I met Kelly a number of years ago at World Fantasy in Austin, Texas. She’s got a fairly successful short story writer thing going on, and is, from what I understand, working toward publication with her longer work, as well. If you’re interested in more info, please visit her website Beyond This Link!

Thanks, Kelly, for gracing my little site here with your fine story.

Martin’s face quirked and he looked back at me, his cheeks pale below his vacation tan. While walking backward, about to say something, he tripped on a tree root and went down hard. The guide stopped to look back at us, and I took a knee beside Martin.

“Wow, I really hit my head,” Martin told me, as if I hadn’t seen the incident. His tone was the weird false cheer of adults who have just taken a nasty fall and feel the need to laugh, just so it seems okay for them to have done so.

“Hold still, Marty.” I checked his eyes as they follow my fingertip. I felt for bloody spots on his scalp. “What day is it?”

“Shit. I don’t know. I’m on vacation.”

I looked up at the guide, a blank-faced old Mayan named Salazar. He seemed neither concerned nor enthusiastic to help. He folded his arms and leaned against a tree. The whole jungle seemed quieter, stranger, darker than it had been a few minutes ago. It was no longer a pretty morning in the Yucatan, though at that moment I couldn’t say why. Not Martin’s spill. Something was already going sideways before that happened.

“Who’s the President?”

“Of which country?”

I pinched him on the arm.

“Hey,” he whined. “Take it easy, Darlene. My man Barack Obama’s the president, okay?”

“You have any trouble seeing, headache, nausea, you tell me.”

I let Martin up, and he seemed to stand without any disorientation. He turned to the guide. “She acts like my mom.”

The guide, Salazar, didn’t seem to have anything to say on that score.

Martin looked back to me. “Good thing you were a EMT before we struck it rich, huh? Keep me from getting into all sorts of medical distress.”

I forced myself to nod, though I knew that, the way we were burning through money, our lottery winnings would be used up within three years, and we’d fall to earth like long-arcing missiles. I’d be back to doing EMT work, and Martin would be back to drywalling and odd jobs to make it through the week. We’ll have had our fun, though, and I suppose that’s something they can’t take away.

“What were you going to say before you had your graceful moment?”

Martin looked around, perplexed. “They said today would be clear. Looks like it’s clouding over.”

“No rain will come,” Salazar told us. “The sun is good and strong. Here, though, it is far away.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“You said you wanted to see real jungle, real place from the old times. Now you see it. Real jungle is dark. The weak-hearted find it fearful when it whispers its secrets.”

The sun seemed no brighter than the moon, the misty air of the jungle clotting in shadowed rivulets around our feet.

“Man, that gave me the shivers. What’s the story with this place?”

The way that Salazar laughed…I’ll never forget that rough sound. No humor in it. Not even malice, but simple, pure absence of emotion. “The trees of this place grow through a field of bones. Those who are dead yet cloud the sun. They yet yearn. There is a hunger in them that death could not cure.”

“That’s great and all, but I think we should probably scram. I’m not much for burial grounds or cemeteries or any of that spooky shit,” Martin said.

Salazar nodded. “Yes, of course you are not. You stand forever in the shallow pool, afraid of the deeper waves. Go, run!” Salazar made a strange gesture with his hands, and Martin, sure as the ticking of a clock, ran up the tiny trail. He didn’t look back to see if I was behind him, nor did he wait up. He rabbited, just like he’d always done when things got rough.

I stood there, considering what I’d just heard. “You spooked him, all right.”

Salazar turned his polished-rock eyes to me. “But not you?”

“I have a better handle on myself than Marty does.”

The guide nodded. “You have been closer to death and life. They are not so frightening to you. You have been wet with blood up to your elbows, as they old priests were.”

It’s an uncomfortable image. I get flashes of some of our bad calls, like the time when the old Jeep had flipped over on the hard roadside shale, when we’d been carrying an arm that had been pinched off by twisted metal. I tried to stop thinking about that day, but I wasn’t successful. The bad moments have a way of hanging around. “We should probably go after him.”

“He will not get far.” Salazar made no move to go. I stood there, thinking about vehicular carnage, thinking about how I was always the one putting things back together, not moving one way or another.

Martin ran back toward us, his eyes wide and wild, his cheeks dead pale and soaked with sweat. “They…they…” he whispered, putting his arms around me and squeezing me tight. “They were so…” his voice rasps. His whole body was cold, his embrace not one offering comfort, but requiring it. I pushed him back.

“What did you see?”

He put his hands over his eyes. “They said that I belonged to them, that I would be theirs forever, and that they’d eat my heart a thousand times, and that I’d never die, but suffer.”

“They speak true,” Salazar. “He is weak, and the weak are taken.”

I felt Martin ripped away from me. Figures made of shadow wrenched away at him, pulling him backward toward the impenetrable jungle. Small, sinewy men who wore but little clothing, but were hung with strange trophies of the jungle. Their eyes glowed amber, their teeth glistened like gold, and though their mouths moved, I couldn’t hear their words.

“If you are his protector, his provider of comfort, then you must go with him. You would hold his head and whisper to him in the long darkness, easing his wounds. If your love for him is great, then this is what must be. If it is weakened by time, and you renounce him, he will go to the places beyond and down alone, and you will live to consider your choices.”

Martin’s face twisted. “Please, Darlene. Don’t let them take me.”

“If I don’t want to go…” I looked to the guide. Everything seemed strangely calm, the choice rather easy. The pain had yet to set in.

Salazar grinned. “I could negotiate with them. There would be a small payment, of course, but you would go and be unharmed.”

“Darlene! No!”

I lifted a hand to him. A pathetic little wave, so little to end things on, such a strange goodbye. “Sorry, Marty. I never said I’d go to hell for you.”

“Darlene, please. You said in our vows that you’d be my girl forever,” Martin pleaded.

“Turns out forever just ended, sweetie. I told you I didn’t like the jungle. Too many secrets, too much hidden. I’m a desert girl and you knew that, but you had to come anyway, didn’t you? Now you get to stay, and this time there won’t be anyone to help you out.”

The spirits yanked him back, through the jungle fronds and into oblivion. The jungle was suddenly warm again, the sun bright. Salazar stepped closer, his rough hand reaching up beneath my khaki shirt and cupping my left breast. “Time to pay.” He pushed me against a tree. I could see his brown teeth, smell the musk of him.

I swallowed down the bile in my throat. “Okay. Okay, just not too rough.” I’d had to pay that way before, back when I was sixteen and there was nothing else I could do. I could relax and just let it happen again. The pain would come later, just like it always did. Other people can hurt us, but the real pain comes from all that we agree to, all we choose, and all we renounce. The world isn’t nice, and I learned that early. I adapted, and I’m not nice, either. Not when it comes right down to blood on blood. Even as Salazar pushed me to the ground and his pungent sweat dripped down on my face, I was thinking of how much longer that prize money would last, since there’d just one to spend it now. I was thinking of that little blue house in Bisbee that I could just about afford, if I was careful.

The barrel of an ancient pencil protruded from Stretchy Guy’s chest.  Billy Finkle grinned.  He’d been having his headaches again, and they made him, in his mother’s words, “A wicked little cretin.”  He withdrew the pencil, eager to learn what squishy goo lurked within Stretchy Guy’s malleable body.  

The hole in the Action Buddy’s flesh (Billy dared anyone to call Stretchy Guy a doll.  Their asses were grass if they did, he swore) glowed with a weird, dark red.  He put his eye close to the hole, sniffing, dipping his finger in a bit of the leaking entrails.  It was like burgundy taffy, translucent.  It smelled like plastic when it heated up too much.  

“Do not imagine that there will be no retribution for this, Little Billy.  You’ll pay a thousand fold for all the harm you have enacted upon my person.”

Billy jumped back, shocked.  He looked around.  The voice had been commanding and deep, like the guy who did the voice on the promos for action movies.  He looked down at the chewed-up pencil and the crimson Stretchy Guy guts on its tip.  His hand went nerveless and the pencil clattered to the hardwood floor.  His tongue was swollen and immobile.

“I…”  With his headache really thumping along, making every heartbeat push little afterimages of silver against his vision, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I have seen you, Billy, so filled with cruelty and hatred.  Broken Matchbox cars littering the floor around you, smashed action figures, burned-up army men.  You abuse your toys, but no more.  They can’t strike back at you, but I have powers you can scarcely envision in your deepest dreams.  Degenerate mouth breather, you shall be made to suffer for every sin.”

“Stretchy Guy?” Billy asked, tentative.  Without knowing, the index finger of his right hand burrowed into his nostril.  He did, in fact, breathe through his open mouth, tongue hanging stupidly past his crooked teeth.

“It is I, worm.  Prepare for…”

Billy picked up the pencil again.  A maniacal light brightened his dull features.  He struck, seized by a lunatic vigor.  Stretchy Guy’s face popped open with the first stab, but he went on and on, stabbing straight through the Action Buddy and into his own flesh.  He hardly felt the pain.  

He massacred Stretchy Guy.  When the pencil snapped, he grabbed his juice glass from the table, smashing it and using the sharpest shard to cut at the toy.  In the process, he sliced his hands to the bone.  Soon, his own blood splashed across the floor, mixing with Stretchy Guys’s annihilated remains.  

“My God,” Billy’s mother said.  He could hear her gasp.  The pain suddenly asserted its full power.  Seeing his own blood, he garped, then threw up, adding to the incomprehensible mess before him.

“Herb!  Herb!  Get the car!” his mother screamed.

“What?”

“Get the car, Herb!  Billy’s hurt himself!”

Billy’s vision dimmed to deep gray and finally black.  Falling, he didn’t feel his head bounce against the hardwood.  

By the time he awoke, he lay in a hospital bed, his bandaged hands booming with pain.  His parents stood outside the door, talking to a doctor.  He couldn’t hear their words, but his mother looked mortified.  He’d get a major whooping for this one.

Billy pretended to be asleep when they looked in on him.  The sound of Stretchy Guy’s voice echoed in his head.  He didn’t understand some of the words, but he grasped that they meant that the Action Buddy was going to kick his ass real bad.  He was all hooked up to medical equipment, and couldn’t get away.  Trapped and helpless, his pulse raced.  That only inflamed the cuts on his hands.

A few minutes later, a nurse came in and injected something into a joint in his IV.  He fell into a drugged stupor, where the nightmares could get him.  

The Action Buddy waited there, now a human-sized monstrosity of oozing red plastic.  Billy ran from him, Stretchy Guy’s wrecked face and gashed open body oozing plastic-smelling junk all the way.  Billy ran and ran, never able to get away.

When Billy awoke, he felt hollowed out and half alive.  Sweat made his limbs slick and chill.  Both his legs went into cramps at nearly the same instant.  Exhausted, even the pain couldn’t ring more than a whisper from his parched throat.

Billy looked around, trying to find a glass of water.  There was a pitcher, but it sat well out of his reach.  When he tried to sit up, his stomach muscles knotted, the pain multiplying.  He made a pitiful whistling sound, casting about for anything to help himself.  There, on the nightstand, sat Stretchy Guy.  Though Billy had cut him and stabbed him, destroying him like no toy ever, there he sat.  Perfect.  He even had the leather vest that Billy had lost the first day he got him.  

“You are powerless against me, Billy.  Were I human, perhaps I would feel pity.  Perhaps I would be moved to be merciful.  I am a toy, however, and suffer no such scruples.  I am your ruin.”

Billy forced his cramp-knotted body up, pulling free of his telemetry and IV.  He rolled, hitting the ground awkwardly.  His head snapped against the hard floor tiles, splitting his skin all the way across his eyebrow.  

Rising, he wheeled and staggered.  Reaching out to brace himself against the window, he felt it give way.  On the floor, he saw a hunk of silicone caulk, so much like Stretchy Guy’s innards…

Both the window and Billy rocketed into the clear air, given into the hands of gravity.  Though well beyond caring by that time, perhaps Billy would have been interested to know much he resembled all his broken toys, laying there after a twelve story fall.

The darkness howled around me that night.  I called the demon and he arose, burning with fires like carnival lights, skin slick with the cosmic afterbirth of his journey. 

“Payment,” he demanded, his voice coming from all around me, a thousand lunatic whispers like rats scuttling through the walls of my mind.

“It’s there.”  I pointed to the pouch atop the old fireplace, still standing long after the house around it had fallen to ruin. 

In one stride, the demon was there, long fingered hands pulling the pouch’s cord free and peering in hungrily.  A growl like a toothed winch rattling against a load arose from his chest.

“It is good.  A good payment.”  He turned, drawing out one of my gifts to him.  A human sternum, one of thirteen I’d collected.  The demon pushed the bone into his mouth and bit down, cracking the bone, eating the soul trapped within.  The wild corona of prismatic flames around him waxed ever brighter.

“These gifts are what you demand, yes?” I asked him.  “These will buy me your favor?”

The demon smiled, his teeth as big and square as horse teeth.  “They died in agony, their souls bound to the chest-bone.  These and one thing more will buy you what you wish.”

My heart wavered.  From my small boat of surety, I navigated an ocean of terror.  I swallowed.  “What more do you wish?”

The demon moved, quick as the flickering of a candle’s flame, and was suddenly next to me, his hand in my hair, his smell–cut grass and still water–all around me.  “You.”

My heart shuddered.  His quick hands found my breast, my hip, my vagina.  The demon’s immense member surged against my belly.  His flames were all around me.  I burned, but was not burnt.

“Yes.  Take what you need,” I breathed.  My eyes closed.  The sound of my clothes ripping away seemed distant.  His touch was hot against my skin.  He lifted me free of the ground and set me down hard, the tufted grass pushing against my shoulder blades.  The demon put his face within the open triangle of my legs and drank from me until I screamed out from it.

With a shifting purple and orange glow burning in his eyes, he mounted, stretching, tearing me inside until pain tears obscured the night, rendering it in dark charcoal smears.  The demon hollowed out my core with all his supernatural vigor, until both our stomachs were slick with my blood, until my jaw muscles cramped from the desperate clench against a scream and I thought that perhaps death would be better than another moment of agony.

The ground around us shook and was torn asunder, sharp spires of rock rising like gargantuan teeth all around us.  The shifting fires around our bodies grew so bright that I was blinded and near the point of unconsciousness when the demon spent out his tar-like passion and sagged against me, finally weak in my embrace.

“Megiddo.  Show me the way,” I said into his ear.  His body tensed, shivering.

“Why?  Why would you wish to walk that ancient path?”

He slipped free of my torn womb, and I wrapped my legs around his chest.  “Because I am incarnated, one of the Conquerors of Armageddon.  Show me the way.”

The demon closed his eyes, touching his smooth brow against mine.  The arid desert land, the many rising, desolate hills, the hundred veils of invisible gloom that enshroud it and hide it from all unknowing eyes–these things flowed into me.  In that moment, the way toward the trapdoor down into the realms of madness became engraved upon the dim parallax of my soul. The demon put his hand against my pubis, held close between our bodies, and energy sung between our fleshy shells.  Every injury his rutting passion had cause was sealed, made whole again.

“I would have found a way not to harm you, had I known,” he told me.

“It doesn’t matter now.  There were costs, and I was resolved to pay them all.  It’s done.”  I released him from the prison of my embrace, but he lingered.

“May…may you have a fair journey, Conqueror.  And may it be that the rest of us have sufficient time to put our affairs in order before your work is completed.  I will remember this…this privilege.”

In a flash of swirling fire, he was gone.  The nearby stream ran cool and slow, cleansing my body beneath the bruised violation of the autumn sky.  Naked, I walked five miles through the forest, across the midnight pavement, through the door of my cheap motel room.  I lay atop the sheets, willing myself to sleep.  There was so much to do.  After all my efforts, all those bridges burned, my real sojourn had just begun.

“There,” the grim coachman said, his skeletal hand pointing out into the rough desert. “That way, ten miles overland. The sky will darken as you walk. If you truly wish this—the end of all the many worlds—you must go into the Tomb of All Those Forgotten.”

“And there,” Harkalivad whispered. “I’ll find Meggido?”

“As you call it, yes. If you have the fortitude to walk the chill corridors of the Tomb.”

The coach, its sleek black flanks now sullied with the desert’s grime, came to a halt. Only the smallest hint of the growling power plant now spoke against the deep quiet of the arid scene. It took Harkalivad a moment to understand how to cause the door to open. This world wasn’t like his own. With their feats of intellect, the people of this world had learned the making of such complex devices. Like children, they’d become so entranced with their own contrivances that they had gone blind to all else.

Harkalivad put his boot down on the parched land. Ancient and honest, depleted of all fertility it had once held, made sterile. He looked back into the shade of the coach. The coachman gripped the wheel and looked resolutely forward, waiting. In the eyes of the dying demoness, though…some pitiful something, some plangent chord in her limited, sinful soul. He shook his head, drawing forth his doom-shrouded blade. It would all be over soon. For her. For everyone. Thank the quiet darkness. He turned away without a word.

“Wait!” she cried. “What will become of me? You’ve dampened all the fires within me. You’ve killed me from the inside out with your utter chill of your passion.”

Harkalivad turned back, only part way. He gazed over his armored shoulder at her, the horror of her beauty diminished, the perfect sheen of the skin gone sallow and slack. “You’ll die. You’ll pass into oblivion, just as everything is doomed to. Only…you’ll know your fate better than most.”

“But…”

He spat upon the earth. “What merit has there been to your long life? What can you claim, if asked to justify your existence?”

“I…I’ve tried to stand with you, to help you on your way. Haven’t I been a good woman to you?” The multiplicative voices, that dark chorus of her speech, had been reduced to a flat monotone. Altogether, she had been rendered mundane. He hardly knew her. Gazing upon her hollow eyes only made his bone-deep fatigue increase. He was tired of being alive, tired of there being such a thing as “alive”. If he could find the strength for one last trial…

“It’s rough terrain, Demoness. Perhaps you have an hour to consider your life. Enough to make some sense of your actions. I fear that the time for some fine deed is long past. If you haven’t accomplished anything of note by now, best to make peace with the hollow places within you and rest easy, knowing you won’t have to carry that burden much longer.”

The demoness hung her head, hiding her eyes. Harkalivad walked away. The dusty land cracked and muttered at his passing, the doom blade singing low lullabies on the wind. So close, Meggido, and yet each step felt as if unseen hands tugged at him, holding him away from his goal. If this dim resistance was all the great universe could summon, the only obstacle left in his way, then the process of existence lacked the will to continue. It had to be put down. If one man, terrible as he was after all these worlds, could cleave the knots and tear everything asunder, than what value could the sum total of life really have? What a frail thing, this tiny spark in the overarching dimness.

Harkalivad ascended a long, pallid track, finally coming to the lip of the rise. There, in the far distance, a pile of ancient brick and stone crouched like a trodden-upon beetle on the surface of the desert. Between him and his goal, though, was one last obstacle to surmount, one final army to obliterate.

Darkening the sky, they bore the soot-steel armor and poisoned arms of their race. The consort demons, all his lover’s sisters, arrayed against him. They flew and dove, arrows to bowstrings, javelins at the ready. Every eye bore the same deep green fire. Every face bore the same lethal beauty, every limb formed with equal aesthetic ideal. Combined, the their flawless beauty bled all the air from the desert. All but his sad demoness, standing pale before him, a husk, a thing dead yet still walking.

“Please,” she begged. “I never thought you’d go this far, never thought I’d have to choose against you, Harkalivad, my love. If it were only my own death…but the death of everything? It’s too much. The pain in us is not so great as yours. We wish…only to remain, to live. If you won’t turn back…”

Harkalivad smiled, closing his eyes for a moment. “And you come against me at last. You do one remarkable deed. I am proud of you, Demoness. You alone, of your whole race will meet the dawn. You will bear witness to their passing, and in your own death, there will be no shame. After all the times I’ve dismissed you with blooded blade, this shall be the last. Sad, perhaps, but it makes me feel…better.”

“Don’t make us, Darling. Please, don’t. Now…you know you can destroy all that exists, you hold the deified power in your hands. You could choose to turn aside.”

“Demoness, I never could. This is my purpose, just as much as this blade. I am the final note in the final symphony.” He smiled at her, perhaps loving her for the first time, just now. “I make no one do anything. They simply choose to respond to what I’ve chosen to do. If you would stop me and save this pitiful spark upon the void, come and do so.”

“As you would have it,” she whispered. “Lover.”

The doom-shrouded blade cried out like a thousand eagles. The combined might of a whole race of demons thundered down upon him, filling the air with uncounted soot-forged weapons. Above, the sky cracked open, utter blackness roiling outward from a Stygian core of absolute nil. The ground shook below, and all the buildings of mortals within hundreds of miles were knocked flat in an instant. The world over, chains of volcanoes erupted their red bile upon the wind. The planet reeled. In the deep reaches of space, stars collapsed upon themselves in an instant. Whole galaxies spun into the unremitting grasp of supermassive black holes. The sum total of all things teetered in the balance. On the plain, dust rose to choke the horizon, and the sound of screams seemed to go on forever.

By Patrick M. Tracy

Cutting up the bodies is the worst part.  Killing a guy?  Hey, that’s straightforward.  There are hundreds of ways, and most of them aren’t that messy.  Even with a simple tool, say a socket wrench or a length of thick curtain rod, you can dispatch a guy with a well-placed hit.  That soft spot at the temple, or right at the base of the skull, for instance.  You swing hard and hit right, it’s a crack, and there’s just a moment of nerve impulse before the long darkness.

Small caliber pistols can work, too.  .22s are really the best for it, since they don’t exit the body.  You can do it with a knife, but I find that you can hurt your wrist if you smack a rib on the way in.  You don’t want to cut their throats, though.  Blood goes everywhere, and there’s that nasty hissing sound of air whistling through their cut larynx.  They don’t go down right away, either.  Sometimes it’s twenty, thirty seconds of them blundering around the room, blowing blood out of their arteries like a human super soaker.  I don’t need that shit.  It gives me the willies.

However you do them in, it’s the dismantling part that I don’t like.  I mean, I guess you could leave them in one piece, just bury them somewhere, or maybe melt them down in an acid bath, but I’ve never had much faith in that.  If you cut them up, part them out, and use multiple dump sites, things usually work themselves out just fine.

Handling a dead body can spook you out at first.  Chill, stiff, heavy things, and you want to deal with them within an hour or two, so the bloating stink doesn’t set in.  If you’re working in a controlled, safe atmosphere, cutting them and letting the blood drain is a great idea.  That way, you can use a power tool of some sort.  I find that a saws-all does the job, but a circular saw or even a chainsaw can do the deed, if that’s what you have on hand.  Really, though, the saws-all is the best, since it doesn’t throw little fleshy pieces all over.  Take the legs down into two, maybe three pieces, arms at the shoulders and elbows, head, and you’re done.  I’ve never seen any upside to cutting into the torso.  Way too messy.  To get rid of the blood, you’ll need powerful industrial cleaners with a high bleach content.  There’s no way to be sure, though, so assume you may have left a bit of blood evidence behind.  Those heavy, yellow dishwashing gloves are the way to go in terms of keeping your prints off of anything.

If you’re doing your work somewhere vulnerable, or sound is an issue, you’ll have to use a sharp knife and a hack saw.  Look for a saw with a good, long throw.  None of the really cheap ones.  They’ll let you down.  Carry extra blades, too.  You can snap one if you put too much torque on the saw, which can happen when you’re tired or in a hurry.  As for the knife, you want it sharp enough to shave, and at least eight inches long.  A good kitchen knife will do fine.  No sense in getting too fancy.  You’ll have to discard the blade when you’re done, anyway.

You cut down the the bone, all the way around the area.  Let the knife do everything it can before you start in with the saw.  Just pull the saw backward in the same spot until you get a nice notch in the bone, and then you can get to gettin’.  There are times, if you’re cutting at the joint, when you can get through the tendons without a lot of sawing.  The knee is good for this, and the elbow.  It’s handy to have a set of bypass loppers for these situations, but you can’t always plan for everything.  Having a knife and a hack saw with you doesn’t arouse that much suspicion, and those are your most basic tools.  Those, and a shovel, of course.  A rounded spade is my personal choice, with a fiberglass handle.

Now, different people have their own methodology for carrying bodies.  I’m all for using a couple big coolers with some dry ice, myself.  I tie up the segments in heavy plastic bags and put ‘em right in.  If you don’t have the room for something that bulky, you can always ditch the coolers and just hustle to the dump site.  In the past, I’ve always favored destroying the most identifiable parts.  Those are feet, hands, and head.  A big wood chipper will do the job, but you have to be careful that it’s not your wood chipper.  They can find DNA in there years later, so find a way to get access to one where there’s nothing linking the machine to you.

If that fails, there’s always burning.  Kerosene or diesel makes a good hot fire, and the high heat will often snap the bones.  Whatever’s left, you break down with the back of a shovel and bury deep.  As for the fleshy parts, you can bury them with quicklime, you can put them in the water, or you can feed them to some animal who’ll eat flesh down and make no complaint.  The water can be dangerous.  In the absence of animals who’ll eat the bodies, the evidence of your work might be there a long time.  A deep grave with ten pounds of lye over the top is my fall-back.  That takes privacy and time, though, so your mileage may vary.

Whatever you do, don’t overuse a technique, and don’t saturate a dump site.  That’s how they find you.  Being sloppy and developing patterns that can be predicted.  There’s no substitute for good planning and careful execution (in both senses of the word).  Next time, we’ll talk about two techniques I always use: the healthy delay, and the directional alibi.  Also, we’ll talk about how to handle the authorities when you’re under suspicion.  Until then, may your enemies be among the ranks of the disappeared, and your name remain unknown.

By Patrick M. Tracy

Donald was glad for the industrial earmuffs, because the screaming broke his concentration.  So many distractions, sullying the purity of the work.  Already, the stench of urine and meat cooking against tool steel filled the workshop.  It was like a cookout for the incontinent.  He shook his head, hand against the drill press, feeling the reassuring vibration of his instrument.  He lowered the handle.

Little slivers of skin and subcutaneous fat crawled up the drill bit, then spun free.  One especially large gobbet of flesh spattered against his face shield, obscuring his vision.  He stopped, spinning the drill press handle back upward and stepping away from the work.  He had a cloth with window cleaner and alcohol to wipe away such impediments.  He had to see, of course.  It was their eyes, the look in their eyes as he lowered the bit against their flesh and allowed it to dig in.  All the art in the human soul resided in that moment.  The realization of mortality, the unleavened horror of knowing they would feel all the torments of hell before the end.

Donald stepped back to the living canvas and returned to his work.  Slowly turning the wheel of the press, he touched that same place—the meaty part of his canvas’ upper arm.  Lingering with the spinning 3/8ths bit just skimming the previous wound, he watched as the sweat of horror and the tears of pain popped upon the canvas’ skin.  Sighing, Donald was sure that, just like every time, his fun would be over far too soon.  Once the deep wounds were breached, he would lose his resolve, unable to marshal himself.  He’d completely lose control.

The screaming, even through his earmuffs, was loud and awful.  He wished he could simply put these canvases on mute, like the afternoon ballgame.  A string of muscle tissue slapped against his apron, shards of bone and a gout of arterial blood spraying against his face shield.  A shiver went through him, just as it always did when he’d torn through to the bone.  No longer mindful of obscured vision or the hope to extend his pleasure to hours, rather than minutes, Donald thrust the drill bit in and out of the canvas’s arm, flinging a welter of blood and tissue fragments all over.  Behind his mask, his grin was a rictus, as much pain as joy.  Sweat and ammonia stink rose out of Donald’s skin like condensation on soda bottle.

He was erect, on the verge of climax, dimly aware that he was making a slurping monotone noise at the back of his throat.  Donald bit at the side of his tongue until he tasted his own blood.    His belly tightened, his hips spasming, and he released his seed.  Shuddering, he knew he needed another point of entry, another beautiful crimson hole in his canvas.  He withdrew the drill bit and turned off the press.

Shifting the canvas would be difficult.  He was a big man, heavy and awkward.  Donald had nearly thrown his back out getting him into position.  What next?  Donald furrowed his brow, wiping the face mask clean with his increasingly-sodden shop cloth.  The leg.  Yes, the leg.  That would be easy.  He’d just have to unhook the leg irons holding the canvas to his shop table.

The canvas was more animated than usual, twitching against the chains.  That was odd.  The dose of sedatives he injected them with generally left them awake and aware, but paralyzed.  The canvas was a big man, though.  Perhaps he’d underestimated his weight.  Donald unlocked the leg irons nonetheless.  At worst…
For a moment, Donald got a good view of the tread on the canvas’ left boot.  Wolverines.  Size fourteen.  The next moment, his mask burst inward.  He felt his teeth, his nose, his whole face cave in at the impact.  A sudden pain, just as quickly chased by the spiraling dark of unconsciousness.

Kicked asleep, he was also kicked awake, bolting to a seated position as two of his ribs cracked.  The canvas stood above him, baptized in gore.  Donald wondered how he’d escaped from the shackles.  The sight of a disembodied arm hanging from the nearby table, then the tourniqueted stump of the canvas’s upper arm told him all he needed to know.  He could picture it, the wet pop of the remaining sinew as it tore away, the anguished yell as the arm flopped free.  Clearly, that had been an act of will, and he would have loved to witness it.

The canvas bent, eyes wild as a shy horse, and drove a punch into Donald’s face.  He could feel the orbit of his eye socket shatter.  The eye went black forever, ocular fluid pouring out onto his cheek.  He tasted his own exploded eyeball for a moment before passing out a second time.

The  steady drone of the table saw muttered in the shop.  Donald’s one functional eardrum told him this as he felt himself hoisted by the neck.  He faced the table saw, seeing that the rip fence had been backed far over to one edge of the table.  The blade had been raised to its highest elevation, the ripping teeth blurred with speed.

“Oh.” Donald said.

“That’s right, fuck-o.  Time to ride the big ‘coaster yourself.  See how you like it.”

That one hand, terribly strong on his neck, somehow flipped Donald up and planted him on the table, legs foremost.  The drug mustn’t have gone into the canvases veins.  It must have been…

The feel of the circular blade as it bit into Donald’s inner thigh was like all the pain he’d ever felt, all concentrated into one, pure moment.  He wished he could have seen his own face as the screaming started.  The blade ripped higher up, producing the churning noise of an industrial blender.  Everything but agony dwindled into nothing.  Donald saw the mangled remainder of one of his testicles fly upward and out of his view.  His body juddered and nearly jammed the saw as it came in contact with his tail bone, then his lumbar spine.  The smell of burning bone and spun shit filled the shop.  The gore leaked down into the motor of the table saw and shorted it, charred blood and harsh electrical smoke pouring out the side.  The lights in the shop flickered and went out.

For a moment, silence.  Donald hung there, his head unsupported by the metal surface of the saw.  Blood from his descending aorta spurted upward into the dim air like the orgasm of some god of the damned.  White and silver sparks flew at the corner of his vision, and the pain began to seem distant.  Donald lamented, just for a moment, all the work left undone.  It was too much to hope that the canvas would take over where the painter had fallen, though clearly, he had aptitude.

The lights came back on.  The canvas approached, clumsily holding the power nailer in one hand.  Donald tried to speak, but only succeeded in spitting out blood and a piece of his bitten-through tongue.  The canvas laid the power nailer against Donald’s upper belly and pulled the trigger.  Again and again and again.

Walt looked into the deep shadow of the old workshop.  His mouth twisted.  “What’s the point of looking in here?”

Marnie caught his hand and held it to the cleft of her ribs, just over her diaphram.  “This is where it happened.  I’ve dreamed of coming here for years.”  Her voice sounded breathy, ragged.  Up close, her vanilla perfume didn’t completely cover the scent of her arousal.

“So that guy Buxton killed all of those people, right in there?”

She smiled sweetly, letting the back of Walt’s hand trace upward, skimming one erect nipple.  “Twelve people over the course of three years.  He used the drill press, the band saw, the radial arm saw, a variety of hand tools.  His last victim, a guy named Bart Whettle, got away from him and pushed him over the table saw.  When that didn’t finish Buxton off, he shot him with a nail gun a bunch of times.”  She sighed.  “I would have loved to see it.”

“You’re fucked up, Marnie.”

She sighed.  “Yeah.  But you love me anyway.”

She pulled Walt into the workshop.  Beside the wholesome smells of wood, glue, and machine oil, the lingering smell of blood and death hung thick and rank in the gloomy shed.  Walt put a hand over his mouth, gagging.  Marnie pulled the scent in, her back arched slightly, her eyes closed.  The death rooms always did this to her.  The stench of murder was like hot house roses for Marnie, Walt guessed.

“What happend to that Whettle guy, anyway?” He asked, if only to avoid thinking about what had gone on in this room.

“He told the cops what had happened, put a face to the whole thing.  He got some kind of blood poisoning, though.  Gangrene set in on his arm-stump and it went right to his heart.  He was dead within three weeks.  No one got out of here alive.”  Marnie walked around, touching all the implements, avid as an art lover at a museum.  Her eyes clouded with bliss as she ran the long-still drill press handle down and back up. 

Walt watched her, a chill sweat on his brow.  He tried to touch nothing but the floor, focusing his eyes on the door, the dusty crabgrass, the afternoon sun that promised that everthing was okay.  The evil here had dissipated with the man.  There was no metaphysical stain, no lingering horror beyond that which he created in his own mind.  That’s what Walt believe.  What he had to believe, anyway.  The fact that Marnie loved these places wasn’t so sinister.  Everyone had a hobby.  Hers was strange, yes.  It spooked him out.  Still, the upside outweighed this one oddity.  In every other way, she was fantastic.

Marnie put her arms around him and squeezed him tight, pushing the blades of her hips tight against his buttox, running her nimble hands across his torso.  She wandered lower, unhitching his belt and popping the button of his jeans.  Walt’s mind screamed, “No!” but his body paid no heed.  Suddenly in front of him, Marnie pulled Walt’s face down to hers, kissing him furiously, until he tasted blood in his mouth and his lips threatened to burst. 

Walt gasped for air, holding her at arm’s length.  “You promised we’d stop.  After we got caught in that lover’s lane where all the teenagers got massacred, you promised that we’d just look.”

Her eyes were huge orbs of liquid.  Wordlessly, she implored him.  His resolve melted.  “Just this one last time,” he aquiesced.

“One last time,” she breathed.  In a moment, she was on her knees before him, his jeans rolled down to his ankles.  Marnie took him into her mouth, into her throat.  The macabre surrounding melted.  Walt leaned back, grasping the table saw where the last killing went down.  He didn’t care.  Before he could spend out the currency of his passion, Marnie took away the paradise of her mouth and turned about.  With her cervical spine beneath the empty chuck of the drill press, she pushed free of her warm-ups and opened herself for Walt.  Her scent now predominated, blocking out even old death.  Walt grasped her hips and pushed in, dimly worried that he’d get her pregnant this time.  It was far too late to stop now.  They’d consecrate the evil ground, celebrating the life and the death inside everyone.  Just this last time.

“Press it against me.  Make it feel like I’m dying,” she gasped. 

Walt understood.  As he rocked forward against her, every nerve alive, he ran the drill press lever down, pressing the open chuck hard against her, hard enough to bruise.  She writhed, mouth open in a silent scream.  In no time, Walt felt the splash of her orgasm, that special sort of climax that she could only have at times like these.  Belly tight, his own crescendo came only a minute later.  He groaned and thrust his final spasms, his cheek against the old and sinful iron of the killing instrument.

Walt let her free, and for a long time, she hung against the press, pretending to be dead.  The final act in their murder play, the effigy of death.  At last, her breath finally normal, she straightened.  They held each other in sweat.  She buried her face into his chest and wept silently.  She always wept after, but Walt had never had the guts to ask why.  Marnie pulled her pants back up and Walt followed suit.  She kissed him tenderly.  “I love you, Walt.”

He touched her hair, now hanging limp and slack from exertion.  “Likewise.”

“Stay here, babe.  I just want to take a final look around.”

Walt stood at the door, looking out into the dust of late summer, the dry grass, the drooping trees.  He could hear Marnie’s little waffle-tread sneakers squeak on the raw old concrete.  Let her say goodbye to the place.  Let her say goodbye to all of this, as hot as it gets her.  We’ll find another kink.  That, or we’ll have to content ourselves with the run-of-the-mill great sex we normally have.  Just not…not this.  For a moment, Walt was sad, as much as this sort of thing gave him the spooks.

Something cold and firm pressed against the back of his head.  “Marnie?  What’s that?”

“It’s a power nailer, Walt.  You made me promise that this was the last time for us, after all.”

Three pops like .22 reports filled the shed.  Walt’s vision skewed, filling with streaks of red and gold, then went dark.  An impulse of pain shot through him.  He produced a wet, slobbery interrogative as he fell to the floor, already twitching with death.  In the way of myth, the last of one tale bled its life out to begin the next.

She sees him at the table, looks down at her unfamiliar clothes, the sparse room, the stout door, the window too narrow to climb out and too sturdy to break.  Ellison knows she’s not totally aware of how bad things get.  Sally-Anne has had a good life.  Things have been easy for her.  She’s been shielded from the ugliness of the world.  She knows this is all wrong, but she hasn’t tumbled to the fact that this is a torture room.  That’s okay.  Ellison has a deed to perform, and he’ll do it, but he’s not averse to giving her these last few minutes of innocence.

“Where am I?”  She puts her palms against her eyes.  “Jesus, my head hurts.  Where’s Justin?”

“Justin is in no danger, Sally-Anne.  He’s resting comfortably.  You’re just waking up after a fairly heavy sedative we gave you.  The headache will go away if you eat something.  You’re at the Lake House.”

This last, of course, means nothing to her.  Only people in the business have heard stories about the Lake House.

“Justin’s okay?”

Ellison smiles slightly.  “Sure.  Fit as a fiddle.”  Like fiddles, Justin is cool and quiet.  He has nothing to worry about.  The quicklime is already eating away at him, and he’ll be down to the bones within a few months.  “Come on over, Sally.  I’ve made this ham and cheese sandwich for you, and there’s a nice cranberry apple drink, as well.  They tell me this is your favorite lunch.”

“Are you, like, the Secret Service or something?”

Ellison smiled vaguely.  “I work for a government agency, yes.”

She rises out of bed, the quick recovery of youth on her side.  She’ll feel fine in another hour.  Once her body is fueled for her ordeal and the meal well-digested, he’ll have to begin.

Sally-Anne stretches, making a cute noise that Ellison couldn’t have resisted in his teen years, long passed.  The blue t-shirt pulls upward just enough to show a small swath of taut belly.  She smooths her hair down and comes to the table, sitting down.  “I am hungry.  How long was I out?”

“Several hours.  You slept all the way up here.”

“I don’t remember much after the car crash.  Just shouting, lights, booming noises.  I passed out.”

“Don’t worry about that now.  It’ll all get ironed out later.”

Sally-Anne picks up the sandwich, made on deli rye and with the finest ingredients.  Ellison watches her eat from beneath veiled eyes, so as not to make her uncomfortable.

“This is a great,” she says around a big bite.  “Tastes like Vultaggio’s, almost.”  Sally-Anne opens the juice and holds it in both of her small hands, drinking with gusto.  She puts the drink down and gives him a bright grin.  “So you must have saved me from, like, the bad guys, huh?”

“We don’t like to use that sort of terminology.  There are people who disagree with us about how the country should be run.  Sometimes, it results in some unpleasantness.”

“Huh,” she mutters, not really listening.  “Thanks, though.”

Ellison feels something curdle inside him.  She isn’t like one of the hard guys who know the score of the game.  They’d eat the sandwich, too, but they’d eat it with sweat on their brow.  They would treat it like a last meal.

Soon, the food is gone.  Sally-Anne leans back and puts her hands on her thin belly, staring at the edge of the table for a moment.  “Is there a restroom?”

Ellison inclines his head toward the cramped lavatory beyond the pocket door.  There’s no way out going that way.  He’ll use that room to clean Sally’s blood off of his hands later.

After several minutes, she comes out, cleaned up, hair slicked-down.  “Am I going to be here for a while?”

Ellison nods.  “A few days, yes.”

“I might need a few things.  Clothes, soap…stuff like that.”

“I’ll take care of everything.  You should get a little more rest.  We’ll have to have a talk later, and I want you to be fresh when we start.”

“Debriefing?”

“Just like that.  Until then, rest up.  I’ll be outside the door.”

She puts her hand on his arm.  “Really, thanks.  I mean it.”  Even after the ordeal, she smells like sweet jasmine.

“No problem.”  Ellison grits his teeth and closes the torture room door behind him.  Oliva frowns at him from the console.  He’s been monitoring things, recording the whole by-play.

“Fucking cruel, man.  I hate it when you make friends with them first.  It just makes it tougher on them, the betrayal.”

“This one’s going to be tough.  Makes you wonder why you’re in the game.  You have to get them to eat, though.  You know that.  Fasting, they pass out before anything productive can be done.”

Oliva says nothing, shaking his head.  Everybody’s a star pitcher when they’re sitting in the dugout.

Ellison goes out onto the stoop and looks across the frozen lake.  Dusk is coming, and he’ll have taken away everything Sally-Anne ever hoped to hold sacred by morning.  Knowing that, Ellison hates her grandfather all the more.  For the good of the country, a man that evil and powerful has to be brought down, has to be made to accept reason.  A man like her grandfather dooms himself and anyone under his aegis.  With Sally-Anne’s innocent smile lingering in his head, he shakes out a cigarette and lights up.  Turns out, even taking a monster like Sally-Anne’s grandfather down brings that same doom, if only slower, like rotting from within.