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  Looking at the man, who spoke with her while the wind confused the words, I was certain that reality had somehow gone off track. I did not feel in danger. I was in a safe and secure place, despite the nightmares and the blonde fairy.

  The stranger, squatting on the ground, temporarily stopped paying attention to my mother to lay eyes on me. He opened his mouth, but he had no teeth.

  After the beach, we went to the solarium. My mother wanted to give me a great day.

  “Thanks for everything, Mom.”

  “You’re my love. And, you’ve also been promoted.”

  “How do you know? The results won’t be announced until next week,” I said in astonishment. We were sitting in the sauna. We were alone, almost in the dark. I could barely see my mother, wrapped in a large towel. The white towel reflected a dim light on her face; in the semi-darkness, that small ray of light barely showed her profile.

  One of the beauticians came in and gave us a black telephone. “Ma’am, it’s for you. Christ, it’s so hot in here. Keep it down.”

  My mother seized the phone that the girl, fleeing the boiling room, was about to drop to the floor.

  Mom set the phone on her lap and grabbed the receiver. She said nothing, and I could only see the wet sparkle of her eyes in the dark.

  She stretched out her arm, handing over the receiver: “It’s your school’s secretary.”

  The warm, wrinkled voice of an elderly person, with whom I had never spoken, told me that I had been promoted with honors. She suggested that I enroll in a particular school famed for its excellence, and then choose law school and later political science. She said I could have a bright career, become a man of power, guided by a friend of hers who would inspire in me an interest in physics and other subjects that I had never heard of. Before saying goodbye, she added, chuckling: “By the way, dear Tomase, your essay gave everyone the shivers.”

  Before the secretary hung up, I realized I had not memorized much of what he had told me. In the incredibly hot temperature of the sauna, I felt lost, and asked myself whether that voice actually belonged to a man or a woman.

  As I sat leafing through a fashion magazine, the ambiguous tone of the voice that had spoken to me on the phone manifested itself as a persistent, mysterious fog. It became part of that bubble, which I was now more convinced than ever I was slipping into and away from the old world.

  I had been promoted; I was no longer a child. In less than sixty days I would start high school. I was going to project myself into a new life beyond imagination. My mother was generously rewarding me in that long, hot day of changes.

  I was about to become a man, although everything I had lived through during those last few hours seemed illogical and unreal.

  I leafed through the magazine without any interest.

  My mother was having her hair washed; I waited on the bench while the other ladies, in front of me, wore the helmet dryers on their heads. Those plastic helmets were heat robots, and I just looked at them in amazement. They looked like alien mouths that were cooking the brains of those unfortunate women.

  I looked for a moment at my mother, sitting by the sinks where the two hairdressers were washing the customers’ hair. She was talking to them, holding the hand of the customer by her side; whose chin had been forced down, the hot water spraying in her face and up her nose. The victim tried to free herself, kicking and stomping on the ground, her face smoking. But the more the woman squirmed, the more she choked on water that ended up in her lungs. My mother laughed along with the hairdresser, and it seemed to me that they continued to talk about shoes and elegant dates, even when the assassin turned off the water and covered the dead customer with a black cloth.

  We went home and I fell asleep on the couch, without eating dinner.

  Again I dreamed of the fairy and of the bramble of hair. But this time it was she who regurgitated them. I saw her in the living room, bent over, vomiting hair with a gasp, almost a desperate scream. She spat the huge black spider out, along with foamy saliva that, as always, began to chase me.

  I woke up just in time, my heart pounding.

  Could it be that the hair thrown up by the fairy represented the water in the lungs of the woman who had been murdered at the hairdresser’s? But the idea vanished in the dull phlegm of sunset.

  My mother was not at home.

  From the backyard I heard the rushing of water pouring into the fountain. I thought it was my mother, busy with laundry. I went out. It was dusk and the sky was red and bruised. I called my mother, circling the house. In the fountain, the jet of steaming water ran freely into the empty tub. I had a dizzy spell.

  I grabbed the knob to turn off the faucet, burning my hand. I tried again with a cloth wrapped around my hand, while hot water kept splashing on me, burning my skin. My attempt was in vain, the knob turned without shutting off the tap. I left it running and decided to go downstairs to the cellar. Surely my mother was already trying to close the water mains and switch off the boiler.

  I ventured down the stairs leading to the foundation of the house. The noise of the boiler was deafening; it was working at full capacity, building up a worrying pressure. It was very strange; there was no need to use heaters in summer.

  The basement was divided into many rooms, some had white concrete walls, and others bare brick walls traversed by cables, pipes and knobs, meters and wires, niches and low empty corridors that stretched into the darkness. I found a few items that I had forgotten: the tricycle, the cradle, boxes of old strategy games, an electric train, scale models, and toy bricks. Below the ceiling, from which hung a light filtered through opaque glass, an impressive array of furniture loomed. The presence of these objects was somehow inexplicable. The humidity increased, covering my back and the hair on my forehead with tiny beads of water. I wondered how those big pieces of furniture could have been transported down there: a marble table, a wardrobe with five doors, a canopy bed, and a dresser. All were too large to pass through the doors or the narrow walls of the stairs. Then it struck me: Could it be that our house had been built around them? I noticed a huge metal trunk sticking out from under a pile of boxes, broken chairs, lampshades, rolled up mattresses, bundles of clothes tied with old strings. Everything seemed out of place, deformed by the low light and the din of the boiler. I called my mother, but got no answer.

  The heart of the house was over my head. I felt submerged in a world reigned by stale air, where no one could have survived for more than an hour.

  After reaching the boiler room, I looked at the red glow emanating from the lights of the machine and the burner cap.

  The noise and heat were unbearable. Just then I saw my mother sitting on the boiler.

  Planted on the ground and as big as our car, with the cylindrical stomach of a kettle resting on four legs, the machine worked relentlessly. The loading and discharge pipes, smooth and grooved, stretching all around, climbed the walls like wet, throbbing tentacles before disappearing somewhere in the darkness. The valves, pressure gauges, counters, radiators, springs, turbines, and heaters dotted the body of the machine: They looked like eyes and ears, fingers, periscopes and pipes. At its base, the boiler trod on an iron jaw, an open box of wires, filaments, electrical coils, transformers, buttons, valves, levers and latches, digits, serial numbers, numeric symbols, all covered in grease and dust. The machine was breathing, its vitality pulsing through red, green, and yellow lights, and puffs of steam. The walls enclosing it were veiled by its sweat, which fed black mold.

  I could not understand the presence of my mother in that room. She had not seen or heard me arriving because of the fierce roar of the boiler. It was not clear to me what she was doing. She was completely naked, riding the boiler with her legs spread open, straddling the cylindrical top. She was letting the machine flay and burn her legs and calves. The smell of melted flesh was suffocating, pungent, and revolting. Her fat fried on the back of the boiler, producing foam in the spots where my mother stoically remained seated, slidin
g back and forth. I threw up on the floor, both from the stench and because I was beginning to understand. A bundle of tubes sticking out of the boiler went up and up toward the ceiling, bending along the top. Some conduits branched into fan-shaped formations, penetrating the concrete and the house. From the center of this sunburst, a dark, shiny tube, as thick as an arm, crept between my mother’s legs, into a bloody hole whose greed shocked me. The slit between her legs was like the spider hairs that had often haunted me in my dreams: In an instant, the nightmare became horribly similar to the obscene feeding of the hole that swallowed, spat, and swallowed the heat pipe of the machine.

  The human fat that fried on the boiler casing congealed in patches on the ceiling and then dripped down the back of my mother, who slid on the black tube, allowing herself to be possessed, faster and faster. The scream of the machine and that of my mother were no longer two distinct sounds, but only one symphony of torment.

  When I had the strength to move toward one side of the boiler, I saw the dark outline of my mother mottled by a red beam of light. Her throat stuck out of her mouth, pulsing at the rhythm with which the black pipe impaled her. Her trachea flexed in and out of the oral cavity, showing gleaming white grooves and dripping saliva. Her arms were welded to the cylindrical case of the boiler, which reminded me of the connecting rods of a locomotive.

  I wished that my mother would stop, see me, and feel ashamed. But everything led me to believe that nothing and nobody could have dissuaded her from that moment.

  I involuntarily walked two steps forward to find out what lay between the boiler and the wall. Perhaps, by circling the machine, my mother would see me and stop.

  Once I got to the front of the boiler I noticed that the red light did not reach that dark space. There was nothing but a filthy darkness in the area. I just stood there, mesmerized by that void, until I thought I could see the reflection of a black eye, a stupid blank eye that slowly opened and shut. Then I saw a pointy snout with horse-like teeth facing my mother, and large horns that scraped the floor. Gasping, I finally took a better look at the beast lying inside the boiler, its iron lung.

  Retracing my steps, now on the verge of suffocating, I discovered that the embrace between my mother and the machine, in a forest of rivulets of flesh and melted skin, tubes and pipes, gauges, welds, nuts and bolts that mingled with ribs, muscles, arteries, nerves, limbs, and joints, was a kind of infernal bull, half robot and half animal.

  I ran away, desperate for air.

  But I found the fairy blocking my path toward the exit. I did not want to go back, where my mother and the fire beast were making those sinful moans. I tried to detour around her, one side and then the other, but the little girl was as fast as me. She walked toward me, forcing me to enter a small niche lit by a dim cone of light that filtered through the glass ceiling bricks.

  “What do you want from me? What?” I yelled in her face, my shoulders against the wall.

  She lowered her cute face, still smeared with shit.

  Between her feet lay her own corpse.

  I had never seen a corpse before.

  I did not believe in ghosts.

  The body lying on the ground was identical to the one in front of me.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked again in tears.

  “Just a caress,” she whispered over the roar of the boiler. I believe that’s exactly what she said. “Please,” she begged, taking my face in her hands.

  No, she was not a ghost. On that cold, filthy ground stood both her corpse and her double, holding my hand. She opened my fist, kissed the palm of my hand with her eyes half-closed, and led me to gently touch her cheek, pushing her hair aside.

  My heart was beating fast, but I wasn’t afraid.

  She held my hand against her face, and then put her forefinger and middle finger into her mouth, wetting them with saliva. Without giving me time to react, her fingers flashed and pierced my eyes.

  A flash of pain drove deep down into my brain making me fall to my knees.

  I fell. She held me by the arm. Her fingers were an electric plug that electrocuted me to death.

  In the midst of the convulsing flames of my eyes, a vivid scene showed itself between her fingers.

  It’s the middle of the night; I see everything through the window of my bedroom that faces the house garden. The gate opens, letting in a large, long black car, which proceeds slowly along the cobbled drive that leads to the veranda. The headlights emanate a strong light that envelops my mother, who’s patiently waiting. The car’s engine turns off, leaving the headlights on. Three men dressed in black get out. One hastens to open the left rear door. My mother approaches the figure who’s about to leave the car. A man cloaked in red gets out, a cardinal or someone similar. He greets my mother with a kiss.

  “Now that we are standing face to face, we are finally ready to settle our account,” he murmurs. Then he bends back into the car, leading the fairy out by the hand. Yes, the fairy. “Once every three moons,” he whispers, holding the little girl by her shoulders, “You allow us to stay here, granting us the exclusive right to operate evil, until the day of the covenant.” The cardinal receives no answer: He hands over the girl to my mother, before bowing and getting back into the car. The escorts look around, do not see me, and the car leaves. The engine is silent.

  Mom closes the gate, and then leads the girl down to the basement.

  In the bowels of the foundation, my mother breaks the arms and legs of the fairy. She kisses her on the mouth, sucking in her spirit, a tangle of hair that she then spits on the ground in the dark.

  Then she sacrifices the girl on the voluptuous pipes of the boiler.

  The young and virgin flesh dies.

  “For every soul that is not given back to the Creator, the celestial armies have one less angel to fight the devil,” the fairy said, freeing my eyes from her fingers.

  I remained on the ground, blinded.

  “Your mother will receive other pure souls to subtract from the kingdom of Heaven, and you will have to learn to love the family,” she whispered again, vanishing amid sparks of pain.

  I cried a lot. The tears did not want to stop; my suffering widened to form a flat, oily sea.

  In my eyes, all that remained was a painful buzzing and a frantic pulse of needles, and nothing else. My sight was back. I saw something moving amid a slow smoke of tears, lit by the dawn. I had cried the whole night.

  “Stop being sad, now,” my mother said as she stood in front of me, dressed in her red bathrobe.

  “Who is my father, Mom?” I asked her.

  “I am, honey,” she answered, frowning in shock. “Keep me hidden, Tomase,” she said firmly. “And you will be the happiest man on earth,” she promised.

  “Forever.”

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  When I started writing “The Contract” I already had in mind a bunch of strong and clear visions. The monster, the location (a real seaside place I went on vacation during my childhood—60 miles South of Rome), the little girl in the yard, the bush of hairs in mouth.

  The main inspiration, all over my whole writing production in years, is always focused on Rosemary’s Baby (the movie), both atmosphere and plot, Carpenter’s The Thing’s metamorphosis and Hans Rudi Giger’s byomechanics. So, in this short story I wanted strongly a very-classic faced background-main character. The evil looks heavily like the eldest representation of the Devil, better known as the Antichrist, but giving it (or him) the deadly body-horror mix between flesh and machine, iron, bones and steam, and finally hiding him inside the most natural place we know: a simple house. I love to search at first for ideas for tormenting my characters, so that weirdly painful solutions themselves often give me the logical sense of the story I’m gonna tell.

  Maybe I am just a romantic guy, at last. I love those immortal American horror stories in EC, Warren and Marvel Comics (translated in Italy in early 70’s from Dracula Lives, Creepy, Tales From The Crypt
, Strange Tales, The Unexpected, House of Secrets, and so on—every one a supercult to me), short stories in which never there is a way out, never salvation, never a Hollywoodian happy ending for the main characters. The common Good and Evil fight always ends in a bad (and ironical) solution, either you’ll see blood or not, making the villain friendly to readers, and victims the target of readers’ natural ancestral wildness.

  OWNERSHIP

  WRATH JAMES WHITE

  From Into Painfreak: A Journey of Decadence and Debauchery

  Editor: Gerard Houarner

  Publisher: Necro Publications

  ______

  Lord whisked the scalpel through her flesh in deft, rapid strokes, carving forgotten runes and symbols, more from instinct than memory, as Miyu continued to moan, and scream, and masturbate with her one free hand. In his intricate designs, he used the welts and cuts caused by the whip, the bleeding avulsions left by the reed-thin rattan cane he’d lashed her ass and thighs with, slicing and cutting with the scalpel to connect wound to wound. Soon, the tapestry of bleeding lines formed hieroglyphics in languages that were ancient when mankind was new.

  Miyu’s eyes were glazed, far away, sparkling like Christmas lights as adrenaline and endorphins coursed through her. She never once attempted to free her other wrist or her ankles from the leather restraints. She was enjoying the endorphins too much, the euphoric waves of dopamine flooding through her bloodstream.

  “Ooooh, yes. Don’t stop, big man. Hurt me! Hurt me!”