G: Why do they hate outsiders, Erik?
T: They hate anyone out of the bludcynn, especially men.
G: Because of the demon? They hate men because of the demon?
T: It lives on hate.
G: What lives on hate, Erik? The demon?
T: They like to cause pain, because it likes pain.
G: Who, Erik? The cult? The demon?
T: They like to cut cocks off of guys.
(Interviewer pauses.)
G: What?
T: They eat people after they’re done torturing them. They cut off their heads and make us cook the heads. On feks they’d sacrifice kids. It was all part of the preparation.
G: Preparation for what, Erik?
T: The Fulluht Loc.
G: What’s that, Erik? I don’t know what that is.
T: They love to fuck. They love to fuck and kill people, torture people. That’s their power—fucking. It’s in their eyes. Their eyes are like the mirror. They make you look in their eyes while they’re fucking you. Lots of times they made us fuck corpses, ’cause it gets them off.
(Interviewer pauses. Patient is trembling, perspiring.)
G: Tell me about the fulluht, Erik.
T: I buried the bodies when the feks were over. That was my job. It was also my job to bring in the hüsls.
G: What’s a hüsl, Erik?
T: They cooked heads.
G: What?
T: Girls they pretty much just sacrificed. They’d chain them up downstairs, save them for the important hustigs.
G: What’s a hustig, Erik?
T: They did the worst shit to the guys. Guys were their fun. They hate men because it hates men.
G: Erik, I want you to tell me about the terms you’re using. Tell me about fulluht, wîhan, hüsl. What do these words mean?
T: Fucking is their power. That’s how they worship her.
G: The demon, you mean. What’s the demon’s name?
T: I got a lot of hüsls picking up hitchhikers or drunks. Girls I got mainly hitchhiking.
G: Erik, let’s backtrack a little, okay?
T: I’d bring these guys down, usually at gunpoint. Sometimes I’d have to knock them out. The munucs would take it from there.
G: What’s a munuc, Erik? Is a munuc someone in the cult?
T: They’d fuck these guys, and sometimes they’d kill him while they were fucking him, they really got off on that. The wifmunuc loved it, she’d do it all the time.
G: Is the wifmunuc the leader of the cult?
T: This guy, the wreccans held him down and they cut the guy’s cock off just like that, and then the scierors skinned him right there on the slab, and I swear to God this poor guy was still alive when they tossed him in the fire. They did all kinds of awful shit like that, things you wouldn’t believe, like sometimes the scierors’d cut a guy open while the munucs were fucking him, and a lot of times the wifford would sit on a guy’s face so he couldn’t see what was going on while the other munucs took turns blowing him, and then just like that they’d cut his cock off, he’d never even know it was coming, and he’s shooting blood all over the place running around screaming and then they’d throw the guy right into the fire, and I’ll tell you something, it takes a while for a guy to die in a fire pit, I’ve seen them lashing around in there screaming their heads off while they’re turning black, and a lot of times they’d try to crawl out and the munucs would just laugh it up and order the cokkers to push him back in, it’s a sight I’ll tell you seeing some poor guy sizzling alive in the pit and screaming and screaming and the girls in the pens would be watching this and they’d be screaming too there was so much screaming man screaming and shrieking and the munucs laughing it was so bad you couldn’t think it was so bad sometimes you’d just want to die…
G: How often did this happen, Erik?
T: Usually, a couple times a year they’d have a big hustig, but every hustig was like a preparation for the Fulluht Loc.
G: Tell me more about the Fulluht Loc, Erik.
T: And sometimes they’d punish us, the wreccans, I mean, if we didn’t bring in enough hüsls, or they’d punish us just for kicks, ’cause they got off on that. I remember one time I was supposed to bring in a hüsl but I couldn’t find any so the wifmunuc had all the wreccans fuck me, and other times they’d order us to fuck one of the corpses before they cooked—
G: Tell me more about the demon, Erik.
T: —all kinds of awful shit, stuff like you never heard, like you could never imagine, but they’ve been doing it for eons, man, for her. That’s how they worship her.
G: The demon, you mean? That’s how they worshipped the
T: —and I can’t tell you how many times I went down there and they’re cutting some guy’s head off and bleeding him into a chettle, a chettle’s a big pot they cook in, and a lotta times they’d be sitting on some guy hammering nails into his head or sticking knitting needles in his ears—
G: Erik, Erik—
T: Yeah man the grossest shit you could imagine and it was all a big kick to them like hauling some guy’s guts out while he’s still alive or hanging some girl upside down and cutting off her head and bleeding her into a chettle for a hustig and all kinds of shit yeah man, that’s what the dreams were like…
G: Dreams Erik? These were dreams?
T: No, no, I mean they were like dreams, they seemed like dreams but after a while you knew they weren’t dreams at all. You knew they were real.
(Patient suddenly cessates. Heart rate 72. Hypnosynthesis
suspended as patient no longer responds.)
Dreams, Dr. Harold reflected. Demons. The court would not authorize further hypnosynthesis or narcoanalysis. They were satisfied that Tharp was just a bipolar schizophrenic acting out a dream delusion. The case was closed. But that did not erase the discrepancies. No wonder Greene was never satisfied. Erik Tharp clearly suffered from a hallucinotic delusion, yet his tarsal plate reactivity, his psych test results, and his visual assessment scores did not indicate delusional behavior. These weren’t things a person could fake. He put the transcripts up and dug back into the bag, extracting the notebooks. Tharp’s only real recreation on the ward was drawing. Immediately, Dr. Harold noticed a rudimentary yet detailed artistic skill. The drawings were fascinating; there were hundreds of them. Many of the strange words from Tharp’s monologues had been written between the scenes. Hüsl. Peow. Wreccan. A sketch of a queue of naked women cutting up a man had been underscored with: Wîhan. More women looked up to a full moon with arms outstretched: doefolmon. Many of the sketches depicted orgies, nude women drawn to great detail on top of blank faced men. Sexespelle, they read, and many had subordinate figures standing aside, similarly blank faced. Yet one face in each was obviously Tharp’s artistic rendition of himself: pallid, wide eyed, staring. And here was a full page sketch: he’d drawn himself holding a shovel in some dense forest dell. Byrgorwreccan, it read. Patients, particularly schizophrenics and hallucinotics, frequently created their own vocabularies for their personal dementias. The word Fulluht-Loc appeared frequently, and even more frequently: liloc.
It was all sexual. Tharp’s madness must have been a byproduct of gross sexual fears. He didn’t hate women, like temporal misogynists, he feared them. The male figures in the sketches had been assigned crude facial identities. But the women were different. Their bodies had been drawn to painstaking erotic detail, yet there was one thing they all lacked.