The Chosen

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT}

The food was exquisite: rich, savory, remarkable.

As remarkable as this heady reprieve. They sat and watched, stuffing their gullets on steaming ambrosia and delectible wines. A taste of the cursed world! This blasted scape of insult!

The women were splayed naked before them, dumbly following their own initial instincts. Lapping at one another upon fragrant beds of feathers as countless candles sizzled. Holy preludes drenched with ungodly designs! The acolytes stood aside in wait of their wishes: more rich foodstuffs, wines, fellatio…

Eventually they rose, their lips glossed by succulent greases, and approached the beds. A male acolyte produced wondrous little blades, while the female shrieked in cosmic enthusiasm, a most diverting creature. Her pleasure was obvious.

One blonde’s throat was delicately slit, and the warm blood allowed to sheen the soft flesh of the others, which several reveled to lave off with their tongues. Several more pried apart the blonde’s brittle skull, to feast upon the still-warm brains…

Stout members turned rigid. They each waited patiently to take their turn.

««—»»

Lee woke up past three a.m. For the third night in a row now, his lover had not shown herself. I guess she’s sick of me, his male paranoia presented. Probably in bed with Kyle right now. Or that weird fucker Feldspar.

He couldn’t sleep. The room’s dark unnerved him, aggravated him like an incessant, yapping poodle. Subtle noises cloyed at him further; he knew he must be imagining them.

Whispers, shrieks, remote thunkings…

Fuck this, he thought. I need a beer.

He hauled on old clothes, taking care to leave the suite as quietly as possible. The hall to the stairs seemed cramped, unearthly in silence. A barely noticeable heat wafted against him as he crossed the atrium, from the fireplace.

The kitchen sparkled back at him when he eased through the double doors. The service bar was unlocked.

Where are you? he wondered, strangely close to tears. Did he love her? What was going on? You fat, silly fool. You’ve fallen in love with a whore. That’s what Kyle implied she’d been in her past life. Scarred by the dementias of others, probably insensible by the way the world worked. Doesn’t care, doesn’t know how to.

The Maibock tasted great. Lee leaned against the big Hobart dishwasher, savoring each sip. He finished one bottle, and opened another…

Next, he felt walking through a dream, yet he knew it couldn’t be a dream. I’m awake, he assured himself. But it beats the shit out of me where I am. Strange warrens led him to stranger ones, he felt immersed in rock and moist air. The walls now seemed carved, like a catacomb. Smoky torches lit the way.

Then he knew he must be wrong; he knew he must be dreaming. Rock-arched entryways showed him flagrant horrors. The warrens were lined with ill-lit rooms, and in each room some new, hideous atrocity unfolded. Things he could never have imagined. Women fettered to beds by leather straps so tight their hands and feet glowed blue. Gorged nipples pierced by needles, tips of clitori snipped with shears and lapped of their blood by greedy tongues. In another room, a misshapen man penetrated a woman with a penis that looked large as a summer squash; the woman vomited, somehow, in ecstasy. In a third room a woman fellated a man who didn’t even look human. A gray corrugated face grinned down; the eyes looked blood-red. Weirdly jointed hands grabbed shanks of dirty hair, guiding the woman’s mouth over the worm-veined shaft…

An in yet another grottolike room, a bald man molested a squirming woman chained to a bed. Beyond a sheen of smoke, other men watched intently. The woman seemed fat, anguished; she squirmed against metal shackles while the bald man snipped off a nipple-end with scissors. He squeezed the breasts hard, blood jetting from the insult into some gaping mouth which yawned in the smoky dark.

Lee winced, disbelieving these mad bits of vision. Did I drop acid and not remember? he asked himself. This was the sickest nightmare he’d ever had. Then something jarred him, as solidly as a hammer to the bridge of his nose:

The bald man, muscles shining in sweat, paused as he drew a thin needle through the fat woman’s other nipple.

“Hey, fat boy, ever wondered why this ugly piece of cooze never talks?”

Lee squinted hard. The bald man’s features eventually jelled—the brazen grin, the fucked-up glint in his eyes.

The bald man was Kyle.

And the woman he was so nonchalantly torturing was—

Holy shit no! Lee’s thoughts screamed.

The silent housemaid. His lover.

“We cut all their vocal cords so they don’t get noisy. Sometimes the guys don’t like to hear a ruckus.”

“Stop that!” Lee screamed as the fat woman lurched at yet another needle piercing. Some thing that only vaguely resembled a man crawled forward to tongue the reddened sex.

Kyle chuckled, his bald head aswarm with tails of candlelight. “And we sew the dolts’ pussies shut every now and then for kicks. The fellas get off on watching shit like that.”

Then Kyle, quite calmly, went back to his needle torture.

Yeah, this is a dream, Lee thought. So I can do anything I want, can’t I?

Of course he could.

He rushed forward, and cracked the Maibock bottle over Kyle’s shining, bald head. The glass shattered; Kyle howled and rolled off the pillowed bed. “How do you like that, dick?” Lee asked. “And don’t call me fatboy anymore—I’m getting a little tired of it.”

Lee, then, jammed the broken bottleneck into the base of Kyle’s spine. Ground it in deep.

Kyle collapsed, convulsing.

God, that was fun, Lee thought. It really was. Next, he contemplated a way to free the housemaid from her shackles. It shouldn’t be too difficult; this was only a dream. “Take it easy,” he assured the housemaid, who flinched naked against her restraints. But as he turned to find something to break them with, he—

BAM-BAM!

—fell to the dirt floor as if swiped at the knees by a scythe. At first, his shock left him shakily numb, then the pain exploded with his scream when he saw the two ragged, gristled knobs that had previously been his knees.

“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, fatboy.” Kyle stood above him, a huge smoking revolver in his hand. “It’s too bad. I was beginning to like you.”

Lee shuddered as blood oozed from his burst knees. Above, he noticed queer, shadowed figures converging on the bed. They seemed in glee as they inserted long needles into the housemaid’s flesh: her nipples, her navel, her clitoris. She jerked dumbly. Then more needles slipped into her nostrils, her ears, her eyes…

Kyle grinned. “She was getting pretty beat so we decided to check her out. But unfortunately, fatboy, you’ve seen too much. We gotta check you out too.”

Kyle set the pistol down and picked up something in its place.

God Almighty, Lee’s thoughts groaned.

The gutting knife slid serenely across Lee’s beer belly, parting fat in a neat divide. Lee felt electrocuted. A deeper slice, next, opened the abdominal vault, the lightning bolt of pain bloating Lee’s face like an angel food cake in a hot oven.

And from the sooty darkness, several more misshapen, hallucinatory figures approached. Twisted faces hovered in wait. Strips of sight showed Lee rows of glossy teeth, propped-open bulging eyes, and tongues skimming inflamed lips.

“Sushi, fatboy. You’re it.”

Lee’s only consolation was the thought which repeated in the fashion of a carousel: It’s only a dream only a dream only a dream only a dream—

—as he had the rare and unique experience of watching as the choicest of his organs were extracted from his gut and eaten raw.

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