The Haunter Of The Threshold Read online

  “Good. Now, with one hand, play with my cock.”

  You hitch when you reopen your eyes. He’d already gotten it out, and there it hangs—so suddenly—right in your face. It’s limp but fat, with a collar of wrinkled skin. Wiry hairs stick out all around it, as if disgorged through the zipper. You begin to knead it with your fingertips, then—perhaps out of instinct—you incline forward, opening your mouth.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I...Don’t you want me to—”

  “If I wanted you to suck it, I would have said so. Play with it, but just with that hand. The other one stays on your knee. And pull the balls out and play with those too.”

  You dig into the opened zipper, then gingerly extract his testicles. You cup them, squeeze a few times ever so gently, then let your hand coruscate around their hot, meaty weight. You smell soap, and even in the midst of this atrocious crime think: At least he washed first. How do you like that? A hygienic rapist...

  But that’s what this is, beyond a doubt. A rape. You always hear about it on the news or read it in the paper, you reflect. It’s always something that happens to someone else...But now it’s happening to me.

  “Good. Now stand up.”

  You’d emptied your bladder without realizing it, and when you look again you notice that his penis is fully erect and beating noticeably, well more than average size.

  Smack!

  You whine at this next smack across your face. “What did I do? ”

  “I said stand up,” and then his hand lands in your hair and pulls, yanking you to your feet. Your face buzzes from the slaps, and your scalp aches.

  “Open the medicine cabinet.”

  You watch your shock-wide eyes and moist face slide away as you open the mirrored door.

  “Let’s see,” he says to himself. “There, the Vaseline. Take the top off and put the jar on the floor, then sit back on the toilet.”

  What on earth..., yet you do so, but when you look back up for his next command, all you see is his bobbing erection.

  “With your right hand, keep stroking my cock, and with your left hand take the rubber out of my right pocket.”

  Rubber? You find the packet, and feel now with your other hand that his penis is even harder. When you squeeze it, it doesn’t give at all.

  “Now put the rubber on my cock,” he says, the gun still hovering around your face. “And do it right.” A chuckle. “You’ve probably never even seen a rubber before. What I hear is you let all those students of yours fuck you bareback.”

  When you glare at him—

  Smack!

  —you get another, harder crack across the face. The impact stifles you this time, you reel a moment, then fumble frantically to remove the condom and roll it down over his penis.

  Now it looks alien as it throbs before your eyes. It looks like something cooked and packaged. At this moment, that’s what the whole world is: this rapist’s erection sheathed in latex.

  “Hands and knees,” he tells you, and when you assume the position as ordered, he continues, “Turn your head to the right, then put your cheek to the floor,” and after you obey, “Stick your fingers in the Vaseline jar and pull out a glob. Rub it all over your asshole, and when you’re done doing that, I want you to reach back and pull your butt apart.”

  Your heart hammers. When you’re finished...

  “Ugh!”

  He’d already kneed up behind you and slammed his penis in. The abrupt pressure startles you. Your assailant wastes no time; he’s pistoning in and out of you quite quickly, drawing the corona all the way out with each stroke, only to plunge it immediately back in. After but ten strokes, you tighten your rectum—you’ve tended to enjoy anal sex with lovers, and constricting your anus was something you’d read in Cosmo to increase the man’s pleasure. It makes sense, doesn’t it? To please this rapist, for if you don’t he’ll only be more liable to kill you. So you tighten it as hard as you can—

  The man moans, and immediately steps up his pace. You feel his testicles slapping your vagina. Then—

  He grunts, hitches, the strokes retard and eventually stop. Moments later, you feel his penis begin to deflate inside you.

  This is when you make your most grave mistake.

  You chuckle.

  “Funny?” he snaps. “What’s funny?” and then you squeal as he grabs your hair again and hauls you to your feet. “What? I came fast, so that’s funny? ”

  “No, no,” you sob.

  He slams you so hard against the bathroom door, all your wind goes out. You see him put the gun down, but in the tense paralysis that companions your impact with the door, you can’t even think much less commence in a defensive move. Stars burst before your eyes...

  “Let’s see how funny this is,” and then something goes around your neck, and in the buzz of your terror you realize what it is: the sash from your robe.

  You gasp, tears pouring now. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t laughing, I swear–”

  Crack!

  Another slap to the face. “Yes, you were. You were laughing at me for coming fast. Well, fuck it, I was gonna let you go, but I think I’ll just hang you instead.”

  It’s almost with an expertise that he loops the sash over the hook on the door. You can’t help but deduce, He’s done this before. Your breath barely returns when both of his hands pull down on the other end of the sash.

  The makeshift noose tightens as you rise and your feet leave the bathroom’s cool tile. Your fingers fly to relieve the noose but it’s too tight. Your face begins to swell.

  You hear his words now like something muttered in a fish bowl: “Yeah, I guess I’ll just hang you, since you’re not gonna be a good girl.”

  Your bare heels pound the door. You’re kicking, however, uselessly, for your life, and somehow you manage to force words through the noose constricting your throat: “I’ll be a good girl, I’ll be a good girl—”

  Thunk!

  He lets the sash go and you collapse to the floor.

  The near-strangulation leaves you more disoriented than your worst drunk. Equilibrium is long gone, you’re propped on the floor like a lone survivor on a raft rocking in high seas. There’s a drone in your head that sounds, somehow, evil, and you know that’s what this is: the coal-black evil of lust, perversity, and mental illness dropped like a depth charge into the middle of your life. He grabs the stout brush of hair banded behind your head and shakes it. “Don’t pass out. We’re not done. Look up here,” and you squeal again when he gives your hair a hard twist.

  “Take the rubber off. Grab it by the end with your thumb and forefinger and then—listen!—upend it over the toilet. Let the cum fall out of it into the toilet.”

  The evil drone is fading all too slowly. Your cognizance struggles to understand him. When you see his crotch in your face, you smell your own excrement wafting off it: a rich, fresh funk. Your hands shake when you carefully slip the condom off and empty its contents into the toilet.

  “Now...” His voice is back to the cool, calm monotone. “Eat the cum out of the toilet.”

  Dizzily, you look up at him. Your lips tremble as if to speak, but then the pistol is shoved into your face again.

  “The thing on the end of my gun is called a chambered sound-suppressor,” he tells you. “You know, a silencer? Like in the movies? The gun’s loaded with sub-sonic ammunition. If I squeeze this trigger, there’ll be no noise. No one will hear the sound. Do you understand?”

  Wobbling on your knees, you gulp, manage to nod, then lower your face into the toilet.

  It is an act completely subconscious, however, when your hand flies up to your chest to hold back the cross, so it will not depend into the water.

  You see the sperm floating there, the milk-white coagulation. You think of a piece of twist pasta. Only now do you remember that after you urinated you didn’t flush, so not only will you have to eat his sperm, but you’ll have to eat it out of toilet water tinted by your own piss. You stick your lips out l
ike fish lips, lower more, and suck.

  You get it on your first try, slurping the lump into your mouth and swallowing.

  When you lift your head out, he bends over to inspect. “Hmm. Good,” he says in more of the same cool voice, but then it is with his most aggressive violence yet that he grabs your throat and hurls you into the bathtub. Your elbows, knees, and head all thunk against the inside of the tub.

  “Put the stopper in the drain,” he orders. His penis is still hanging out, withered as if exhausted, and wriggling as he speaks, “then lay on your back.”

  You don’t even attempt to understand. The pain in various areas throbs when you turn around in the cramped tub and incline yourself. For one second, you dare to look up. You see him there, standing, gun hovering.

  Feebly, you whimper, “I—I’m on my back now...”

  “I can see that. Just be quiet. Now pull your knees back to your shoulders, all the way back as far as you can.”

  Here is another unwitting opportunity to please him. From first grade to twelfth you were a gymnast. Your nimble physique, spry form, and double-jointedness left you perfect for this mode of athleticism. With almost no effort, you bring your knees back and slip them fully behind your shoulders.

  “Wow, that’s cool,” he remarks.

  But then he begins urinating on you.

  You tense in the contorted position; the initial stream hits your belly with such force, it stings. Then he rakes it across your nipples, and they constrict. His urine feels piping hot. You seethe through your teeth when he zigzags the stream back down your belly, then roves it up and down over your vaginal groove. He seems to be trying to piss into you from a distance.

  “The reason I had you stopper the tub is because I don’t want it going down the drain,” he says, half-focused on his task. “When I’m done pissing, you’re going to drink it. You’re the drain. Get it?”

  I’m the drain, you think.

  But what will come after that?

  You’re being showered on. Your flesh is someone’s yard being sprinkled, and you writhe beneath it all.

  “Put your hand between your legs and open your pussy...”

  When you do, the stream begins to separate the folds of your vagina.

  “Now masturbate,” he says next.

  The word, oddly, clunks in your head.

  “You heard me.” A bit more gruff. “Masturbate.”

  Again, the word clunks. It’s like a bad chord tainting competent music.

  “You deaf? Masturbate! Masturbate while I’m pissing on you!”

  The last clunk, then the muse shatters like safety glass. You’ve got to be kidding me! you think, and then you unlock your knees from behind your shoulders, slouch up, and eye him with a sigh and look of either disgust or grievous disappointment.

  “Damn it, Ashton!” you yell. “That’s not in the script! You messed it all up again!”

  The stream of urine dwindles. The intruder pulls off the false beard and goes, “Huh?”

  It was done. Just like that. The build-up had been near-perfect, but then he had to go and wreck it all. I didn’t even get to come, she griped to herself.

  Hazel Greene hopped up in the tub and yanked the stopper chain. A dull vehemence beat headache-like behind her eyes as she cranked on the shower.

  “I followed the script!” insisted the “rapist,” who was actually Hazel’s boyfriend–er, her semi- boyfriend, she thought of him as–a grad student named Ashton Clark.

  “You screwed up the words, Ashton.” She twirled in the shower spray, plunged her face in, then began to lather up with this neat body wash she’d found that smelled like blueberry muffins. “The words, the words, the words.”

  Ashton stared at her.

  Hazel shook her head, which was now an aura of bubbles. “Ashton, a rapist would never say masturbate. He’d say ‘frig yourself, bitch,’ or ‘Play with your pussy’ or ‘finger your snatch’. Something like that.”

  “Oh for shit’s sake!” Ashton flung the dollar-store beard in the waste can, put his penis back in his pants, washed his hands, and stormed out of the room.

  Oops, Hazel thought.

  After she’d dried off, she traipsed into the living room, wearing only panties covered with orange Smiley Face bats and a towel wrapped about her head. With a cat-grin she came up behind him in the chair and began to rub his shoulders. “Ashton, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to criticize you–”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” came the obvious sarcasm as he looked coldly at the TV. “I feel like such a loser that I didn’t get your precious script right again.”

  “I over-reacted,” she whined, “I’m sorry. You were really getting me into it—I thought it would be the best ever, but then—”

  “I said the wrong words,” he finished with a smirk. “Christ, the things I do for women. Makes me wonder about myself; I must be co-dependent or something. Next you’ll be wanting me to take acting lessons, just so you can have a better time.”

  “You seemed to have a good time,” Hazel almost snapped back. “You came, didn’t you?”

  “Hazel, I had to force myself.” He laughed sardonically. “I had to think about doing you missionary-style. Shit, what ever happened to the good ole slow comfortable screw, huh? I guess people just don’t do that anymore, do they? It’s blasé. I guess I’m just not hip ‘cos I’m not into all this sexual perversion and deviation stuff.”

  Now Hazel pouted. “It’s just a game, Ashton. Lots of couples do it. It’s just innocent role-playing.”

  He gawped at her. “Hazel, Dungeons and Dragons is role-playing. Choking a woman and pissing on her in order to fulfill her addiction to rape-fantasies is something else altogether.”

  He just doesn’t understand, Hazel thought. He’ll get over it. “But this time it was really intense. Maybe I’m the one who should be an actor. I really was able to assume the mind-set of a rape victim. Never once did I—”

  “Wait, wait,” he said holding his hand up as a commercial ended. “I want to hear this. It’s more about that guy who survived the Mother’s Day Storm.”

  Him again, Hazel thought. Frank’s friend. She sat on the edge of Ashton’s chair and began to pat her hair dry. What the news had dubbed the Mother’s Day Storm was still mystifying the meteorological and scientific community. It happened two months ago, shortly before dawn; the entire downtown area of St. Petersburg, Florida, had been ravaged by what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Hurricane Center had determined to be some manner of fluke storm activity, something described as a spontaneous confined array of multiple-vortex tornados. 2,900 people had died, with several times that injured, making it the country’s worst natural disaster since the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. This man that Ashton was watching had been the only survivor from the “ground zero” point, where all of the vortexes had apparently touched down. Billions of dollars of damage had been done, several “storm-proof” high-rises had actually collapsed while dozens more had blown out all their windows and had their entire contents sucked out. Occupied apartment complexes were flattened, and even the famous St. Petersburg Pier was torn from its steel-and-cement moorings and broken into chunks. A harrowing tragedy, yes, but like many young people, Hazel regarded it with a distanced detachment. Indeed, like rape, hurricanes, tornados, tidal waves, etc., were things that only happened to other people.

  “There he is,” Ashton said of the picture flashed on the national news, news: that of a fiftyish man with solemn, intelligent eyes and a gray-touched goatee. “Wilmarth. Did you know he taught here?”

  “Yes, Ashton,” Hazel droned, bored already. I guess I should have more compassion, she realized of her aloofness, like my father always said. “Didn’t I tell you? Frank Barlow knew him very well.”

  “Frank–oh, you mean, Professor Barlow, the head of the geometry department?”

  “Yeah. Sonia’s fiancé.”

  Ashton smirked, like he always did whenever Hazel referred to
her best friend, Professor Sonia Heald, by her first name. “Yeah, the fastest way to earn the title of fiancé is to knock a woman up.”

  Hazel slapped him— not quite as hard as she would’ve liked–on the shoulder. She changed the subject’s tangent, jabbing her finger at the TV. “So, what? The guy died a few days ago, right? Was he murdered?”

  “Maybe if you’d stop talking, we could find out,” and then Ashton turned the volume up. A blond newscaster who looked more suited for Hooters employment was informing: “—hours ago when the Belknap County Coroner’s Office ruled suicide as Professor Henry Wilmarth’s official cause of death. Wilmarth, a professor in high-standing at Providence, Rhode Island’s Brown University, was found dead on his property four nights ago. Local police initially believed that Wilmarth had been murdered, as his lodgings were found ransacked upon the discovery of his body. Today, however, we know that Professor Wilmarth took his own life by hanging himself. Wilmarth miraculously survived last May’s massive multiple-vortex tornado system which killed nearly 3000 residents in a fifteen-minute period and damaged or demolished a several-square-mile perimeter of the city of St. Petersburg. Shortly before sunrise on May 12, Wilmarth had been sitting on a bench in a park-area known as Mirror Lake, and witnessed the entire storm from all directions. He’d undergone treatment for shock immediately afterward, and later, trauma therapy.” Now the screen showed an aerial of “ground zero.” Trees were uprooted, buildings either crushed or roofless, car-sized chunks of rubble lay scattered everywhere save for a modest circle of land near a pond. A graphic arrow appeared on the screen, pointing to that circle, with the legend, WILMARTH’S POSITION DURING THE STORM.

  “Good God,” Ashton gasped. “Every time they show this, it looks worse. It looks like Berlin after the Allied bomber offensive.”

  “All but that little area where Professor Wilmarth was sitting,” Hazel remarked with fading attention. “Talk about lucky...”

  The newscaster went on, “Wilmarth commented very little about his eye witnessing the storm, only to say, ‘It wasn’t a tornado cluster. Of that I’m certain...’”