17 - The Case of the Phantom Prick

Roberta took a deep breath, then leaned over to lift another candle. Its soft white glow seemed to form a halo for a moment.

"In my studies of parapsychology and unknown phenomena, I have often wondered if **** truly is an end," she said, her voice suddenly cold and sepulchral. "For some of the living, certainly, it is a relief. An escape. Yet there was one instance I knew when no relief came. I call this..."

THE CASE OF THE PHANTOM PRICK

"Nobody believes me. You won't neither."

Annette Gibbons wore a dress from the thrift shop she worked at. Barely thirty, but she looked older. There were lines in her face, a resigned look in her eyes. A hard life might do that, but there are others who lived harder lives and didn't end up sharing coffee and stories with me.

A newspaper article, barely an inch on the third page, had caught my eye. A phone call had gotten me a name. A computer search had brought up details. Annette's boyfriend John Wayne Manson had died seven months ago. Burned to **** in his own chair. **** ruled an accident. Another phone call had been to a friend on the police ****. A history of domestic **** calls that never stopped him from hitting her. All the bruises had faded now, but...

"Try me," I told Annette.

Her jaw worked. She swallowed hard, took another sip. There was a reason I had asked for her story in a coffee shop rather than a bar.

"A week after they put Johnny in the ground, I was in bed, in the trailer. Same bed we'd shared. I hadn't gotten rid of all of his clothes and stuff. I'd been so upset, just been drinking a bit too much. Then I...felt something move against my thighs. It pushed into my pussy. I was too drunk to move, just completely paralyzed, but I could feel the cock—for I knew it was a dick, the way it slid in and out of me—and that didn't scare me so much as it was Johnny's dick. I knew it. Felt it often enough. There were times he'd get home and just pull my panties off and go to town. He figured that was his right, and I remember lying there, night after night, as he just sawed that prick in and out of me."

Annette said it all matter of fact. No shame, no blush, nothing more than a kind of weariness, like repeating yesterday's news.

"An it happened again the next night. And again. The third time it happened, I hadn't even been drinking, and that's what scared me. I made that damn fool 9-1-1 call, and the police came to take a statement. They laughed at me! One of them joked that a squirrel or a snake must have gotten in, offered to call pest control. Damn near said something that got me thrown in jail then. Tried talking to the doctors, but they all talked about depression and grief and psychosexual whatsis. The reporter woman came around after that, asked me a bunch of questions. She kept going on about ghost dicks, all smiling and nodding, asking me these stupid questions, like Johnny's prick was squirting ectoplasm in my cunt every night."

"It's not a ghost?" I asked.

Annette's lips pursed. She seemed to be warring with herself. Yet she had told this story twice already, and it seemed obvious there was something more to it. A part of the story that was **** to get out.

"Johnny weren't...he weren't entirely human," she said, her voice raw. "I knowed it the first time he took his pecker out. Johnny were white, but his pecker was black and shiny, and the veins beneath it glowed through the dark skin like fire. I was skeered of it, but he told me to just touch it. An I was young, drunk, stupid, and horny, and I did. Grabbed a hold of it like I was gonna pump water from a well."

Her upper lip made a curious fluttering motion.

"It was warm. Strange. Slick. Like petting a roach. Johnny didn't wince in pain, he just smiled and grabbed my arm. Moved it back and forth, so I was stroking him...and he told me how, when he was younger, though he weren't much older than I was, he'd found something out in the field one night. A hard, round thing, size of a tire, with a hot, wet hole in the center. And since there was nothing on his family's farm to stick his wick into that weren't on four legs, he knelt there under the stars and shoved his cock into whatever it was. And it did that to him."

Annette knocked ash into an old-fashioned glass cigarette holder stolen from McDonalds. No one in the diner even stared at her smoking inside.

"Or maybe he was a lying son of a bitch with a weird dick. I don't know. I do know that...well, Johnny used to get violent. It was never worse than right before he died. Used to be I'd have to do something to set him off, but that last week he just started off swinging, busting me in the mouth without a reason. And his prick was always hard, fucked me raw and bleeding and never got soft even after. I think maybe that was what was driving him so mad, how nothing he did could calm it down unless he was dead drunk."

"I read the autopsy report," I told her. "There wasn't much left of the body. You were fortunate he was out on the porch when the cigarette caught him, or the whole trailer might have gone up."

Annette stiffened. Eyes like a cornered animal.

"He was dead drunk. Already out there. I didn't touch him! I didn't want no part of him!"

Her lips did that strange flutter again. Her voice dropped to a whisper.

"It wasn't really him though, were it? He said so. I thought...I thought maybe I just cut it out. Kitchen knife was sharp. I cracked three teeth, could barely walk. Blood on my panties for a week. So maybe I just pulled the pants down an...I put the edge of the knife where it met the skin. Didn't think it would spark like that."

"Did you ever see it? In the trailer, I mean. After Johnny's ****." I asked.

She stood up. At six and a half months pregnant, her stomach stood out on her frail body. She laid a hand on the swell, the other on the table for balance.

"No. Three nights done it. Maybe it's still hiding in a hole somewhere. I never did see it. Only feel it."

Annette stubbed out her cigarette, took a last sip of coffee, and waddled away. I hope for her sake that was the end of it. That whatever was left of John Wayne Manson would never bother anyone else. I suppose, in a few months, if she's still in that trailer, we'll see.

Roberta blew out the candle, and the little halo vanished as though it had never been.