The Minotauress

"I don't know if I can do the dry-out," she croaked into her knees. "I don't think I can make it."

"Look."

Her spine felt like a creaking board as she raised up, blinked, and looked at the booking sergeant. His fat fingers spun the arrest report around for her to read.

He hadn't filled it out.

"One more chance," he said.

Then he dropped a plastic bag full of chunks of crystal methamphetamine on top of the blank report.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"But nothing's free, you know?" He stood up and lowered his starched-blue police trousers. "You know the game, right?"

Nodding, she stood up, came around the desk, and got on her knees. His little dick looked like the end of someone's nose in a nest. But then he turned around, bent over, and spread his buttocks.

"Rim job first, okay?"

"Sure," Arianne said and slowly slid her practiced tongue up the hairy crack until it found the puckered aperture. She pressed the cheeks further apart and began to suck.

««—»»

And as Arianne commenced with the indecorous task of sucking dirty police ass—tasting spoiled tints of Burger King and grape-jelly donuts—a few miles away, a shadow slouched in the dark, an outrage beyond description, beyond cogitation. It tasted smidgens of consternation and ancient blasphemy.

A breeze slipped across her subcorporeal face like spirits whispering.

The world just got worse—she understood that now after so long a gentle slumber. She could not imagine...

She was beautiful in her skein-weave of darkness. She was made of darkness. It was darkness which flowed through her veins of ghostly dust. It was darkness that filled her eye sockets.

And when she thought of what she would do—as she'd just done, in fact—it was darkness that dripped like ichor from her dark goddess cunt.

The breeze, over the night air, continued to sigh. Messages from her world? Chatterings from the overseers of the dead?

Her name was Pasiphae, the Slut Mother.

Her pretty, bare feet were but a dark fog, her cunt a night-smile. In her excitement, black milk shed from her ebon bosom.

In the shit-pocked dust, the sentry lay, his odd garb pulled down. As his glorious cock had plumbed her long-dead loins, she'd sucked out his eyes, swallowed them as sweet white-chocolate buds. He'd still been quivering, still been alive, as she sucked out his sperm, then sucked out his gorgeous balls. Later, sated, she'd pressed her unreal lips to an empty eye socket and sucked out his brain.

The meat fell richly into her gut, made her more real.

Soon she'd be real enough to call out...

Outrage for outrage. That's how it was and how it had always been.

Her bottomless gaze surveyed the sentry's corpse a last time. Seeing him like that, splayed and ravaged and dead, left her cringing. Pasiphae's nebulous hand touched her clitoris—a small nugget of coal—and she could actually feel solidity burgeoning, smoke turning to slime. What would the slime become tomorrow? Gel? And the day after that?

Then she could conjure up her son through the same threshold of horror that had summoned her.

She left the corpse, sauntered her nightness through the night, ghost-feet stepping daintily between the hideous scatterings of horns—the horns which lay like so many curled fetuses in the dirt, aborted for some meager mortal's indulgence like the tiny lives kicked, clubbed, or cut from innocent wombs by wine-drunk Athenian soldiers.

Black tears bled from Pasiphae's cosmic eyes.

Some things, some horrors, could even bring dead gods back to life.

CHAPTER THREE

"You're kidding me, right?" Ajax asked.

Dean fidgeted over his halibut fish and chips. "Well, I mean, it's reasonable. After all, I only make twenty-five a year at the credit union, Daphne makes three times that. She brings home more money so it's only fair that I take care of the house. And I guess I have been a bit negligent in my chores. The house was a little dirty."

Ajax'd met him for lunch at Anthony's Fish Bar on the waterfront. He put his face in his hand, shook his head. "And what time did she get home?"

"Like, one in the morning," Dean told him.

"One in the morning—from a work meeting?"

"Like I told you, she's in a hectic business. It's non-stop."

"Right, those quarterly inventories," Ajax droned. "Till one in the morning. And now she's gone off to Las Vegas? For a work convention?"

Dean knew what he was getting at. "Ever heard of the Las Vegas Convention Center, smart guy?"

"Yeah, and she left her wedding ring on the bathroom sink." Ajax crunched into a pile of fried clams. "How long does it take you to realize that two plus two equals infidelity?"

"She's not cheating on me for Christ's sake," Dean insisted. "And the ring?" He'd noticed it this morning, after driving her to the airport. "Simple explanation. You take your ring off to wash your hands, then you forget to put it back on."

"Yep, simple explanation." Ajax ate some more clams in order to avoid chuckling. "But you had another Jig-Jag. Isn't that what you said on the phone?"