The Dunwich Romance (21 page)

The Voorish Sign...

Sary configured the fingers of her left hand, took a breath, and made the sign once more, while looking with great intent at the cot.

The anemic woman did not make a reappearance.

Sary went back to the tome, looked up at an inclination, then shouted, “Holy
BULL-flop!
”

It was now an ancient man who stood before her. Grayish-black crinkly hair bloomed about his head, and he had a beard identical to the hair; it was much like Wilbur’s hair and beard, along with the recessive chin. But this oldster was short, bow-backed, spindly, dressed not in the laboring-attire of the day but in black trousers, black shoes and tunic—like an outre priest. About his neck hung a flat metal pendant, depicting what Sary could only guess was a malformed head with snakes trailing from it. Spectacular gems surrounded the monstrous effigy, stones like rubies but striated with threads of obsidian-black. Also of note were several lines of scar tissue on his throat, incisions made long ago.

The man looked at Sary crazy-eyed, though there was an undisputable shade of
approval
in his overall cast. His lips moved emphatically yet gave no voice. He was nodding.

Then he, too, disintegrated.

WHAT is goin’ ON?

This question, a qualified one, would regrettably be commuted to uselessness in only a moment.

Before Sary could long cogitate the meaning of what she’d just witnessed, she flinched, and her heart skipped, as—

CRUNCH!

—the sudden sound assaulted her ears. Did it remind her of wood planks being pried away?

A murmur akin to voices followed the noise.

Sary rushed to the small window.

Outside, in moonlight more than profuse, a male figure busied himself before the saturnine house, in his hand a crowbar.
Aw, noooooooo,
Sary thought, for she recognized the trespasser: Joe Czanek, a local idler whose repute was that of a poacher and petty thief. Last year, the man had paid Sary a dime for sex; whereupon he’d kicked her hard as he might between the legs, choked her unconscious, copulated with her to satisfaction, revived her by urinating in her face, took his money back, and tromped off, laughing. The reason for the man’s presence here was obvious enough: he was crow-barring the planks off one of the downstairs windows of Wilbur’s house, sporting burglary as his motive.

This, however, was not Sary’s most salient concern.

Of late, Joe Czanek was seldom seen out of the company of his partner, a drifter and former state incarceree named Manny Silva. Mr. Silva had raped Sary on several occasions, and not without the accompaniment of some diverse violence and appalling degradation. What much troubled Sary was this:
I see Joe Czanek right thar, so where might Manny Silva be?

BAM!

The shed door broke open, by the impact of a large, booted foot belonging to the subject of her last question. “I
knowed
I heerd me suthin’ inside this li’l shit-house. And look who it be!” Manny Silva guffawed. “Stew Face, weerin’ nary a stitch!”

He was fat, had a lazy left eye and a curious hole in his right cheek. Seeing Sary so abruptly nude transformed his plump face into a portraiture of lust-soused diablerie. Before Sary could move to defend herself, the abdominous home-invader (drooling through the cheek-hole) deployed himself in a tactic which cornered Sary, and then—

THUNK!

Silva had lunged, slamming the prostitute against the wall, an act which deprived her of all energy and air. “Yes, sar! Jess wait’ll Joe git a gander’a
yew!
” he speculated, then grabbed his victim by her tuft of pubic hair and conveyed her from the tool-house out into the sultry night. Sary’s head and shoulder-blades scuffed along the ground, around the shed, and out to the front of Wilbur’s boarded-up house.

“Hey, Joe! Take a look-see!”

On her back, Sary wheezed breath, blinking spots out of her vision. By the time she was vaguely sensate, two moonlight-forged silhouettes stood over her, arms crossed in valuation. She heard black chuckles, and then—

Kurrrrrrr-HOCK

—one of them spat on her.

“Wal what have we heer?” Czanek, the thinner criminal, posed. “Never thunk
any
gull would have the stomach ta take up with Wilbur Whateley.”

“I heerd he en’t got
no
balls!
”

“Probably no dick, neither!”

Dizzy, Sary croaked her proverbial two-cents’ worth. “Wilbur be
double
the man’a both a yew combined.”

“Yeah?”

“And I heerd yew fellas suck each other, then swap the cum,” Sary added.

The men laughed. “Do we naow?”

Belts came unfastened, trousers were lowered. Right now, Sary needed no capacity for interpreting matters beyond the range of ordinary perception; she was not surprised, in other words, when both miscreants began to urinate on her. Why destiny had seen to insist that Sary be pissed on
so many times in her life
was a puzzle she suspected had no solution. But she knew well that far worse was in store for her tonight.

“Now
thar’s
haow it’s done,” Czanek’s black words blared. “En’t nuthin’ more finer’n pissin’ on a gull a’fore ya fuck her.”

“Yes, sar!” cracked Silva (whose urine, for whatever arcane reason, tasted
spicy
). “My pa tolt me the same thing yeers ago!”

“Weren’t my pa who told me,” Czanek recollected. “‘Twas my
ma.
‘Tis a good rasher’a kidney juice what make a woman know her place.”

Both men maintained their urine streams for a full minute without so much as a decline; to Sary, however, it felt more like an hour. When she summoned some strength, and made to lunge away—

THWUP!

—one of the interlopers stomped on her belly.

Sary again was pilfered of all her wind. She could do nothing but gasp and cringe as her two visitors
continued
to urinate with a copiousness which seemed more equine than human. But when they at last had no more “kidney juice” at their disposal, Sary remained sufficiently paralyzed from the abdominal blow. What she heard, with the hard moonlight in her eyes, were sounds akin to those of men undressing in anticipatory haste. Then?

A
causerie,
since the debauched chat which followed could not be dignified by the word “conversation.”

“Dang, talk about some dandy luck. Fust we see Wilbur headin’ daown the rud toward Aylesbury”—he pronounced the word “toward” as
terd
—“and then we find this ‘un buck naked in his shed.”

“And with Wilbur goin’ all the way aout thar, it en’t likely he’ll be back a’fore marnin’.”

“Plenny a time ta search that big ole pile’a shit haouse of his, and find all the gold he got hid in thar.”

“Yes, sar! An’ plenny’a time ta fuck this
hoo-uh
raw!”

A chuckle. “Wonder what ole Wilbur’ll think when he come home’n find his tramp full’a
our
cum!
”

This was the manner of colloquy that Sary’s dizzied attention rewarded her with. So it was the gold they hoped to find within the house? Sary knew it was not there, but instead somewhere in the woods, for that’s from whence Wilbur had trekked when he’d given her the coin...

She began the grim speculation in her mind,
When they dun’t find it in the haouse...,
but there was no advantage in finishing, for it would be granted that the likes of these two would torture her with an unprecedented vigor in order to be apprized of where the gold might be.

The truth made her feel gypped, as it often did in her life.
Wilbur wun’t be back fer quite a spell, and likely as not, I’ll be dead when he git heer.
Rogues such as Czanek and Silva would hardly leave a living witness to their crimes.

If only she could somehow slip away long enough to regain the tool-house, secure a knife or other weapon, and at least die fighting.

“I fucked this one a’fore,” Czanek remarked. His shadow appeared to be
flapping
its penis.

“Aw, yeah. Me, too, bunch’a times. Didn’t piss on her, mind ya, but I shore as hail
shit
on her, and rubbed her face in it tew. Then I gave her a boot shampoo as to go with it.”

“Watch this,” Czanek suggested. “See, what
I
always do ‘fore a fuck a gull, see, I give her a good hard kick in the cunt.”

“Yew dew?”

Czanek’s gaunt silhouette nodded. “Reason ta dew that is on accaount when ya cunt-kick her hard enough? It make her pussy swell all up inside, and get’cha a tighter hole up in ‘nar for ya to get your dick in.”

Silva’s silhouette stared still as if the entirety of Immanuel Kant’s doctrine on Transcendental Idealism had just been imparted to him with full comprehension. “Why...I never thunk’a that.”

“Aw, yeah.
Always
cunt-kick a gull ‘fore ya fuck her. ‘Tis a waste not tew,” and with this, Cnazek walked around to Sary’s feet, bent over, grabbed her heels, pushed her legs far back, and—

“Gander this, Manny. I’se gonna cunt-kick her
so hard,
 her baby-maker’ll come up her maouth!”

Sary still could scarcely move. The prospect of Wilbur arriving for a rescue as timely as he had at Osborn’s seemed to present a very low order of probability. Instead, she resigned to this atrocity, remembering well her short time with Wilbur and how happy he’d made her. She turned her head aside, staring barrenly. Waiting...

What she saw, though—and with an unbidden yet insistent focus—was the very window that had been previously vandalized by the talents of Monsieur Czanek. All the boards had been pried away, and the frame itself too. This left a gaping black oblong hole...

“Git reddy!” Silva exclaimed as Czanek poised his kicking leg.

“Git set!”

Czanek pulled his leg back farther.

“Aaaaaaaaaaand...”

Sary remained too dizzy even to pray, but her bedimmed mind managed a final gesture:
Yew take keer, Wilbur Whateley. Hope ya know I love yew...

The extra second which Silva would require to yell “Go!” would not be provided, nor would Czanek have opportunity to propel his foot forward against the desired abutment of Sary’s sexual aperture. Instead, both men seemed to seize in place, their heads cocking toward a faint, even barely audible sound.

Was it a
hissing?
Or more semblant to a
slithering,
as of a snake advancing rapidly?

Sary’s eyes remained peeled on the vicinity of the agape window. Just below this stretched a portion of scrub grass, which—

Sary squinted in the moonlight.

The grass was
moving.
As if, indeed, a snake were traversing there.

But in this case, it would have to be an
invisible
snake.

Joe Czanek and Manny Silva, with a suddenness as if catapulted, left their place on the ground and
flew up into the air.
They roved there, not as if flung but as if via some manner of controlled suspension—that is...an
invisible
 controlled suspension. Screams took little time to issue from both of the airborne gentlemen, screams which might mirror an abstraction as those of human souls held helpless and
ad perpetuum
in the clutches of perdition.

In truth, these two valueless sociopaths were in the clutches of something else altogether.

Into Sary was injected an amount of adrenalin more than commensurate to efface her pain and bleared consciousness, and to locomote her with an excess of speed to the edge of the tool-house. Circumstance left her no option but to stare into the moonlit area before the house and behold the unbelievable sight. Her two accosters continued to belt out blood-spraying screams as they continued, too, to rove about in the mid-air. By moonlight, Sary could see well that they were fully naked, and could see
too
well every depressing detail of their fish-belly-white bodies, their horror-diminished genitals, and the splats of excrement blurting from their bowels. Each scream stepped up as their uncanny hovering went on. Were bones heard cracking? And was some inexplicable distortion suddenly effecting the abdominal regions of both men? Sary felt certain that Joe Czanek’s waist
collapsed
for no discernible reason; again, the “snake” parallel came to mind, for many times on her walks she’d witnessed snakes subduing squirrels, rats, and such by constricting about the mammals’ bodies. When the snakes unreeled to reposition themselves, their prey displayed mid-sections that were collapsed in a corkscrew fashion...