Seeds of Fear

SEE MARILYN MONROE'S PANTIES! Bentley Little

We'd been seeing the signs for the past hundred miles:

They were spaced twenty-five miles apart, the only man-made objects on this godforsaken stretch of desert highway, and as advertising, I had to admit, they were pretty damn effective. There was nothing else to focus on, nothing else to remark upon, and without any visual competition, the signs captured drivers' undivided attention. The space between them gave them time to be discussed, the next one anticipated, and that only increased the attention they received from motorists.

As a communications major with an emphasis in advertising/public relations, I admired the billboards and their ability to intrigue and involve, in a crudely simplistic way, their captive audience. At the same time, I knew that the audience was small — most people preferred to fly to their destinations these days rather than drive — and that, as effective as they were, the signs were little more than quaint relics from an earlier marketing age.

I stared through the front windshield. Another sign was coming up, the bright red rectangle growing as we sped toward it.

Ray looked over at me. "What kind of place is this?"

I shook my head. "How would I know?" I took a sip of warm melted ice from the McDonald's cup between my legs.

Another billboard was already visible a mile or so ahead. Whatever it was, we were getting close. I realized that we still did not know the name of the museum, store, or tourist trap whose wonders had been spelled out for us. Clever hook.

'"The Place'?" I said. "Is that what it's called?" Ray grinned at me. "How would I know?" Ahead, we could see a series of signs, spaced approximately a mile apart. The signs counted down the distance to The Place. Four miles. Three miles. Two. One. "Let's check it out," Ray said as we passed the last sign. I nodded. "Sure."

I could already see a small run-down building by the side of the highway. A final billboard stood directly in front of the short drive, this one with an arrow pointing toward the building and the words THIS IS THE PLACE!! printed in huge letters. Ray slowed the car, pulled in.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it sure wasn't this. We parked in the dirt lot next to the only other vehicle there, a dusty red pickup. At the very least, I'd assumed that The Place would be bigger. I'd known that the trail of billboards was meant to lure in suckers, but in my mind, the building had been larger, gaudier, in keeping with the signs. The ramshackle wooden structure before us was definitely not what I had been led to expect from all the hype and buildup.

I guess I was one of the suckers.

I got out and stretched my legs. Ray did the same. We looked at each other over the roof of the car. "Still want to go in?" I asked.

"Might as well. We're here. Besides, I gotta take a whiz."

The front door was mirrored glass, reflecting the highway and the desert beyond. We pushed the door open and walked inside.

The interior of The Place was dark, lit only by a single bar of fluorescent light and the filtered sunshine that was strong enough to penetrate the dust on the skylight. The air was humid and only marginally cooler than the air outside, circulated by an ancient swamp cooler I'd spotted on the roof. It looked like a gift shop, the type of slightly seedy tourist trap usually attached to gas stations in towns that had been on the main highway before the newer freeways had passed them by, and on the shelves and counter I saw cut geodes, fake Indian jewelry, assorted candy bars, and the type of novelty items that were mass-produced in Asia but had local names added on in an attempt to make them seem like legitimate souvenirs. An old man who was probably in his sixties but whose sun-leathered face made him look more like he was in his eighties stood behind the cash register, smiling at us.

"How do today," he said. "Welcome to The Place."

"You got a bathroom here?" Ray asked.

"Public facilities are outside and around to your left."

Ray looked questioningly at me.

"I'll meet you back in here," I said.

He went back out the front door, and I turned toward the old man. "I thought this was, like, a museum."

"Oh, it is," the old man said. "This is just the gift shop. Museum's through that door there." He gestured over his shoulder at a doorway behind him. "Admission's a dollar."

"A dollar, huh?"

"Can't beat that price," the old man said. "Not out here." He laughed wheezingly.

Why not? I thought. I dug through the wad of bills in my pocket and pulled out a one, handing it to the old man. "Here."

He took the bill, stepped aside, and flipped a light switch next to the doorway. A series of low lights flickered on in the museum behind him. He motioned toward the entrance. "Step right in. We don't have a guided tour, but all of our exhibits are pretty well marked. If you have any questions, give me a holler."

I nodded and stepped past him into the museum.

It was bigger than I thought it would be. The gift shop was small, and I guess I'd assumed that the museum would be equally tiny, but though it was narrow, it stretched pretty far back. In contrast to the rough exterior of the building and the cheap paneling of the gift shop, the museum's walls were finished white, more suited to a metropolitan art gallery than this collection of kitsch in the middle of the desert.

I walked up to the first exhibit, a large glass case housing an electric Gibson guitar. A low spotlight in the ceiling directly above the case was trained directly on the instrument, dramatically highlighting it. A simple sign on the side of the case read: "John Lennon's Guitar." There was no other description, no explanation, only those three words.

I didn't know if the guitar really had been Lennon's, but I wasn't quite as skeptical as I had been earlier. Something about the museum and its layout bespoke authenticity.

I glanced around the room, not certain where to start, and decided to tour the room clockwise. I walked over to the next case on my right and read the sign.

"Marilyn Monroe's Panties."

I looked through the glass. On the floor of the case was a grayish greenish clump of what looked like mold on wadded cloth. I blinked, stared, moved around to the side of the exhibit. The disturbingly fuzzy material in the case could have conceivably been moldy panties, but the sight was so unexpected and so bizarre, so at odds with my perception of Marilyn Monroe, that it startled me. I had been expecting exotic lingerie, satin or some sort of frilly lace, not this disgusting wad of filth, and I couldn't take my eyes off the object. If these really were Marilyn Monroe's panties, how had they gotten to the state they were now in? Had they been tossed in some dump or garbage can? Had they sat for years next to rotting food? They had to have been moist to become moldy.

Moist from her?

The thought aroused me. No matter that the mildewed wad of material in the middle of the case looked like it was putrifying, the idea that the mold was growing from Marilyn Monroe's lubricating juices stimulated me. I stared into the case.

And the clump moved.

It did not move a lot, did not crawl around or jump against the glass. But there was a definite shift in the material, almost a shrug.

And there was something exciting about it.

I felt a stirring in my groin.

Another shift. I breathed deeply, continued to stare. Were the panties. beckoning to me?

I touched my hand to the glass and the illusion was gone. There was only a dark fuzzy clump of wadded cloth in the bottom of the case. It had not moved. It could not move.

Still, the attraction had not gone away, and an erection pressed hard against the denim of my jeans as I looked in at the panties.

"Dude!"

Ray's voice carried across the silent room, and I turned to see him standing on the other side of the counter back in the gift shop.

"Anything worth seeing in there?"

I hazarded one last look at the panties, then shook my head and walked toward the museum entrance, surreptitiously pressing down on the front of my pants. "Not really."

"Ready to hit the road, then? We're losing time."

I nodded, walked out of the museum. For some reason, I didn't want Ray to see the panties. I felt protective, almost jealous, of what I had seen, and I didn't want to share it. I glanced behind me, at the other cases I hadn't yet viewed, but I realized that I didn't care what was in them. Whatever curiosity I had initially felt had fled.

I stepped around the counter to where Ray was drinking a Coke he'd bought. The old man grinned at me as I passed by him, and though it might have been my own paranoid imagination, it seemed as though he knew what I had experienced in there, what I had felt. "See anything you like?" he asked.

My answer came out harsher than I intended. "No, your mama's vibrator wasn't in there."

He laughed, a high harsh cackle, and I did not look back as I followed Ray out of the building into the parking lot. "See any of that stuff they advertised on the signs?" Ray asked. "Hitler's toupee, Elvis's uniform, Marilyn Monroe's panties?"

I shook my head. "It was all fake."

"That's what I figured."

I did not feel like talking, and once in the car, I leaned my head against the passenger window and pretended to fall asleep. I tried not to think of what I had seen in The Place, but I could think of nothing else, and I kept my hands in my lap, pressing down on my erection, hoping Ray wouldn't notice. Eventually I did fall asleep.

I dreamed of Marilyn Monroe's panties.

Phoenix was where we were to part company, and we reached the city three hours later. I was going to stay at my brother Jim's house there for spring break, while Ray was going on to Palm Springs, where he hoped to get into some serious partying. He'd come back through in six days to pick me up, and then we'd drive back to Albuquerque together.

I was silent as I unpacked my bag and suitcase from the trunk, and Ray looked at me strangely as he helped me carry the ice chest into my brother's house. "Are you okay?"

"Sure. I'm fine."

He nodded, but I could tell he didn't believe me, and he still looked uneasy as he said good-bye and pulled away ten minutes later.

I had been looking forward to staying at Jim's ever since the semester started. I hadn't seen him for a while, and I figured we could hang together, maybe get in a little hiking, hit some of our old haunts. But I felt restless, and as I sat there in my brother's living room, drinking a beer, listening to him tell me about his job, about the babes he'd gone out with since the last time we'd spoken, I found myself tuning him out.

And thinking about The Place.

There was no doubt in my mind that the dirty mildewed material I had seen really had been Marilyn Monroe's panties, but I could still not figure out how they had ended up there, in the middle of nowhere, in the hands of that old man. The whole thing seemed creepy to me, unsettling, and the fact that I could not stop thinking about it — and that every time I did recall what I had seen, I became aroused — frightened me.

"So what do you want to do tonight?" Jim asked. "Want to hit some of the clubs?"

I didn't really feel like doing anything, but I found myself nodding. "Sure," I said. "That'd be great."

The hip nightspots had changed in the two years I'd been gone. Jim took me to the newest meat markets, and he met a tall blond bimbo while dancing who was more than willing to come home with him. I was sitting alone at the bar, trying my best not to meet or talk to anyone, and he sat down on the stool next to me and asked me if it was okay if the woman spent the night, and I said I didn't care and was ready to head back whenever he was.

I sat in the back of the car on the way home, with the two of them up front, and as soon as we reached Jim's house, I said good night and locked myself in my bedroom.

I awoke sometime in the middle of the night to take a piss, and I pulled on my jeans and walked down the hall to the bathroom. I turned on the light, closed the door, and saw, on the shower rug next to the tub, clothes. Jim's and the woman's. I stared down at the black satin panties lying atop the wrinkled minidress. I bent down and slowly picked them up, running my fingers over the smooth material. It had been a long time since I'd had sex, over a year, and this woman's underwear should have been exciting to me. But I felt nothing as I rubbed the soft panties over the skin of my face.

I kept thinking how much sexier these panties would be if Marilyn Monroe had worn them.

If there was mold growing on them.

I dropped the panties, my erection springing to life as I thought of the grayish green fuzz on that wadded clump in the museum case.

What the hell was wrong with me?

I hurried back to my bedroom.

I tried to fall asleep, but I was wide-awake, thinking, my brain unable to concentrate on anything other than what I'd seen in The Place, and finally I succumbed, pulling down my underwear, grasping my erection and stroking it as I thought of the sensuous way in which the moldy panties had shrugged at me, beckoning me. I came violently, the biggest orgasm I'd ever had, so much semen pumping out onto my chest that I thought it was never going to stop.

I cleaned it up with Kleenexes, dumped the Kleenexes in the trash can, and lay there breathing deeply until I finally fell asleep.

In the morning, I knew what I had to do.

I asked my brother if I could borrow his old Dart. He was reluctant at first and asked what I wanted it for, and I said that there was an old girlfriend I wanted to look up. I pointed out that he would still have the Lexus to drive around in, and he said okay, he'd let me borrow the Dart, but I had to promise to bring it back before nightfall because the taillights didn't work.

I lied and said I would.

I reached The Place just after noon.

The old man was again behind the counter, only this time he looked at me more suspiciously when I paid my dollar and walked into the museum. Or maybe I was just being paranoid.

The panties were as filthy and disgusting as I remembered. Green and gray and black and fuzzy. The allure was there, though. Stronger, if anything. My penis grew, the erection straining against my pants. More than anything, I wanted to smash that glass so that there was nothing between the panties and myself. I examined the case and saw that one of the glass sides, the one opposite the identification sign, was hinged. There was no lock on it, and I touched it and it swung outward.

I glanced quickly toward the door, to make sure the old man hadn't seen me, but I could only see the back of his head and the right half of his body. I quickly closed the door to the case and glanced around the museum. There were two doors other than the entrance through which I'd come, and I gave Marilyn's panties one last loving look, and then walked over to the door on the side wall. Again I looked toward the entrance to make sure the old man wasn't watching me. I didn't see him at all, and I quickly turned the knob and opened the door.

I closed it just as quickly. It opened onto the desert on the side of The Place.

A possibility.

I walked to the rear of the museum, glanced up front, then tried to turn the knob on this door. It was locked.

That settled it. If I was going to break in, I would do it from the side.

I glanced around at the museum's other exhibits, then moved back over to the case with Marilyn's panties.

"Time's up."

I looked toward the entrance to see the old man staring at me.

"Your time's up," he said.

I walked toward him, reaching for my wallet.

"I don't want your money," he said. "I want you out of here."

I looked at him. "What?"

"Out." He stood next to the door, and I hurried past him, walking around the counter into the gift shop.

"I don't — " I began.

He pointed to a sign above the cash register: We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. "I don't ever want to see you again," he said.

My face was flushed. He must have seen me, I thought. He must know. I looked away, started toward the door.

"And don't come back!"

"Fuck you!" I yelled over my shoulder.

I walked across the dirt to the Dart, my heart pounding in my chest. Ordinarily I was not the type of person to engage in any sort of altercation, verbal or otherwise. I always tried my best to avoid confrontation. But I felt a strange sort of defensiveness at the thought that the old man might have seen me looking at the panties, and I was angry enough that if he had responded to my epithet in any way, if he had come out of the building and come after me, I would have punched him.

I got into the Dart, drove out of the parking lot, pulled onto the highway. I drove five miles east until I saw the back of the billboard that I was looking for on the opposite side of the divided highway. I slowed, looked in my rearview mirror to make sure it was the right sign, then drove over the dirt of the center divider and parked underneath the words "See Marilyn Monroe's Panties!"

I waited there until dark.

I had not checked to see what time The Place closed, so I drove closer, until I could see the building. The lights were still on in the gift shop, so I pulled off the side of the road and waited.

The lights went off at seven. I waited another hour, but the pickup in the parking lot did not move, and I assumed that the old man lived somewhere on the property and did not have to drive anywhere to go home. I gave it until nine, just to be on the safe side, then pulled forward to the arrow billboard, turned off my lights, and coasted to a stop in the parking lot. I waited a few moments to see if I'd been spotted, if the old man was going to come out, then took the flashlight from the glove compartment, got out of the car, and quietly hurried around to the side of the building where the door was. As I'd feared, the door was locked, but I knew there were no dead bolts or anything, just the knob lock, and I took out my Texaco card, pushed it in the doorframe, slid it down, and was gratified to hear a click and see the door move outward. I pulled open the door and stepped inside. My heart was pounding, my hands shaking with the rush of adrenaline. Turning on the flashlight, I walked quickly across the room to the case housing Marilyn's panties. I stood there and shone the light through the glass. The beam of illumination highlighted the dark fuzziness that coated the material. And the panties moved.

I stopped, the flashlight shaking in my hand. I held my breath, forced myself to exhale. This was stupid. The light had jiggled in my shaking hand. Or my perception had been off. The panties themselves had not moved. They moved again.

I stepped forward, peering through the glass, terrified and at the same time fascinated. The panties were definitely moving now, inching across the bottom of the display case in a wormlike crawl that was sickening and unnatural and. and somehow arousing.

I was already hard, and I unbuckled my pants with my left hand while my right trained the flashlight on the crawling panties. I yanked open my button fly, pushed down my jeans and underwear. My penis was firm and rigid, harder than it had ever been before, and I reached out and opened the back of the case.

I smelled mildew and dirt, rot and decay, and I wanted to touch myself, to stroke myself, but I was already coming, and my hips thrust convulsively in the air as my semen shot into the case, the thick white liquid spurting onto the panties, the panties moving back and forth across the floor of the case to catch every last drop of my randomly pumping sperm.

It went on for what seemed like minutes, until my penis was hurt and sore, still throbbing in time to spurts that were no longer coming. I was out of breath and shaking, and I stared into the case, holding weakly on to its frame, watching as the whiteness grew dark, hardening, solidifying, developing what appeared to be an outer covering of mold and mildew. The individual pools and puddles and drops and droplets slid over the irregular surface of the panties, meeting in the middle, becoming one unified mass that pulsed and undulated in a rhythm so alien that even in the aftermath of my ecstasy, I was frightened by its strangeness.

The wadded panties jerked once, throwing off the hardened lump of darkening sperm, which landed on the floor of the case next to it, still pulsating. The mound of sperm stretched, twisted, grew, and underneath the moldy surface, I thought I could detect a vaguely humanoid form.

The lights in the museum switched on.

I jumped, looking immediately toward the door to the gift shop. The old man was standing there, staring at me, his hand on the light switch. I'd half expected him to be holding a shotgun, but he was unarmed. I quickly reached down, pulled up my pants.

"I figured you might be back," he said. "I was hoping you wouldn't be, but I figured you might."

I licked my lips, not knowing what to say.

He walked into the museum. "I know how it is, boy. I know how it gets."

He looked into the case, and I did too. My moldy sperm was now the size of a hardback book, and pale protuberances that definitely looked like arms stretch ed out from the fuzzy darkness. I swallowed. "What is it?" I asked. My voice was quiet, barely above a whisper.

"It's yours. Yours and Marilyn's."

"This. this has happened before?"

The old man nodded. "You could say that."

I looked at him. "Are you… are you going to have me arrested?"

He shook his head. "Wouldn't make much sense. You didn't have no more control over it than I did. It's not you. It's her." He motioned toward the panties, now hunched in the corner opposite the open door of the case.

The pulsating mass was now obviously humanoid in shape, pieces of hardened mold and gelatinous blackness cracking and sliding off from the small figure as it struggled to right itself. I saw a head, eyes, mouth.

The old man cleared his throat. "I can help you dispose of that," he said.

I looked at him, not certain what to say, not certain of what I was feeling.

"Come here," he said. "Follow me."

I hazarded one last look at the twisting creature, at the panties in the corner, then followed him to the rear of the museum. We walked through the back door and out behind The Place. There was a full moon, and though no lights were on in the back of the building, I could see clearly and did not need my flashlight. I followed the old man down a barely extant dirt path, behind a stand of ocotillo and over a small rise.

And looked into the pit.

It was easily as big as a football field, sunk some twenty or thirty feet down in the desert. He obviously used this as his landfill. There were sacks of groceries, pieces of broken bric-a-brac, a couch, a car door, lying in the dirt.

But there were other things as well.

I felt sick to my stomach as I looked at the dried vaguely humanoid forms piled on the sloping sides of the pit, as I saw the small bones protruding from the dirt.

"Ten bucks," he said. "No one'll ever know."

I don't know what shocked me more, the fact that he had a killing field in his backyard and was willing to kill my. creature for me, or the fact that he wanted to charge me for it.

He must have guessed by my silence what I was thinking, because his voice, when he spoke, was softer. "It's not human," he said.

I nodded.

"Do you want me to dispose of it for you?"

I shook my head, staring at the overlapping forms in the pit.

"Well, then, we'd better get it into your car."

We walked back into the museum, and he grabbed a large box from a pile outside the rear door. I walked back over to the case and was shocked to see that the creature had jumped or fallen out and was now on the ground in front of the exhibit. It was now the size of a medium-sized dog.

"How — " I began, but my voice cracked. I cleared my throat. "How big is it going to get?"

"How tall are you?"

I frowned. "Six feet."

"It'll be six feet tall."

I watched as the old man gingerly picked up the creature and placed it in the box. Its mouth opened as he did so, as though it was trying to scream, but no sound came out. Its eyes, black and white, rolled strangely.

"Take it," the old man said.

I was frightened, but I forced myself to pick up the box. It was lighter than I'd thought it would be. I stared down at the creature. It was not human, but. but it looked like me. It also looked a little bit like Marilyn, and I was instinctively protective of it. Part of me was repulsed by the creature, but another part of me wanted to take care of it.

The old man held open the side door and walked with me as I carried the box out to the car and placed it in the backseat.

"Remember," he said. "I can get rid of it for you."

I shook my head. "No, thanks."

He held out his hand. "That'll be five dollars."

I blinked. "What?"

"Five dollars."

"For what?"

"That's half Marilyn's," he said.

I didn't want to argue, so I took out my wallet and gave him a five.

I got into the car, backed up and pulled onto the highway, heading toward Phoenix. I saw no other cars on the highway, no other lights, and I could hear the… thing on the seat behind me, making strange mewling noises, as well as sounds like crackling cellophane and breaking twigs issuing from some where within its still-growing body. The noises sent a chill through me, and I turned on the radio, cranking it up. The only station I could get out here was a gospel station, but I didn't care, and I tried to focus on the music, tried not to hear the noises on the seat behind me.

Ten minutes later, I heard it move out of the box.

I kept expecting at any minute to feel cold slimy hands touch the back of my neck, but I was afraid to look behind me, and I didn't want to pull off the side of the road because I knew I might never get back in the car, so I kept driving.

By the time we reached Phoenix, I could see the thing in the rearview mirror, sitting up on the seat. It was as tall as I was. It had Marilyn's face.

It smiled at me in the mirror, and against my will, I felt myself becoming aroused.

I pulled into the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour supermarket. I was no longer frightened of the creature, but reality had set in. How was I going to bring this thing into my brother's house? I wondered. What was I going to say? How was I going to explain it?

I parked the car beneath one of the lights in an empty section of the parking lot and turned around to look at the creature.

It was male.

The sight of the penis, long and gracefully slender, shocked me. The face was Marilyn's, as was the hair, and I had automatically assumed that the creature was a female. I had seen no breasts, but I had not been able to see that low in the mirror.

Now I saw everything.

And I felt attracted to it.

The creature smiled at me.

And its penis stiffened.

What the hell was happening? My own erection was growing, even though I didn't want it to, my body responding to this monster even as my brain was disgusted by it. It wasn't even human, I told myself. Three hours ago, it had been a puddle of my sperm that had landed on Marilyn Monroe's moldy panties.

The creature leaned forward, puckered its lips, and though there was no lipstick around its mouth, it looked exactly like one of Marilyn's classic poses.

My penis hurt, it was so hard. I didn't want to insert my penis in the creature, didn't want to stick it in its mouth or in its ass. I wanted to do what I'd done with the panties: spurt on it.

But what would happen to that sperm?

In my mind, I saw it blackening, moldering, combining with the flesh of this monster to create yet another monster.

The protective feelings I had originally felt for the creature were gone, replaced by this unnatural lust. The disgust was still there, though, augmented by an unfocused rage. I got out of the car, opened the back door, grabbed the creature's arm, and yanked it outside. Its skin was soft, erotically smooth to my touch, and I could not help looking down at the erect organ pointing outward from between its legs as I pulled it from the car.

I hit it over the head with the lug wrench I took from the Dart's trunk. It did not bleed, but it fell down in a crumpled heap on the parking lot. It had not even tried to avoid the blow, and though a brief flicker of that initial protectiveness returned as I hit it, the feeling was overpowered by my rage and fear, and I hit it again.

And again.

I glanced around the parking lot to see if anyone had witnessed this beating, but the lot was empty save for a few cars near the supermarket entrance, and there was no sign of any people.

I picked up the creature and put him in the back seat.

I drove at an even seventy miles an hour once I got past the outskirts of the city, but it was still close to dawn when I reached The Place. I skidded into the parking lot, braked to a halt. I opened up the back door and looked down at the form of my son. I didn't know if he was dead or merely unconscious, but I didn't really care.

I picked him up. He was warm, still alive. The sensuous smoothness of his skin aroused me again, and I glanced involuntarily at his slender penis and I felt myself becoming hard.

I kicked shut the door of the car and carried him into The Place.

The front door was open, the old man waiting for me. He looked at me and there was neither horror nor humor on his face, no look of I-told-you-so in his eyes. He merely looked at the form in my hands, nodded at me.

"Want me to take care of it?" he asked.

I nodded. I could not even bring myself to speak.

"Ten dollars," he said.

I took out my wallet, handed him two fives.

He accepted the money, pocketed it.

I glanced toward the museum entrance, thought of Marilyn's panties, then forced myself to turn and walked out of The Place. I pressed down on my erection. ' I did not look back.