Then he was gone.
The room was empty of all but the commingled stench of him and the webby gush of liquid he had inundated her privates with. She could feel it drying, thickening, becoming a cool-warm jelly that encased her, glued her legs together, and pasted her arms to her sides. She could barely breathe. It was like pine sap that held her, capturing her in amber like an insect. She felt herself sinking in it, drowning in sticky, phlegmy depths. It would cover her completely, gumming her eyes shut and filling her nostrils and flowing down her throat and filling her lungs, gallons upon gallons of slimy, ectoplasmic semen. Her mind raged, her mouth tried to scream, her body tried to thrash… but in the end she was pulled down and down, buried alive in darkness.
It was later when her eyes opened.
She could hear a constant, racked sobbing and it took her a moment or two to realize that it was her own. She could still feel the dummy’s ejaculation all over her, only now it had dried into a viscous, gelatinous emulsion that felt like cooling candle wax, rivers of animal tallow sealing her up and holding her forever in place. Her crotch burned, her thighs felt like they’d been scraped by forks. She could taste vomit in her mouth and bile in her throat, all the while smelling Piggy’s discharge which stank of gangrenous drainage, untreated wounds and running pus.
You were raped, you were raped, you were fucking raped! Do you hear me? You were raped!
But no, no, no, she would not and could not accept that. Her head thrashed from side to side on her sodden pillow and this was the first time her body seemed capable of any voluntary motion. The tears ran and the whimpering sounds bubbled from her mouth.
Do you hear what you’re saying, you silly bitch? Raped? Raped? RAPED? By a fucking dummy? A puppet? A ventriloquist’s doll? Are you totally out of your pea-brained fucking mind?
And she was. Oh yes, most certainly. The desecration she had suffered had kicked her mind right out of her skull. Even now it was circling her brain like a dying planet, trying to find its way back in, trying to cement itself to her psyche and her id and bring the terra firma of reality with it.
Raped… raped.
She closed her eyes, listening to her own sobbing.
When Kitty opened them again, the sunlight was coming in.
She leaped from bed, still feeling the cold violation of the dummy, smelling his charnel breath and feeling his icy member sliding into her. She stumbled into the bathroom. He had been chewing on her. The pain was a distant memory, but an insistent one. She examined herself carefully. There was no blood, no ache of rape, only that pervasive psychic defilement that she could not shake.
It was a dream. You dreamed it all.
But she could not convince herself of the same because she could still hear his voice and feel the violation. Piggy was a dummy. Dummies did not rape women (or men for that matter). She kept telling herself this as it slowly began to fade from her mind. She repeated it under her breath again and again and she would have really believed it if it hadn’t been for the fact that the window was still open.
And she knew that she had closed it last night.
12
And it was that afternoon, after a long and surreal day in which she was haunted by what might and might not have happened the night before, that she received an envelope by special courier. It was from Charlie Bascomb. There were several sheets of paper in there. On one of them, Bascomb had scribbled: I found this in Eddie Bose’s room. It was in a drawer. I never showed it to the police. When you’re done reading it, please burn it. C.B.
That was all.
The rest were written in a rambling, spidery script that seemed to roam all over the page. And from the looks of them, they were the final thoughts of Eddie Bose, one-time ventriloquist and full-time lunatic.
Kitty began to read, feeling something tightening inside her from the very first line.
To whom it may concern,
If you have this in your hand, then I’m pretty much toast and that’s not very funny and it’s not intended to be. I just want you to know some things that happened to me. Some things I can’t bear to admit to another living soul, because if you didn’t know this already, people think I’m nuts. Maybe they’re right and maybe I have a good reason.
The subject of what I’m going to tell you about is the McBane family and before I start spreading the dirt on this old Scottish clan, let me just say that I brought most of this on myself. And if it wasn’t for Ronny McBane, I wouldn’t be even as alive as I am right now. Understand that. So let me be brief here on account I don’t think I have very much time. Ronny McBane is a ventriloquist as I was once. Ronny had a most unusual dummy, one that was like no other and so, true to form, I had to know about it. I had to know what made it different and why. And that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Curiosity killed the cat? Sure, but this cat wasn’t killed outright, but one day at a time. Makes no sense? Of course it doesn’t. Just keep in mind most think I belong in a straightjacket. That might make this an easier read. Long story short, I was obsessed. I had to know how this dummy of Ronny McBane’s could move by itself, could speak when he was nowhere near… and the expressions on its face, my God. Well, suffice to say that this dummy was the sort of unintentional bait no self-respecting vent artist could refuse.
And I took it, I sank my teeth into it, God help me, but I did.
Yes, the bait was offered and I bit. I never thought it would bite back.
Okay, board the crazy train with me because here we go. I was so obsessed that I broke into the McBane house. It was one of those tall, rambling old Victorian nightmares up in Edgewater. You lived here long enough, you’ve seen them, no doubt. Big, ass-ugly monstrosities, busy and confusing with towers and gingerbread and wrought-iron fences, all that crazy 19th century shit that makes you think the architects wandered out of a Lewis Carroll book. Popular on Halloween, but just goddamn odd the rest of the year. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about that. Point is, I broke into the McBane house. I jimmied a window in the back and went in. I’m not going to tell you what I saw because I don’t trust myself. I could not have seen what I thought I saw. All I know is that whatever I looked at, it burned my soul to cinders, filled my brain full of ashes that are still blowing around up there. I’m hoping this makes sense, because most days I have a pig of a time stringing together two or three coherent sentences. Well, like I said, I saw things there that turned my brain to jelly. Drove me right over the edge. Not only that, but gave me something of a stroke that paralyzed my left side to the point that I have no feeling there.
Onwards and upwards.
Ronny found me laying there in the upstairs hallway and he got me out of there. I was a wreck. I had pissed myself and my hair was streaked with white. I could not speak. I could barely think. But Ronny carried me out and got me into his old car, took me home. It was a pretty valiant, selfless act on his part, because that act of kindness must have cost him dearly. I’m sure he paid a terrible price for it.
From who? Well, I’m not ready to go there just yet.
The McBanes. Quite a bunch. Just as I researched Ronny and his dummy, I researched the McBane clan. Why? Because something told me his family history was pertinent. At least, I like to tell myself that. The truth is, people, yours truly is what is known as a compulsive-obsessive. I’ve always been that way. When I get into something, I just don’t get my feet wet, I dive right in and touch bottom. And this time, well I touched bottom, all right.