Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, and the brave people at ROC. No one sued, the world didn’t end, and now it can be reprinted here for your reading pleasure.

She walks in, the pop star. Arrives with her retinue, wearing a black leather outfit that shows part of one tit and is supposed to be revealing but just doesn’t cut it here in the bar. I can tell she’s slumming, looking for action. The second she walks through the door she’s acting as if she owns the place, and she tries to appear nonplussed when she finally figures out no one’s paying attention to her. She’s wearing a wig, pretending she wants to travel incognito, but now that no one notices her, she stands in her most recognizable pose, desperately willing people to recognize who she is.

Nobody does.

I do, but I don’t say anything, just watch. I’ve seen her videos, read about her in
Playboy
and
Rolling Stone
and
TV Guide
, read how she’s outrageous and into kinky sex, how she likes to pick up young black hitchhikers and have her way with them, and I see her now, this pampered bitch, and I have to laugh. Wild and outrageous? I’ll show you wild. I’ll show you outrageous.

Welcome to the Ugly Bar.

She said in an interview that she likes to be spanked, something pretentious about there being a fine line between pleasure and pain and that for her the two sometimes overlapped. Old news. Shocking maybe for grandpa in Kansas but babytalk here in the bar. I look at her smoothly unblemished carefully moisturized skin and I know it’s never experienced true funpain. I think of Desdemona, the time I carefully flayed her left buttock and rubbed vinegar and lemon juice on it while Deke pissed in her mouth, and I can’t see the pop star going for that.

Well, I can, but I can’t see her liking it.

Control freak. That’s what we have here, folks. Walks on the wild side carefully modulated, well-planned. Little fantasy trips with safe, padded boundaries, escape routes if things get too real, if the monster gets too hairy.

Pleasure and pain

Are almost the same

To me

Isn’t that a line from one of her songs? One of her videos? I look at her, at her Hollywood costume. Almost the same? I suddenly want to make her prove it. No matter that it’s an act, that she’s just entertaining people, trying to titillate them. The fact that she’s here in the Ugly Bar means that it’s no longer just an act, that she’s starting to believe her own press, that she really thinks she’s daring and provocative and out there.

I glance around the bar, catch the nods, catch the looks, and I know they all want to be in on it.

I walk up to her, ask if I can buy her a drink. Her eyes take in my mask, my codpiece, and I see, for a second, fear. She’s afraid. Not of me, specifically, but of losing control. She might say in her interviews that she likes big men, hung men, that she’s looking for a man who has enough between his legs to really satisfy her, but I can tell that now that she’s seen one, she’s scared. She doesn’t like it at all.

I push aside her bodyguards, and two of the Others come out of the shadows and drag them quietly off, taking them away. She says with all of the confidence she can muster, all of the confidence her money and power have bought, that, yes, she’d like a drink. The bartender pours it, holds it between his legs, stirs it with his cock, lets a couple drops of bloody jizz fall visibly into it and hands it to me.

I grin, give it to her. “Here, bottoms up.”

She grimaces, puts it down an arm’s-length on the bar, pulls back. “God.”

The other patrons laugh derisively, and I think she realizes for the first time that she’s just an amateur here.

She looks around for her bodyguards, notices that they are gone, and I see the fear on her face again, but she pretends she’s not afraid, and she walks away from me, to the other end of the bar. She walks now with the grace and confidence of a dancer, the athlete she has to be in order to perform her stage show, but when I am through with her she will not walk that way. She will be hobbled and crippled, cleaned out with the razorcock perhaps, or violated to hemorrhage by the first three feet of Mr. Pole, and she will never be able to dance again. Each step she takes will be filled with pain and will remind her of her former pretenses and her forced knowledge of reality.

What if I cut her off at the kneecaps, cauterize the wounds with lighter fluid and fire, use the leftover blood to lubricate her bottom two holes?

Could she handle living on stumps?

She looks at me from the safety of the other side of the bar, faces me. “How big are you?” she asks, feigning boldness.

“Cock or arm?” I say.

She blinks.

“Two feet cock, four arm. More reach with the arm, too. I can maneuver around in there, feel out the womb, stroke those babygrowing sides with my fingers. Ain’t nothing like it, babe.”

She looks sick, looks like she wants to say something, looks like she wants to bolt, but her bodyguards are gone, she’s a long way from the door, and she’s been left here and hanging and knows she’d better make the best of it.

A crowd is gathering. The Mother and Zeke and Mr. Pole and the Roothog. Ginjer and Liz. There’s an animal smell in the air. Lust. Sexual lust. The lust of victors for more victims.

The bar is never satisfied is it?

I drink her drink with the drops of bloody jizz, walk over.

The Roothog approaches. “A question,” he says. “Do you have to be in love to have sex?” It’s clear he still doesn’t know who she is.

She stares in open horror at his whiplike pizzle, and she nods slightly, tentatively. Her voice is a little girl’s voice, frightened. “Yes,” she lies.

“Love is spending time together,” he says to her. “Sex is just sex.” He grins, cackles, and pulls on his pizzle, and I realize that he does know who she is. He’s just thrown a quote from her book at her.

And she’s scared.

Sometimes the Ugly Bar surprises me.

She starts for the door. The Mother blocks her way.

I nod casually toward the Roothog’s pizzle. “He’s good with that,” I say.

“Let me out of here!” She tries to maneuver around The Mother, who moves to the side, blocks her again.

“You want another drink?” I’m trying not to laugh.

“I want out of here!”

“Then why did you come in?”

She looks at me, doesn’t answer. I’m the only one she’s really spoken to, and she thinks that’s established some sort of relationship between us, she thinks I’ll feel sorry for her and take pity on her because I’ve looked into her eyes, but she doesn’t know shit about the way things really work.

I stroke my codpiece. “I’ll take you,” I say. “I’ll even hurt you if you want.”

“Let me out of here!”

“No.”

The flatness of my refusal throws her. Did she have lipstick on when she came into the bar? It’s gone now. Her lips are thin and dry. There’s a tic starting in her left eye.

“You don’t know who you’re fucking with,” she says. “There’ll be a lot of people looking for me. A lot of people. You don’t know who I am—”

“I know who you are,” I say.

She stops, stares at me, and what little color she has left drains from her face, leaving it a beautiful porcelain white.

“Come on,” I say.

I take her hand. It’s soft, thin, I can feel the bones. I start to pull her toward the door to the Back Room.

“I—I’m having my period,” she lies.

I grin at her. “The more blood the better.”

“Oh God … Oh God … Oh God …” She’s crying. Scared and frightened. Runny mascara tears. Clear snot. She doesn’t look much like a pop star now.

“Please …” she begs, sobbing.

And I lead her into the Back Room.

The waterbed is filled with sperm and blood, piss and placenta, but I don’t take her to the bed, I take her to the table and strap her into the stirrups. She is pliant and pliable at this point and I can do anything I want with her. She looks around, takes in the bones and the babies, the devices and the animals. Dazed, she tentatively touches the sticky wall next to the table with a finger, slowly puts the finger to her tongue as I strap her in, then she’s gagging, spitting so she won’t puke, and Liz comes and licks the spit off her face, off her mouth.

She struggles, squirms, and Liz slaps her face. Five times. Quickly.

The games have begun.

The pop star looks at me, mouth open, nose bleeding, eyes teary.

“Make a fist,” I order.

She does, and holds it up, and Ginjer jumps on top of it, sliding slowly down, already slippery wet. The pop star reacts instinctively, cries out in disgust, tries to shake Ginjer off, but Ginjer’s cunt is like a steel trap and she’d clamped on tight and not letting go and she starts spinning, round and round on the pop star’s arm, squealing wildly with each successive climax.

“Get if off!” the pop star screams. “Get it off!”

But Ginjer’s still spinning, and the juice dripping down the pop star’s arm is starting to mix with blood.

I’m not sure if it’s Ginjer’s blood or the pop star’s.

The Roothog steps up, pizzle in hand, starts whipping her with it.

She’s screaming. More fear now than pain, although that will change.

Ginjer’s already ground off the fist, and blood is streaming down the pop star’s arm. Her chest is bruised purple by the pizzle.

They all want in on it, all the patrons of the bar. I’m not greedy, I’m willing to share, but her mouth is mine. I’ve earned it. I stake my claim, pointing, and there are no objections. Zeke holds down her forehead, while I bust out her teeth. She stops screaming, fainting I think, but that makes no difference to what I want to do. There are shards of teeth left, and I clean them out with a piece of bone. Her mouth is filling with blood, just the way I like it, and she comes to, gagging, and I open my codpiece and take out my cock, and start feeding it to her.

Her bladder lets go, but Liz is there to bathe in the spray.

It’s gone too far, I realize. She’s not going to make it. I wanted to leave her changed, marked, not dead, but there’s no turning back now, and if that’s the way it’s gotta be, that’s the way it’s gotta be. Fame or no Fame. There are no exceptions.

Everyone’s the same in the Back Room of the bar.

We take our time, and she’s alive for much more of it than I would have thought, but eventually we finish her off, and by the time it’s all over and done with there’s not even much of her body left.

What remains is thrown in the slush pile.

We celebrate with drinks.

They come in later, official representatives of the Law outside, looking for the pop star, but no, officers, we haven’t seen anyone matching that description. Lemme look at the picture. Nope. Haven’t seen her. Any of you seen someone like that in here?