Steamy Screams: Anthology of Erotic Horror

DEAD DEANNA John McNee

I didn’t plan for any of it. I just got in the truck and I drove without thinking about why or what for. And when I got to Buster’s, I just sat there in the lot, hands at ten and two, knuckles white on the wheel, and I waited. I didn’t think, I didn’t plan. I couldn’t get the fog clear long enough. The only thing I knew—all I could feel—was pure, hot rage.

It wouldn’t fade away, it wouldn’t leave me alone. And it had total control.

It was ten when I got there. I sat watching the door, waiting for the place to empty out, for people to go home. It was just before midnight when the last couple stumbled out of the bar, into the last car in the lot that wasn’t hers and drove away.

I climbed out then. There was a toolbox full of blunt instruments in the flat-bed, and a pistol in the glove compartment. I left them where they were and walked calmly through the doors.

All the tables were empty. Ernest Tubb was playing on the jukebox. Deanna was alone behind the bar.

“Hello, handsome,” she grinned. Six hours spent on her feet shilling beers and she looked fresh as the spring. Not one golden hair out of its place. “Shot and a brew?”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what would come out of my mouth if I opened it. So I kept my jaw clenched, crossed the floor and took a stool.

She set a bottle before me. “I’ve been hoping you’d come around,” she said. “I’ve missed you.” She laid her hand on mine and I pulled it back.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I said, finally finding my voice. It sounded mean.

That feline smile of hers widened and the hand I’d rejected went to her neck, fingers sliding along the collar of her shirt. “Nothing you couldn’t fix,” she answered, hand sliding a little lower. “I’m guessing you finally realized little Lucy never had it where it counts.” She popped a button on the blouse, showed me a little more breast than she’d shown the customers. And she’d shown them plenty.

“Stop it,” I said, not sternly enough.

She cocked her head to one side, looked me up and down, and whispered: “I’ll get the door.”

I gritted my teeth and took a swig from the bottle as she rounded the bar. She didn’t look at me, but did her best hip-sway walk to the door. She was wearing her favorite too-short denim skirt. Any man who dared to watch her long enough would eventually find out she didn’t wear panties. She slid the bolts firmly into place and turned back to me, fixing me with a cool, considered gaze. “Well?”

“You’re crazy,” I said.

She laughed and came back to the bar. “It’s just us here, Ray. You don’t have to keep up the act.” She climbed up onto a stool and sat down on the bar, perched there cross-legged, looking down at me.

“That’s rich,” I said. “You’re the actress. You have any idea what your lies have done to me?”

She pouted and rolled her eyes. “You’re not still angry with me are you, Ray? Can’t you forgive me having a little fun? I’ve forgiven you.”

“You’ve nothing to forgive,” I growled.

She smiled slowly and picked up my beer bottle. “You’re still sore,” she said. “I can see that. But I bet I can make it up to you.” She spun around on her ass and lay down, stretching out on the bar in front of me, blonde hair spilling out over the polished wood. She opened her blouse and showed me the full mounds of her tanned breasts, nipples pert. She hitched up her skirt and put the bottle between her legs, running it along the inside of her thigh. The condensation on the glass left tiny water drops on her skin. In a movie, they would have sizzled away into steam.

“Dee,” I said. “It’s not going to happen. Not ever again.”

She lifted her hand and placed it on my shoulder. I resisted the urge to slap it away. I wanted to make her understand.

She sat up, face coming closer, clear green eyes gazing into mine. “Say it,” she whispered. “Say it so’s I believe it.”

I took a deep breath. “Deanna, you… ”

She grabbed the back of my head and pulled her face into mine. Her mouth tasted of Bourbon. I didn’t fight her. I don’t think I could. She wrapped her arms around my neck and slid into my lap. Her tongue was hot against mine. She pressed her breasts up against my chest. She was tying me up in knots. The rage and the hate were still there, but she wouldn’t let me get it out. She silenced me with her kiss and forced the fury back down, where it stayed, bubbling away in my gut, throbbing at the back of my skull. It’d have to come out some time.

She lay down on the floor and I lay on top of her. We had at it there, in the sawdust and spit.

She pulled my dick out of my pants and laughed to find I was already hard. “Now tell me you don’t want it,” she said.

I plowed into her and she squealed, legs wrapping around mine, fingernails digging into my back. She bowed her head to my neck, bit and kissed. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at her.

“Yes,” she said. “God, yes. I love it. Just like that. I love it…”

My left hand was pressed flat against the floor. My right hand was clutched to her tit.

Her lips were at my ear, breath hot and wet. “I love you, Ray. God, I love you.”

My hands moved. All by themselves. I didn’t make any conscious choice. I just let them do… what they had to do.

“Say it to me, Ray,” she gasped. “Tell me. Tell me you love me.”

My right hand sprung away from its perch on her breast and clamped on her neck. All my weight pressed down on it. Her whole body went tight. I lifted myself up on the strength of that clenched claw and brought my other hand over to join it. And I squeezed.

I kept my eyes tight shut, but I could imagine hers popping open, gazing up at me in dreadful confusion. I closed my grip tighter, harder, crushing her neck. I could hear her tensed muscles yielding to the pressure, heard the chokes and gasps spilling softly from her lips and I pressed down harder, harder till there were no chokes, no noises at all. I strangled her till her clawing arms and legs went limp about me, till her arched back fell flat against the floorboards and the pulse went out of her cunt. And I kept on choking her.

And then, sometime later, much later, I finally let her go.

I never felt bad about it. Not about killing her. Fucking her that last time seemed like a kind of shitty thing to do, but killing her never felt wrong. It had to be done.

I was forty-six when I met her. She was twenty. She was working the late shift at Buster’s road-house and I was drinking myself to death at a corner table. Drinking too much to dull the pain of a collapsed marriage ruined by too much drinking. I was pretty pathetic, but I was too drunk to care and she was too young to tell. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d talked my way into her snatch. And it was good back then. Real good. We got lit up together and she was young and wild and everything I needed.

But it didn’t last. Things like that don’t. I sobered up. I started wanting something more. About that time, Lucy showed up. She got me whipped into shape pretty soon. I knew I didn’t deserve a second shot at happiness, but here it was and I didn’t want to screw it up. It helped that she wasn’t bug-nuts crazy.

You’d think a girl who falls so easily into your lap would be happy enough to fall out again, but it turned out Deanna wasn’t that way. Not by a long shot.

I told her it was over and she took it all as one big joke. For days after, she kept showing up, thinking I’d be pleased to see her, asking why I hadn’t called, wouldn’t be told ‘no.’ When I finally convinced her I’d moved on, she lost it. She was crying, screaming, shouting, lashing out with her fists. Then came the threats, then the promises. I told her to grow up. She didn’t like that.

Lucy started getting phone calls in the night, things’d go missing, she’d get that feeling that someone was following her. She left work one evening to find her car all smashed up. It didn’t take long to work out who did it. Weeks it went on. Only getting worse. Lucy said she could handle anything Dee had to dish out. She was strong. But not strong enough.

I fought her, ignored her, threatened her… I did everything I could to shake myself free of her and she wouldn’t leave me alone. She was always there, wouldn’t let me be happy. Way Deanna saw it, she and I were gonna be together forever, whether I liked it or not. We were soul-mates, bound in eternity. And, yeah, so I smacked her around a little, towards the end.

Well she got me back for that. But good.

She went to the cops and told Lenny Warner that I’d beaten and raped her.

And that did it. I got put in chains and hauled into the station. Word got out. Lucy said she’d stand by me, but when, after a day and a half of pointless interrogation, they finally let me go home, she was gone. “Sorry, Ray,” her note read. “It’s too much. That bitch is just too much.”

And that’s when I got in my truck… and drove to Buster’s.

After it was done, I finished my beer then hauled her body outside and tossed it into the back of the truck. There wasn’t a damn thing but woods and road for two miles in any direction from the bar, so I wasn’t afraid of anyone spotting me.

I drove west and, after a few miles, took a turn off the main road into the forest.

When I found a spot I liked, I dug up the ground and I planted her there.

And tapped the grave level.

The next day, I woke up from the best night’s sleep I’d had in weeks and reached my hand out for Lucy. Finding her side of the bed empty—and remembering—I reached a little further and grabbed the gin bottle from the bedside table. It was only half drained.

I called Rick at the auto-shop to tell him I wouldn’t be into work, made out like I was down with some kind of summer flu. He was unusually understanding. “Take all the time you need,” he said. That wasn’t like him, but I figured he’d heard about the rape charge and was planning on firing me anyway.

It was too hot to go outside and too claustrophobic in the room, so I spent most of the day sat in the window, neither in or out, listening to the radio and drinking.

Later, when I started to get hungry, I fried some eggs and toasted the last of the bread, then went out to the store on the end of the street, bought a six-pack and a half-pint of scotch and came home. The radio was still on, but I wasn’t listening to it. At some point, after the beer was gone, I turned it off and went to bed.

I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, not awake, but not exactly sleeping either. I dozed away the hours in a slumberous state without thought, till I heard the sound of the front door swing shut and soft footsteps on the stairs.

Lucy. My sweet Lucy.

I had to press a hand to my mouth to force the grin away, sat up slowly, blinking back tears to see her silhouette in the doorway.

“Baby,” I croaked. “You came back.”

She stepped forward into the only light in the room, that narrow rectangle of moonlight shining through the open window and revealed herself. Not Lucy.

My first, base response was a split-second of anger. How dare she break into my home! Then I remembered the bitch was dead.

Her hair was a tangled mess, face and chest smeared with dirt, though you could still see the dark bruises on her neck. She wore the clothes I’d buried her in: check shirt, unbuttoned, baring her dead breasts, pale blue and beautiful in the moonlight, and denim skirt, creased, mud-stained and riding up around her hips. Those achingly long legs of hers seemed to shimmer with an ethereal glow, sweeping slowly one past the other, entrancing me with their movement. It was with a dull, listless sort of dawning dread that I suddenly realized she was coming towards me.

So all-consuming was my panic that for a moment the ability to run deserted me. Seemed my whole body had forgotten how to organize itself and, rather than leap urgently from the bed, I thrashed violently on my back, like a confused upended turtle, tangling myself in my bed-sheets, unable to put my limbs into some kind of order.

I didn’t scream exactly. Nothing so focused. Instead, I seemed to expel great bursts of breath in hurried, heaving gasps.

She might have thought I was trying to speak, because she parted her mud-flecked lips and whispered a reply: “Hello, handsome.”

I rolled onto my belly and scrambled away, only to feel her cold fingers clamp down onto my ankle and haul me back onto the bed. Christ, was she strong! Her jagged fingernails drew blood.

“Oh, no,” I squeaked, pathetically. “Oh, no, no, no.” Like some helpless toddler.

She climbed up onto the bed, on top of me, her legs straddling my hips. Her hands were on my arms, pinning them down, though I made no effort to resist. I don’t think I could.

She bent her head to me and I closed my eyes tight, anticipating the touch of her lips against my neck in the moment before she bit through the skin and ripped my throat out.

Instead of that though, she pressed those icy lips to mine and kissed me. I heard my own voice in my head screaming for me to wake up, to prove this all a nightmare. Her hips began to gyrate as she rubbed herself up against me and slipped a hand under the bedsheets. “I’ve missed you,” she breathed, mouth at my ear, dry tongue flicking against my neck.

“Fuck this,” I said, to no-one and everyone. “Fuck this, fuck this… ”

Her fingers coiled around my dick, finding it warm and inexplicably ready.

“Fuck this!”

She stripped back the sheets and guided me into her. She was rough and dry and cold, but she wasn’t holding back. “I love you, Ray,” she said, grinding on top of me, grinning wide. I saw a woodlouse crawl out of her ear, wander aimlessly over her face. “Tell me you love me.”

“Fuck this!” It was all I could say and I couldn’t stop saying it. “Fuck this! Fuck this!”

“That’s it, Ray. God, yes. I love it. Just like that. I love it…”

“Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this—”

She wanted me to come. She wanted me to make her orgasm. She wanted me to finish what we’d started in the bar.

I tried. And passed out long before.

I woke with the dawn, surprised I was still alive. My dick ached, like I’d been fucking sandpaper all night. And I wished I had. For a time, I lay staring straight up, not wanting to look round, not wanting to confirm what I already knew, but finally I did. She was sprawled out on the bed beside me, stiff, unmoving… dead. Deader than ever. Dead, dead, dead Deanna.

I suppose other men might have broken down then, wrestling with their own sanity, calling into question everything they’d ever believed, unable to trust themselves or the physical world. Not me, though. I don’t like to waste time over-thinking things.

I wrapped her body in the bedsheets (fuck sleeping in those again), carried her downstairs and out to the truck. My garage was littered with engine parts, mechanical projects and winding lengths of chain. I gathered all the shit together and piled it up on top of her then drove her out to the swamp.

It was still too early for most people to be out and I knew a spot near the water where no-one would see us. I’d taken her there to fuck often enough back when we were fucking. When she still had a pulse. I parked the truck, dragged her body, bundled up with bedsheets and metal out to the water’s edge and rolled her in. She sank fast… and deep.

I swung by the liquor store on the way home. When I got back to the house, Lenny Warner was waiting for me. The prick always looked too well-rested for a cop. He stood on the porch steps rolling a cigarette as I approached.

“Where’ve you been, Ray?” He didn’t look at me when he said it.

“I didn’t realize we had an appointment,” I replied.

“I was in the neighborhood,” he lied. “Thought I’d swing by. Wanted to ask if you’d seen or heard from Deanna.”

Oh, boy, but if you only knew. “If I never see that girl again, it’ll be too soon,” I said. “And I’m not answering any more of your questions.”

“Not without a lawyer, huh?”

I shifted the brown bag of booze into my left hand and unlocked the front door. “Get off my porch, Lenny.”

“Deanna’s missing,” he said. “Ain’t been seen since two nights ago at Buster’s. She was supposed to lock up, but in the morning the doors were open, all the lights were on, her car was still there but she wasn’t.”

Try the bottom of the swamp. “You saying I had something to do with it?”

“You sayin’ you didn’t?”

“Goodbye, Lenny.” I swung the door shut in his face.

It was too damn hot in the house and the whiskey couldn’t cool me down. I sat at the kitchen table with a glass in one hand, bottle in the other and never letting go of either, as the sun swept across the sky and finally set in the west. I didn’t move from my chair except for the odd twitch or jump whenever I imagined I could hear Lenny’s prowler coming back up the drive or a soft knuckle’s rap on the door.

Yeah, right. Like she’d bother to knock.

That’s when the bad thoughts started to sneak up on me, there in the kitchen. Thoughts about what I’d done, what I’d seen, what I was doing, whether any of it was possible. What did it mean? Was it real? Was I mad?

“Fuck this,” saying it again. “Fuck this, fuck this,” and drowning all semblance of thought with alcohol. Drink till you can’t think any more. Drink till it’s all numb and easy. Drink till the morning comes…

I didn’t make it till morning. I passed out on the kitchen floor shortly after midnight.

When I woke up, dizzy, sick, drunker even than when I’d passed out an hour before, my dick was in her mouth.

She looked up at me, smiling with hooded black eyes, leaking filthy gray tears over filthy gray cheeks. Blonde hair slick, matted damp against her head, strands coiled around her neck like thin throttling fingers.

Her head rose and fell in rhythm, blue lips tight around my flesh, mouth so cold she’d numbed my cock. The putrid lizard skin stink from her was overwhelming. I turned my head away and puked—a violent, burning jet of bourbon and bile that broke like a wave across the tiles.

Deanna’s hand moved, rattling chains, sliding under my shirt, caressing my skin with her white, wrinkled fingers. She left a dark smear wherever she touched me.

“No,” I begged, in a voice soft as ash. “No more… ”

Her head snapped upwards and she let my dick slap back against my belly, something more than mucus on her chin. Fluid trickled from her ears, nose and eyes. She raised her naked, water-logged body up to straddle me again, carelessly draping chains across my legs. They didn’t seem to bother her.

She positioned herself over my cock and with two fingers splayed the lips of cunt. Black water splashed out over my crotch in a foul gushing stream.

She opened her mouth and I heard the echo of blood and swamp water bubbling in her throat. “Now,” she rasped. “Now, tell me you don’t want it.”

I couldn’t tell her a damn thing.

When the dawn came up, I was crouched in a corner of the kitchen, my mind on the pistol in my truck. That was a definite way out. A bullet in the brain could at least put my mind at ease.

But then my thoughts strayed from the glove compartment to the flat-bed and the big bag of tools I kept there. And I thought of the big old saw, sharp and strong.

I stared at Deanna’s gray, bloated corpse in the middle of the floor, still wrapped in chains and vegetation, lying stagnant in her pool of waste liquid, my spent seed lining the walls of her dead womb. I thought of how easily the saw would sink into her flesh, cleave her sodden bones apart, what short work it’d make of that crumpled pile of stinking meat.

I stood, rising dizzily onto my feet, went out and returned with what I needed.

Two hours later, I was six miles outside of town and Deanna was beside me in the passenger seat. Or rather, she was in the foot-well of the passenger seat… in a black plastic bag… in bits.

Wherever I spotted an unguarded garbage can, I pulled up and dropped a little piece of her in. After a few hours driving, she was spread out across more than half the county.

Before heading home, all trace of her gone to rot at the bottom of over a dozen different trash sites, I stopped off at the church to say a prayer for the dear departed. I prayed to God that her soul might at last leave the earth and find peace in the hereafter. And leave me the fuck alone.

Then I went next door to the Christian Center and made their day by buying the whole place out. I bought five bibles, twenty-eight crucifixes, three boxes of candles, holy water and every cheap-ass tacky-looking ornament I could find. I threw it all in the back of the truck and headed for home. Lenny Warner was waiting for me.

Or maybe not for me. Just waiting. That’s how it looked anyway. He sat in the prowler across from the house, smoking a cigarette, looking at nothing in particular. After I pulled up and stepped out, I went up to the porch and stood there awhile, thinking he was going to come over. But he didn’t. He stayed right where he was.

So I took all the crap I’d bought inside and stood at the window, watching him, waiting for him to leave. He didn’t. At last, I stormed back outside and was halfway to his car when I heard chatter blaring out of his radio, saw him flick the cigarette away, and he started the engine up and drove off.

He never looked at me once.

Cleaning up the putrid stain in the kitchen took a long time, but I did it. Then I went around the house, locking all the doors and windows, barricading myself in as best I could. I put a bible in every corner of my bedroom and nailed every crucifix to the wall. I washed the door and floorboards down in holy water and arranged little plastic and porcelain Jesuses and Virgin Marys on every spare surface I could find.

Then, as the blazing sun went down, I climbed into bed with a bottle of whiskey, the pistol and a bible.

And I waited.

You might be surprised by how quickly sleep took me. I was so exhausted, I’d been through so much, and even after all I’d seen, I couldn’t help the feeling I’d beaten her. She was gone. Chopped, scattered, to sizzle in the late summer’s blistering warmth, to be dissolved away to sickly mush by thousands of ravenous insects. And, wrapping myself up in the warming comfort of this knowledge, I went to sleep.

I woke up soaked through in spilled whiskey, half the candles burned out, and I couldn’t find the pistol.

And she was at the door.

I felt her before I saw her. Felt the gaze of her shriveled eyes and the chilling blast of night air from the doorway. I turned towards her and saw her limping, lop-sided calamity, towards me, slapping one torn and repackaged foot wetly down and dragging the wilted other behind.

“Mmmmmm,” she said. “Mmmmmmmm… ”

“No!” I shrieked. “Fuck you!” And hurled the whiskey bottle at her. It struck her left shoulder, knocking pieces of flesh loose. They spattered upon the floor with a soft thud.

I tossed the sheets, hunting for the pistol, threw away the pillows and found only the leather-bound bible I’d taken to bed with me. “Mmmmm,” Deanna said, clawing her way onto the bed beside me.

Turning, I swung with the bible, swatting her in her misshapen face, and again. She grabbed my arms in her iron grip and pinned me down. This close in the candlelight I could see the joins where she’d put herself back together, all the pieces going mostly where they were supposed to, but at an angle. That was a little-known fact about Dee—she was a real whiz with a needle and thread. She clambered up on top of me like a crooked jigsaw puzzle.

Against all protestations and struggle, she forced herself upon me, straddling with discolored, lumpy thighs, seeping with ripening pus. Her cunt was one improbably long slit, cutting up across her belly, threatening at any moment to cover me in her leaking yellow innards.

As she rode me, I saw one of her tits had already popped its clumsy stitches and flapped wanly over her navel, useless clump of hanging dead flesh. And then there was her face.

“No,” I cried, as she bent down to me. “No, Deanna, no!” As her stitched and sun-burnt mask peered into me. “Noooo!”

She opened her mouth wide and closed it over mine. Her swollen black tongue slid between my lips, quivered suddenly and exploded… flooding my throat with maggots.

“Oh Jesus… ”

Reluctantly, I awoke.

“Mother of God in Heaven… ”

Still tasting the rot of her final kiss, the tightness of dried spit and slime over my face.

“My, oh my, oh my… ”

I opened my eyes one at a time, blinking queasily into the morning’s light, and saw Lenny Warner standing at the foot of my bed. Flanked on either side by deputies. Turned out Dee had left the door open when she’d come up. And a trail of bloody footprints to follow.

“Shit, Ray,” Lenny said, hand over his mouth, too much in shock to be much in any mood for retribution. “Just… shit.”

I went resigned to my death.

The lawyer—cheapest in the county but a real nice guy—did everything he could and I did absolutely everything he told me, but everyone could see there was no way I was escaping the electric chair.

And that was fair. I’d murdered her. I couldn’t deny it. Everything I did, I’d done to myself and, if it was oblivion, then to oblivion I would go, stoic and resigned.

When the time came, I declined the last meal and offered no final words.

Somebody threw a switch… and I died.

Thankful for the embrace of nothing at all.

When I woke up I was six feet underground, sealed up tight in a cold pine box and Deanna’s lips were pressed against my ear.

“Hello, handsome,” she said.