The Minotauress

'Well that's great because I've got five kids back at the projects. Shit, man—I'll give 'em to you if you let me go. I mean, you satanic guys sacrifice kids all the time, right? And, shit, one of the little fuckers is only a month old. You can drink his blood. That's what you guys do, isn't it? Drink baby's blood and use it for rituals and shit?'

Oh, such a sad refrain... The old man pushed the girl toward the second of the six arched doorways. This was possible because the chain's ratcheted pulley was fixed to an overhead track which branched off to each door.

'What are you doing, you fuckwad!'

'Your time has almost been expended, my dear,' he told her in a kindly voice. 'I'd advise you to spend these last moments in prayer, because one thing I can tell you beyond all doubt is that in the course of my studies I've verified that there is indeed a God in Heaven and a Devil in Hell, not that I suspect any amount of repentance on your part could save you from meeting the latter... '

'You cock-lick dingleberry-eating piece of fuck!'

The old man re-opened the crematory's hatch.

'I knew it! A lying old shit-heap motherfucker!' she railed. 'You said you weren't gonna burn me!'

As aforementioned, the wooden door in each archway had been fitted with a sharpened iron spike. The old man, next, grimaced when he placed both hands against the girl's flaccid breasts and pushed.

She tensed, then convulsed, gargling blood when the spike exited the hollow of her throat. The pale belly sucked in and out in horror, causing the atrocious LOVE DEPOSIT tattoo to sort of undulate. Her last words, though barely intelligible due to the puncture, were as thus:

'I never should've left Atlantic City... '

The retractors were out and ready; there was only the minor problem of separating the sternum from top to bottom. For this he used a simple branch-cutter. The sickle-like blades first cut up into the outer solar plexus, then eight or ten strokes on the tool clipped a reasonably straight line right up the sternum. The task never required as much strength as one would surmise, but that grisly clipping sound never failed to unnerve him.

The girl continued to tremor on the spike, blood seeping out nicely. She was still in a sense alive, and perhaps she even heard the old man when he said, 'Have no fear, young lady. I'm not going to burn all of you, just your noxious heart,' and then he applied the cardiac retractors and began to crank her rib cage open.

PART ONE:

ADVENTS

ONE MONTH AGO

(I)

It was a fine summer day when twenty-year-old Richard 'Dicky' Caudill dragged two large plastic bags across Main Street, as he did every day, into Pip Brothers Laundromat. This was July 24th, 1991, six full years before Dicky would meet his death by having his spinal column torn out of his rectal cavity at a place called Wroxeter Abbey. The official cause of death filed by the Russell County Sheriff's Department would be 'Death by traumatic mutilation via an unknown mode,' but there were plenty of folks who knew full well that he was actually killed by a legendary monster called The Bighead, but that was another story. This would occur in the future, of course, as Dicky was alive and well just now, and what he had in the preposterously depressed town of Luntville was something many didn't: a job. Hence, the large plastic bags he was dragging into the laundromat. Dicky was fat, with a buzzcut, a symptomatic dopey redneck. The Caudill family went back a ways; in fact, his great, great, great grandfather was a Confederate general in the Civil War who had supposedly sold his soul to a demon named Anarazel, and who then allied himself with an industrialist named Harwood Gast... but that was another story as well. He also had another blood relative named Thibald Caudill: yet another story.

Dicky's T-shirt showed a flowing American flag and the words TRY BURNING THIS FLAG, FUCKER! but in truth he wasn't much of a patriot. A number of Luntville's young men had joined the Army and some of them had gotten maimed or killed in some place called Bosnia and right now there was this other war going on in one of those nutty sandbox countries called Iraq and the news was dubbing it Desert Storm. There was no way Dicky was going to go get his fat ass shot up in some place like that just for a paycheck and benefits. Besides, he already had a job.

And, to say it for the third time now, in a terribly undisciplined narration, he was dragging those two big plastic bags—the first two of many—into the laundry when he stopped at the door at the sound of footsteps. He looked up and saw a wiry fella with long hair, black goatee, and jeans coming down the sidewalk. The snapping footsteps came from a pair of beaten rawhide boots. The fella was wearing a John Deere hat, and he was eating what appeared to be chicken nuggets from a Wendy's bag.

Dicky blinked. Is that...  'Balls?' he called out. 'Tritt Balls Conner?'

The wiry fella stopped and stared, then his unpleasant face turned up in a sneering smile. 'Dicky Caudill! Well shee-it my drawers!'

'I ain't seen you in, shee-it, two years I'll'se bet.'

'That's 'cos I just got done doin' two years, in the county slam.'

'Shee-it. What fer?'

Balls ate a few more nuggets. 'Cop was hasslin' me one night, so's I'se beat his ass fierce, I did,' Balls bragged, but actually this was a bold-faced lie. He'd received the two-year sentence for stealing a woman's purse in a Giant food store parking lot, but before he'd run off with the purse he'd felt up the woman's ten-year-old daughter. 'Got out two days ago.'

'Where's ya livin'?'

'My Daddy's house in Cotswold.' Balls eyed a redneck woman probably in her forties walking into a pawn shop two storefronts down. He rubbed his crotch, thinking it might be fun to fuck up her hair with his sperm. 'He died whiles I was in stir, some disease I never heared of called hepatitis,' but he pronounced the word as 'heppa- tat-iss.'

'Dang, Balls. I'se sorry ta hear it.'

'Fuck,' Balls gruffed. 'I'se glad the fucker's dead. All he ever done was beat my ass and lock me in closets whiles he was fuckin' a bunch'a whores. I done inherited the house'n all the shit in it, not that it were much.'

It needs to be mentioned now that Balls and Dicky had been friends in their early teens, both having attended