Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Kevin has tried it all, and you have watched like a voyeur, living vicariously through his efforts. Someone getting the thrills without the risks. You encouraged him, perhaps to placate the demon within you that demands extremes. When Kevin told you about his plans for the operation, and how if he were female instead of male, if he had been you instead of himself, life would be different, fulfilling, accepting, that night you had the first of what would become a recurring nightmare.

Stuck at the bottom of a dark empty well, you look through a soulless mirror that liquefies. This noir river begins to flow into you, your nose, mouth, ears, anus, vagina, even your pores. Little animals with barbed bodies scratch this tender penetrated flesh, stimulating you almost beyond endurance. You are poised in midair, air black as night, body throbbing with desires that will not allow release. And only when the black fire of passion forces a scream of exquisite agony from your lips do you wake in your lonely bed, covered with sweat and tears, thighs slick with juices. And no amount of stimulation releases your volatile frustration.

Eventually, when you had dreamed this enough, and cried miserable tears until your ducts emptied, it dawned on you what had been happening all along. And now, like the religion that both of you turned away from when it failed you, you have come with no answers to save Kevin from himself. But in the process of trying, perhaps you will be rescued as well.

Didi nudges you and you follow, away from the safety of the bar, around the outer corners of the room. You pass between people, and hands reach out to touch you, finding fabric instead of flesh. You smile, happy to have thwarted their expectations. But then one hand discovers your secret and worms beneath the fabric, inside your blouse, down under your bra, the body pressed hard against your own, following, in step, bony fingers tweaking your nipple in time to the pounding beat, forcing your head back, your mouth open, the black river flowing once again—

“This is it, what we came for,” Didi says. The hand is gone, leaving your nipple burning, your body freezing.

Didi opens a door and enters. You step into a cathedral of ice, with lighted grottos on each side of you. As you walk down the aisle, you pass these “rooms.” On the left a man is suspended by his wrists and ankles. Four naked attendants shave his head, strip the hairs from his torso with wax, pluck out his eyebrows, and the hairs around his anus … To the right, a bald woman’s bare body is cut with a scalpel, little cuts, deep enough to bleed, not enough for permanent injury, her flesh a canvas of tiny crosses, out of her mouth deep erotic pleas for forgiveness … A genderless being is having finger- and toenails clipped very very short, eyelashes singed, dead skin cut from the feet … You bend to peer inside a small door to find three pale and slender bodies prone on blond-wood shelves, sweat pouring off them as an attendant splashes water onto steaming rocks … Another grotto, a woman with her finger down her throat, vomiting, peeing, shitting, bleeding from her vagina, all at the same time …

You have seen each of these worlds in one way or another, and they do not shock you. All your life you have known that to rid the body of everything leads to purification, to spirit. Every major religion reinforces this value. The culture in which you reside prays for the destruction of the flesh.

At the end of this corridor of pain and humiliation is a white door with a white Gothic arch above folding inward. Didi opens the door and you realize that somewhere along the way she has discarded the rest of her clothes. You move up the three steps to this altar of rejuvenation.

The inner sanctum glows with twinkling lights, bright as stars. All here is colorless, odorless, pure and uncorrupted: walls, floor, hospital gurney, sheets atop it. A frail woman lies still as death, attended by skinny hairless beings dressed only in white latex gloves and milky rubber shoes.

Didi puts a finger to lips, and you stare into her liquid eyes, realizing that they remind you of the black liquid fire. Her body is lean, angular, the dead refusing to die. Your vagina spasms.