The Sadist's Bible (11 page)

balloon. Connelly hated to be the guy who had to deflate him. But, on the other hand, the deflation was necessary. He’d asked too many questions before. Now that he’d gotten a

little taste of some answers, Connelly reckoned he wouldn’t be so big on asking

questions. He’d be more likely to take directions.

“Get on your phone and try to contact her. Indiana State Police should be calling you

very soon to start their branch of the investigation.”

“Oh Lord...Oh, dear God please. She’s just my little baby. Confused, that’s all. She

doesn’t know better. Let her live and repent, Lord. Let her live, don’t let her die and go to Hell. Let her live and re-”.

Connelly wasn’t ordinarily the sort of man who would interrupt a prayer. But

ordinary went out the window in these sorts of situations. “Sir...sir...We’ll do our best to get her back in your arms. These days, with all the cell phones and email and social

networking data at our disposal, finding missing persons is much easier than it used to

be.”

* * *

Even Ellie didn’t know where she was.

This was only natural, as so many of her memories–the people, places and things that

could anchor and orient her – felt like fragments of a dream that was rapidly slipping

away. Her brain rebelled against this process. There was someone important...someone

she had to remember. The reason for all of this: the girl with whirlpool eyes; the girl who would suck her and probe her, who would take her to the farthest edge of her desires.

Then, together, they’d plunge over that edge to a Hell that was preferable to Earth. The name started with the letter L...Laura? No, not Laura.

Lori.

She remembered this much: she loved Lori, but Lori hadn’t yet said that she loved

her back. They were going to fuck each other then die together. There was

a...creature...named René involved with this, too. A mutilated man. He’d been the one

who’d taken her from her old life. In a police car? That didn’t seem to make sense but,

yes, in a police car. They’d driven away from one world and had arrived in a new one – a place as dark and warm as a womb. A quiet place where the ground was slick with mud

and the air smelled like fading flowers.

She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but she knew René was still with her.

She felt his cold, plastic hand guiding her along by the arm – as though he’d been to this place many times before and knew the way, or could at least see where he was going. She

also heard his voice.

“Duh-skusth,” he said.

Ellie struggled to understand him.
Disgust? Disguise?

They stopped. René grabbed her chin and tilted it upward. “Duh skusth,” he

repeated, this time with a heightened tone of seriousness, a respect bordering on awe.

Oh,
the skies
– René was directing her attention to the stars overhead. They were several times larger than any stars she’d seen before, and each glowed with a different

vibrant color. Even more surprising, they were unstable. (No, more than unstable.

Liquid
.) They throbbed and melted and trickled toward the horizon, leaving behind trails that looked like neon candle wax (or painted pus).

Ellie followed the course of a melting, pulsating green star until she began to feel

dizzy and nauseated. Her head started to pound in synch with the palpitations.

She shifted her focus to a blue star, hoping a more soothing color might settle her

nerves. It didn’t help. It was too globby and too pale; the injured, blotchy blue of a bruise, not the rich blue of eyes and oceans. Each time the blue star throbbed, she imagined it

pumping diseased blood through the veins of all creation. She cringed, slipped, and lost her footing.

She heard a familiar whirring sound as René yanked at her hips to steady her.

Gooseflesh ran up the back of her neck, followed by a shudder, followed by a wave of

bitter embarrassment at how weak she must have just seemed to him. She’d gotten used

to a number of oddities over the last two days. So why did she find this bizarre sky so

uniquely disturbing?

She had only a hunch about the answer. It was one thing to feel increasingly

comfortable around a deformed creature like René, or even to accept that degeneracy was

everyone’s
inevitable destination. But it was quite another to face the reality that stars, too, could devolve into something broken and freakish and wrong.

The arc of the universe was long but bent towards degeneracy.

It was too much for her exhausted senses. Yet, she needed to be brave and stare at

the sky. Anxiety and awkwardness no longer had a place in her life. A bizarre serenity

began to take hold of her. Yes, she was broken. What of it? In this place, the stars were too.

Like trickling raindrops on a windshield, the purple, red, green, orange, and blue

stars began to coalesce. Their colors mixed and darkened at the points of contact, while the trail each had left in its wake remained the original hue. Ellie decided an infected, deformed sky was a beautiful sky. She sighed.

René uttered a soft, approving moan and patted her on the back, as if to acknowledge

her progress in adjusting to her new surroundings. Then he led her onward. She followed

without questioning.

René did not seem the least bit troubled by the blackness at ground level. Ellie

trusted this meant all was well. She kept her gaze fixed on the broken sky and slipped

into a peaceful sleepwalker’s trance.

When she came to, the trails of starry wax-pus had finished their courses for the

night and trickled below the horizon. No new stars rose to replace them. While the sky

had once seemed sick, it now seemed dead.

Ellie wondered how long she’d been sleepwalking. Obviously, some time had passed

(how much, she couldn’t say). She had little endurance for hiking. Ordinarily, she wasn’t able to stand more than a half hour of it before turning back. But, despite apparently

journeying far longer than that, she felt rejuvenated.

René grabbed her chin once again. This time he tilted it downward, back toward the

ground. Something cast a flickering yellow glow in the distance. The smell of fading

flowers yielded to an eruption of pungent smoke that reached down Ellie’s throat,

grabbed at her stomach, and yanked. It reeked of overcooked pork, rotten eggs, and rotten fruit. She dry heaved.

“Woreh!” René said, pointing toward the fire.

Ellie paused, trying to make sure she understood him.
Worry? Yes, my old life was

marinated in worry. But I’m changing, and René seemed to have approved of the change.

So that couldn’t have been what he’d said. It must’ve been…

“Lori? She’s there, near that fire?”

René chuckled and patted Ellie on the shoulder. Was she to take that as a yes or as a

condescending no?

As they walked farther along, the glow grew in size and intensity, overcoming the

blackness. At first it seemed as though it might be a wasteland, a vast array of tall

bonfires. But as they marched through the strange night, ever closer, Ellie came to see it was a series of burning stone towers.

Fire flickered sporadically through their windows, at times revealing the silhouettes

of grotesque figures so deformed they made René seem like an Adonis. Fire thrived in a

constant, crackling roar at the very top of the structures – bathing each minaret and

battlement in flames. Along with the sounds of burning, she also heard desperate pleas

and sadistic laughs; animalistic grunts and orgasmic moans; the cracks of whips and the

clatter of chains–the sounds of suffering and its mischievous instigation.

The fire burned the creatures in the tower, but didn’t seem to be killing them so

much as changing them into more degenerate shapes. Rendering them more holy.

Purifying them
. As René guided her ever closer, Ellie wondered what exactly would become of her once she stepped inside. But this question was overwhelmed by a sudden

surge of undeniable arousal that pulsed through her veins.
I need to hurt her...I need to
fuck her...I need to hurt her...I need to fuck her
.

They arrived at a tower entrance – a stone archway. Tall, lit torches stood unsteadily

at each end, wobbling back and forth in the wind, belching foul black clouds into the air and casting chaotic light on the first half dozen steps of a wide interior stone stairway.

Ellie found them almost-comically redundant. Torches posted right outside an

inferno? It made no sense.

“Tack hew up,” René said.

The torches crept toward Ellie. Amongst their flames, she glimpsed boiling blue eyes

peeking out of carbon-black faces. They weren’t torches at all but rather living, burning men. As they approached her, the air started to boil and her brain started to boil and she let out a revolted wail.

René enjoyed a slobbery belly laugh as he insistently pushed her toward the

creatures.

Most of the burning men’s appendages were charred and weak, seeming as though

they might fall to the ground at any moment. Hence, their hunched-over gait that made

them look all the more strange.

Only their flabby bellies and hard cocks were left uncharred. The hairy, blistering

flesh of these two hungry parts–in flames but never completely consumed–reminded Ellie

of the burning bush that spoke to Moses.

The burning men each grabbed Ellie by an arm. Their flames galloped onto her like

small, rabid animals. Burned her clothes and burned her skin and melted the two together until there was no distinction between them. Then she, too, was a walking torch. She, too, smelled of overcooked pork, rotten eggs, and rotten fruit. They had spread their fire on to her, like a disease. Their cremation was a contagion.

By all rights, it should have been agonizing. But instead there was only a dull

stinging sensation, a crackling in her nerves as if they were finally waking up. As if

they’d been asleep her whole life – artificially sedated by her parents, her school, her church, and her husband.

By all rights, it should have been horrifying. At the very least, the smell of her own

burning flesh should have left her disgusted. But she felt increasingly convinced that it wasn’t really her body burning, but rather some obsolete mask that desperately
needed
and
deserved
destruction.

The men-she’d-thought-were-torches led her into the tower and up a flight of stairs.

She looked back to see if René was coming with them. She could only make him out in

silhouette. He stood on the other side of the threshold, repeatedly bowing at the waist.

Making the sign of the cross. Uttering praise: “Haweh. Haweh. Haweh.”

During the trio’s ascent, they came upon a dozen pudgy, naked, blistered, half-

human things. Some trotted up the stairs on all fours. Some giggled. Some screamed

vulgar threats. Some ignored the procession entirely and used the stairway as an arena for orgies. “Who else wants a piece of this?” a pig-man said after shooting his load into the bleeding ass of a scorched, cackling, masturbating crone. Two of his kin trotted forward and squealed with delight.

On closer examination, Ellie saw the crone wasn’t masturbating. Rather, her index

finger had been forcibly attached to her vulva by a nail that had been driven through an arthritic knuckle. And, upon further reflection, that cackling
might
have been weeping.

Should Ellie have been shocked that such an obscenity was being committed in plain

sight? A vague sense that she
should
be shocked rose to her consciousness, but quickly passed. The fire was purifying her. Melting away her mask, exposing the brokenness

underneath. Old ways of thinking drifted away from her, like the smoke drifting from her head.

Ellie and her guides found ample room on the wide stairs to slip past the spectacle,

but they couldn’t avoid the puddle of blood and shit that had seeped from the old woman.

She tread carefully, so she wouldn’t slip. But she felt not even a twinge of guilt or

revulsion when the filth clung to her feet, and she could tell that such emotions never

even occurred to her guides.

She was on her way to becoming more like them.

She felt strange sensations deep inside her head. Maybe they were growing pains, as

new physical structures developed in her brain that would enable her to better understand how this realm worked. Or maybe, old parts of her brain – the parts devoted to the

preservation of conventional morality – were simply dying. In any event, she sensed she

was mutating into something better-than-human.
Wiser
-than-human. She became more and more convinced the events she’d just witnessed were beautiful.

How could she think otherwise? The creatures and their mate (victim?) were

arguably even more broken than she was, and God wanted everyone to be as broken as

possible. She couldn’t remember how she’d first learned that God wanted everyone to be

as broken as possible, but the important thing was she
knew
it. She knew it in the boiling marrow of her bones. Therefore, logically, every single one of these creatures should be envied, not scorned.

What was this place? She still didn’t know, exactly, but felt certain that it was a
holy
place. Yes, of that she was sure. Only one thing could make it better.

“Where’s Lori?” she asked.

Her guides responded by pointing fiery fingers upward.

The trio climbed five additional flights of stairs, with similar sacred perversions

sporadically unfolding around them. On the second flight, a pig man moaned ecstatically