Fantasmagoria (36 page)

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And now, the bonus scene, just like in the movies after the credits have rolled…

(AFTERLUDE) The Creature from Dire Swamp

Moments before his death, Michael had his hand in Julie’s bikini. She choked on a moan as his lips wandered down her neck. She pressed her breasts to his chest.

That was it, the sign to move in.

Michael dipped his index finger between her increasingly slippery labia. Her thighs tensed. The night water was cool, and he could feel her nipples poking through her top. Michael pulled it up and buried his face between her breasts. He moaned into her flesh and sent the sound rumbling across her skin.

Julie closed her eyes and let her head fall back. Michael’s face slipped down the length of her body and into the water, which muffled the barest beginning of a yelp.

Julie stood blinking in the softly lapping water. She looked into the turgid lagoon but saw only the shimmering reflection of the moon. “Mike?”

Julie smiled as she felt his fingers on the lip of her bikini. He tugged it rhythmically. “You’re so bad,” she teased with a smile. “My husband never does that anymore.” She closed her eyes again and ran her hands over her wet, erect nipples waiting for his mouth to find her soft creases.

But they never did, and Julie wondered how long Michael would tease her, and how long he could hold his breath. He was a beautiful man, muscular and fit and hairless like a boy, but he wasn’t very bright. She didn’t want him out of breath. Not yet.

“Mike?” Julie reached into the water and felt his hand hanging on the line of her bikini. It was cold. She lifted it out, and he let her. She sucked on his thumb and rolled her tongue around the tip. “Now come up out of there.” She smiled.

That’s when she noticed the wedding ring. Michael wasn’t married, or at least that’s what he’d told her back at the bar. And she’d checked. Her own entanglements were enough. She didn’t need some crazy bitch that couldn’t hold a man stalking her.

But that raised an impossible question, and a stomach-churning, acid-bile gag. If it wasn’t Mike’s hand, whose hand was it?

Julie’s heart skipped. She stepped back. “Mike?” She lifted the hand out of the water. It was severed at the forearm. Twin bones the color of the moon poked from ragged, waterlogged flesh.

Julie dropped it as her mouth went wide in a silent scream. Her toes curled into mud. Her body was surrounded by the dark, dark water. She was twenty feet from shore.

Julie began heaving, mouth still wide in a scream that could not come. The forearm floated in the water a few feet from her, next to an eyeball.

Julie looked around. What in the darkness she had taken for leaves or other debris were the rounded crests of partially-submerged body parts.

Dozens.

Bobbing gently in the dark.

Julie clutched her stomach. Still her scream wouldn’t come. Neither would the vomit. All around was the unfathomable mystery, the unseen in the water. She wanted her submerged legs to shrivel into her body so she could fly away. Her throat spasmed a series of short, awkward, involuntary coughs. Something brushed against her lower back.

Then came the scream.

Julie ran to shore, hands raised, skin brushing past the collected deaths of countless people. No wonder the beach had been deserted.

Bare-breasted, shrieking, convulsing Julie ran toward the car. She was halfway there before she remembered the keys were in Michael’s jeans lying in a pile on the narrow beach. She turned and stared at the morbid dance in the water. Julie’s breasts quivered and erupted in gooseflesh. She wrapped her hands around her shivering body.

She took a few cautious steps. The only sound was the lapping of the water and the rustle of the leaves in the gentle breeze. Julie caught whiffs of the summer lilacs.

She leaned down, eyes on the water, and felt Mike’s jeans without looking. She pulled the keys free with a jingle. She backed toward the car, climbed in, and drove away.

It was only a moment before she saw the weed-covered ghoul in the back eating Michael’s head. Julie spat and shook in violent heaves. She was terrified beyond control of her body. The car jerked and swerved.

The fiend looked at her in the rear view mirror as if she were a passing cloud and kept eating. It was burnt, decayed, ragged, a skeletal sac covered in vegetation and the last wisps of hair. Its eye sockets were hollow. It seemed to see right through her.

The car shimmied to a halt, and Julie jumped out, red-eyed and whimpering, and ran barefoot down the pavement. She looked back and didn’t see it following her.

She turned forward and there it was. She screamed, stumbled back, and fell.

The taut-fleshed ghoul ripped open her abdomen with skeletal fingers and plunged its face in. Julie screamed as the monster moaned and slurped orgasmically inside her. The threads of hair on its head quivered in ecstasy as it pushed deeper and deeper into her.

“Please!” Julie begged as she pulled and squirmed and hit and felt her insides disappearing, but the creature from the swamp was unmoved. “Please . . . no . . .” she sobbed. “. . . please . . .”

After several moments of dark cunnilingus, the ghoul lifted its red-faced head to the sky in the glory of salvation. Its black teeth had pulled loose a long string of small intestine, and it slurped the guts like spaghetti and swallowed. Then it gasped a smile, like a lecher at climax, and dove for more.

As it chewed and gnawed on the dying woman’s organs, its face began to reform. Muscles grew over its decaying neck, and black fingernails appeared. Long, full locks of white hair sprouted from its charred skull.

It was a woman, a beautiful woman with black eyes and ivory skin as flawless as a marble headstone. And a mouth red with blood.

Julie’s body seized. She had only moments to live, she knew, but her head shook in final disbelief at the creature before her and the sight of her own internal organs.

Her attacker leaned close. “Shhh,” the woman consoled. “It’s okay. It’ll all be over soon. I just need you to tell me where I can find”—she put her mouth close—“
Jack Fulcrum
.”

Appendix:

Gallery of Art

“I was
gnawty
”

Deleted Chapter: Gilbert in the Old Sewers