Darrell sparked the flame on the Bic lighter clutched in his blackened fingers and held it up to Joey’s face.
“You have to learn not to play with fire, Joey.”
Joey tried to scream again as the crazy old dead guy aimed the flame up his right nostril. Joey’s flesh began to sizzle. He writhed on the bed in nerve-searing anguish, but Darrell held him firm.
The boy had learned at least one of the lessons. He knew now that there were things in the world that could hurt him, that he was not invincible and that he could not get away with anything he wanted. The other lessons would take longer and be much more painful. But, Darrell had time. The boy had to learn.
Darrell would not let him grow up to be a criminal like his son Jake, on death row for murdering a drug dealer. He would teach the boy better. The old man moved the lighter to Joey’s eyelid and smiled as his eyeball sizzled and popped.
Addict
J. F. Gonzalez
“Addict” originally appeared in Insidious Reflections #5, January 2006.
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J. F. Gonzalez is the author of over a dozen novels of horror and dark suspense including Back From the Dead, Survivor, Primitive, The Beloved, and the upcoming novel They. He is also the co-author of the popular Clickers series of novels (co-written with Mark Williams and Brian Keene respectively). He writes in a variety of media including print, screen, and the corporate world. A native of Los Angeles, California, he relocated temporarily to Pennsylvania, where he now resides and is trying to escape from. Learn more about him at www. jfgonzalez.com.
It was a place he stopped by occasionally on his way home from work and, like most underground porn flea markets, it moved around periodically. This time it was in a modern three-bedroom tract home in Alhambra. Dennis Hillman stopped by shortly before 2 p.m. after having left work early for the day.
He tried to stifle a yawn as he flipped through home-made magazines containing photos of various sexual acts. Normal garden variety in-andout didn’t do much for him anymore. It hadn’t in a few years. The deeper he got into it, the more hardcore his pornography had to be. It was his unique tastes in pornography that led him to seek out places such as Carl Grossman’s group a year or two back. You couldn’t find bestiality or scat stuff in neighborhood porn shops. Or women being fucked by guys with dicks the size of those little souvenir baseball bats you could pick up at Dodger Stadium.
There were half a dozen other porn junkies browsing through Carl’s wares this afternoon. Dennis ignored them as he silently sifted through the materials. None of it excited him anymore. He felt a slight sense of disgust with himself as he leafed through a rape magazine. Violence didn’t even turn him on anymore.
Carl Grossman lumbered over. “Got something I think you might enjoy.” Carl was a huge fat man; he looked like a crowd of fat people squeezed into a tight suit. His trousers were wearing thin, the tails of his white shirt was coming out from his pants. Even though Carl didn’t work a normal job, he still tried to dress as if he had a regular nine-to
“Come this way,” Carl beckoned. He turned and Dennis followed him down a dim hallway to the rear of the house.
“Just got this in the day before yesterday,” Carl said, weaving his way through boxes piled on the floor. He opened a box and rummaged around inside it before he found what he was looking for. Dennis let his eyes stray around the room as Carl looked for the thing he wanted to show him; this was where Carl kept stuff for the hardcore freaks. His eyes rested briefly on a still from a bestiality film depicting a young woman with thin limbs and heroin sculpted cheekbones on her hands and knees being fucked by a large monkey. “Here it is,” Carl said, handing Dennis the item.
Dennis picked it up. It was a magazine, the cover showing a woman with blonde hair lying on a bed. Her throat was slit, a great cascade of blood spilling down her chest and on the mattress. Her eyes were open and glazed over.
Dennis handed the magazine back. “It’s snuff, and every snuff film I’ve ever seen is fake. Don’t try to pawn this shit on me.”
“It ain’t snuff,” Carl said, handing the magazine back to Dennis. “Take a better look at it.”
Dennis sighed and began flipping through the magazine, growing more disgusted with himself. What he should be doing was working at the office; he had to finish that CPM spreadsheet for a meeting next week. But the pull of desire was strong and he needed an outlet. Admit it, Dennis thought, his hands trembling slightly as he flipped through the pages of the magazine. You’re a hardcore porn junkie. You’re addicted to this shit and you know it.
The photos in the next few pages showed the same woman from different angles. The next few pages showed a young man, about twenty years old, climbing onto the bed with the woman and embracing her. The next few pages had photographs of the young man sticking his cock between the woman’s lips and shoving it into her mouth. That particular set of photos ended with the man vaginally penetrating her.
“What is this, some kind of special effects thing?” Dennis asked, his curiosity only slightly aroused.
Carl shook his head, a sick grin on his face. “Keep looking.”
The next few pages showed different subjects. One was of what appeared to be an old man, his belly puffy and distended, the flesh of his torso the color of dark storm clouds. A woman who looked like a junkie was sucking his flaccid penis. It wasn’t until he got to the old woman—what Dennis thought was an old woman—that he stopped and stared at the picture, his stomach curling in his belly.
He flipped back through the magazine, looking at the photos again. His eyes were wide. “You mean … this shit is real?”
Carl grinned. “As real as they get, Dennis.”
The photo that had stopped Dennis in his tracks was that of an old woman. She must have been Caucasian because her hair was straight and long. Her skin was black and blue and green in places, some of it wet-looking. There were spots of white in various parts of the body. As Dennis flipped through it the photos got perversely worse. There were close-ups of her decayed face, the eyelids sunken in. There were close-ups of her rotting breasts, the flesh falling off her arm bones. It wasn’t until the man entered the picture that Dennis held his breath. Even though he found it hard to go through the rest of the magazine, he did so anyway. His eyes were riveted on the scenes of the faceless man’s cock buried in the rotting woman’s pussy, the close ups of the man’s penis with brown, maggot-ridden, rotted flesh caked to it amidst creamy semen.
Dennis closed the magazine. He couldn’t breathe, he was that excited. “Where did you get this?”
Carl shrugged. “Just got it in a few days ago. A local outfit. You want it?”
“How much?”
“Fifteen hundred.”
Normally Dennis would have paid for it, but he hadn’t come prepared to pay that much money for something. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said, handing the magazine back to Carl. “I’ll call you.”
Carl smiled and put the magazine back where he’d found it. “You do that.”
Dennis exited the house with a sense of shaking excitement that chased him on the drive home. He couldn’t get his mind off that image of the corpse of the old woman being fucked by the faceless stranger.
* * *
“Dennis, are you okay? ”
“Hmmm?” Dennis snapped awake, banishing the daydream that had been floating through his mind. He was replaying the images of the necrophilia photo in his dreams again, wondering what it felt like to fuck a rotting corpse. Trying to imagine what the sensation must feel like on your dick.