Robert Butler - Hell

Lilith in features and stature is clone-similar to her daughters. But as she draws near to Hatcher, the millennia are obvious upon her. Her all-over bleach job looks more white than blond and her flesh is pasty and liver-spotted. Though she has had a great deal of work done: her face is mostly unlined but forever fixed in a wide-eyed, leering rictus of lust.

“Now, Mama, he’s mine,” Lulu says, as Lilith arrives before Hatcher and settles onto her feet. Hatcher is filled with the smell of Lilith’s perfume: rose and jasmine, both synthetic, and sulfur and semen, both organic.

She looks past him now to her daughter. If her face could physically register an emotion other than lust, it would be doing it now. “My dear,” Lilith says, “you must learn to share.”

“I am sharing,” Lulu says. “I’m here, aren’t I? You get to watch.”

“Oh, darling daughter, haven’t I always been a good mother? How many three-ways have we had, my sweet? Men of my own acquisition, yes?”

“Mama, you got off on that big time,”

“You see what children do?” Lilith says, looking Hatcher in the eyes abruptly. “They twist your maternal generosity and affection into something selfish.” Lilith looks back to Lulu. “If what you say is true, then there has never been an unselfish act in the history of creation. Can I take no legitimate pleasure from my generous act? Must I feel displeasure being generous in order for the act to be truly generous? Then are you saying that the only truly generous acts can come from ungenerous spirits?”

“Mama, you just want to fuck this man. But he’s mine.”

“At least, my darling, a little of his essence for my collection? That’s the vigorish, dear. I am the house.”

“I could have taken him anywhere.”

“You’ll give nothing but some quarters for a peep show to your mother who birthed you and raised you and taught you everything?”

Hatcher feels Lulu shudder behind him.

“Oh all right,” Lulu says. “Have some diddling. But I get him last. I get to bite.”

“Of course, darling. That’s for the young anyway.”

At some point Hatcher tried to convince himself that in the final analysis, since pain was so extreme in Hell, one pain was pretty much like another. He had to get his addresses from Lulu, but on this point about what he would pay for them, he is realizing he was wrong. He should have known. He has never understood the attitude in people that “It’s only sex.” That’s like saying, “It’s only death.” There’s something uniquely intense about all this, in whatever form.

No more so than in Lilith’s double-wide, for she instantly lifts him up and tucks him under an arm and in a flash he is at the other end of the room and he is slammed onto the bed on his back and he closes his eyes and he thinks of England. Literally so. Involuntarily. It’s 1968 and the Grosvenor Square protests are just over and the vacationing young journalist has seized the day and taken smart, edited-in-the-camera footage with his Kodak Instamatic and he will soon add a cassette-taped voice-over and win his first broadcast journalism job, and he and Mary Ellen are wandering Piccadilly and she breaks off to go into a bookstore and he is excited by what he knows he will do and he lets her go browse while he wanders on and he passes a cobblestone alley and just off the street a young man is kneeling alone in an army-green field jacket and he is dousing himself with gasoline, and Hatcher pauses, and perhaps all this isn’t quite registering on him but now the young man is striking a match and there are no words and no signs, this is a very private act, and perhaps that’s why Hatcher still watches and does not think to move, but the privacy does not stop him — nascent newsman that he is — from simply raising his Instamatic, and he films the tiny flare of the flame and the dropping of the match and the man has rested backward a bit on his heels and so the match falls on his lap and the bloom of flame starts from the young man’s crotch.

And that’s the England Hatcher thinks of as he closes his eyes passively to the sex being visited upon him, because his own quick scorching flame of pain is very much starting in the same place, and the notion flashes through him that perhaps this will be something of an atonement for his newsman’s sins, and another pain — damp acid-burn pain — dabs itself again and again all over him — the touch of parts of Lilith’s body that he wills himself not to identify — and his own central body part in all this turns abruptly into an unending fount, a great soaring Old Faithful in more ways than one, with the flow geyser-hot, feeling as if the inside channel of him is being ripped up in the process and expelled as well, and now he is aware of a struggle above him, shoving and succubus-hissing and snorting and a sharp “all right you little bitch” from Lilith, and Hatcher knows Lulu has taken over, and a new pain grabs his cheek, a fierce clamping, and he presses his eyes more tightly shut and he could count her teeth if he chose — each is a separate twisting flaming knife blade — and the clamps of pain move down his chest, his abdomen, down and down, heading for Old Faithful as it pours searingly on with the image in Hatcher’s head turning from steaming geyser to flamethrower, but Lulu navigates around that spot and down his thighs, the clamp and clamp and clamp of new pain intensifying until it stops for a moment with his right ankle, the last step in a long trail of ongoing pain — the day-after deep throb of puncture wounds — and now he feels his right foot being taken up whole into a wet razor-lined cavern and held for one brief moment and then he hears himself crying out — perhaps he has been crying out all along unawares but now he hears as if from afar his own cry as it fills the room and probably the mountains outside as well — and there is the snapping of bone and the tearing of flesh.

The physical torments of Hell do not allow for the convenient side-door exit of unconsciousness. And so Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell , newly invested but free-thinkingly subversive minion of Satan, in full consciousness begins to suffer in ways that go rather beyond the poor powers of language to describe, as one foot is devoured and then the other, one leg done in four bites and then the other, the torso done in a dozen large chunks, the throat taken in one bite, and Hatcher McCord’s head — including his universally recognizable face — is swallowed whole. And then, last but not least, the famous anchorman’s penis remains utterly alone in the center of the bed, spouting on manfully, bravely. After making rather thorough use of this final part for a time, Lulu finally looks at it thoughtfully and then swallows it one gulp. All of Hatcher’s parts have now vanished down the wide-gaping throat and into the ever-expanding stomach of the redoubtable Lulu, succubus spawn of Grand Mater Lilith, as the Mater herself flutters nearby watching, having already collected more than enough of his essence for the Hatcher McCord snow globe.

Lulu belches.

“Cover your mouth, dear, when you do that,” Lilith says.

Lulu farts.

Lilith rolls her eyes and shakes her head, and with her cupped palm full of Hatcher, she floats off to her arts and crafts corner at the other end of the trailer.

Lulu — her belly vastly distended — lies back on the bed. She pulls a pack of Lucky Strikes from under a pillow and lights a cigarette. She blows a smoke ring and reflects: I adore having a man inside me. Even if they don’t appreciate it and just want to shoot their little load and then roll off you and turn their back and act like you’re not even there. And you’re so like them, Mama. Deep down, you prefer to watch. The Internet is all you really need. And when you do them, it’s just to add to your collection. Oh I did this one. And I did that one. For me, this is the real moment. I cannot hold you close enough, my darling. Come inside me, my darling. We are one, my darling,