Psycho Liza after Dulville: Give it over

Green note: Here’s another fast job. Just trying to get down ideas for Psycho Liza episodes (you can read the first episode here).  This is another idea that kicked off via Oneword then came here. Like Slade, who is definitely going to be part of the Liza story. Lance and the Judge’s kid are coming up. Bits and pieces. Chapters on the loose.

“Let’s see where the little bastard threw it today.” Herb opened his front door and peered out. He threw up his hands. “Goddammit!” He sinched up his bathrobe and shuffled across the veranda and down the steps in his slippers.

The morning air was pressurized. Herb looked at the sky for signs of a front. It was blue as ever and the sun was just beginning to work its way up. He shook his head, scuffed down the walkway and grunted as he stooped to pick up the newspaper.

He unfolded it and started reading on his way back up to the house. “Shit fire!” he bellowed.  His wife snapped open the kitchen blinds and darted her wide eyes around the yard.

Herb held the paper up to her and shook it. He hurried into the house and threw it down on the kitchen table. “Don’t that just take the rag off the bush!”

“Good Lord, Herb! What on earth has happened?”

“Look here, M.” Herb pounded the paper with a great, long index finger.

Martha raised her glasses to her nose and began to read the headline out loud, “Woman Holds Up 7-11 With Voodoo Curse.” Martha gasped and put one hand to her breast. She looked up at Herb. “The 7-11 just over on Myrtle and Main?”

“The very same, Herb said. “The Dooley kid was working the cash register. Says here this wild-lookin’ woman came in and said somethin’ to him and he jus’ give her all the cash in the till, no gun, nothin’.”

########

Psycho Liza flew out the door of the pub and disappeared into the side alley. She kept to the dirty narrows like a rat to sewer corridors and she worked her way artfully through the heart of Dulville until she reached the blackness beyond the town’s edge.

Clouds threatened the light of a near full moon and the air was a cold sweat that smelled of rust and dogwood.

Liza strode over the back roads and sprang into the ditches at the first glow of car lights on the horizon. There she would wait, barely breathing, until the noise and lights had bled back into the night.

She pressed on until she began to smell the stench of the Darby paper mill and the power of midnight had grown so close and strong as to be unbearable. She could see Highway 319 ahead and she stopped and turned to the waxing moon. Her eyes glowed with its yellows and she whispered to it.

O Ningal, I have thy husband’s power!
Soon we shall sup as queens at table
And all the kings as dogs shall cower
Underneath the blade of Ereshkigal

The wind rose and blew Liza’s long black hair out from her curvy body. She raised her arms to the heavens and her eyes transformed to the blue and indigo of white hot.  Then she plumped up her creamy breasts and clicked her sharp black boot heels South on Highway 319.

Liza heard a car coming far off behind her. She turned and walked backward with her thumb out. The car came on fast then skidded into the shoulder in front of her. It was a beat, old Ford Falcon. She ran to the passenger side and got in.

The driver was a drunken, middle-aged man with beady eyes and a patchy, dirty beard. His sweat was heavy with the smell of ammonia and he had a nervous little laugh. “Well lookee here, if it ain’t Elvira, Mistress of the Dark! Heh heh.”

Gale force storms rumbled in Liza’s head and the moonlight that filled her eyes became obscured by blackened clouds.

“Don’t say much, do ya?  Heh heh.” the drunk said.

Liza’s black eyes pelted the drunk with the torrential rains of her sickness.

Your one and only purpose is come
For soon you shall be divinely birthed
No longer drunk and howling hokum
As Ningal severs your ties to this earth

The drunk leaned back from her. His eyes had seen her silky black wrap. “Say is that blood on your coat, girl? Heh heh.”

“Why no, Hon,” Liza cooed. “It ain’t.” She shimmied her wrap from her shoulders and took it into her hands. She silk caught the moon’s light as she moved it like water flowing. She winked at him. “Let me show you the pleasures of the dark like only I know how,” she said all smoky.

The drunk perked up. “Well now yer talkin’! Heh heh.”

“I’m Liza”

The drunk offered his hand. “I’m Percy. Heh heh.”

Liza grabbed his hand with an unnatural force and twisted it to the right. He howled with the pain and followed his ripping arm, turning with it out from under the wheel and into her lap and she entwined and held the wrap like a vice around his neck until he stopped kicking and fighting like a wild beast.

She snatched the keys from the ignition and dragged dirty Percy out of the car and around to the back of it. She unlocked the truck, hoisted him up into it and slammed the lid down. “Drunk fuck,” she said.

Liza got into the driver’s seat and took off down the highway. She drove until the needle twitched on a quarter of a tank and she looked for exits to gas stations. She got off at exit 25 to Wrightsville and screeched up to the pumps at a 7-11. She stepped out and squinted wild yellow eyes around to gauge the action.

Her hair whipped in a sudden wind and she clicked her boot heels up to the door and yanked it open. She blasted in and stopped with the wind. Everyone froze. She fixed her eyes on the cashier and hissed, “Yahdoh machte spiro shakti,” and he opened the cash drawer, gathered everything into a bag and mechanically handed it to her. She snatched it from him and tore out the door, filled the tank and drove off, South on 319.

Fin

Click here for more on prompt “#273 – Give” from other Sunday Scribblings participants.

The spirit of Slade: The next step

Green note: This guy Slade popped out in a Oneword earlier this month and he dogged me to the point I used SS #271 to explore him more.  So here he is, the proprietor of Painted Ponies body shop, in his first flash.

Photo from IMCDB

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It was just mid-morning in Iron City, Georgia and already it was 100 degrees.

Even with the fans going full tilt, it was 90 degrees inside the Painted Ponies body shop.

Slade pulled his head out of a big Cutlass 442 and grabbed a shop towel, ran it around his face and the back of his neck.  He walked to the front office like a cowboy off a two-month cattle drive and banged on the side of a vending machine he’d rigged up.  A can of Budweiser banged its way down through the machine and bounced into the tray.

The shop grunt looked over at Slade, hotboxed his cigarette and shook his head.  “Why don’ you jus’ keep yo’ beer in the fridge, Boss?” he said.

Slade just looked at him and pulled the tab.  Beer sprayed into his mouth and face and hair.  He grinned and shook his head like a dog and growled, “That’s why, you unimaginative bastard.”

The grunt rolled his eyes, flicked his butt onto the dirty linoleum floor and ground it out with his boot.  “Guess I’ll git back to work seein’ as I’m borin’ you with my mundan—”

“Shut up and listen, Lance,” Slade whispered.

“What Boss?”

“If that ain’t the sound of a 1977 Super Duty 455 V8 Trans Am comin’ our way, then slap my ass an’ call me Sally!”

Slade strode all excited out the front door and past the gas pumps, almost to the road, and he stopped.  He threw his head back and hollered, “Whoooeee!”

Lance ran out to look, shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand.

A mint condition 1977 black-and-gold special edition Trans Am tore into view and fishtailed to a stop just a few feet from Slade.  A wiry kid rocketed out of the driver’s side door, ran at Slade and grabbed both sides of his leather vest.  “Slade, dude, ya gotta help me!”

Lance postured for a fight.

Slade brushed the kid’s hands off his vest.  “Whoa now, boy, you don’ just come on a-grabbin’ a man like tha—”  He squinted at the kid.  “Say, ain’t you Judge Beeman’s boy?”

The kid panted, “Yessir, Slade, sir.”  He gulped for air.  “An’ like I said ya gotta help me please I got drunk and stole this car outside a shack near Andalusia, Alabama and hell the keys was danglin’ from th’ ignition jus’ a-beggin’ me to take ‘er and I been drivin’ all night and ya gotta help me and paint this here car real quick-like.”

Slade spat on the dirt.  “You fool kid!” he growled at the boy and slapped him hard upside the head.  “It ain’t as easy as that.”

The kid staggered back, panting and rubbing his ear.  He looked like he was gonna cry.  He whined, “What then, Slade, what’ll I do?”

Slade pulled gloves out the back of his jeans and put them on.  “The next step is to look for a LoJack,” he said, “and if I find one, it’s too late for you, Bub.”  He motioned to Lance to get gone.

Lance nodded and scrambled on into the shop to make ready.

Slade grabbed a couple of tools out of his pocket and opened the passenger door.  He unscrewed nuts and bolts, got up in the glove box hole and unscrewed some more and scoured the dash then looked under the seats.  “A shack in Alabama,” he grumbled.  He leaned into the back, pulled up the seat and looked.  “Fool been drivin’ all night.”  Slade pulled the hood release and jumped out of the car.

The kid was wringing his hands, walking in circles.

Slade lifted the hood and scoured the engine bay.  “It’s 9 o’clock now.  Dude owns this car mighta heard you takin’ it and called the police as many as 5 or 6 hours ago!”

The kid stopped his circling.  His voice was shaky.  “Oh man, dude, well I put ‘er in neutral and pushed her a long way down the road ‘fore I started ‘er up and anyway I don’ know if anyone was even home.”

Slade pulled his head up out of the engine and growled, “You don’ know if anyone was home and you even think of stealin’ a car like this?”

Two steps and he was at the kid’s neck.  He gritted his teeth in the kid’s face and snarled, “You stupid little fuck!  Now give me the keys!”

The kid just stared.  His lower lip quivered.

Slade shook the kid silly until the keys fell out his cold sweat hands and onto the red dirt.  He pushed the kid out of the way, grabbed up the keys and opened the trunk.  He jumped back like he was on springs.  “Sweet Jesus!” he hollered.

He turned and took the kid in.  Maybe 20.  Almost six foot and skinny.  Peach fuzz on his face.  Baby eyes that hadn’t a clue.  “Son,” he said to him, “There’s a dead woman in the back of this ‘ere trunk.”

The kid snapped out of his daze.  “Oh no, God,” he said.  He rushed to the trunk.  His eyes got the size of half dollars.

There was a middle-aged woman, her eyes staring, big and dull.  Her cracked red lips were parted, like in mid-sentence.  A pool of blood congealed around her teeth.  There was a gaping hole in her chest and her heart was hardening in one of her clamped hands.  Below her skirt, her knees were caked with blood and her feet had been cut off.

The kid’s face was green.  He stepped back falteringly, his stomach waved and heaved.  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, whispered, “I dunno what this is, man, and I swear to you on my mother’s grave that I didn’t do this.”  He shook with weeping.  He let out in sobs, “What…will…I…do?”

“The next step will cover your ass,” Slade said.  “It’s all you have to know, Bub.”  He knew the kid didn’t do it, and he suspected the killing fucker what owned this car didn’t have a LoJack, but he ripped out the sides of the trunk to be sure.  Then he lifted up the panel to the spare.  The body rolled to the back.  He tore up every place there and under.  Nothing.  He looked toward the shop.

Lance gave Slade a thumbs-up from the window, then walked out to take care of the kid.  He had a bottle of Jack in the back of his pants and a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up in each T-shirt sleeve.

He sauntered up to the kid.  “C’mere, man,” he said.  “Slade’s gonna take care of your five-finger ride.  Now I need to get you the fuck away from here.”  He offered the kid some Jack and he gulped it like a thirsting, dying man.  “You’ll be safe, man.”  Lance lit a smoke and offered it to the kid.  He sucked on it like breathing to live.  He walked the kid to his piece of shit pick-up, helped him in and drove off.

Slade got in the Trans Am, fired it up and drove it with the dash in his lap back behind the shop.  He pulled up under the ceiling of turf Lance had raised and he pulled a transmitter out from his front pocket.  He pressed a button and the freight elevator took him down while the raised turf above him lowered and clamped down to ground level.

Fin

After-party notes:  no time to proof this but at a glance back, it looks like there’ll be more to this.  Just like with Liza.  Maybe the two will meet.  Maybe cool dude Slade, who I enjoy writing about, will lead me to Psycho Liza by surprise.

Click here for more on prompt “#271 – The Next Step” from other Sunday Scribblings participants.

Thursdays in Dulville, GA

Green note:  I’m bringing Psycho Liza home.  The idea of her came to me in January of 2010 and I gave her a timid spin in May, but she didn’t get to show her true colors until the Brazill gig this January.  Truth is, I’m scared of Liza.  Trouble is, it’s obvious ‘Thursdays in Dulville, GA’ is not the end of the line for her.  Bringing her here puts me under the gun.

Photo from concentrate media

The door to the pub flew open and hit the wall with a sound like a single shot bang.  Everybody in the place jumped a mile high and looked toward the source of the commotion, their nerves jarring their limbs like jackhammers.

All eyes locked on the wide open doorway filled part way with a mini-Elvira, her big creamy breasts askew in their confines and most of her ass-length black hair loosed from its clip.  She looked like she’d been chased out of Hell, hounds on her heels, into a snare of silence and stares.  She was motionless but for panting and darting her savage eyes back and forth, gauging the danger.

“Do something for crissakes!” Boss Barker hissed at Hal.

Hal laughed nervously from behind the bar.  “Evenin’ Miss Liza!” he hollered over to her.  “Come on in and take a load off, won’tcha?”

Liza’s eyes darted to Hal.  He could see the damaged gears clunking in her head and he felt her disease spinning off them like mud.  He cleared his throat and lied, “You’re lookin’ mighty fine tonight, Darlin’.”

Liza swept her eyes back across the barroom, and by sheer do-or-die desperation, the staring, mute folks jolted themselves back to drinking and jawing as much like usual as they could muster.

Liza blinked and took one step inside.

Hal let his breath out, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.  He poured a glass of merlot and held it up to Liza.  “Here you go, Darlin’.  It’s on the house.”  A smile quivered on his lips.

Liza blew a strand of hair out of her face, plumped up her breasts, and clicked her tall black boot heels across the floor toward the bar, her black, silky wrap fluttering out to the sides.  She took the wine and smirked at Hal.  “Thanks, Hon.  You still my man ain’tcha?”

“Oh you know it, Miss Liza.”

“Ain’t no one at my table is they, Hon?”

“No ma’am,” Hal said, “it’s reserved for you ever’ Thursday.”

Liza turned her back on him abruptly and clicked her sharp heels toward a raised section of the barroom in the back corner.

Hal snapped, “Someone go shut the goddamn door.”

Jim Colt slid off his barstool.  “I got it.”

Buck Walsh quit peeling the label off his beer bottle.  He leaned into the bar and said real low, “I told y’all somethin’ was wrong, I mean real wrong, like to make Psycho Liza this late for her usual happy hour, like maybe she got fired or got herself in a car accident or got raped or maybe—”

“Or maybe she done snapped the rest of the way to crazy,” Boss said and bust out laughing.

Jim hopped back onto his barstool.  “Oooowee, this place is packed.”  He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder and said, “Theys even some outta-towners in here tonight.”

Buck whipped his head around, got a bead on the strangers, a man and his woman at one of the tippy cocktail tables having a good time.  He turned back around quick and whispered fast and scared, “You think we oughta warn ‘em ‘bout Psycho Liza and the game she play, well it’s not a game to her but it is to all of us, an’ you know it’s the best fun we got in this fallin’ down town since the Bijou went bust an’—”

“Idiot!”  Boss slapped Buck upside the head.  He shook his jowls in Buck’s face, “Think about it, you moron!  We go tell them folk that shit an’ what the fuck do that make us look like?”

“It’ll be alright, Buck,” Hal said.  “Jus’ give ‘er some time with that wine an’ she’ll calm down.”

“I dunno,” Jim said, “Look at ‘er.”

Liza stood beside her table squinting at the lights in the stained glass valence that hung from the ceiling all the way around the bar.

“She gonna sit down and start or what?” Boss grumbled.  “Missus say I gotta be home by nine.”

As if she heard him, Liza turned slowly from the lights, her eyes glowing with the reds and oranges of them.  She set her wine glass down on the table, pulled out the chair and arranged herself on it.

All the folks in the barroom watched her out of the corners of their eyes.  And they waited.

Liza dipped a finger into her wine and touched it to her forehead.  The wine drop ran down to the bridge of her nose and cut left through smudged eyeliner and on down to the corner of her mouth.  She snapped it up with her tongue and lifted her wine glass and drank half of it down.  And when she looked up, the cool fires of red and orange had transformed to the blue and indigo and violet of white hot.

Here am I, you defenseless man-beasts,

Holding high court, queen of your Lust,

While you piddle with unworthy sows

Cast your pearls not there, nay, but avow

To lay them before me with a wink and a kiss

Liza looked around the barroom, man by man, catching their attention with the heat of her eyes and winking and licking her lips at them.  They winked back and smiled and that made them hers.  Then one by one the women reached out to touch her men when she wasn’t looking, seeing how close they could get before the fire in her eyes burned them.  It was a delicate balance, tricky to pull off.  Only Victoria Parsons had come the closest, almost kissed a man before Liza caught her.  Liza stood up and made like she was gonna tear Vicky up, but she sat back down when Vicky ran out the door.

Liza blew a kiss at Jim Colt and he smiled and winked at her and followed her eyes over his shoulder to the strangers.  They were animated in conversation, their eyes sparkling and tickling each other’s fancy.  Their laugher rang out joyous and quieted to chortles and then down to whispers at just inches away.

Blackness filled Liza’s head.  Smoke from firestorms rumbled across her eyes, and she became as a blowtorch, blasting the stranger-man with the whole of her sickness.

Look to me, man, and take my cup, for

I am the only woman, the feminine source,

Of your endless desire, the fount of your fulfillment

Over and over, and I say when, I hold the key

Look to me now, man, now man, now man

The stranger-man seemed impervious.  He reached out a hand across the top of the cocktail table and the stranger-woman took it and time stopped its onward march for them, a blissful breath taken in and held.

Obey your lust, you man-beast

Ever only a knee-jerk away, just

Do as I say, mantis prey

I am Kali, the black Shakti!

I am the One Eternal Woman!

Dance for me, fertilize me

Feed me!

The strangers opened their eyes and withdrew slowly from a kiss, their smiles full as apple flowers dripping with nectar.  They took up their wine glasses and prepared for a toast when the stranger-man felt the heat of Liza’s stare.  He looked in the direction of the heat and his head jerked back involuntarily, his eyes widened, slathered with horror.

The stranger-woman rescued the wine glass from her man’s trembling hand and she leaned in close with grave concern.  She touched his arm, asked him what’s wrong, and in absence of his words she followed the line of his dilated pupils to the pathological laughter of Psycho Liza.

Jim Colt cried out, “Oh sweet jesus!” and Hal dropped a bottle of Old Crow onto a stack of glasses.  He turned in slow motion amidst crazy witch laughter and breaking glass and patrons’ gasps, and he saw Psycho Liza moving from her table like a panther along the limb of a tree.  Her eyes were yellow and slitted with evil, and she picked up speed through the parting people.

Her black, silky wrap flapped out from her sides like helpless crows with broken wings.  They brushed the stranger-woman’s cheek in a flurry and batted hard against the stranger-man’s head.  They flew out the door, their wingtips red, leaving peals of laughter and disease trailing after.

All movement within the barroom stopped on dropped jaws and hands clamped to mouths.  All hearts missed a beat when the stranger-woman screamed.  And in a collective sweep, all eyes turned from the door to a rush of blood flowing from the stranger-man’s neck.

Fin

‘Apostle Rising’ debut after-party notes

 The Veuve Clicquot is flowing tonight.  There are no Lenten sacrifices besides the odd politician and sex worker.  It’s Fat Thursday, the day Richard Godwin’s blue-eyed Apostle begins his rise.  Just in time for the bloody affair of crucifixion right prior to Easter and resurrection and all.

True enough, ‘Apostle Rising’ is no novel for the fainthearted.  It’s already been said in a few reviews.  But I’m a style hog, no matter what the genre.  I’ll suck every last drop out of poetic prose.  And this novel gives both on top of a tight plot.  Heaven.

Richard is the perfect setup.  High IQ embellished with an education inconceivable to most Americans, on top of an extraordinary talent for writing.  It’s his time.

He might’ve shaved off a bit from the beginning of the novel—and that’s been mentioned as well—but the symphony of the whole of his words is swoon-worthy.

Some of the killings are radically graphic to some, poetry to others.  Never has being carved up sounded as a bittersweet acid trip.

She felt her body no longer belonged to her and in the intervals he allowed between the cutting she fell backwards into memories she had carefully concealed behind what seemed suddenly now nothing more than a work facade. Each time he penetrated her, each time she felt the sharp breaking of her skin, its rending by the polished metal whose glint was the constant image in her torture, she felt a conflict of cold and warmth as the weapon entered her, summoning the rush of bodily fluids from her…

…The faces of lovers fled across her mind like supplicant spirits, their bodies’ warmth leaving her now, her feeling of them deserting her like a wasted limb. Her husband lay across her, a solid weight she wanted to throw off and she looked down seeing her body held less fluid than the carpet, thinking how do we hold so much of it as the tide of her life slowed, her heart aware of its own redundancy.

 
This is pure Godwin.

One critic, Bruce Grossman of bookgasm, called ‘Apostle Rising’ ‘a great introduction to Godwin’s style and talent for prose.’

CrimeTime called it ‘An arresting and cleverly plotted police procedural married to gothic horror and the aesthetics of the slasher genre Apostle Rising is an unusual and memorable crime story.’

But the best summary I’ve read to date—and this one comes from the ARC review phase—is author Vincent Zandri’s.  In short, ‘Engrossing, exquisite…horror so disturbing but beautifully written…a noir tour de force.’  ‘Apostle Rising is exactly that.

As I take my aspirin before bed, a final note:  I believe ‘Apostle Rising’ will indeed be the next runaway bestseller and I, among untold others, patiently await the sequel.