Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [38]
Hudson stared.
“Oh, and Mr. Hudson? You’ll need to remove your clothes as well.”
Hudson winced. “I’m not taking off my clothes, for God’s sake.”
“For Lucifer’s, not God’s. It’s all part of the protocol, I’m afraid. You must be as naked as Adam when he stalked out of the garden.”
What am I doing? came the thought as he began to strip. At least being nude would make the heat more tolerable. The deaconess and the whore were already shining with sweat.
Now the deaconess was inspecting the prostitute’s heavy breasts, twilling the meaty nipples with her fingers. “Let’s see here now,” she murmured. Milk sprayed out at once. “Yes, good, so full” Then the deaconess tasted a wet fingertip. “Ah. Soiled. Perfect.” Next her hand stroked up and down the recently deflated belly, whose stretch marks now looked like the gouges of a garden claw. An abundant sprawl of black pubic hair jutted nestlike from between the prostitute’s pasty legs. The deaconess ran her fingers through it, fascinated. “So how many babies have come out of here, hmm?”
“Six, seven—fuck, I don’t know,” the prostitute said, disconcerted.
“And you left them all to die?”
“Yeah. Fuck it. The world’s a bunch’a shit anyway. Who wants to bring kids up with all this shit goin’ on? Besides, I make more money when I’m pregnant.”
“Really? How interesting.”
“Sure. Kink tricks, you know? Lotta guys out there go nuts for knocked-up streetwalkers. They pay more. So I pocket the cash, and when it’s time, I pop the kid out in an alley somewhere and walk away.”
“Perfect,” whispered the deaconess.
Hudson felt sick.
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
Hudson and the prostitute jumped at the start. The sound of impact shook the house. When Hudson cleared his confusion, he noticed the deaconess–
WHAM!
—driving the pickax point with gusto into the wall. After a dozenish strikes, she’d managed to tear out a hole about the diameter of a dinner plate, roughly four feet from the floor.
Hudson peered out the hole, which showed the moonlit backyard. Then he refaced the deaconess.
“I ask you once more, Mr. Hudson. Do you wish to proceed?”
Hudson could feel the sweat pouring out of him. He wanted to say no, and he wanted to leave, but instead?
“Yes.”
“I thought you would.” And now she had the plastic bag again, and reached in. Hudson grimaced before she even extracted the contents: the rotten head of a baby.
The small face had dried to a rictus. But then Hudson noticed something even worse. The top of the head was missing.
The deaconess threw the head through the hole in the wall, where it landed, bouncing, in the scrub-laden backyard.
“But I thought—”
“That I needed it for a ritual of some sort?” the gleaming woman finished. The nipples on the high breasts stood out as if she were sexually frantic. “Not the head itself. This. The skullcap.” And from the bag she produced just that: the top of the infant’s skull, which had obviously been sawn off. At once Hudson recalled the smudged coping saw at the church.
She’s really been busy.
“The brain had already putrefied.” She showed him the inside of the empty dome. Then she raised her brow at the prostitute. “I’m afraid the newborn of our friend here wouldn’t do. It hadn’t lived long enough to be touched by Original Sin. It had to be this baby, from this house.”
“And what did you call this house, earlier?” Hudson asked.
“A Bleed-Point,” she said, her bare, flat stomach glistening. Droplets of sweat beaded in her pubic mound like clear little jewels. “Think of it as a sieve.”
“A hole between here and Hell?” Hudson figured but couldn’t believe what he’d said so convincingly and with such nonchalance.
“Yes, but only a semidimensional hole.