The Minotauress

Cora collapsed to more sobs. The Writer sighed in relief, now that he didn't have to look at the ghastly cleft. I'll bet she doesn't make very much as a prostitute... .

Cora bawled for several more minutes, hitching the shorts back up but eventually her eyes roved back to the pallid corpse on the door. She stared, her mouth falling open. "My fuckin' gosh—I know that bitch... "

"Ya do?" Dicky said.

"Aw, yeah, I used ta see her a lot back when I were turnin' tricks up the truck stop. She kicked my ass one night 'cos I was low-ballin' truckers fer blowjobs... the bitch."

Dicky laughed. "So's she's a whore, too?"

The Writer looked closer this time. "Given the obvious heroin needlemarks and the LOVE DEPOSIT tattoo, it's probably safe to say that she's not a church organist."

"But what the fuck happened to the dirty skank?" Cora queried.

Dicky was all too proud to explain. "A sorcerer sacker-ficed her to the Devil, so's he could open a doorway to places where demons hang out. That's where that black chick upstairs come from."

The Writer winced yet again. "Actually, Mr. Dicky, it's just superstitious nonsense of Crafter's. No demons really came through that door, no woman painted black. Like I postulated previously, we think we all saw something supernatural but in truth it was just an example of shared hallucinations."

Then, from upstairs:

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

Cora shrieked.

The Writer ground his teeth again.

Dicky pissed his pants and yelled, "Balls is plum shootin' someone!"

They could hear the mad footsteps thundering downward, then the fist banging on the door.

"Dickyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Open the fuckin' door!"

Dicky froze in place, but the Writer raced up the basement steps and opened the door to let a petrified Balls burst in and fall all the way down the stairs. In the second or two before the Writer reclosed the door, his eyes reached out unto the candle-lit sitting-room where he thought he saw a sleek shadow diced by snatches of white bare skin. He caught a half-glimpse of pre-eminent breasts, a half-glimpse of a flat female abdomen, and even a quarter-glimpse of a bald, plump, beauteous pubis with a seraphic pink twist of flesh peeking through the bifurcation.

And a one-eighth-glimpse of a Black Angus bull's head complete with horns.

The Writer slammed and barred the door just as the shadow would be at the threshold, and with the slam, he heard an animal-like howl...

The Writer trembled back down the steps and at once lit a cigarette.

Dicky was helping Balls up, the latter appearing just as shaken as the Writer.

"Balls!" Dicky exclaimed. "Who's were ya shootin' at?"

"I hit it, I know I hit it!" Balls yelled. "Couldn't'a missed in a million years, but then I seed the bullet-holes in the back wall... "

The Writer sat down and took a deep breath. "Mr. Balls. What exactly did you see upstairs?"

"Bet it was that weirdo chick painted black," Dicky said. "She come back, ain't she?"

Balls looked at his cohort with befuddlement. "Naw, Dicky. It was a white chick with a body that'd make the Pope kick out a stained-glass winder, and-and-and—"

"A bull's head?" the Writer asked.

"You saw it too?"

"Yes." The Writer spewed smoke. I'd sell my soul right now for just one drink. "A Minotaur, the offspring of Pasiphae."

"And you see the tits on that brick shit-house?"

Tits, the Writer thought obscurely. "I did, Mr. Balls. I actually saw a bull's head on a female body, so I guess that could only be a Minotauress." He shook his head, however, convinced of his resolve. "But just as before, I insist, it was not real—"

The inhuman howl resounded again from upstairs, shaking the house.

"Not real, huh? Then what the fuck was that? One'a yer fuckin' ‘lucina-shun-uns?"

"I contend it was exactly that. The duress we're all under, along with the macabre circumstances—" He gestured the sacrificed corpse. "It's all simply reinforcing the power of suggestion and creating a mode of multiple hallucinations."

"Aw fuck you'n yer bullshit, man!" Balls dismissed. "You're the asshole who says there ain't no Devil or demons and God's a bunch'a ‘rithmatic! Well, I'll tell you one thing, Writer. That thing upstairs shore as shit's a demon."

"If it were a demon, Mr. Balls, then why didn't it break the door down and come down here?"

"'Cos of the cross on the door, ya dick-head!" Balls answered without missing a beat.

The Writer could think of no argument. My existential actualization has now met its greatest challenge, he deemed. He thought of Sartre's protagonist in "The Wall," who faced a similar challenge by submitting to the firing squad...

"I'll prove Emmanuel Kant's theory that God is the only supernatural entity that can exist," and then the Writer got up and headed for the steps.