The Ushers E-Book

Edward Lee

• Herausgeber: Independent Legions Publishing
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The first digital edition of the cult story collection by the Master of Hardcore Horror.
Includes the stories: “Death, She Said” (1993), “The Wrong Guy” (1993), “The Decortication Technician,” (1999), “Secret Service” (1998), “Mr. Torso” (1994), “The Hole in the Wall” (1999) , “The Seeker” (1992), “Almost Never” (1991),“The Man Who Loved Clichés” (1992), “Grub Girl in the Prison of Dead Women” (1997), “Please Let Me Out” (1994), “The Horror of Chambers” (1982), “Shit-House” (1995), “Goddess of the New Dark Age (1992), “The Salt-Diviner” (1999), “Scriptures” (1999), “Xipe” (1993), “Hands” (1999), “The Ushers” (1999)
This edition contains a new Foreword by the Author. Cover Art by Les Edwards

Leseprobe

Edward Lee – The Ushers

ISBN: 9788899569082

Copyright (Edition) ©2016 Independent Legions Publishing

Copyright (Text) ©Edward Lee

1° edition epub/mobipocket: 1.0 May 2016

Proofreading: Jodi Renée Lester

Cover Art by Les Edwards

Digital Layout: Lukha B. Kremo - [email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Story Afterwords and Foreword, copyright © 1999 by Edward Lee

“Death, She Said,” copyright © 1993 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Bizarre Bazaar 93.

“The Wrong Guy,” copyright © 1993 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Cyber Psychos A.O.D., Summer 1993-issue; appeared again in Into The Darkness #4.

“The Decortication Technician,” copyright © 1999 by Edward Lee.

“Secret Service,” copyright © 1998 by Edward Lee. Shorter version first appeared in The UFO Files, ed. by Martin Greenberg (DAW). The version included in this collection is uncut.

“Mr. Torso,” copyright © 1994 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Hot Blood: Deadly After Dark, ed. by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett (POCKET).

“The Hole in the Wall,” copyright © 1999 by Edward Lee.

“The Seeker,” copyright © 1992 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Sex, Truth, & Reality, a chapbook by Tal Publications.

“Almost Never,” copyright © 1991 by Edward Lee. First appeared in the Autumn-1991 issue of Cemetery Dance; appeared next in the Autumn-1994 issue of Bloodsongs; appeared next in the anthology The Best of Cemetery Dance (CD PUBLICATIONS).

“The Man Who Loved Clichés,” copyright © 1992 by Edward Lee. First appeared in

Bizarre Bazaar 92. The version included in this collection has been slightly revised.

“Grub Girl in the Prison of Dead Women,” copyright © 1997 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Wetbones #2.

“Please Let Me Out,” copyright © 1994 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Voices From The Night, ed. by John Maclay (MACLAY ASSOCIATES).

“The Horror of Chambers,” copyright ©1982 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Eerie Country Six.

“Shit-House,” copyright © 1995 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Palace Corbie Six,

ed. by Wayne Edwards (MERRIMACK BOOKS).

“Goddess of the New Dark Age,” copyright © 1992. First appeared in Sex, Truth Reality, a chapbook by Tal Publications.

“The Salt-Diviner,” copyright © 1999 by Edward Lee. “Scriptures,” copyright © 1999 by Edward Lee

“Scriptures,” copyright © 1999 by Edward Lee

“Xipe,” copyright © 1993 by Edward Lee. First appeared in The Barrelhouse: Excursions into the Unknown.

“Hands,” copyright © 1999 by Edward Lee

“The Ushers,” copyright © 1999 by Edward Lee. Originally published in The Ushers and Other Stories, Obsidian Press, May, 1999. Revised on April 30, 2013.

Epigraph is an excerpt from a poem by Ryan Harding entitled “The Ushers.” It is used here with the permission of its author.

Edward Lee

The Ushers

FOR JACK KETCHUM

Get behind the razor…

You will find no solace

In what you have created.

FOREWORD

Other writers have frequently related to me that what they like most about selling a collection is the opportunity to write pretentious and/or esoteric forewords—so allow me to indulge in the same with this little preamble.

I’ve written a bunch horror—dozens of mass market paperbacks, small-press novels and collections (collaborations and solo), short stories, comic scripts—close to three million words’ worth, and it’s been a bunch of fun. In the old days, however, just when I was starting out, I’d never hesitate to scoff when I’d overhear other writers remark that it’s harder to write a short story than a novel. Yes, I’d frown to crease my face. But one day it occurred to me that perhaps I was being a trifle judgmental—for I’d never really seriously written short stories. Then I embarked, and—

I ain’t frowning now.

It is harder, a lot harder. It’s a different terrain, and a terrain bound by proximity. Not just word count but something subjective too. Like trying to cut out a tiny piece of yourself just right, where as a novel is more akin to summary amputation where all that’s necessary is a crude, simple swoop of the ax.

But it’s still fun—more fun in many ways—and it’s provocative too, and one thing I’ve always believed is that fiction must be provocative, it must make us think about things: the world, the people around us, ourselves. Without that mode of provocation, however unseemly, however fantastic, grotesque, or perverse, the fiction isn’t honest. Honesty’s the best policy, right?

So I gotta be honest, too, about why I write the stuff that I write. It ain’t for everybody, I'll tell you that. To say that horror should be a joyride isn’t quite good enough for me. More like a joyride through a whorehouse in hell—the point is what you see while you’re along for the ride—or taking a break-neck trip down a waterslide only to land in a wafting, hot corpse pile. The point is how you feel once you’ve landed, and who you see. Sometimes we see ourselves.

Perversity, sadism, sexual aberration, etc., are parts of the nomenclature of the human spirit—just like altruism, fellowship, love, and all that. No, I’m not saying it’s cool to be perverse, sadistic, and sexually aberrant, but I think it’s honest to be curious about the very worst that humanity has to offer, and the very worst manner in which mankind has presented itself. Not only is it honest, I dare say it’s healthy, and the soil of that same curiosity is where I grab my trowel and start to dig.

I’m not trying to be the Proust of horror, nor will I ever presume to scribe the genre’s equivalent to The Sound and the Fury. The literary analysis of societal design is fine—but I’ll take gut-eating and trans-vaginal evisceration any day. Fiction as philosophical symbology and epistemological allegory is terrific, but, Christ, I’d rather look into that corpse pile or that psycho-killer'’s fridge or that whorehouse in hell.

Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger: cool guys, smart, lotta meat between the ears on those fellas, and certainly trying to define who we are in the world or the universe is a noble undertaking. But isn’t it somewhat as legitimate to try to define the reason why people do the horrible things they do? It’s a fascinating query for me. It’s a kick.

Hence, my plight. I write horror. I love it. A number of the stories in this book are technically reprints, but some of them are “uncut” versions. The original versions were either toned down by me because, at the time, I didn’t have the balls to submit them as is, or I cut them because of editorial advice. The new stories are pieces written the way I want them published: gross, unrepentant, profane, perverse, pathological.

Down and dirty, ya know? Cos life, all too frequently, is down and dirty. Aberrant, erotopathic, disgusting, politically incorrect. Yeah. Groovy.

Anyway, that’s my pretentious and/or esoteric foreword. If you like your horror the way I do—straight up, no beating around the bush, the fresh guts and karyolytic rot, and throbbing, reeking pudenda right in your proboscis—then I hope you like these stories, and I thank you for buying this. Furthermore, I thank all my loyal and very wonderful fans out there whose support has made this collection possible.

There’s plenty of fresh, rich, worm-laden soil to till in this book, and as I just got done saying, I like to dig.

And, who knows? Maybe I can dig a hole big enough for both of us. We’ll have a hell of a party.

Edward Lee

DEATH, SHE SAID

“Life,” I said.

I’d said it to myself, to my reflection in the rearview as I peeled the cardboard cover off the razor blade. Yeah, life.

I was all set; I was going to kill myself. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Sure, fella. All the time you’re hearing about how suicidal tendencies are really just pleas for attention, cries for help. Fuck that. I didn’t want help. I wanted to die.

I had one of those Red Devil brand blades, the kind you cut carpet with, or scrape paint off windows. Real sharp. I’d read somewhere that if you do it laterally, you bleed to death before the blood can clot. I sure as shit didn’t want to pull a stunt like that and blow it. I could picture myself sitting in some psych ward with bandaged wrists—a perfect ass. I wanted to do it right.

Why? Long story. I’ll give you the abridged version.

I’d spent my whole life trying to make something good for myself, or maybe I should say what I thought was good turned out to be nothing. It was all gone in less time than it takes you to blow your nose. We had two kids. One ran off with some holistic cult, haven’t seen him in a decade. The younger one died a couple weeks after her senior prom. “Axial metastatic mass,” the neurologist called it. A fuckin’ brain tumor is what I called it. Worst part was I never really knew them. It was my wife who brought them up, carried the load. I was too busy putting in twelve, fourteen hours a day at the firm, like airline trademark infringements were more important than raising my own kids. But I still had my wife, her love, her faith in me. She was behind me every step of the way, a real gem. She quit college to wait tables so I could go to law school, gave away her own future for me. She was always there—you know what mean? We were going to get the house painted. She went out one day to check out some colors—I was too busy suing some company that made bearings for airplane wheels—but she never made it home. Drunk driver. I still had my job, though, right? Wrong. Month ago I was a senior partner in the number three firm in the country. A couple of associates decided it might be neat to bribe some jurors on a big air-wreck case I was litigating. They get disbarred, but I get blackballed. Right now I couldn’t get a job jacking fries at Roy Fucking Rogers my name stinks so bad. So I guess that wraps it up nice and neat. I’m a 48-year-old attorney with no job, no family, no life.

There.

I didn’t want anyone saving me, calling the paramedics or anything like that. I decided I’d do it in my car. The repo people were already after it, so I figured let ’em have it with my blood all over the suede-leather seats. I backed into an alley off the porn block. Rats, oblivious to the cold, were hopping in and out of garbage cans.

Lights from an adult bookstore blinked in my face. Up ahead, I could see the hookers traipsing back and forth on L Street. They were like the rats; they didn’t feel the cold. You should’ve seen some of the wild shit they were wearing. Leopard-skin leotards, sheer low-cut evening dresses, shorts that looked like tin foil. It was kind of funny, that my last vision in life would be this prancing tribe of whores. I had the razor blade between my fingers, poised. Each time I got ready to drag it from the inside of my elbow to my wrist, I kept looking up. I wasn’t chickening out, I just felt distracted. But distracted by what?

That’s when I saw her, in that last half-moment before I was going to actually do it.

She’d probably been standing on the corner the whole time, I just hadn’t noticed.

It was like she was part of the wall, or even part of the city—darkness blended into brick.

She was staring right at me.

I stared back. She stood tall in a shiny black waistcoat whose hem came up to mid-thigh. Long legs, black stockings, high heels, I sensed she wasn’t young—like the streetwalkers—yet she seemed more comely than old: graceful, beautiful in wisdom.

Somehow I knew she couldn’t be a hooker; looking at her, I thought of vanquished regalities—an exiled queen. She had her hands in her pockets, and she was staring.

Go away, I thought. Can’t vou see I’m trying to kill myself?

I blinked.

Then she was walking toward the car.

I stashed the razor blade under the seat. It didn’t make sense. Even if she was a prostitute, no prostitute would approach a barely visible car in an alley. Maybe she’d think I was a cop. I could give her the brushoff and get back to business.

Her high heels ticked down the alley. Was she smiling? I couldn’t tell. The rats scurried away.

She stopped beside the driver’s window.

“I’m not sportin’, I’m not datin’, and I’m not looking for someone to tickle my stick,” I said. “Buzz off.”

Her voice was weird, like a wisp of breeze, or two pieces of silk brushing together. So soft it almost wasn’t there. “Providence is a mysterious thing,” she said. “It can be very nourishing.”

I squinted. She was standing right there, but I couldn’t see her, not really. Just snatches of her, like my eyes were a movie camera and the cameraman was drunk. All I could say in response was, “What?”

“Think before you act,” she said. “There are truths you haven’t seen. Wouldn’t it be regrettable to die without ever knowing what they are?”

She couldn’t possibly have seen what I was trying to do in the car; it was too dark, and she’d been too far away. Besides, the razor blade was under the seat.

I can show you providence,” she said. “I can show you truth.”

“Oh, yeah?” I challenged. “What the fuck do you know about truth?”

“More than you think,” she said.

I looked at her, still only able to see her in pieces, like slivers. I sensed more than saw. I sensed beauty in her age, not haggardness. I sensed gracility, wisdom…

“Come with me,” she bid. “I’ll show you.”

I got out. What the hell, I thought. The razor would still be there when I got back. In my gut, though, it was more than that. In my gut, I felt destined to get out of the car.

She walked away.

I had to nearly trot to keep up. I could imagine how I must look to the people on the street: an unshaven, shambling dolt in a crushed $800 suit, hectically pursuing this…woman. Her high heels ticked across the cement like nails. The shiny waistcoat glittered. She took me back through the alley. Ahead, windows were lit.

“Look,” she said.

Crack vials and glass crunched beneath my feet. Rotting garbage lay heaped against vomit- and urine-streaked brick.

I looked in the window, expecting to see something terrible. What I saw instead was this: A subsidized apartment, sparse but clean. Two black children, a boy and a girl, sat at a table reading schoolbooks, while an aproned woman prepared dinner in the background. Then a black man walked in, a jacket over his shoulder, a lunch pail in hand. Beaming, the children glanced up. The woman smiled. The man kissed his wife, then knelt to hug his children.

But this wasn’t terrible, it was wonderful. Jammed in a ghetto, surrounded by crime and despair, here was a family making it. Most didn’t in this environment. Most fell apart against the odds. I was standing on crack vials and puke, looking straight into the face of something more powerful than any force on earth…

“Love,” said the old woman.

Yeah, I thought. Love. I’m a lawyer, which means I’m also a nihilistic prick.

You’ve heard the joke: What happens when a lawyer takes Viagra? He gets taller. But this made me feel good to see, the power of real love, real human ideals.

But why had the woman shown me this?

She was walking away again, and again I was huffing to keep up. Now I was curious—about her. Where did she come from? What was her name? She led me through more grimy alleys, more garbage and havens for rats. A single sodium lamp sidelighted her. My breath condensed in the cold.

I tried to look at her…

All I could see was one side of her face from behind. Fine lines etched her cheek and neck. Her short, straight hair was dusted with gray. Yeah, she was up there—60ish, I guessed—but elegant. You know how some women keep their looks in spite of age—that was her. Well-postured, a good figure and bosom, nice legs. But I still never really got a look at her face.

In the next alley, muttering rose.

It was getting colder. I was shivering, yet the woman seemed comfortable, she seemed warm in some arcane knowledge. She pointed down.

Aw, shit, I thought. Strewn across the alley were bundles. They were people, the inevitable detritus of any big city. They lay asleep or unconscious: shivering dark forms wrapped in newspapers or rags. Many slept convulsing from the cold. The city was too busy repaving commuter routes to build more shelters. It was astonishing that on a night this cold they didn’t just freeze to death. And all this time I thought I had nothing. Jesus.

“I don’t want to see this,” I said.

“Wait.”

I heard footsteps. Then a bent shape was moving down the dark alley, stepping quietly between the twitching forms. It was a priest, an old guy, 70 at least. Slung across his back were blankets. I don’t know how a guy his age could manage carrying all of them, especially in cold this bad. The guy huffed and puffed, stooping to cover each prone figure with a blanket. It was the look on his face that got to me most. Not pity, not fanaticism, just some kind of resolute complacency, like he was thinking Well,tonight I’ll get whatever money I can lay my hands on, buy some blankets, and cover up some homeless people. No one else is gonna do it, so I’m gonna do it. It was simple.

Right now your average person was watching the cable, or getting laid, or sleeping in a warm bed, but here was this old priest doing what he could for a few people no one else gave a pinch of shit about.

“Compassion,” the woman, my companion, said.

I watched as the priest went about his business, shivering himself as he lay a blanket over each figure, one after another after another. Then I touched the woman’s shoulder. “What is this?” I asked. “Why are you showing me this stuff? I don’t get it.”

“Providence,” she whispered. “Come on.”

Providence, I thought. She led. I followed. Now we were walking down Connecticut Avenue, the power drag. Lots of ritzy schmucks getting out of limos in front of restaurants where dinner for two cost more than the average working person made in two weeks. There were a lot of lawyers too, tisk, tisk. Whatever this tour was she was taking me on—it was making me think.

Next we were walking past Washington Square, where I used to work, and 21 Federal, where I stopped for cocktails every day, or had power lunches with the managing partners. Jesus. A couple of blocks away people were sleeping in the fucking street, and we were too busy to care. Too busy hiding behind Harvard law degrees and clients who paid seven figures per annum just in retainers. This bizarre woman was showing me what I used to be. And she showed me this: I may have been a good attorney, but that sure as shit didn’t mean I was a good person. An hour ago I was going to kill myself. Now all I could feel was shame. I felt like a spoiled baby.

“One more stop,” she said. “Then you can go.”

With the less I understood, the more I wanted to know. But one thing I did know: There was a reason for this. This was no ordinary encounter, and she was certainly no ordinary woman.

I half trotted along, always just behind her, never quite keeping up. It reminded me of the Dickens story, the wretched cynic shown his future and past by ghosts. But the woman was no ghost. I’d touched her; she was flesh.

She was real.

Minutes later we were standing in a graveyard.

Yeah, this was like the Dickens story, all right. My breath froze in front of my face. The woman stood straight as a chess piece, pointing down at the stone. But I already knew it wasn’t my grave.

It was my wife’s.

“Truth,” the woman said.

Thoughts seemed to tick in my head; my confusion felt like a fever. First love, then compassion, and now…truth?

What truth was there in showing me my wife’s grave? She’d been dead for years.

“Does it nourish you?” the woman asked. “The truth?”

Dead for years, yeah, but even in death she was the only real truth in my life. “I loved her,” I muttered.

“Indeed. And did she love you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She paused, gauging me, I guess. “There, then,” she told me. “There’s truth even in memory. You should remember her love for you—the truth of it. It raises us up, doesn’t it? It nourishes us.” Her gaze seemed to wander. “The truth.”

I wanted to cry. Now this final vision made sense. I’d had love. My wife had loved me. Lots of people, most people probably, never had love, not really. Just sad facsimiles and bitter falsehoods. I wanted to fall to my knees at this old woman’s feet and blubber like a little kid. Because it wasn’t cruelty that made her bring me here. It was the same force behind all the things she’d shown me tonight. Things to make me think and see. Things to make me realize that life really was a gift, and that even when people died, even when the shittiest, most fucked up things happened, the gift remained…

We followed back the way we came, back through the bowels of the city. It was different now—everything was. The streetlights made the pavement look gritty with ice. It began to snow but all I could feel was the warmth of what she’d shown me.

That’s how I felt. I felt warm. I felt nourished.

She took me back to the alley, to the car. We got in. She sat beside me in the passenger seat.

“Time means nothing,” she said. Her voice was soft, sweet in its age. “It’s always meant nothing.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Instead she smiled, or at least she seemed to, because I still really couldn’t see her. Just fragments of her, just shards of vision that never quite came together.

“You’re some kind of angel, aren’t you?” I finally summoned the nerve to ask. “You were sent to keep me from killing myself.”

“Love, compassion, truth,” she replied. “They add up to something. What a waste for a person to die alone, unnourished of the truth.”

Yeah, she was an angel or something. The first thing she’d said to me was something about providence.

Greed, selfishness, cynicism, and God knows what else, had brought me to the brink of suicide but I’d been saved at the last minute by seeing the good things out there, the things that transcended the bad, the evil.

“The truth,” she said.

“Thank you.”

Somehow it didn’t surprise me. She slipped out of the black waistcoat. She was nude beneath. Her breasts were large, with large full nipples. They sagged but gracefully. The gentle roll of flesh at her waist, the fine white skin of her throat, shoulders, and thighs, her entire body—seemed softly radiant in its age, beautiful in its truth.

That’s what this was about—truth. And I knew why she’d taken off the coat. She hadn’t brought me all this way just to fuck me in a Porsche 911. All night long she’d given me things to see. That’s why she was naked now, to let me, at last, see her.

And I wanted to. I wanted to see the body which carried so resplendent a spirit. The light from the streetlamp shined through the windshield. I could see her body now, but still not her face, and I guessed I never would. This seemed appropriate, though, you’ve got to admit.

The face of an angel shouldn’t be something you can ever really see.

“We’re all here for a reason,” she said, leaning over to look at me. “And this is my reason. To show the truth, to make people see the truth.”

I held her hand, ran my fingers up her arm. I slid over close and began to touch her breasts, smoothed my fingers across her abdomen, down her thighs, and over the thick plot of her pubic hair. She seemed to expect this, like it was some kind of calm precognition. It wasn’t lust, it wasn’t sexual at all. I just wanted to touch her.

I needed to know what an angel felt like.

Her skin, though it had lost some of its elasticity, was soft and smooth as a baby’s. Cool. Palely clean. The groove of her pubis sheathed my finger in heat.

Then she asked: “Are you ready to see the rest?”

“There’s more?”

She paused. I think she liked this a lot, lazing back in the plush seat, being touched. “I’ve shown you love, compassion, and truth. I’ve nourished you, haven’t I?”

“Yes,” I said, still touching.

Her cool fingers entwined in mine. “But I need nourishment too, through something else.”

“What?”

“Death,” she said.

I stared at her. My hand went limp.

“The truth is like people. Sometimes the real face is the one underneath. Look now at what you didn’t see before—the rest of the truth. The real truth.”

She leaned over and kissed me. I turned rigid. Her cool lips played over mine, her tongue delved. All the while my eyes felt sewn open. I couldn’t close them. The kiss reached into me and pulled. Yes, the kiss. It forced me to stare whimpering into the wide-open black chasm that was her face.

The real truth.

First, the future: The family in the window. The man, unemployed now, and drunk, was steadily beating his wife’s face into a bleeding mask. Then, the boy, older, was holding a woman down while four others took turns raping her. He crammed a handful of garbage into her mouth to keep her quiet. “Watch me bust this bitch’s coconut,” he said when they were finished. He split her head open with a brick while the others divvied up her money. Meanwhile, blocks away, his sister spread her legs for the tenth stranger of the night, her arms, hands, and feet pocked by needlemarks, her blood teeming with herpes, hepatitis, AIDS.

Next, the present: The alley of the homeless. The priest was gone. A gang of faceless youths chuckled as they poured gasoline over the huddled forms, drenching the new blankets. Matches flared. The alley burst into flames, and the gang ran off, laughing. Human flesh sizzled in each cocoon of fire. Screams wheeled up into the frigid night.

And last, the past: First, brakes squealing, a collision of metal, and my wife’s neck snapping like a wine stem as her head impacted the windshield. Then the vision reeled back an hour. A hotel room. A bed. Naked on hands and knees, my wife was busily fellating a young man who stood before her. He held her head and remarked, “Yeah, Duff, this is one class-A cock-suck. She’s fucking me with her tonsils.”

“Best deep throat in town, just like I told ya,” remarked another man who then promptly inserted his vaselined penis into her rectum. “Bet your hubby would shit if he could see this, huh?” Eventually he ejaculated into her bowel.

“Here comes lunch,” said the first man, whose semen launched into her mouth. My wife swallowed it, purring like a cat. Then she lay back on the bed.

“Can you believe it? I told him I was going to the paint store to check out color schemes for the house.”

“When you gonna dump that limp shithead?” inquired the second man. She began masturbating them both.

“Why should I?” she said. “A deal like this? Come on! He keeps me in jewelry, and you guys keep me in cock.” Then the three of them burst into laughter.

The kiss broke. I seemed to fall away from it, a rappeller whose line had just been cut. I sat slack in the seat. The old woman was looking at me, but I could see she wasn’t old at all. She looked like a teenager. The meal she’d made of my truth left her robust, vital, glowing in new youth. Her once-gray hair shined raven black. The pale skin had tightened over young muscle and bone; the large white orbs of her breasts grew firm even as I watched. Their fresh nipples erected, pointing at me like wall studs.

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move.

Greedy new hands caressed me; her eyes shined. She kissed me some more, licked me, reveled in what I was to her. Her breath was hot in my drained face.

“Just a little more,” she panted.

She was drooling. She reached under the seat. The Red Devil razor blade glinted in icy light. Then, very gently, she placed it in my hand.

Probably the most popular story ever told is Dicken’s A Christmas Carol; I think I read somewhere that more printings of this story have been published than any fiction in history. I believe it. But I can also say that the first story to have any serious impact on me personally was “Was It a Dream?” by Guy de Maupassant. Here I’ve mixed both elements of influence. It’s probably the most negative story I’ve ever written. Even though I consider myself a positivist…I’m not quite sure what compelled me to write this one. I’ve considered the question for years, but I’m fairly sure no answer will ever arise.

THE WRONG GUY

“We sure made a mess of him,” Wendlyn remarked. Rena cut a wicked grin. “Yeah. Neat, huh?”

Neither woman, by the way, wore panties. As they each leaned over the big opened trunk of the clay-red ’76 Malibu, this fact would be obvious to any onlooker. Not that there would be any onlookers in proximity to the old Governor’s Bridge at close to 4:30 in the morning. Nevertheless, the farther over these two women leaned, the more of their backsides, i.e. rumps, i.e. glutei maximi, i.e. asses, peeked out from beneath their shortish skirts. Rena wore tight blue leather. Wendlyn wore a more mature Ralph Lauren navy chino wrap.

“This one was fun,” Rena said.

“Yeah,” Wendlyn agreed. “A real scream, pun intended.”

Rena giggled, “One less pretty-boy motherfucker to affront the society of women.”

Moonlight dappled their well-lined backs and legs, wavering through high trees.

An owl hooted. Below them, the gentle stream burbled over stones.

They both wore latex gloves as they tended to the corpse; just because they were impulsive didn’t mean they were stupid. They’d read all about the state police carbon-dioxide lasers and special resin treatments that could lift fingerprints off human skin. No way these two gals were going to get caught. Wendlyn couldn’t imagine anything more dreadful: doing life in the state slam, the dyke wing. She was not adverse to the pleasures of a woman, but eating some 300-pound cellblock mama’s crusty cooze every night did not strike her as a pleasure. No, indeed.