Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [49]
Questions upon questions still bubble up in your gourd-head, but they all stall with every glimpse you take of the nefarious street. Panels of guts raised like Sheetrock, cinder blocks of such butcher’s waste formed walls, sidewalks, and even entire buildings. You turn away as you drive past.
“And in the event that you’re wondering,” Howard mentions, “you’re able to traverse the Snot-Gourd by means of a Psychic-Servo motor. Your impulses engage the gears.”
You hadn’t thought about that, nor about how the steam-car itself is even being maneuvered. “Is it some kind of black magic that’s driving the car?”
“Not at all, and my apologies for failing to introduce you to our driver.” Howard leans forward and pulls back a webbed canopy before them, which reveals a hidden driver’s compartment whose bow tie–shaped steering wheel is surrounded by knobbed levers. Seated just behind the wheel is—
Holy SMOKES! you think.
—a stunningly beautiful nude woman. Hourglass curves rise up to grapefruit-size breasts, which offer nipples distending like overlarge Hershey’s Kisses. By any sexist standard, she’s perfect in every way . . . save for one anomaly.
She’s made of clay.
“She has no name,” Howard explains. “She’s a Golemess. Dis-Enchanted riverbed clay is what she’s made of. Her male counterpart—Golems—are quite larger, while these female versions are manufactured more petitely, and to be sexually provocative.”
The wet grayish clay shines—indeed—as if a centerfold has been airbrushed. Her hair, however—on her head as well as between her fabulously toned legs—bears sculptor’s marks.
A Golemess, huh? you think. That’s a pretty attractive piece of clay . . .
“Quite a comely monster,” Howard says, “though my detractors could hardly conceive of me making such an observation, I suppose. They said I was homosexual, for goodness sake, in spite of my having married a woman! Regrettably, though, love is quite temporary, and I’ll admit, her pocketbook was impressive to a poor artist such as myself. But, more dread luck—barely a year after we were wed, she was dismissed from her lucrative position! We had to move into an absolutely pestilent rooming house in Brooklyn; one could scarcely distinguish between the tenants and the rodents! And forty dollars a month the slum barons charged!”
You hardly hear Howard’s odd aside of petulance, in favor of scrutinizing the Golemess’s astonishing features. She was what Randal would probably call a “brick shithouse,” and . . .
You could literally build one out of her.
“Pardon my digression,” Howard says. “It’s just that I have so much rancor now—a sin, of course: wrath—but still . . .” Howard seems dejected. “I can scarcely believe that Seabury Quinn was the name of the day while I foundered on considerably lower tiers. Gad! Have you ever read his work? Let’s hope not. As for the Golemess, you may be wondering if it’s sexually functional, which I can happily or unhappily asseverate. Quite a lot in Hell is, for reasons that need not be expounded upon. The common veils of empiricism are no less prevalent here than in the Living World. So, too, are the notions of invidiousness. I was an atheist but hardly a bad sort, yet here I am. The circumstances which led to my Damnation are barely even explicable. You, on the other hand, are in quite another circumstance, hmm?”
Your pumpkin-face frowns; at least you are getting the knack of it now. But you barely understand your fussy tour guide. “Because I’m going to the seminary, to become a priest?”
Howard grimaces over a bump and another waft of organic stench. “Miasmal! Ah, but to respond to your legitimate query, you, Mr. Hudson, are more than just a priest-to-be, you’re one who is spiritually well-placed on the—how shall I phrase it?—the plus side of the Fulcrum . . .”
Your furry brow arches. The Fulcrum . . . The deaconess had said something similar, hadn’t she?
The steam-car, at last, pulls off the chunky pavement as the Golemess turns the wheel. A sign floats past: TOLL BOOTH AHEAD. You can’t keep your thoughts straight.
“I just don’t get