The House Read online

  One night in the winter, Rocco and Knuckles had barged into the house by surprise, Knuckles shoving in a living female figure with her hands tied behind her back and a burlap sack over her head. "Get your camera, kid," Rocco had so ordered, something sharply hostile in his voice. Leonard did so, then followed the accommodating noise to the farthest bedroom—the "ready" room, Rocco called it. He called it the ready room because it was reserved for features that resulted in an invariable mess upon conclusion. These "messes" had, until tonight, of course, existed exclusively in the form of urine, feces, vomit, and semen—hence the room's perpetual carpet, so to speak, of plastic drop cloths which made cleanup quick and easy and prevented the excretions from permeating the room's hardwood floor. Yet when Leonard arrived in the ready room, it was not the expected "dime-dropping" or "holding-out" street prostitute that lay in wait. It was a robust, scrupulously clean and well-nourished woman in—Leonard guessed—her early 20s. She was beautiful, peaches and cream, the girl next-door, and Knuckles had lashed her, arms and legs widely parted, to a work bench built especially for such events. Her keen-hazel eyes couldn't have been wider in horror as they darted about. A rubber ball and strap sufficiently gagged her, reducing any vocal remonstrance to rough, muffled oddments of unpleasant noise.

  Rocco shot Leonard a dagger glare. "Fuckin' Weinstein boned us bad, kid."

  "Uh, who?" Leonard asked.

  "Sixth District Appellate Court judge. We warned the fucker, we even offered him a hundred large to skim the case, but, no, that asshole had to think he's Super Judge. The motherfucker slapped life without parole on two of Vinch's Manhattan lieutenants. Vinch wants payback. Bigtime."

  Leonard stood in a veil of subtle confusion. "So, uh, who's, uh, who's this woman?"

  "Weinstein's fuckin' daughter, that's who," Rocco cracked back. "Fancy pants ritzy blue-blood bitch. She goes to Princeton, for Christ's sake. Belongs to fuckin' country clubs."

  "Uh-oh," Leonard said.

  "Vinch says we give her the works."

  The works. This sounded rather ominous, and something deep in Leonard's gut did a quick hitch. He supposed it was the cryptic "scent of fear" that instilled itself about the room now, a hot, bitter tang wafting off the girl's skin in her sweat. Then Rocco withdrew a hypodermic needle and injected its contents into the judge's daughter's arm.

  "What, uh, what's that, Mr. Rocco?" Leonard inquired.

  "Pharm-grade speed. So she won't pass out from the pain. Vinch wants her feelin' the whole job," Rocco explained.

  "Oh," Leonard said.

  Then, Rocco again: "Knuckles. Get me Dick Nixon."

  Yes, this was ominous, all right. The masks, Leonard realized. Rocco pulled the jowly rubber Richard Milhous Nixon mask over his head, while Knuckles followed suit with Barry Goldwater.

  At least they were keeping it all in the party.

  Then the likeness of America's 37th President pointed at Leonard and, as if by executive order, snapped, "Roll 'em!"

  Leonard pulled a quick tracking shot, then homed in. "Your old man fucked up, bitch," Rocco said through the President's mouth-hole, and slapped the victim in the face. "So now you're fucked. We're gonna do a job on you that would make the devil puke."

  Of that, Leonard had little doubt, and as the "job" began, he dissociated his sentient mind from the gist of the occasion and merely pretended he was shooting a...well, a political documentary. It was with a casual and even a smooth calm that Knuckles, as controversial Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, began to—SNICK! SNICK! SNICK!—clip off all of Ms. Weinstein's toes with a pair of boltcutters. With each SNICK! her back arched up off the workbench and her throat generated a sound, however muffled, reminiscent to a dog bark. Then came a series of smothered, high-tone mewls as Rocco pinched closed her nostrils, the gag-ball already blocking her oral airway. Her body gently convulsed as her face pinked; Rocco released her nose each time she was about to pass out. Then—zzzip!—he pulled out his long, thin penis and urinated liberally all over her. The urine and the fear-stench of her sweat about knocked Leonard out.

  Knuckles dropped trow and stepped right up between her widely parted legs. A quick spit of saliva on her vagina and then he was humping away. For all of several seconds.

  "Oooo, yeah," he grunted.

  "Here comes the judge!" Rocco celebrated.

  Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.

  "I'm saving my nut for later, Knucks," Rocco elucidated. "The more I work on this bitch, the harder I get. Guess I had a bad childhood, huh?"

  Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.

  Leonard, on the other hand, had no inclination at all to laugh. He just kept his eye glued to the Canon's eyepiece and tried to get lost in its whir. The victim's gagged whine rose machinelike behind her throat as Rocco slapped Craftsman visegrips onto her rosebud nipples and pulled. Her eyes seemed lidless now; her delicate areolae were yanked out to a surprising length, like off-pink taffy, and Knuckles then did the same with her clitoris. Her body bucked, her wet back slapping the benchtop. Now Rocco was twisting the VGs, making pink corkscrews of flesh. Knuckles, far less articulate, merely stretched the clitoris and hood out as far as he could and then—snip!—quickly clipped off the fleshy bulb with a pair of tin-snips. This brought a sound like a gush of gravel from her muffled throat, and also a summary release of the entire contents of her bladder and bowel.

  Now the room was a virtual brew of unearthly aromas. Leonard quite imagined the deepest grottoes of hell smelling the same.

  And certainly the scene, too, provided a similar image. I am the cameraman of hell, Leonard mused.

  With a frozen-food knife, Rocco sawed off both of her pretty little ears, with no more concern than if he were cutting off the ends of a French bread. Knuckles ran the lit end of a blow torch up and down her shins, turning them black in no time. More mewling, more bucking, more convulsant slaps of her bare, wet back against the bench's top. Rocco's intramuscular injection of amphetamines into Ms. Weinstein's bloodstream did indeed keep her conscious through the job. Knuckles baked off her pubic hair and then cooked the raw meat of her genitalia until it resembled a forgotten hamburger patty left on the grill. Rocco cut a line across her forehead with a penknife and scalped her, yanking off the human wig with a suspicious expertise. The tin snips cut off her nose, and the frozen-food knife sawed off her breasts. Only now did her autonomic responses begin to simmer down to just feeble twitching.

  "Knucks, gimme a shank."

  Knuckles passed Rocco a knife—not the trademark German "Hoffried"-brand angel-blade that had divorced Leonard from a testicle, but a Gerber MkIII (nice shiv, by the way). "I'm hard as a fuckin' rock now," Rocco announced and slipped the blade from its sheath. "Gotta gut-fuck this bitch before she croaks."

  The camera whirred and whirred and Leonard's mind swam and swam. Rocco planted the blade into her lower abdomen, then quickly crawled up and inserted his penis into the wound. He humped and humped, and without further delay—

  "Ahhhh, yeah! I'm comin' in this bitch's stomach fierce, man! Fuckin'-A!"

  Whether or not Ms. Weinstein was still alive at this moment scarcely mattered. The continued meager twitches of her body could've been involuntary muscle spasms of the peri-mortal state. Rocco finished dumping his semen into her abdomen, then slithered off. "Keep that camera rollin', kid. We ain't finished yet."

  Not finished? came the aghast thought. What else can you do to her?

  Leonard found out in short order when Rocco decapitated the woman with a twelve-inch coping saw. Leonard's teeth ground at the noise, a steady wet gristly gust, rocking back and forth. Then Knuckles seared graffiti lines of char over the rest of her body.

  The stench couldn't have been worse now. Burned hair, burned flesh, shit, piss, and death-sweat. Leonard was only able to breathe through wincing hiccups as he tried his best to keep the camera on angle. "Last shot, kid," Rocco instructed. "Get a good closeup."

  Rocco detached the strap and ball from the head's m
outh, then sat down in a metal chair, his pants down to mid-thigh. At first it appeared that he'd merely placed the scalped head in his lap but in a moment the crucial detail was made obvious. Rocco had inserted his penis into the esophagal entrance where her neck had been severed, and now—

  "Ahhhh," Rocco intoned. "How ya like that, your Honor?"

  —he was urinating yet again, only now the urine spewed from the dead girl's mouth. Leonard rolled in the zoom for a close angle shot, then retreated for the final image: Richard Nixon pissing out of a severed head's mouth.

  "All right, cut it, kid. Good job." When Leonard turned off the camera, Rocco dropped the head, pulled his pants up, and yanked off the Nixon mask. "We'll be back tomorrow," Rocco said, waving his hand at the stench. "Have the print developed and ready. We want to mail it to the judge soon as possible."

  "Uh, right," Leonard affirmed.

  Rocco and Knuckles made their exit, leaving Leonard at least with the proud credit of having just made his first official snuff film.

  Later, while the film was in the processor, he buried the body and the head in the back yard, and he buried the charnel drop cloth.

  The room, though, would continue to stink for weeks to come.

  ««—»»

  Leonard supposed that the above represented the peak of his film-making for the Mob. The rare other "specials" seemed tame by comparison. Though there were some other specials. Occasionally, Rocco would bring up bums, homeless men—"rummies," he called them. Leonard filmed these unfortunate men as the even more unfortunate Sissy and Snowdrop were ordered to perform fellatio on penises that clearly had not been washed in years or even decades. Sagging, mite-infested scrotums raised a stench that even Leonard could smell halfway across the room. And sores, herpes, foreskins laden with smegma were not excuses to desist. "Go on, honey," Rocco ordered Sissy as he watched once. "A little dickcheese ain't gonna hurt ya. Hell, I shoulda brought some Ritz!"

  Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.

  On one occasion, they'd brought up an articulate, cologned mulatto man in his '50s nicknamed "Plugger." Plugger spoke in a tint of a femmy English accent, and was very well-poised. He ran the initial accounting den for Harlem's numbers racket, which Vinchetti's crime family got one-third of. He always wore a tan leisure suit with a chocolate-brown silk shirt, the collar out. Yet the front of his pants seemed...stuffed with something.

  Leonard saw with what when Plugger took his pants off.

  "Ain't that somethin', kid?" Rocco remarked, a smile in his eye.

  Plugger had a very rare disease syndrome known as endogenitalitis with resultant "counter hypogonadism." And pituitary irregularity combined with an inability to regulate zinc oxide metabolites from infancy to pre-adolescence caused this bizarre affliction which struck only one in ten million. Ninety percent of all male sufferers died by the age of eleven, while ninety-nine percent of females died. What the syndrome entailed exactly was a hyper-accelerated growth of the sex organs. They essentially never stopped growing.

  Hence was Plugger, a rare survivor. By age 50, the syndrome had turned his penis and gonads into things that scarcely looked as such now. A scrotum stretched to the point of shining, housing lumpen testicles the size of boiler onions. A penile shaft that, flaccid, measured sixteen inches long and probably four wide. A glans big around as a navel orange.

  "Holy shit," Leonard muttered.

  Then it was lights, camera, and action. "A delectable measure of talent," Plugger complimented as Sissy and Snowdrop fervently laved the elephantine genitals with their tongues. They were antsy tonight, fired up and nearly shivering in their zeal, for both were close to clinical withdrawal. "Twins of passion," Plugger commented, lounging back on the floor, manicured hands behind his head. "You, blondie," Rocco gestured Snowdrop. "Do that finger thing like last time."

  "Huh?" Snowdrop squinted at him.

  Rocco kicked her in the side of the head. "Stick your finger in his dickhole!"

  Snowdrop, her memory refreshed, was quick to comply. "A most tantalizing combination of sensations," Plugger pointed out. Snowdrop sheened her index finger with saliva and inserted it into Plugger's urethra, drew it fully in and out as Sissy masturbated the mammoth tube of flesh with both hands. Rocco articulated, "Yeah, it takes two hands to handle the whopper!"

  Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.

  Now Snowdrop was drawing two, then three fingers in and out of Plugger's urethra.

  It took at least twenty minutes of proper attention before Plugger's penis came fully erect. And, erect, it proffered a terrifying vision. It looked like some strange, glistening and puffy sea creature. Eyeless, with a puckered mouth. Beneath which sat the bloated scrotum traced with veins.

  Rocco took the camera away from Leonard. "Okay, kid, here's where I take over. Hate to do this to ya but it's how Vinch wants it."

  "Um, what?" Leonard asked.

  "Have one of the bitches blow ya till you get hard, then fuck Plugger."

  Leonard stared. Blinked. Gulped. "You want me to, uh, sodomize the man?"

  Rocco frowned, setting the Canon on his shoulder. "No, kid, you ain't gotta butt-fuck him. Get your willy up and fuck his dick."

  "Um...oh," Leonard said.

  Plugger winked at him, grinned with—believe it or not—a gold tooth. "Step right up, my boy. It'll be grand!"

  Leonard sorely doubted that it would be grand. Sissy briskly sucked his cock amid a flurry of wet, smacking sounds as Leonard squeezed his eyes shut and thought very resolutely about the hostess at the Widow's Walk. He thought long and hard but, alas, it took some time before Leonard could achieve the necessary erection considering what he would resultantly be required to do with it.

  "Come on, kid," Rocco griped. "You're pissin' me off. Raise that crane and get with it. The Yankees are playing fuckin' Baltimore tonight."

  "Hurry!" Sissy whispered up to him, a grim plea in her eyes. "Don't get him mad!"

  It was a good point. Thus far, Leonard had managed to avoid Rocco's wrath, and he facilitated this simply by doing what he was told. Do as you're told, Leonard thought desperately. Perhaps it was the fear element, then, but against all odds, Leonard finally achieved an erection—

  "Yeah, good, good woody, kid," Rocco praised from behind the camera. "Now fuck Plugger's dick and come in it."

  Leonard considered that these were perhaps the most absurd words ever spoken in the history of civilization. "That's the spirit, son!" Plugger elated, standing now and holding out the strange tube of meat. The urethral entry was already well-lubricated with Snowdrop's spit, so Leonard—

  —stared. Blinked. And gulped—

  —and then admitted his penis into Plugger's urethral tract.

  It was a tight fit, yet Plugger, the passive partner of this standing duo, made no protest. Leonard held Plugger's shaft as he moved his hips back and forth. More strained thoughts then, of the Widow's Walk's pert and horny hostess, the new girl on Charlie's Angels, Helga on Hogan's Heroes, the cover of Roxy Music's Country Life, and, the end-all: Mary Ann from Gilligan, and those preeminent packed breasts, the tan tummy, and the cute little farm-girl bellybutton. What was a farm girl doing on the Minnow anyway? Didn't she have fields to tend to? What the fuck was a farm girl doing on a three-hour tour?

  The questions aside, the images sufficed. Leonard successfully ejaculated quite quickly into Plugger's penis, rifling what seemed a dozen hard spurts of semen.

  "Mmmmmm, a hot one," Plugger approved and winked.

  "Hey," Rocco cracked from behind the whirring camera. "Maybe you'll have a dick-baby!"

  Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.

  Leonard exhaled in a blurt, and withdrew, and with that came the most absurd thought of all: I just came in a man's dick...

  "Watch this, kid! This is great!" Rocco enthused.

  Sissy, on her knees, inclined her face toward the ceiling, open-mouthed like a chick awaiting nourishment from a dutiful hen. Plugger walked over, his fingers pi
nching off his urethra. Then he lowered the gargantuan cock to the target sight, released his fingers, and out fell all of Leonard's sperm directly into Sissy's waiting mouth.

  That was about it for Leonard; the acknowledgment that he had just had coitus with a penis was not easy to cope with, after all. Rocco gave back the camera, and Leonard filmed the rest in a mercifully forgetful blur: Plugger slicking his swollen penis up with Noxema, then sodomizing both girls until he eventually ejaculated white worms into Sissy's face.

  "What a man!" Rocco obliged later, and slapped Leonard on the back. "Your daddy'd be proud!"

  "Damn straight," added Knuckles. "I know mine would."

  Leonard, mind-blown, rather doubted that his dear, dead father would approve of his son's fornicating with another man's penis, not that he paid it much mind. Instead he retreated to the dark room to begin processing this latest snippet of dementia. There seemed no end, now, to the limits to which human sexual activity could be exploited for the purposes of perversion.

  And the girls, by the way, bled for days.

  ««—»»

  On the night they brought the pig, Leonard was in the cutting room trying to tune in the SoundDesign FM radio. (There was an 8-track player, too, and a record "changer.") Sometimes at night he could pull in D.C.-area stations, which were a godsend. Leonard had been weaned, so to speak, on WHMC from Montgomery County, Maryland, namely the Barry Richards Show, "The Home of The Heavy, Heavy Head"; back when music had some artistic integrity with the likes of Lothar and the Hand People, the original King Crimson (not this watered-down-for-money-with-some-bald-guy-in-the-group shit they were doing today), early Pink Floyd, and Sir Lord Baltimore, which made the hard rock of the '90s look like The Mickey Mouse Club. As the early '70s degraded into the mid-'70s, Richard's show bit the dust at about the same time as Chuck Colson and E. Howard Hunt. Along, then, came the next wave of music that was supposed to defy commercial strictures: Peter Hammill's terraschizoid warbling with Van der Graaf Generator, Throbbing Gristle, the Buzzcocks before Howard Devoto quit, Hawkwind, Robert Calvert, Adrian Wagner, Magma, the Fripp and Eno projects, and tons more good shit that perpetuated music as an art form. No Lemonheads in this bunch, fella. No doubt, there was no No Doubt, and you can bet your corona The Spice Girls weren't nothing but yet-to-be-produced sperm cells in their Brit daddies' balls where they really-really-really-really-really-really should've stayed.