'Don't you laugh,' Gerald said stiffly.
'Oh Gerald,' she said, laughing all the same. 'This is such a bad story. I don't blame you for using a penname. it's-' she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes'it's
He began to walk toward her stiffly.
'You haven't made me big enough, Gerald. That's the trouble. I'm too big for you. Perhaps Poe, or Dosteyevsky, or Melville. . . but not you, Gerald. Not even under your royal pen-name. Not you. Not you.
She began to laugh again, huge racking explosions of sound.
'Don't you laugh,' Gerald said stiffly.
* * *
The tool-shed, after the manner of Zola:
Wooden walls, which showed occasional chinks of light, surrounded rabbit-traps hung and slung in corners; a pair of dusty, unstrung snow-shoes: a rusty spaceheater showing flickers of yellow flame like cat's eyes; Tales; 2 shovel; hedgeclippers; an ancient green hose coiled like a garter-snake; four bald tires stacked like doughnuts; a rust), Winchester rifle with no bolt; a twohanded saw; a dusty work-bench covered with nails, screws, bolts, washers, two hammers, a plane, a broken level, a dismantled carburetor which one sat inside a 1949 Packard convertible; a 4 hp. air-compressor painted electric blue, plugged into an extension cord running back into the house.
* * *
'Don't you laugh,' Gerald said again, but she continued to rock back and forth, holding her stomach and flapping the manuscript with her wheezing breath like a white bird.
His hand found the rusty Winchester rifle and he pole-axed her with it.
* * *
Most horror stories are sexual in nature.
I'm sorry to break in with this information, but feel I must in order to make the way clear for the grisly conclusion of this piece, which is (at least psychologically) a clear metaphor for fears of sexual impotence on in), part. Mrs. Leighton's large mouth is symbolic of the vagina; the hose of the compressor is a penis. Her female bu Ik huge and overpowering, is a mythic representation of the sexual fear that lives in every male, to a greater or lesser degree: that the woman, with her opening, is a devouter.
* * *
In the works of Edgar A. Poe, Stephen King, Gerald Nately, and others who practice this particular literary form, we are apt to find locked rooms, dungeons. empty mansions (all symbols of the womb); scenes of living burial (sexual impotence); the dead returned from the grave (necrophilia); grotesque monsters or human be ings (externalized fear of the sexual act itself); torture and/or murder (a viable alternativ e to the sexual act).
These possibilities are not always valid, but the postfreild reader and writer must take them into consideration when attempting the genre.
Abnormal psychology has become a part of the human experience.
* * *
She made thick, unconscious noises in her throat as he whirled around madly, looking for an instrument; her head lolled brokenly on the thick stalk of her neck.
* * *
He seized the hose of the air-compressor.
'All right,' he said thickly. 'All right, now. All Tight.'
* * *
bitch fat old bitch youve had yours not big enough is that right well youll be bigger youll be bigger still
* * *
He ripped her head back by the hair and rammed the hose into her mouth, into her gullet. She screamed around it, a scund like a cat.
* * *
Part of the inspiration for this story came from an old E. C. horror comic boo), which I bought in a Lisbon Falls drugstore. In one particular story, a husband and wife murdered each other simultaneous))- in mutually ironic (and brilliant) fashion. He was very fat; she was very thin. He shoved the hose of an aircompressor down her throat and blew her up to dirigible size. On his way downstairs a booby-trap she had rigged fell on him and squashed him to a shadow.
Any author who tells you he has never plagiarized is 2 liar. A good author begins with bad ideas and improbabilities and fashions them into comments on the human condition.
In a horror story, it is imperative that the grotesque be elevated to the status of the abnormal.
* * *
The compressor turned on with a whoosh and a chug. The hose flew out of Mrs. Leighton's mouth. Giggling and gibbering, Gerald stuffed it back in. Her feet drummed and thumped on the floor. The flesh of her checks and diaphragm began to swell rhythmically. Her eyes bulged, and became glass marbles. Her torso began to expand.
* * *
here it is here it is you lousy louse are you big enough yet are you big enough
