The Minotauress

have a genuine split personality...

'And get the fucking newspaper!' Daphne shouted down from upstairs. 'It's been sitting out in the middle of the GODDAMN driveway all morning!'

'Yes, sweetheart!' he raised his voice back. 'I was just about to do that.'

Dean pulled on his jeans, which were strewn across the coffee table. He stumbled out the front door, into raving sunlight, then stumbled again and tripped over a coil of unrolled garden hose that lay stretched across the sidewalk like a trip-wire.

Dean fell flat on his chin.

CHAPTER SIX

Within a week, six more DeSmet children where found dead within proximity to the long-closed Stoddard's Mill. All were found in the same disrepair: gastro-intestinal organs evacuated through a ragged aperture. All appeared to have been gored in the chest.

As if by a bull.

Sergeant A.T. Lass was sufficiently apeshit, and so were the residents of DeSmet.

'My baby boy got killed! Where were you!' shrieked Janice Stumore when Lass went to pick up his 'pad.' Janice lived at the Callisto-Brownsroad Trailer Court with her common-law hubby Leonard. Leonard had a masters in organic chemistry from M.I.T.; he was also a meth-head who'd gravitated to DeSmet after escaping the correctional custody of the Massachusetts State Police Narcotics Unit. Here, Leonard ran the biggest ice lab in the county, and in order to continue to operate, certain payments needed to be made to certain constables of the law. One day, Lass knew, this trailer and a third of the park would go up in a minor mushroom cloud when Leonard fired up a pipe too close to the solvent.

'Here ya go, Adam-12,' Leonard said through his Fu Manchu beard. Greasy hair hung like black worms. 'Always a pleasure.' Then he slapped five century notes into Lass' fat paw. Janice's mad bellowing ripped through the paper-thin walls.

'Guess she's taking it pretty hard,' Lass, not much in the way of smarts, deducted.

Leonard put his thick black glasses on, squinting at a triple-beam balance as he weighed product. 'Sure. Her kid's ground chuck in the morgue.'

'Come on. Her kid was a retard with a head shaped like a pinto bean,' Lass pointed out. 'Christ, she had him turning tricks on Main Street for chickenhawk pervs.' This much was true. Kevvy Stumore, thirteen years old, had every learning disability known to the American Journal of Psychiatry, and a malformed cranial vault due to maladapted fissural calcium formation during the first trimester, thanks to his mother's chronic speed use during pregnancy. Kevvy was a trick baby to a meth-whore. He was all fucked up.

Perv homos paid the little mutant ten bucks for front-seat blowjobs. The way Lass saw it, the world was a teensy bit better without him.

'Look, I gotta bust one,' Lass informed because, see, the first part of the deal was hush-money. But Lass was also entitled to partake of Janice's sexual flesh whenever the urge rose—that was the second part of the deal. 'She's sounding kind of crazy now—'

Leonard got up from his make-shift lab table, walked out to the 'living' room. 'My poor little baby boy got butchered while that fat cop piece of shit was eating donuts, Leonard!' Spit gusted from her lips. 'My beautiful baby boy!'

Leonard promptly kicked her in the side of the head, which put an end to her agitation but fast. One of her few remaining teeth flew out. 'She's all yours, Officer,' Leonard told Lass. 'Go to town.' Then he walked back to his lab and closed the door.

Fuck. Janice was thirty-five but looked fifty-five. She certainly wasn't busy now; that's why Lass never saw any harm. Her dirty feet stuck up as he pulled her dirty jeans off her dirty legs. Looking at her split junkie beaver, his far-less-than-average-sized penis rocked in his pants. Aw, shit! By the time he got his trooper trousers down, there was no time to sink it in her. Two quick shucks with his hand and he was squirting all over her. Oh well, he thought at the waves of sensation. The droplets of sperm glittered off her corpse-white skin. Lass beat out the last and sighed.

That's what I call good lovemaking, he thought. He stuffed his putty dick back in his pants as his heart raced down.

Janice looked dead lying there. Perhaps she was dead, but that would be no biggie. One less meth-head whore in the world was almost as good as one less lawyer.

'Sorry about your kid,' he muttered and left. But even Lass could not have guessed that as his sperm dried on Janice's face and fried-egg junkie tits, yet another DeSmet, South Dakota, child was gored, mauled, and eaten only a few miles away.

««—»»

Dean's mouth sucked to hers. Their bodies entwined, and their tongues roved over one another. Each stroke into the hot cup of her sex brought an intractable bliss, and she cried into his mouth. She came for fifteen minutes, and when she could come no further, she pushed him off, then sucked him off. Dean spent himself in volume down her tongue. She swallowed without hesitance.

Dean lolled over, exhausted. She massaged his spent balls with one hand, caressed his face with the other... .

'Why did you leave me, why did you leave me?'

Leave? Dean thought. 'Daphne, I would never le—'

Blackish liquid began to trickle from her nostrils and corners of her mouth; simultaneously, a stench rose so foul that Dean audibly gagged. His eyes burned like riot gas. But he recognized the stench at once—it was rendering bilge—and when he looked between her legs, more of the noxious liquid oozed from her sex.

'Why, honey? Why? I loved you... .'

Moonlight blazed on her face. It was not Daphne. It was Arianne.

'We could have had everything,' she sobbed. Even her tears were bilge. Then she vomited in a plume directly into his face. Not puke. Rendering bilge.

The Baby Ben alarm clock rattled like an annoying toy. Dean woke up in an empty bed, flinging off imaginary bilge.

Holy shit...

The nightmare left him bolt upright, shivering. His hand padded sideward and found nothing but cold sheets where his wife should be. Then he remembered: she'd left yesterday for a design show in Chicago.

God in heaven, he thought.

Dean sat up, wearing only boxers. He scratched his balls and fell into nebulous thought as a long sigh stretched across his mind.

He saw his life now, in its utter disappointment, and then he saw his old life, in its crude, earthy glory. I was somebody back then, he realized. I was somebody special.

Good Dean, Bad Dean, he thought. Blackouts, split-personality, and