Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

I am He that Liveth and was Dead … & Have the Keys of Hell & Death

Randy Chandler and t. Winter-Damon

“I am He that Liveth and was Dead … & Have the Keys of Hell & Death” was first published in Grue magazine No. 14, summer 1992. The story is an excerpt from their novel Duet for the Devil, published by Necro Publications in 2000.

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Randy Chandler is the author of Bad Juju, Hellz Bellz, Dead Juju, and various short stories. He is also the author of Daemon of the Dark Wood and Dime Detective, both coming soon from Comet Press. He lives in Georgia.

t. Winter-Damon was a writer and illustrator from Tucson, Arizona whose works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies. Tim passed away in 2009.

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Tim Winter-Damon would be pleased that this piece of Duet for the Devil is included in this book. I have the feeling that he is looking on from the Vast Beyond with a wicked grin on his mug.

Before he became something more than human, he liked to hang out in punk joints & coffee houses like Nouveau Expresso & 90 Night—funky little clubs where young radicals & Post Beat post-hip poets & punk musicians gather for mutual ego massage or to have their philosophies styled in the latest fashion. In that previous life, Slice was an angry young poet known as “The Bard of Bones,” because he always wore his hand-tooled leather-&-bones outfit when he read his mad poetry in public. T-bones, chicken bones, porkchop bones, dog bones, cat bones (painted black), squirrel skulls, a human femur, all rattling musically as he moved about like a demented witch doctor, mouthing his bone-chilling poems & death hymns. His outfit was topped off with a spooky hoodoo headdress made of a cow’s skull & hung with chicken feet & bird feathers. He strutted his killer stuff & the tight little pussies in the audience (those with the kinkier libidos that flamed darkly to the spark of his hellcoals-&-gris-gris laden rap) would get wet & squirmy, aching for that big bone bulging beneath his loincloth. The Bard of Bones got a lot of pussy in those days.

Then came his Bloodbone Poems & his subsequent arrest on obscenity obsession with sordid sex, urban bloodbath & megaviolence. Neither did they appreciate his state-of-the-art collection of S&M, fetishist & bondage zines. Their bootheels & balled-fists-in-the-gut made that rather clear …

He was convicted, placed on probation & ordered to undergo psychiatric counseling. He enjoyed the cat-&-mouse mindgames he played with the shrink, entertaining private fantasies of extremely creative carnage. The drawback was that he lost interest in writing poetry. But he convinced Dr. Howard (who looked too much like Moe of the Three Stooges) that he had no desire to perform in public again. The baggy-eyed quack never scratched the surface of his mind’s core—that dark chamber of id-horrors inhabited by a psyche blown wild by storms of evil. The stupid shrink never even caught a glimpse of the bloodlust boiling behind those hooded eyes. His Freudian flimflam was a total flop. The Bard of Bones became “Slice” right under Herr Doktor’s big nose, & now he is someone else—something else. Something more than human. A nocturnal predator attuned to the poetry of the blooded flesh. He sees the universe in bones laid bare by his blade. Slice became the hunter of the blue nocturne.

He blows into 90 Night like a storm-building thunderhead.

“Bones! Is that you, man?” squeaks a rat-faced faggot.

Slice shakes his head.

Negative, asshole.

He picks up the sultry scent of choice prey.

His bootknife shifts against his ankle.

A pretty drag queen is sitting on a stool, reading into the mike a long poem about the gay plague.

Slice slinks across the room & sits at a vacant table. A butch lesbian wearing a dildo on a rope around her neck looks into his face, then quickly looks away. He can imagine what she saw there: saw him stuffing that dildo dick down her fucking throat, fucking her with it till blood filled up the torn crater of her mouth. You ain’t butch enough to handle me, cunt. Choke on it, you half-human bitch.

The queen on the stool ends his epic by ripping off his blonde wig & spinning around on the stool to reveal a death’s-head mask on the back of his head. The audience applauds & cheers. Slice hawks up thick phlegm from the back of his throat & spits the blue glob on the floor, causing three punks at the next table to look in disgust at him & move to another table. Don’t you know artistic criticism when you see it?

The scent comes in stronger.

Something dark & powerful stirs in his belly & groin.

A prettyboy MC steps to the mike & says: “Ladies & gentlemen—Miss Phaedra Flame!”

The prey mounts the stage. The black sheen of her long hair, the black body stocking & black lip gloss accent her milk-white face.

A demonic grin sharpens the predator’s face.

Phaedra Flame holds up a slim red-bound book, & says, “These are my Torch Poems.” She holds up a blowtorch in her other hand & a tongue of fire licks at the book. Then flames engulf the book, & she tosses it into a bucket of water. “I hereby proclaim the death of the printed word!”

The audience whistles & cheers. Mindless sheep.

“Now I do real poetry,” Phaedra says with a sly smile.

From the Olympus of his heightened blue awareness, the new god Slice looks down upon the roomful of ragged mortals & savors the coming creation. Destruction in creation. Reductionist to the Nth. His artistic medium will be flesh/bone/blood. Each slaughtered lamb a work of art, impermanent like ice sculpture. Art that literally sends spirits soaring into the great unknown.

Phaedra is putting her body & soul into her impromptu scat poetry, moving with feline grace, slinky and seductive, speaking directly to the new god, though she is not consciously aware that she is doing so. “… hungry in the hamburger air, tossed aside like a used condom, wearing the emblem of a washed-out revolution, alone with my own bloody abortion …”

Slice studies her every move, the jiggle of her full breasts, the quiver of her firm thighs, the pucker of her lips as she wraps them around every word. He is mentally outlining his artistic approach, planning the impetus of his strokes, finding cosmic inspiration in the poetry of her moving body.

The revelation hits him with such force that he is thrown back in his chair, his long hands dangling below the seat. He sees it all with crystal blue clarity: his handiwork must be exhibited for the masses, not merely for the homicide police & the coroner. He will display his blood art, like human graffiti, to the public. Phaedra Flame will be his first message to the world. The more sensitive souls will see the meaning beyond the carved & flayed flesh. Perhaps a few will even glimpse the coming blue doom.

The demonic grin returns & remains on his face like a mask.

* * *

As he follows her out the rear door of 90 Night & into the poorly-lit parking lot, he suddenly feels fear. Not his own fear, but the wimpy emotion of that intruding mind from Mermaid’s Inn. The mind of the four-eyed professor, the one who inadvertently turned him into the new god.

Welcome aboard, Professor. Welcome to mindfuck. Come along & I’ll show you what I’m going to do to you. You’re in my orbit now.

He can feel the wimp squirm, taste his terror, sense his futile resistance.

You can’t hide from me, cuntface. You know that now. You’re just beginning to see my power.

Across town, the helpless one cringes.

You thought you could control me? Fat chance. We’ll do her, you & me, then we’ll turn her into raw art. I know you get off on death. Imagine the rush you’ll get when I do you …

She bends to unlock the door of her battered bronze Toyota, & Slice puts the tip of the blade against the small of her back.

“Don’t make a sound—” he hisses.

Phaedra’s body tenses & her breath catches in her throat.

He steps beside her, putting an arm around her like a lover, shifting the knifepoint to the underside of her right breast.

“I loved your poems,” he whispered. “They put me in an abstract mood.”

He walks her to a garbage-filled green dumpster behind the coffee house.

“I’m going to do something very abstract,” he tells her. “You’ll be the talk of the art world.”

He leads her behind the dumpster & pushes her back against its cool surface.

“If you scream, I’ll slit your pretty throat.”

He slits the thin material of her body stocking from the neck to the crotch, then peels it off her supple body.

“I smell your essence. I hear your blood rushing through your veins, wanting to come out.”

He deftly works his fingers through her pubic bush & into the warm lips of her quim.

She tries to draw back from his touch, but her buttocks are already pressed flush against the dumpster.

His zipper opens with a loud rasp & his ponderous penis nudges against her dry slit.

“Please … don’t …” she whispers.

“You’re dry as a bone,” he giggles, “but I can fix that.”

He clamps his left hand over her mouth & runs the blade downward, over her belly.

“I’m going to fuck you,” he says & jabs the blade deep into her vagina.

* * *

Professor feels a twinge of envy as the huge cock slides deep into the bloodslick tunnel of ruined flesh. Had he been so well-endowed, he may never have gone through his various bookwormish stages of transformation, womanless through high school & college, through a series of bungled sexual encounters with prostitutes & sluts who made light of his inchworm cock, & on into the solitary pursuit of science. Had fate given this magnificent dong to him instead of this crazed sadist, then maybe he would not have summoned the succubus, in his LSD ritual of sex & self-destruction, she who tipped him to the formula & possibilities of Li Di 1 …

Envy, regret, &, now, revulsion—as he is trapped in the monster’s mind, bearing sick witness to the slaughter of the dying woman. Her mind screams in terror and disbelief as the blade slices off her breast.

A short-handled axe flashes in the dim light from a distant street lamp & strikes the woman’s shoulder, completely separating her arm from her body. A fountain of blood gushes from the severed socket, drenching you/her psychotic slayer & the litter-strewn pavement alike in the hot spill of her life-essence. She enters into numbing & merciful shock/you feel the center of her mind melting, dispersing randomly/each dripping direction going to death/butchershop chic/a little off the top …?

Her head comes off with ease, though the axe keeps slipping in your blood-greased hands. Like the cries of a kitten down a well, the beheaded woman’s mewling echoes somewhere in your backroombrain, psychic screams from a locked corridor. Then dead silence. You start to hum a tuneless stream of bluenotes as you sculpt meat & bone. With your eyes ablaze with blue fire, it’s easy to work in the dark.

He/you/she/IT … spiritflesh bliss blowing back eons … back to the bigfucking bang!

From your angle-less corner of the blinding blue galaxy you feel her ghost fly away.

You work blind, by feel, by the sound of rending flesh & grinding bone, by the light of an inner blue radiance, out where interstellar radio messages bleed into curved mirrors & broken space & time, keying a haunted memory of idiotic phone conversations breaking into your old reality like that CB breaker-breaker shit coming out of your TV & making you want to find those rednecked motherfuckers & make them bleed like stuck pigs. Ah, sweet memories. Whose memories …?

Bad to the last bone. Blistering blue heat bending mirrors, mirrors catching the bluenotes you hum as you do your best work. Monster art. Opening soon at your guerilla theater.

* * *

The satellite’s orbit begins to decay as it passes over Manila. Its inevitable entrance by fire into Earth’s dense atmosphere has not yet been calculated by those paid to monitor such things; when the Com-Sat’s demise is plotted, it will be deemed one more hunk of expensive space junk likely to shed a minimum of dangerous debris upon the planet. Scant minutes later, the doomed satellite passes high above & to the south of Hong Kong, &, eventually, over Miami, where Lucy Nation & Pynchon are coupling aboard her yacht Hellraiser, & several miles inland, where the squad car lurches to a stop in front of the coffee house 90 Night. If the satellite’s onboard equipment were still operational, its camera could snap pictures of the bloody, contorted corpse hanging by a rope from the roof of the coffee house, could zoom in on the horrified & sickened faces of some of the individuals in the crowd, gathered to bear witness to the bizarre abominations. But the Com-Sat is shut down, making its silent way to inevitable destruction somewhere over an ocean of the southern hemisphere, sometime after it flashes by the beaches of Galveston, its bulk visible only as a brilliant pinpoint above the extreme horizon where the sea meets sky …

It was the biggest goddamn fly he had ever seen. Not a horsefly, not a green fly, but a goddamn housefly so big that Officer Robbins thought it must be a goddamn mutant, what with all the pollution & shit in the air. & why was it, in unflylike behavior, still out making its rounds in the dead of night …?

Now he’s staring into the bloody cavern that the fly disappeared into a moment ago. That’s what the gaping wound in the girl’s chest reminds him of—a raw cavern. Christ! It could be two girls, Robbins thinks, the way all the body parts are hanging there, oozing all that gore & shit, the hand jammed up her ass so it looks like she’s shitting a fucking severed arm, & the head, oh Jesus, the head clamped between the thighs like she’s giving birth to her own fucking head. Some sicko had a field day with this poor babe. From what’s visible of her face she was probably a looker. Before the butcher worked her over.

A guy in a business suit steps up for a better look at the mutilated thing twisting a little on the rope as the salt-edged breeze from the shore seems to invest it with a momentary, mocking breath of pseudo-life.

“Get back,” Robbins orders the wide-eyed suit. “Something drops off her, you get it smack in the face.” He turns to the small crowd of onlookers & closet ghouls & says, “Everybody stay back. This ain’t a sideshow. Jesus!”

He lights a cigar & waits for the homicide boys to arrive. While he waits, he watches for that goddamned mutant fly to come out of that bloodyfucking cave.