Grimoire Diabolique

and arranged about her as if for some macabre inspection. An outline of slowly seeping blood spread about the corpse like a Kirlian aura.

Gormok was eating something dark and wet out of his hands. Her liver, Rudy realized. He’s eating Mona’s liver.

“Friends! Hello!” Gormok greeted, chewing. “How art?”

Rudy bellowed, “What in God’s name did you do!”

“Not in God’s name,” Gormok lamented. “In Nergal’s. Lo, and to my eternal shame, behold the freight of my curse. I try to fight it, on my heart. But the blasted Nergal has condemned me to such heinous acts wheneverest I breathe on the salt’s divine fumes.”

“Uh…huh.” Rudy shuddered, feebly wielding the nail file. Should I kill him? he debated. But he thought about that. He’d never much liked Mona anyway. Bitchy, arrogant, and always taking cheap shots. Sure, he’d fucked her a couple times when Beth was at work (—no great shakes in bed, either. Like fucking a starfish—) and since then she’d regularly implied that it wouldn’t be a good idea for Rudy to ever raise her rent.

“Gormok, wait here a minute. Beth and I have to talk.”

“Of course! Enjoy your discourse, dear friends,” Gormok invited. “Whilst I enjoy my meal.”

Rudy had to about carry Beth back to their bedroom. She was going pasty-faced, pale. “Rudy,” she fretted, “we have to get out of here while we still can! We have to call the police!”

“Don’t overreact, honey. He’s harmless.”

“Harmless!” Beth’s eyes came close to jettisoning from her head. “He’s eating Mona’s liver! You call that harmless?”

Rudy had a plan, but he had to play it out right. “Listen, Beth,” he said in a consoling, quiet voice. “Mona’s got no relatives or friends—hell, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend. She’ll never be missed. And she wasn’t doing well in school, anyway—”

“Rudy! You call the police right now!”

“All right, all right.” Rudy held up his hands, his hair sticking up. “I’m calling the police. See?” He picked up the phone and began to dial.

But not the police. Instead, he dialed 1-900 Sportsline. He listened a moment, tapping his foo. Then he hung up and smiled.

“Clipper won the bout in the sixth round.”

Beth went into a staccato burst of crying and screaming. “Rudy, you’re out of your mind! What is wrong with you?”

“Baby, it’s only because I love you,” Rudy, well, lied. “I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for us. I want us to be married someday, have kids, and all that.”

Beth sniffled, looking up. “Really?”

“Of course, honey,” he assured her and gave her a hug. “But I need you to have faith in me, okay? I want you to go to bed now. Just trust me.” He lovingly touched her cheek. “I’ll take care of everything.”

««—»»

Rudy did exactly that. First, he put Gormok back to bed in the basement. The alomancer, smiling calmly, said, “I’m sated now, dear Rudy. My curse is relieved, and now I can sleep. And I am heartily sorry for any inconvenience i have caused you.”

“Hey, Gor, don’t worry about it.” Rudy winced a bit, thinking of Mona’s liver. “These things happen all the time.”

“Until the morrow, then! And for now—sleep. For to sleep is perchance—to dream.”

“Uh…huh,” Rudy said.

When he went back up, this time, he locked the trap-door.

««—»»

Digging graves was hard work, harder than one might expect. Yet dig Rudy did, maniacally in his boxer shorts. He dug deep.

Inserting Mona’s internal organs back into her opened abdominal vault proved a trying task too, but at least it was unique…

And later, in the little moonlit backyard, with the crickets trilling and the grass cool under his bare feet, with the scent of the bay in the air, Rudy buried the fickle bitch.

««—»»

But one more task remained. Gormok said he was cursed to commit murder on any day that he performed a salt-divination. That’s a big problem, Rudy realized. He couldn’t very well have Gormok cutting folks up and eating their livers every time he gave Rudy the read on the next fight or ballgame, now could he?

So…

He crept quietly back down into the basement.

Gormok slept on, murmuring sweet Babylonian nothings.

Here goes, Rudy thought—

—and raised the fire ax.

 “Sleep no more!” Gormok quoted Bill Shakespeare as the great blade cut down. “MacRudy doth murder sleep!”

Blood flew like spaghetti sauce. Things thunked to the floor. But there was no other way! Hell, I’m doing him a favor, Rudy felt convinced as he chopped and chopped.

And chopped some more. Once he’d succeeded in severing Gormok’s limbs, he tied off each stump with twine.

What a day, he thought when he was done.

IV

Beth, shrieking, pummeled up the basement stairs the next afternoon. “What did you do!”

“Hey, didn’t I say I’d take care of everything?”

“Rudy! You turned him into a…a torso!”

“Yeah, well, he can’t hurt anybody now, can he?” Rudy rationalized. “And he doesn’t even care, as long as we keep him happy.”

Beth’s face crimped. “What do you mean?”

Rudy thought it best to change the topic. “Look!” he celebrated and waved a sheaf of $100 bills. “Our man came through again. Pimlico, baby! Afternoon Tea by a nose in the first! The odds were 32-to-one! Can you believe it?”

Beth, quite reasonably, went nuts. “Rudy! You bet again? He’s a murderer, for God’s sake! We can’t keep a murderer in our basement! Much less a murderer who’s a torso! ”

“Sure we can.” Rudy placed the stack of bills in her hands.

Beth went lax, astonished. “This looks like about ten-thou—”

“Eleven thousand clams,” Rudy corrected. “And I already paid off Vito The Eye. We’re rolling from here, babe.”

Beth’s eyes stayed fixed on the money.

“But, uh, you see,” Rudy commenced with the bad news. His throat turned dry. “There’s a catch. Remember when I told you, ‘as long as we keep him happy’?”

“Yeah?” Beth replied.

««—»»

The catch was this:

That morning, Rudy had shown the head atop Gormok’s de-limbed body the racing journal as he held the fuming ashtray under the alomancer’s nose.