The Messenger (2011 reformat) (14 page)

"Lord,
can you believe all that noise?" came another woman's voice. Mrs. Baxter,
one of Danelleton's most infamous gossips, was weighing a package at the self-serve
counter. She was a squashed little curmudgeon of a woman, stoop shouldered,
white hair bunned and, netted. "I haven't seen that many police cars all
at once since that time last year when Corey Halverson caught his wife cheating
on him-remember, with that man who'd come around and cleaned the leaves out of
your gutters? Remember him? Turns out he was sowing quite a few oats with some
of the local women, and he was an ex-convict to boot! Anyway, poor Corey
Halverson caught the two of them together at one of those fleabag motels over
in

St. Pete
Beach, and he got so depressed he climbed to the top of the Danelleton water
tower to jump. Must've been twenty police cars there that day. Of course, he
didn't jump but he was going to. Do you remember that, Annabelle?"

Annabelle did
not. In fact, she rather doubted that anything like that had happened at all;
Mrs. Baxter had a knack for fabrication. Outside, though, more police cars sped
by. "Whatever it is, it must be serious," she said.

"I saw
more cars racing down Main Street when I was on my way here. It looked like
they were heading for that Seaton school, and I can tell you, I've heard a
story or two about that place."

I'm sure you
have, Annabelle thought.

"All
those teenaged girls in there, no contact with boys their own age? We can only
imagine what goes on in their minds ..."

Annabelle
rolled her eyes. What a pain in the butt. She tuned the old woman out as best
she could, heading over to the stamp machine and then the drop box. She hoped
the old woman would just leave, but then she heard a rustling sound from the
corner. I don't believe it! Mrs. Baxter was rummaging through the trash can by
the self-service counter, opening junk mail that post office box customers had
thrown out. Annabelle dawdled, pretending to be putting stamps on her own
letters, until Mrs. Baxter left.

Annabelle
wanted to go home right away and take a nap. She'd sat up late last night with
her husband, Mark, watching some ludicrous horror movie, something about
colonial settlers finding an evil root in the ground. The movie was so campy
and badly done that Mark had been honking with laughter. Annabelle laughed,
too, but not quite so hard. She'd wound up having nightmares, waking up half a
dozen times, and when morning finally arrived, she felt exhausted. Mark was
working today, a construction contractor. I've got the whole day to myself, she
thought. What a luxury. First a long lazy bubble bath, then a nap before Mark
got home. But there's one thing to do in between.

Annabelle
quick-stepped to her PO. box. Seven to ten days for delivery, she reminded
herself. Today was the tenth day. God, I hope it's here.

Annabelle had
the PO. box for just such events as this. A little indulgence wasn't a bad
thing; in fact, she felt she deserved it. It wasn't like she was cheating on her
husband or anything. She'd never done that, in spite of innumerable opportunities
and sometimes, when primal urges collided with moral sensibilities, the former
had come very close to winning out.

Sometimes
Annabelle just couldn't stand it.

Hence, this
confidential mail-order purchase, this clandestine indulgence.

She felt
tingly approaching her PO. box, then a sudden discontent swept through her,
leaving her utterly depressed. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst,
Mark always said.

It's not going
to be here, she immediately knew. More disappointment. I'm going to open this
box, look inside, and it'll be empty. The friggin' thing probably hasn't even
shipped yet, won't get here for another week. Or maybe they'll never send it.
Maybe I just got shafted.

She turned the
key, opened the box...

Jesus!

...then jerked
her head around again at another salvo of screaming police sirens. What is
going on out there? she thought.

When the
sirens faded, she looked into the Post Office Box.

Her heart
jumped in her chest-she nearly shrieked in delight. Inside the box sat a
package.

She slipped it
out. The return address said Erotronica, Inc. This is it! I finally got it!
Annabelle stuck the package under her arm, like something forbidden, like a
cocaine dealer having just made a secret pickup, and she whisked herself away,
flip-flopping briskly out the doors and into the parking lot. Her brand-new,
ocean-green Mercedes convertible sat in wait.

She couldn't
wait to get home.

But...

Oh, damn it!
She had to go back. I left the box door open and my key in the lock! The
package was an excusable distraction, but that didn't abate any frustration.
Annabelle was an instant-gratification type of woman. She didn't want to have
to wait even an extra minute for what she wanted.

She threw the
package into the Mercedes, and her flip-flops snapped right back into the post
office. There was her box, door still open, bronze key sticking out of the
lock. She reached forward to clack it shut but paused.

This time
another police car screamed by but Annabelle didn't hear it.

She was
looking at the open box. It occurred to her to reach forward and close the
door, but, for some reason, that wasn't possible. She couldn't concentrate.
Perhaps she'd been in the sun too much today, and she hadn't had breakfast this
morning either. That combined with a bad night's sleep from horror-movie
nightmares had brought her well under the weather.

Or maybe not.
Maybe it was something else.

Annabelle was
only thinking in snatches. She felt sick to her stomach, and she smelled
something so foul-something like waste and rotten meat and unwashed Bums all
mixed together. She wanted to throw up, yet another part of her felt keenly
excited. Her nipples ached against the shiny fabric of her sundress. She began
to tingle between her legs.

She was
reaching forward, frowning at the atrocious smell, but she knew she wasn't
doing so to close the box door. She meant to reach inside.

But there's
nothing else in there, she thought with the tiny sliver of reason remaining in
her mind. I know it's empty. I put the package in the car. So what am I doing
this for?

A flap! startled
her. Annabelle froze, then jerked around. It was five o'clock. The front
service area was closed now, and someone on the other side had locked those
doors and flapped the closed sign around. And the self-serve area remained
empty.

What...am...I...doing?

She lowered
herself to her knees, looked into the box. It remained empty; in fact nothing
could be seen behind it, either, just darkness. Someone must've turned out the
lights back there.

She ground her
teeth against that stench. She was right-it was coming from the box, flowing
out in a disgusting gust. Nevertheless, she put her hand in ...

She reached
into the box.

There's
nothing there, there's nothing there! So why am I putting my hand in?

Her hand was
all the way in. Slowly, slowly. No, her arm was going in, an inch at a time,
halfway up the forearm, then to the elbow. Then-

She was
touching something-something warm. It was slimy, too, like that time she'd
found the pack of ground sirloin in the back of the refrigerator. She'd opened
it, thinking it fresh, but then the smell had hit her just after she'd touched
it. Viscid slime. As it turned out, the meat had been in there for weeks.
That's what whatever she was touching felt like.

Oh, God, she
thought now. What was this?

Thoughts more
foul than the smell swarmed in her head. In her mind she saw things, bodies,
reveling over her in some stinking grotto, figures hauling her down-into
slime-to slake their lusts. She was molested and prodded and licked, she was
mounted and humped, her own body mauled in every position. The figures doing
this to her were enslimed as if the pores of their skin were sweating mucus.
Every detail of these goings-on absolutely repulsed her, yet she felt more
aroused than she had in...

...well...

Ever.

It couldn't be
mouths that suckled every inch of her body-the orifices were too large to be
mouths. Yet her nerves detected teeth in them, and great, fat, budded tongues.
Not human mouths at any rate. One such mouth sucked her feet, another sucked
her stomach, centering on her navel, yet the diameter of the lips were nearly
that of a dinner plate. When the mouth slid down lower, the tongue like a flap
of flank steak entering her, Annabelle climaxed spontaneously, orgasms
detonating. The immense tongue remained within her, and then yet another mouth
clamped all the way over her face, then her entire head. Her head was being
sucked like a lollipop.

This foul
ecstacy never dwindled. The image or dream or hallucination ground on for what
seemed hours, these things in rut, these creatures, lining up for her.
Annabelle had no objection. She was stretched and pulled, splayed and spread,
sat up, flipped over, turned upside-down, to be used over and over again...

She couldn't
see the things at all, there was no light. All she could do was feel them as
she shuddered beneath each one, nipples gorged, back arched, legs open,
begging, begging for more.

When they were
done, Annabelle sighed. Had she worn them all out? They were dragging
themselves up, disinterested in her now, now that they'd spent themselves. She
could hear them scuffling away through muck and then, for the merest moment, a
light flickered-firelight, she guessed-and she saw them.

Tall lean
things. Ridged in muscles yet emaciated. Knobby joints, hands with fingers a
foot long. Their skin did indeed shine with slime, the hue of old, old
paraffin. One looked back at her with black orblike eyes; Annabelle shuddered
at the long slack-mouthed face, slits for a nose, and horns sprouting from the
warped forehead.

Demons, she
knew now.

Then the light
went out, and there she was, on her knees in the post office, with her arm
halfway into the post office box.

Her eyes felt
pulled open by hooks. She knew what she was doing. She knew what the hot,
organic thing was in her hand.

Eventually,
something wet and just as hot emptied into her palm. Did she hear a moan? The
smell was still overpowering. She slowly retracted her arm.

Hand to elbow
was covered in slime. Pearl-like globs clung to her palm and fingers. Oh my
God. What in God's name is behind there?

She was about
to fall over and vomit, when someone nudged her.

"Miss?
Miss?"

Annabelle
dragged her eyes upward. A postal clerk was standing behind her, a concerned
look on his face.

"Are you
all right?"

Annabelle's
head was spinning. She looked at her arm. It was clean, normal.

"Here,
let me help you up."

She struggled
off her knees, wobbled a bit once she was back on her feet, then leaned against
the wall of post office boxes and sighed. "I'm sorry. I don't know what
happened to me. Dizzy spell, I guess."

"Happens
a lot this time of year." The clerk smiled. "Hot and sunny all day,
you get dehydrated."

"I'm sure
that's it," Annabelle agreed, because there was nothing else she could
believe. "And I'm fine now." She told herself, too, that she felt perfectly
fine but her hand shook when she closed her box door and withdrew the key.

The clerk
raised a brow.

"I'm just
a little jittery", she said. "If you want to know the truth, my husband
and I sat up late last night and watched a horror movie that wound up giving me
terrible nightmares." Demons, she remembered. She'd just had some sort of
waking dream about demons having sex with her, the day after seeing that movie
about demons. That's all this is. "Then, I guess, something triggered the
memory when I got here. Flashback or something."

A long hand
the color of old wax opened on her chest. It stank. And it landed against her
skin with a wet slap. It was humid, slimy. Annabelle was paralyzed. She
wouldn't look up at the thing's face because she'd already seen what their
faces looked like. All she would do was convulse as the hand slid down her top,
rubbing infernal slime over her breasts.

"You like
that, don't you?" the corroded voice bubbled. "I know you do, I feel
your precious little tits getting hard, like they did a few minutes ago in the
grotto. My brothers and I enjoyed you very much, and later, when you're with us
forever, we'll enjoy you every night for the rest of eternity."

Annabelle's
teeth chattered.

"I'm one
of the Messenger's sons," the voice from Hell burbled on. "He has
many, many bastard sons. We help him spread the word in the domain of our lord.
My father needs you to spread the word here. You will do it."

The hand was
lathering her breasts in slime, the grub-like fingertips twisting her nipples.
Annabelle couldn't breathe.