The Whorehouse That Jack Built Page 3

  A bulb of pre-come the size of a walnut appeared at the tip of the dwarf’s penis. He thumbed it up and into his mouth. He hummed in satisfaction before winking at the albino.

  “And your soul, of course, but most folk who end up here have already forfeited that. So… what’s your poison pilgrim? Make a choice or I’ll choose for ye.”

  A drowned corpse with antlers of coral offered sea anemone orifices. A charred corpse, smoke still coiling from empty eyeholes and anus, croaked of charcoal pleasures. A rot bloated corpse promised a gash overflowing with pus and flesh-grubs.

  The albino said nothing, but his impassive gaze finally slid away from the tempters to settle on the smirking dwarf.

  “Satisfy me,” said the albino.

  McGregor stopped fondling himself.

  “What’d ye say?”

  The albino reached up with two fingers and pulled his smoked glasses further down his nose. His blood shot, pink eyes had no lines around them, making his age an impossible guess; did he not cry, did he not laugh?

  “Satisfy me,” he repeated.

  The architect of flesh licked his fleshy lips and regarded the albino with narrowed eyes.

  “Are ye challenging me, ye gobshite?”

  The albino then expressed the first hint of any emotion. He grinned, fast, bright, no real emotion, just a token facial expression by a creature trying to communicate in another species’ language.

  “Just your whores. I’ve heard bold claims. I don’t believe them.”

  “Ye what?”

  “Your possibles...” the albino said, “Mediocre at best. My palm excites me more.”

  McGregor rubbed at his jaw and blinked rapidly, realizing that he was being insulted, that his right to this corner of Hell was being disputed, mocked. He stopped rubbing and waved a long, knuckly finger at the albino.

  “Ye cheeky shite...” he muttered, rage building, “Ye cheeky fucking shite! Ye come into mah house and ye talk tae me like that? I’ll fucking have your guts for garters ye cunt! I’ll skin ye with mah own fucking teeth!”

  The demon whores shrunk back from his anger, though it was not directed at them.

  The albino’s pink eyes gazed blandly over his smoked spectacles.

  McGregor had threatened, but he had not moved. Of course not. A challenge had been issued, and he had no choice but to answer it. The supernatural world was constrained by laws as tightly as the world of men, just different laws. It was the reason haints could not enter a house unless invited... And why entering the Devil’s house placed him entirely at your disposal, for as host he was bound to his guests every whim.

  Marshall McGregor had made his pact and become a subject of such laws.

  “I seek release,” said the albino, “The standard bargain. My corpus for satiety. I doubt I’ll get it, judging these.”

  McGregor ground his teeth.

  “And if ye are unsatisfied by my whores? What stake do ye expect from me?” he asked slyly.

  But the albino was slyer still. The grin returned.

  “Nothing. Hell hates to forfeit. Hell will hold you accountable.”

  McGregor bared his teeth.

  “Ye cunt,” he spat.

  “As you say.”

  McGregor rushed him, thundering forward on ponderous legs, his whole disgusting bulk in motion, his still erect cock bobbing. But he stopped short of actually touching the albino, his hands clutching at the air as if to rip him limb from limb.

  The albino did not flinch.

  Powerless, McGregor raged, every obscenity on his lips in a torrent of threats and promises and extravagant claims as to the albino’s future.

  That gentlemen took it all with bland indifference.

  The occultist eventually ran out of puff and stood glaring up in raw hatred at the man whom he had extensive, gruesome destinies planned for.

  “Ye cunt,” he whispered.

  The albino said;

  “Satisfy me.”

  McGregor turned and stalked away. One of his whores didn’t see the danger quick enough, and in a moment the heavy hipped creature with a sea horse head and tail was disembowelled. It was a reflex of anger, thrown away without thought.

  No matter how comical his grotesque appearance, the dwarf was still one of the most dangerous humans on Earth.

  The demon whores fell upon their sibling and ate her alive.

  McGregor stomped on a dolls house and immediately, miles distant in the greater room, one of the massive buildings collapsed with a sound of thunder.

  The albino was unmoved.

  The architect of flesh finally reined in his passions enough to stop destroying things, and when he did inspiration struck him.

  “Satisfaction is what ye seek, is it?” he asked, his back to the albino.

  Above the sound of the whores eating, the albino said it was.

  “And ye don’t think any of my possibles here are gonnae do the trick, is that it?”

  “Any of them? All of them? None of them.”

  McGregor turned around, and once more he was the courteous host.

  “Sure, ye’d be a connoisseur of cunt then, and not just any pilgrim. Yes, ah see plain enough now! Ye will have to forgive me, its not like the sort of souls we’re used to here have what ye’d call refined pallettes. No, no, none of these possibles is suited to a connoisseur. Ah find myself embarrassed!”

  The albino had been warned of this line of reasoning. It was a loophole for a demonic host to wriggle out of responsbility.

  “And seeing as though ah can’t offer ye anything up to ye high standards, embarrasing as it might be, ah guess that means ye are...”

  “I want the Vestals.”

  McGregor’s act of gracious humility vanished in a moment.

  “Ye what? The... how the fuck do ye...” the dwarf’s eyes narrowed. The past decade of endless debauchery had addled his wits, so that only now it dawned on him to ask the question that mattered; “Who... what are ye?”

  The albino’s sickly eyes sparkled.

  “Your questions,” he said, “Who, what, don’t matter. Why... I have been sent by the Sisters of the Immaculate to end what you began in Whitechapel.”

  The albino was normally a man of few words but he had prepared these for some long time as he tracked the occultist to the very edge of the frontier gleaning clues from whispered talk around campfires and hog ranches and missions until his final tip from a Pinkterton agent gutshot and dying in delerium had lead him here to the very edge of manifest blasphemy.

  “I’m here for a sexorcism.”

  The albino’s filthy poncho fell from about his shoulders to reveal that he was naked underneath except for a pair of spurs and holsters that held not guns. He was coyote-lean and moon-pale, his sinews a map of bite scars, his back furrowed by claws in ecstasy. A rosary of razorblades wrapped around his right wrist. Between his legs hung heavy his circumcised cock, a rope fist-knotted at the end; it was enormous, though more shocking still was the colors of it. Rainbow hued, from root to bell head, all seven shades from red through to violet.

  McGregor had bound demons to his whim and now was bound himself by the lore of the land; he could not refuse the custom of any who crossed the threshold willing to trade. Even if they came asking for the rarest of pleasures, pleasures that he kept for himself, and even then only indulged lightly.

  Forget the exaggerated sex between its thighs, this sickly looking creature wouldn’t survive Mary, let alone the others.

  McGregor grinned to himself. Then he began to laugh. His laughter grew from deep chuckling into great bales that rolled about the not-room. The demons who ate of their kind leered up with bloody mouths and joined the laughter, teeth claggy with smouldering flesh, screeching and hooting like beasts.

  “Ye come here wantin’ for the Vestals... a pasty wee ferret-faced fucker like ye? By Christ, the Sisters aren’t what they were if they’re havin’ to recruit the likes of ye! Ye may be as big as a fuckin’ donkey, but the Vestals...”
the dwarf stopped laughing with a snap, “I’ll have ‘em save ye skull so’s I can shit in it.”

  If the albino took note of the threat he showed nothing, just gripped his cock with both hands and began to work his inches, impatient. He swiftly began to stiffen, to swell.

  “Fancy talk’s finished. Where’re the whores?”

  The dwarf’s face turned red, then beetroot; his mouth opened and closed like a fish, unable to find any way to express what seethed within him.

  And then his color cleared. His eyes darkened.

  “Alreet,” he said, and clapped his hands, twice.

  In a moment everything was different, as if they were in a theatrical production and a scenery change had been called; the skeleton architecture of the room and the Hell-Whores themselves were whipped away up into the darkness until the albino and the dwarf stood alone and exposed surrounded by doll houses on the floor of the vaster room filled with mansions.

  The dwarf stooped and picked up one of the dolls houses and the albino recognised it as a replica of the outside of the Half-World.

  “D’ye want a wee peek at what’s tah come?” asked McGregor with a sneer. He lifted the roof of doll whorehouse and tilted it towards the albino, who caught a glimpse of five miniature rooms; one was a squalid garret, another inside of a redskin’s teepee, and yet another was the inside of a backwoods shack, filled with bizarre taxidermy. But what were the last two rooms? The glimpse gave only impressions, one of an Egyptian tomb, and the other a cave with crude paintings on the walls...

  The dwarf snapped the lid down and dropped the model building on the ground at his feet and at once an entire building dropped silent from the darkness above to land behind him. The effect was disconcerting indeed, as if an elephant had plummeted to Earth only to land as softly as a feather. More disconcerting still was the fact that it was the building they were already in, the Half-World.

  (as above so below)

  McGregor grinned.

  “Ye ever seen those Russian dolls preacher? Little wooden things they are, one nesting snug inside the other, and another inside that, and another inside that, and on and on.”

  The door to the Half-World opened. No light spilled out, but shadow did, as if it had substance.

  The dwarf’s eyes never left the albino who was striding past him, titanic rainbow hued cock swinging.

  “Five vestals, preacher,” said McGregor, “That’s what ye asked for, and that’s what ye’ll get. For yer flesh, for yer blood, fer yer seed and yer soul. And when they’ve finished with ye...” the albino paid no notice, disregarding the dwarf, who became incensed, “Wha’, hoy, ye divn’t DARE ignore ME ye cunt! HOY! Ye cheeky gobshite, ah’ll fuckin’...”

  The albino was already at the threshold. How many Hell-Whorehouses had he sexorcised? How many of their owners had made tedious speeches about how they were going to defecate in his hollowed skull, and wipe their rectums with the ragged remains of his soul?

  Not slowing, without ego and so without fear, he stepped into the darkness as the dwarf raged behind him in the vastness of the outer room;

  “AH’LL HAVE YER FUCKIN’ GUTS FER GARTERS YE CUNT! D’YE FUCKIN’ HEAR ME? AH’LL...”

  The door closed and the silence of the darkness was deafening.

  *

  Within the house was a ruin of a parlour room, cold, dark. The roof was long collapsed to expose a sky full of constellations never seen upon Earth. The door he had passed through was one of six that lead into and out of the room.

  The parlour was the kind of room in which gentlemen would pass the time waiting for their favorite soiled dove to become available, reading, smoking, or dreaming of what was to come.

  This ruined room was strewn with broken furniture, scattered books. Upon one wall hung a sampler in a shattered frame. Whores had to pass the time too. Needlework kept clever hands clever.

  The albino gazed around the room, and saw each door had a name burned upon it, or scrawled in chalk, fingered in blood, carved with a bone knife…

  Mary Maggie Darling.

  Bear-Maiden.

  Grandma Spuckler.

  Clitocris.

  Ginger.

  The albino’s gaze settled once more upon the sampler hanging crooked upon a wall of rain warped boards. His eyes favored the pale glow of the alien constellations, adjusted easier to it then to candles and gas, and by weird starlight the albino read this message picked out in stitches:

  The PARABLE of the LOCK & the KEY

  The LOCK that can be opened with many keys is a Very Bad Lock.

  But the KEY that opens many locks is a Very Good Key.

  A key turned. A lock opened. A door began to open and within it was darkness into which the albino walked naked.

  CHAPTER II

  "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."

  Genesis 3:15

  (In the Garden how many were there that went on two legs there were three that went on two legs Adam and Eve and the Other)

  (Who is the Son of God He is His own Son)

  The Motherfucker Superior drank Holy Water until her stomach bulged below her bare tits, tits as sagging and wrinkled as old eggplants, long nipples pointing at the ground.

  “In the Talmud,” she croaked, gasping from having drunk so much, “It is written that demons outnumber humans by millions, are responsible for all illness and disease, and yet remain invisible to the eye of man.”

  He knelt before the font, finger shuffling bead by bead through a rosary as he recited prayers.

  The Motherfucker Superior smiled down at him, a smile of thin-worm lips rimmed with downy fur. A hundred years old, her every inch of flesh showed it, from the infinite complexity of wrinkles that sagged her face to the stretch marks and liver spots and loose knit cheesy skin that hung in folds from her bony carcass of a body.

  “Some years ago men of science, bacteriologists they were called, found staphylococci, streptococci, coli bacilli, Loeffler's bacillus, and other bacteria in samples of Holy Water taken from this very church. But it was only sanctified, not purified.”

  He never slowed a moment from his prayers as the Motherfucker Superior caressed the mottled skin of her bloated belly with one hand, as if her decayed womb had at last fulfilled a destiny her calling had denied, as if it were heavy with child and not sanctified water. Her other hand held the aspergillum, a perforated metal ball on the end of a wooden handle that was used during Mass to sprinkle the Holy Water about.

  “The germ theory of disease states that organisms so small as to be invisible to the human eye are responsible for sickness and ill-health. Once again, we find the sciences only just beginning to understand what religion already knew.”

  She shoved the aspergillum up her cunt and started to masturbate with it.

  Prayer still fell from his lips as he thumbed each bead of the rosary through his left fist, his right hand steadily working his foreskin back and forth. His balls were still in agony from the branding, but he did not falter as he flogged his meatus.

  They soon fell into a rhythm, matching each other stroke for stroke, like pistons in a steam engine perfectly engineered.

  Between moans, Motherfucker Superior continued with the lesson;

  “Holy Water... can cast out demons... but only... when it has been purified first...”

  The mutual masturbation pitched, peaked, reached a crescendo as a dual round of shouting in tongues as he shot his seed across the baptismal font and the Motherfucker Superior found release as well.

  Such release as loosened her bladder.

  Pissing onto his face, effusion by urination into his open eyes, his upturned mouth gulping the golden goodness flushed clean by her kidneys, she concluded the lesson with Acts 2:17;

  “’And in the last days I will pour out my spirit upon every sort of flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions and
your old men will dream dreams.’”

  And he saw a vision his eyes washed with her divine salty piss cleared and he saw many mansions he SAW…

  *

  All women bleed once a month, though most not so from their palms.

  The albino sexorcist knew it all started with this one. It was with this fallen woman that McGregor made the pact that resulted in the murders of five other prostitutes, and the horrors that came after.

  She didn’t look like much. Mary Maggie Darling was no more remarkable than any other Cockney flower girl deflowered and forced to take cock on her knees.

  Except, of course, for the wounds.

  The first of the five Vestal Whores lay on a filthy mattress with her legs spread wide to expose the rose of her sex. She was drinking from a bottle of wine, guzzling whenever she wasn’t speaking.

  “’Ello, flower,” she said, her East End accent twisting flower into flahh, “So, the boss says you reckon you’re gonna gimme a bloody good seein’ too? Well, we’ll see, alrigh’, we’ll fackin’ see!”

  The room was a hovel painted a butchershop nightmare. The center of the chaos was the bed where the whore lay, a horse-hair mattress soaked through and through with blood from which radiated a demented pattern of bloody handprints across every wall, as if a blind slaughterman had sought an exit.

  Darling wore but a whalebone girdle, fingerless gloves, and a grin full of rotten teeth, her hair a greasy black nest, a fake beauty spot on her upper lip and her right pupil permanently dilated. She spotted the albino’s cock, gestured with her bottle of wine.

  “An’ what’s this then? Well, looks like the lad’s at least got a peggo for the job! Lemme just get wet for you, love, need to be nice ‘n’ slippy to get that hog’s leg up me snatch!”

  Saying this, she stuck the neck of the wine bottle up her cunt and pumped it back and forth.