Sex and Murder Magazine

By Charles A. Muir


Janet lost track of how long she'd been driving. The dashboard was too dim to see the clock by and night had fallen. The country road she was on seemed to go on forever, with no sign of life, no civilization, not current, anyway. If only I hadn't bumped the lid off Timothy's box, she thought, cranking up the music to stay awake, if only I hadn't pushed it back just a few more inches and looked inside...Just then the willow tree sprang into view.

She slammed on the brakes and pulled over. It looked just as he had sketched it underneath the address she'd found, rearing up out of the shadows like a mythical beast she'd dreamed into place. Through the passenger window she gazed at the dark house behind it while "Tainted Love" droned on the stereo for the sixth or seventh time.

Gathering up the Hefty bag in the seat next to her, she killed the stereo and stepped onto the road's shoulder. Not a breeze stirred on this section of rural highway that snaked through miles of flat country, where the moon shone on nothing but dilapidated barns and rusted tractors. Now it shone down on her, in her eggshell jacket and matching skirt, bright and bold as an Avon lady approaching the porch at the side of the house. With her heart in her throat, she rang the doorbell.

"Enter." a man's voice said. A man. She had not thought about what she would say if a man were present. What if he were the husband of Timothy's mistress? What if he didn't know?

An overpowering stench filled her nostrils when she pushed the door open. Janet fought through it like a shroud of smoke, batting at flies, stumbling out of the foyer down a step into the living room. Her eyes began to focus, but they were watering up, the odor of ammonia--of stale urine and feces--searing her nasal passages. She burst into coughs. Some tissues from her jacket pocket helped a little, enough that she began to make out details around her.

It was a small room with bare walls and sparse furnishings, a filthy armchair and an even filthier couch. A blanket had been nailed over the window facing the street. Bags of Doritos, Cheetos, a Dominos pizza box, candy wrappers and quarts of ice cream littered the dirty white carpet. Cockroaches were eating through a sheet of grease-stained wax paper. Maggots crawled over a blackened banana.

Her first thought for the man on the couch was that he was not moving. Then she saw his chest rise and fall, in the light from the reading lamp near the window. Watching him take air in tiny gulps, she thought perhaps he was asphyxiating. He looked near death. His eyes were yellow and there was something lizard-like about their blinking. His skin was gray and mottled with dark spots and bluish veins. He was fat, perhaps as much as seven or eight hundred pounds, sprawled sideways on the couch, lying, judging by the smell, in his own filth. If he wore anything at all she couldn't see--his belly hid everything between itself and his knees. My God, she thought, fighting the urge to retch, he is why it smells so bad in here. Ninety percent of taste is smell. I'm tasting him. At which point she heaved--though only stomach acids came. Wiping her mouth, she vowed to leave as soon as she determined he was all right. Who was supposed to be taking care of him? How did he live this way?

"I'm sorry;" she got out, "are you--okay?" And started coughing again.

"I'm quite okay." he answered, with a mucous rattle in his throat.

That was it then. Fresh air, quickly. But as she beat it toward the foyer--

"Something for me?"

She had forgotten the trash bag. She straightened, faced him, feeling the coils of the harness-thing inside brushing against her knee. How did Timothy know this place?

"Do you know my husband, Timothy?"

His eyebrows drew in. "Uh-uh."

"He has your address on a piece of paper." she said, looking down, for she had thought to produce it, but had run out of hands. She put the tissue back in her pocket, breathing through her mouth--tasting him--and watching the maggots crawl over the decomposed banana and the cockroaches nibbling at the wax paper near her feet.

She held up the scrap of paper, for show, and stuffed it back in her pocket. "Are you sure you don't need an ambulance or something? Who takes care of you?"

"Well, that has been a problem lately." It was a relief to hear him speak because it broke up his breathing pattern, which reminded her of an aunt who died of emphysema. On the other hand he sounded like he was talking underwater. "Ordinarily my little helpers come to me on a regular basis. I figured you must be one. Is there nothing in that bag for me?"

Now, absurdly, she was ashamed to show him. Of course the scene she had envisioned had played out much differently, her husband's little student-fling turning red, looking away, Janet pulling her discovery out of the bag and thrusting the quivering dildo-thing in her face.

She turned the bag upside-down, shook the contents into her hands. Cockroaches skittered away as the appendages brushed the floor. "Maybe you could tell me what this is." she said, taking two corners and spreading them taut, pinching them with the ends of her fingers as she raised it for his scrutiny.

It looked like a tandem parachute harness without the parachute. Veins snaked its thick coils, which were a bright pink, like skin rubbed raw. She could tell the man recognized it. His features showed the same slack, watery expression Timothy had the time she confronted him with the box of condoms she'd found in his coat pocket while she was still on the pill.

Only instead of launching into a tirade about his privacy or withering into his act of self-pity he stared sullenly into space, an enormously fat wooden Indian. So that was it, she thought. He knew, but would not admit anything. Shoving the thing in the trash bag, she headed for the foyer and had her hand on the knob when she heard him ask, "Wait, can I ask what this is for? You didn't come here by mistake, did you?" The last was not a question.

"What's your name?" she asked, raising the tissue to her face as she came before him.

"Smeed."

"Janet." And something told her to lay out all her cards, or go home listening to "Tainted Love" another ten or fifteen times knowing she had made no effort to keep from leaving as frustrated and in the dark as she had been before.

She told him how she'd stumbled on it, the weird sex toy-harness or whatever it was, and the slip of paper with Smeed's address. How she later eavesdropped on Timothy's phone conversation in the den, which sounded like a psychopath confessing a murder-rape fantasy over some fetish sex line, how she had called the out-of-state hotel to confirm Timothy's reservation for a mathematicians' symposium that, it turned out, was not scheduled to take place. And when she was finished she was troubled by just how easy it had been to unburden her marital problems to a stranger--one who might still be her husband's ally.

"You do know him, don't you?" she asked.

"No." he said.

"But you know what that thing is, don't you? The thing I brought?"

"No." he said, staring at the bag. Then: "If I tell you, will you help me?"

She swallowed. "Yes."

"First?"

"Yes." she said, blinking away tears that were not induced by the nauseating smell.

It took her several moments after she came behind the couch as he instructed to realize what the front had hidden from view. His skin had fused with the upholstery--over a dozen strands, some thick as her own arm, twining into the fabric, shading into the dark green hounds tooth check pattern like Silly Putty.

He must be in excruciating agony, she thought, to be on a couch that long until it fed on his own flesh. Or perhaps it was the other way around...

"Somewhere back there," he said, "is a bag of chips. Help me find them? I believe they're under my right arm."
What he needed was a paramedic, not a bag of chips, she thought. There was no way, no way she could touch him.

"I promise you I won't feel a thing." he said, wiggling the flesh-strands up and down his back, "Come on...come on. You find it and I'll tell you everything you need to know."

Janet looked toward heaven. All she saw were flies, a reverse constellation of them ringed on the white ceiling. Reaching down the back of the couch, she thought of the grossest tasks she had ever done--like that time she was a courtesy clerk when some senile old man had smeared his shit all over the bathroom wall--and told herself to get it over with, quick. To get past the fused flesh, she thrust her hand in then turned her palm up as she jammed it home, the folds of armpit closing around her like an enormous hamburger bun dipped in olive oil.

"I think you've got it." he gurgled, throwing his weight forward, crushing her fingers rather than easing off them; still she felt the crinkly lining of the bag and began inching it out, gingerly, with a surgeon's care, letting out puffs of air and blinking sweat from her eyes as she watched it emerge with all the glory and anticipation of a baby's birth.

She held it before him like a doctor displaying a newborn to its mother--the proud parent of a three ounce bag of chili cheese Fritos. He made to grab it. "No," she said, stuffing it in her jacket pocket, "not until you've explained to me everything you know about my husband and whatever's in that trash bag."

Her host was heaving for breath and sweating like he'd downed a bottle of Tabasco sauce. "It's called a Transporter." he said, finally.

"A Transporter? What? Like in Star Trek?"

He sighed. "Put it on. I'll show you."

Inwardly she scolded herself for wearing a skirt. One of the limbs attached to a belt by looping through her thighs while the other two ran under her arms and over her shoulders. It grew taut all over, suctioning itself at all points of contact as though perforated with hidden valves full of compressed air. A fourth loop attached the shoulder loops across the middle. From this hung the thick cylindrical appendage Janet had planned, ironically, to wave in Timothy's mistress's face.

The fat man's eyes narrowed, sank into the folds of his face like worms in pie dough. His lips squirmed around a tiny O as though he were sucking her, ounce by ounce, through an invisible straw.

"Stop staring," she said, "now what?"

He told her where to insert it. With her skirt hiked up between her thighs, the dildo-like thing jammed in her throat, Janet glared at the garbage, the scavengers--a rat waddled up, shrank from her raised heel--the antique spines on the bookshelf next to her, stamped with gold leaf characters she didn't recognize, resembling Timothy's equations...Who was this Smeed, where did he come from, she wondered. Who were his "little helpers?" How did Timothy fit into it? As seconds passed she began to think it was all a sick, elaborate joke, like in those TV shows, only she was not going to press her hand to her mouth and laugh, she was going to scream, scream if she had to choke on the damned thing a minute longer.

A dark, sinuous energy pooled in the pit of her stomach. Janet had the sense of reaching the top of a roller coaster and dropping straight down, slowing, stopping, then a hot dry wind whipped at her face. The room was gone. Instead a vast dark landscape spread in all directions, as though of obsidian, meeting at the horizon a red, roiling sky.

From the soles of her feet--she was naked--a tarry liquid squished like discharges of black pus. All around her now, in the festering, seeping matter, she saw shapeless, or rather shape-shifting, things, a blob of fluid motion in which, like body parts turning in a great boiling stew, she began to discern hands, feet, limbs, hair, tongues, teeth. And though the wind was dry and fierce she realized what she had taken for its howling was the moaning of these writhing monstrosities, shrill and metallic with pain and laughter.

For they were all connected, their misshapen forms flowing and twisting, ripping apart and forming new connections, destruction and synthesis mating in a hideous ballet of human anatomy. A being of limitless proportions that fed off itself, raped itself, mutilated itself, while furiously regenerating...Janet's scream was lost in the din as arcs of semen and ribbons of blood burst from the convulsing mass like the venting of some gigantic, masochistic beast.

When she had recovered herself she began to scuttle away, the ground like some muddy battlefield yielding up its dead, the dead shrieking and groping for her with blind, sticky fingers. It was then, as she felt herself sinking into their embrace, she spotted Timothy. He was on his stomach, riding the tide of bodies like a crowd surfer at some orgiastic rock concert, stopping between the thighs of a woman nearly as fat as Smeed. Janet watched him raise himself on one arm, eyes squeezed shut, blood drooling from his lips, while tongues extended around him to receive it.

Then his other hand came up with something that gleamed--a butcher knife, miraculously unstained. He raised it, the handle protruding between thumb and forefinger, the blade a silver shard pointing at the black and crimson earth.

The fat woman screamed.

Janet screamed.

The whole world was screaming.

*****

She couldn't get out of the Transporter by herself; Smeed coached her through it. Her heart was still racing and the blood pounding in her ears when she sank into the armchair across from him, uncaring as to its condition or anything around her. She was even getting used to the smell. Anything but what she had just experienced.

What had she experienced?

"Janet, what did you see?"

Flashes of rending flesh tore through her psyche. She felt cold all over. As though phantom Timothy hands were stroking her hair, her earlobes, her spine. She clenched her fists, unclenched them. "What was that?"

"I'm sorry," Smeed said, in his best imitation of a fatherly tone, "but it was the only way to make you understand. The Transporter is not a plaything. Or rather it is a plaything, but only if you are ready for it. Most people, it tears them apart."

"What was Timothy doing there?"

"Timothy?"

"He was there. He…"

"You could not have seen him."

"That's the one thing I know I did see," she said, tracing a circle in the air with the toe of her shoe, "I saw him committing murder. Only it couldn't have been, could it, because..." She broke off, knowing reason ended there, like a bend in a dark alley.

"Janet." His face was almost paternal, "How could you have seen your husband? When did you see him last? Before just now?"

"Two nights ago. He hasn't even been coming to bed lately, just sleeps in his study."

"You mentioned he was at a conference. Don't you think that's where he must be?"

"Stop talking to me like I'm a child!" she cried. But she felt very much like one then, clawing at the ends of the chair, tears filling her eyes and inarticulateness like a wet rag in her throat.

Think, she told herself, cradling her head in her hand, goddamn it, think. If what she'd seen was hallucinatory it most likely wouldn't take up where she'd left off, would it, and if it wasn't then he was still there, wherever it was, slicing and dicing, Goya's version of Jason. Like a light flickering on it came back to her, what she'd heard him say in the den the other night: "And I'm not coming back." Who was he talking to? Shining bright now, another detail leaped out at Janet with cutting significance: the green rotary phone on the table next to the couch.

Thankful she'd snatched it before his departure, she rummaged in her coat pocket, pulled out Timothy's cell phone and speed-dialed the last number. It gave her pleasure to watch Smeed cringe while the ancient bell crowed.

"I'm going back." she said, and stood.

Over Smeed's protests and threats, she got back into the Transporter, a cold calm settling in her brain even as her body fumbled nervously with the appendages and the dildo-like thing went back in her mouth. Janet hoped that calm would sustain her through whatever happened next; she hoped it would give her strength to face Timothy.

*****

She began to make out movement. People. No, not people. Pieces of them, or nightmare distortions of them: claws, sinews, hair like spider's legs, red tongues flapping in razor sharp teeth. Flowing and twisting, engaged in obscene acts, rolling in drool, filth, blood, semen. Her ears filled with their panting, their screams. She was sinking in a pool of their ecstasies.

And there was Timothy, riding the surging litter like a blood-soaked rock star, his butcher knife a spinning, spiraling instrument of carnage.

Something had changed. A wild urgency, a thickening in the bubbling of life and death around her that had him at its starting point, a feeling of impending riot, appetite awakened. It struck her that what she had seen before was simply this thing, whatever it was, in its natural state, or perhaps the digestive process of some even greater thing that fed on pain but received no pleasure from it until now, thanks to Timothy--and his new brand of pain.

Her husband's gray eyes fixed on her. He went on hacking and stabbing, but changed direction toward her. Riding the gory Slip'N'Slide, Janet closed the gap between them. She took a vicious shot to the cheek as she sought to pry his fingers from the knife. He seized her by the hair, the knife pointed toward her throat. Only her shaky grip on his arm slowed its progress. She leaned away and thrust his hand over her shoulder. She bit his hand. The knife fell. His fist flew. Pain burst between her eyes and then under the side of her jaw.

She rode the current blindly, desperately away from him, opening her mouth to cry out, to add to the howling din, when the smell stabbed her brain and her only sound as she slumped forward, tumbling to the floor, was a strangled sob of relief.

*****

She leaned her head back in the chair, Smeed's questions, his pleas, unanswered. If she opened her eyes and looked down she would see the knife in her lap, covered in blood. She let him go on asking how she had gotten it.

Darkness spread around her, drowning out his voice, draining all tension from her skull. She became aware of a slowing of movement, like a track played at half-speed. In this hypnagogic state she heard the unintelligible drawl of mumbling baritones, saw dim, lumpy shapes at the edge of her vision. These were replaced by clockwise revolutions of Timothy's multiplying face, the mannequin expression he wore while butchering those who could not be slain. As the wheel of images turned faster she experienced a sense of tumbling through space, its dimensions collapsing rapidly so that she felt she were being sucked through a straw a mile long.

"Janet?"

She shuddered.

"Janet?"

A pair of tentacles slithered out of the pinhole darkness, touching her...

"Janet!"

She jerked awake. Something was skittering up her arm. Something black and shiny the size of a baby's shoe. She shrieked, and slapped it away.

But a wild energy seized her. She stood, stamped on the cockroaches crawling over the wax-stained paper, place kicked at the pile of maggots, slashed at the wallpaper, tore books off the shelf, went back to the armchair and ripped the knife into the seat cushion, tearing out chunks of smelly foam padding.

She knelt there, heaving for breath.

"Janet--"

"Shut up!"

"You've got to tell me how you got that knife."

"I told you, from my husband."

"You couldn't have seen your husband. It's impossible."

"So is everything else I've just seen." Without knowing why, she took the knife, the Hefty bag, the Transporter she had thrown next to the chair and headed for the door.

But when she opened it she saw nothing. No car, no driveway, no road, no farmland. It was black and empty and it was laughing at her.

Out of the blackness two tentacles slithered...

She slammed it. She was at the nexus of nothing. So what? What was she? Nothing. What was Janet, but a dream in which she had felt humiliated, cast out, alone?

There was a lot of mucus in that laugh, Janet thought, dropping everything but the knife.

There was a lot of blood in it, too, when she was finished.

*****

He raised his hand to his face and felt the cold wire frame of his glasses.

Removing them, he touched his right eye where she had stabbed him; the wound was gone. He replaced his glasses. The curtains, the garbage, the furnishings shifted into focus.

What was he doing at Smeed's place?

Then he saw Janet.

She looked like she'd stepped straight out of Carrie--drenched in blood, but also naked. His eyes fell to the knife, which she took from the arm of the chair and waved in teasing figure eight's, a coquettish smile spreading across the red mask of her face. She smiled wider when she caught the lingering look he gave her breasts.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, to cover his embarrassment.

She stepped out of the Transporter as easily as though it were a nightgown and said, "I might ask you the same."

"Are you all right?" She said nothing. He sighed and looked for a place to sit. There was a lot of explaining to do, he thought. In surveying the room he observed that the couch looked bigger. He had never noticed its dark green hounds tooth check pattern. Mentally he snapped his fingers.

"Janet." he cried, rushing toward Smeed's outstretched form.

Smeed looked fit to hang on a meat hook, crimson all over, perforated with stab wounds and diagonal incisions, great gashes exposing tendon and bone. Down the side of his craterous back flaps of severed couch-flesh hung like miniature tentacles. Timothy felt acid rising in his throat.

"So the Great Butcher can't handle the sight of a dead fat man." his wife said, seating herself in the chair. He backed away, braced his hand on the sofa.

"That's different. That's in another place."

"Tell me about that place."

"You've been there. You know."

"Tell me more. I learn quick." she added, turning the knife point toward the ceiling, both hands wrapped about the handle.

A fat blood droplet rolled from the valley of her breasts and vanished below her navel.

"Stop being so dramatic." he said, and sat at one end of the couch. "All right. So you found me out. What you saw...pain has no meaning there. Not like it has here. In our world, I mean. Anyway, Smeed once told me that few mortals have ever found their way here. I was lost. You were looking for it deliberately. That makes you special."

She leaned forward, pointing the knife at him. "No. You did this to me. You infected me--with your disease."

"You found your way here, didn't I just say that? You certainly did a job on him." he nudged Smeed's corpse with his foot. "There's plenty more of that if we go back, you know. We could travel through dimensions together, shake things up. He would hate that."

"Who was he?"

"A god, sort of. Not powerful enough yet. Give him another gazillion years and he might have fused himself to the whole planet if he'd wanted to."

"You wound up here by accident?"

He chuckled. He was in his element, now. The professor addressing his class. Only this student had changed significantly since the last time he'd seen her.

"All right, I was seeing someone. But I got lost and stopped at this house for directions. It was the only house I'd seen for miles. We struck up a conversation--I'm not quite so fastidious as you think--and when I got back in my car I was the owner of a Transporter.

"Now you know we are not on earth, Janet. You've heard theories that matter in our universe exists in higher dimensions? So does thought. So does desire--hunger. The Transporter lets you explore your appetites...an infinite number of worlds to suit an infinite variety of tastes! Only the creators of the Transporter are fearful and lack imagination, so I didn't tell Smeed, the gatekeeper, that I had learned to travel between dimensions, once I had already 'ported through. Are you beginning to understand? The creators wanted us to see more of the landscape, but not the entire landscape. To discover that our bodies are ideological constructs of the very device that would free us...Don't you see the intolerable contradiction it represents?"

She studied him curiously. After a while she said: "Those are more words than you've spoken to me all week."

He sighed. "We should go."

"I'm not ready."

"If we both go then no one can bring us back. You took care of that."

"Come here," she said.

For several moments Timothy scanned her pale blue irises for a sign of the woman he married, who rubbed his shoulders in her sleep and shook hands at faculty parties with women she suspected, sometimes rightly, he was having affairs with. But now she stared at him with wide, hungry eyes, her lips squirming around a tiny O as though she were sucking him through an invisible straw...

Before he knew what was happening he was standing before her. Her gaze traveled from his crotch, up his stomach, and lighted on his. This was not Janet, he thought. Something had possessed her. Then he thought of his own arguments to the contrary when she had tried to blame him. Perhaps she was right; perhaps he had infected her with his disease, whatever that was.

He sank to his knees.

His eyes focused on the furrowed flesh between her legs, the elongated, hair-sprouting teardrop that was pink as raw meat. With her thumb and forefinger she spread the lips, releasing a stifling, sulfurous odor and revealing the toothless-gum walls of the vagina. Two dark, gauzy appendages fluttered out, waving and curling like fan-blown streamers. Then they retreated. The knife pressed into the base of his neck, stopping just short of piercing the skin.

"Please." he said. His groin tightened as though an ice cube had been pressed to the base of his scrotum.

Minutes ago he had debated trying to wrestle away the knife; now he craved it, not the handle but the blade, the flat of which she ran across the back of his neck, making the hairs stand up in anticipation...

*****

Janet dropped the knife. He had screamed and writhed and sobbed, burbling through his own blood, as hungry for his own mutilation as the hemorrhagic meat mob in the other dimension. It had been a lot of work, more for his gratification than hers, it seemed. Even now he lay at her feet, grinning at the constellation of flies on the ceiling.

She got up, stepped over Timothy and Smeed and looked around. She was tired, yes, but even more so she was famished. After all she hadn't eaten since this morning.

Then she remembered the chili cheese Fritos. She saw the bag in her mind's eye, its colors, its crinkly seal, its paltry dimensions, better than nothing. It was in the pocket of her coat, the one Timothy was now lying on. The plastic was slick with blood, but so what? It was what was inside that mattered. The couch was cozy, too, warm to her skin as she lay down and tore the bag open.

The contents were delicious, though they were little more than crumbs, of course.

Now if only she could find something else to eat.




















































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