Shifters (34 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Shifters
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“Feel that?” Martin inquired over his work.
scritch scritch scritch
More shuddering coughs and suspended lurches. After a few more scrapes of the razor, the navel had been fully shaved off which provided a single line of blood rolling down to the scalped pubis.
“Scared yet?” the artist asked. The only response was a droop of his victim’s head in this next pause. “Oh, not talkative today, is that it? Shit, usually this should jazz you up…”
“Fuck her up some more!” Darlie shouted. “It’s not enough!”
“It needs to be more refined.” Martin smirked at his couchside accomplice. “Haven’t you ever heard of delineation? You don’t just slop the thematics of art together any old way.” Now he wielded a bare razorblade, jerked the redhead’s face up—
“That’s what I call keeping your eyes peeled,” the blonde said.
—and very daintily cut off her eyelids. He flicked them away like scintillas of onion skin. “Spectacular! Yes! I think we’re getting there!” What looked back at him in this protraction of horror were two denuded rolling eyeballs which now seemed huge as bloodshot orbs of glass pressed into her skull.
“Is that all you’re gonna do? Fuck,” the blonde complained. She sat picking at scabs on her arms. “Thought you were really gonna do a job on her.” Next, she was gingerly eating the scabs. The position she assumed—one thin, needle-tacked leg angled beneath the other—afforded a view of a vaginal entry that, if stressed, could probably admit the full girth of the shank-end of a leg of lamb.
“Patience,” Martin replied. “How long do you think it took Rembrandt to paint
The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Bannings Cocq?
I’m looking to blow that chiaroscuro-neat-trick-cop-out Dutch motherfucker clean out of his wooden shoes ’cos I
know
I’m better.” Martin was getting whipped up, his face tensed, beads of sweat popping from his brow as if in a blaze of sun. “Fuckin-A, I could paint
Nicolaes Ruts
or fuckin’
Moses Smashing the Commandments
with a Number 6 Grumbacher tied to my dick! Deliberation, Darlie! Mechanistics, the perpetuity of aesthetic vision. They don’t come along in the wink of an eye—” Then he jerked a bent expression toward the redhead. “For those of us who still can, I mean… The true artist needs to…cogitate…ruminate…contemplate…conceptualate—er, well, I guess that’s not really a word, but—” Martin threw up his hands. “Oh fuck it! You non-artists just don’t get it!” He rushed toward the blonde, intense, pointing his finger at her like a gun. “We should all stick with what we know! A guy who makes cheese doesn’t paint because he only knows how to make cheese. A guy who binds books sticks to book-binding because he doesn’t know anything about hanging sheetrock. You hear what I’m saying? We stick with what we know. You know sucking cock, spitting out a trick’s cum, taking it up the ass till you can feel some player’s foot-long pud poking your stomach, and shooting skag. Me?
I
 know art.” He stared forward, threw up his hands again at her uncomprehending gaze. “Oh fuck it! Nobody understands me!”
Martin tromped off across the room like a disgruntled toddler having been deprived of a toy, while Darlie tightened her scowl and picked more scabs. “Who shit in your TV dinner? Jesus, Marty, don’t get so pissed off.”
Martin didn’t hear her. He strode back to the scene. “I’d say a more plentiful palette might be in order.” A quick swipe of the razor across the redhead’s brow opened the most diminutive line. Then the line
bloomed.
 
“Oh beautiful red…”
Blood rolled down her face. Martin stepped back again, to conceptualate a little more.
“Hmmm, hmmm…”
“What’s wrong now?”
The painter stood stalled, fingers pressed to his lips as he looked on. He was thinking. “The eyes bother me.”
“But you just said they were spectacular!”
“In life, sure, but I’m wondering now…” He scrutinized the blood-shellacked face and macabre skinless eyeballs. “The translation to the canvas will be marred. Vacancy—that’s what I need. To symbolize the-the-the…
soullessness
 of the down-trodden’s plight… Yes! Yes! Vacant eyes, vacant soul! Openness within the articulations of the truth of the portrait!”
He snatched up a yard-long wooden plank, walked around behind the redhead, and—
WHACK!
—brought the plank against the back of her head with the force of a batter’s swing. Then:
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!
Three more solid blows, yet still the maestro was not content. A more steadied stance, then, a focused line of sight and a flex of muscles.
KUH-RACK!
The last blow sufficed to not only break the plank in half but jettison both eyeballs from their seats in the skull. The sheer force yanked the tenuous nerves from their optical canals, snapped them, and the eyeballs shot to the floor.
“Better, yes! Better!”
“You’re taking too long,” Darlie was griping now. “I need to slam, Marty. Fuck, I’m fuckin’ stringing here. I can’t wait any more, I’m gonna cook up.” A crisp snap and a sputtering flash. She lit a candle on the end table, went through the mindless regimen that was her life, then began to heat a twenty-bag of Afghani heroin in a spoon. The spoon, by the way, was from the same set of 1300s Limoges goldworks dinnerware that Locke had previously eaten his Poulet au Vinaigre a l’Estragon with a number of hours ago.
Martin stared definitively at the redhead’s form, now back in the true creative fugue-state. By some turn of miracle, though (that Locke would deduce only later) she was still alive. Her sucked gut heaved in and out, eyes knocked out of her head and fractured skull notwithstanding, she still quivered on her ceiling hook, mouthing through uprushing blood: “No more no more no more please Marty no more.”
“
YES
 more!” Martin broke and snapped, his orange-fringed mohawk shivering at the vocal gust. “I’ve got it now! Darlie’s right! It’s not a sparseness of aesthetic mechanics that make the work! It’s the creative courage to ignore conventional restraint for the full sake! Darlie! Did you hear me?”
“
What?
” the blonde squealed back.
“The work is the thing!”
Darlie sighed through a skinny pinched-up fucked-up junkie face. “Marty, I’m trying to slam!”
“You’ll see! You’ll love this!”
The screams which followed could not be likened to any sound to ever issue from a human throat. More akin to a heap of cats dropped into a mulching machine. “Feel that, feel that, baby? I’ll bet
that
puts some kick back in ya.”
And kick they did, dirty junkie street-prostitute feet flailing back and forth as Martin, the proud successor to Rembrandt van Rijn, energetically ran the pizza-cutter up and down between the redhead’s legs. The round rolling blade sliced through the works: the majora and minora, the clitoris and hood, and of course the puffed pink swellings of herpetic outbreak. Upon the cutter’s invasion of the latter, watery pus marbled the open running blood.
It was pretty.
zzip zzip zzip zzip zzip
On the pizza blade went, with zeal up and down over the most acutely sensitive perimeter of the redhead’s anatomy. By now she was dancing on that ceiling hook, strutting it out like no tortured junkie ever had.
“What’cha think?” Martin pulled his infuriated gaze. “Darlie! I thought you wanted me to fuck her up more!”
“
Martin!
 I’m trying to slam…”
Goddamn non-artists. “Slam later, get over here.”
“
Mar
ty!”
“Honeybunch, how can I say this without sounding like a neo-nazi New Republican misogynistic creep? Get your 90-pound junkie-whore ass over here before I cut off this bitch’s leg and stick it so far up your giant garage-sized cunt you’ll be able to taste her toe-cheese.”
Evidently Darlie was convinced. She dragged up all 90 pounds and trudged over to her supermate’s beck and call. He shoved a pre-stapled 18”x18” blank canvas frame into her hands. “You know what to do, so do it right,” he advised.
He spun the redhead once more on her wrist-pivot. “We gotta get it all,” he said. “We gotta get every twitch of the theme. If we don’t, I’m no better than Peter Max…” From a spread of curious implements, he first chose a commonplace ice-pick and repeatedly inserted it into the metus surrounding the redhead’s anus. “Yeah, yeah, bet that smarts,” he approved, then, to the blonde, “Get that frame up there, you stupid ditz! We gotta get it!”
Darlie pressed the canvas hard against the redhead’s face, her lips besmirched, as Martin continued with the ice-pick action. Each insertion caused an abundance of nerve-reflex activity on the part of the redhead, and no reservation of vocalization. On each occasion upon which the thin silver spike sunk into the tight rectal meat, there came a gruff yelp and a strong lurch of her legs. Once the targeted area was sufficiently tenderized, Martin emptied a plastic bottle of Rex-All-brand isopropyl alcohol into the cleft of her buttocks.
Now the redhead
sang.
 So high and hard, Locke, in his never-ending paresis, wouldn’t have been surprised if hanks of lung tissue didn’t come up with the objection.
“Keep that canvas on her face, you skag-head bimbo!” Martin hollered.
For there was more to come. The blonde’s stick-thin arms flexed against the resistance as she leaned the canvased frame against the redhead’s screaming face. Next, Martin was jamming the ice-pick between the vertebral slits of the spine, slowly at first, then digging deep to get to the cord. “Press! Press!” he bellowed. The redhead was throwing up now against the pressed flat of canvas.
“Excellent! More variety for the palette!”
“Come on, Marty, I’m shitting cinderblocks I’m stringing so bad…”
“Okay! Take it off!” Martin dropped the pick and then dropped his navy-blue Fruit of the Looms. “Put the canvas down!” he barked as he rushed to sodomize the redhead. The redhead
wailed.
 Not too many strokes, and then he was whining the advent of his release.
“Marty, will you
please
 do my spike?” Darlie pleaded, having set the canvas against the lower wall. The imprint glared back—a marvel of the creator’s initiative: an abstraction of the face of terror. Runnelled smears of scarlet described the face of torture and agony, thinner runnels—thin as wild crimson threads—mushed up to the treated white cloth, with empty white eye sockets roving to and fro the scape of imprinted pain.
Probably not as good as
The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq
also known as
The Nightwatch,
 the world’s most valuable painting, but…
It did what Rembrandt’s canvas did, at least to the liking of most modern art critics. It captured the moment of truth.
The irreducible—and the most honest—moment of terror. It was the artist defining the moment, beyond all reckoning.
The Face of Real Terror.
“Oh, shit’s coming out her ass now,” Martin recoiled, taking offended steps back. “Fuck it, we’re done.”
“Marty,” the blonde cooed. “Her junkie ass may be done, but we’re not.”
“Oh, right, your spike. All right.” He glanced at the “portrait,” brought an awed hand to his tattooed chest. “My God, if it dries right, it’ll be better than the
Mona Lisa.
”
Locke rather doubted that claim, but it mattered little. Something inexplicable was happening here, something that he could no longer play off as a drunken dream or hallucination. It was some grasp of perversity—and one of reality however altered—that kept Locke’s helpless face pressed to that window pane of hell. He thought and he breathed and he even bled—when he tasted his initial convictions by biting his tongue.
This is real,
he knew.
Just a different reality. The same thing the angel said…

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