38 - The Case of the Final Affliction

Roberta rose, and took measured steps to retrieve her candle. They were more than a third gone now, wax dribbling down their sides, and the night hushed as the darkness deepened. Without preamble, she launched into her story, declaring this:

THE CASE OF THE FINAL AFFLICTION

The first time was a mistake. Frat party. Everybody drinking hard. Everybody fucking. Alfredo had thought the girl was dead drunk, bent over the toilet, head resting on the bowl. He was drunk himself. All he was looking for was a hole, and she already had her panties down around her knees. Drunk enough not to pick up how lukewarm her cunny was, how slack. Still tight, but not gripping him. Alfredo pumped her hard enough for her head to be bumping into the toilet lid. Filled the condom with a long, drawn-out grunt.

He pulled it out, tied it off, then reached to shake her, ask for her number—and saw how blue her lips were.

When the cops got there, he was the good Samaritan, the picture of the law student. He'd had a few drinks, but saw the girl like that, noticed she wasn't breathing, called 9-1-1. Cops asked a few more questions, but there wasn't anybody who could swear they saw him in the bathroom with her. She'd choked on her own vomit, and had sex earlier in the evening. No physical evidence, no motive, not even a suspect in an accidental case of molesting a corpse.

The second time had been bad luck. Alfredo had decided to throw himself a little party for graduation. Had his cock buried to the balls in the hooker's ass when she snorted the heroin instead of the cocaine. He had completely misunderstood what was happening, holding onto her as she bucked and flailed. It wsa when she finally went slack and still that 'fredo was able to finish, relishing the way his balls tensed and the tip of his dick tingled as spurt after hot spurt ballooned out the condom-tip buried deep in her colon.

Alfredo hadn't called the cops this time. He'd called the pimp. It took all the cash he had on him, but the problem was taken care of. Never even made the Hollow Herald. Deaths by misadventure seldom do.

It was the third time that Alfredo knew he had a problem. That had been a crime of opportunity. He had been checking out foreclosed houses; cheaper to buy and renovate. The realtor was a college buddy, gave him the keys, told him to look around, but to wear gloves and shoe-covers: leave no fingerprints or footprints. The third property that afternoon had been some sort of squat. There was a broken window in the back, a mattress in the bedroom. One shoe was off, so she could fit her toe in the trigger of the shotgun. Her head was gone; a Pollack painting on the wall, bits of brains and skull.

The blood hadn't even fully dried. A couple flies, but no decay. Not even a smell.

She was wearing a brown business dress. Pantyhose, but no panties. Dark brown heels. Needle marks in her arms. Alfredo wondered, briefly, about what her name was. Who she had been. What had brought her to this ****.

Then his eyes went to her skirt. The hose on her long legs. Before he knew it, he was kneeling on the mattress, pulling her skirt up. The corpse wasn't wearing panties, just hose. He had a condom on his cock and was humping away at her with a kind of single-minded determination that shocked him with its intensity. 'fredo had never been this hard. Not for any of his girlfriends or one-night stands. His gloved hands dug into the mattress as he stared into the ruin of a head. Her tongue was still mostly intact, a piece of meat that flopped around as he humped her cooling cunt. He watched the flies settle, then get scared off by the motion. Laying their invisible eggs.

"Nnngh," a puff of air exited the dead lungs through her windpipe, and 'fredo shot his load with such **** he was amazed the condom didn't break.

Another call. Not to the police, but to his realtor friend. He told him that he'd seen the broken window, thought he'd seen a squatter, didn't go in. The shoe bags, gloved, and condom went into a gas station trash can. Cops called him later, and he repeated his story. Truth, excerpt for the part where Alfredo discovered his unexpected kink for cracking open a cold one.

Once awakened, **** is an unpleasant thing to live with. Not so much the physical urge, but the inability to safely and legally meet that new and unexpected need. Alfredo finally felt a degree of sympathy for some of the sex offenders he dealt with as a public defender. The terrible psychological strain of an itch that couldn't be scratched.

Porn was only a modest substitute. There was a brisque trade in certain types of evidence among cops, forensics, morticians, and lawyers. Crime scene photos, autopsies. A discreet inquiry with Vice introduced him to the videos of Mr. and Mrs. Crawley, some of which held Alfredo's attention with almost rabid fascination. Yet the deeper 'fredo got into satisfying his need in that way, the less other things aroused him. Normal pornography did nothing. A couple dates had ended in terrible frustration, with 'fredo on his knees with his head buried between bristly thighs, trying to give a woman satisfaction that his dick couldn't.

Options were few. A sex doll, maybe. He priced those. They were very good, high tech, but still fundamentally dumb. Molded silicone. Woman-shaped things. Womb-bottles to catch his jizz.

It was his realtor who inadvertently brought him relief.

When old Rudolph Grumman died, the house laid vacant for a long while. A big pile, not a ninety-degree angle in the place. The town had finally seized it for non-payment of taxes, the bank had got it at public auction. Pennies on the dollar for the right buyer.

There was a crypt on the property. Down in the basement. There was some confusion about who was in there; no burials registered, no name. It certainly wasn't Grumman himself, the old man had been cremated by his own request. Alfredo had bought the property without thinking much about that vaulted crypt. He had the upstairs renovated, remodeled. Modern fixtures installed: proper plumbing, air conditioning, internet. It wasn't until after he moved in that he took a crowbar and busted the lock on the rusted iron chain, opened the door...

...and he saw her.

There was no smell. Just the dust that his feet kicked up as he entered into the space. The vault was about ten feet square. A table had been constructed in brick, and topped with a single six-foot-long slab of dark grey stone. And on that table was the corpse.

She had white hair, splayed out around her head. Eyes closed, lips gently parted. Completely naked. Her body showed the marks of a life he couldn't guess at. Flesh cold and smooth as marble, but almost hairless. No obvious sign of ****, although the railroad spike driven through the chest, just left of center, was a distinct possibility. No blood, though. The skin was even puckered around the wound. There was very little decay; the features were slightly sunken, the muscles curiously defined against the skin.

It was cool in the crypt. There was enough room on the slab for Alfredo to climb atop it. To pull the cold thighs apart. For the first time in his life, he pushed his prick between the cold dead thighs without protection. It was like plunging into a frozen river. The chill of the grave seemed to brace him, to wash through him. It drove him on harder as he pumped himself into the cold corpse. So inviolate by time, now violated thoroughly by Alfredo.

She became, if not 'fredo's wife, than the closet thing to a wife he would ever have. He cared for her, washing his cold spunk from her holes, at first daily, and later about once a week. Enjoying the extra lubrication, the smell his old cum gave her Alfredo never dared to move her from her room, and he obtained a new chain and a better lock. Other lawyers at the office noticed how improved his attitude was after he moved into the house, how focused he became on his cases, easier with jokes. The interns and secretaries appreciated how he never made a pass, and privately speculated he was gay.

Like all relationships, however, enough wasn't enough. Alfredo needed to try something new. That was the end of him.

The fatal affliction came upon him suddenly. Alfredo awoke in his bed in a wet spot. He, who had not experienced a nocturnal emission for years, had been dreaming of the woman on the slab. She had stood before the bed, and the iron spike was no longer in her chest. He had watched as she drew the sheets aside and revealed his stiff prick. She had smiled then. Later, on his deathbed, he had described that smile to me.

"Too sharp," he said, though whether he meant the teeth, or something else, I was never sure. "Too sharp."

He missed work. After three days, a wellness check gound him in the bed, unable to move. The first responder commented on the reek of decay. She told me later that she had seen the maggots crawling out of the curiously shrunken and discolored cock, which was worn almost to a nub. The scrotum swollen with gases from his liquefied testes.

"I just...I just thought if I pulled out the spike, I'd have a new hole to play with," he confided in a dying wheeze. "I wanted...needed to know what it felt like, to cum inside her heart. That's all."

The official medical report was infection with an unknown disease, which caused necrosis of the tissues. Sepsis is what he died of. Yet when his **** neared, he did not ask for a priest. He asked for someone who would listen to him without disbelief. He asked for me.

The crypt was there, although not the body. Nor any sign a body had ever been there. If he had told the doctors, they no doubt would have attributed it to his fevered mind.

Angelica removed a railroad spike from a pocket. It was shiny and clean for most of its length, with only the head red and black with rust.

"I do not speculate. I will only note that the new chain he bought had been burst—from the inside."

So saying, Angelica blew out the candle, and the night was that much older and darker.