Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

Tuesday

The first thing he saw when his eyes creaked painfully open the next morning was the alarm clock's stubby hands pointing to eleven. He felt panic rush from stomach to chest to throat, and he tried to push himself up. Pain shot through him, as if every muscle in his body had been stretched to the point of tearing, held there for hours, and then been snapped back without warning. He fell back moaning, and looked down the length of his body.

The sheets and blankets rolled haphazardly onto the floor like a wool and cotton river. The bottom sheet was soaked with sweat and was stiff in many places, sticky in others. Two spots were still damp with a rust-brown stain that he knew was blood.

His body was marked with bruises at elbows and knees. The pubic hair was set into hard curls by dried fluids, and powdery bloodstains ran the length of his shaft and speckled his thighs. His testicles ached miserably, and the ridge of soft skin around the head of his penis was rubbed open in several places.

Trembling from both fear and pain, he examined himself gingerly to find the source of the blood. Then he remembered the virgins.

There had been two of them, twin sisters about fourteen years of age. Their mother, a duchess he had seduced months before, had brought them to him, begging him to initiate them into womanhood before they could be rudely skewered by brothers or servants. He had done so gladly, breaking both hymens with care and dexterity so that neither flinched nor cried, then probing them both to multiple climaxes until each in turn swooned in exhaustion. He then turned his attention to the duchess, who had responded like a starved animal. He served her well and left her breathless. They were only the first.

Lying in the bed as the sun tried unsuccessfully to push through the drawn curtains, Bell remembered the women he had loved the night before — noblewomen, sluts, maids, young girls, grandmothers ripe both in years and juices; all had bowed beneath his phallic might and worshipped the great thick god he carried. All had melted like the candles that flanked the myriad beds to which he bore them. Not one had been unsatisfied.

Not one.

Bell smiled.

After the sheets were safely soaking in a prewash liquid, he called his secretary and told her that he had been throwing up all night and had slept through the morning. He assured her that he felt better and would be in the following day. After he hung up, he showered, made a light lunch, and took a nap that lasted until six o'clock. He treated himself to dinner out, and then went to a movie, careful to avoid anything with an R rating. It would be best, he thought, to get a good night's sleep.

Wednesday

The next morning he awoke refreshed, having passed a dreamless night. The bruises had faded to a pale gray, the minor abrasions had healed, and his muscles, though still stiff, were not as sore as before. He pressed his scrotum delicately, but whatever cords or muscles had been swollen had once again receded to normality, and he felt only a slight, infrequent ache.

When he arrived at the office, Perry was waiting for him, coffee in hand. 'Well?' he said. 'Who'd you sleep with that wiped you out for a day? King Kong?'

Bell laughed in spite of himself. 'Flu. A little touch of flu, that's all.'

Perry nodded knowingly. 'Sure. The French flu. Come on, Rick, who was it? Mata Hari? Marilyn Monroe? The Trapp Family Singers?'

'Look, I told you. Flu. Plain old diarrhea-throw-up-dizzy-sweaty flu. No dreams, no women, no nothing. Flu.'

'Oh-kay!' Perry stood up and walked to the door. 'I'd tell you, Rick. But if you want to pretend it's flu, when I know you're playing Don Giovanni, it's oh-kay.' He walked out, then popped his head back into the office, whispered, 'I hope you catch dream-crabs,' and disappeared.

That night Bell took Perry's suggestion. He couldn't find anything on Don Juan in the Waldenbooks he visited after work, so he went to the library and took out Byron's poem and the libretto of Mozart's opera.

They were enough.

In a way he was surprised at Bell/Don Juan's performance. He was not nearly as gifted as Bell/Casanova, having an instrument of less length than Bell's own, but it was the technique that made Bell proud and made the ladies unutterably happy. In his dream Bell did more with hands, mouth, and feet than he had ever thought possible. And he was satisfied, too, many times over, for what Don Juan had lacked in size, he made up for in staying power. It was a case of parry as opposed to thrust, and Bell could not decide which he, or the whimpering receptacles of his art, preferred.

When he awoke he felt drained but happy. There were no cuts, no blood, no large bruises as there had been when he had played the insatiable Casanova. The bed, as before, looked like a battlefield, but he no longer felt like a war casualty.

Thursday

At work that day he ignored Perry's winks and innuendos, and thought about who would be the next subject in his nocturnal rogues' gallery. He finally decided, after some hesitation, on the Marquis de Sade. Except for tying a stewardess to the bed one night (at her request), Bell had never indulged in pleasure-through-pain sex. Rough stuff had always put him off, for, although he felt he could have gotten a buzz from a little gentle sadism, he was not willing to be victimized reciprocally.

But a dream was different. He could be the complete master there, totally in control, and there were no real victims in a dream, only the willing and eager masochists his imagination could create. Nothing could harm him. Nothing could harm de Sade.

That night, a worn, green paperback of The 120 Days of Sodom provided the inspiration, and he fell into a dream of blood and screams and pain that glowed redly in the night. Skin ripped like paper, bones broke with muffled snaps, and through it all came the groans of the tortured and the slow drip of blood on the stone floor. That night flesh was made to be broken, orifices to be filled, and fill them he did, until his tool became the most awful torturer's instrument of all, a red hot club to tear and rend and draw the shrieks that made it swell even more prodigiously and spew its seed in jets of liquid fire. And Bell/de Sade laughed at the shrieks and loved the night and knew that at last here was truth.

Friday

He awoke slowly, unwilling to leave the dream. But daylight was unrelenting, and soon his eyelids twitched open, revealing his body and the bed in which he lay.

They were both drenched with blood. The stench of it hung in the room like a thick cloud, and had drawn several flies inside through holes in screens and loose window fittings. He stared as one crawled across his stomach and settled in the red, wet pit of his navel, like a tiny starling in a birdbath of blood.

Bell lurched out of the bed, but before he reached the bathroom, brown bile mixed with blood (God! did I drink it, too?) gushed from his mouth, and he vomited everything onto the wooden boards of the hall. Everything except the fear. The taste of that remained long after toothpaste and mouthwash had removed the sour taste of vomit from his mouth.

He called in sick, then set to work cleaning up, scraping and wiping up the mess in the hall, stripping the bed and throwing the covers in a garbage bag, sponging the blood off the bed frame and the hardwood floor of the bedroom. The mattress, sodden with blood, was ruined.

And all the time he worked he thought about the night before and how he could relate it to anything he knew of humanity. He had enjoyed it, had actually derived pleasure from the torment of others. And not, perhaps, only torment. All the blood. Could a person lose so much blood and live? Had he killed in his dream?

Then memory came to him — a naked girl barely in her teens, forced by taut chains to stand spread-eagled, bleeding from a hundred tiny cuts… and he, a knife in his hand, coming up behind her for the last time, erection pointing toward the stones of the arching vault, the knife passing from his sight and the girl slumping in her chains with a terrible finality while he laughed and then he…

No!