Paul Holm positively dripped with venom, but then thought better of it. Wordlessly he turned toward home, and we followed. The tallow candle quivered feebly as he made his way through the seething passages. Animals fled at the sound of our steps. After about fifteen minutes, we reached the tarpaulin separating the house from the barn. Groundcherries and Judas’s coins surrounded the frontporch. Suddenly, Paul grabbed a healthy looking piglet. Stars danced in his eyes as he squeezed the life out of it. The piglet shrieked and shat and Paul tossed the dying corpse into a corner of the dark basement.
— My dear child, here you’ll see all Jie great trophies Paul has collected throughout the years, Grandpa said in a friendly tone and pointed to a stuffed alderman hanging on a wall in front of us.
Paul’s reserve melted a little and he lit a sevenbranch candlestick. The rumpusroom came to life like a bloodclot in the heart. The walls were covered with Paul’s prey. Every trophy had a brass plaque recording what had been killed, when, where, and how. Next to the barn’s entrance a huge hydrocephaluscranium hung alongside a sabbathgoat’s darkly gleaming horns. Rows of embalmed cocks, mandrillbutts, and mottled retireehides gave way to mammothparts, doxies in fur coats, an entire sasquatch family, and a mummified Australopithecus. Hundreds of alcoholfilled jamjars held cherubic toddlerheads. The real prize of the collection, though, was a manticore — wiry and bloodred with three rows of teeth in every mouth and a scorpion’s tail — poised to spring, a basilisk: that huge snakecock with a murderous gaze, a nerveball from a kikeplanet near the horsehead nebula, and a fewthings I didn’t know what they were and a few others I don’t want to remember.
— This one was hard to kill.
Paul stroked a stuffed author’s unwholesome face.
— I had to crouch in the dungcellar beneath the cowbarn a whole day and night before I got him.
The placard said: “Teratological author. Cryptogerman. 187 cm., 80 kg., 20 cm. cock. Killed the twenty-seventh of October nearly 2,000 years after Christs inglorious death under my barn with my dear old tencommasixmillimeter.416 Rigby.”
Grandpa lit a gray Prince.
— What was so special about him?
— He had some papers on him describing how folks like us live and what we do.
— What did you do with them?!
— I used them to wipe my ass.
— That was the right response: Satans dysangelium must be kept secret from the uninitiated until the Antichrist’s arrival.
— He’s close, Paul smiled darkly and led the way into his sick house.
We climbed a warped staircase to the back of the house. A woebegone cryptozoologist impaled on a taxidermist with rigormortis was standing in a niche. Paul kicked open the basement door and led us into the povertystricken kitchen. He moved a stack of beastsexmags and a Möbius and Weininger off the rickety, stained table and brought out two hollow meteorites, which he filled with blacksoup. Grandpa flipped through Abdul Alhazred’s original Necronomicon and I scratched my scraggly hair. Paul laidout the sooty maincourse and scraped some burnt flakes onto plates for desert.
He sat them on the table and watched Grandpa.
— This spread is a little sparse, Grandpa said in the selfrighteous, vaguely threatening voice that guests tend to complain in.
— You always do this! You’re always a pain in the ass! If you were anywhere else, they’d fuck you in the duodenum just for being the way you are!
— But Paul! Grandpa hiccupped, Why are you so pissed off. Has the devil got your panties in a wad!? Tied the duodenum into knots?!
— Youyoudamnfuckinsatandontknowhowitfeelswhenigetprickingsinmychestandstomachwheniseeyouigetallmessedintheheadsomeonecomeandputmeoutofmymisery!
Grandpa’s cold eyes were mocking and Paul slunk off to the john to dry his tears.
— He’s stingy as a Chinese priest, Grandpa muttered, shoving aside the cupboardcurtain and disappearing inside.
He rummaged around for a bit and then came out with an ELC-brain in brine, a bowl of shredded pigcunts, a tub of Vaseline, and a nicotineloaf.
— Kolyma-Paul’s shots are stronger than Karelin’s lecherholds, he nodded in the direction of the bathroomdoor, which had just opened again.
Paul came out as though nothing had happened. He threw himself into his chair and began ladling out the black soup. Grandpa dug into the brain with his bare hands, and at his nod I spread Vaseline on a piece of bread.
— Forgive me Paul, Grandpa slurped out, I didn’t mean what I said.
— I forgive you, because you’re not right in the head.
Grandpa bent over the table and pulled Paul close to him. Then he gave him a sloppy wet kiss. He reminded me of a neighborgeezer comforting a kid who’d just puked.
— Being all anguished didn’t help much when old Herod took a shine to babybashing, Paul proclaimed. But all human lives are of equal worth … they’re not worth a shit!
— Typical Paul! Grandpa laughed, turning to me. You see, Paul here, when he’s not being a troublemaker, is one of the finest misanthropes to ever claw his way out of the pateruterine cavity. But since he learned everything he knows from a fellow with a PhD in Cryptic Oncology, don’t be surprised if what he says sounds as squirrelly as morals do to a girly.
— Not so unlike yourself, Grandpa, when it comes to the purely intactual, Paul observed. I wonder how some of the other boys are doing, though. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since our schooldays.
— Whatever happened to poor old Torkel?
— Professer of Processorfelling in Lappbatikhalet.
— And Bulimic-Henning?
— In a psychiatrichospital.
— What about that slanteye with feverblisters?
— Kang Sheng?
— No, the other one.
— Anton Szandor? I heard he founded a Satanic cult in Pissiniemi.
— Thinking of them gets me all tingly.
Grandpa slurped up the Rolandicstrip and wiped his mouth with a bib that Nils Poppe had given him as a thankyou for services rendered. Then he sprawled in the rickety crofterchair, flicked away a gooberdinky, and lit a handicappedciggi.
— But I still say, Paul, my old friend, that you and I were the two the man in black had the highest hopes for. And I hardly think he’s been disappointed.
— True, true, Paul nodded sagaciously, a junkie’s insectsful wisdom written all over his far too lovely features …
— You and I were the only two who followed Baphomet’s call, Grandpa declared and took a swig from his pocketflask, which was filled with fermented biturongpiss and spiked with Elie Wiesel’s bile.
— Nah, there were a few others just as promising …
— Like “Måntengrymmer” and “Jan Orsa Päll” …
— Yeah, but they frittered away their evil on mere mischief. It takes more than celebrating Gilles de Rais’s birthday or rattling off the peristalticconfessions every night to call yourself Hell’s emissary. Most of them didn’t make any more splash than a fart in the bath. They lived following Martin Luthers motto, “Live and let live so you won’t get mauled,” rather than the Lord of the Flies’ “Buggering thy neighbor beats the hell out of getting a rattan cane in the ass.”
Paul half-heartedly tried to shoo away the persistent flyswarm as he fell into daydreaming.
— Oh, how his dead voice burrowed deep into the mustiest corners of the brain, planting the black seed that changes all you see to gray. “Seek out need and show no mercy,” he ordered. Great and terrible, cloaked and cowled, in chronically magnificent condition. He kept shagtobacco, you know, in a real heteroballsack. His rough hands gave the toughest whoreboy caresses. And the sulphurtaste of his slimy grizzlynuts … He touched me deep inside … He was so hard and went so far in … His cock was colder and rougher than the resinous dwarfpines on Ryssbergets baby-barbecueplateau.