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  Copyright © 2016 by Jamie Grefe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Bizarro Pulp Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  Bizarro Pulp Press, a JournalStone imprint

  www.BizarroPulpPress.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-31-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: September 23, 2016

  Cover Art: Matthew Revert

  Interior Art: Luke Spooner

  www.carrionhouse.com

  Interior Formatting: Lori Michelle

  www.theauthorsalley.com

  STATIC

  Alina is lost in this tangled mess of gropes: cucumbered clefts, limbs and swells, white cotton stained and sopping, hard-yanked.

  A hot sludge.

  Sacs dangle like skin bells from strange men. Tonight, this desert house blurts soupy facials, spurts gaping waves of blue static through the walls.

  Those among the debauched are the neighbors of the well-drawn shade. They are the colleagues of the creamed tonsil, of the velvet pelt and quivering hip.

  Distant radiance of the nameless undressed.

  Slip to a pink nipple, a wet lip skittering fluorescent in bath light.

  Toes uncurl, a perfect row of red streaks. Cheek to tongue, a flap and lick, milk-jets on the bearskin.

  Drinks spill down laps, bleed the shag sticky.

  In another room, logs hiss, glow, and pop in the fireplace.

  Everywhere, oiled bodies sparkle off dark corners. Liquid seducers. The lamped den shimmers, coating nudes in slick light.

  Lek Gardenio smacks, gropes at a wall, oozes from a foggy bedroom to the hall and takes a breath to lean, careful not to drown under his own garbled spasm.

  The unseen lurks.

  From a side bedroom comes a whip-crack. Palm to posterior. Lek’s balls still burn. His yellowed teeth clack, coated in muck. Amiss, he stammers forward, trying to stuff the lack with a scratch. There is no way out.

  And his mustache of ferment.

  And it makes his aching head burn solid jelly around this:

  Private desert party—a place to ram holes in the doldrums.

  A mistake, no doubt.

  For there are too many floors to this maze of grunts. Was it something I drank? Oh, what if it was? he thinks. The worm of a thought, perhaps?

  Hushed coos resound. “Lek, come, Lek,” they say, with lusty abandon. Or, “How about a hot mound and swig of gin?” they say. “If it’s too hot—icebox your thermometer, old seadog.”

  But, who exactly mouths this summons for this shirtless, pantless, all but argyle-socked Lek, who stumbles in his near middle age to the pretzel bowl, to the fruit platter? He fumbles, itches across the room to the vegetable spread. Are his fingers crusty, joints weakened? Smothered and sweet sauced? He soaks a scrap of toast crust in a glob of bacon cream, crunches, trying to taste his way back to Alina, to his muse who has taken to mingling her fare elsewhere around the house, with some new body elsewhere around the house.

  She left him hours ago.

  Rewind to: a dip in the bottom of a healthy muff and Lek shot quick, obliterated. The shudder of a jackhammering index, a probing middle, a curious thumb skirting the rim of a fundament.

  Now, wipe juice from nose.

  It reeks of blood.

  There are too many differences here, not to mention the static storms he suffers, threatening to crack open his skull.

  Focus.

  Alina is nowhere to be seen in this mess of moaning holes. But Lek thinks, Yes, I do believe I recognize you, I know you from our mutual acquaintances, I think I’ve seen your faces: Wade’s goo-smothered shaft, his face screaming, “Slurp mine honey.” Or, Sandy sliding legs open, oiling some buff goon’s chicken bone, and popping it out on purpose, going to work on it with hairy tongue flicks.

  Lek fingers a stale pretzel.

  There, by the stereo, a reverse expulsion, a peony stuffed, plunged. He bites, saltier. There is a hum in the room, a reverberating whistle.

  Plunge.

  Into the throes of—the bacon cream, the skinned shrimp, salad dressings, red plastic cups.

  And then she—the anomaly—happens.

  Out of the steam of a side door, a young brunette in black-rimmed spectacles, painted-on jeans, and cardigan green approaches. She grabs Lek’s hand—he’s taken to wiping cream-streaks on his thigh—guides him toward her.

  Behind her, someone says, “Full sleaze ahead,” and rushing from out of frame to focal point, a curly-haired Absalom propels himself over the leather sofa and plops awkward in the lap of a stuffed limb sandwich, the living room somehow wider now, looming open now.

  The brunette tugs him off to get his attention. He says, “I really can’t—Alina, my lover is—I don’t know about this—ooogaaalllooogaaa.”

  “You’re with me now,” she says. “I’m your only hope.”

  “She’s all over the bathroom, son,” some hunk slurs from across the room. ““Don’t let that diamond in the dark slip you up.” This man bumbles across the room, perhaps, to speak more frankly with Lek and the brunette, but he cannot be sure, for the brunette, with Lek in tow, tugs him away.

  “This is not the end of the line,” she says over her shoulder, more to the odd man than to Lek. “A painless resolution remains.”

  Lek pulls a corner of his own mustache into his mouth, trying to keep himself in check. “Surely,” he says, “this is a confusion of who you think I am.”

  “But,” the brunette says, “it’s not just lust, Gardenio.” She giggles, bending her middle finger inward to tickle Lek’s palm. “You’ll learn to ignore those impulses if you only listen.” And they continue off through the brambles of skin and house, of teeth, veins, thighs, feet.

  The gurgling of the house has grown louder. More bodies Lek has not seen in his life. If I dart away, he thinks, just to make it to the coat rack, or what if Alina is already back at the car? But the brunette squeezes his hand too tightly. Alina, he thinks, my light in the shadow of this dumb show. Why, my dear, how have we arrived here?

  His mind skips, jumps to Alina at the office picnic in the city park, her black skirt mustard-smudged like a smeared yolk on black canvas. That was buns and buns ago. Some wiener antic he can’t properly remember—and even if he could? The question startles him. And there he is again dropping the stapler on her sandals. And how minutes later (perhaps hours, he can’t focus) he clinked coffee mugs with Alina at the microwave in the break room. She had told him the toaster stunk as if scorched, pointed out an old flier on the bulletin board. He only heard her accent, smelled the buttons on her blouse.

  He says, “Can you tell where we . . . ?” But this brunette does not speak, just pulls and leads. Pass door upon grumbling door: sweat and musk and armpit stink.

  A shape creeps closer. His boss, Briggs, the bald oaf, waves his arms as if he has a deal to seal with the air itself. But two blonde twins, giggling, shoot out of the dark, pirouette before the boss, halt him obscenely with their tied tongues. One of them cups his pickle, slaps his buttocks to a jiggling tango.
<
br />   The hallway pulses dark green from little circular lights in the ceiling. Lek’s whisked away under them. And under him the carpet feels warm growing warmer.

  The voice of an old man booms from behind: “She’ll cut you, son. Wouldn’t be the first time in this tollbooth of deception.”

  Whatever that means, thinks Lek. But he’s distracted by spice, the remembered plume of Alina’s peachy hair. Her neckline in the morning, a vase. Tiny leg-lines where the prickly hair spots poked skin. Pretty sprinkles of pepper.

  “Don’t look at any of them now,” his brunette seducer says sharply, not looking back, charging on. “It’s what they’re here for.”

  “Where are you taking me?” Lek says. “I should be getting my coat,” But he slips on a trail of rubbers on the floor. She yanks. He pushes on, feels the goop dribble out.

  “Lek,” someone from the kitchen yells, “welcome to what lies between.” And how many steps have they taken? How long is this hall? Is it shriveling to a paste? But is it shriveling at all, not glitching to a blurred row of blue doors?

  Lek passes the kitchen. It’s Georgette, the mechanic who flushed the transmission on his convertible just last week. She’s being serviced, bent over a faux wooden island in the center of a kitchen so big it could house a dock. She cleaves at mutton, hair spilling over her face, gives Lek a toothy grin, bob, nod, shiver, shudder.

  “I can’t very well—” Lek says. “Hey—have you seen Alina?”

  “—time for a pole-sniffer like you,” Georgette mouths, rammed hard by her suitor who accelerates and pops, spoons a clump of cream pie all over her tattooed back.

  Lek is hand-squeezed down the never-ending hall. He passes barreling bodies of skin. Some nod, stare, clap.

  An open door.

  Footsteps stomp above, muffled.

  And Lek has given up questioning his destination, assuming it to be some kind of Moroccan themed hash bar tucked in a hidden closet or a chest of drawers stuffed with socks. Of course, where he last left Alina—was she relieving herself in the bathroom to a crowd of limp sailors?—and how to snag her attention long enough to get her to leave is the coin of his dilemma.

  And this is when, abruptly stopping in front of the last door on the left, the last door before the stairwell rises to meet the upper reaches of the house, he sees her.

  Lek gives a vicious yank to shake off his seducer’s grip.

  It looks like her, but a hair taller, her edges not crisp, blurred in a jittery frame. She’s coming undone. She’s gorgeous, oblivious. He rubs his eyes.

  “It can’t be . . . ” he says.

  The room before him is a sterile motel vignette, shitty windows opening to a fog-soaked nightscape.

  Lek doesn’t recall seeing this room during his jaunts through the house, through the plugging of licked holes. How can this be here?

  He reaches out an arm, rims his lips, and continues to soak up the strange room before him as if his outstretched hand could somehow flick away this motel replica of Alina.

  The wood-paneled television tuned to static.

  The dark green bedspread and starched pillows, head-dented.

  Alina stubs out a cigarette—she’s clad in a white towel—stands, and wrenches the window open to let in a square sheet of black fog.

  A man’s hands reach inside, quickly grip and grab Alina under the arms, towel and all, and scoop her sweetness out into the foggy void.

  And that man leans forward.

  What Lek sees is a man with a plain thin gaunt ugly September face, eyes quaked in shadow, and a dead-grass scrawl of stubble atop his lip. And, finally, on top of the man’s plain thin gaunt ugly September face rests a cowboy hat the color of weathervane rust. Lek reads that face, “So long, farewell—give up, fair night—She’s mine,” as if spoken in a voice already on the inside of his mind.

  And the man vanishes.

  Lek is about to burst, his argyle-clad calves already poised to propel his spent self across the room and out the window, but the brunette (ever carefully) finger-wraps (for the second time) his rod and twists it up like knobbing an oiled nub. His nose holes pulse, heat up. Where is that man taking Alina? And what is the meaning of this vision if that is, truly, what it is? Is this delirium? Did someone slip something wanton into the punch: a crushed pill, love juice, a shot of dread?

  He wants to throw up, throw a fist through the walls of this house. Seed spread across the bellies of too many unknown faces of this night, Lek sucks air to push away his weakness. “How is this . . . ? The hell did she go?” he says to the empty room. “There’s something wrong with this goddamned house.”

  His forehead clenches, lines squiggling, aching, noise whirring inside his skull.

  The brunette tugs lovingly as if medicating him. She won’t let him go. A soft pulse in her grip. A clenching keeping him near. It’s all too much. His nose is plugged.

  Lek finger-flicks the air, scatters dust and flies. If this were only a game played with the rub of a thumb, the mashing of buttons. This cannot be shut down. Something strange cut and drawn or uncut—the wholly singular, unbound and explicit: a lament, the vignettes, the priest, smoke, metal snips snipping flesh.

  “That’s my crotch of—ow!” he says to the woman. “Enough, you’re rubbing me sore.”

  The brunette places one hand on Lek’s chest, says, “She wants you to follow fairies down fairy holes.” Her voice is soft, urgent. “You never knew better and we have no time to waste, Gardenio. This is beyond what you want.” She pauses. “I’m sorry.”

  Lek inhales: shrimp, horseradish sauce, semen, cinnamon. And the sounds from this hallucinatory house well up with Janet and Pete, Wade and Cynthia, Bob and Bob, Jessica and Rob, Roy and Georgette. And more. The moans rush the hall in pulses of light.

  The room before them has twisted back to normal, just a bed of filth.

  “Step up, step up the stairs,” the brunette says. “It’s a way for you to save yourself, Lek. Trust me.”

  And for the first time all night, Lek really looks down at his naked body. Only socks. Socks and the rank of his own skunk-sweat.

  The brunette nuzzles her face into his neck. She says, “This house is not a crypt, it’s the birth of choice.” She spins, goes behind Lek and slaps his ass hard. He stammers, but steps.

  And behind Lek, the orgy melts into a frenzy of mashed limbs. The players are sticking and jamming and ramming their goods around teeth and tongue, deep up into clefts, chewing calluses and scabs. Someone’s turned the stereo to pure static.

  Lek moves painfully up the stairs.

  Toward the letting go.

  ***

  But Alina has not been whisked away by a mustachioed man in a dreadful hat. No, she is in one of the house’s many regal bathrooms, rolled in a shower of legs, fruit-flavored soap, slippery torsos, lips and tongue-tips.

  Here, in this shower, women and men crush up against Alina. Her breaths come quick. She throws her beautiful head back and cackles.

  A hairy arm slides out and up from between a pair of thick legs. Blonde hair mashes against Alina’s mouth. Her tongue, coated in blonde fur. She spits, angles her head around to take a breath of something other than hair and steam. The arm reaches. Fingers poke up from behind. The steam rises, too thick to see past.

  The toilet flushes, gushes gallons of water.

  “Are you waiting for him to return?” a voice says, near her ear. Who? But the hand works a jig around her pouch. She cannot move in this sloppy skin. More soap slithers across her back like bubbles drizzling down her crack.

  Alina shivers, feels her body grow thinner as if more women are throwing themselves into the shower, pressing her deeper into this cream chamber. “I have seen him with a chestnut angel of deception,” the voice says. “How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel a hundred fingers inside you fading to Hell?”

  The man’s fingers dig up inside her.

  And the bodies crush her lungs, her chest, her ancient bones. That hairy ar
m suddenly wraps round her neck. It does not squeeze. Still, she cannot breathe right. A blackness crackles, sparkles behind her eyes. A darkness and the arm’s constriction is a reminder of how far she’s come and under these conditions of extreme pleasure of what it means to experience the chance of entrapment.

  Alina shudders, excretes an orgasm. It tips her body to hum, shiver. Her body is too pushed to other wet bodies. They rattle, squeak. Yet, her coming causes the coming of others around her as if they can feel from within. And her skin drips orgasmic.

  Women squeal like piglets.

  Men huff like boars, snort gravel.

  The man behind her, the one with his arm around her, says, “When I was child and all that, I had a pillow—night friend softness—with a scissored hole. Led down into the meat of the mattress vortex. It grinds a member to nothing but sick, sick, sick hope.”

  Alina’s eyes roll up into her head. She’s feverish chills, fire, a lamb. She can’t stop coming syrup-waves out her skin. “Who?” Alina speaks, her mouth moaning steam, sludging out the words. The man’s fingers unceasing, his arm tightens around her throat. “Did you imagine a God made of sweat stains?”

  The explosion from her snatch is a clumping drip that oozes between toes.

  The shower burps and the hot juice rises in this sealed box of suffocation. The shower door buckles, expands to meet the pressure of all these bodies. The secretions and gasps of so many pig-people.

  But the door holds, fills, buckles.

  Water rises, turns the shower to a bath of ooze. A fury of release. “Oh, Lek,” she cries out, the orgiastic sweetness filling her mouth, coating her teeth. “I kept all this so far away and now your tables have turned to chopping blocks of sacrifice—I’m going to kill you.” But she does not speak these words, cannot speak with musk-soaked lungs in this mess of limbs and fingers and it’s as if the man fingers the valves of her heart. “I must remain.”

  The water bleeds red. The blood of her heart singing shudders to burst. And the hole between her legs tugs far enough open for the man to crawl up into her, just inviting enough for him to pull the insides of her out.

  And let truth spill to death.