It was a hot July summer evening.  Rain had not fallen on the southern Nevada desert landscape for four months, and the night sucked at him.  The barren mountains to the west took on pink and purple hues, occasionally bleeding into red.  Intensifying colors, feeding dark desires, a cloud of smog and dust from ongoing construction hung over the city.  Small fires of evil desperation—his phrase—burned on the city's darkening edge.
 
Dread perched on his soul.  Josh Reynolds stood, leaning on the railing that surrounded the balcony to his twelfth-story apartment,  resisting the urge to jump.  The urge was a black fist in his gut.
 
It was the first Friday of the seventh month.  Tonight, he knew, the succubus would crawl into his heart.  Tonight, he feared he would commit an unspeakably bloody act.  He would commit an abomination.  The prospect both fascinated and repelled him.
 
He knew he would not be able to help himself.  Josh had gone through the same transformation for years: on the first Friday of every seventh month, scaly darkness oozed into his soul, pushing him to abominable acts.  Seven months ago, he had performed a knife-wielding sacrifice and then, in a burst of rage, he had disemboweled and then dismembered his gorgeous female victim under the blood red moon, smearing himself with her blood as he stood alone and naked on a cold desert plateau.  While the crime had been reported in every major newspaper across the country, local and national investigative authorities had not traced the act to him.
 
Closing his eyes now, he recited The Lord's Prayer, hoping to feel the peace he had known as a child.  In his spirit, as he tried to summon strength to fight strangling darkness, he felt himself being sucked from this life.  The words to the prayer disintegrated like ashes underfoot.
 
Clinging darkness within grew like a cancer, bending thought to bloody deeds.  Rubbing his right thumb over the sharp blade of the knife in his left hand, feeling himself go hard, he opened his eyes and forced them onto the city spread before him across the southern Nevada desert.  ‘Where is she?' a voice inside him asked,  and he wished  he could see through buildings and magnify objects.  He wondered for an instant what he sought.   He found temporary comfort in the lights blazing before him and searched his mind for an image of Augustine's City of God;  instead, he imagined himself as something serpentine, swimming in a muddy sea of light, seeking its next victim.  He had to swim in this sea and take something living from it if he were to exorcize the dark thing growing in  his soul.  To survive, to sustain hope of freeing himself from this thing,  he needed his victim's soul.  ‘Finally', he thought.  "I will take this long, cruel knife with me into the heart of Las Vegas", he said.  "And it will sing as it cuts deep and sucks the soul from her body."  The knife, he reminded himself, is a symbol of my soul.
 
In  twilight's haze, wishing he had courage to take the plunge, he recalled his life.  Twenty-five years ago, he had been finishing up his Ph. D. in English in a university in Seattle when he had been offered a position as an English professor in a college in southern Nevada.  At the time, he had been a dewy-eyed romantic, believing the best of everything, enamored with ‘The Confessions of St. Augustine'.  Tired of the drab gray Northwestern climate, he and Jan jumped at the chance.
 
But the move to Vegas proved to be a disaster; demonic powers, he now realized, had conspired against them.  During the first week, their apartment had been broken into.  A week after that, their dog had been ground up in a cement mixer.  That summer his wife had the first of many miscarriages and, one month later, tried to commit suicide by taking a bottle of pain killers.  Beyond these incidents, a multitude of little things accumulated to a growing depression:  the Buick broke down at least once a month, the eight-by-twelve apartment was invaded by spiders and ants seeking to escape the summer heat,  and few colleagues at school would acknowledge his scholarship in Eighteenth Century English literature.
 
More importantly, he still remembered the morning, nineteen years ago, when he had awoken and could no longer feel God, up to that point, as a constant presence.  The howling desert wind had been particularly loud that morning, shaking the apartment complex to its foundations, reminding him of Yeats' poems about the Second Coming.  At the time, he and Jan had recently come back from a revival at the Church of Heavenly Jerusalem in Southern California, the Holy Ghost sitting on their hearts like Pentecostal flames and filling them with God.  He had devoted himself to the study of scripture, had attended church often and occasionally handed out evangelical tracts on a  downtown street corner.
 
Then, darkness rushed in like a sudden wind, and God had left him.  That gray and gusty winter morning, the Holy Ghost had flowed out of him, and he had awakened Jan, who had held him as he cried like a baby.  Somehow, inexplicably, he had lost paradise.
 
At first, he and Jan tried pastors, then priests, even exorcists.  God, they knew, would help.  God wouldn't let Josh sink.  But Josh did plunge into a spider web of depression so severe that he thought he could never untangle himself.  Numerous sessions in the following years with therapists did  not assuage daily despair, and finally resorting to heavy medication, he gradually lost any sensitivity he may ever have felt toward those around him.  His remarks to those closest to him became sarcastic, meanspirited, his behavior to his colleagues coldly indifferent.  He took pleasure in hurting others, particularly his wife and children.  He began to refer to Jan as "Lollipop."   The only thing left in his life was the nightly opportunity to have sex with a wife whose beauty and grace outshone those around her.
 
One evening, after the kids were in bed Jan told him she was leaving him and moving back home with her mother and father.   She felt that his empty cruelty had become intolerable, after he had struck her when she had refused once again to be bound to the bedposts with leather straps and fucked unconscious.
 
In the end, before she escaped, Jan had discovered that Josh was seeing another woman, a tall black dancer from the Strip who claimed that she was the reincarnation of Zoroaster and had power to raise the dead.  When Jan confronted him with the affair, Josh confessed  that, for two years at least, on the first Friday of every seventh month, he killed a  beautiful woman of his choosing; in so doing, he told Jan, he had found a method by which he could temporarily exorcize the darkness that saturated his soul.   "It's a cleansing ritual," he explained. "I must do it."
 
Knowing then that the God of Hosts would judge her husband,  Jan had fled to Idaho early in March of 1987, taking the children with her.  (It was like Lot and his family fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, she later told friends.)  Now, at forty-nine years of age, he could barely remember what the children looked like.  He didn't much care.
 
Absorbed by the dark thing clinging to his soul, Josh now no longer felt the desire to jump, his thoughts turning instead to perform the sacrificial ritual.  He imagined what his victim would look like.  Certainly, she would be beautiful.  Licking his chops and gazing across the city, he knew that this night, after he had found a woman with long raven hair and blood-red lips, held something extraordinary for him.  He knew she would be waiting for him, somewhere in the night, that she would know his name.  Breathing rapidly, Josh thrilled at the prospect of sucking the life out of her.
 
Blood slowly beginning to boil within him, he turned and moved from the balcony and into his apartment.  He opened the closet, took out his black leather jacket, put it on, and slipped his knife into a deep inner pocket he had created.  The woman he sought would be waiting for him, he sensed in his heart.  Time to go, he heard the still dark voice inside of him breathe, as he walked out the door, careful to lock it behind him.

II.

He drove to a small building on the outskirts of North Las Vegas;  the vast desert stretched beyond, into endless darkness. He had driven past this building several times on his way out of town, a
nude bar surrounded by abandoned stores that had once represented someone's dream of a mall.  Josh had always felt drawn to this place.
 
Tonight, the parking lot on the west side of the building was packed, and so Jake parked across the street in front of the church that he and Jan used to attend.  Munching his fifteenth Snickers bar, he sat in the car for a good half hour, listening to an Ozzie CD,  panting, pounding the dash, feeling incredibly aroused.  The full moon just over the Flesh Pit seemed for a split second to scowl at him, as if to tell him that he was ready.
 
As he stepped from his car, black leather boots first, and locked the doors, he saw a light flickering in the window of the pastor's office.  He wondered if black pastor Isaiah Martin still preached at the church.  He turned toward the church and saw a shadow move behind the curtain, knew the tall bent shape belonged to the preacher, and wondered if God were watching.  He wished then he were seated in the church, listening to the preacher ramble on about the Second Coming of Jesus, holding his wife's hand, and wondering what his children would grow up to be.
 
"Where the hell do these memories come from?" he asked himself, shaking his head, trying to ward off images of worship and focus on the ritual call of the night. After he had given into a fit of howling following one of Isaiah's sermons, the church had turned its back on him long ago, as soon as the members learned that God had left Josh.  He had been told by the elders never to set foot in the church again.  So he could not understand the strange yearning he felt to return to earlier days, to sit in the church again, and to listen to the pastor.
 
As he walked across the street and approached the entrance to the club, boots scraping on asphalt, he glanced into the dark space between the Flesh Pit and the building next to it.  He was not sure why he had taken his eyes off the red neon spider perched atop the strip club.  "Perhaps," he thought, "I noticed something move in the darkness."  He watched the darkness as he walked, knew he was being watched in turn, and felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle.  He felt, as he crossed the street, that he had become nothing more than two eyes moving through space.
 
Stopping just when he reached the sidewalk, he stood, as if held in place by an invisible hand, and stared into the palpable darkness, sure that someone was there.  As he watched, the hot summer wind whipping  around him, he saw the unmistakable fiery glow from a cigarette being inhaled and thought instantly of the fires of hell.  Wanting to continue his walk into the nightclub, he couldn't take his eyes off the darkness.  He knew that something or someone in there wanted to devour him.   As he watched and waited, the streets became silent; he could no longer hear music from the night club; aware of the glare of the street lights overhead, he felt engulfed in liquid darkness and struggled to catch his breath.  And as he waited, watching the darkness, the thing buried in the shadows emerged into the pool of light created by the Flesh Pit's marquee.
 
"Hello, brave one," she said, her ice-cold voice cutting like a knife into his heart.  She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  She had long, raven hair, blood-red lipstick, a black leather dress that revealed enormous breasts and stopped just below her crotch and red fingernails.  With two slender fingers, she held the cigarette inches from her mouth. "I've been waiting, Josh," she added.
 
"Hello," he said, his voice cracking, his heart pounding feverishly against his chest.
 
The two stared at each other under the full moon, and Joshua could not distinguish predator or prey.  "How does she know me?" he asked himself silently.
 
"You are looking for me, aren't you," she asked, inhaling on the cigarette.  Josh noticed that her eyes had a red glitter, and he suddenly imagined a beast lurking in a dark cave, its presence signaled only by two red glowing dots for eyes.
 
"Sure.  Who else?" he said, immediately apprehensive.  His heart raced.
 
"Then, Josh, do you know who the fuck I am?  Do you have any fucking idea?" she asked, her tone playful.  She crossed her arms, cigarette in her left hand.  She moved closer to him, and he felt a wave of nausea wash through him.  Suddenly, he felt chilled.  Beads of sweat broke out on his brow.
 
"I think I know," he slowly responded, not sure where this exchange was going.  Surely, this was the woman who had called to him earlier that evening, as he had stood over the balcony.
 
"Really?  Well, tell me, who am I?" she teased, arms still crossed.  She stood inches from him and smelled sweet as a rose.  Behind her fragrance, he sensed the abyss of death.
 
"You're the dark woman of my dreams. . ." Josh  responded, carefully.  His life, he felt, hung by a slender thread tonight.  He thought of the red neon spider perched atop the nude bar, and briefly saw himself as that spider, dangling by a filament over an ocean of fire.
 
The smoke from her cigarette circled her head, forming a smoky web and obscuring her fiery eyes.  He looked at her delicious dark red lips and wanted to taste this woman.  Insanely, he desired to eat her flesh.
 
"Guess again, sweet dog.  I am that, but I am a hell of a lot more."  She dropped her arms to her sides, allowing Josh to gaze at her breasts.  The brown nipples of both breasts were slightly exposed.
 
"Well," he began, black thoughts fluttering like bats in his mind, "If you're not just the woman I'm going spend the night with, then who are you?" He could feel himself being sucked into this woman.
 
"Can't you guess?" Her voice seemed to echo. "Do you want to taste me?" she added. "Or eat me?"
 
Joshua remained silent, slightly afraid.  His victims were normally much more passive, far less controlling than this woman.  He wanted to say yes to her questions.
 
"C'mon, baby doll," she encouraged him, draping her left arm over his right shoulder.  "Take a wild guess.  You love my tits.  You love me.  You've seen me in your dreams.  Many, many times."  She tilted her head back and sniffed,  bestial.
 
Chilled to the bone, Joshua felt his mind go blank.  He could no longer feel the street beneath his shoes.
 
"Have I ever heard of you or seen you before?" Josh mumbled.  He felt dizzy, as if overcome by a gigantic force field exuding negative energy.  Again, he felt sick.
 
"Oh, my, yes.  Everyone has heard of me.  And you've seen me several times."  She hissed these words and something rustled in the darkness behind her.
 
"Where?" Josh asked, and he felt an urge to place his hand under her skirt and over her crotch.  "I should be afraid," Josh told himself.  "I should leave."  But Josh was powerless to resist.
 
"In your dreams, sweet and succulent lamb.  I'm the one you sought as you stood on your balcony tonight, looking over the city.  You dream about me.  I swim like a serpent through this sea of lights.  Call me Babylon, if you like.  And go ahead, touch my pussy, please.  Please.  I'll like it and so will you."
 
"Your name is Babylon?" he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
 
"Yes," she responded, "Babylon.  As in the opposite of Jerusalem."
 
She stepped closer, brushing against him, inhaled, blew the smoke into his face.  "And please, sweet pup, I'm ready.  Let's go far, far away from this place—I have an idea where we can go, but you've never been there—and have some real fun." She said this in a singsong voice, as if she were reciting a chant.  Mesmerized, a small bird at the mercy of a snake,  he moved his right hand move under her skirt and felt her wetness.
 
"Real fun?" he asked, breathless.  Overpowered by the dark woman's presence, he felt himself fragmenting.
 
"Real fucking fun.  How about it, you delicious tidbit?" She grabbed him between the legs with her left hand, caressed him, and he felt himself automatically go hard as a rock.  Bathed in the red neon glow, he felt pleasure in being caged by this woman.
 
"Who are you?  Why should I know who you are?" he asked.  For some reason, Josh was trembling.  It was at that instant that he saw, in his mind's eye, the woman before him standing in the midst of towering flames.  He was certain that he could hear, in the vision, the screams of the damned.  He could even feel the flames; they were scorching and freezing him.  Facing the woman, he felt totally, helplessly consumed by darkness.  Yet he remained totally aroused.  I would like to fuck this thing, something inside of him said.
 
"This is the moment we've all been waiting for," the voice inside Josh's head intoned.   "Time to play.  Knowing that this was the moment of bloody ritual sacrifice for which he had been called this weekend, Josh knelt reverentially in front of the woman, his eyes level with her crotch, and briefly closed his eyes.  He looked like a man in prayer.  Then he reached inside his pocket and, his hands shaking, pulled out his knife.
 
Feverish with excitement, aware that he was out of his mind, he opened his eyes and used the tip of the knife to lift the hem of her skirt.  He scraped the sharp point against her flesh.  He smiled, realizing that this women did not shave.
 
"Stick it in, big boy, and suck me out—if you can," said Babylon, her voice low and sexy.  "C'mon. This is the moment we've both been waiting for."
 
Josh started, then hesitated.  Her words had disconcerted him.  "Surely," he thought to himself, "she didn't mean the knife."
 
"I mean the knife," she said, calmly, as if reading his thoughts. "Slip it slowly into me. It'll be better than sex. You'll see."
 
Remaining silent, his heart racing wildly, Josh took a deep breath and, as the woman placed both hands between her legs and slowly opened herself up, Josh inserted the tip of the blade and gently pushed, thinking that she was already wet.  The knife slid in smoothly, as into a ready-made sheath.   As he gently pushed, the woman sucked in her breath and gently moaned.  Josh felt euphoric, transported out of himself as warm blood flowed down the knife and onto his hand.  He watched the blood pour out of the woman, wanted to taste it, and wondered why she did not cry out.  "Keep going, Josh baby,"  was all she said.  "All the way."
 
The blood smelled sweet to Josh, like a rose.  Realizing that he should have been appalled, even sickened by this act, Josh felt ready to burst.  It was as if the knife was an extension of him, and as he pushed, he could feel tremendous pleasure in his own manhood.  The further he pushed, the more she bled, the greater the pleasure he felt until, finally, he had inserted the blade all the way in.  As he did, he felt himself explode, cascades of joyous relief washing through him.
 
He looked up, saw the woman standing tall and strong over him, looking down at him tenderly.  She smiled faintly, and after several minutes of bliss, he slowly withdrew his blade.
 
For an instant, he held the knife in front of him, blood glistening darkly in the pulsing light from the red neon spider.  He  had begun to lick the instrument when, feeling the woman put her hands under his arms, he rose, still holding the knife in his right hand.
 
Josh felt totally at peace, for the first time in years, and knew he was one with this dark woman who refused to die, who refused to show anything but pain.  He looked for an instant at Babylon, who moved close and put her warm lips against his, and as they kissed passionately, he felt his soul being sucked from his body.  He placed a hand between her legs and realized she was no longer bleeding.  She took his free hand in hers, pulled him after her, and began to lead him across the street to his own car.
 
"C'mon, Josh baby, we gotta go," she sang, guiding him toward his car.  "My little baby man, listen:  darkness calls, night to night."
 
Walking as if in slow motion, hand in hand with the most beautiful woman in creation, Josh felt his jaw and neck go numb, felt his tongue swell and his mouth go dry.  Fear and desire smote his heart as he suddenly realized that the woman could be only one person, that she was one who could assume many forms, and he wished that he had the ability to ask God for help.
 
It was at that moment that he looked up at his car and saw in the light of the red neon spider a tall, stooped old man standing next to a post office box twenty feet down the sidewalk.  He knew the man immediately and was temporarily dazzled by the glow about the figure.  This, a voice inside Josh breathed, is the war of the spirit and darkness has won.
 
"Hey, Preacher," Joshua stuttered, wondering how the preacher could help him now.  Darkness pushed in upon Josh.  The preacher took two steps closer; now, actually fearful, Josh could clearly see his face.  The woman guiding Joshua to his car stopped suddenly, as if she were afraid to go any further.  Josh stopped with her.
 
"Hello, Josh," came the man's gentle but penetrating reply.  "Spirit calls to spirit.  It's been a long time."  The preacher's voice was low, soft, and mellow, just as Josh remembered it.  He hadn't heard the soft, sweet voice for years.  His children had called it the voice of God.
 
For an instant, time stood still.  Memories of his and Jan's days in the church flooded his mind.  He saw himself standing next to Jan in the church, heard himself singing "Amazing Grace." Those were blessed moments he realized.
 
"Yes," Josh finally replied.  "A long time."
 
"And hello, my twisted dark friend," the preacher said to the woman in the still gentle voice that had brought Elijah out of the cave. Wondering how the broken, crippled old man could even stand, Josh thought he could feel his strength slowly trying to flow back into him.  He wondered if what he felt was God.
 
Just as quickly, he felt the darkness extinguish the light.
 
"You can't have him, you can't save him, you can't buy him," said the woman, almost mockingly.  "Rules are rules, old stump.  You gave him up when he gave you up, lickety thump.  He's mine.  He gave himself to me long, long ago.  He now belongs to me."
 
The summer wind banged furiously at Josh.  Aware that he could still smell the woman's sweet, sweet blood, he felt chilled, pushed to the door to death's dream kingdom.
 
"Yes," came the old man's reply, "he did do that.  But nothing, I believe, is irrevocable.  Not in this universe."
 
"What is it that I did long ago?" Josh wondered, freezing.  The wind blasted furiously around him.
 
And then Josh remembered: an evening one week before he had lost the ability to feel God, he had gone out with some friends to a seance.  His wife had told him that he was walking into danger, begged him at the door not to go, wept as he stepped out into the night, walked down the sidewalk, and got into his friend's car.  That night, gathered at the house of a friend whose name Josh could not remember, he and three of his friends held hands, recited chants, and asked the spirit of darkness to enter them, to take control of their lives.  Until now, for some reason, it had never occurred to Josh that a relationship must indeed exist between his conviction that God had left him and his participation in the seance.
 
"Several nights ago, in fact, he felt darkness coming and asked to be released from your domain and transported into the heavenly kingdom."
 
"Might be a bit late for that," said Babylon.
 
"Might be, " the old man replied.
 
The moon shone brightly overhead, and  music from the strip joint filled Josh's ears.  It was something from AC/DC.  The stars overhead seemed to be spinning, and Josh felt that the orderliness of everything within him and outside of him disintegrating.  He felt that if he looked upward he would see the millions of stars fall from the sky.
 
"Josh, come with me," the preacher gently intoned.  "At least try.  All you have to do, son, is take a step this way and agree in your heart.  All can be forgiven and forgotten in an instant."  As Josh listened, certain now of his eternal destination, he was aware of another presence guiding the preacher's words.  Struggling with thought, Josh could not remember the name of this presence.  Part of him now hated this presence.  His mind was fogged up.  He felt an immense wall separating him from that presence.
 
Josh was thinking about taking the step when the lady broke in again with, "He's mine, Daddy.  All, all mine, Daddy.  He's mine.  He'll come to me, a poor lost sheep without his master.  He's already bound to me, aren't you, Josh?"
 
Josh wondered why she called the preacher "daddy," thought for a split second that the Lord of Hosts dwelt in and glowed around the old man, and then told himself he was out of his mind. The red neon sign overhead flickered and then went out.
 
It was as he was shuffling forward that the old man, perhaps in response to the almost total darkness, he seemed to wobble.
 
"Josh, my dark sweet love," hissed the woman beside him, now soft and gentle, sticking her tongue into his ear.  Held by darkness, Josh felt himself again quickly aroused by the woman's sensuous voice, knew that he was growing huge.  This was the woman he had dreamt about.  Inwardly, he consented to let darkness rule in his life.
 
In the pause that followed, Josh felt the dark thing inside him slowly push through his conscious mind, like a plant forcing itself through thick soil, speaking to him in hushed, reverent tones.  He knew he had been fully born into night.
 
"You know what to do?" she asked. "Josh, you know what to do, right?  You've been listening."
 
"I know what to do," Josh replied.  The dark plan materialized in his mind, and he knew that since God had abandoned him and created the great emptiness, he was programmed to this act at this moment in this place.  It was part of the eternal plan, he realized, and he knew as well that he was one of the Sons of Darkness that ancient Dead Sea mystics  had written about.
 
As he moved away from the woman and stepped toward the preacher, he   brought up his right arm, saw that he still the held long, thin, now bloodied  knife.  The knife singing, he knew what do.  There was only one thing to do, and stepping forward and seizing the old man by an arm, Josh pulled the old man toward him, smoothly, easily inserting his knife just below the rib cage on the right-hand side.  It was as easy as slicing open water melon, and Josh once again felt warm liquid bathing his hands.  The preacher made no effort to resist Josh, who recognized that he had been baptized this night into a realm he had been warned long ago never to enter.
 
Josh looked into the old preacher's eyes, saw pain and compassion, knew that the old man forgave him even then.  Closing his eyes, Josh saw himself as one of those who drove the nails into Jesus' hands and feet.  As Josh withdrew the knife with his right hand, he continued to hold Preacher Ike in his left arm, life leaving the body as it slumped to the street.  Then, looking up at the woman Babylon, Josh performed his final act, drawing the knife across the old man's throat.
 
When Josh released the old man, now a corpse, he shut his eyes and, in that brief moment, saw the bloodied figure hanging on the cross, saw the crown of thorns, recognized, as if he stood at the foot of the cross, the Man of Sorrows, who had died for him.
 
He continued to kneel, hoping that forgiveness could be his that moment, aware also that he could not break away from the dark woman who stood behind him, immense in the cloud of dark energy that now filled her.  He knew that he was lost eternally.
 
"You're mine, Josh," she said, her voice cold, leaden.  "You are mine for all eternity."
 
"Yes," said Josh, realizing he must embrace the woman's pronouncement.
 
The words rang like a dark bell in Josh's brain, and he opened his eyes, knowing that he must go, that he had given his soul forever to the dark presence that stood behind him and consumed him and the night.
 
Standing, he looked at the corpse lying peacefully at his feet.  Isaiah had a smile on his face.  Josh knew that the person who had inhabited that body had left the earth.  Stunned, Josh turned and looked at the woman, still as dark and beautiful and seductive as she was when she had emerged from the darkness.  Josh knew he could not fight this woman, that his soul was inextricably bound to her and to the immense darkness from whence she came.
 
His eyes locked with hers, and as he looked, he knew he had now become a part of her. Taking her outstretched hand, feeling her dark energy course through him like electricity, he allowed himself to be led to his car.  Taking his keys out of his pocket, he escorted the woman to the passenger side, opened the door and let her in.  Then, glancing up at the Flesh Pit, he heard the music pulsating through the open glass doors.  The red neon spider illuminated the night.  He walked around the car to the driver's side, unlocked and opened the door, and slid behind the steering wheel.
 
He put the key into the ignition, turned it, and started the car.  "Where to?" he asked the gorgeous dark lady sitting next to him.  He noticed that her blouse was undone and could see the nipple of her right breast.  Josh leaned over, held her breast, and took the nipple into his mouth.  Sitting upright several minutes later, he knew he had no regrets.  He loved Babylon now.  He desired more than ever to consume her flesh and knew, certainly, that she was going to devour him.
 
"That way," she said, pointing straight ahead to the darkness, which Josh knew, in that moment, would be endless.  "It'll be fun.  It'll be wild.  It'll be like driving into Death.  Like driving into a fucking black hole."  As Babylon turned toward him and put her hand between his legs, Josh put the car in gear, eased out from the curb, and then pressed the accelerator to the floor.  By the time he reached the edge of the city, he was doing ninety.  Josh knew he would never regain paradise, but as he drove in silence, he did not care.  Glancing at the woman beside him, aware that darkness was engulfing the car, he knew his dark future was fixed, drawing him like a magnet.  Too, he knew he would make a new life somewhere in the dark expanse that stretched before him.
 

About the Author:

Author of some of the darkest fiction on the internet, Rich Logsdon
resides in Las Vegas Nevada, where he teaches English at the
Community College of Southern Nevada.  In the past several years,
Rich has published over 60 short stories on and off the net.  His short
story Magic Red was named The Best Horror Fiction of 1998 by
Reader's Hood.  His stories have placed among the finalists in several
gothic/horror writer's contests.  His story Beast Feast was selected by
'Zatta Fact as one of the best short stories of 1998.  Beast Feast was
also nominated to appear in shortstory.org as one of the internet's
best short stories.  For more about Rich Logsdon, read the very
favorable review of his fiction in San Francisco Salvo.

About the Artist:

Sean Simmans is the Cover Illustrator of DEAD END STREET PUBLICATIONS LLC and the Creator of THE BELIEVABLE TRUTH @ Scowlzine and VIBE Nation (UK). In addition he illustrates for UMM Magazine (Canada) and is staff illustrator for Blood Moon zine.