The Book of a Thousand Sins Read online

  “Don’t scream,” she whispered into my ear as my eyes rolled back into my head and the most shrill cry of horror and anguish raked the night air.

  “Shhh!” she said more firmly, but I had already strained my vocal chords so that I could no longer utter more than a hoarse squeak.

  “Don’t scream,” she said again as she ran a hand through my hair then seized my bruised throat and held me still while she bit my ear off. I tried to scream again, my voice box seized and the chords in my neck strained in silence.

  “Shhh!” she commanded again, still petting my head like I was some frightened pet. She waited until I had stopped screaming before she pulled me down on top of her. She would not let me go until I’d satisfied her. So, like the obedient dog that I was, I slid my semi-erect penis between her lubricious thighs and into that infernal pit. I fucked her with the end of that shovel still broken off in my ass where she’d left it.

  I spent three nights in the hospital and underwent a psychological evaluation. Of course I didn’t tell them that my dead wife had come back to life with the sexual appetite of a serial killer and was fucking me half to death every night. Despite or perhaps because of my refusal to explain the excavation tool lodged in my anus, the admissions nurse was arguing hard to have me committed to an asylum where I could no longer injure myself. As a compromise they put me under 24 hour suicide watch and then released me when my insurance ran out. I went back home that weekend, back into the arms of my beautiful dead wife.

  And we lived happily ever after. Except there was something wrong with her. Something beyond the violent and ravenous sex-drive. Something that was leeching its way into me. Everything about this was somehow not right. I was fucking the woman I’d murdered or rather she was fucking me, fucking me right into the grave beside her.

  Each night she undid me, and each morning I rushed to the Emergency Ward to get put back into some semblance of my original condition. Eventually my sex drive began to wane. I needed a break from her. To heal from the wounds and to replenish my own desires. After years of relative abstinence I was now thoroughly oversexed, chafed and spent. My erections were painful. My orgasms were streaked with blood. I spent each night cocooned in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of indescribable agony and pleasure. Taking such abuse each night was draining me. But she would not leave me alone and I could not resist her. When I tried, it ended badly.

  “Not tonight. Maria I need to rest. My work is suffering. I’m like a zombie at the office. I keep waking up later and later. The guys at the office are starting to notice the welts and cuts also. I told them I was in a Kung Fu class but they know something isn’t right. We have to stop for a while.”

  She replied with a growl and a slap that knocked me to the floor. My jaw popped and unhinged. My eyes teared up and I rolled over on my back with my arms crossed over my face as if to ward off further blows. Maria seized both of my arms and pinned them to the floor with hands that felt like heated vice grips. Then she pressed her damp sweaty sex to my face and ground it against my mouth as I screamed in pain and fought to free my head from between her thighs. I was smothering and my jaw was in agony but she would not free me until I gave her the orgasm she demanded.

  “Shhhh! Don’t scream,” she hissed and I obediently choked off my cries and did as she commanded, lapping at her clitoris which was still littered in topsoil from her climb back out of the pit. My jaw was a riot of pain by the time she came. Then she forcibly wrestled an unwanted orgasm out of me, nearly tearing my penis right out of my groin in the process. I limped to work the next day with my jaw wired shut and my bruised and swollen penis bandaged to my leg.

  “David. Can I see you in my office?”

  My supervisor was the type of private anti-social despot that only talked one on one with his employees on the day they were terminated. I packed my things before I even entered his office and walked out halfway through my exit interview. I didn’t care about my unemployment benefits or what I needed to do with my 401k and my health insurance benefits. All I could think about was Maria.

  I started locking my doors and windows at night. I even put a deadbolt on the bedroom door. Still, she came. Tearing through the drywall to get at me like some hellish beast. I considered hanging up crucifixes and perhaps even a garland of garlic and wolf’s bane. She was killing me.

  I started praying at night, clutching the bible tight against me and begging the Lord not to let her rise again from the grave. Sometimes I would recite the Lord’s Prayer even as she rode my erection and milked me of my seed. I tried to read the bible but fatigue and exhaustion had lead to a bizarre presbyopia in my vision and I could not bring the blurred pages into focus.

  The first few nights she had been careful to leave only superficial wounds that could be repaired with a few sutures or stitches, a little ice, painkillers, and some anti-inflammatories. Now Maria would re-open wounds the very next night after they had been stitched closed by the conspicuously annoyed and disgusted ER nurses and she didn’t always leave behind the pieces she’d ripped or cut off leaving no opportunity for reattachment. I was looking more and more like some unfortunate accident victim in need of plastic surgery. Soon I was too ashamed to leave the house. I sat in the dark with the curtains drawn tight trying to find a way to defend myself against Maria. I had to get away from her.

  I stood in the mirror cataloguing my injuries. Both nipples were missing along with both testicles. They had been chewed up and swallowed. I think she had even forced me to eat one of my own nuts. I vaguely remember swallowing something with the texture of veal.

  I was missing most of my left ear and even part of my cheek had been bitten off along with most of my bottom lip. Chunks of flesh were missing from my chest and neck where she had cut or eaten away at me. My ass-cheeks were a minefield of gauges, avulsions, and deep cuts that were now growing infected without the proper time to heal.

  Somehow Maria had come back the exact opposite of the woman that I had stuck in the ground. In life she had been repressed and nearly asexual. I had always wanted her to be more adventurous and uninhibited; more willing to try new things. Now, I had gotten what I wanted. She had no inhibitions any longer. She would do almost anything. Anything she thought of she immediately performed regardless of its effects on me. At first it had been heaven. I’d felt like the luckiest man in the world. But now . . .

  I saw Maria walk up behind me in the mirror. I felt her hands slide over my back followed by her mouth and tongue and then her teeth. I tensed in anticipation of the pain. I looked back into the mirror as her hands crawled from my back to my chest and the scalpel in her hand slid into view. She had opened me up from my collarbone to my solar plexus before I’d noticed. I was in hell.

  It struck me like an epiphany, like a revelation. I remembered it all now. Yes, I had killed Maria. I dragged her out into the garden and dug a hole and the hole had started to widen, to collapse in on itself as the ground swirled beneath me and funneled down into some deep underground chasm, but I hadn’t crawled back out. I hadn’t raped Maria’s corpse and thrown it into the earth. I had died down there, imprisoned in tons of rock and dirt. My eyes widened as the full implication of what I was thinking hit me. I had died and gone to hell or was this heaven? My every desire but yet my every fear.

  “No! No! Nooooo!” I yelled as tears rolled down my face and I shook my head as if I could make it all go away just by denying it.

  Maria was still cutting on me with the scalpel and now had me opened up from abdomen to mid-chest. I looked down and realized with horror that she had started cutting much lower than my abdomen. My penis was gone. I felt a burning sensation rip across my throat as she plunged the knife into my carotid artery and then ripped it across my neck all the way back to my opposite ear, neatly slicing through my larynx and choking off the scream that had come roaring out of me when I’d realized that this torment would go on forever. My penis reappeared in her hand then disappeared again and reappeared once more sticking out of the
enormous gash in my throat.

  “Shhh!” Maria commanded, “Don’t scream.”

  I could hear sirens coming and could see the red and white lights of the ambulance as it screeched to a halt outside my door through the gaps in the Venetian blinds. I hadn’t called an ambulance and I doubted that my neighbors had either. No matter how shrill and agonized my screams, they would have called the police before assuming I was in need of medical attention. Of course they would save me, stitch me back together, no matter how grievous the injury, so that Maria could take her time undoing me night after night, again and again, forever. My pleasure and my punishment.

  Maria kissed my ragged lips as blood poured from them and the look in her eyes was like nothing I’d ever seen in them before her death. Not hatred or even love but pure animalistic lust. I closed my eyes as her kisses descended down my body soothing the wounds she’d created and I wondered again if this was heaven or hell but was certain that it didn’t matter either way.

  Resurrection Day

  “Bring out your dead! Or we’ll come drag they asses out! Either way they’re going to burn!” The voice shouted through the megaphone over the angry mob of anti-ressurectionists and the crackle of the flame. I heard them just outside my door, pounding to get in. They were pissed off and scared and they wanted their sacrifice. They wanted to offer up another soul in the hope that it would appease the gods and return their world to normal.

  I hated to admit it, but I was glad that they had come. It wasn’t right, him being alive. It wasn’t fair.

  A red sun burned through my blinds bleeding fiery tendrils of crimson light and casting dark shadows around the room. The Colt 45 and MD 20/20 hangover made the world stagger and lurch and my stomach roll as I raised my head from the pillow. The light stung my eyes and intensified the throbbing ache in my temples.

  It was Easter Sunday, and usually that meant getting up early to go to church with the family. Not that I was all that religious myself, but it was tradition. However church was a highly unlikely proposition that morning.

  I had just hit the snooze button and rolled back over to resume my dreams, when a loud and persistent ringing jarred me awake again. Dazed, disoriented, and with my head still pounding like a bass drum, I woke up to my Grandmother’s panicked phone call.

  “What? Are you serious?”

  At first, I thought she was joking. Except Grandma is no comedian. Maybe she was trying to teach me some kind of lesson for missing church? Whatever it was, she had to be wrong. There was no way what she was telling me could be true.

  “I’m telling you they’re here! Right outside my door! You’ve got to get over here!”

  The choking sobs interspersed between her frantic words convinced me. At least they convinced me that she thought she was telling the truth. My Great Grandfather and Great Grandmother were at her front door. They were alive again after twenty years in the grave. It made no sense. Immediately my mind went to images plucked from the scores of horror movies I’d watched in sticky-floored theatres, peeking out from between butter soaked fingers. Hollywood had long ago driven home the lesson that when the dead walked the earth it was always a bad thing for the living. I imagined snarling vampires thirsty for blood or rotting zombies pounding on my Grandmother’s door hungry for human flesh. There had to be another explanation.

  Of course there had been signs. There was no way to avoid noticing the drastic increase in the local vermin. Roaches and rats blanketed the streets by the tens of thousands and the sky was filled with clouds of knats, flies, mosquitoes, and bees. Even the dog and cat population had exploded, which was the only thing keeping the rats from consuming us all.

  One day Mr. Hightower next door walked up and down the street with a couple gallons of kerosene dousing the teeming throngs of vermin before lighting them all on fire. It was the only thing that seemed to work. He’d tried driving his truck over them two or three times a day but somehow it never seemed to make a dent in their numbers. So he began doing his kerosene trick every morning. I hated the caustic stench of burning rat flesh but I hated the rats themselves even more so I never complained and neither did anyone else. The city hadn’t done anything about them so we were happy someone was taking action.

  I never saw the sudden infestation as anything more than another tragic consequence of ghetto life. Who could have ever envisioned something as impossible as mass resurrection?

  “They’re on the porch right outside my door! I can see them through the peephole!”

  It had been over two thousand years since the last resurrection and that one had spawned a religion. I guess those things are all a matter of where and when. Someone comes back to life in Jerusalem we call him God. Someone comes back to life in G-town and we call the police or run for the shotguns and the wooden stakes.

  In the bible it all seemed so wonderful and miraculous. No one had thought to mention all the damned flies and cockroaches or the goddamned rats! What was happening in my little neighborhood was just creepy.

  I could here a loud banging coming through the phone and the sound of a doorbell. Then I heard Poppa’s voice loud and forceful, just the way I remembered it, not faint and ethereal like a ghost or the moaning echo from the grave of a mindless zombie. It was Poppa all right. And he did not sound too happy about being locked out of HIS house.

  “Now, girl I done tole’ you, I ain’t got my keys! Now open this door and let me up in there. Ya hear?”

  As the undisputed patriarch of the Johnson family, Poppa wasn’t used to being disobeyed and I could almost hear Grandma’s resolve shatter like a pain of glass in a hurricane. I heard a metallic tinkling sound and I knew that she had taken the chain off the door.

  “Grandma! Grandma! Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know baby. They look alright. I think I’m going to open the door.”

  “Don’t open the door!”

  “But I don’t want Poppa mad at me. It’s been twenty years and I don’t want our reunion to begin with an argument.”

  “Grandma! That’s not your father! They are dead. Long dead. Do not open that door!”

  I heard my Grandmother’s screams coming from the other end of the phone and my skin crawled with goosebumps. Every hair stood on end.

  “What happened?”

  “Now Uncle Joe and my brother Paul are out there too.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I’m going to open the door.”

  I started to protest when a knock came at my door. My first thought was who the hell would be visiting me at nine o’clock in the morning? My next thought was to wonder who I knew that was dead and knew my address?

  I threw on a robe and rummaged around for my shotgun, remembered that I’d pawned it two years ago, and settled for my rusty twenty-five caliber Beretta. I was pretty sure it wasn’t enough to stop a zombie or a vampire, but it made me feel better anyway. I grabbed a steak knife out of the kitchen for added back-up. The doorbell began to ring insistently, in chorus with the knocking.

  “Who the fuck could that be?”

  I went to the door, and saw my friend Rick standing on the front porch. My “Missing and presumed dead,” friend Rick, whom I hadn’t seen in five years.

  “Come on, Bro. Open up the door! I know your ass is home.”

  He was a little dirty. Grave dirt no doubt. But the sunlight was beaming directly onto him and he wasn’t bursting into flames. So he couldn’t be a vampire. Could he? I wasn’t sure. That sunlight thing could’ve been a myth. There were no signs of rot or decay and his skin held none of the ashy gray or putrescent green pallor of death. It had an almost healthy glow to it.

  Aliens! Aliens that have taken the forms of our dead friends and relatives! That’s the only thing that made sense. This had to be some kind of invasion. Of course, there was always the possibility that I was still drunk, and that this was some type of schizophrenic intoxication. Maybe I was still asleep; one of those heavy drunken sleeps that are nearly impossible to
wake from. I stared out the peephole at the dead man on my porch and prayed that I was still drunk and not insane.

  “Get the fuck off my porch, muthafucka!”

  “What? What you trippin’ on, man? I thought you was my boy? Now you gonna do me like this?”

  “I was your boy, until you died. Now what the fuck is you doin’ up and walking around instead of lyin’ in a grave?”

  “Dead? Did you go to my funeral mutherfucker? ‘Cause I just woke up lyin’ in the god damned woods bare-assed naked! I had to steal these fuckin’ clothes just to get here!”

  Of course I hadn’t gone to his funeral. Not a real funeral anyway, just an informal affair between some of the homies. His body had never been found. Like I said, he was “Missing and presumed dead”. No one was really sure what happened to him.

  “Come on, Bro. My mom won’t let me in. That’s why I came to your house.”

  “Your mom don’t live there no more. That’s Mrs. Watson’s house now.”

  “Then . . . then where’s my mom?”

  “I don’t know, Bro. She upped and left like a year ago. I don’t know where she went.”

  Rick collapsed against my porch railing. At first, I thought that whatever dire magic had reanimated his corpse, had fled him and he was dying once again. Then, I felt guilty, as I realized that he was crying. I opened the door, still holding the knife and the Beretta of course, but concealed beneath my bathrobe.