"Nightmare In Black"
by Leon Marcelo
email: bile666@earthlink.net

By the time Gothess Doom stormed into the last song of their set, The Morgue was packed to capacity with spastic, convulsing bodies. The dance floor before the narrow stage was a sea of fevered flesh brimming with chemical-fueled kinetic energy. It looked like a killing floor, frenzied with madness, before the slaughterhouse began churning. The gray acrid air that hung just beneath the club's ceiling like a haze of webs was thick with the dizzying odour of sweet young sweat and rank alcohol. This was the first show Gothess Doom had played since returning from a short tour of South America and so The Morgue's crowd was filled with ravenous fans who had anxiously awaited this night for some time.

Gothess Doom hammered out the last notes of "The Black Blood of Set," the B-side of their first seven-inch, and left the stage. The audience's cries of blood-lusting echoed in the narrow corridor as the six heathens made their way to the supply closet The Morgue called a dressing room. After entombing his guitar in its sticker-covered, coffin-shaped case, Bucho Marins, lead guitarist of the conquering horde, tore off his sweat-weltered clothes. Leather cerements and spiked gauntlets might look real horror-show in photos, but to wear while playing a guitar at break-neck speed in a club that was as hot as Hell, it was not. But the band wore it still, despite the fact that it made them sweat like beasts up on the stage under the red-tinged spotlights.

He washed the black and white theatrical paint and sticky fake blood off his face with a wet rag. When he was somewhat cleaner, he toweled himself off and tied back his long, black hair. He put on his street clothes, a pair of leather pants and an old Blasphemy t-shirt, and pulled on a tall pair of battered combat boots. After he took a sloppy drink from a bottle of beer, almost finishing it in one long swallow, he left the dressing room, grabbing his long coat and guitar case as he walked out. He didn't bother to bid farewell to his bandmates, who were all busy working their lascivious magicks on the nubile, "Vampira"-esque goth-girls who had come backstage. Bucho had spent far too much time with the five of them on a grueling month's worth of touring to give a shit about them now; he'd rather talk to a corpse than any one of them. It was difficult for him to be veritably the only creative wellspring in Gothess Doom, as he composed not only the lyrics and music but also painted the myriad of artworks for the band's albums and the like. And to watch them thanklessly get fattened like maggots on the meal his darkest imaginings had set before them, it sickened him to no end. But they were fine musicians, all of them, the bastards. And the band was his wee impure child. He couldn't abide by anyone else birthing these nightmares that were Gothess Doom, now could he? No. In the end, it could only be him.

Bucho went out into the now-empty club. A few hands were sweeping up the trash left behind by the night's crowd. It was always surprising to see how much clothing, the occasional lone boot and blood-stained shirt, was strewn about after the security guards herded the audience out the front doors at the end of the show. As he made his way across the barren dance floor, he caught sight of something, someone, coming towards him out of the shadows. At first, he thought it might be a straggling fan, pen and record sleeve in hand, wanting his scrawled autograph. Or maybe a drunk groupie, the sort who usually desired his semen in her throat rather than his signature on paper. Some death metal groupies could be rather off though it would seem. When Gothess Doom was down in New Orleans for a metalfest the Halloween before, there had been one who'd burned the band's name across the smooth, pink meat of her chest with a soldering iron and wanted his mark on her breast so that she could brand that into her skin as well. He obliged her, of course. It wasn't often that you were worshipped so in this life, not unless you were the son of a god or something like that. But when this shadow-cast presence came before him, Bucho looked upon it, looked upon her, into her abysmally black eyes, and knew that she wasn't a groupie. She was something entirely different, another species all together.

She didn't look more than thirty, but her eyes were much older. They spoke to Bucho of the farthest experience, of sights beyond that which most would ever yearn to behold. Her hair hung long and black about her shoulders, the hue of a raven's wing. It was the carbony black of ash scraped from the floor of a crematorium. In utter contrast, as if a negative image, her skin, porcelaneous, was as white as a freshly fallen December snow. The pure, pristine white of seraphic vestments. Her skin was so absolutely ashen, exquisitely bloodless, that it almost seemed to glow luminously like quicksilver against the ebon matte of her hair. He could not help himself from staring at her; he had never before seen a woman of such beauty. Many of the girls he met on the scene, at clubs or shows, would have to peel through layer upon layer of caked make-up to get to their true skin, which, more often than not, was scarred with a bloom of acne due to years of choked pores. And their hair was usually as vibrant as straw after being rendered brittle, lifeless, by the caustic chemicals of hair dyes. But not her. Her hair, her skin: it was all real. However Bucho knew, it was all real, all so bewitchingly real. And he found himself utterly charmed by her, by this unknown breed of the female before him.

Bucho stood there in the darkness of The Morgue, staring at this woman, until she bent her head to the side to interrupt his gaping and take hold of his attention. She had the eyes of a grotesquely beautiful Giger portraiture, wholly serene in their deepest unlight. And as she looked at him with those chilling black eyes, his skin arose in goose flesh and his testicles saught refuge within his torso. It was as if invisible tendrils twitching with a spectral musculature had reached out from those color-void irises and were caressing his soul with their black touch. He fought off a shiver that threatened to shake his whole body. As she set those eyes of hers upon him, he knew unbridled fear and fervent desire both. These primal urges ran through his blood like a narcotic, obscuring his thoughts like a fog. His heart began to beat harder as adrenaline pumped within him, her eyes, her everything, seemingly churning his organs, his glands, like a carneous machinery. Her haunting gaze's weird hold over him broke as a roadie toppled an amp off the stage to the begrimed floor mere feet below, sending a sepulchral echo through the now-lifeless club.

Scratching his head through stringy, wet hair, Bucho offered her a simple smile, trying not to make his rapture embarrassingly evident. He was somewhat certain, though, that that was an impossibility, as his dizzied head felt as if he had just emerged from a trance.

"Can I help you?" Bucho asked.

She returned his smile. Her lips were blackly purple, the color of badly bruised flesh.

"I wanted to tell you that I loved your performance tonight ..." she replied in a whisper.

"Well ... uh ... thank you ..." Bucho stammered. "We've been looking forward to tonight for a few weeks now. Since returning from our South American tour ..." Bucho searched her eyes for some sign of recognition but found not a thread. "Have you ever seen Gothess Doom before?"

She shook her head without pause. "I had never even heard of your group before tonight. I was walking down the street, heard you playing, saw the posters on the doors outside, and decided to come in ..."

Bucho's eyebrows arched in surprise. To the uninitiated, those out of the know, black metal is a somewhat acquired taste, like eating worms perhaps. Your first helping might make your skin crawl, sick to your stomach even. But after you've experienced the fetid delicacy a few more times, you either love it or it makes you retch even harder. So to hear, in passing, vomitted shrieking seemingly fashioned by eating broken glass set to the endless chaos of chainsaw guitars and finding it appealing enough to put money down for more, well, that was a true rarity.

"Yes," she continued, "I found your band, you, quite good. There was a certain ... darkness ... about it all that I found glorious. Some of the lyrics were profoundly black ..."

"You could understand the lyrics?" Bucho had been thrown by this tenebrous female before him yet again.

"Is that strange?"

Bucho shrugged his shoulders. "Truthfully ... yes, it is! The music is meant to be brutal foremost, not enunciative. Most have to listen along with the printed lyrics to understand what is being said. Well, if they care to know at all that is, sadly. To some, lyrics are meaningless as long as the music is storming For the writer, it can be frustrating, but a fact is a fact."

"Well, your libretto were as horrific, black psalms. Darkly poetic. Nightmarish. Everything about your group was nightmarish. You have a funerary atmosphere that is quite ... beautiful ..."

As Bucho watched those dark, cadaverous lips part and come back together as she spoke, he could feel himself harden inside the tight crotch of his leather pants. He wanted to feel the wetness of them, the coldness, against his flesh as she lay beneath him.

Bucho shook off his lust and finally spoke to her compliments.

"I compose all the lyrics and render all the artwork for Gothess Doom, so I thank you for your flattering words."

"It is not flattery," she remarked. "You are quite talented indeed ... ?" Her words trailed off in search of a name she did not yet know.

"In Gothess Doom," he answered with a grin, "I am known by the moniker 'He Who Keeps the Ravens and Wolves In Food.' But you can call me Bucho. Bucho Marins."

"Is that Brazilian?"

Surprised yet again by this mysterious creature, seemingly woven from the shadows themselves, Bucho laughed. She seemed at no lack of a deftness for doing that.

"Yes, it is. How did you know?"

"It rang Brazilian for some reason. I am Justine. Myself, I am from nowhere in particular ..."

For a moment, they stood there, in silence, looking at each other, their eyes intertwined in wordless meditation. Bucho could feel Justine's eyes searing his flesh, burning into him, as if she was dissecting his every cell, unwinding each chromosome, poring over each gene. What was it that she was seeing there, in the blackness of his insides, he asked himself. Or wanted to see?

Justine's eyes narrowed to slits as she examined him so very intensely. Bucho could feel his heart begin to beat like Gothess Doom's base drum inside his chest. Her eyes were as those of a serpent in the darkness of The Morgue, blackly pure and blinking not. Many would be disturbed by her eyes, doubtlessly by everything about her. But he found himself drawn to her. He could not take his eyes from hers even though a dread, ominous in its depth, he could neither explain nor reason away gnawed at the most primitive recesses of his gray matter.

Justine raised an arm up between their bodies and ran one of her long, thin fingers, a dagger born of white flesh, up Bucho's chest. He could feel a bead of cold sweat drip down his already wet back, as if she was inducing him to fever.

"Why don't we go somewhere else and talk ..." Justine's words were barely louder than a mere whisper, her voice the rustling of dead October leaves. "We could talk more ... talk about all these ... dark ... things ..."

Bucho didn't know what to say. He didn't know if he could say anything even if he had the words to speak. He could only nod his head in silent aseent. And take her arm when she offered it to him. They walked towards The Morgue's exit, past the few remaining staff members still cleaning up. When they neared the merchandise table near the front doors, Justine slowed her step to look down upon Gothess Doom's mephitic sundries, which were being packed back into a box by a bald pated roadie who wore a black t-shirt with a band logo far too intricately rendered to be legible. Her eyes lingered on the cover of their last release, Abhorrent Bestial Profanations: a nude, leather-winged succubus draped over a rotting, vermiculose Christ crucified on an inverted cross. She looked at it with unfaltering, curious eyes. And she smiled.

Justine led Bucho out into the night. Arm in arm, they walked down the dark street, the burned-out tenements that neighbored The Morgue casting their shadows down upon them, enveloping them in blackness ... * * *

Justine and Bucho sat at a small table near the front window of a little Indian restaurant several blocks from The Morgue, by the university. From their seats, they had a perfectly scenic view: across the narrow street, an porno shop lit up brightly with neon lettering and, next to it, a run-down movie theatre specializing in arthouse and underground cult films. Justine was ravenous; she had already nearly finished her own meal while Bucho's languished before him. He picked and prodded at the goat stew on his plate, a dish she had suggested whose name he had already forgotten. Although he wasn't all that hungry, he made an effort to eat anyway. For some reason, he didn't want to disappoint her.

They had talked some on the walk over. Mostly, their conversation had consisted of her asking him questions and him answering them. While he really hadn't minded, it had felt like an interview for some 'zine. She had wanted to know about his black arts: his music, his writing, his paintings. Justine had questioned him mostly about their content, their "dark nature" as she kept referring to it. He'd told her that it wasn't something he could explain. These morbid vistas of desecration he painted and penned, he could no more explain why he was compelled to unleash them than why he breathed, why he ate. It was his instinct to give rise to such works. They were a part of him, extensions of his soul.

Justine put down her fork and wiped her mouth with a napkin. She sighed, her appetite seemingly sated, and her lips spread out in a smile.

"I am very pleased that I stumbled upon you this evening, Bucho Marins ..." She let her head hang to the side a bit, like a dying flower. "You are truly a very interesting young man." She said this yet she looked no older than Bucho himself. "Most of those I come across are as dilettantes, merely play-acting at embracing the darkness within them ... but not you. You are intimately familiar with the macabre. The morbid. All that is forbidden. It sings to me from every fiber of your vitiated being like a choir of the loveliest castrata. I could smell it on you like the sweet smell of putrefaction the very moment I saw you up there on that stage. Shine you do like a bright, unfallen star against the black velvet of night. You should be proud, Bucho. You are the stuff a girl's nightmares are made of ..."

Embarrassed by her words, Bucho thanked Justine with an awkward grin and a shrug of his shoulders. Once more, she had left him without words. What was it about this woman, Justine, that vexed him so? Perhaps it was because he knew, knew in the deepest recesses of his heart, that she was far darker than he. A perfectly black, obsidian goddess she was; he could truthfully say that he'd never met anyone who filled him with as much unease, such a deep sense of nameless terror, as she had done to him, was doing to him even now. And it was that very thing that drew him to her, like a pestilential fly to a slab of raw meat blossoming with wormy putrescence in the heat of the sun.

Luring his thoughts from such a reverie, Justine asked him what he called his music, the style and such.

"Well ..." Bucho began, clearing his throat, "It began as death metal. Most of our older songs are in that vein. But we'd been flirting with a more black vibe over the last two years or so and have made the metamorphosis more or less complete by now ..."

"The difference being?"

Bucho snickered to himself. "It's rather hard for me to explain really. But, some technical aspects aside, the difference has much to do with atmosphere. Black metal as a whole is more atmorspheric in terms of the scope its blasphemy. Like the first Cradle of Filth album or old Emperor. Mayhem's De Mysteriis ..." He knew these names meant nothing to her the moment he uttered them. He scratched his head in search of better dilineations. "Black metal has a much more macabre, ritualistic aesthetic. Black candles, corpsepaint, goats' heads impaled upon inverted crosses. I found the genre more appealing, artistically speaking. I don't know. In the end, I suppose I was just enamored by the thought of Norwegians and Swedes burning down churches ..."

The movie theatre across the street let out in a loud ruckus and Bucho and Justine's attention was drawn to the noise. She tipped her head in the direction of the illuminated marquis that hung above the theatre's front doors: a double-feature of Lucio Fulci's The Beyond and The Gates of Hell.

"Have you ever seen those films?" Justine asked and took a sip of the dusky wine in her near-empty glass.

Bucho nodded. "Yes. Many times ..."

Justine saw the indifference on his face, heard it in his voice, and, puzzled, her brow furrowed with curiosity. "I have never seen them myself, but are those not horror films? I thought they would be to your liking ..."

"I like them well enough. I have them on video at my apartment. But, well, horror movies don't do much for me anymore. Perhaps I've become desensitized to it all. Jaded, I suppose, to the horrific. Not much really scares me anymore ..."

Justine crushed an ice cube between her teeth and smiled at him. Her smile was mordant, as were her eyes. She was as a jackal lusting for the kill.

"Come now ..." Justine said, her low voice was as seductively syrupy as warm Chartreuse. "There is nothing in this world that "scares" you? Nothing that sets your blood coursing with fear? No nightmares that leave you sleepless at night as you lay alone in the dark, covered in sweat?"

Bucho could hear the challenge in her words. She might have been smiling, but her words were not playful. She knew he had been lying, somewhat at the very least, when he'd said that, that there was nothing any longer that scared him, that there were no nightmares. She knew by her accusing tone, by her inquisitive eyes.

"Well ..." Bucho began but stopped. He sat up in his chair, avoiding her glance. What was he doing, about to speak of such things to this woman whom he had just met? He owed her nothing. He could just shake his head, refuse, and keep his mouth shut. But despite his hesitation, he felt a compulsion rising up within him like burning vomit to tell her things it seemed he had not spoken of in ages, things he himself had forgotten - or at least had tried to. He could not say why. This woman had put a spell on him and he could deny her nothing. And so he took a drink from his glass, damp with condensation, and began his admission.

"I was born in Brazil and lived in S‹o Paulo with my parents and brother for most of my childhood." Justine leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the table. "My older brother would torture me to no end for his amusement. He was an altar boy and my mother would make him recite my prayers with me before I slept so I would learn them. Instead, he would make me repeat over and over again with him that I was a bastard and would burn with the sinners in Hell ..."

Bucho laughed to himself, silently, awkwardly, as if he heard his brother's taunting, Portuguese words ringing in his ears as he sat there, at that table, with Justine before him. Shaking his head and those tittering remembered words away with it, he went on.

"Several years before I was born, there was this film maker. A horror film maker. He was known as 'Graveyard Joe.' It was the name of the character he portrayed in all his own films. He would dress all in black and wear a top hat adorned with animal skulls and bones. His fingernails were like daggers, which would use to gouge out his victims' eyes. In these films of his, he was a sadistic madman who loved nothing more than to torture and murder. Over the course of maybe ten years, he had made almost a dozen films, all of them low-budget and very popular in the S‹o Paulo slums. But his character's depravity was not confined before the cameras. For it became known that the dead bodies in his films were real, the corpses of Brazilian homeless whom he himself had butchered for the sake of his art's realism. After a somewhat scandalous trial, the most infamous in Brazil's history, he was executed by a firing squad. He became a sort of "boogie man." The Jack the Ripper of Brazil, his deeds made immortal in the darkened streets of the city. The theatres showed his films without end though! They were even more popular than ever! But myself, I was too frightened to watch them. The horror on the screen was too much for me. But my brother ... my brother reveled in my fear. He made me watch them, threatening to have Graveyard Joe step out from the shadows of the dark theatre and poke out my eyes if I didn't. I would beg him to sop, but he would only laugh. Laugh and --"

A thin Indian waiter took their plates. Bucho stretched his head from side to side. His every muscle was stiff with tension, as if his very being resisted such remembrances of aged but yet-unscabbed traumas. He was very much haunted by these past events and ruminating over them now, to Justine, had left him shaken. But she said nothing to comfort him. No words of solace for his nerves. She merely sat there, watching him shift uneasily in his chair, waiting for him to finish with his recollections. She had savored each word, each struggled utterance, and was hungry for more.

After a moment, Bucho coughed into his clenched fist and continued.

"As I told you, Graveyard Joe loved to torture his victims, especially women. With tarantulas. He would set a dozen of them loose in the bedroom of a sleeping woman and watch in utter bliss as they crawled all over her barely clothed body. You see, these tarantulas were like extensions of his hands, allowing him to perform horrific acts of torture on these helpless women from afar. Well, I was already very scared of spiders and had been since I was very little. My brother, he knew this about me and would make me watch these very scenes with open eyes, showing after showing. Some time later, only days before my tenth birthday, I was hit by a truck and was almost killed. I woke up in the hospital bed a week later, up to my neck in a cast, unable to move my body even a little. It was like a tomb, this thing. One night as I slept, I was awoken by the feeling of tiny ... legs ... moving across my face. Spiders ... spiders ... had descended from their webs in the corners of the ceiling and were ... crawling ... all over the sweaty flesh of my face ... my face! I tried to scream for help, but I couldn't. I could only lay there, unable to do a thing. Those spiders had crawled into my gaping mouth, onto my eyes! I swear that I could even feel them crawling inside of me! Deep down in my throat, in my lungs ..."

A shiver shook Bucho like a current of purest fear. His fingers were laced and white-knuckled on the table before him. His eyes were closed tightly, but the thin, membranous skin of his eyelids could not keep his conscious mind from witnessing yet again the horrific images his memory was setting before it. It was as if even now he could still feel the legs of those lurking spiders leaving imperceptible tracks on his young skin. Justine looked upon him and cooed silently at this torturous display before her.

"I don't know how long I lay there like that, with those spiders creeping all over me, still awake yet oh so much worse for it. I was in an utter shock, choked with terror. I'm surprised to this day that my little heart didn't stop inside my narrow chest because, in that hospital, in that dark room lit only by the light of the full moon outside my window, unable to move, unable to scream, my ... nightmares... had become flesh, horrifidly alive, in each and every one of those spiders ..."

Bucho took a deep, rattling breath and finally opened his eyes. She was waiting there for him and he found himself staring into those eyes once again. Her irises were the blackness of spilt blood under the full moon. And those cold, light-bereft pools held no trace of sympathy, offered no regret. They read of nothing but carnal lust. Feral hunger was etched upon their whites like an intricate scrimshaw upon defleshed bone. She licked her lips ever so slowly, her tongue slithering across those lips the color of flesh gone to rot. As they parted, Bucho could see her white teeth within the dark void of her grinning mouth. They were teeth meant for biting, for rending.

Instead of running out of that restaurant as the animalistic instincts at his most primeval core frantically urged him to, Bucho took Justine's hand when she gave it to him. Her pallid flesh was absent of warmth in his grasp and seemed to chill his fevered skin. She cicatriced his palm with the black-painted nail of her pointing finger and his cock strained against the binds of his crotch. She asked him, told him rather, to take her to his apartment. He had hardly agreed when she pulled him out of his chair. Down onto the table she threw a wrinkled one-hundred dollar bill and dragged him by the arm out into the street, the front door rattling as she flung it open, nearly knocking it off its hinges in her maddened urgency. Other late-night diners turned from their meals at the clatter but didn't see a thing but a flurry of black cloth in the cold night wind ... * * *

Bucho and Justine were practically fucking when they got to Bucho's floor, the fourth in an old, five-story walk-up near the waterfront. Bucho almost broke the key off in the lock as he tried to open the front door with all the finesse of a rabid neanderthal. He finally got the lock to turn and they were inside. They fell to the floor of his living room, his hand up her long, black velvet dress, between her mortuary cool thighs. Her curved hips writhed to meet his hand. She let out a deep, lusty howl as he snaked his long fingers in and out of her. She kissed him hard. His tongue between her lips, he tasted her: an intoxicating mix of curry powder and succulent spit. She bit it with a wicked laugh, her teeth cutting into the meat like a scissors' blades. The salty taste of blood flowed over his lacerated tongue and into her mouth. He moaned but didn't try to pull away from her, the pain divine. She drew hungrily on the wounded thing, sucking blood and saliva both into her mouth. She gave it one last bite and then set it free.

Justine pulled Bucho's hand from her dripping crotch and he gasped as she stuck his fingers, still slicked with her most intimate lubrication, into her yearning mouth. As she sucked on his fingers, a guttural rumbling rose from deep within her chest. Her long-lashed eyes spasmed to a close as what had to be thrall consumed her. His fingers still between her dark lips, she undid his leather pants and tore them down. His cock, painfully hard, sprung out from its former confines like the steely knife of a switchblade. She took it in her hand and it burned inside the chill of her palm; Bucho gasped and shivered against her. Justine spit out his fingers. Winking impiously, she stood and pulled him up with her, his engorged member the rein. He moaned at the tension and, rising to his feet, conceded to her will. As if walking him on a leash, she dragged him into the bedroom.

Bucho's room was small and made even smaller by all of the macabre ornamentation that adorned it. Framed prints of Breughel's "Triumph of Death" and DŸrer's "The Four Horsemen" hung on the gray walls alongside old concert flyers and barbarous weaponry that would have made a war-lustful Hun envious. Black occult grimoires and well-read tomes by the likes of de Sade, Poe, and Lovecraft lined the shelves of a small bookcase. Animal skulls of all species lurked atop a short bureau. A wrought-iron candelabra decked with dripping black candles and wrapped in barbed wire and chains stood in a corner.

Justine shoved Bucho down onto the unmade bed. She went over to his stereo and began to go through some compact discs and tapes stacked haphazardly alongside it. His lean body already covered in a thin sheen of sweat, Bucho began tearing off his clothes, what little there was left on him, the moment he fell atop the mattress. After struggling to free his legs of their leather shackles, he lay back on the black bedding, his eyes closed, his temples pulsating against his skull with adrenaline-fed blood. His lungs worked like a bellows, sucking in breath to feed his exhilaration. His fear was now a mere figment from a more sober past seemingly eons ago, laid to waste by this woman's wanton ministrations. The stereo began to vomit forth a brutal, venomous din: guitars thundered with an apocalyptic barrage of chords; a drum blasted a staccato beat almost too fast to be of human making; a keyboard wailed, sounding like a pipe organ befitting a defiled church; a guttural demon-bark roared out with fury. Bucho sat up, his eyes open wide. It was Gothess Doom. Justine had put on an advance CD of the band's next release. It was entitled A Nightmare In Black. The song playing, an eight-minute unholy opus of blackened death, was the title track. Bucho cringed and shook his head. He didn't mind having music playing during sex, he rather liked it in fact, but it all depended on what it was. And his own was not it; not now, not ever.

"Why don't you put something else on?" Bucho's request was half-gasped, his breath still short. "Danzig maybe. Or some Black Sabbaath. Anything but this ..."

Ignoring his plea, Justine made it louder. Smiling that impious smile of hers, she turned towards Bucho and the bed. Her dress fell down to her now bare feet. He looked upon her naked form and any objections, any fears, he might have held mere moments earlier fell away with her clothing. Justine's physique, thinly muscled and lithe, was slight but not skinny. Her skin was pristine, hairless like a cancer victim's. and white like purest mother's milk. Her black hair hung down to her rounded breasts, her nipples as hard as coffin nails. Justine's necrophilously sensuous body glowed like that of a phantom in the dim light of the room. Hers was the lurid visage of some eldritch goddess. That of Lilith. Of Hecate. Kali. And he hungered for her, as he had for no woman before.

Justine took the bed and stood over Bucho, her legs apart and straddling his torso. Making sure his lusting eyes were on her, she torturously licked her lips . A line of spit dripped from her tongue. It fell like a single drop of heaven-sent rain and spattered onto his cock, which twitched like teased vermin. She lowered herself onto him, Gothess Doom's cacophonous incantations thundering to her descent. Bucho rose his hands to grasp her breasts, but Justine took hold of his wrists and drove his arms to the bed. She leaned down, kissed his mouth, and whispered into his ear ...

"Close your eyes ..."

Bucho did as Justine said. His eyelids fell before her funereal smile and he entered the darkness that lay behind them. Her hands around his wrists were fleshen bands of iron. She pushed her hips downward, the engorged head of his cock spreading her fleshy, glistening gates, and allowed him passage into her torture garden of unearthly delights. Her insides had all the warmth and wetness of a bloody stab wound. The pink meat of her sex coalesced like liquescent tissue around his cock, a cenotaph of erubescent flesh; her fluids slathered him like a torrent of abyssic lust. She whipped his face with her black hair as he ferociously penetrated her again and again. They fucked like rutting wolves under the full moon, their passion inexorable.

As Bucho felt orgasm brimming, ready to burst within her like a severed artery, she slowed down her frenzied pace. She laid her body down upon his, her breasts pressing against his dampened chest, and licked the salt-ridden sweat from his neck, his face. Her hips undulating slowly, her yearning orifice clenching him still, she began whispering once more ...

"Your nightmare," she uttered, "was exquisite. All those who embrace darkness ... so fervently ... fear it the most. Those who deny their fears ... by flirting with all that is black ... always have the most ... delicious ... nightmares ..."

Urging his cock deeper into her dark recesses, seemingly impaling herself upon it further, Justine sat back upon Bucho, a moan escaping from between her parted lips, and resumed her churning pace. Her words swirled aimlessly in his blood-starved brain. He hadn't even heard them really. He was knew only his throbbing cock buried deep within her sweet insides. Even if he had heard her, truly understood her words, those ominous words, it wouldn't have mattered for he wouldn't have cared. All he cared about at that very moment was coming inside Justine, this black goddess of his darkest desires and passions most unholy ...

Bucho lay on his back, his eyes clenched shut, and could feel orgasm creeping up on him like the sweet kiss of Death. As the delicious pressure inside his cock grew to almost unbearable proportions, Bucho began to feel a tickling on the skin of his thighs. At first, he thought it was his nerves firing uncontrollably as release beckoned. But then the weird sensation moved to his groin, his scrotum, and it had become more pronounced, more sharp, as if tiny pinpoints were being jabbed into his skin ever so lightly. And those pinpoints were moving. He swore, through his lustful haze, that it felt like ... spiders ... were ... crawling ... across his flesh ... again ...

Bucho's eyes flew open in aghast realization and found himself staring into the eyes of a nightmare. Justine's eyes were still as cold, perhaps colder now, but instead of one pupil, each eye now had many and each of those small, black dots was bearing down upon him. Her mouth was impossibly wide, a black chasm spanning from ear to ear, jaws beset with near countless teeth. And they were a beast's teeth, each a dagger of white bone dripping with a thick ichor. Her body had distorted itself above him into a monstrous grotesquerie. Her shoulders had broadened and thickened with a brutish musculature. Her abdomen had stretched and rounded, blasphemously inhuman. Her hands ensnaring his wrists were bestial claws and tore into the meat, the bones, of his arms. Her legs, twisted at impossible angles, were constricting his heaving abdomen like a fleshen vice. The whiteness of her perfect flesh had disappeared, replaced now with a black coat of coarse hair. The hair of a spider. A tarantula ...

Bucho lay there, unable to speak, unable to move, unable to even look away from the monstrosity before him, above him. Justine ...

"To deny your nightmares," she, it, purred horridly through her murderous, razor wire-smooth maw, speaking to him in Justine's faint voice, her words the whisper of a coffin lid closing, " << is to beckon them to usher you into oblivion ... >>"

A blood-red tongue the length of a man's arm unfurled from between her jaws and dropped down onto Bucho's face, slathering it with a viscous drool, as Justine spoke these last words, spoke them in perfect, Brazilian Portuguese, spoke them in Graveyard Joe's all-too-familar voice. That was when Bucho started screaming. But the blaring of the stereo drowned out Bucho's cries, Gothess Doom, his very own music, his very own words, blocking out his screams of utter terror with a deafening wall of aural morbidity.

Justine laughed at his screams, laughed at Bucho with the cackle of that depraved Brazilian. She laughed down at him and, her dripping gash filled with him still, began to fuck him again. His languid cock thickened anew with blood as he slid in and out of her. It would not go down, no matter how desperately he wished it would. No matter how filled he was with unspeakable horror. For his cock only knew the wetness of the spider-beast's cunt, the tightness of it, the warmth.

Justine fucked Bucho furiously, like a primordial beast, her clawed grasp ripping into the meat of his wrists, splintering the bones within, crushing them like mere bits of chalk against each other. As she hammered her hips down upon him, his pelvis shattered and snapped away from his rattling vertebral column. Shards of flat pelvic bone shot up through the muscle of his groin. Blood flowed down his scrotum in red rivulets, mixing with her purulent secretions in a pool between the cheeks of his ass. Tears streamed down his face as his mouth quivered, strained, in agony, his vocal chords vibrating uselessly within his raw throat.

Bucho's penis tensed violently as volcanic semen ejaculated through his urethra and into her wetness, filling her to overflowing with his bloody seed. His terror-filled eyes were locked on Justine as his cock convulsed in orgasm. Laughing, the beast Justine leaned down on him, her mouth widening, her fanged jaws dripping in atrocious ecstasy. She drew it about his head, down to the base of his neck, her teeth scraping away tender flesh as it descended viciously. As the last sanious pearl of semen shot from him, she snapped her jaws down on his throat. His neck severed in two, a bloody, ruined mess of torn muscle, tendon, and oozing vertebral bone. His arteries and veins torn asunder like flimsy straws, hot, spumous blood pumped from his headless neck, an ensanguined geyser heralding his grisly extermination, and soaked his sheets and mattress in mere seconds. In a thick jet, it sprayed a crimson streak across the wall behind his bed, across the only picture he had of himself: in a simple frame hanging on a tiny nail, a photograph of himself as a child in Brazil, lying in a hospital bed, covered up to his chin in a white sarcophagus of plaster ...

As Jutine's bloody, obscenely smiling mouth closed shut over his head, drawing it into the black, stygian abyss of her insides, Bucho heard Gothess Doom hammer out his pitiful knell with the closing movement of "A Nightmare In Black," heard the blood whistling like a dusk wind out of his twitching, death throe-waked corpse, heard Justine, the spider-formed hungry end, laugh at him, around him, in the voice, the throat, of a self-denied, all-too-real ... nightmare. And then ... then ... Bucho heard no more, Justine's jaws crushing his head, his very existence, all he had, all he was ever going to have, between her knife-like teeth in a gush of thick, meaty red ... * * *

Justine devoured Bucho's body, slowly, lovingly, savoring the spice of fear, the hint of nightmare, that seasoned his cooling, blood and come-stained carcass. When she was finished, she wiped the sticky filth from her thin, naked, human body with a wet rag, revealing the flesh beneath, her skin as white as Bucho's semen had been. She combed her straight hair, the deep blackness of it hiding any trace of gore that might have become spattered through it. She put on her long, velvet dress and her tall boots. She took one of Bucho's Gothess Doom CDs, the one that had been playing, A Nightmare In Black. She dipped one of her long, thin fingers in a black puddle of coagulating blood and wrote his name on the back of the insert so that she would never forget him. It would be a memento that she would cherish forever.

As Justine left the apartment, she couldn't help but smile that enchantingly nightmarish, purple-lipped smile of hers at her miserable, sanguinolent wake. She blew Bucho's room a kiss farewell, stroked the warm bulge in her stomach, and walked out into the cold blackness of the city's early morning, a Gothess Doom tune on her lips and nightmares on her mind ...

 

Dedicated to ... The Scum Collectively Referred to as CRADLE OF FILTH and Jose' "Ze' do Caixao" Mojica Marins.

 

about the author: I am a graduate student at Montclair State University here in New Jersey. I work for the school's English dept. as a teaching assistant, tutoring and helming my own Basic Comp. class. I have written travelogues from a horor fan's perspective for such magazines as Horror Biz, Chiller Theatre, Fangoria, and (soon) Rue Morgue from Canada. My dark children's fiction has been published by Carpe Noctem and Leilah Wendall's Azrael Project Newsletter. One of the pieces, "Caleb & Death", is currently being adapted into a short film by a San Francisco-based director. I am currently working on more travelogues, more horror fiction like "Nightmare In Black", and even a late night horror movie show like those of the 60s and 70s. Furthermore, I am working with the cult death/black metal band Necrophagia (featuring Phil Anselmo of Pantera on guitar) on a short story based on their band's songs and obsessions to be released with their upcoming release. I am also working with the band's lead singer, Killjoy, on a script for his directorial debut.