Magovitch lies back on the cool sheets, satin like slippery midnight skin, and tries not to think about the twins, nor Jimi de Sade. Watches Tam at her cluttered, antique dressing table, the back of her head - hair blacker than the sheets, and her face reflected stark in the art deco looking glass. Knowing he could hate her if only he were a little bit stronger; if he’d never let himself love her. She selects a small brush and cupid’s bow of her upper lip, her unruined pout, and he looks away, stares up at the blank ceiling, the dangling forest of manekina hanging there, dolls and parts of dolls, ripe and rotting Stacy as fruit would on copper wire and cobalt twine. The ragged puff from the AC stirs them, makes them sway, some close enough to bump into others, a leg against an arm, an arm against a plastic torso.

And then Tam comes teasingly slow towards him, crosses the room in nothing but white: bone-pale skin and a touch of sanguine with crimson panties. She crouches on the foot of the bed, just out of reach - a living gargoyle down from the cathedral, stone made flesh by some unlikely and unforgiving alchemy. Her eyes sparkle in the tube’s electric glare, more hungry than Faustchrista ever imagined; as she speaks, her left hand drifts absently to the tattoo that entirely covers her heart: the maroon and ebony petals that evoke her nipple and areola, bramble that twine themselves tight around her breast and draw rippling-ink lacrimal blood.

    “I’m sure Larc and Krizpian won’t disappoint me,” she says, the smile a wound on her pristine face. “They never do.” 

And of course she’s cradling the navaja in her right hand, the straight and silver razor with its mother-of-pearl handle, a clean swath of bottomless green and blue iridescence. “And you won’t ever disappoint me, sweet Maggie.”

He sits up, no need for her to have to ask, turns his back and grips with cold, tense claws the iron headboard, palms around the gritty metal like prison bars. The old springs creak and groan gentle protests as she slips across the bed to him - and Magovitch feels her fingertips: Braille tracing the scars on his shoulders, down the length of his spine, one for each night he’s run la sombra with her.

    “You love me,” she sneers and he closes his eyes, and waits for the release of the encrusted blade.

  two

Jimi de Sade’s junkheap car waits for them in the alley, that rumbling hulk of a Lincoln, rust bleeding from a thousand dents and scrapes in its vomit-green skin, one eye blazing, the other dangling blind. Its front fender hangs crooked loose beneath shattered grill teeth, truculent chrome held on with duct tape and gritty wire.  
Jimi opens a door and shoves them all into the backseat.  And the car smells like its own shitty exhaust, stale cigarillos, smoked jane, spilled liquor -- but more than anything else: the sweet, clinging parfum of rot.  Magovitch gags, covers his mouth with a free hand, but then Tam is screaming ... 

    “Don’t mind Fido,” de Sade slurs in the Aussie accent that no one has ever for a minute believed is real, and then the twisted thing stuffed into the corner with Tam tips over, all gore-encrusted fur and limbs bent in the wrong places; and falls stiff across their laps. Its ruined maroon coat is alive with maggots seething, and parts that belong inside are slipping out between shattered ribs.

    “Minnie here ran into the poor thing the other day and shit, mayt, I alwiz wanted a doggy.”

Tam screams again and Krizpian and Larc vomit in perfect, twinly unison; spray booze and the pork-flavored ramen noodles they ate before striking Mag’s apartment onto the roadkill-tangle. Magovitch swallows hard, turns his head to the window as Minnie pulls out of the alley unto the monstrous weekend snarl-up.

    “You stupid, sick f^ck ...” he says, the Gristle twins laugh, and de Sade grins his wide, yellow-toothed hyena face,winks.

  start

In the catacombs beneath downtown, the old tunnels dug a century before for smugglers and Chinese apiyan dens,
and the air is not warm here and smells like mold and stranded water.  Magovitch sits on his bare ass on the stone floor, his black jeans are a shapeless wad nearby, but when he reaches for them it wakes up the pain in his ribs 
and shoulder, and he gasps, slumps back against the seeping wall. There is light, row after row of the stark and soul-bereft fluorescent bulbs.  And so he can see Krizpian and Larc, naked and filthy, huddled together on the other side of the chamber.

Tam, wrapped in muddy vinyl and torn pantyhose, stands with her back to them near the door. There are chains like rust-eaten intestinal loops that end in meathook claws, dangling worse things than the road mutt in Jimi de Sade’s car.

And Jimi sits on the high-backed wooden chair in the center of the room, smoking, watching them.  The others have all gone:  the Gristle twins and the woman with teeth filed to sharp, piranha points, the man lacking ears and only a pink, scar-puckered hole where his nose should’ve been ...

    “Are you finished?”, Tam yells,
  “Are you satisfied?”, and it frightens Magovitch how little her voice has changed, how she’s retained her calm.

shift

Tam turns around slowly, arms crossed and the jacket pulld close to hide her small breasts.  Her face is streaked with blood, makeup smears, and livid bite marks -- the welts and clotting punctures dapple her throat and the backs of her porcelain hands.  The flesh around her left eye looks pulpy and is almost swollen shut.

For a moment, Tam’s old mask holds: indomitable frost and those eyes that betray nothing, show nothing more or less than what she wishes.  But the moment passes and the mask splinters, falls away, revealing the roil beneath; shifting kaleidoscope of bone and skin, tumbling bright flecks of rage and violation.  And Magovitch is almost afraid for Jimi de Sade ...

    “Hey Tammi -- it’s just biz, roit?”, and he holds out his hand to her. “These things happen.  No bad feelin’s?”

Her lips part wet, salmon hint of her tongue between teeth before the cascade of emotion drains away and there’s nothing left in its place, and she falls, collapses into herself and the pull of gravity; crumpling like ash to her knees and the uneven cobblestones.

    “Sure,” de Sade says, “I understand,” and he stands, pushing the chair away. “When you guys are done in here, turn off the lights, okay -- and close the door behind you?”, he points to a switch plate rigged on one wall, a bundle of exposed red and yellow wires.

And they’re alone then, except for the things-without-eyes, the careless hanging sculptures of muscle and barbed wire, and Magovitch drags himself the seven feet to Tam. The pain in his side strobes violet and he has to stop twice, stop and wait for the pain in his head to clear -- the crooning promise of numb and quiet, and cool oblivion pressing at his temples to fade.

  stop

“At times I am cursed with fragments and remnants of otherwise glorious Nightmares. Thankfully I recover in time, and awaken in the Real World: but they carry over; from being whispers-in-the-Dark they turn into actual Horrors. And thus,  every Night (in dreadful fascination) I start all over.” So, when I do find the courage to write about these Fears, it becomes like a stone in my throat, and I catch my breath: the Dreams are so real! 
And a tiny voice in me:  “When will they come and haunt me next?”

  stop