Psycho-Mania!
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Synopsis
We all go a little mad sometimes ...
Included among these twisted tales - of psychos, schizoids and serial killers, many with a supernatural twist - is Reggie Oliver's revival of Edgar Allan Poe's wily French detective, C. Auguste Dupin, a new 'Bryant & May' London mystery from Christopher Fowler, child-actor-turnedprivate-eye Marty Burns investigating a quirky Hollywood case by Jay Russell and internationally bestselling Michael Marshall revisiting The Straw Men conspiracy.
Alongside one of Robert Bloch's most iconic stories, there's an original wraparound sequence in the style of the author by John Llewellyn Probert.
With classic reprints by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Basil Copper and Dennis Etchison, original fiction by Peter Crowther, Brian Hodge, Richard Christian Matheson, Paul McAuley, Lisa Morton, Robert Shearman, Steve Rasnic Tem and others, you'd have to be out of your mind not to take a stab at these stories!
Release date: October 17, 2013
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 160
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Psycho-Mania!
Stephen Jones
“Introduction” copyright © the Estate of Robert Bloch 2013.
“Prologue: Screams in the Dark” copyright © John Llewellyn Probert 2013.
“I Tell You It’s Love” copyright © Joe R. Lansdale 1983. Originally published in Modern Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Green Hour” copyright © Reggie Oliver 2013.
“The Secret Laws of the Universe” copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2013.
“The Recompensing of Albano Pizar” copyright © Basil Copper 1973. Originally published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories No.3. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Night Soil Man” copyright © David A. Sutton 2013.
“Let My Smile Be Your Umbrella” copyright © Brian Hodge 2013.
“The Trembling Living Wire” copyright © Scott Edelman 2013.
“Case Conference #1” copyright © John Llewellyn Probert 2013.
“The Undertaker’s Sideline” copyright © Agberg, Ltd. 1959, 1987. Originally published in Monsters and Things, April 1959, as by “Richard F. Watson”. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Long Shift” copyright © Joel Lane 2013.
“The Man Who Photographed Beardsley” copyright © Brian Lumley 1976. Originally published in Star Book of Horror No.2. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Hollywood Hannah” copyright © Lisa Morton 2013.
“I Spy” copyright © Paul McAuley 1999. Originally published in White of the Moon: New Tales of Madness and Dread. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Reflections on the Critical Process” copyright © Mike Carey 2006, 2013. Originally published in different form in Mike Carey’s One-Sided Bargains.
“The Finger” copyright © David J. Schow 2013.
“Hot Eyes, Cold Eyes” copyright © Lawrence Block 1978. Originally published in Gallery, 1978. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Shushie” copyright © Jay Russell 2013.
“Case Conference #2” copyright © John Llewellyn Probert 2013.
“The Gatecrasher” copyright © R. Chetwynd-Hayes 1971. Originally published in The Unbidden. Reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate.
“That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love” copyright © Robert Shearman 2013.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. Originally published in The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine, Vol.1, No.1, January 1843.
“Got to Kill Them All” copyright © Dennis Etchison 2001. Originally published in Cemetery Dance Magazine, Issue #34, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Essence” copyright © Mark Morris 2013.
“The Beach” copyright © Michael Kelly 2013.
“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” copyright © Robert Bloch 1943. Originally published in Weird Tales, July 1943. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Robert Bloch.
“Case Conference #3” copyright © John Llewellyn Probert 2013.
“See How They Run” copyright © Ramsey Campbell 1993. Originally published in Monsters in Our Midst. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Manners” copyright © Conrad Williams 2013.
“Bryant & May and the Seven Points” copyright © Christopher Fowler 2013.
“All the Birds Come Home to Roost” by Harlan Ellison®. Copyright © 1978 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Originally published in Playboy, March 1979 and The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective (Revised and Expanded). Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author and the Author’s agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison® is a registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Wide-Shining Light” copyright © Rio Youers 2013.
“Feminine Endings” copyright © Neil Gaiman 2008. Originally published in Four Letter Word: Original Love Letters, February 14, 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Eater” copyright © Peter Crowther 1995. First published in Cemetery Dance Magazine Issue #22, 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Case Conference #4” copyright © John Llewellyn Probert 2013.
“Mister Mellor Comes to Wayside” copyright © Peter Crowther 2013.
“Failure” copyright © Michael Marshall 2013.
“The Only Ending We Have” copyright © Kim Newman 2013.
“Kriss Kross Applesauce” copyright © Richard Christian Matheson 2013.
“Epilogue: A Little Piece of Sanity” copyright © John Llewellyn Probert 2013.
“Case Notes” copyright © Stephen Jones 2013.
IN 1958 I wrote a novel called Psycho, wherein my heroine was suddenly and shockingly killed while taking a shower.
So much for cleanliness.
In 1960 Alfred Hitchcock filmed my novel. It follows the plot of the book faithfully, though in a few cases the movie dramatizes or lengthens events I merely report in the novel. One example, of course, is the shower sequence. I startled readers with a shockingly abrupt murder. Hitchcock jolted audiences by prolonging it. Each of us employed the tempo most effective for our medium.
But neither the film nor the novel is a story about a girl being killed while taking a shower. Psycho is a story about the killer – a character named Norman Bates.
And Norman Bates is a character. To mislead my mystery readers I created him as middle-aged. Hitchcock achieves deception visually by depicting him as a dozen years younger. Again, our intentions were identical, and appropriately executed for the medium in which we worked. But despite the disparity in age, and dialogue changes supplied by the scriptwriter adapting the book, the basic character of Norman Bates remains unchanged, right down to my last line, and the film’s.
Hitchcock’s shower sequence is masterful indeed, but in the past thirty-odd years it has been constantly surpassed in gory, graphic detail, which Hitchcock was adroit enough to convey through suggestion.
Some of the more explicitly violent films are admittedly frightening – and/or nauseating and revolting. Many of their on-screen atrocities are perpetrated by serial killers who do away with victims by the most fiendish methods which low-budget or hi-tech can devise. Moreover, many of these choppy-chappies prove to be immortal: after meeting gruesome (and usually, quite noisy) fates, they tend to come back to life at the drop of a sequel.
But despite the miracles of modern make-up and special effects, it’s Norman Bates who has apparently emerged as a symbol of the serial killer – not because he’s super-ugly or supernatural, but because he’s seemingly just your average face in the crowd until an alternate personality takes over. He could be anybody. Or somebody. Somebody you know.
I refer, of course, to the original Norman – not to the retreads offered in subsequent sequels on-screen, or even a prequel in which character becomes self-caricature.
It’s the inevitable self-caricature element which makes many of today’s “mad slasher” films meaningless. When characters are unbelievable their deeds lack credibility. And the films (or books, for that matter) offer a series of momentary shocks but leave no lasting imprint on our long-term memory. Short jabs for people with short attention-spans.
To be effective in this genre, the writer or director must aim not for the reader’s/viewer’s eyes, but for their imaginations. And for emotional rather than mere visceral impact, it is important that the story is more than a dramatized body-count. Whatever the medium, its audiences must be led to care about the victims as human beings – and to understand the “psycho” as a human being too.
Which means that the films that endure must offer us something more memorable than a loud soundtrack, zoom-shots, jump-cuts and an endless chain of crudely contrived examples of death-by-special-effects.
Hopefully, with these criteria in mind, it is possible to evaluate the contents of this book. Fiction and films have come a long way from the standard mystery/horror offerings where the most kindly and intelligent cast-member was finally fingered as the culprit and instantly turned into a raving maniac.
Today, even Hannibal Lecter manages to keep a civil tongue in his head. It’s just his teeth we have to watch out for.
The same, of course, could be said for Count Dracula, but in the out-and-out supernatural fantasy the monsters generally advertised their identities or concealed them only clumsily. The problem with the real-life psychopath or sociopath, as well as with many outright dangerous sufferers from psychoses, is that they’re not always easily recognizable. They can – and all too frequently do – live just down the street, or even next door. Some may knock on your front door or (worst-case scenario) even move in with you.
Correction: that’s not the worst-case scenario after all. Because for some there comes a time when they catch their first glimpse of a psycho by looking into a mirror.
And for many of us who don’t necessarily catch a full glimpse, there’s always the possibility on occasion of seeing a glimmer.
There’s still a great deal which society doesn’t know about the problems of psychopathology and psychosis. Perhaps books and films may eventually impel us to learn a little more about our psychos. And ourselves.
IT WAS AN old building, fashioned from weathered red brick and held together with mortar that was crumbling almost as quickly as the minds of many of those confined within. The corridors echoed with the flickering whispers of a thousand lonely souls, condemned to reside in the ever-lengthening shadows that would one day coalesce and consume the building in a darkness of never-ending despair. The anaemic green paint on the walls had cracked and split as if in empathy with the patients’ sanity, the greying plaster beneath saturated with over a century’s worth of screams from the lost and the forgotten.
There were over a hundred rooms, not all with padded walls, not all with three sets of locks to keep their residents within and the staff safely without, not all with red discs on their foot-thick steel doors to indicate that on no account were they to be opened without at least three members of staff present.
Not all.
But most.
“This is an asylum for the criminally insane.”
Robert Stanhope’s eyes widened at these words, spoken by the much older, and far better dressed, man sitting on the other side of the huge, ornate writing desk. It was one thing to have driven here through the pouring rain, the huge rambling complex of Victorian buildings rising from the moors as he approached like some beast in waiting, the bars on the windows and the signs everywhere forbidding those without permission to come any further, but it was another entirely for the institution’s director to be quite so blatant about its purpose. Now, having been shown through a maze of corridors, each with a pair of locked doors at either end that had to be negotiated in keeping with the building’s security regulations, he was finally here.
He eyed the man sitting opposite. Dr Lionel Parrish’s hands were clasped neatly on the cherry-red leather of the desktop, a pale blue silk handkerchief arranged meticulously in the breast-pocket of the jacket of the blue pinstripe suit he was wearing. The man’s demeanour radiated authority, and with only a single sentence he managed to make Stanhope feel partly guest but mainly intruder.
The younger man presumed Parrish’s ensuing silence meant he was intended to respond.
“Yes,” he said, drawing out the word in a way he hoped suggested he was politely disagreeing. After all, it was possible he was being tested. “At least, my understanding is that’s what they used to be called. Nowadays there are more reasonable, understanding, tolerant terms for places like this.”
He looked around the vast, dark study, the shelves filled with medical tomes, the filing cabinets beside the door behind him crammed to bursting with case files. “And for the patients they treat,” he added with a smile.
Dr Parrish leaned back in his swivel chair. The creak made Stanhope jump. “I have been the director of this institution for a long time,” Parrish said eventually, “and I have been a doctor for far longer than that. And one of the many things I have learned during my career is that it doesn’t matter how frequently one renames something, the word or phrase one uses will, gradually but inevitably, take on the same stigma with the general public as that which preceded it.”
He folded his hands behind his head. The chair creaked even more ominously as he leaned back further, but his gaze never left the young man opposite. “Lunatic. Insane. Psychotic. Disturbed. Challenged. Different. Special. Crazy.” He seemed to be enjoying saying each word. “It doesn’t matter what you call them so long as you have no misconceptions about what you are actually dealing with.” The director narrowed his eyes. “The patients in this place are dangerous, Mr Stanhope. Exceedingly dangerous. You may have come here with very high ideals about kindness and understanding, about hope and optimism, but up there . . .” he gestured above him “. . . you will find nothing and no one to respond to those ideals, except to use them against you.”
Stanhope’s hands twitched. This wasn’t how he had anticipated the meeting starting off at all. “I’m aware that these patients can be violent,” he said. “After all, they wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Not all of them are violent,” said Parrish. “Some of them are dangerous in other ways. A few are exceedingly manipulative, and will have the coldest heart bleeding for them while they gently slit your throat. Others will turn you against yourself without you even realizing it. There are some very, very clever people in here, young man. Engineers who have devoted their lives to devising new kinds of torture devices, teachers who have delighted in driving their own students to suicide. We have one man upstairs who, before he was caught, managed to manufacture an entire orchestra’s worth of instruments from the flesh and bones of his many victims.”
“Are there any doctors who are patients?” Stanhope could not help but ask.
“That last one is a doctor,’’ Parrish replied with a small smile. “We do have one or two others. No psychiatrists, though, which is interesting, don’t you think?”
All Stanhope could do was nod. In the silence that followed, he fancied he could hear a very faint wailing coming from somewhere upstairs, before Parrish eventually nodded at the dictating machine Stanhope had placed on his desk.
“Shall we get started on this interview of yours, then?” the director asked.
Stanhope raised his eyebrows. “I was under the impression we had already begun,” he said.
Parrish snorted, picked up the little tape player and squinted at the tiny see-through plastic window in its casing. The wheels of the cassette mechanism were indeed going round. “Good grief, no,” he said, pushing the stop button and setting the tape to rewind. Stanhope, taken aback by this, reached out for the device, but Parrish held it away from him.
“Before we properly begin, Mr Stanhope, I would like you to answer a question for me,” said the director, his manner confrontational now that he had realized the recorder had been switched on without his permission.
Stanhope suppressed a shudder and forced a nod. “Go on,” he said.
“At what point in your own medical career did you decide that you couldn’t stand the patients any more?”
Stanhope’s eyes widened as Parrish continued.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t have done some research of my own before agreeing to let you in here? I am well aware that before you decided to pursue a career writing tabloid-friendly articles for, shall we say, the less-discerning members of the general public, you were a member of this profession yourself.” He reached into his right-hand desk drawer and produced a collection of clippings of some of Stanhope’s more hysterically headlined articles. “I know you call yourself a medical journalist because that sounds slightly more reputable than the type of tabloid degenerate I sometimes get asking me for an interview, but you are a journalist nevertheless. So . . .” He steepled his fingers and pushed himself away from the desk a little. The chair creaked again and Stanhope was no more prepared for it this time than he had been the first. “Tell me.”
“I got my medical degree,” said Stanhope, coughing to clear the frog that had suddenly taken up residence in his dry throat, “worked in a couple of junior training posts in various specialities, but then I decided that I preferred writing, so that’s what I did.”
“That’s what you did.” Parrish repeated the words slowly and deliberately, savouring them with all the liquid menace of someone who knows that they have only been given a tiny fragment of the true story. For now.
Stanhope nodded. “I’d had a few articles published in the British Medical Journal, Healthcare Matters, International Ageing—”
“Comics,” said Parrish with a dismissive wave of his hand, “and ones that don’t pay well either, if at all.”
“I know, which is why I realized that if I wanted to make a living at it, I’d need to broaden my horizons.”
“That’s how you would refer to it, is it?” said Parrish. “Broadening your horizons?”
“It’s as good a way as any,” said Stanhope, starting to get riled by the man’s attitude. Usually it was he who was the one asking the questions, he who was the one probing and investigating, causing his interview subject the maximum of discomfort to elicit the juiciest information. But, he supposed, that was one of the reasons he had accepted the invitation. An interview with the director of Crowsmoor Institution regarding the alleged mistreatment of its inmates would do his career a world of good, and it wouldn’t hurt his bank account or his ego, either. But it obviously wasn’t going to be easy.
“You may be wondering why I’ve asked you here,” said Parrish abruptly.
It wasn’t difficult to guess. Stanhope glanced at the clippings. “I imagine those may have had something to do with it,” he replied.
The director nodded and pushed them towards the journalist. Stanhope didn’t need to pick them up to see they were the series of articles he had written for a major newspaper on the alleged incompetence of the staff in large mental institutions.
“I only wrote what I was told,” he said. “Ex-patients, cleaners, porters. They all had stories to tell.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” said Dr Parrish, leaning forward. “What always worries me in all these articles you’ve written is the unquestioning belief that what you have been told is true.”
“It’s unlikely that they all lied independently,” replied Stanhope.
“No,” said Parrish, “but this was a series of articles published over many months and under such circumstances it’s conceivable that some of them may have got wind of just how much your paper was paying for such information, and realized they might be on to something if they could come up with the kind of story you were looking for.”
Stanhope crossed his legs, a slight smirk on his face. “And have you invited me here today to prove them all wrong?” he asked.
“As you are well aware, not all these articles were about my institution,” said Parrish. “But a couple of them were and, Mr Stanhope, I can tell you now that I and my staff were deeply offended by the claims made within them. Deeply offended. And as for the patients . . .”
“You’re not trying to tell me your patients were upset by them?” Stanhope replied, stifling a chuckle.
Dr Parrish narrowed his eyes. “Most of the patients at Crowsmoor are going to be here for a very, very long time, Mr Stanhope. It is therefore not unreasonable for many of them to think of this place not as a prison but as a home.” He pointed at the clippings. “It can be most upsetting to see this sort of thing written about the place where you live and about the people who care for you.”
“Fine, fine,” said Stanhope, once again wondering where this was leading. “So you asked me here for an interview and here I am.” He pointed at his Dictaphone. “And there’s my machine, all ready and waiting now that you’ve turned it off. So perhaps we could stop procrastinating and get started? Or are you hoping if you delay things for long enough, spin out how hurt and upset you and all your patients are, that I’ll get fed up and leave?”
“Oh, you’re not going anywhere,” said Parrish with such vehemence that Stanhope turned and looked at the door. “I don’t mean that.” Now it was Parrish’s turn to chuckle. “What I mean is, there is so much for me to tell you that we are both going to be here for quite a while. Would you like some tea?”
Stanhope shook his head.
“Let me assure you, it won’t be drugged. You’re not going to wake up in some white-walled room with no chance of ever seeing the outside world again. The thought makes you nervous though, doesn’t it?”
Stanhope stopped fidgeting in his seat. “All right then,” he said defiantly. “I will have a cup of tea. Lots of milk and two sugars.”
“I might have guessed,” said Parrish, reaching for his intercom and relaying the instructions to his receptionist.
“Well?” said Stanhope, once Parrish had finished.
“Well what?”
Stanhope reached out a hand. “Can I have my dictating machine back?”
Parrish grinned. “Surely the correct usage is ‘May I’?”
Once he showed no intention of relinquishing the device, Stanhope gave in. “Okay, may I have my machine back?”
“Of course!” said Parrish, handing it over. “We wouldn’t get very far if you couldn’t record what I was going to say, would we?”
“Thank you,” said Stanhope, pressing record and giving the machine his details, the date, and an index number for whichever secretary back at his paper would presumably be typing it up. “I’d like to start by asking you your name, and how long you have been the director of Crowsmoor?” he said, pointing the tape recorder at Parrish.
The director sat in silence for a moment before shaking his head.
“What’s the matter now?” said Stanhope, pressing the off button.
“That’s not the way we’re going to do things,” said Parrish. “You are going to have to earn the answers to any questions you want to ask me.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” Stanhope was starting to get annoyed now.
“Oh, it should be fairly easy,” said Parrish with a trace of amusement. “You see, my concern is that you can’t tell truth from fiction, or at least these articles of yours seem to suggest as much. So I have a proposition for you.”
Stanhope didn’t look taken with the idea. “Go on,” he said.
Parrish gestured to the rest of the room. “In this office are all the case records of all the patients who are here now or ever have been here, including those who have been released and those who, sadly, ended their days within these walls.”
Stanhope looked around him at the towering bookcases crammed with ring binders and box files, and then at the filing cabinets behind him. “And . . .?” he said.
Parrish got to his feet. “Over the last few months, in fact since I began reading those articles of yours,” this time he pronounced the word “articles” with disdain, “I have been adding a few cases of my own. Fictional ones. Ones I have created, made up with the intention of inviting you here to put you to a little test.”
“What sort of test?” Stanhope sneered, not at all happy that Parrish had once again taken control of his interview.
“I propose to read some of them to you, and all you have to do is tell me whether or not you think the case I am describing actually happened, or whether it is, in fact, the product of my somewhat overactive imagination.”
“You have one then, do you?” said Stanhope. “In my experience most of the doctors I’ve met don’t even read.”
“Do you think if they did they would tell you about it?” said Parrish with a raised eyebrow. He crossed to the bookcases on Stanhope’s left and rested a hand on a battered lilac-coloured box file. He glanced at his desk, and then at the bay window behind it.
Beyond the glass lay gloomy rain-washed fields, the few bare trees battered and twisted by the constant buffeting winds of this exposed place. “You’d be surprised how much time there is to think up such things in a place like this, Mr Stanhope, and no – you are not allowed to put that in your interview. At least, not yet.”
“Go on then,” said Stanhope, realizing there was nothing for it but to accede to the man’s wishes. He looked at his watch and found himself wishing the tea would hurry up. “Read me a story and I’ll tell you what I think.” After all, how difficult was it going to be to tell the difference between a proper clinical case history and some nonsense this man had made up in a hurry, to try and prove some sort of ridiculous point?
“Good!” Parrish lingered by the bookcase for a moment as if considering something, and then moved to the filing cabinet nearest the door. He pulled open the top drawer and began to leaf through manila folders, talking all the while. “What shall we begin with? I wonder,” he said, giving no sign of whether he was talking to Stanhope or himself. “A wife-beater? A child-strangler?”
Stanhope shrugged. “I don’t care, but let me warn you right now – if you start reading me something that’s filled with maniacal gibbering laughter, I’ll know you’re making it up from the start.”
Parrish put down the file he was holding and gave Stanhope a severe look. “Let me assure you, Mr Stanhope, that there is not much laughter of any kind in these files. Tears – yes, sadness – of course, and screams . . .” Parrish paused, a faraway look in his eyes for a moment. “Too many screams, Mr Stanhope, all locked away here in the dark.” He gave the filing cabinet a pat that was almost affectionate. “All locked away in the dark, all waiting for someone like me to come along and read them to someone like you. Are you ready?”
Stanhope nodded.
Parrish looked through the cabinet drawer once more before taking a battered folder from the very front.
“May as well begin at the beginning,” he said with a smile, as he took out two sheets of paper held together with a rusty paper clip in the top right-hand corner. “How does a little whipping sound?”
Stanhope narrowed his eyes. “Not really my sort of thing,” he replied. “But somehow it doesn’t surprise me that you’d want to start with something like that.”
Parrish took the case notes back to his desk, sat behind it, and adjusted his desk lamp so he could better see the hand-written confession that began the document.
“In that case,” he said, “let’s begin . . .”
THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN had no eyes, just sparkles of light where they should have been – or so it seemed in the can dlelight. Her lips, so warm and inviting, so wickedly wild and suggestive of strange pleasures, held yet a hint of disaster, as if they might be fat red things skilfully moulded from dried blood.
“Hit me,” she said.
That is my earliest memory of her; a doll for my beat ing, a doll for my love.
I laid it on her with that black silk whip, slapping it across her shoulders and back, listening to the whisper of it as it rode down, delighting in the flat pretty sound of it striking her flesh.
She did not bleed, which was a disappointment. The whip was too soft, too flexible, too difficult to strike hard with.
“Hurt me,” she said softly. I went to where she kneeled. Her arms were outstretched, crucifixion-style, and bound to the walls on either side with strong silk cord the colour and texture of the whip in my hand.
I slapped her. “Like it?” I asked. She nodded and I slapped her again . . . and again. A one-two rhythm, slow and melodic, time and again.
“Like it?” I repeated, and she moaned, “Yeah, oh, yeah.”
Later, after she was untied and had tidied up the blood from her lips and nose, we made brutal love; me with my thumbs bending the flesh of her throat, she with her nails entrenched in my back. She said to me when we were finished, “Let’s do someone.”
That’s how we got started. Thinking back now, once again I say I’m glad for fate; glad for Gloria; glad for the memory of the crying sounds, the dripping blood and the long sharp knives that murmured through flesh like a lov er’s whisper cutting the dark.
Yeah, I like to think back to when I walked hands in pockets down the dark wharves in search of that special place where there were said to be special women with special pleasures for a special man like me.
I walked on until I met a sailor leaning up against a wall smoking a cigarette, and he says when I ask about the place, “Oh, yeah, I like that sort of pleasure myself. Two blocks down, turn right, there between the warehouses, down the far end. You’ll see the light.” And he pointed and I walked on, faster.
Finding it, paying for it, meeting Gloria was the goal of my dreams. I was more than a customer to that sassy, dark mama with the sparkler eyes. I was the link to fit her link. We made two strong, solid bonds in a strange cosmic chain. You could feel the energy flowing th
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