He blows into 90 Night like a storm-building thunderhead.
“Bones! Is that you, man?” squeaks a rat-faced faggot.
Slice shakes his head.
Negative, asshole.
He picks up the sultry scent of choice prey.
His bootknife shifts against his ankle.
A pretty drag queen is sitting on a stool, reading into the mike a long poem about the gay plague.
Slice slinks across the room & sits at a vacant table. A butch lesbian wearing a dildo on a rope around her neck looks into his face, then quickly looks away. He can imagine what she saw there: saw him stuffing that dildo dick down her fucking throat, fucking her with it till blood filled up the torn crater of her mouth. You ain’t butch enough to handle me, cunt. Choke on it, you half-human bitch.
The queen on the stool ends his epic by ripping off his blonde wig & spinning around on the stool to reveal a death’s-head mask on the back of his head. The audience applauds & cheers. Slice hawks up thick phlegm from the back of his throat & spits the blue glob on the floor, causing three punks at the next table to look in disgust at him & move to another table. Don’t you know artistic criticism when you see it?
The scent comes in stronger.
Something dark & powerful stirs in his belly & groin.
A prettyboy MC steps to the mike & says: “Ladies & gentlemen—Miss Phaedra Flame!”
The prey mounts the stage. The black sheen of her long hair, the black body stocking & black lip gloss accent her milk-white face.
A demonic grin sharpens the predator’s face.
Phaedra Flame holds up a slim red-bound book, & says, “These are my Torch Poems.” She holds up a blowtorch in her other hand & a tongue of fire licks at the book. Then flames engulf the book, & she tosses it into a bucket of water. “I hereby proclaim the death of the printed word!”
The audience whistles & cheers. Mindless sheep.
“Now I do real poetry,” Phaedra says with a sly smile.
From the Olympus of his heightened blue awareness, the new god Slice looks down upon the roomful of ragged mortals & savors the coming creation. Destruction in creation. Reductionist to the Nth. His artistic medium will be flesh/bone/blood. Each slaughtered lamb a work of art, impermanent like ice sculpture. Art that literally sends spirits soaring into the great unknown.
Phaedra is putting her body & soul into her impromptu scat poetry, moving with feline grace, slinky and seductive, speaking directly to the new god, though she is not consciously aware that she is doing so. “… hungry in the hamburger air, tossed aside like a used condom, wearing the emblem of a washed-out revolution, alone with my own bloody abortion …”
Slice studies her every move, the jiggle of her full breasts, the quiver of her firm thighs, the pucker of her lips as she wraps them around every word. He is mentally outlining his artistic approach, planning the impetus of his strokes, finding cosmic inspiration in the poetry of her moving body.
The revelation hits him with such force that he is thrown back in his chair, his long hands dangling below the seat. He sees it all with crystal blue clarity: his handiwork must be exhibited for the masses, not merely for the homicide police & the coroner. He will display his blood art, like human graffiti, to the public. Phaedra Flame will be his first message to the world. The more sensitive souls will see the meaning beyond the carved & flayed flesh. Perhaps a few will even glimpse the coming blue doom.
The demonic grin returns & remains on his face like a mask.
* * *
As he follows her out the rear door of 90 Night & into the poorly-lit parking lot, he suddenly feels fear. Not his own fear, but the wimpy emotion of that intruding mind from Mermaid’s Inn. The mind of the four-eyed professor, the one who inadvertently turned him into the new god.
Welcome aboard, Professor. Welcome to mindfuck. Come along & I’ll show you what I’m going to do to you. You’re in my orbit now.
He can feel the wimp squirm, taste his terror, sense his futile resistance.
You can’t hide from me, cuntface. You know that now. You’re just beginning to see my power.
Across town, the helpless one cringes.
You thought you could control me? Fat chance. We’ll do her, you & me, then we’ll turn her into raw art. I know you get off on death. Imagine the rush you’ll get when I do you …
She bends to unlock the door of her battered bronze Toyota, & Slice puts the tip of the blade against the small of her back.
“Don’t make a sound—” he hisses.
Phaedra’s body tenses & her breath catches in her throat.
He steps beside her, putting an arm around her like a lover, shifting the knifepoint to the underside of her right breast.
“I loved your poems,” he whispered. “They put me in an abstract mood.”
He walks her to a garbage-filled green dumpster behind the coffee house.
“I’m going to do something very abstract,” he tells her. “You’ll be the talk of the art world.”
He leads her behind the dumpster & pushes her back against its cool surface.
“If you scream, I’ll slit your pretty throat.”
He slits the thin material of her body stocking from the neck to the crotch, then peels it off her supple body.
“I smell your essence. I hear your blood rushing through your veins, wanting to come out.”
He deftly works his fingers through her pubic bush & into the warm lips of her quim.
She tries to draw back from his touch, but her buttocks are already pressed flush against the dumpster.
His zipper opens with a loud rasp & his ponderous penis nudges against her dry slit.
“Please … don’t …” she whispers.
“You’re dry as a bone,” he giggles, “but I can fix that.”
He clamps his left hand over her mouth & runs the blade downward, over her belly.
“I’m going to fuck you,” he says & jabs the blade deep into her vagina.
* * *
Professor feels a twinge of envy as the huge cock slides deep into the bloodslick tunnel of ruined flesh. Had he been so well-endowed, he may never have gone through his various bookwormish stages of transformation, womanless through high school & college, through a series of bungled sexual encounters with prostitutes & sluts who made light of his inchworm cock, & on into the solitary pursuit of science. Had fate given this magnificent dong to him instead of this crazed sadist, then maybe he would not have summoned the succubus, in his LSD ritual of sex & self-destruction, she who tipped him to the formula & possibilities of Li Di 1 …
Envy, regret, &, now, revulsion—as he is trapped in the monster’s mind, bearing sick witness to the slaughter of the dying woman. Her mind screams in terror and disbelief as the blade slices off her breast.
A short-handled axe flashes in the dim light from a distant street lamp & strikes the woman’s shoulder, completely separating her arm from her body. A fountain of blood gushes from the severed socket, drenching you/her psychotic slayer & the litter-strewn pavement alike in the hot spill of her life-essence. She enters into numbing & merciful shock/you feel the center of her mind melting, dispersing randomly/each dripping direction going to death/butchershop chic/a little off the top …?