Warning! Do Not Read This Story! Read Free Page B

love," said Lucid, "that I shall bestow upon you a great gift in return."
    "What gift?" The tribe sounded expectant.
    "I shall become an actual part of your families," said Lucid. "Through marriage."
    "Through marriage?" The tribe sounded horrified.
    "I shall marry the eldest daughter of every family in my tribe," said Lucid. "Together, we shall conceive the next generation."
    "Conceive?" said a tribesman.
    "We didn't think you could," said a tribeswoman.
    "Of course I can!" Lucid laughed. "Now bring me your daughters!"
    For the next month, Lucid married a daughter a day. After each ceremony, his retainers carried his bucket to a special tent. The brides were brought in next, and reached into the bucket.
    They fished in the putrid ooze, holding their breath against the stench as they followed Lucid's instructions. Things they could not see squirmed and pinched at their fingers, latching on and burrowing into their flesh. They wept for days and tried to
    Forget...
    Forget...
    Â 
    *****
    Â 
    Not again!
    I forget !
    If only I were still whole. If only you could read the real me, just as Towers told Buzz and the LaVerges.
    I was magnificent. I was revolting and beautiful at the same time.
    Before the LaVerges did their dirty work, I radiated the power that had brought down empires. Collapsed civilizations.
    Controlled minds in that very room in Lasco, New Mexico, when my latest acolyte presented me from start to finish in my original, unexpurgated form.
    Â 
    *****
    Â 
    After Lucid had married the eldest daughters of the tribe, leaving every one of them forever scarred--both physically and mentally--he moved on to the next step of his great plan. The last step.
    Once again, he called all the people of the tribe before him. By now, after living with him and losing their beautiful daughters to his ugliness, the people were crushed. Their grotesque god in a bucket had twisted their spirits and filled their hearts with horror.
    Now, he would take them one step further into hell.
    "You have welcomed me into your homes," said Lucid, peering over the rim of his bucket. "You have made me part of your families. Now, I give you the greatest gift of all: the chance to become one with your god."
    The people of the tribe stared vacantly at his obscene, bucket-bound mass. Flies buzzed around his pulsating blood-vessel hair.
    "Here is how this communion will come to pass," said Lucid. "Each of you will offer one part of yourself...one sacrifice that will bind you to me.
    "Now come forward and unite with my divinity!" Lucid bobbed in his bucket, spilling rancid fluid over the sides. "One at a time! Chanting prayers and crawling on your hands and knees, please!"
    As the people approached, Lucid's surgeon went to work on them. He hacked a different body part from each one and placed it in a framework—a man-shaped framework.
    From one man, he cut a hand, chopping through the wrist with a cleaver. From another man, he carved off a face.
    He removed a woman's skin, cutting carefully from chin to ankles, slicing with the razor as the woman's chanting turned to shrieks, and then he...
    He...
    Â 
    *****
    Â 
    I don't know.
    I can't remember.
    I've no idea what comes next. That part of the story is lost to me. That part of me is gone.
    It survived for all the long ages, passed down from one storyteller to the next, from the earliest human beings all the way to Sergeant Towers. In fact, Towers might have been the last person to retell me in my glorious entirety.
    I apologize for not being able to recapture her exact words that day. Suffice it to say, she finished telling Buzz Mahaffey and the LaVerge sisters every last wonderful bit of my original text, and then she said...
    Â 
    *****
    Â 
    "The End." Towers stared at the glass coffee table. "That's all Espinoza told me."
    "What a downer ." Carrol scowled and lit another cigarette. "The least you could've done was jazz that thing up for us with a little creative editing."
    Sascha leaned