The House Read online

  "Oh, what the hell?"

  —pulled his pants down and had sex with the lower half of Sissy's body.

  He fucked the legs with gusto, now singing "Ain't no cure for the summertime blues," the version by the Flying Lizards, naturally. He came quickly, and it was a "good nut," as Rocco would say, and when Leonard was finished dispensing it, he went back to the kitchen and finished the bacon. But as he reached for the first piece he did notice this:

  His hand was green.

  ««—»»

  Leonard awoke to the pulsating thrum of crickets. He leaned up from the kitchen table, rubbed his face, and thought, Oh, man. What a horrible dream! Yet the first thing he saw after that thought was Snowdrop's severed head, her tongue sticking out at him from her eye.

  Something was amiss.

  A quick, stunned walk about the premises showed him what he already knew. Snowdrop's gnawed skeleton glistened within the dog pen, several very fat dogs sleeping aside. Sissy's legs and ass lay splayed on the living room floor, a giant wet spot on the carpet between them, while the rest of her lay several feet beyond the front door. Leonard closed the door.

  "Ooops," Leonard voiced to himself.

  What had happened? What had gotten into him, and moreover...why? The evidence about the house indicated something clearly more acute than a bad mood.

  And when he looked at his hands, they were, indeed, green.

  His arms were green, and when he pulled up his Van der Graaf shirt, he couldn't help but notice that his chest and stomach were green too.

  Kind of like the color of snowpea pods, if a bit darker. Then came the inevitable moment of truth. He pulled down his pants...

  "Oh, man! Even my dick is green!"

  The fungus- and vomit-specked bathroom mirror sealed the total package into reality. Leonard stared cockeyed at his green face. Something had turned him homicidal and green.

  A few seconds of cogitation...

  Then he had a pretty good idea what it was.

  ««—»»

  Beneath the shroud of midnight, he slipped like a sprite down the hill. Crickets and peepers pulsed their waves of music into the night. A sickle moon followed Leonard through a declivity of waist-high rye grass and man-tall sunflowers. Leonard's sprint through the wild consumed at least several miles, his feet blazing a trail, and then he'd arrived.

  The "compound."

  The Epiphanite settlement.

  Stark rectangles filled the expansive perimeter of 10-foot-tall chainlink fence: one squat building after another. Leonard scrabbled over the fence with no difficulty, then dashed behind a stack of hand-made barrels. She was in there somewhere—Esther the Contortionist, but— How am I going to find her without alerting the entire compound? What, he was just going to barge into every building—a skinny green man in a Van der Graaf shirt—and say Excuse me, but I'm looking for Esther, you know that girl who can pin her feet back behind her head? Not likely. He'd have a dozen guys who looked like Ernest Borgnine chasing his ass with pitchforks.

  But what could he do? It seemed hopeless!

  "Yooooooow!" his shriek cut into the night when a hand grabbed his shoulder.

  "Shhhhhh!"

  Leonard turned wide-eyed and looked straight into the pretty face of...good luck.

  "Be quiet!" Esther urged in a fierce whisper. "You'll wake everyone up!"

  Leonard let his heart pace down, then considered this remarkable stroke of fine fortune. Not only had Esther found him, it was too dark out here for her to notice the incongruenty that his skin was green...

  "What are you doing in here?" she complained. "Are you nuts?"

  "I, uh—I was looking for you."

  "Well I was looking for you." Her face blushed slightly in the moonlight. "I just snuck out and was gonna come up to your house."

  "Why?"

  She rolled her eyes. "To fuck you, you dummy. I told you last night I want you to knock me up."

  For whatever reason, the words which composed this prurient statement put a spark something fierce in Leonard's loins. At once his green dick was hard and throbbing in his pants, and the wash of lust completely side-tracked him as to his purpose. He roughly grabbed her there behind the barrels, licking her neck, pawing at her coarse black pilgrim's dress.

  "Not here!" she contested but spared a giggle. "Someone on rounds would see us." Leonard rubbed his erection against her hip. "Mmm, you really do want to see me," she observed. "But we can't fuck here, we have to go to your—"

  An idea cut off the rest of her words, and a slow smile bloomed on her face. "Wait a minute, wait a minute—this is great!"

  "What is?" Leonard asked, now trying to stick his hand up her dress. "You want to go back to the house?"

  "Nope, I've got a better idea! Come on!"

  She grabbed his hand and jerked. Anxiousness led him quickly through the maze of stark, squat buildings; she'd stop every so often to peer around a corner for sentinels, then led him further until they arrived at a smaller building near the far end of the compound. "Here's where the girls sleep," she whispered. "Buddy, I hope you're horny." Her hand molested his groin. "Holy shit, you're horny, all right!"

  Indeed, Leonard was, hornier than he'd ever been in his life, and raring to go. Yet his distraction let go of him long enough to notice, beyond the fence, a moderate pig pen filled with sleeping hogs, and beyond that, some horses and sheep grazing in the fields. A high cloud moved off, and suddenly Leonard's face was bathed in moonlight.

  "Are you all right?" Esther asked with a sudden curiosity.

  "Uh, yeah."

  She squinted. "You look kind of...dark."

  Leonard frowned to himself. "We need to talk."

  ««—»»

  But the talk would come later as Leonard's "distraction" returned once Esther showed him into the girl's dorm. Five spartan cots sat in a row, and four of them contained girls in their late teens, donned in sackcloth nightgowns and fast asleep. Esther glided through the dark and nudged each one of them awake, whispering the likes of: "Shhh! Don't make any noise," "Keep the oil lamps out!" "I brought a man back!"

  "A man!" one of the girl exclaimed.

  "SHHHHH!"

  The girls sat up now, their eyes focused on Leonard's silhouette in the dark. "This is Leonard," Esther explained, "he lives up in that funny house on the hill and he's going to fuck us all!"

  Wow, Leonard thought.

  A rush of giggles and gleeful squeals rose up as all of the girls peeled off their austere gowns and converged on him. The darkness, thankfully, continued to conceal Leonard's greenness, but by their vim and vigor, he suspected that he could've been pin-striped and covered with pink elephants and these girls wouldn't have cared. They mauled him, stripping him as though he were a candy bar and his clothes were the wrapper. "Goddamn, this guy's got a big motherfuckin' cock!" one girl celebrated when she grabbed him.

  Who? Me? Leonard thought.

  Hot hands coursed over his body.

  "What a fuckin' rock-hard bod!"

  "Jesus Christ, this guy's a rack of muscle!"

  Huh-huh-huh—who? Me?

  But bacchanal lust pushed these oddities away in short order. Leonard was sucked like a lollipop and fucked like a whore. He merely lay back on the dirt floor and let these feisty gals do their thing, taking turns sitting on him. And it astounded him, the severity of language eloquented by such cloistered, Christian women. "Ooo! This fucker's cock is splitting my pussy wide open! Feels like it's gonna come out my mouth!" "Shoot a big giant wad in me, you fuck-machine! Knock me the fuck UP!" "Goddamn! He's coming in me like a fuckin' hose!" "Holy goddamn shit, Esther! I didn't know guys had cocks this fuckin' big!"

  Who? Me? Leonard thought.

  They fucked him there in the dirt for a good hour, sweating on him, drooling on him, and fucking him some more. And he gave it up each time with quite a bit of charity, firing repeated hot rockets of sperm deep into every vaginal pass that saw fit to encompass his manhood. For some reason, thoug
h, he did not question this seemingly impossible feat of sexual prowess. There was no period of erectile refraction, for instance: each time Leonard deposited his reproductive goods, his penis didn't even lose its turgidity. It simply stayed hard and kept belting out the semen like a turkey baster with an unlimited reservoir. An hour later his four charges lay giggling and exhausted about him, while Leonard just lay there with his hands behind his head and his unwavering erection sticking up.

  "One more wad for me," Esther said, and now she was sitting on him. "Are you sure you're the same guy I was with last night?"

  She squealed high as a metal whistle when Leonard thrust a hard one up into her. "I, uh, I think so," he said.

  But that was all the talk Esther was good for. Her sex gulped every impossible inch of him, and then, for posterity, he turned her around in the dirt, pinned her feet back behind her ears, and then really gave her a pumping. Soon she was orgasming so abundantly that all she could do was jibber, her sex clenching in spasms like a myocardial infarction. When Leonard discerned that she'd had enough, he released one last ejaculation into the womanly confines—or, not quite as eloquently, dumped a giant fuck right in her hole.

  He looked down at her in the moonlight coursing through the high, tiny windows. Her head lolled, showing an idiot grin with a tongue sticking out, and all she could do was murmur and blow spit bubbles as most of that giant fuck ran warmly out of her sex.

  But now that his needs had been properly slaked, Leonard's attentions returned to the matters at hand. After all, he hadn't come down here to ball the ever-living tar out of a bunch of Epiphanites. He'd come to seek answers to the queries that were now piling up to mountain size. I am not myself, he thought. There is something seriously wrong with me, and I have to find out what it is.

  "Come on, come on," he insisted. He hauled Esther naked up off the floor. She felt rubber-boned. "We have to find someplace to talk."

  "Back here," she eventually agreed. "The wash room."

  He followed her to said room, which was just as dark. "Let me light a lamp," she said.

  "No, wait! Not yet," Leonard hurried. "I need to talk to you first."

  She slumped in the dark. "All right, what about?"

  Leonard swallowed. "About the...the pig."

  "Whuh—oh, you mean the—"

  Leonard impatiently cut her off. "Look, last night you said something about some 7-day religious celebration or something—"

  "Yeah, the Penitence Festival."

  "And something about your grandfather and the rest of the congregation being overly concerned because—"

  "Because the pig escaped," she said.

  "Well, I need to know about that pig."

  "Huh?"

  Leonard took a breath and began, "I'll give you the short version. The pig didn't escape. My...employers came down here last week and stole it."

  Esther gaped incredulous in the moon-tinsled dark. "Are you kidding?"

  "No. I'm not. For a number of days, and for reasons I'd prefer not to explain, your grandfather's pig was in our house. And by a matter of complicated happenstance, the pig...died. My employers aren't very diligent about providing an adequate ration of food, and I was near starving, so...I slaughtered your grandfather's pig and cooked it. And I ate some of it."

  Her wide eyes held on the preposterous revelation he'd just made. And then—she burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.

  Leonard was appalled. "What's so funny?"

  "You-you-you ate the Emblem of the Sacrifant!"

  "What?"

  She had to sit on the wash basin she was laughing so hard. "The Penitence Festival is a symbolic ritual—it's called a transpositional rite. For six days we pray in silence for God to purge us of our sins and to banish those sins."

  "I don't get it," Leonard said.

  "When the sins are banished, they have to go somewhere, right?"

  "Well...I suppose so."

  "So we ask God to banish them into the Penitation Host, which we also call the Sacrifant."

  "I still don't get it," Leonard communicated, trying hard not to bellow.

  "The pig, you doe-doe! We transpose our sins into the physical body of the pig!" She crumbled, slapping her bare knees and giving over to more ludicrous hitches of laughter. "And you-you-you...ate it!"

  Leonard smirked. "You're telling me that I ate all the sins of the Epiphanites?"

  "Well, no, not just the Epiphanites. The sins of the whole world."

  Interesting but...Leonard didn't believe in the supernatural, nor the mystic. It was just a pig, wasn't it?

  "This stuff's not really true, is it? I mean, it's just, like, a symbol, right?"

  Esther continued to wheeze laughter. "Sure, I guess."

  "Then what's so damn funny!"

  She had to talk in stops, catching her breath. "It's just that you've completely ruined the Penitation! And-and-and...Solly doesn't even know it! Oh, man, holy shit, this is great! He thinks the pig's out running around in the woods somewhere. But it's really in your stomach!"

  Leonard was getting irked. "All right, so what's the big deal? I ate the pig. What's the difference between me eating it and someone else eating it? Didn't you say you were going to slaughter it yourselves at the end of the festival?"

  "Yes, yes!" she guffawed. "But not to eat. The meat is considered unholy! It's the worldly vessel of sin! You're not supposed to eat it, you're supposed to burn it and bury it—purge it from physical existence!"

  Leonard failed to see the humor in any of this. "Just tell me. Was there anything wrong with the pig? Like, was it diseased or anything like that?"

  "Well, no. It was just a normal pig."

  Leonard nodded snidely. "Yeah? Well yesterday I was a normal guy. But since I ate some of that pig I've noticed...changes about myself."

  Esther's fluttering laughter stopped cold. "What kind of changes?" she asked in a voice that suddenly rang very serious.

  "Well, I've noticed some changes in my, uh, behavior." You got that right, Leonard, he told himself in sarcasm. I pulled a heroin addict's head off with my bare hands, stuck her tongue in her eye, and threw her body to the dogs. And there was another heroin addict there too, and I cut her body in half at the waist and then had sex with the bottom half. Would you consider that a change in normal behavior?

  Instead, Leonard kept it simple. "I've become moody, hot-tempered, impatient, you know. And one more thing. I mean I thought maybe it's an allergy or something but—"

  "But what!"

  A pause. A raise of the brow. Then he had out with it.

  "I turned green."

  The silence which followed troubled him. "Let me get a lamp lit," he heard Esther mutter in the darkness. There was some faint clatter, then a match flared. She lit the wick of a globed oil lamp and turned up the light.

  Then she put that light on Leonard.

  "I hate to tell you this," she admitted after a long hard gander. "But you haven't just turned green."

  "What are you talking about?" the dark question flowed from his throat. And the answer was just as dark.

  "You've turned into a fuckin' demon," she said.

  ««—»»

  The moments—and then the hours—that followed seemed to wilt together as intertwining strands of nightmare. Horror folded over into self-revelation which then folded over into more horror until it was all the same thing. No doubt this change—this transposition—ensued as a progressive event. Earlier at the house, he was just green but when Esther shined that lamplight on him and he looked down at himself, he easily noted that he had become far more than just green. He'd grown bigger, huskier, hairier. His former spindly-form film-school-geek body had mammothed out into a sinuous carriage of terrifying musculature. Rippled pecs sculpted his upper torso; his belly looked runneled, and his shoulders tapered down to a V of butterflied latissimus dorsi and venosity. Nails like sharpened pitons stuck out of his fingers, and he now stood on feet that were huge, splayed, and webbed. Before all
human reason left him, he of course looked down at his genitals and gasped. On a good day Leonard could pull a six-inch hard one, but what now hung between his legs had to be ten inches flaccid: a fat, slightly curled tube of sexual sausage with a snout of foreskin hanging off the end. Er, a snout of green foreskin, that is. He remembered thinking, That's not my dick! Where did this whopper come from! He also remembered grabbing it, shaking it in disbelief like a slab of raw steak. And the previously walnut-sized testicle occupying his scrotum now hung down in its fleshy sac, about the size of a baseball.

  He thanked God she didn't have a mirror, for what must his face look like? He didn't want to see, but then he didn't really have to because a forbidden instinct urged him to slowly raise his gargantuan hands and touch his forehead, where he felt two protruding horns.

  Sometime thereafter, he ran screaming out of the dorm, running, running—yes, but to where he had no idea. He just ran and ran, quite aimlessly, pounding through the woods and overgrown fields, thinking, I'm a fuckin' demon! I'm a fuckin' demon! What the hell am I gonna do now?