Grimoire Diabolique

“Afternoon Tea, dear Rudy,” informed the happy head. “In the first tourney.”

Rudy didn’t argue, in spite of the odds. But since last night, a question had itched at him like stitches healing.

“Hey, Gor? Yesterday you said something like you had to commit a murder any day you do the salt thing.”

“Upon any such day I perform a holy alomance, yes,” Gormok affirmed. “Nergal, the abyssal prince, has cursed me as such.”

“What happens if you, uh, don’t commit a murder?”

“Then the gift of prophecy is lost to me. Forever.”

Balls! Rudy thought. Shit! Fuck! Piss!

“Unless,” Gormok’s head leaned up and added, “I am, as a substitute, properly relieved of the groin wheneverest such needs of passion call.”

Rudy’s gaze thinned. “You mean…”

««—»»

“No!” Beth wailed upon the revelation. “No no no!”

“Honey, come on,” Rudy urged. “It’s the only way. If you don’t, he can’t pick the winners anymore.”

“Rudy, read my lips! I’m not going to have sex with a torso!”

Ho boy, Rudy thought. Women. You ask them to do a little something and they get all bent out of shape. Time to lay on the heavy bullshit, he decided. “It’s for our future, sweetheart. It’s for our children.”

Evidently, children was the magic word. Beth pouted a moment more. She looked at him, pink-faced.

“Our…children,” she whispered. “I- I…”

Rudy hugged her, stroked her hair. “It’s the only way, honey. I wouldn’t ask you to do it, but it’s the only way. Don’t we want our children to have the very best?”

“Our children,” she dizzily repeated. “I guess, I guess you’re…right.”

Then she turned for the basement steps, began to descend.

That’s my little trooper, Rudy approved.

««—»»

Little trooper was right—and then some. Rudy, being an investigative kind of guy, felt it only fitting and proper to make an observation or two, so he sneaked down a few minutes behind her and peeked through the slight gap in the door…

Good God! he thought.

Most would deem this a reasonable thing to think when witnessing one’s fiance engaged in the physical act of love with a living torso. Beth wasted no time in the deletion of her garments, and, despite a rather disconsolate look on her face—just as reasonable—she commenced to her task with something that could only be described as a formidable resolve. She squatted over Gormok, who lay unsurprisingly motionless atop his blanket. This afforded Rudy a front-on view, and though Beth’s discomfiture was plain, she soon began to ease into the brass tacks, so to speak, of the project.

In the dim basement light, her face flushed, and her small, pretty breasts began to sway. Meanwhile, her companion gibbered sweet Babylonian gibberish in response to her attentions. How does she do it? Rudy wondered. This was, after all, a torso. Moreover, ha wondered next: What is she thinking about?

Now there was a question! What would any woman think about while slamming glands with a dismembered salt-diviner? Perhaps it was brute rationalization, but Rudy came up with the only answer his psyche would allow.

She’s thinking about me—

Of course. Who else could she be thinking about? Certainly not Gormok. In moments, Rudy became aware of a considerable hardness loitering at his groin. My girlfriend’s humping a torso and I’m getting a woody. And as he watched further, the image transposed…

He imagined himself in Gormok’s place, right there on the basement floor and shuddering in bliss as the slot of Beth’s womanhood slid hotly up and down over his cock. His crotch felt smoldering, his heart raced. Beth’s breasts bobbed vigorously on her chest as she stepped up the momentum. Up and down, up and down, hot and frantic, her hips began to locomote like a machine, until—

Aw, Christ…

“Sweet mercy of Ea!” Gormok exclaimed at the obvious brink of his crisis.

Rudy caught his breath, and realized that he’d had a crisis of his own, his libido relieving itself to the sheer exploitation of his underpants…

I just watched my wife-to-be get it on with a fat torso, he realized. And I spunked in my shorts.

He crept back upstairs, as bewildered as he was disgusted. But he did feel convinced of one thing at least: it was all for a good cause…

V

No, a great cause, an absolutely big time wonderful cause. Within a week, Rudy was something he never recalled being: debt-free. Exit the ’76 clunker Malibu, enter his and hers Mustang GT’s. The 52” Sony TV was nice too, and so was the Adcom stereo and the $50,000-worth of new furniture.

And the new house. A spacious, skylighted A-frame off Bay Ridge Drive. It was the nicest house in the area that had a basement.

VI

Gormok remained surprisingly content, considering what Rudy’s greed had divorced him of. He jabbered and drank beer through a convalescent straw during the day, propped up behind pillows in bed, while Rudy cashed in at the track. Not once had Gormok’s divinations failed, and soon Rudy’s biggest problem was what to do with all the money. Beth, of course, had her ups and downs—the freedom to buy anything she ever wanted was a bit spoiled by the constant sexual service she was required to perform upon the libidinous torso in the basement. Eventually, she began to complain…

“That thing downstairs made me give it head today!” she spat at Rudy. “Did you hear me! I had to give head to a torso!”

Just like a woman, Rudy frowned in thought. You give ’em a good thing and they STILL bellyache. “Honey, he’s not a thing. He’s not an it. You’re talking about Gormok—he’s our man.”

Beth gaped. “Our man! Then you go down there and fuck him! See how you like it! You go down there and blow our man!”

Rudy thanked the fates Gormok wasn’t gay. “Stop being selfish,” he told her. “Don’t we have everything we want?”

“Yeah, Rudy, we do, and that’s my point. We have enough now, so I shouldn’t have to do it anymore.”

Rudy looked up reprovingly. “Beth, there’s never enough.”

“Oh, so that’s it, huh?” Beth, who rarely wore anything other than panties these days (due to the mounting frequency of Gormok’s need), stomped exasperated around the kitchen table. “You think you’re going to spend the rest of your life cleaning out the goddamn racetrack while good old Beth fucks and sucks a dismembered Babylonian alomancer!”

“Don’t be vulgar, honey. It’s not like you.”

Beth’s little breasts jiggled as she belted out a bitter chortle. “You make me fuck a torso and tell