The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (64 page)

“Sam,” Amanda cut in, “don’t. They’ll kill us.”

“Shut up, Amanda. What else can we do?” I reached in my pocket and wrapped my hands around the container.

“As I was saying,” the man with Amanda continued, “you are a bit of an enigma. Interesting phenomenon, isn’t it?”

“Here!” I snapped the lid of the container open. “Catch!”

The wiggling spider sailed through the air, landing smack on the big goon’s face.

I dived to the floor, expecting gun shots.

“Ahhh – you bitch,” shouted the little guy. Protruding from his knee was Amanda’s switchblade, buried to the handle. She spun from under him, knocking him off balance. He
fired a blind round.

The big guy screamed. He dropped the rifle, covering his face with his hands. The spider was taking care of business, planting both fangs into his nose. I dived for my gun.

I was luckier with my shot. It hit the little guy. A voice went off in my head: “Share the wealth,” it said.

My next bullet struck the big, bellowing guy. He hit the wall.

I spun, taking aim at shortie. The splat of blood and bits of brain painting the wall indicated another shot was unnecessary. But the big guy still made noise. He rolled over onto his back.

I flinched as two more rounds shot off. It was Amanda! She had shortie’s gun. She emptied the clip into the big guy.

“That’s for David, you bastard!” she affirmed, dropping the gun.

“Damn, Amanda!” I said, as she pulled the knife out of the little guy’s leg. She folded it and returned it to its home in her boot. “We make a good team.”

She threw her arms around me and squeezed me tight. Tears were on her face. She kissed me on the cheek.

“Ouch,” I complained. She managed to kiss my throbbing cheekbone, right where I had been punched. “That hurt, but not in a good way.”

I went to the one who had held Amanda. His pocket revealed a wallet full of ID and cards. Now we would have a better idea who we were dealing with. Amanda stood above the bigger guy. She pulled
the goggles from his face.

“Come on, Amanda,” I said, grabbing her backpack and rushing for the door. “We have to fly.”

“Sam.” She turned to me, a look of horror on her face. “You have to see this!”

I went to her side and stared into the face of the big dead goon. It was the most hideous thing I had ever seen.

It was his eyes! They were huge, like the unfeeling eyes of some nocturnal reptile. His eyelids were small, vestigial, useless. His pupils were fixed wide, the sclera parched and dry, ruffled
like dried skin. The skin around his eyes, protected by the visor, was pale with a sickly translucence.

Next to this apparition was Naggie, Amanda’s poor spider. Its legs were folded under its body. The big goon had crushed it dead.

I gave Amanda the car keys and told her to meet me at the front of the house. I ran to the kitchen and unplugged the electrical power to the self-starting gas oven. I turned up all the jets and
grabbed the grenade rifle.

I was already standing in the road when she pulled up. I motioned for her to roll the window down.

“Bid
sayonara
to your old life, Amanda.”

“I already did,” I heard her say from the darkened car.

The grenade took off like a rocket, passing clear through the open front door. Amanda’s house exploded in a brain-shaped cloud of red flame.

Amanda finally fell asleep, but she was restless. She had suggested cunnilingus might help her relax. We were sweaty from our long trip. We were too exhausted to even shower. I
did not hesitate to suckle between her legs. She tasted fantastic!

Here we were, in the same hotel room we had rented for my celebration when I had gotten my license. Sure, it was risky. But what a great place to spend the last hours in the States. I was
exhausted myself, but could not sleep. I rubbed my lips and Amanda’s aroma revived me.

The stolen visor rested on the table. The Darkling hat was squirreled away in Amanda’s suitcase. Her little computer would easily pass as business accessory, so Customs would be a piece of
cake. And Sam the private dick knew whose palms to grease if we ran into any trouble. I could hardly wait for the bidding war between the Hong Kong triad and the Japanese. Our goal was enough hard
cash to do anything, to go anywhere. And those Asiatic business types were sure kinky: their company benefits plans even budgeted for sex! Amanda could set up the best fetish palace in history.
With that spooky visor and her computer, I would be the best private eye that ever hit the Pacific Rim. Nobody on the planet could put the drop on us.

But what about other planets? What was that thing we killed back at Amanda’s pad? Was he once human, or something else entirely? Was it possible the visor did this?

Amanda kept tossing. I quietly rose from the chair and picked up the mysterious visor. I just had to take a peek through this thing. I stepped toward the balcony and parted the sliding doors. A
blast of humid, polluted air bathed my naked body. I put the visor to my eyes.

For a few seconds, everything was black. Then, one by one, stars began to appear. They were all around me. I realized they were minds. I could see them walking the streets forty-seven stories
below. Brains even glowed through the tops of cars and through the buildings around me. After a time, the lights of their minds merged. Each human entity was a lighthouse, casting shadows in a sea
of thick conscience.

It was pulling me. It tugged at my face. I felt the thoughts would support me. All I had to do was step off the balcony and crowd-surf on the thick chorus of mentality. A new, powerful sense was
growing in me.

A distant rumble broke my thoughts. Gazing upward, I saw the outline of the StratoLiner. Its now transparent fuselage trapped a swarm of mental fireflies: I had access to the minds of the
passengers. They were dissected before my scrutiny. In a few hours, one of these ships would carry us over the horizon, delivering us across the near-vacuum of low earth orbit to our new lives.

I was getting dizzy. I stumbled back into our room. My gaze fixed on Amanda. A huge, shapeless entity was squatting on her. She was being torn up by a monster. It ripped at her, digging her,
stripping her flesh away. It was splitting her in half. She could not get away. All she could do was toss under the covers, trapped in an unending nightmare.

I grabbed the suitcase. I dialed “007” into the lock. The case popped open. The Darkling hat was in my hands.

I went to Amanda’s side. As I took off the visor, the apparition vanished. I pulled the covers back. She was asleep, her eyelids darting in REM. I placed my hand on her shoulder. She
flinched but did not awake.

She might curse me for what I was about to do, but she said this was the intention of the Darkling hat. I hoped the woman who got up in the morning would be the same wonderful spirit I so madly
loved. She once said our demons might be the best part of us.

But I was no longer going to allow this demon to chew my lover to death.

SCRATCH

Nikki Dillon

The Devil is a lot of things to me and my four housemates: he’s our boyfriend, our employer, and our master. For the rest of the world, he’s a fashion photographer
known as Scratch – a middle-aged man with deformed eyes and a few unusual physical abnormalities, which may or may not be the product of plastic surgery. His signature appears on the upper
right-hand corner of each of his photos, in lurid red. It’s blood, according to Scratch. He develops only thirteen prints of every picture and, supposedly, burns the negatives in an occult
ritual involving goats.

We’ve never seen a goat around here, though there was a Doberman chained up in the basement – with Gregory – for three or four days last February. Gregory never complains about
anything, but the dog whined and barked incessantly. Scratch gave it away to one of the production assistants.

Most people assume that the Devil thing’s a gimmick. And it works. One of his early photos sold last week in London, at an auction, for half a million bucks. As usual, Scratch will give a
chunk of that money to controversial theatre troupes and undiscovered artists. His detractors say he needs the tax break.

Those of us who sleep with him know why he gives away his cash.

Money is what attracts us.

We’re his slaves.

Scratch shoots photos for fashion spreads and slick magazine ads. Designer suits. Designer handbags. Designer lingerie. Financial success has ruined his reputation. Last year,
before his retrospective at the Whitney, there was an article in the
New York Times
about him. It quoted an anonymous curator who called Scratch “a third-rate photographer turned
con-man”.

In any case, I believe Scratch is who he claims to be. I’ve stroked the two stubby hard lumps on his scalp. Covered by his thinning hair, they’re located half an inch behind his
pointed ears. I’ve had my neck scratched by his claws and my foot stepped on by one of his cloven hooves. It sure feels real to me.

The five of us live with Scratch here in Milan, Italy, where his photography studio is based. He owns this four-storey building – a squat, ochre-coloured structure on the waterfront by the
navigli
, canals. The neighborhood, once working class, is in vogue with fashion insiders. Gregory thinks it’s so hip and romantic. The rest of us are less convinced. I admit I liked
the place when I first arrived here last November. The cobblestoned streets were covered in a thick fog, then, and I couldn’t see too clearly. Also, I was more or less delirious.

I had an idea that I was going to get rich,

When it comes to money, I am stupid.

Before Scratch took me to Milan, I’d lived in New York City for nine years. There, I’d led the humbling, wretched existence of an aspiring novelist. I’d been
marginally employed as a freelance copywriter for a publishing company that specialized in coloring books. My wages were laughable, so low that I took perverse pride in them. I’d cite the
figure to well-dressed, overpaid acquaintances. I enjoyed their stunned reaction.

“How do you survive in New York?” they’d gasp, sounding horrified.

“I guess I have a masochistic streak”, I’d say, joking. (It seemed funny, then.) By the time I turned thirty, I’d developed the self-deprecating and slightly paranoid
personality of an outsider. My career had showed some early promise, as the saying goes, but was failing to materialize. Mysteriously, one by one, my friends had been absorbed by the middle class.
They joined up with that amorphous group, Professionals. I could no longer follow their conversation; it was filled with jargon. As far as I was concerned, they did vague things, in conference
rooms, that concerned computers, the law, and television. They owned houses and apartments, furniture, and matching plates. They acquired husbands, wives and children. I saw how they eyed my
second-hand clothes, and watched me count out dimes from my change purse to pay for drinks. They’d invite me over to their four-bedroom colonial houses in the suburbs to feed me what I
thought of as a “pity dinner”. In my apartment, I dined on toast and instant soup.

By the time I met Scratch, I’d written two “literary” novels:
Miracle at the 23rd Street Laundromat
and
Odor of the Swamp
.

Needless to say, I couldn’t sell them for my life.

Four days after I hooked up with him, Scratch handed my landlady a cheque from a Swiss bank and removed me from my roach-infested, one-room apartment on West 121st Street,
where drug dealers convened on one street corner and drunken vagrants on another. He hired three handsome moving men to pack up my belongings and ship them to Milan. They called me “Ms.
Bellamy”, and they handled my chipped coffee mugs and paperbacks as if they were priceless, wrapping every object, including my sneakers, in a sheet of newspaper, cushioned by shreds of white
Styrofoam which they referred to as “the snow”.

The day before we left New York, Scratch took me shopping at Barney’s, the trendoid department store. It was cold out, so he bought me a red vinyl baseball cap with fleece-lined earflaps.
Now I keep it on the windowledge in the studio, in my office alcove, next to the futon mattress which I unfold at night to sleep on. I don’t wear it much, and I never wanted it in the first
place.

It cost Scratch $248.00.

It’s a number I remember, because it was my weekly salary at Dunn and Bradworth Publishing Co.

Fucking price tag. It impressed me.

I work for Scratch eight hours a day, seven days a week. My desk is a card table equipped with a portable computer in an alcove. I’m separated from the photography studio
by a wall of rectangular glass bricks. Back in New York, Scratch and I made a deal to produce a book which would wind up on the bestseller list, or even lead to a lucrative Hollywood movie option.
In exchange for room, board, a one-way plane ticket and that useless shopping trip to Barney’s, Scratch commissioned me to write a book based on his character. I’m supposed to be his
first official, authorized biographer, with exclusive access to his correspondence and private papers.

Unfortunately, the book I’m writing sucks.

It’s a fictionalized biography, or what Scratch calls “bio-fic”. The working title is
I, Satan
. But Scratch refuses to tell me anything about himself. So I have to take
wild guesses and tell lies.

When I objected to doing that, Scratch lost his temper. “Don’t be an idiot!” he yelled, stamping the floor with the heel of his motorcycle boot. “Make it up. That’s
what you’re here for, stupid girl.” It was one of the few times I’ve seen him lose control. Usually, he keeps his voice low. Scratch often smiles when he’s angry.

My relationship with him is fairly twisted.

I expected that, I guess.

“Candles are in”, Scratch told the four of us this morning. He looked up from the latest edition of Italian
Vogue
. We were all sitting at the long dining
table, eating our usual breakfast of bread and water. Some of us – including me – were allowed to have a cup of instant coffee. Katrina, the Austrian dancer, was feasting on scrambled
eggs and a slice of toast with butter. The rest of us, half-starving, were trying not to watch her eat. My mouth was watering, and I knew that, when she performed for Scratch last night, he’d
liked her choreography, for a change. Probably, she’d gotten laid in some way which was pleasurable instead of humiliating or painful. That’s part of the reward when he approves.