"You tricked me! You were supposed to be a twenty-dollar trick! You-you-you... " The dull eyes blinked in the pudgy face. "You knocked me out!"
"I congratulate you on your perceptivity."
She wriggled uselessly on the chain, which only caused her to sway back and forth, pendulum-like. A pendulum of ungainly human flesh with a LOVE DEPOSIT tattoo on a belly busted out with stretchmarks from untold trick babies. "You spinach-chin motherfucker! I knew I shouldn't have gotten in the car with you! You look like my motherfucking grandfather, you dick-suck ass-lick psycho shit-suck ass-bag piss-slit ASS-motherfucking-HOLE!"
"You speak with the eloquence of queens, my dear."
"And-and... you fucked me already, didn't you, you gray-haired bald shit! My pussy doesn't feel right! You fucked me while I was knocked out, didn't you, you sick cock?"
The old man couldn't resist. "Young lady, I'd sooner admit my penis into the drain-hole of a ghetto dumpster than admit it into that horrific morass you call your vagina."
She paused in an attempt to comprehend his words, then gave up. "Just let me go, you shit-dick!"
The old man chuckled. "I would estimate that such an event presents a very low order of probability."
Her pasty bulk kept swinging. "Where're my clothes!"
The old man's fine leather shoes tapped across the room's cement floor. He opened the hatch of the Ener-Tek IV crematory, showing the rows of white-hot liquid-propane nozzles kicking out 2,200 degrees.
"Regrettably, your attire was consigned to the flames... along with what I would approximate to be your last dozen or so meals."
The girl shrieked again, so shrilly this time that the cords stood out in the old man's neck.
"Oh my God you crazy sick piece of shit! You're going to burn me alive!"
"Please, miss. I can't implore you more deeply. Be quiet. And, no offense intended"—the old man shook his head ruefully—"but your accent is killing me. And don't despair. I've no intention whatever of burning you alive," and then he closed the hatch.
Her terror dropped down a notch, her flip-flopping on the chain retarding. She blinked repeatedly, cogs turning in the spoiled brain. "Look, look—lemme think. Er, look, mister, I'm sorry I called you bad names—"
"Bad names?" The old man couldn't help but be amused. "That's putting it a bit mildly, I'd say. Your language could stop the Devil in his tracks—"
"Look, look, listen... " For the first time, her eyes appeared half-enlivened. "I'll do anything you want, no shit. You ask any of those guys at the truck stop and they'll tell you I suck better cock than any girl working. I'll give you the best nut of your life—just let me go."
"Please... "
"You wanna piss on me, shit on me?"
"I should think not."
"Oh, I get it, you're one of those guys. You want me to shit on you—"
The old man grimly recalled the sheer volume of the feces that was now reduced to ash. "Trust me, miss, even if I did desire to be so debased, I'm sure you're not up to it at the moment."
"All right, all right," she hurried, desperately assessing possibilities. "I'll tongue your asshole and suck your balls at the same time—how about that? Or—hey!—I'll put my big toe up your ass and sit on your dick. Think about it, mister. I can really do that."
The old man groaned. "Really, miss, I've no interest in your debauched delights, I assure you. Your being abducted by me and my associate is an example of ill-fortune, I'm afraid, but such are the pitfalls of your profession, hmm? There's a fair share of disturbed people out there, and, plying this trade of yours, you could fall victim to any one of them: psychopaths, rapists, the sexually monomanic, the mentally ill. But at least you didn't fall into the clutches of one of them. Instead, consider yourself privileged. You've fallen into the clutches of an eccentric antiquary who also happens to be a sorcerer of some authority."
She squirmed more on the chain now, but then stalled. "Sorcerer? You're into, like, satanic shit, devil worship and all that?"
The old man's bushy gray brow rose. "Indeed."
"Well that's great because I've got five kids back at the projects. Shit, man—I'll give 'em to you if you let me go. I mean, you satanic guys sacrifice kids all the time, right? And, shit, one of the little fuckers is only a month old. You can drink his blood. That's what you guys do, isn't it? Drink baby's blood and use it for rituals and shit?"
Oh, such a sad refrain... The old man pushed the girl toward the second of the six arched doorways. This was possible because the chain's ratcheted pulley was fixed to an overhead track which branched off to each door.
"What are you doing, you fuckwad!"
"Your time has almost been expended, my dear," he told her in a kindly voice. "I'd advise you to spend these last moments in prayer, because one thing I can tell you beyond all doubt is that in the course of my studies I've verified that there is indeed a God in Heaven and a Devil in Hell, not that I suspect any amount of repentance on your part could save you from meeting the latter... "
"You cock-lick dingleberry-eating piece of fuck!"
The old man re-opened the crematory's hatch.
"I knew it! A lying old shit-heap motherfucker!" she railed. "You said you weren't gonna burn me!"
As aforementioned, the wooden door in each archway had been fitted with a sharpened iron spike. The old man, next, grimaced when he placed both hands against the girl's flaccid breasts and pushed.
She tensed, then convulsed, gargling blood when the spike exited the hollow of her throat. The pale belly sucked in and out in horror, causing the atrocious LOVE DEPOSIT tattoo to sort of undulate. Her last words, though barely intelligible due to the puncture, were as thus:
"I never should've left Atlantic City... "
The retractors were out and ready; there was only the minor problem of separating the sternum from top to bottom. For this he used a simple branch-cutter. The sickle-like blades first cut up into the outer solar plexus, then eight or ten strokes on the tool clipped a reasonably straight line right up the sternum. The task never required as much strength as one would surmise, but that grisly clipping sound never failed to unnerve him.
The girl continued to tremor on the spike, blood seeping out nicely. She was still in a sense alive, and perhaps she even heard the old man when he said, "Have no fear, young lady. I'm not going to burn all of you, just your noxious heart," and then he applied the cardiac retractors and began to crank her rib cage open.
PART ONE:
ADVENTS
ONE MONTH AGO
It was a fine summer day when twenty-year-old Richard "Dicky" Caudill dragged two large plastic bags across Main Street, as he did every day, into Pip Brothers Laundromat. This was July 24th, 1991, six full years before Dicky would meet his death by having his spinal column torn out of his rectal cavity at a place called Wroxeter Abbey. The official cause of death filed by the Russell County Sheriff's Department would be "Death by traumatic mutilation via an unknown mode," but there were plenty of folks who knew full well that he was actually killed by a legendary monster called The Bighead, but that was another story. This would occur in the future, of course, as Dicky was alive and well just now, and what he had in the preposterously depressed town of Luntville was something many didn't: a job. Hence, the large plastic bags he was dragging into the laundromat. Dicky was fat, with a buzzcut, a symptomatic dopey redneck. The Caudill family went back a ways; in fact, his great, great, great grandfather was a Confederate general in the Civil War who had supposedly sold his soul to a demon named Anarazel, and who then allied himself with an industrialist named Harwood Gast... but that was another story as well. He also had another blood relative named Thibald Caudilclass="underline" yet another story.