Authors: Edward Lee

The House (15 page)

BOOK: The House

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"Won't eat my fresh, home-cooked bacon with a dog's mouth, huh?"

Sissy was on the floor now, on hands and knees. Ropes of blood hung from her mouth. Leonard stepped on her back and stomped down hard. The impact of her abdomen to the floor caused a spurtle of bile to jet from her mouth. Her spine cracked in the process.

"Skinny wimp motherfucker, huh?"

"No Leonard no!" Snowdrop pleaded, backing up with her dirty palms showing. Her right eyeball bobbed on her cheek.

"Yes Leonard yes," Leonard replied and approached her. From the cutting room he could hear the radio, and it seemed delightfully appropriate: Iggy Pop groaning "All aboard for funtime..." Leonard grabbed Snowdrop's skinny neck and squeezed. He squeezed so hard she couldn't even gag. Her face turned pink, then blue, then something close to black. From her eye socket, blood poured. Leonard curiously stuck a finger in there, heard a thin bone crack, then he wriggled his finger in her brain. She was clearly quite dead, yet he held her up off her feet for some time. Her tongue—fat now in its post-mortal edema—stuck out comically from between her pressed lips. Leonard leaned forward as if to kiss her. But he didn't kiss her. He clamped his teeth on her fat tongue, bit if off, and—

"
Pluuuuey!
"

—spat in back into her face.

While this was going on, by the way, Leonard was only seeing red, so to speak. He did not calculate the motivation for his deeds, nor did it occur to him that what he was doing to these poor, unfortunate drug addicts totally defied the sense of morality and good will he tried to live his life by. Equally, he did not question the oddity of newfound strength and the vigor of several serial-killers all rolled up into one. Instead, he just kept tearing ass. He revolved Snowdrop's head round and round and round until her neck looked like a pale cinnamon twist. Eventually it detached and fell into his lap. He pulled the depending eye away, severing the optical cord, and then picked up the bitten off tongue and inserted it into the socket. Now she was sticking her tongue out at him through her eye! It was a neat effect. He calmly carried the headless body out back and—"Soup's on, doggies!"—threw it into the dog pen. The dogs barked in jumping, saliva-flying glee, and they ate with voracity.

When he meandered back into the house—whistling "Domino" by the Cramps—he found that Sissy had managed to crawl most of the way to the front door, dragging her dead legs behind her.

"Why you little dickens!"

She shot out a shriek, then hastened her progress, thumping forward ever faster on her palms.
Thump-thump-thump-thump...
It was quite a measure of determination. "And just where do you think you're going, Miss Priss?" Leonard coyly asked. "Want to go for a stroll outside? Here, let me help you." He opened the front door and gestured to the bright sunlit yard with his hand. She cast one terrified glance up at his grinning face, shrieked again, then just kept thumping. "You know," he said, "it troubles me to see a woman in extreme travail. And I think I can relieve some of your burden!" Leonard dashed off only to return a moment later with the big wood-chopping ax. "Let's get rid of some of that dead weight, huh?"

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

Three swipes was all it took to cut her body in half. Amazingly, if only for a moment, Sissy seemed to not recognize this, and the front half of her body thumped even more quickly forward, leaving a wake of scrawny innards and blood. Leonard watched in revel as everything from the waist up dragged itself out the front door, where it stalled and then died a moment later. Everything from the waist down, of course, remained in the living room: two skinny legs joined to a skinny buttocks.

Leonard flipped the legs and ass over. To his surprise, he discovered that all this killing and mayhem had made him horny, so, as if to conform to this new and sudden change in his personality, Leonard—

"Oh, what the hell?"

—pulled his pants down and had sex with the lower half of Sissy's body.

He fucked the legs with gusto, now singing "Ain't no cure for the summertime blues," the version by the Flying Lizards, naturally. He came quickly, and it was a "good nut," as Rocco would say, and when Leonard was finished dispensing it, he went back to the kitchen and finished the bacon. But as he reached for the first piece he did notice this:

His hand was green.

««—»»

Leonard awoke to the pulsating thrum of crickets. He leaned up from the kitchen table, rubbed his face, and thought,
Oh, man. What a horrible dream!
Yet the first thing he saw after that thought was Snowdrop's severed head, her tongue sticking out at him from her eye.

Something was amiss.

A quick, stunned walk about the premises showed him what he already knew. Snowdrop's gnawed skeleton glistened within the dog pen, several very fat dogs sleeping aside. Sissy's legs and ass lay splayed on the living room floor, a giant wet spot on the carpet between them, while the rest of her lay several feet beyond the front door. Leonard closed the door.

"Ooops," Leonard voiced to himself.

What had happened? What had gotten into him, and moreover...
why?
The evidence about the house indicated something clearly more acute than a bad mood.

And when he looked at his hands, they were, indeed, green.

His arms were green, and when he pulled up his Van der Graaf shirt, he couldn't help but notice that his chest and stomach were green too.

Kind of like the color of snowpea pods, if a bit darker. Then came the inevitable moment of truth. He pulled down his pants...

"Oh,
man!
Even my
dick
is green!"

The fungus- and vomit-specked bathroom mirror sealed the total package into reality. Leonard stared cockeyed at his green face. Something had turned him homicidal
and
green.

A few seconds of cogitation...

Then he had a pretty good idea what it was.

««—»»

Beneath the shroud of midnight, he slipped like a sprite down the hill. Crickets and peepers pulsed their waves of music into the night. A sickle moon followed Leonard through a declivity of waist-high rye grass and man-tall sunflowers. Leonard's sprint through the wild consumed at least several miles, his feet blazing a trail, and then he'd arrived.

The "compound."

The Epiphanite settlement.

Stark rectangles filled the expansive perimeter of 10-foot-tall chainlink fence: one squat building after another. Leonard scrabbled over the fence with no difficulty, then dashed behind a stack of hand-made barrels. She was in there somewhere—Esther the Contortionist, but—
How am I going to find her without alerting the entire compound?
What, he was just going to barge into every building—a skinny green man in a Van der Graaf shirt—and say
Excuse me, but I'm looking for Esther, you know that girl who can pin her feet back behind her head?
Not likely. He'd have a dozen guys who looked like Ernest Borgnine chasing his ass with pitchforks.

But what could he do? It seemed hopeless!

"Yooooooow!" his shriek cut into the night when a hand grabbed his shoulder.

"Shhhhhh!"

Leonard turned wide-eyed and looked straight into the pretty face of...good luck.

"Be
quiet!"
Esther urged in a fierce whisper. "You'll wake everyone up!"

Leonard let his heart pace down, then considered this remarkable stroke of fine fortune. Not only had Esther found
him,
it was too dark out here for her to notice the incongruenty that his skin was green...

"What are you
doing
in here?" she complained. "Are you nuts?"

"I, uh—I was looking for you."

"Well I was looking for
you."
Her face blushed slightly in the moonlight. "I just snuck out and was gonna come up to your house."

"Why?"

She rolled her eyes. "To fuck you, you dummy. I told you last night I want you to knock me up."

For whatever reason, the words which composed this prurient statement put a spark something fierce in Leonard's loins. At once his green dick was hard and throbbing in his pants, and the wash of lust completely side-tracked him as to his purpose. He roughly grabbed her there behind the barrels, licking her neck, pawing at her coarse black pilgrim's dress.

"Not
here!"
she contested but spared a giggle. "Someone on rounds would see us." Leonard rubbed his erection against her hip. "Mmm, you really
do
want to see me," she observed. "But we can't fuck here, we have to go to your—"

An idea cut off the rest of her words, and a slow smile bloomed on her face. "Wait a minute, wait a minute—this is great!"

"What is?" Leonard asked, now trying to stick his hand up her dress. "You want to go back to the house?"

"Nope, I've got a better idea! Come on!"

She grabbed his hand and jerked. Anxiousness led him quickly through the maze of stark, squat buildings; she'd stop every so often to peer around a corner for sentinels, then led him further until they arrived at a smaller building near the far end of the compound. "Here's where the girls sleep," she whispered. "Buddy, I hope you're horny." Her hand molested his groin. "Holy shit, you're horny, all right!"

Indeed, Leonard was, hornier than he'd ever been in his life, and raring to go. Yet his distraction let go of him long enough to notice, beyond the fence, a moderate pig pen filled with sleeping hogs, and beyond that, some horses and sheep grazing in the fields. A high cloud moved off, and suddenly Leonard's face was bathed in moonlight.

"Are you all right?" Esther asked with a sudden curiosity.

"Uh, yeah."

She squinted. "You look kind of...dark."

Leonard frowned to himself. "We need to talk."

««—»»

But the talk would come later as Leonard's "distraction" returned once Esther showed him into the girl's dorm. Five spartan cots sat in a row, and four of them contained girls in their late teens, donned in sackcloth nightgowns and fast asleep. Esther glided through the dark and nudged each one of them awake, whispering the likes of: "Shhh! Don't make any noise," "Keep the oil lamps out!" "I brought a man back!"

"A
man!"
one of the girl exclaimed.

"
SHHHHH!"

The girls sat up now, their eyes focused on Leonard's silhouette in the dark. "This is Leonard," Esther explained, "he lives up in that funny house on the hill and he's going to fuck us all!"

Wow,
Leonard thought.

A rush of giggles and gleeful squeals rose up as all of the girls peeled off their austere gowns and converged on him. The darkness, thankfully, continued to conceal Leonard's greenness, but by their vim and vigor, he suspected that he could've been pin-striped and covered with pink elephants and these girls wouldn't have cared. They mauled him, stripping him as though he were a candy bar and his clothes were the wrapper. "Goddamn, this guy's got a big motherfuckin' cock!" one girl celebrated when she grabbed him.

Who? Me?
Leonard thought.

Hot hands coursed over his body.

"What a fuckin'
rock-hard bod!"

"Jesus Christ, this guy's a rack of
muscle!"

BOOK: The House

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