Doa Ii Read online

  “Truth,” I repeated, giving her a telling stare.

  Now she understood. She knew the question we’d left off on, back when our relationship was just starting.

  “Right then,” she moaned, “how’d you lose the finger?”

  “I chopped it off with a hatchet.”

  She began grinding her pelvis into my hand.

  “You see,” I continued, “there are all kinds of fetishes. I’d heard about one that makes it so some people can’t have an orgasm unless something is being amputated. I don’t have this problem, as you well know. But I was curious about the condition.”

  “So you went for it. That’s so ballsy, baby.”

  “That’s not the whole story,” I said. “It took a lot for me to build up the nerve to do it. But I was alone. I had no sexual partner for months. My movies and my masturbation were all I had. You already know about my boyhood fixation on Madeline Smith.”

  “Oh yes, the Bond-girl.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, my obsession with her never left me, only escalated. During those lonely months, I grew sick over her. I pulled a Van Gogh, you might say. I chopped off the finger as a tribute. I’d planned to mail it to her for Valentine’s Day.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “But why?” she asked as if heartbroken.

  “After the excitement of hacking it off, I began to think more clearly. Most women would panic if they received a finger in the mail. The police would be notified. It might all lead back to me.”

  “So do you still have the finger?”

  “Well, I knew I couldn’t preserve it for long, and I was too embarrassed by the idea of rushing to the emergency room to have it reattached. Besides, it had been a profound moment in my life and I wanted it to stay severed, the nub being a reminder of the madness I’d reached. But I didn’t want to just toss the finger. I wanted to keep it, but not frozen or something stupid like that. So, that night, I ate it.”

  For a moment we both fell silent. She stared at me.

  “What was it like to do that?”

  “While I felt like I’d hit rock bottom, at the same time I felt liberated.”

  “Just like watching snuff.”

  “Exactly, only better because I was involved.”

  We fell silent again as she stared at me with those animal eyes. It was then that I realized that she had fallen in love with me as well.

  “Alex, darling.”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to make a movie with you.”

  ~

  We watched the video together while she soaked her foot in ice. She’d taken a few painkillers and was doing fine. The video had come out good, Violet doing an excellent job filming. Her hand didn’t even shake much as I’d severed her toe, even though she screamed. Watching myself eat it made me feel about the same as I’d felt earlier while actually eating it. I was into it, but it wasn’t the same as when I had eaten my finger. Something was lacking, flaccid.

  “We’re off to a great start,” Violet said. “But it needs more. A little cannibalism goes a long way, but we need to get things in perspective.”

  “I’ve been trying to come up with ideas but nothing’s struck me, you know? Rape, torture, murder; it’s all been done.”

  We sat there thinking as we watched. And just like that, something came to me.

  “You’ve given a toe,” I said. “Now it’s my turn.”

  “All right, but no more toes,” she said, “we don’t want to be redundant.”

  ~

  From my point of view, I filmed her on her knees before me, performing fellatio. We got typically kinky with it, the deep-throating and cheek smacking. Then up came the dagger. She teased me, scraping the shaft. Then, she ever so slowly began to cut away a small section of my erection’s flesh, not anything like a castration, just shaving a section of skin. She did this and then sucked on it in a frenzy before chewing the striped flesh.

  I exploded in her face as she ate me, and it was the most intense orgasm of my life.

  I knew then what had been missing when I had devoured her toe. It wasn’t so much the eating of human flesh that excited me: it was having my own flesh eaten. Eating myself was nauseating bliss, but being devoured by a beautiful woman was the sweetest fetish of all.

  And Valentine’s Day was drawing nearer.

  After I’d been bandaged and we’d watched the tape with fervor, I told Violet my epiphany of the ultimate gesture of love.

  “Snuff is redundant because it’s all murder,” I said. “What if, instead of a victim, there was a willing participant?”

  “Holy hell,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

  “It would add levels of depravity, horror and fetishism the likes of which the world has never seen. Think of it: a film where someone willingly dies, and even enjoys it. Better yet, instead of a pretty woman being snuffed by insane men, we have an insane man being snuffed by a pretty woman. The man is not just killed, but eaten alive. Not just by the woman, but by himself too.”

  ~

  Strapped to the slab, I lay beneath Violet who rides me, films me, shreds me. The agony and ecstasy are one, an insufferable heaven. I am in thrall, but my most erotic nightmare has come true, so I am free. The feel of her fingers twisting in my abdomen is as wonderful as the feeling of my erection that now spews inside her. This is the masterpiece we give to the world, our blessing of sickness bestowed upon the already infected.

  Violet agreed with my final wishes and is going to complete the film on her own. The porno-snuff footage we’ve shot will be put together in a montage of our best moments then the film will build up to this scene where I am willingly eaten alive. The remainder of the film will be Violet first having whatever sex she can with my corpse, then a thorough dismemberment, and finally, the cooking and eating of my remains. She will then edit a rough final cut and send free copies to all of the people I have listed on my hard drive, my records of all the customers I’ve had for my horror and porno films: the nasties. Once completed, close to a thousand people will have an authentic snuff film and, as anyone in the underground film business knows, the circulation won’t stop there.

  Violet’s face appears on the film, and I’ve suggested she blur it, but she insisted on leaving it in for the integrity of the film. She doesn’t care if its release might put her in prison. The trial would see more exposure than the O.J. Simpson case. It would all just hype the movie up even more.

  I can feel death tightening as Violet pushes my intestines into my mouth. As everything goes black I taste a flavor that is the true so-called nectar of the gods; I chew with what little energy I have left.

  She bends down and her mouth drips blood as she whispers into my ear: “I love you, darling. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  This is the proudest achievement of our lives.

  This is the outcome of our desires.

  This is the very pinnacle of our art.

  IF MEMORY SERVES

  Jack Ketchum

  Patricia sat relaxed in the armchair across the room.

  The metronome on the table in front of her had done its work in record time.

  “I’d like to speak with Leslie,” Hooker said.

  The woman looked at him, sighed, and shook her head.

  “God! Leslie again. I don’t get it. What the hell’s wrong with speaking to me once in a while?”

  Hooker shrugged. “You lie. You evade. You try to confuse things. If you didn’t lie so much, Susan, maybe I’d want to talk to you more often. Nothing personal.”

  She pouted, leaned back in the chair and folded her arms across her breasts.

  “I’m only trying to cover my butt, y’know,” she said.

  “I know. And I understand. It just doesn’t help matters much at this juncture. Let me talk to Leslie, okay?”

  The eyelids fluttered. The woman threw back her head and howled. Then gave him a meek bright sidelong glance and began to whimper.

  “Leslie. Not
Katie.”

  Katie was a dog.

  Only the second such dog ever recorded in the history of MPD—Multiple Personality Disorder. Hooker had written about her extensively in the article he’d done for the Journal of Psychiatric Medicine. Speculation mostly and observation of the physical aspects. Crawling, snuffling, howls. Katie’s connection to the other personalities had seemed vague at the time. Now, knowing what he did, it was clearer.

  “Hi, Doctor Hooker.”

  “Hi, Leslie.”

  “I guess you want to talk some more.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m not supposed to.”

  “Why?”

  “Patricia doesn’t want me to.”

  “I think she does want you to, Leslie.”

  “She’s scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  She shifted uncomfortably in the seat, a typical teenage girl wrestling with a problem. Like all the personalities who had emerged so far other than the dog Katie and Lynette, who was only five years old, Leslie had come into the world at sixteen and sixteen she remained.

  “They said they’d hurt her, remember? If she talked. They said they’d kill her.”

  “I remember.”

  “So?”

  “So that was quite a long time ago, wasn’t it.”

  Twenty-two years to be exact. The woman sitting in front of him was thirty-eight and the mother of two, both girls, ages eight and ten. Until her divorce a year and a half ago she had been a successful editor for a large paperback book company and then a chronic alcoholic who finally had sought therapy when she found herself having beaten her oldest child with a soup ladle across the face and head without remembering having done so. Four months into treatment the first personality—little Lynette—had emerged.

  “I don’t know about this, doctor.”

  “You’ve done fine so far, Leslie. Why stop now?”

  “I don’t want to stop.”

  “Then don’t. Believe me, it’s going to help Patricia enormously in the long run. Enormously.”

  She thought for a moment and then sighed.

  “Okay. I guess I owe her that.”

  He allowed himself to relax. It was a crucial point. Had she balked here it might have been weeks before she allowed herself to address all this again. It had happened before.

  And today, finally, he had Patricia’s permission to record their sessions.

  “You were talking last time about how they—the Gannets—‘passed her around’ I think you said.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you were talking sexually passed around, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me who her mom and dad were giving her to?”

  “Lots of people. That whole group they had there. Mr. and Mrs. Dennison, Judge Blackburn, Mr. and Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Hayes, Doctor Scott and Mrs. Scott, Mr. Seymour, Miss Naylor…”

  “The schoolteacher.”

  “Right. And Mr. Harley. There were others. But those were the main ones.”

  “Her mom and dad, did these people pay them for this?”

  “No. They just allowed it. It was just okay by them.”

  “And this was when Patricia was how old?”

  “Three. Maybe four.”

  He suspected it was five. Lynette’s age.

  The age she’d begun hiding.

  “So then what would these people do to her again?”

  This was all familiar territory but he needed it for the tape.

  “Well, she would be naked pretty much always and they would put their fingers in her, in her bum, in her vagina, and some of the men would put their penises in and sometimes make her put their penises in her mouth, and they would spank her real hard and Doctor Scott, he liked to put these long needles in her…”

  “Acupuncture needles?”

  “I don’t know. Just big long needles.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’d put them in her, stick them everywhere. And Mrs. Scott always wanted her to lick her vagina.”

  It was a hallmark of Leslie’s personality that none of this seemed to embarrass her in the slightest. She treated this catalogue of childhood horrors with a detachment that was almost clinical. Admirable, he thought, were it not so sad and frightening.

  “Mrs. Siddons liked to twist her nipples until she cried. And Miss Naylor always wanted to have her breasts sucked like Patricia was a little baby and she was her mommy. Mr. Hayes would put her in the tub and pee on her and one time he shit on her too. On her belly. Sort of stood over her and bent his legs a little.”

  “And there were other kids involved, right?”

  She nodded. “Danny Scott, Ritchie Siddons, and the Dennison twins.”

  “Did Patricia ever try to resist at all? Ever try to run away?”

  “A couple times she tried. But she was too little to go anywhere. The Gannets beat her bad for it. So she didn’t try anymore.”

  She stopped. Tears were rolling down her cheeks in a sudden stream.

  “Leslie?”

  Her chin trembled and the large brown eyes were doe’s eyes, liquid, innocent.

  “Lynette? Is that you?”

  “They hurt me! Mommy and daddy…”

  “I know. It’s all right, Lynette. Mommy and daddy won’t hurt you anymore. I promise. I swear.”

  That was true enough. Mommy and daddy were dead in a car accident nearly ten years before. He was drunk. The telephone pole unforgiving. As far as Hooker was concerned, good riddance.

  “They hurt me!”

  “I know they did, Lynette. But that’s all over now. Mommy and daddy can never hurt you again. You understand?”

  She sniffled. The tears abated.

  “Are you okay now?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  “Good. If it’s all right then, can you let me talk to Leslie again?”

  “Oh for chrissakes, fuck Leslie!”

  The voice was deep and husky.

  Sadie.

  Only the third time she’d appeared.

  The first two times were trouble. He could see this was not going to be an exception. She was up and out of her chair and striding over.

  “You want to talk sex, honey? You feel like a turn-on? Is that it? Then you better talk to me.”

  He was halfway up out of his own chair when she reached down and pushed him back again.

  Then lifted her skirt and straddled him.

  “Sadie…”

  “I know. We been through this before. ‘It’s inappropriate for a patient and therapist’ blah blah blah. Loosen up, will ya?” She shrugged off her jacket.

  “Get off me, Sadie.”

  “Loosen up. You know you want little Sadie.”

  “What I want is to talk to...”

  “Yeah, Leslie. I know. But will Leslie do this for you, Doc?”

  She pulled the sweater off over her head. Underneath it her breasts were naked. They were lovely breasts, full and firm for her age and the fact that she’d born two children—and judging by the size and shape of the nipples, breastfed at least one of them.

  Lovely but for the scars.

  Small puckered burn-scars. Over a dozen on the breasts alone. Many more on her stomach, neck and shoulders.

  He could still make out the swastika carved just above her navel.

  He had never seen the evidence first-hand before.

  “You want to talk about those, Sadie?”

  She laughed. “Talk about what? My tits?”

  “Those burns. The swastika.”

  She pushed off him angrily and scooped up the sweater and walked to the window. Slipped the sweater on. Walked back to her chair and dug in her purse for a pack of Winston Lights.

  Sadie smoked. The others didn’t.

  “I don’t allow cigarettes. You know that, Sadie.”

  She gave him a look, disgusted, and tossed the pack back into her purse. Sadie would rebel but only so far. Then, like all the others, she was for
ced to obey.

  “Oh, fuck you, doc. Talk to your precious Leslie. Have a wonderful time. You asshole.”

  She dropped into the chair and looked at him. The eyes softened. Her face went slowly neutral.

  Leslie again.

  Now if he could just keep her here for the duration.

  The session was running long. He could see that already. The clock on the wall above and behind her read two-fifty. But this was all much too productive to quit in ten minutes. He had a first-time patient who was probably already outside there in the waiting room—his three o’clock appointment. It wasn’t the best way to start a doctor-patient relationship but the man would have to hold on awhile.

  It wasn’t just Patricia who had something on the line here.

  This case was going to make his reputation, no doubt about it. The first article, published six months ago, had gone a long way toward doing that already. AP had picked up on it. My god, the New York Times. For Warhol’s classic fifteen minutes, he and his unnamed patient were famous.

  Soon they’d be more so. His first paper was only the beginning.

  “Leslie.”

  “Hi. Hello again.”

  “We were talking about all the sexual things they did to Patricia. But there were other things too, weren’t there.”

  She nodded.

  “Would you mind going over them for me again?”

  “There were all the witchy things,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “They taught her all these chants and stuff, and they would all dress in black and sometimes they’d visit graveyards at night and sometimes dig up bodies and do stuff with the bones and the dead guy’s clothes, make up devil potions for the Feast of the Beast or Candlemas and calling up spirits and...”

  “What do you mean, ‘devil potions’?”

  “Pee. And wine. And blood.”

  “Whose blood?”

  “Theirs. Anybody’s.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, most of the time though, they were in the basement of the Gannets’ house. They had a really big basement there. And everybody would be naked. And everybody would have to kiss Mr. Gannet’s penis before things started, like all in a line, and then there’d be chanting and people would eat and drink a lot and then they’d bring in the sacrifice.”