Bukkakeworld Page 12

  “It’s pies and peas and black bread, I’m afraid.” Granny Pepper makes her apologies. “We don’t like to see the meat anymore. It’s town policy. As long as there’s a crust on it and some gravy to hide the details. You get used to the saltiness, the oiliness.” Her carving knife lunges into the centre of the pie and she starts to saw the pie into slices. Somewhere off in the distance a baby screams and you wonder what the other families in this fucked up town are having for Sunday lunch.

  “Eat, eat.” Granny Pepper lays a cloth over the pie and you see the steam rising off the cloth. She offers you a piece of black bread, which you’re to share. “Jeffrey never misses Sunday lunch. No matter how busy he is. He’s a good lad. He’ll be along soon.” She looks at the clock on the kitchen wall with some trepidation. “He never misses Sunday lunch with his mummy. He’ll be around any time now.”

  So, there’s your answer. Jeff Pepper is Marianne’s dad—happy now?

  A manly rattling at the door. Granny Pepper dislodges a crumb from the side of her mouth with her little finger, wipes her hands on her apron and races to the front door. “See? I told you he never misses Sunday lunch with his mummy. He’s a good boy, our Jeffrey...” Her voice trails off as she unlocks the front door and greets someone. The pair exchange greetings and enter the kitchen.

  Is this Jeff Pepper? This stocky big man with blood all over his thick forearms? Is this how the greatest business magnate in Bukkakeworld made his living? As an abattoir worker, a slaughterman, a pie filler?

  The man washes his hands in the sink, the same brown water you two used to wash your hands. He sits down at the table, takes the piece of black bread you two were supposed to share and rips a big bit off it before stuffing it and some peas into his mouth. He chews loudly, like he has wooden dentures or something. Not a word is spoken. He smells of lavender. How can such a brute of a man, such a murderer of... whatever it is he murders for a living... smell so pretty?

  “Is there no justice in this sick world?” you say out loud—but you say it under your breath. Still everyone round the table hears you say something. All eyes fall upon you. It’s the first time you’ve been noticed so far.

  “Who’s your friend, Marianne?” asks Jeff Pepper.

  You gulp. You realise you’ve blown it and soon he’ll be killing you. You realise that Marianne has led you into a trap. You realise you’re the next filling for the pie. You start to cry.

  “I met him today in the village. He’s with the newcomers. His name is Pierre. It means rock, in French,” Marianne lies, but a bare-faced lie of a natural politician, a leader of men, a betrayer of souls to a higher purpose.

  “Lighten up, Pierre, the food isn’t that bad,” he says to you and continues eating, spooning big spoonfuls of pie into his mouth. Granny Pepper scowls at him, in a reprimanding sort of way that brings a wry smile to his bristly face.

  “Eat, eat, little one,” encourages Granny Pepper. She takes your fork from beside your plate and monkeys around in your plate, getting a bit of crust and some peas and pie onto the fork before bringing it ever so slowly to your tight mouth. All around the table are watching you. Even the enormous tortoise-shell cat. Smiling softly.

  And as the greasy grey tears plummet down your cheeks and the sobs catch in your chest, you open your mouth and take your first generous forkful of human pie into your mouth. After a while, you start to chew.

  And you know what? It doesn’t taste half as bad as you thought it might.

  Before Marianne can kill Jeff Pepper and straight after Sunday lunch, you and she are invited out to play by the local kids who’ve gathered at the front door, the first time many of them have been brave enough to approach the big white house. Safety in numbers. They parade you through town like a tribe that’s just killed the golden stag. Cheers of joy and a celebration of child play ensues.

  That’s right, they head straight for your worst nightmare—the body mounds.

  In fact, that is just the scouting party. The rest of the village kids are all assembled at the body mounds like it’s a summer day at the private pool of one of the rich parents. Everyone’s screaming and laughing with glee. Some of the more daring kids are jumping off the side of an old asbestos-roofed garage into the mounds of rotting corpses. Doing back flips and swan dives and atom bombs and all the other freestyle diving actions you might expect from kids just having fun.

  You’re introduced to the regulars:

  There’s the elusive Cleveland, who doesn’t have much of a voice since they did those operations on him. Cleveland’s the craziest of the bunch. He has a clear inferiority complex and has to be the wildest, most daring stuntman of the village. He’s out there, as if in a lone stunt world, where bones don’t break and bruises heal within a minute. You should hear Cleveland as he crashes into the mounds of pseudo-soft bodies; men, women, children, their faces or what’s left of them hanging open where post-mortem atrocities have been performed on them for every child’s amusement.

  There’s Mathias, who’s like the mommy—you’ll hear Mathias all the time, jumping in like a water polo referee when fighting starts over a piece of a corpse or when someone’s tiny diving skills are bettered by a newcomer or when their swimming style lacks, their basic hip-thrusting moves put to shame by some living sine-curve of rhythmic motion. Mathias has a lovely voice and you can imagine him in a church choir singing his little heart out. Mathias is smaller than most and not as strong as some but he is the rock, the hard-nosest settler of arguments the village has. Without him, there’d be anarchy, factionism, not well-moderated fun.

  There’s Skippy and Poppette. They’re brother and sister. Skippy’s the big round hard shouting lad who likes to explode into the mound. Poppette’s pure butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth sweetness. Yet Poppette’s always the one stuffing ripped off or rotted off thighs into natural and man-made apertures of the corpses so that, if you squint, and the sun’s in the right direction, the whole mound looks like a hedgehog. Poppette tells dirty jokes, too, but you have to wait until she’s been in the mound herself—it’s like her creative muse.

  Tommy’s like the best diver the town’s got—you should see his perfect form. He’s like a warm knife sliding through butter. He’ll disappear into the mound from a nearby oak tree and then silence for more than a twenty second count then POP up he comes in some totally distant part of the body mound. He’s like miles away, waving his arm and smiling in his goofy way. He never seems to hurt himself, always comes off without a scrape.

  There’s Cassie, who likes da brains (she does it in a zombie voice that cracks you up)—kicks them from the corpses with her rusty ballet shoes. Plays with them, letting the grey goo run through her fingers until the genius that formed it is gone, forgotten.

  There’s Lizzie, who shouts out, “Hey, cunt slippers!” and when you look at her you see she’s got one corpse on each foot. She’s laid back imitating reading the Sunday papers and sucking on a fat Havana.

  Even you, you try the body mound, diving into a shallow part and having a go at the standard swimming motion. You’re not much good at it, but you’ve given it your best. And that’s what’s important—you’ve put your heart and soul into the act.

  On the pool side, as they call it, out where no corpse can lap up against you in its most atrociously greasy way, stands Marianne, trembling as if with cold. It’s at this point in the horror fun that you realise that Marianne can’t swim. Won’t even try.

  Now this is a tribal thing. You swim or they kill you.

  The kids start to throw spare body parts at Marianne and she huddles up into a ball. Mathias convinces her to have a go, whispering into her ear in his smoothly hypnotic fashion. Eventually, Marianne steps up to the side of the pool. The kids already treading corpses holler down at her to get in, ya chicken! Well, that’s enough. Marianne even takes off her coat, goes in nearly naked.

  She jumps right in. Goes right under. Everyone holds their breath. Everyone looks around at each other. Has she dro
wned? People start to dive, searching for Marianne in their vicinity. Nothing. Marianne never comes back up.

  Glimpser love

  is like no

  other love.

  * * *

  You lie in bed later that evening, unable to sleep. You’ve been watching the Glimpsers all night. Watching them prowl. Waiting for them to strike. The way you know they always will. You’ve been seeing their face on the far side of closed doors and on the far side of closed curtains since you got back from the body mounds.

  You’ve not smelled them or heard them. That’s not how Glimpsers work. The only sense you use with a Glimpser exists deep in your mind, at the really fundamental level where your lungs inflate and deflate, where you heart fibrillates, where your eyes lock onto them. They are there, faces on the far side of reality. That’s all. There’s no further debate. They have no names. They eat no specific foods you can detect later in a blindfold line-up.

  They’re just there, behind every door. Faces pressed against wood. Behind every concealment, be it curtain or wall or darkness. Chrome faces emerging from darkness. Emotionless ‘No Theatre’ masks that so terrify you, you are unable to move as their electric presence dares you to blink, dares you to gasp, dares you to scream out in the night. You open your mouth, your lips pull back from your gums, your eyes stretch open, showing the full pupils fully dilated. Goose bumps down your arms. A sudden sweat.

  But you are immobile. Not moving. You’re in a cum-coma? Disabled by the proximity of cum in its purest form. Remember, the stuff inside a Glimpser is congealed and compressed cum that’s so hard it’s like a metal amalgam; bronze, tin, chrome. Some strange substance that gives off a dull shine if you scratch it, like sodium prior to rapid re-oxidisation.

  You can’t move as the Glimpser faces approach, getting nearer and nearer in series. You never see two chrome ‘No’ faces at a time, and every mask is different. Maybe each Glimpser has to change faces every few seconds, and that’s what scares you so, that there are beings in the world whose faces are not the faces they were born with, that there are creatures out there in the strangeness of the universe who shun private identity as a snake shuns its skins to grow.

  It must have been the pie and peas. Or something in the gravy. Something in the body pits. All evening you’ve had a terrible stomach ache. Like something is growing in there. Now, lying in bed, haunted by Glimpser faces, your swelling belly itches like mad. You want to, oh so very much, you want to reach down and scratch that growing ball of itch with the nails of both your hands. That would ease the itching. That would end the pain. But you can’t. You can’t move. You’re not allowed.

  The one sheet that covers your nakedness lifts back as if by a genteel breeze and a Glimpser slides into the cot behind you. The Glimpser is so heavy, it’s like an elephant has decided to share your cot with you, pulls you so close with arms that are like elephant trunks. The skin of these elephant trunks is not like the wrinkled rough skin of normal elephant trunks, though.

  Think of the softest fabric you’ve ever held against your skin. Velvet? Cashmere? Silk? Now rub your skin hard enough with any of these ‘soft’ fabrics and very soon you’ll start to suffer from the excruciating pain of friction burns. You don’t get that same result with Glimpser skin.

  Think of that part of yourself where no hair seems to grow, be it the back of the knee, a place on the shin maybe, or up high on the thigh near the pelvic bone, maybe the inside of an elbow. Everyone has some part of their body that is totally hair free. Pull that skin and see how fine it is, how pure, how fat free, how gossamer. Well, make that skin a thousand times finer so that only a molecule-thick surface lies over the subcutaneous muscle mass.

  The Glimpser tightens its embrace of your body and you break out in an involuntary sweat. An electric surge pours through your skin into your bones, into your organs, into your heart, your lungs, your brain. Some reinforcing sedative passes osmotically to your inner being, calming you, delighting you. It’s a feeling you can’t remember ever experiencing, not when you were at your happiest, not in all those years.

  A Glimpser arm moves across your face like a boa constrictor. Its supersmooth underbelly slides painlessly across your dry lips. You wonder if it’s making a sound at all. You strain your ear but all you can hear is the creaking of the cot as the Glimpser behind you reshapes itself one more time. You know that Glimpsers are doing this all the time, warping from one form to another, but this knowledge doesn’t allow you to retreat from reality.

  You feel another Glimpser arm stroking the soft skin at the back of your knees. Your legs part and that arm passes up between your thighs. Up past your limp cock. Up over your belly. It lingers around your navel and you wonder if it’s going to press into you there so that an intimate connection can be made. But it doesn’t penetrate you there.

  The arm proceeds up your stomach, over your sternum, all the time growing, swelling, fattening. You think it’s heading for your mouth, and in a vain effort to stop it, you grab hold of it with both hands. The skin at the far end of the arm pulls back like foreskin, revealing a raw nerve-laden appendage. You wrap both your arms around the Glimpser arm as it writhes to be freed, the nerve-laden end squirming against your inflamed cheek.

  There’s such power in a full Glimpser embrace. You start to breathe heavily.

  You’re gasping, groaning out loud. You no longer remember which way is up, which way is down. It’s like you’re floating on a sea of dreams, lost in ecstasy. Only the deep ache in your stomach breaks the fantasy. The pain shoots a spasm through you and you groan out loud, this time with pain.

  The Glimpser lifts you up the cot somehow, what strength, your head is pressed up close to the wall where the pillows have fallen to the floor. All the while the Glimpser arms readjust themselves, moving like metal oil. You see, even in the dark, how light refracts through them until one of the arms completely covers your face, your eyes and nose. Even then, there’s a glimmer of light sparkling in your head like a million stars.

  Another groan escapes you and you feel your teeth bear down onto Glimpser flesh. You nearly vomit. The feeling is so delicious, the taste so vibrant like an electric eel, you start to lose consciousness. The Glimpser is suffocating you. A peristaltic surge of panic gushes through your body. The pain in your guts intensifies.

  You’ve never felt so ready to die.

  A Glimpser arm parts your buttocks—you tense. You fear this is really going to hurt. You feel your innards will drop out onto the dirty wooden floor when you try to get up. You feel you’ll be totally broken by this life-changing event. You’re so used to things coming out of your rectal passage, you don’t even realise that your body is full of stools all the time. Every minute of the day a stool is perched at the entrance to your anus, waiting to extrude out. It’s like the turd only starts to exist once the air gets to it.

  This is just the same process in reverse. Anyone who’s ever suffered from piles or haemorrhoids will know that there are some itches that are so painful they break the pain barrier and become total bliss. That’s what it’s like when a Glimpser shares its secret love with you. You feel like you’re in the most beautiful place, with the most beautiful friends, having the most beautiful time. You see cherry blossoms falling from trees old as time.

  The Glimpser arm seems to push in, in, in for hours. You wonder if you’ll rip apart, wonder even now if gallons of fuck blood are pouring onto the cot. You don’t even feel a thing as the Glimpser pours itself in, in, in, pulling you closer and closer so that you’re sure you’re actually inside the main body of the Glimpser, nestled in the flesh like a tick. You feel the Glimpser arm inside you like massage and the pain in your guts seems to evaporate.

  Then the Glimpser ejaculates, inside you. A white heat pours through your body. When the heat subsides, you feel the Glimpser cum dissolve into a fine oil that seeps out of tiny capillary holes in the fine membrane and suffuse the inner cavities of your body with love and togetherness. You are in par
adise. You see how it is. You understand why the symbiotic relationship between human and Glimpser has been so successful for all these millennia.

  The Glimpser isn’t torturing you like some midnight paedo, he isn’t abusing you, he isn’t trying to corrupt something pure, nothing’s that pure. He loves you. And you love it back. Equally.

  When you open your eyes, you see Marianne in the small cot across from you. It had been touch and go at the body mounds. She’d gone under and eventually someone dragged her out. Nobody told you about Mercia, the most mischievous of the town’s kids. Mercia the drowner, they called her. And for good reason—she had taken Marianne so deep to the very festering bowel soup of the mound that it’s a miracle she made it back out alive.

  Marianne says, “That’s my daddy, not yours. He loves me, not you.”

  “How many other ‘gifts’ have you brought for your dad? How many of your friends know that you’re in league with the devil himself?” You sit up in the bed and confront her, face to face. “I see now why you have to kill him. But I will not allow it. Do you hear me, Marianne Buckman? I will not allow you to assassinate Jeff Pepper. He is my daddy, too. Fact.”

  There’s nothing worse than sibling rivalry.

  The wall of

  black cum.

  * * *

  Jeff Pepper holds your hand at the breakfast table the next morning. Marianne shoots daggers at you. Granny Pepper busies herself with the washing, immensely engrossed in her astronomical denial.

  Marianne reaches for a spoon and attacks her dad, your new lover, your guardian. You race around the small kitchen table to defend him. A scuffle ensues and you come off the worse. Jeff Pepper is about to seriously brutalise Marianne. He has her by the throat against the kitchen wall. He’s already nutted her in the face and her pretty nose is all squashed flat, blood pouring down. She flails weakly at Jeff Pepper as if that blunt breakfast spoon can take his eye out.