Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

At the end of this corridor of pain and humiliation is a white door with a white Gothic arch above folding inward. Didi opens the door and you realize that somewhere along the way she has discarded the rest of her clothes. You move up the three steps to this altar of rejuvenation.

The inner sanctum glows with twinkling lights, bright as stars. All here is colorless, odorless, pure and uncorrupted: walls, floor, hospital gurney, sheets atop it. A frail woman lies still as death, attended by skinny hairless beings dressed only in white latex gloves and milky rubber shoes.

Didi puts a finger to lips, and you stare into her liquid eyes, realizing that they remind you of the black liquid fire. Her body is lean, angular, the dead refusing to die. Your vagina spasms.

This side show is interesting, but you remind yourself of the purpose of this quest. The pounding techno is a fraction dimmer here, enough to allow thought. Kevin is not here. You turn to leave.

“Fran?”

The voice catches you in a net of fragility. You glance back at the gurney, and the languid corpse-like form lifts its skull. Unnaturally bright eyes — familiar — peer into yours from deep in their sockets, as if beckoning.

“Kevin?”

“I’m Fran now,” he tells you, and your body jolts with this confirmation. “I need you for the reinventing.”

It is Kevin, or what is left of him. Instantly you move beside the gurney as if it is a coffin. He has no hair, no eyebrows, lashes, no finger- or toenails. His body is covered with pale stitches, like a rag doll repaired too many times.

“What’s … happening to you?” you ask.

“Ecstasy,” he says, his voice more feminine than masculine, the tone otherworldly.

“Drugs—”

“No. True ecstasy.”

You stare at his body, breasts plumped like white plums, his penis gone, replaced by … by … nothing! This is disturbing, but what leaves you unable to speak is his once thick-fleshed frame, now lighter than air, an exoskeleton.

“I’m thinner than you are,” he whispers with a smile so grotesque you shudder.

You can only shake your head, confused, horrified, resigned in your failure.

Suddenly, as if they are meant to distract, you notice the apparatus — clear tubes removing blood, suctioning fat from the body, washing out the intestine’s contents. You watch as one of the attendants pulls skin together over Kevin’s stomach where fat cells have been suctioned out, cuts the flab, stretches the skin taut, sutures …

“My stomach is stapled now, so I don’t need to eat,” Kevin whispers, eyes gleaming.

“What? … why? …” But you can no longer form sentences.

“To be you,” he says, the words so simple. The message clear as a crystal bell. This is your nightmare, your legacy. What you have created in your own distorted image. What you cannot show the world but what Kevin displays on your behalf. You gave him permission to reflect your darkness. Now that you see yourself with clarity, you cannot bear the sight.

He stares at the ceiling as if seeing God, as if he is ascending, and your eyes fill with tears.

Didi gently pulls the coat from your ravaged body, your clothes, then fingers find you through all your barren openings, filling them with black fire.

At long last, the heavy basket slips from your grip. Finally, you descend.

Pop Star in the Ugly Bar BENTLEY LITTLE

“Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” was first published in Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories From the Edge, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Nancy Holder, ROC, 2005.

* * *

I originally wrote this story in 1992 for an anthology titled Shock Rock, edited by the Hot Blood team of Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. They like the story and accepted it, but a month or so later, I received word that Pocket Books’ lawyers were not so thrilled. I was never sure whether they thought the story was obscene and thus open to prosecution, or whether they were afraid that Madonna, who had just come out with her Sex book, might be in the mood to sue. Either way, they banned the story. Three years on, after several rejections in the interim, Poppy Z. Brite accepted it for her anthology Razor Kiss. Unfortunately, she soon got word from the lawyers that they could not allow her publisher to include my story, and I received notice that once again the piece was banned.

Finally, a full decade later, “Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” appeared in the anthology Outsiders, thanks to editors Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, and the brave people at ROC. No one sued, the world didn’t end, and now it can be reprinted here for your reading pleasure.

She walks in, the pop star. Arrives with her retinue, wearing a black leather outfit that shows part of one tit and is supposed to be revealing but just doesn’t cut it here in the bar. I can tell she’s slumming, looking for action. The second she walks through the door she’s acting as if she owns the place, and she tries to appear nonplussed when she finally figures out no one’s paying attention to her. She’s wearing a wig, pretending she wants to travel incognito, but now that no one notices her, she stands in her most recognizable pose, desperately willing people to recognize who she is.

Nobody does.

I do, but I don’t say anything, just watch. I’ve seen her videos, read about her in Playboy and Rolling Stone and TV Guide, read how she’s outrageous and into kinky sex, how she likes to pick up young black hitchhikers and have her way with them, and I see her now, this pampered bitch, and I have to laugh. Wild and outrageous? I’ll show you wild. I’ll show you outrageous.

Welcome to the Ugly Bar.

She said in an interview that she likes to be spanked, something pretentious about there being a fine line between pleasure and pain and that for her the two sometimes overlapped. Old news. Shocking maybe for grandpa in Kansas but babytalk here in the bar. I look at her smoothly unblemished carefully moisturized skin and I know it’s never experienced true funpain. I think of Desdemona, the time I carefully flayed her left buttock and rubbed vinegar and lemon juice on it while Deke pissed in her mouth, and I can’t see the pop star going for that.

Well, I can, but I can’t see her liking it.

Control freak. That’s what we have here, folks. Walks on the wild side carefully modulated, well-planned. Little fantasy trips with safe, padded boundaries, escape routes if things get too real, if the monster gets too hairy.

Pleasure and pain

Are almost the same

To me

Isn’t that a line from one of her songs? One of her videos? I look at her, at her Hollywood costume. Almost the same? I suddenly want to make her prove it. No matter that it’s an act, that she’s just entertaining people, trying to titillate them. The fact that she’s here in the Ugly Bar means that it’s no longer just an act, that she’s starting to believe her own press, that she really thinks she’s daring and provocative and out there.

I glance around the bar, catch the nods, catch the looks, and I know they all want to be in on it.

I walk up to her, ask if I can buy her a drink. Her eyes take in my mask, my codpiece, and I see, for a second, fear. She’s afraid. Not of me, specifically, but of losing control. She might say in her interviews that she likes big men, hung men, that she’s looking for a man who has enough between his legs to really satisfy her, but I can tell that now that she’s seen one, she’s scared. She doesn’t like it at all.

I push aside her bodyguards, and two of the Others come out of the shadows and drag them quietly off, taking them away. She says with all of the confidence she can muster, all of the confidence her money and power