Art by Mike David
The men hunched over the bar are workers from the nearby factory. They’re missing more pieces than a garage sale jigsaw puzzle. The goggles the amputees wear while trying not to lose any more body parts to the machines protect their eyes from the soot which encrusts the entirety of their faces save for domino masks of skin, white as the bellies of vampirized cavefish, around their dull dead doll eyes. They sit silently, only moving to pick up their glasses and raise them to their mouths before returning them to the bar for further visual contemplation. None of them so much as glance up when the door of the dive whose sign proclaims it: Harry’s Hole in the Wall creaks open on rusty squeaking hinges.
Against the rear wall sits a small stage with a crooked brass pole rising from its center.
The naked woman dancing atop the stage is skinny as a starving snake. The skin shrink-wrapped around her protruding skeleton is caked with grey dust. Slug trails of clean white skin extend from her haunted eyes down her sunken cheeks; the tears which carved these tracks drip from her chin.
An old fashioned hand cranked turntable sits on a rickety table at the side of the stage and belches out the kinda music they used to play on the Ed Sullivan show while some dude in a tuxedo balanced spinning dinner plates atop pool cues. The record pops and hisses as the crying stripper bucks and grinds her hips before segueing into shaking her shoulders to make the rubbery pink tassels on her pasties spin.
The mirror behind the stage faces the mirror behind the bar and creates an infinity of weeping, dancing girls each tinier than the last.
“Please help me,” the stripper moans piteously at Butch as he stalks towards the bar.
“Please mister, I’m in hell. This is hell, please help me,” the stripper begs; her entreaty is cut short when the record she’s dancing to skips and she seems to skip right along with it, beginning her routine again with the bucking, grinding hips giving way to twirling tassels. Then the record skips and she repeats the routine all over again.
Butch stops to watch her go through her loop a couple times before ignoring her,as do the redneck behind the bar and the soot encrusted workers.
Butch saunters up to the bar.
“Look here buddy I don’t want no trouble, I’m all paid up with Mr. W. and the fuzz,” the redneck bartender says, one hand gripping something under the bar.
Butch briefly considers taking whatever the redneck has hidden under the bar and sticking it up the fucker’s ass. But he doesn’t, instead he says,
“Teddy’s dead.”
“Shitfire,” the redneck says.
“I’m his replacement,” Butch says.
“You get two free shots, one before, one after,” the redneck drawls, “Mid-shelf only. What’s your poison?”
Butch downs the shot of rotgut and checks his watch.
“Please, please kill me,” the record skip stripper pleads while Butch rises from the wobbly stool.
“Good luck,” the redneck says as Butch marches towards the door to the bathroom.
The door to the shitter has a sheet of paper nailed to it by four big ass Martin Luther nailing shit to a door type nails; “Out of Order!!!”scrawled on the paper in red marker.
The lock on the bathroom door is both the newest and most expensive object in the shithole dive. Butch removes the fob from his pocket and sorts through the keys until he finds the right one. After stepping into the lavatory, he closes and locks the door behind him.
He sets his attaché case on the counter, unlocks, and opens it. Then he takes off his jacket and hangs it from the hook on the door. The yellow rubber apron he dons is the type worn by slaughterhouse workers. The safety goggles are probably not too dissimilar to those worn by the partially devoured factory workers while they breathe in soot for twelve hours a day. The thick black rubber gloves are at once both fetishistic and industrial.
Butch spreads a crisp clean towel over the counter and begins to carefully lay out his gear.
As his fingers curl around the handle of the meat cleaver, Butch feels an intense desire to bury the blade in his flesh. He stares at the silver mirror of the cleaver’s blade, but instead of his own reflection staring back at him he sees a screaming woman with no limbs howling in either agony or ecstasy as blood slow motion gushes from her freshly amputated stumps.
He sets the cleaver on the counter and continues laying out his other tools in a precise orderly row.
He checks his watch.
“Bet ya couldn’t cut your own head off with a single swing,” a mocking voice hisses inside his skull as he picks up the cleaver. He desperately wants to prove the snake voice wrong. But he ignores it and imagines a brick wall which holds back the voices and the strange urges they inspire (a trick he learned from a movie).
“What happens to you is gonna make what happened to Teddy seem like a walk in the park ya piece a shit,” a growling death metal voice rumbles from beneath the bottom of his brain as he checks his watch again.
There are three stalls; the glory hole is in the partition between the center stall and the one furthest from the door.
There’s a stain on the filthy yellow tiled floor beneath the glory hole. A Rorschach blot tumor colored a bruise-like purple which seems to pulse and squiggle as he stares at it.
A string of occult symbols are graffitto’d around the glory hole through which peers an incredibly realistic painting of an unblinking bloodshot eye which is inscribed on the wall of the next stall. There’s a sign on the wall above the glory hole which reads: “Employees Must Wear Eye Protection Near Glory Hole!” Beneath the hole in the partition a graffito scrawled in a spidery hand: “4 a goo slime call 666-6969”.
Butch checks his watch then sits down on the toilet and waits, cleaver gripped in his hand, eyes trained on the glory hole.
Time moves strangely in the bathroom, or maybe his watch is broken cuz when he checks it again it says it’s five minutes before the last time he checked it.
Every ounce of mental fiber he possesses is dedicated to resisting the nearly overwhelming urge to whip his tackle out and jam it into the glory hole, from which faintly whispering, nearly inaudible voices seem to drift.
He imagines the brick wall as he resists an intense urge to put his ear up to hole so that he might hear what the seductive yet menacing whispers are hissing. Even without knowing what they’re saying he gets the gist of it from the tone, the whispers are both an enticement and a threat, inviting him to partake of his own doom (and giving him permission to enjoy it).
The chorus of whispering voices suddenly grows louder and a gush of hot humid air that stinks like rotten goat meat and mushrooms boiling in blood and diseased vaginal secretions heated by burning brimstone oozes from the glory hole.
There’s a sizzling electric chair noise from the ceiling, then the fluorescent lights go dark.
The darkness is filled with the sound of all the toilets flushing simultaneously; beneath the rush of water and the hungrily sucking vacuum noise is a sound like the gurgling screams of a drowning man.
Then light, unlike any earthly color spills from the portal, like some pestilent luminescence oozing from a diseased star covered with bruises and infected sores. It isn’t merely some combination of colors never previously combined; it’s an entirely new color, some wavelength of light his eyes have never absorbed before. The rancid phosphorescence doesn’t behave like light; it isn’t projected like a beam or ray, rather it blooms in the air like a swirling cloud of smoke or vapor.
A slimy, glistening black-purple tentacle unfurls from the glory hole, wriggling like a beckoning finger curling in a come-hither gesture. The tentacle doesn’t have suction cups. It’s a smooth, horse-wiener-length whip of flesh, soda-can-thick where it emerges from/disappears into the glory hole portal but tapering to a pointy dunce cap shaped tip.
The writhing of the tentacle is like bad claymation, a film with missing frames or laggy video. The wrongly wriggling thing seems more like a pseudopod extruded from the body of an amoeba rather than the solid fleshy tentacle of some squid-o-pus type mollusk; it seems more a viscous goo than something solid.
The safety goggles are fogging up with condensed moisture and Butch feels a nearly overwhelming urge to remove them. Brick wall, he thinks.
He glances through the open door of the stall at the mirror behind the sink on the far wall. Nothing visible in the stall on the ‘pitching’ side of the glory hole. His face reflected in the mirror is horribly distorted, trembling all seizure-y, blurry, mouth open wide in a silent scream.
Black snakes of twisting smoke rise from the tentacle to swirl and spiral in the fetid air. The shiny black slime which drips from the pseudopod beckons Butch to lick it off the floor, begging him to kneel before the glory hole and take the tentacle in his mouth.
Resist the call of the tentacle. Brick wall.
His mind is flooded with an extremely detailed vision of the squirming tentacle plunging through his eyeball–which pops in a seething gush of KY-Jelly-like vitreous humor–and burrowing into the wrinkled meat of his brain. Some part of him desperately wants nothing more than the tentacle buried in his skull.
Resist. Brick wall.
Butch raises the cleaver white-knuckle gripped in his gloved hand and brings the blade chopping down into the frenetically squiggling tendril.
The tentacle must be tougher than its soft-slimy appearance suggests, the blade only bites halfway through the shaft and an explosion of steaming hot, black-purple goo sprays from the stump which rapidly retracts half its length back into the glory hole portal.
Hard to pull the blade out, pressure inside the tentacles suck-grips it. Butch’s hand is shaking like a hanged man’s legs. He yanks hard as he can, nearly falls on his ass, recovers, aims for the same spot, brings the blade down again, misses the site of the previous chop, but manages to sink the cleaver three quarters of the way through the tentacle.
His third blow hacks the tentacle in twain. It falls to the floor seemingly in slow motion.
The blighted light mushroom-clouding from the glory hole portal grows dimmer and dimmer until it dissolves completely. Likewise the frenzied babble of the whispering voices grows quieter and quieter until it lurks just a nun’s cunt hair above the level of inaudibility.
Butch just sits there in the utter darkness for a moment or two breathing heavy like an asthmatic obscene phone caller, then there’s a Taser sizzle and the fluorescent lights pop back on.
He stares at the severed tentacle writhing on the floor like a slug recoiling from a shower of salt. Can’t help but feel like it’s trying to tell him something, as if its writhing is a form of writing he could begin to read if only he stared at the wriggling worm long enough. Butch reaches up and slaps himself, then takes out the little spray can, shakes it, and sprays the shit inside it onto the tendril which in an instant freezes solid. The tongs dare him to pluck his own eye out as he grips them in his rubber gloved hand and uses them to grab the frozen tentacle tip and drop it into a jar which he seals up and carries to his attaché case.
The puddle of black goo tries to trickle-crawl away as he sucks it up with a little battery powered wet/dry vac. The shrill whine of the vacuum provokes the nearly inaudible chorus of whispering voices to crescendo into a clamorous babble which makes Butch for the briefest of moments contemplate jamming his thumbs into ears until they puncture his ear drums.
Once all his gear is in the case he gives the bathroom a last once over. Everything looks in order.
“Please mister, please, please kill me,” the record skip stripper pleads as Butch emerges from the bathroom.
He locks the door behind him.
“Please . . . please . . . please,” the stuck in a loop stripper dancing to the skipping record begs.
He whirls around, pulls his gat, and unloads the magazine into her torso.
Then he sits down at the bar and signals the redneck to pour his second complimentary shot of rotgut.
Joshua Dobson is the inventor of the theory (but as of yet not the actual recipe) for the Lemon-Vanilla Marinade a tricky blend of an acid and a base which if ever achieved in actuality will redefine flavor.
SLUGGER 