Let me say this as an introduction to our fiction section. I have
no predetermined concepts as to what modern gothic fiction should
be or could be. What I have nestled within these electronic labarynths
is nothing more than stories I have collected over a certain amount
of time. I have included them because they are about the tragic,
or the hopeless, or the unwanted. I think that should be enough.
The Bastard Within Stringleflab the Wobbly
The mausoleum was cold.
The moon is lying on its back tonight.
He thought of hospitals, and shuddered.
hospitals
Twelve zillion volts of electroconvulsive therapy. They'd
told him over and over he needed it. He never believed them. Tried
to hide from them. They forced him in the end, threatened to COMMIT
him. Committal would have been nice, he thought, after all....a
nice snug cell, all his own. Safer than this place. This mausoleum.
He was afraid. Armies of the dead. And he didn't know any of them.
Are the volcanoes still active?
She pleaded for him. Tried to hide him. Had been taking care
of him for so long. But they did let her sit in the waiting room
outside, outside, outside that horrible LAB with all the electrics.
No way would they let her in to keep him from being scared and
screaming. She cried when they took him away, the question
burned on nails
And when they dragged him away from her and slammed the heavy
white door in her face, oh you should have seen the glitter of
glee in their eyes....
They ripped his clothes. Tore his clothes wide open and violated
, so they could press nasty little pads with wires on them
to his skin. And tape them there. To the sides of his head, his
temples, where the headache had always been. They were chilly
and wet.
Needles upon needles. Flicking into scant flesh. Shiny silvery
kissing needles. The drugs had overdosed him tractable and docile.
Drugs on drugs on more drugs and the fear came slicing through
anyway, rendering him able to thrash about and struggle and be
terrified.
They clamped him.
Clamped his delicate limbs to a table, a chilly table, and his
breathing tore his throat, getting ragged, because they were ADDING
to it, now, blurred, winding heavy dungeon-chains in coil upon
coil about him crushing his fragile fragilefragile body into place,
and the links were each as big as his hand and the metal was as
thick as two of his fingers---the kind of chain on which they
hang slaughtered cattle out to drain. And as he watched, hallucinated,
breath pounding in ears, moans keened out of his throat between
pressed lips, and as he watched, the chain slithering over his
flesh melded into a huge snake...fully as thick through as his
neck...even colder than that forsaken chain...
"Don't worry, son. Try to relax, and you'll do better."
"We're trying to help you. Don't fight us."
Then why did their grinning faces look like twisted dead
voodoo-dolls???? Why did they laugh when sticking needles
in telephone-books, i believe in it, i do when
when
===ohhhh===
her face, tearful in the keyhole.
They laughed. And pulled and pushed the switches. And next smiled
because
entire worlds were ripping his body, jagged glass worlds
on fire,
contorting him NOT of his own volition
violation
His body fell back, echoed for a second, and wrenched again
into an impossible arch, his back his clenched bleeding fists.
Tears started to be tinged with blood
She was crying, pounding tiny fists on the door only he could
would hear. They watched her watch him. Knew it. Laughed. They
taunted her through the keyhole. She wailed faintly. He convulsed
and shuddered at more volts. And more, that came now
his mouth was bleeding.
And screamed,
sobbing,
screamed bloody, screamed his nerves raw,
scream ripping itself raw and bloody from the base of his spine.
come in
my dear little boy
you live here. lie down. stop screaming.
But it was peaceful, something about flowing black robes.
Or was it white? softness those voices. Soft. Blood had run down
his face and neck, out of his mouth down his chin, out of his
ears, out of his blue eyes. Now it was hardened and black.
He used to have the biggest eyes in the world, she used to tell
him that when he was?
oh jesus.
was...
The mausoleum was cold.
1.3.90.
Errata Stigmata
Pittsburgh, PA
(quote neubauten--uebersetzung)
She was a vegetarian that worked in the same bank of chicken
coop cubicles as I did. She also had my cock in her mouth when
the elevator crashed.
I remember -- I think -- her face as the center of a pool of
blood. I had my first period. She learned what eating meat is.
But she died. I broke a set of shoulder bones, and a rib, and
lost my penis. Money is worthless.
I wanted a prosthetic penis, but the lesbians hadn't yet fostered
that technology. I think things would have been better today if
they had. I got an eight-inch chrome bar attached to my stump.
It held a quarter-cup of vegetable oil that was slowly released
through two dozen holes when I, or some bitch, held down a switch
between my ever-fuller bag and ass. I had a jimmy in my pants.
I decided a few days after it was installed that my best road
to satisfaction was date rape. No one wanted this bar shoved up
her cunt. So I acted as I felt. I held down the switch. I growled
like an aggressive dog, and at the same time cried, and at the
same time shoved the bar home. It was a bit of a bruiser, but
no one turned me in. The beauty of date rape is that girls get
disturbed and fool themselves into thinking it might be seduction.
Rape is a crime of passion, but with the inner load repressed,
the outer only vegetable oil, it led me toward violence.
I became angry often. My face turned the same blue shade as my
balls. I held the base of my chromium cock in my left hand, and
with my right I hammered the tip on an anvil. There was purgation
in hammering, violently, in the bark of chrome. For a time it
was what I needed.
I had the prosthesis ground down and replaced with one more elaborate,
with all the same oil holes, but with a half-ounce load of yogurt
in the front, voice-actuated ejaculant. One honey cooled down
hot Indian food -- "not Amerindian, dolt!" -- with the
yogurt from my cock. If I'd been able to stand the sight of her
for one more week I'd have had her convinced that New York's Sewer
Authority needed her, for ecological reasons, to eat her tampons.
But it's hard to stand the sight of anyone who will suck a metal
bar that's not really part of you. I imagine she did it with the
postman too. Bitch.
The physical pleasure in fucking came from the nerves around the
stump. They grew more sensitive in time. Emasculated, I was the
lie about girls wanting friction above the cunt and not in it.
I tried masturbating, for the first time in my life. Yogurt was
forthcoming. Orgasms were not.
I found myself on the World Trade Center, contemplating a grandiose
suicide, and fighting suicide I fought myself about how domestic
dogs deal with the tension of sex.
Should I or shouldn't I have my balls removed? I was down to killing
myself, killing someone, or having my balls cut off, and, as I
didn't think more than sham relief would be found in killing others,
I decided to first try life without balls. If that didn't work,
I reasoned, I could kill myself.
No doctor would geld me, or even admit to knowing how. They did
not think themselves hypocrites. They called for reproductive
freedom at their Association meetings, but would not cut off my
balls.
I bought a gun at a shop on 47th St., suffered through a two-week
wait. I loaded the gun, held it on a veterinarian, and insisted
that he geld me, with a local pain killer.
Life is better without balls.
He had only found the location of the beast a few days ago even
though he had always known of its existence. He knew that it was
located inside, but where? That was always the damn question,
where did this unwelcome parasite make its home in the living
host?
At first he thought it was the brain. Where else would the Other
make its home. It was a creature of thought. A being that interfered
with his own thought in an attempt to take over the fleshy vehicle
that was the body. The brain, the seat of the soul was the only
place that made sense. It wasn't there.
He checked. Scans and readings and tests and drugs and therapy.
No sign of the infernal thing could be found. Nothing with such
a profound effect could leave no mark. It had to be someplace
else within the body.
The heart? The ancient seat of the mind? Could it have squirreled
itself away in this lump of pumping meat? No. The rhythm of the
flesh was too regular. Too known. It would never betray the rest
of the flesh by harboring this alien thing.
The stomach and the bowels was his next location of choice. Did
he not has horrendous pain when the Other made its way to the
outside? When the thing exerted its will over his own? This blossoming
of pain and horror could only be the works of an intrusion. However,
it could not be that. The stomach was only a source of pain because
of the machinations of the Other. The pain was caused by its excrement
building up in a system ill designed to house anything like the
Other.
The answer, the only solution, the only hiding place left, was
in the meat. The muscle. The veins, the sinews. The carriers of
that which held the heart, the guts, the brain and the soul. There
it could find a place and build its home without knowledge. Hidden
in the meat that surrounds the bone would he find the adversary's
lair. It was into this very domain in which his quest for wholeness
would take him. Courageously in would he fly with only naked steel
and steeled heart. He knew there would be blood, the rending of
meat and the horror of pain but these only added to the glory
of his adventure. This mission to remove the Other. The one within.
The bastard inside. The extermination of all that inside which
held him back. The thing that stopped him from the normal, happy
life that he craved. The life that he desired and deserved. It
was through the conjunction of steel and meat in which this could
be accomplished. Only through the physical exorcism of the beast
within.
The knife slid into the flesh. The passage of the shaft puckered
the skin, like the meat was sucking in the steel. It was so damn
sexual. He understood in this crystalline moment why some people
are so driven to drive metal into skin. It wouldn't matter if
they were male of female, gay or straight. The plunge, the puncture,
the penetration, is so sexual. It must be built in. Wired into
the human head. His cock started to jerk in his pants. Growling
in sympathy with the knife it grew larger as the blade disappeared
into the muscle. The dead sex dance between the brain and the
balls swelled the traitorous phallus to tremendous size. It was
as if his sperm had decided to try abandoning this body in hopes
of finding one more hospitable to their needs.
The blood didn't start to well up and out of the wound until the
knife began to make slow passage along the line of the bone. It
streamed over his hands and down his arm, collected then dripped
off his elbow to splash onto the floor. The spend of his steel
mates meat sex.
He watched the blood pool in the furrows of the tile and run
in slick lines away from him. As he watched he felt. He felt for
the waning of the Other. He felt for the cold trail of hate it
would make as it rode the wave of blood. He waited. He felt. He
waited. And finally felt better.
The tools were hung on the pegboard. The board, with all of its
many tools, was in the basement. Directly in front of it was a
worn, but clean, wooden table. In this clean and precisely organized
basement, beneath the outlined board, and in front of the immaculate
table stood a small child of seven. He was his father's boy.
He stood straight and as tall as seven years would let him. He
breathed quietly, reverently. He moved slowly, carefully and never
very close to the table. This was his father's place and those
were his father's tools. Each had its own place demarcated by
an outline carefully painted onto the brown board in virginal,
unblemished white. His father's hand had held his father's brush
and painted the place of his father's tools on his father's pegboard
in the basement of his father's house. It was his father's paint
which marked the tools immutable place on the board. Each tool
was in the place where it must be. His father painted the lines
and knew where each tool demanded to be.
He toyed with the idea that maybe, somehow, possibly, the tools
could be in some other arrangement, or even, that a tool could
be placed in the wrong spot, but he knew this couldn't happen.
The tools were in the best place they could ever hope to be. The
tools knew that his father knew what was best. The tools knew
their place. He was his father's son and he Damn-Well-Knew-His-Place.
He knew where he was supposed to be and he made sure that he was
there. He knew when he was supposed to be there and he was. He
even, he thought, knew why he had to be there, but that changed
sometimes. So did the where and so did the when. Actually, they
couldn't have changed because his father must have told him. He
must have forgotten.
He forgets often.
The only times he had a problem was when he Really-And-Honestly
didn't know where he was supposed to be. His father said not knowing
was never an excuse because No-One-Is-Going-To-Accept-That-When-He-Was-Older.
He was his father's son and he knew Who-The-Head-Of-This-Household
was. His father sat at the head of his father's table. His father
drank his father's beer and fell asleep in front of his father's
TV. Occasionally, he would cautiously look at his father when
his father was asleep like this, but he had to be careful because
his father Might-Be-Testing-Him. His father would be sprawled
on his father's couch, the TV babbling quietly to itself in the
corner. His father's great belly would rise and fall with his
father's beer perched wobbling on top. His father was allowed
to do this because his father, his very own honest to goodness
father, Worked-To-Death-Just-To-Put-The-Food-On-The-Table. Whenever
he heard his father say this he thought his heart would explode
with love and guilt. Love because his father who worked so hard.
Guilt because he was the reason his father worked so hard. He
knew that If-It-Wasn't-For-Him his father would be rich and happy
and not have to Work-To-Death. His father told him of all the
incredible and wondrous thing his father would be doing if he
wasn't around. His father would be powerful. His father would
be famous and respected. His father could have been anything If-It-Wasn't-For-The-Deadweight.
He could only start to comprehend the magnitude of the sacrifice
his father made for him. He could only start to pay back his debt
to his father with his careful obedience. He knew it was His-Duty
to do whatever his father told him to do, and he never complained
about it either. He wouldn't even think of complaining, anyway,
his father wouldn't tolerate a Whining-Ungrateful-Sissy as his
father's son.
He was his father's son and his father painted the lines. He
knew his place and he knew he couldn't possibly be anywhere else.
It okay because when he grew up and he had his own son and he
was the Head-Of-This-Household he would paint the lines. He knew
this.
He was his father's son.