LAIKA

Feature Writer: Silvio Stoker
Feature Title: Laika
Copyright: Copyright (C) 2000, Silvio Stoker. ALL Rights Reserved
Story Codes: Mf, Mg, Mff, gg, Pedo, Pre-teen, Teen, Extreme caution
Uploaded: http://www.asstr.org/files/Authors/Sergdriver/www/index.htm
Notes: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
Synopsis: Simon Seize, a hard-boiled detective, is hired by the parents of a missing prepubescent girl. He learns that their daughter is hiding out under the alias ‘Laika.’ Simon tries to find out everything he can about the 12 year old soft-core starlet whose identity their runaway child is living under. Looking for both the ‘real’ Laika and the lost little slut, Simon stumbles upon a stable of sassy bc girls and some very sweet MCLT children…

LAIKA

 

I SHY TOWN

Laika is a dog’s name. Some Nimrod on the Usenet recently scribbled some sappy sophistries about how the girl so called, Laika as in ‘Lolita,’ another misnomer of sorts, must be a Slav, since the name recalls the first canine in outer space. The writer also claimed that Laika (girl, not dog) was shot with the permission of her parents and is now a happy housewife somewhere in darkest Poland.

She may well be Slavic, the girl in question. No doubt some sorry matron inspired by Sputnik may indeed have named her daughter after a flying dog – deep in the hinterlands of Russia are stout Babushki with names like Elektrifikatsiya and Stalina, a host of Vladlens and a vast number of less conspicuous creatures whose easy Vladimirs and Yuris nonetheless reflect the lost luster of Lenin and Gagarin.

The Laika I mean appears incessantly in every newsgroup that even hints at the underage. Of course, I myself have never seen any pictures of anyone too young to have a doctorate, and the very idea of nudity curdles my bright blue blood, but, you know – one hears things.

The city in the Laika Pictures looks like Munich. I know no Japanese, but – unless my memory fails me (though those of you who read my stories regularly may well assume that I have long ago pickled my brain in rare and rather pricey distillates of the blue agave and boreal grain, not to mention the grape, both as wine and an amber spirit, or bottled in tall, slender bottles as grappa, clear as day and redolent of stem and skin and seed, the little pictures of architectural monuments near the naked girl seem to include the Koenigsplatz and Friedensengel.

But, then, one can never be sure. Certainly there are other weird neoclassical bonbons of stone scattered throughout Europe, even among the

Slavs, and gilded angels leap from columns in many an Old World metropolis.

Laika the Lolita is what, then, an Eastern European pubescent named after a famous dog, festering in a Thaipuff not far from the Hofbraeuhaus?

No, no, she’s probably okay. She’s a defiant child – in several pictures there is a striking anger to the set of her face, though not to her poses. Because she has been posed. She has been posed in such a way that Laika is the darling of armchair pedophiles all over the world, her perfect body and rosy skin radiating a forced innocence and equally ersatz sexuality while her eyes give away the sorry truth – Laika is as miserable before the lens, and in the hands of the oriental gorgon fondling her, as your average Silvio Stoker character.

Anger and sorrow. Laika lolls before the lens of, say, a Leica, which technology the Soviets filched as reparations from the Hun, offering the ripening fruits of her share in the natural lottery to emulsion and later on to the bleak escapists huddled in cyberspace, eager for a fine form regardless of expression, as long as the body is young.

So it must be a resilient innocence that is the currency in this corner of the virtual world – you want to see the virgin poked like the Pillsbury Doughboy, to see her swiftly regain her form and giggle. After all, as far as we know, no one is raping Laika. She is assaulted only by the camera, raped by the light alone.

Oh and then by what we do not know. For instance, who is the gorgon she is forced to kiss? Are there other pictures? What became of her?

xxxxx

Deng he was drunk. He disliked his life in Little Vietnam, off Argyle, under the El tracks. Winters were so harsh as to be surrealistic, what with the game roasting on a piece of car-trim-cum-spit above the drum, the scavenged wood lit with old newspapers, information grilling the dying pigeons, cans of expired beans, and tonight a peacock stolen from the zoo.

But Deng he was a super-hero, for he hung out near this homeless fire for educational purposes only. God rot them who don’t, blimey an’ so on. After dinner, Deng returned always to his wife, a lean sucker with an exploding heart. They lived in holy matrimony on Division Street, their union sanctioned by a renegade Chinese church, and Deng porked her daily, resulting in seven celestial daughters, no men. Deng cry an’ cry an’ lack a men.

And so he come each night by stealth to the Argyle El, et a bowl of fiery soup in which the sick thing festered, and the sick things that live in parks silently floated, an’ he done sip a syrupy plum wine while rapping with his ancestors, who were as it happens none too nice.

On Saturdays, Deng drifted into the Bar Do. Here he met Manga, a mangled adolescent with luminous eyes and the Kaliyantra tattooed sublimely between her small but succulent breasts. It was his one luxury, this honey.

xxxxx

Laika squeals each Christmas as the cock cries. Tears the sequined curtains to a slimy after world, sequels to a sorrowful a meaty serious, an incomprehensible life. As the crow flies, innocence and angel dust. The funny thing about the kid is that she is this underworld starlet of a virginity exposed, yet weeps over the possible loss of the very pseudo-innocence we look to her for, as if it were already gone. So, on a winter morning, somewhere north of the elliptical and wavy line that shows the northernmost extent of palms on her handily immanent map, Laika eats her porridge and listens to cockcrow, preening before a full-length mirror before heading off into the underworld before.

The other funny thing about the kid is that she is teary-eyed about her torn innocence when – forgive me – despite her yes perfect pubescent body and pretty cute face, Laika seems (and such seeming is bien sûr an asinine assumption) to have nothing behind that hymeneal veil.

In other words, I get the feeling that Laika is none too bright. It is a terrible thing, what was done to her, I mean the light raping her and all, dressing her like a cutey-pie and having the gorgon suggestively offer her tit to a demanding public… but one does get the impression that this Lolita would have made it to happy housewifedom with or without these tenebrous phototaxis and rotten erotica or the so-called soft-core, soft softer softest mi corazon.

xxxxx

Simon Seize dipped into the same watering hole as Deng, wearing a T-shirt that said THE FUTURE BEGINS TODAY. Deng he wore a similar logo between his scratchy sweater, wiry body and ragged cape: HISTORY DID NOT BEGIN YESTERDAY, and so they got to talking.

The Laika Pictures aren’t kiddie porn, they’re art. Because they’re foggy? Soft focus, desirous blur. A hint of hair. Her nether regions are baroque. Stalinbarock, ja ja, Hitlergothisch und eine oder keine blasse Ahnung, wahrscheinlich, (Stalin’s Baroque, yes, Hitler’s and one or no idea, probably), and this rococo hope. The wooden curtains of the Cuvilliés-Theater at the Residenz. At a distance these appear to be cloth. Supple folds. And yet, they do not give.

Later it was impossible for her to be alone. There was always someone there, watching her, studying her undress. Touched by people she didn’t want touching her, suffocated. Lifting her leg to display her secret hiding place. The photographer paused while she wept. ‘Tis of a lovely child upon a lonesome wild, indeed.

xxxxx

They had got to talking when Manga wafted in, a teeny waif with eyes as pink as a laboratory rat’s.

An almost weightless albino, fifteen years old, with the mind of an immortal and the threadbare astral body of a guttersnipe, emotionally waifish and wafer thin, strangely studious, a scholiast, this Gothic oddity attracted Simon Seize intellectually and – unbeknownst to him – also sexually, the sludge in muladhara shifting as she entered the Bar Do, the heavy rings threaded through her pale nipples pressing against her black T-shirt, cut off at the sleeves and midriff, white with the salt of her sweat beneath outlandishly emaciated arms.

Simon Seize tried to lead a life rife with fictions, rinsing his mouth with whiskey after the occasional brushing, sleeping in his rumpled trench-coat and dancing with imaginary friends. The tango.

He had gone to detective school during a prolonged period of unemployment, seeing a commercial that proclaimed this possibility through a haze of Herradurra and an oft-repeated hallucination of scrawny burros wending their way to Alamut. He gathered evidence for divorce cases, primarily, and the Case of the Disappearing Virgin, as he named it over a tumbler of mescal, was Simon’s first search for a missing person.

Simon Seize was a salesman. His ostensible skills as a shamus were purely for show. Oh, he cracked a divorce case now and then (he loved crack both as verb and substance), sniffing out an infidelity, but most often he failed, as he did at everything, really. No matter, for Simon’s sense of the real was so addled by alcohol that a tango with a phantom was as tangible to him as the arugula and aspic on which he fed.

So when the Dawsons contacted him about their virgin daughter, Destiny, who had vanished at the unripe age of twelve six months before, the aggrieved suburban snobs having found his name in an outdated edition of the Yellow Pages (the new one omitted him because he never paid the bill), and Simon said he’d get right on it and gave them his account number, and Simon put his feet up on his desk and cracked open a bottle of Monte Alban, brooding about where to begin, he did not expect Destiny to lead him anywhere in particular.

He liked the case, though. The Dawsons were spectacularly wealthy and strangely mysterious – they didn’t want to meet Simon, and the information he had to go on was scanty but intriguing. Destiny suffered what sounded like the crisis of adolescence when only eleven years old, several months before her disappearance. She had become rebellious, uncommunicative, worn forbidden clothing and stopped eating. Her mother had found marijuana seeds in her lunch-box.

Destiny had run away from home twice before her twelfth birthday, but both times she had been found at her sister’s. Fatima Dawson was seventeen, and had been on her own for about a year. Drugged out and obsessed with witchcraft, Destiny’s sister hadn’t spoken to her parents since long before she left their stately home in Kenilworth, dropped out of New Trier and moved to a nasty apartment near the Aragon Ballroom with a Haitian man twenty years her senior.

The police, after Destiny’s final disappearance, had interviewed Jules, unable to find Fatima. They claimed that the twelve-year-old had not darkened their doorway since long before her birthday, and both professed an intense dislike for the disobedient urchin.

Fortified by half a bottle of mescal, Simon set out to question the elusive Fatima Dawson and the somewhat sinister Jules Poulet.

xxxxx

The brown brick building in which the seventeen-year-old witch and her thirty-seven-year-old procurer resided was a slum. The drunken detective warily climbed the dark wooden stairs and banged wearily upon the door of the fourth floor apartment, which bore a little handwritten sign that said ‘bell does not work’, some intersecting triangles and the scrawl ‘Io Pan’ in dark red paint.

Simon blinked twice when the teenager answered his knock. Naked except for leather bracelets and anklets with thick steel rings, and a studded collar, the creature looked as though she had just been liberated from a concentration camp. Her skin was as white as the cocaine under her aquiline nose, and her aquamarine eyes sparkled with insanity. Her skeletal body glistened with a fragrant oil that gave the detective an erection, and her smile smelled of blood, the loose teeth ensanguined.

Fatima – if this was Fatima – could hardly walk. She said nothing but staggered back into the dimly lit hallway, leaving the door open. Simon entered and closed it, following the wraith. Her back and bony butt bore countless scars, and her anus was surrounded by a purple bruise.

The room she led him to was cloudy with incense, and unfurnished except for large pillows and what appeared to be an altar, two black cubes placed atop one another and surmounted by a live snake that coiled around a curious statue – a muscular man of red jasper mounted by an emaciated woman carved of rock crystal.

In the middle of the room was a dead dog, disemboweled. At the far end a black man, probably the Haitian, supine, before him two beautiful young girls, nude, intent on performing fellatio, his cock shining with their saliva in the light of a candelabrum that hung from the ceiling.

Near the door was another girl who looked about fourteen, dressed in a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and black denim shorts, barefoot. She was high, as everyone else seemed to be, and didn’t acknowledge his presence.

Fatima did. She lay down with the back of her shaven head against the dog’s gutted corpse and spread her legs, which were thinner than Simon’s forearms. Her labia were pinned back, and her cunt hole was gory.

“I’m here to ask you some questions,” Simon said, staring at the tiny navel of her sunken stomach and the mutilated nipples on her hard little breasts.

“Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh,” Fatima moaned, running her fingertips along her oiled white body.

“Are you Fatima Dawson?”

The specter giggled, took her left foot in both hands, and began to lick and suck her toes, gazing at the detective. One of the girls, who was sucking the Haitian, rose and came towards him. Fifteen or sixteen, pierced to the gills, with straight, light brown hair down to her firm round buttocks, pert breasts, and a bright, childish face that looked out of place except for her corrupt green eyes, the teenager embraced him and parted her chapped lips, sticking out her wet pink tongue. Simon’s hands went automatically to the kid’s butt. Her mouth tasted like cock. She rubbed against him, then sank to her knees and fumbled with his belt, kneading the bulge in his pants, smiling up at him.

“No,” Simon said, thinking of Marlowe, who only slept with decent girls.

He took hold of her wrists and pulled her to her feet. She kissed him again. She kissed good. The trouble was that he _liked_ indecent girls.

“Don’t you want to make love to me?” Her voice was a seductive whisper.

“If you do, I’ll tell you everything you want to know. I want your cock in me.”

Simon looked down at Fatima, who had stuffed her hand into her mangled cunt hole. The girl who wanted him or said she wanted him squeezed his erection again.

“If you’re shy, we can go into the other room,” she whispered. “Come on… you can fuck my ass.”

The detective let her lead him into the hallway, then into a small bedroom. There was a narrow bed with handcuffs hanging from the cast iron bedstead and not much else. The walls were covered with gruesome photographs of the Black Dahlia, and a single bare bulb, blue, hung at the height of his eyes. The teenager moaned and threw herself at him, undoing his pants. He let her, and she sank to the floor and sucked. Simon had a big cock, eight and a half inches and as thick as they come. She gazed up at him with her filthy green eyes, running her tongue around the bulb.

“I’m still a virgin in my butt,” she said, fondling his balls. “Tell me what you want to do to me. It turns me on.”

“What’s your name?”

“Amber. Tell me what to do.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen… tell me. Talk dirty to me.”

“Get on the bed.”

Amber hopped onto the narrow bed and spread her cheeks. Simon slowly undressed as she looked at him over her pink shoulder.

“Am I pretty? Will you lick it for me before you put it in… daddy?”

“You’re very pretty,” he said, climbing in behind her. “But don’t call me daddy.”

“Okay… is ‘mister’ okay? Will you lick my botty before you stick your big cock in it?”

“Are you really a virgin in there?”

“Uh-huh… I only lost my other cherry a couple months ago. Fuck me, mister.”

She was lovely. Her butt looked younger than a fifteen-year-old’s, the cheeks round and soft. Her skin was very rosy and her shaven cunt wet coral.

“Do you want me to?”

Amber started to masturbate, wiggling her butt. Simon slapped it playfully.

“Noooooooooooo,” she whined, tensing. “Don’t… don’t hurt me… don’t hurt your little girl.”

Her voice had changed suddenly. She sounded like an abandoned child. She was trembling. Simon pulled her to him and kissed her. She looked scared now, vulnerable. Amber sprawled on her back, grasped his cock, and guided him into her cunt. It was tight but slippery, and the girl shuddered as he entered her.

“Yesss,” she whispered hoarsely. “Is it… good? Ohhhh… is it good, mister? Yeah… deep… deeper… Aaaaauuuugh… fuck me… I need it… fuck…”

She didn’t seem to like it at all. It was like she wasn’t there, or only her body was, writhing, rocking its hips, desperate for a pleasure she didn’t know. It was like fucking a warm robot. Simon wilted. When she sat up after begging and shaking, her emerald eyes burned with fury. He slapped her, and the fire went out, tears streaming down her rosy cheeks. He slapped her again and got dressed. She rose to go, but he threw her back on the bed.

“I fucked you. Now tell me what this place is… and everything you know about Destiny.”

Amber hugged her knees and started to get seductive again. The detective lit a Pall Mall and offered her one. She took it, and he held up a paper match. It blew out.

“Who want to know?”

Simon whirled around and saw Jules Poulet. Naked, his long, thin cock completely erect, the Haitian stood three feet away. He was a small and sinewy, with skin the hue of a blue Buddha, his eyes bloodshot, dilated, his white teeth gleaming between thin gray lips. His hair was slicked back, jet. The man looked far older than his supposed age of thirty-seven, but radiated a strength that seemed divorced from his diminutive body. Even without the scene in the other room, there was something wicked about the bokor.

“I’m a private investigator,” Simon began.

“Work for my priestess’ parents?”

The unshagged shamus had had enough of this half-baked hocus-pocus and the morbid mumbo-jumbo that permeated the Poulet household.

“By priestess, you mean the anorexic freak?”

Jules grinned. “Gimme pliss a fag.”

Simon handed the Haitian a Pall Mall and ashed on the bare floor. Jules disturbed him – men who do not bother with the elided melodies of practical life always disturbed him. Simon didn’t bother either; he lived off of alcohol and aspic, but Simon didn’t have a harem of underage whores worshipping his penis.

“Is somebody gonna gimme a light?”

They had both forgotten about the forlorn teenager while they explored one another’s psychic defenses, they had, and now Jules Poulet shooed her from the room, throwing a matchbook after her. The gumshoe snuffed his smoke with his sole and lit another.

“I kill you one-two,” the bokor began. “I kill you easy except the loa let you in, you know, we go when this police come, but you no, you some sort of seeker, _hein_?”

“I’m looking for Destiny.”

“You a sick man,” Jules said. “You no look for no Destiny, you look for fuck, no? You like little Amber? She like your dick, _hein_?”

He was saying that the detective was impotent compared to him, that much Jules picked up through the thick accent, _echt_ Criollo, and muddled speech, and in Amber’s eyes as she slunk away, staring at the Haitian’s prick.

“Fuck you,” Simon said.

“Oui-oui,” Jules gibbered. “You want?”

The black man laughed, then shot him a shriveling look. Simon felt like a fresh tulip lashing a radiator.

“Ohh, ohh, Mister Detective,” Jules mocked, pronouncing it detek-teev, “a hurt in you yes not quite, no, weakness? You make no woman happy you, and child know, too. Poor um, oui, a somber hombre, sad sad man. The priestess like you, detek-teev, like you as um. She like you piss in her ass.”

Simon Seize was at a loss, and had the very beginning of a hangover, meaning that he needed more booze.

Jules Poulet divined this thought and opened the closet. There were seven shelves. The lowest were laden with dildoes and smut and the middle held an array of stuffed animals and expensive dolls. The upper part was a well-stocked bar, and Jules chose a bottle of fine rum from his home country, aged in oak, as subtle as cognac.

To drink it meant perdition, which was why his host offered it. Simon gave in, of course. His body was still before Amber, wanting what had wanted him until it disappeared.

Jules drank, too, then spat it in a fine spray at Simon Seize, this ritualistic shower of aureate rum reaching even Simon’s ill will and somewhat beady little heart.

The Haitian smiled. “You make for Erzulie something,” Jules said with a sudden gravity. “I make you juju, and you look Destiny, you look Destiny in face. She had same problems you has, detek-teev. Bad love. You find

Erzulie together, I know it.”

“Who’s Erzulie?”

“Ah, she is loa of certain love. You Aphrodite know? Peut-etre you

Mary? But is best find god first, no? First find, then name. Otherwise see through name, then no see her when have no name, _hein_? And what is your name?”

“Simon… Simon Seize.”

“Ah – he sees and he seizes, yes.” Jules chuckled and handed the detective the bottle. “And ‘seize’ – sez – this is number sixteen in Creole, Simon Sez, aaaah, uh-huh, that the number of the Tower, Maison-Dieu, God’s house, you know?”

The black man reached into his pocket and produced a tarot card – XVI, the Blasted Tower or the House of God, which was a picture of a phallic structure on fire, ejaculation, humans and flames leaping from the parapet.

Simon wasn’t feeling well. He lay back on the narrow bed, staring at the fearsome pictures on the wall. Jules stood, bowed, and departed.

xxxxx

Laika not a dog’s name but a breed of dog, and etymologically it would be ‘she who barks’, then, this Siberian creature. Perhaps the pictures are not of Munich but Berlin, again the capital of resurgent Germania, the Friedensengel actually the Siegessaeule, and the neoclassical thing an ostentatious edifice on Museum Island?

xxxxx

What we know, and how we live. And how what we know infects how we live, and vice-versa, or we never ever know anything, really, or we live by evading what we know. Simon fell asleep and woke in the gender gap, naked, between Fatima and Amber.

x x x

After he fucked them, fucking Fatima like fucking a preternaturally aroused insect, her pale exoskeleton slick with sweat, Amber reaching into her womb to stroke the stiff cock she had sucked into her distended ass, begging him to piss, to impregnate her, wide-eyed, rippling the muscles in her rectum and shaking her pelvis, howling, her toes slipping into his mouth and fondling his tongue like penile fingers, transferring his prick to her cunt hole to get his semen, then back into her anus, coming in agony as his urine gushed into her thirsty guts – after he fucked them, deflowering Amber’s vise-like sphincter while Fatima fingered the fifteen-year-old’s tiny clitty, forcing his cock into her womb to come, to knock her up, to make her little titties swell with milk and hurt her uterus, slapping her breasts as he ejaculated – after he fucked them, Simon smoked and stared at pictures of Laika.

That was the name she did go under, this Destiny Dawson. Fatima showed him a sheaf of photographs featuring her little sister. She went by Laika, the same age and yet utterly different from Laika-Mascot-Among-Lolitas, a cerebral Inconnue.

They didn’t want to meet Simon, Dawson père and Dawson mère, they were afraid of their daughters and what their daughters said of them. Afraid of the rueful echoes they were.

Simon Seize tried to suck it all in, the information, spotting the signs and city scenes behind her, studying her, noticing the symptoms of Fatima’s long buried emotions. The thing about detective work is not getting into it, is remaining detached, a kid in a storybook oh yeah.

Destiny ‘Laika’ Dawson was not a virgin. She bore no resemblance to the little schoolgirl so photogenically keelhauled, and was an obvious pervert instead, in the worst sense, the kind of girl who long ago and far away had trouble with her classmates abominating her because she stank of another species.

xxxxx

Deng was dead drunk when Simon sidled up to the bar and demanded a Rusty Nail, disgusting drink, what is that lyerrrh lyerrrh Drrammmbooey an’ ‘s some S-sss-scotch, tee many martoonies, lyerrrh. Simon read Deng’s T-shirt and right away felt a strong kinship. ‘Time begins somewhere,’ Simon thought, ‘n I can’t get there and my kin can’t neither. Lyerrrh.

Deng is serious man, small time for sentimental white people. Seven daughters and each of them in engineering school. Nonetheless, Deng when he was gnawing on stolen peacock had a strictly delimited epiphany which nonetheless included the company of men, what with the Year of the Dragon nigh and all, so when Simon started slurring at him he listened.

This was Simon’s violet hour, when he had accidental insights into a case, passing between a grueling sobriety and a state akin to death.

Simon sipped his sick little cocktail and spoke to Deng about the weather. Simon could not stop thinking about Fatima. Her smell was all over him, her taste still in his mouth despite the liquor. Even her shit was sweet. The detective’s dick stayed disturbingly hard, and he went into the washroom and jerked off, unable to extinguish image after image of Fatima’s bony body, Amber’s hand deep in her cavern, stroking him through the thin wall of her bottom hole as the corpse-like creature played with his mouth, her long toes caressing his tongue, her feet grasping his hips when she needed his semen, the pale, agile toes wrapping around his penis, her soft, high voice begging him for his baby, asking him to come in her cunt before he pissed up her butt, the sick ecstasy in her eyes when he did, her finger entering his ass as she suffered an orgasm, the way she sucked him back to hardness, his urine gushing from her guts, and guided him into her friend’s virgin anus.

And afterwards, after he’d finished with Amber’s shit hole and shot off in the fifteen-year-old’s snatch, Fatima had given him head for what must have been hours, gently pulling him into her pussy whenever he was about to ejaculate, whispering to him, telling him how fertile she was, how good it felt to get pregnant by him, fondling his balls and whimpering when he came.

When Simon couldn’t come anymore, Fatima had gotten the packet of photographs and shown him her sister. Fatima had treated him as though they’d known one another forever, as if he were her brother.

Simon spurted into the toilet and returned to the bar. The freak had bewitched him.

He ordered another Rusty Nail and stared at the strange Chinese man sipping his Singapore Sling. Fatima had told him about the Bar Do, its inconspicuous entrance in an alley under the El tracks. She told him to start looking for Destiny there.

The pictures drew him in like she did. Destiny ‘Laika’ Dawson was a frail, dirty child with skin like march-pane, almost translucent. In several of the shots she wore the thickest glasses Simon had ever seen, and in the others her eyes, aquamarine like her sister’s, were unfocused, lost.

The eleven-year-old’s lips, asymmetrical nipples and damaged vagina were the color of lox, almost orange. Her delicate limbs were dangerously thin, like Fatima’s, but Destiny was smaller, small even for her age.

Her left breast was in bud, the other titty utterly immature. Destiny’s distended fuck tube was snotty, the dilated opening the size of a donut hole. Her clitoris was prominent, crimson like her anus, which was surrounded by a hard scab.

There were pictures of her sucking a dog, dripping with come while what looked like the Haitian’s cock was buried in her butt, a man’s dick in each hand, of her tense, tiny body sandwiched by two young men twice her size, of her squatting down on a dark dildo as thick as her thigh, of her torn asshole afterwards, of five men urinating on her, of her beautiful hands and feet masturbating animals – ponies, donkeys, dogs, goats.

Then there were photographs of Destiny dressed as an innocent schoolgirl, sneaking cigarettes, stripping, going pee, suggestively holding a banana. The thing about these was that she actually looked like a virgin until she displayed her wrecked cunny hole and slid the banana in, sucking her thumb. Destiny’s hair was the color of dogs’ blood.

Fatima licked Simon’s ass while he looked at the pictures. She told him that her sister liked posing for the camera. That Destiny left only because she wasn’t satisfied – that the little slut wasn’t content with Jules and whatever else they did to her. To live with them, a girl had to worship Jules Poulet. Almost all of the girls he fucked fell under his spell. Fatima and Amber were under his spell. Destiny didn’t fall. She had gone away with her friend, whored at the Bar Do, and disappeared.

Simon knocked back his drink and showed Deng one of the pictures – Destiny in a diaphanous sailor suit, barefoot, eating a banana, wearing her glasses, her free hand draped across her emaciated thigh, the hairless, mutilated pudendum hidden by a pair of lacy panties.

Deng fell silent, and Simon saw recognition in his eyes. The detective ordered a stout and tried to get Deng to talk. It was futile.

Then Manga drifted in. She kissed Deng on the cheek and slid into the stool between them. Simon’s cock stiffened. The albino ordered a shot of tequila and a glass of cold white wine.

It was as though our shamus had stumbled upon another nest of anorexic whores, and whatever Fatima had done to his libido, the result was that

Simon was sexually starved, compulsive, utterly bewitched.

Manga was fragrant, nutmeg oil and cunny, and when she saw that Deng wasn’t going to buy her that night, she turned her attention to Simon, leaning forward so that he could glimpse her tiny, pear-shaped breasts and the heavy rings hanging from her raw nipples, then casually putting her hand on his thigh while she chatted with Deng. About the weather, of course.

When Deng departed, she moaned and kissed Simon, then crawled into his lap. She wore a child’s cut-offs, but even they hung loosely from her very narrow, bony hips.

“For two hundred dollars you can take me home,” she said, kissing his neck and squirming against the bulge in his pants.

Simon nodded, paid, and left with her. Her smell was very strong in his old Camaro, the scent of sperm and urine perceptible under the heavy odor of cunt and nutmeg. He drove carefully to his apartment in Rogers Park, concentrating, drunk, and they didn’t talk until he found a parking spot and staggered down Glenwood, along the embankment of the El, and climbed the two flights to his somewhat dingy two-bedroom.

He poured them some tequila, found a lime, and kissed her deeply. She was very different from Fatima. Manga was trembling, and she wanted to be held.

“Take off your clothes,” Simon whispered. “Stand up and strip… slowly.”

The waif stood unsteadily and undressed. Her inflamed slit was covered with long white hair, wet. She had little hands and feet, like a child. Hard, pimply buttocks, the crack hairy and damp, her anus open, scarlet, leaking sperm. After displaying her weird charms and unshaven armpits, she slid to the floor and undid his pants. The tattoo between her little breasts bothered him, the same intersecting triangles that were on Jules’ door.

“I can smell her on you,” Manga whispered.

“What?”

“Fatima… you… you were fucking her. She let you.”

Manga whimpered and took him deep into her mouth, sucking hard. Simon stood, took her tiny hands, and thrust in and out of her warm wet mouth, fucking it. When she started to gag, he grabbed her ears and stabbed deeper, then took her by her white hair and forced his penis into her throat. The weakling struggled as he cut off her breath. He let her get some air, then shoved it down her throat again. They found a rhythm and she started to swallow his shaft. He pulled out and came on her face as she choked and clung to his legs, crying. He took a spoon and fed her his semen, then spat in her face and slapped her. Manga bawled like a baby, then collapsed on the floor. Simon gave her some tequila and sat her in a chair at the kitchen table. Then he showed her the pictures of Destiny.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Manga said. She hated him.

Simon lifted her to her feet and slammed her against the wall. He kneed her in the stomach. Manga doubled over.

“Where is she?”

His violence was gratuitous. She probably would have told him if he hadn’t been so cruel. He kicked her. He kicked her again and again, and Manga passed out.

xxxxx

To be shanghaied. To wake again upon a strange vessel, enslaved. Now there was a rancid dream, the little boy hoping to find himself in the middle of an adventure beyond his control, and so unaware that his sedentary and fain sedimentary life was already the very odyssey he sought. Simon Seize when young, writing things on the white wall above his bed, in pencil. Kids are fascinated by order and disorder, spatial relations. Then he would masturbate his way into a deep sleep, a somnolence that grew shallower as he began to drink himself to death in adolescence. Alcoholics sleep badly. They accustom themselves to this betweenness. But the thing about Simon’s fantasy – it was non-specific, mountaineering in the neighbor girl’s crack, figure skating on frozen urine… the thing was that Simon Seize imagined a Devil. This Devil would not hurt him but force him to do things. Ugly things. But Simon’s dreams, there, were warm as a virgin’s piss. They possessed the spiritual frivolity of pissing in a swimming pool. Chlorine stings, and Simon’s eyes were forever after reddened by his sin. He loved the Devil because the Devil did not tell him what to do. The Devil exerted the simple and easily comprehensible pressure of coercion. Simon sailed westward in the Devil’s box.

xxxxx

Manga is the Prussian word for whore. By Prussian I mean what is sometimes called Pruzzian, Old Prussian, a Baltic and not a Germanic language. It is a dead tongue, and not many words survive. But ‘whore’ is among them, there with the flying horses and the countless forms of milk.

xxxxx

When the detective woke, dehydrated, Manga was gone. His kidneys hurt and his marbled liver, devoid of nerves, swelled against the surrounding organs like Buxtehude. One of these days, you’re gonna wake up sober, Simon sang to the tune of Summertime, a woundy fog wafting through his addled brain, bleeding. He found a carafe of ruby red grapefruit juice from concentrate and poured it into his parched and eloquent throat. It was early afternoon. Chicago looks and tastes like vinegar. They used to dye the river green for Saint Patty’s day they did. The day hung like a crystal gallows, and the detective stomped through the snuff-colored slush towards the Heartland Café.

The Heartland is a throwback sort of place, a pseudo-yuppie semi-Communist emporium of pierced waitresses in paisley dresses and ‘natural food,’ vegetarian until the owners realized that they could make a buck off fowl, as they do from the wetbacks working in the open kitchen. The clientele includes locals – poor and lost – and the hyper-nostalgic in from wherever they live when mature, and there is still a silk-screen of Chairman Mao in the bar while Che Guevara looms above the smokers’ dining room.

The service is always agonizingly slow and not exactly cultured. Simon smoked Turkish Specials found surprisingly enough in the weird Korean liquor store and head shop under the Morse El, and helped himself to cup after cup of Bustelo. When the Sandinistas were in vogue, the Heartland served Nicaraguan coffee. The air there was thick with naïveté and the stubborn political posturing of the young and disaffected in a world after Cold War. It pleased Simon, and many a budding flower child ended up in bed with him until the emotions began. The detective detested emotions, his own and others’. In the mescaline light of his heavy hangover, Simon Seize felt Fatima as a subtle pull upon his balls. Intellectually, he was into the entire web; he was even attracted to Jules Poulet.

‘But is best find god first, no? First find, then name. Otherwise see through name, then no see her when have no name, _hein_?’

He ordered a Heartland High Life Health Shake and an enormous carrot juice, guzzled water (tap water, _echt_ Lake Michigan, the water cribs so mysterious in childhood, like follies, little castles above the constantly changing colors of an inland sea) and soon felt as squeaky and nippy as a drunken detective can feel after sex with a ghoul.

His zest he dissolved in Cuervo 1800, the Heartland not being averse to alcohol among its sprouts, and spotted the same strange rum that the

Haitian had served him. This then he did also down, as hair of dog, and by the time he wandered out past the alternative newspapers printed on recycled paper and staggered back into Lunt Street (‘What Chicago streets rhyme with vagina?’ Paulina, Malvina, and Lunt,’) Simon Seize was raring for what he called contemplation, the first steps in a case.

That meant a walk. His unsteady hands deep in the pockets of his professionally rumpled trench-coat, the detective shambled southward along Sheridan, past the Loyola campus, and soon found himself deep in thought. The elder Dawsons, whose money had been deposited in his account. Unknown. Rich as fuck. One Amber, whose surname he had failed to learn, ostensibly fifteen and partially virgin until the previous evening. Fatima

Dawson, sister of subject, a spectrally thin masochist and apparent sorceress. Manga (again no surname), pale as an Indian pipe, pink-eyed, also thin. She had volunteered no information. Jules Poulet, Fatima’s keeper, a frightening creature with a mysteriously perpetual erection and a veritable harem of underage girls.

Destiny ‘Laika’ Dawson. Twelve years old in body, but at the same time obviously indescribably ancient, fucking archetypal, an imp of Hell. The subject. And Deng, a Chinaman with a long face, a man who smelled like a homeless shelter but was obviously rich as fuck, like the Dawsons.

Detective Seize had trouble with Orientals. It was not that he denigrated or disliked them, it was that he neither understood nor felt understood by them. He didn’t know them, and being fairly affable after a few stiff drinks, Simon liked to get to know a guy. Simon could be a buffoon if necessary, and was if he was ever threatened, with a slight edge of insanity, sharp enough to escape unscathed. But even with a guy who hated him, he liked to find out what they were about.

Asians were inscrutable to Simon, stereo-typically so. He had known one once, in college, a guy who came to America to study and looked upon his return to Japan as a sort of prison sentence. Simon did not doubt that Asia was lovely from within – but, then, everything was, even the dark brotherhood of desperate drunks or the intricate interstices of the Cosa Nostra. He simply could not connect with Asians, with their aesthetic. He didn’t think it was a racist thing, having been intimate with many an African-American and not a few Indians, both subcontinental and aboriginal.

This Deng held the key, Simon thought. Simon held a piece of fog. He wanted Deng to be the key because he wanted very badly to be in the Bar Do. To scope it out, yeah. Striding swiftly through Edgewater, he was headed there. The memory of Fatima was at his testicles like the sting of an invisible but fatal jellyfish. The arc of drunkenness is especially lucid when followed into a dry and measly void, a shower or a walk. Lucid, yes, and yet so like a religious reptile in a room without walls, speculating about the ceiling. At last he slipped into the seedy bar. It was utterly empty until the bartender appeared.

‘And a barmaid came by in fishnet stockings and a bow tie… all romantics meet the same fate, someday cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café… dark café…’ Joni Mitchell blared from the Wurlitzer.

Korean she was, the bartender. Simon requested a Rusty Nail. ‘Huh?’

Bitter bile coursed through him, choler, and phlegm, too.

He was the Misunderstood Man from the Fifties was Simon. Gimme a hat and a gun and I’ll defend my family from the fucking Yellow Peril. Yarrow paerww-ww, gimme a gun I mm-mm, Drambooey ‘n a Scotch, Scotch yeah, Scotch Irish ahwwwwr, naw naw mix it wit’ awwwwwr, every word a fresh vintage of amber saliva, gimme-a drrrinnn, a picture of that pig-dog from the beer commercial behind the oaken bar. Delirium tremens.

Kim made him his drink and smiled. She was as far from his imaginary Orient as he was from understanding where it was that he was. Simon once knew a brain damaged boy who thought he was in an exotic country whenever he went to the Double Happiness. He would read the zodiacal place-mat and take a trip. The Year of the Dragon. Simon extracted the now dog-eared photographs of Destiny Dawson and showed them to Kim. Doesn’t Korea have to do with the dawn?

“Yeah, I know her,” the bartender said.

The detective pulled out his little leather-bound notebook and PaperMate.

“Who did she talk to?” To whom did she talk?

‘The girl you left with last night.’ (Funny Simon couldn’t remember Kim serving him.) “And Deng,” she said – was she being seductive? “And whoever took her home.”

Are you being seductive, he wanted to ask, suddenly regretting every thought he had ever had about the East. Kim made him another drink. A long count, a Chicago shot. Shit-caw-go, Hog Butcher to the World no longer.

“You’re very seductive,” Simon said.

“Thank you,” Kim answered, pulling her shoulders back. Her breasts were proud but diminutive things, the swollen nipples stiff against her black leotard.

“Do your feet get tinier after centuries of foot-binding?”

“That’s a Chinese custom, asshole,” Kim said, and walked away.

“Sorry,” Simon said to no one in particular, sipping his Drambuie and Clan MacGregor or whatever the crap was that they gave him.

The trouble and wonder of America is that it despises actual culture don’t it. It has its own, of course, of a sort, but it’s… well, tenuous. May it survive, drawling under Microsoft and juvenile fizz. Simon once knew a Siberian who wandered Alaska and came to the conclusion that the _lives_ of the people there are worse than among the downtrodden Chukchi; they don’t know how to _live_ in the North, this Ivan he said, not having seen any saunas there or not real ones anyway. The environment here is always private and artificial.

“Bartender!”

Kim returned. She had already forgiven him, and gave him his poison on the house. Oh, fuck, thought Simon, every modern society doesn’t know where it is. Tough titties. And the trouble is – I’m part of it. I don’t know where I am. _Life_, yeah-yeah. This pretense of freedom, as if being born without any idea of what to do and being taught only to make money and not hurt others (if you could get caught doing, that) was liberty. Whatever gets you through the night.

“Go to the bathroom if you’re going to be sick,” Kim said.

The detective nodded like an obedient schoolboy, staggered to toilet and puked. He saw himself in the mirror.

“Land of the Free…” Well, what can you say about a country where eight out of ten people believe that God is a cloudy father, an overseer, a terrible narrator?

When Simon emerged, Manga was there. He sat down a stool away from her and ordered another drink. Kim made it, but didn’t give it to him until he paid. Stand beside her, and guide her, with the light from the lamp up above.

“What the fuck did you do that to her for?”

Simon looked at the albino. Manga’s face was swollen, the left half like the dark side of the moon.

“She wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know,” he said, as threateningly as he could.

Amazingly, Manga smiled at him. It was because he had fucked Fatima. She wanted anyone who had been anywhere near the priestess. She wasn’t allowed near. Jules said she was bad luck. Or it was that Manga could never remember the day before.

xxxxx

“Who is Deng?”

Good cop, bad cop. Janus-faced and besotten, the detective continued to drink. Manga draped her spectral self upon his strong but weary arm.

“He… he’s nothing. An admirer.”

Only now did Simon notice how mellifluous this Manga was, and the strange worlds so imminent in her bright pink eyes. They contrasted attractively with her bruised face.

“An admirer of what?”

“Us.”

“Who are you?”

“Take me to the toilet,” she whispered, touching his groin. “Take me.”

The detective carried her to the washroom. She weighed nothing. She cried as he undressed her, then straddled the toilet, spreading her pimply little cheeks and moaning. Her childish crack was damp. Flecks of feces clung to the white hairs surrounding her scarlet anus. Manga looked back at him, sticking out her tongue, and fingered the slimy hole. Simon took out his cock and slid it into her musky shit hole. She whimpered like a child, fucking back. From behind, her body was utterly immature. A starving little kid.

Suddenly he wanted to knock her up. He shoved his cock into her stinking cunt and came, then stuck it back in her butt and gripped her hips, pissing as he wilted. Manga howled. Simon squeezed her bloated stomach and hardened again, reaming her pissy rectum and kneading her belly as she kicked and screamed. He fucked her hard, pulling her onto the toilet and slapping her bony ass, trying to tear her, jabbing it in at different angles, reaching under her heaving chest and twisting her nipple rings. Then he flipped her over and sat her down, jerking off. Manga convulsed, his piss gushing from her rectum. Simon forced his dirty dick into her mouth and ejaculated again.

To his amazement, the whore sucked and swallowed, then stroked him, trying to get him hard again. The detective pushed her against the cold porcelain of the tank, then pulled her to her feet. He helped her dress, then kissed her.

“I can still taste her,” Manga said, her voice weak. “Even under my shit… you still taste like her.”

They returned to the bar. It had filled with people, wan young alcoholics and red-nosed old men, creepy hookers and elegant immigrants, runaways, ronyons. Deng was seated in the back, and the seats at his table were vacant. The detective guided the smelly albino to the strange Chinese man. Deng held yarrow stalks. He was divining. Kim came by with another Rusty Nail and a lemonade for Manga. Deng was sipping a Singapore Sling again, his eyes cloudy, incurious. Manga’s soiled T-shirt said TOMORROW NEVER COMES.

“You are looking for Destiny,” Deng said. The detective pricked up his ears. “She go to work for a man,” the stiff Chinese continued stiffly. “An important man. A very important man.”

Deng laid out the yarrow stalks and counted them again and muttered something, closing his eyes. Simon stared at Manga. Her recovery was remarkable. She stank. She took his hand. Euphoria. Detective Seize was shitfaced.

“Why do her parents want to find her, anyhow?”

Whirr. Whirr-whirr, her. And her a whore. Simon turned away and gestured frantically to Kim. The Korean bartender returned with an entire bottle of cheap Scotch, smiling garishly.

“At least you make little Manga come,” Kim said.

“How can you tell?”

“He made me pregnant, too,” Manga said, stroking the detective’s bare arm.

So many matrices, Simon thought. Here we are under-dressed in ugly weather. Strange weather we’re having, aren’t we. I had a dream last night – oh, such a dream! And the whiskey warm, insidious. If we were all available to one another. Simon Seize had a vision of Rilke’s common bed, of the loneliness that accompanied him each night, of there being no solution for it. He clutched Manga’s hand. Stay with me. Save me. Please.

“She went to work for Siskin. You know Siskin?”

It was all so mysterious, and there was nothing to it. Of course I don’t know Siskin. Does anyone know Siskin? Simon thought of Dashiell Hammet’s story, “Dead Yellow Women.” Otherness. He stared at Deng’s dark eyes. Not into, at. Inscrutable. ‘They’re just like us.’ Only when they_are_, by behavior, and then they aren’t _they_ anymore, are they? Ancestry, o atavistic ones. How we see. This is ‘red’. It is not ‘rouge’, not ‘rot’. This is the same sunset my forefathers saw. Is not. Simon saw red, but, then, he had long since left the world. He was drowning in himself and Clan MacGregor. His soul was clammy, clannish, lost. He clung to Manga’s little hand.

“Who’s Siskin?”

The Khmer Rouge, some French philosopher remarked, was an awful alloy of European Marxist excess and local, e.g., Cambodian, political horror. Things like that are very old. Very, very old. They are below speech and simultaneously silver-tongued. Simon drank from the bottle, and Manga crawled into his lap.

“You don’t know Siskin?”

‘And a barmaid came by in fishnet stockings and a bow tie… and she said, drink up now it’s getting on time to close… you need roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you pretty lies… pretty lies, they’re all just pretty lies – when ya’ gonna realize they’re all just pretty lies? Pretty lies…’

‘She put a quarter in the Wurlitzer, and she pushed three buttons and the thing began to whirr, and a barmaid came by in fishnet stockings and a bow tie, and she said…’

“No… who’s Siskin?”

Deng glowed as though before the Unwobbling Pivot. “Siskin… Siskin now, Siskin find most of the girls. He find most of the girls, and then if gentleman see what he like, he… he find her for gentleman.”

“What girls?”

“Girls!”

And then the slim lizard-skin attaché was on the table and Deng was showing Simon – what? Books. Printouts of scans of Japanese books. Russian girls, Ukrainian girls, Baltic girls. There was the other Laika, the ‘real’ one, the one ‘everyone’ ‘lusts after.’ In one picture, we are meant to think that she is seeing an erect male organ. In another, she is sitting like a prostitute, but that one’s dark. In most, she’s a little kid on the cusp of an hysteria internalized. Her body is used by being seen – and, of course, the fact that she is seen means that Laika the Lolita is a very bad girl. Or her parents were bad, or the photographer coerced them with dreams of expensive objects and ‘art’, because this is art, although a couple of the pictures, the ones where the still young gorgon holds her in her lap kissy-kissy are risqué and do skirt the limits of the licit. Lyerrh. Why did she name herself after this, thought Simon.

‘You are in my blood – you’re like holy wine, you taste so bitter, bitter and so sweet, oh, I, could drink, a case of you, my darling, and I would still be on my feet, still I’d be on my feet.’

The Joni Mitchell purled from the jukebox and Simon Seize basked in the commas. O comma, comma. O cunt. He experienced an enigmatic endlessness. A hiatus in the hairy sickness called living. Why are you showing me these.

“Siskin, he supplies the girls.”

‘I met a woman… she had a mouth like yours, she knew your life, she knew your devils and your dreams, and she said: go to him, stay with him if you can, but be prepared to bleed…’

“Where is Siskin?”

“In St. Petersburg. Sometimes the one in Florida, sometimes Russia.”

“What does she do for him?”

“Anything he wants.”

Why did her parents want to find her, anyhow? That the detective could not fathom. They had disowned Fatima. At the very breath of her name across his prick, Simon was Nemo, living below the surface of things. They had disowned the strange chalice in which his cock swam crowing. Why so?

“Mister?”

Manga took a swig and shifted in his lap. Like Fatima, the waif was powered by her pussy alone.

“Mister?”

He kissed her. She tasted like his shit. And yet even he could sense the sour elixir of Jules’ wife down there, the memory of the memory of.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go to your house.”

Manga’s eyes were miserably glassy. She wanted to be taken care of and gravitated toward the man who had hurt her so. Nothing made sense.

“Do you want these?” Deng proffered the packet of photographs, the dumb-born books.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“You good man,” Deng said, staring at the writing on Simon’s shirt. THE FUTURE BEGINS TODAY. Deng appreciated such ambition. Simon took to the books.

xxxxx

A sexual backwater for those of us not knowing love. A ribcage out of Porphyry’s cave, her swell like a summer sea (‘rends-moi la mer de Posillipe’) and in the body eyed a ruined innocence of stained glass, wet light through the jagged panes of a rose window, smashed.

“White Nymph.” bc_wn, ten years old; photos by Mitsu Osaka.

‘Carol,’ clutching carnations, teary-eyed, flashing a forced smile until the last few photographs, more of a grimace, then dazed, surrounded by dolls. Drinking apple juice, hue of urine, hiding her hairless pubis with her hand, her other hand flat on the covers next to her, it means ‘come play with me.’ Eating cookies. The nice man gave me cookies.

“Funny Lady.” bc_pau, fifteen years old; photos by Kou Osaka.

‘Pauline,’ school uniform, legs spread, holding a rose. Then a parody of a uniform, a negligée, sheer underwear. She couldn’t stop crying. In an empty cabinet, naked, on display. Waving a fan of pink feathers. Lying in bed, blossoms covering her cunnus. Hatred. Misery.

The Bananafish Scans – adl – again a literary allusion, to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” J. D. Salinger’s ambiguous tale. And so again something of a misnomer, like “Lolita.”

‘Anne’ – adl0700. Thirteen? Fourteen? Pointing to her slit, her other hand loosely upon her belly. ‘Impregnate me.’

‘Angela,’ Pauline’s friend, fourteen. ‘Eveline,’ fifteen, soft and white buthardly innocent. Pink satin, lovely hands.

Formulae: school skirt, flowers. ‘Molly,’ a sprig of artificial blossoms. Skirt lifted, the supposedly and often really virgin entrance blossomy and spatic and hidden by pantyhose, panties, hands. Often the same locations: a mansion (the nobility is gone, Tovarich,) or a drear apartment in a series of drear apartment blocks, the standardized furniture. Foreign dolls, sweets – gifts. Geisha costumes, fishnet things, Japanese parasols. Kissing the mirror. Lying on satin, the slit oh not quite visible – by that time they are usually not crying but the whites of their eyes are pink. On the carpet, the lens looming above. On their hands and knees. Something between their thighs – a lit lamp, a stuffed animal.

xxxxx

Simon took Manga, too; he couldn’t not. His very own personal bones, an estrous wraith writhing in his rickety bed. The detective sobered up inside her, sodomizing the skeletal albino until the fifteen-year-old was temporarily crippled, capable only of crawling about and crying, clutching her bony butt, her shitter gaping to the diameter of his forearm, shuddering, fingering her slimehole to distract herself from her horrible cramps. She was devoted to him, slithering between him and the toilet, mouth open, her hands cupped below her chin to catch what she couldn’t swallow, sucking him awake, stuffing his feces into her infected cunt. Simon washed her with champagne, shooting into her open rectum, helping her force the foaming wine into her womb, buttfucking her while she lapped up the excrement and bubbly, kneading her taut belly when she puked, his fingers pressing into her ovaries until she passed out.

At night he bathed the delirious girl and transported her to the Bar Do. She cowered in the washroom, naked, and despite her condition could usually earn enough money to buy the cocaine she needed while Simon talked to Deng about the weather. But with sobriety came the realization that the detective’s dick was addicted to Fatima. Simon could not stop thinking about the priestess. He molested the young albino because Manga reminded him of the anorexic specter with her educated feet. Three weeks after meeting the strange denizens of Jules Poulet’s apartment and the seedy bar, Simon went back to the slum.

xxxxx

Fatima was alone with the fourteen-year-old who had been a mere spectator during his previous visit, the one who had sat by the door in a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and black denim shorts.

Her name was Jessica, and she was naked now. There were blisters on her lips and dark bruises on her developing breasts, and her vulva had been mutilated, the outer labia cut away. The girl’s gray-green eyes, which had been innocent, were as insane as her nymphadidic body. She crawled toward the detective, foaming at the mouth, and fumbled with his pants. When he pushed her away, Jessica whimpered and groveled, then started to masturbate, showing him her mangled gash and lubricated anus. Her vestibule was a violet hollow, with viscous, opalescent pus and bright blood seeping from the tiny puncture wounds. Her urethra was swollen, magenta, and her adolescent fuck tube hung open, crimson.

Olive-skinned and obviously immature, the enslaved creature held her little butt like an offering. The opening was as big as Jessica’s vagina, vermilion, and the detective could see into the pink, dilated passage as she rocked her hips seductively, begging him to buttfuck her, moaning.

“They feel like they’ll die if they don’t get fucked,” Fatima whispered. “Like you feel when you’re without me. Take off your clothes.”

Fatima wore nothing except her studded collar, and was sore where the bracelets and anklets had bitten into her tender skin. While Simon stripped, she took an aluminum baseball bat and slowly shoved it into the fourteen-year-old’s shithole. Jessica jerked and flapped her legs until the thing was a foot deep, then gripped her ankles and groaned as Fatima worked it in and out of her rectum. After a few minutes she had an orgasm, crying and rubbing her bruised little breasts. The priestess extracted the bat from her butt and licked Jessica’s feces from the end, smiling at Simon invitingly.

The detective embraced Fatima and moaned as she stroked his stiff shaft. Jessica was in agony, vomiting. Fatima pulled Simon to the floor and suddenly he was inside her, her freaky toes in his mouth, her bony finger deep in his anus, his prick spurting in her womb.

“I’m going to have your child,” she whispered as he rolled off of her.

“You made me pregnant last time. It’s a girl, poor thing.”

“You can’t possibly have a baby in your condition,” Simon said.

“Oh yes I can. I’ve had two. A boy and a girl.”

“Where are they?”

Fatima led her to the bedroom and turned on a video monitor. A three-year-old girl, barely alive, flickered on the screen, strapped to a bed and drenched with semen, screaming as a man who looked like a pygmy penetrated her bottom. Fatima sucked Simon while he watched the terrible scene, and soon he came again, flooding her mouth.

“You love me,” Fatima whispered after swallowing.

“Yes,” Simon said.

“Say it.”

“I love you.”

He grew hard again in her hand as the horror unfolded on the screen. Fatima held her three-year-old daughter and Destiny slit its throat. Simon felt nauseous, Fatima stroking him as the video showed her sister devouring the baby raw, her aquamarine eyes orgasmic, her prepubescent slit wet, waiting.

“Why do your parents want to find her?”

“Our father wants to fuck her.”

xxxxx

The lineaments of the case grew clear, and slowly Simon understood his position and the assignment he had been given by Dawson père. He gleaned information from Fatima; from furtive conversations with Deng and his droogs in the dim bar, from Manga, who remained his concubine; and even from Jules Poulet, the heinous Haitian, who invited him to attend the initiation of a young girl who was still only a spectator, as Jessica had been before he knew the ‘family’, as these slum dwellers referred to themselves.

The albino belonged to the detective now, lock, stock, supple sinew and sinuous soul, and so Poulet permitted her to attend the ritual corruption of Lourdes Cooper, a languid beauty that Fatima had found on Belmont, begging. Lourdes was thirteen, and still intact. She had fled her stepfather before he could stick his dick in her delicate body. A week of panhandling, fending off men who wanted to molest her, had traumatized Lourdes, and Fatima’s offer of soup and a place to stay was irresistible.

Soup was beef bouillon and four hits of acid, followed by Fatima’s sorcerous caresses. Brainwashed, the sweet blonde had spent a week watching Jules have sex with Jessica, Amber, and the other doomed strays who frequented the apartment. Fatima fondled the virgin and fed her more drugs, and by the time Manga and Simon arrived for the ceremony, Lourdes was a wanton zombie, her innocent face swiftly acquiring the lewdness of the others’. Simon had wanted to see how they did it, but the Haitian and the priestess only laughed when he asked such questions.

Lourdes was their prettiest victim so far. Her white gold hair in long braids, her bright green eyes suffused with an immature eroticism that Fatima carefully manipulated, the thirteen-year-old’s body was hard, muscular, with soft pink skin and breasts like the eggs of a pearl hen. She barely noticed the visitors, fixated on the Haitian’s penis as Fatima masturbated her.

Lourdes let Fatima put her on all fours and trembled as the priestess oiled her. Her pudendum was very nearly hairless, the hue of a weak hibiscus tea, or rose hips, and she stayed docile as the sorceress lubricated the tiny opening between her taut buttocks. Lourdes whimpered when Fatima began to spank her, lightly slapping the virgin’s vagina.

Jules knelt in front of the adolescent, his long hard penis brushing her innocent lips. Her green eyes glowed with fear for a moment. Fatima slid her slender middle finger into Lourdes’ anus. The thirteen-year-old moaned, opening her mouth, and Jules’ shaft slid inside, into her throat. Lourdes gagged, but didn’t struggle. In a few minutes she was sucking him like hypnotized whore, letting him stick it deep in her throat. She didn’t stop when Fatima deflowered her with her finger and sucked the hymeneal blood from her snatch.

Amber, who had lost a lot of weight, staggered in with a large black dog on a leash. Lourdes undulated, her movements obscenely anal, her tight butt wiggling with uncanny desperation. Whatever Fatima had done to her, the adolescent obviously needed to be fucked in the ass. When Jules stopped fucking her throat, Lourdes spread her cheeks and wailed.

Fatima whipped her. Lourdes howled, but didn’t try to get away. She writhed in agony as the priestess cracked the bullwhip against her back and quivering buttocks. Blubbering, the blonde shit herself. Fatima ordered her to lie on her back. Lourdes sobbed, covering her tiny titties until her hands were covered with welts. She passed out, squirting pee, when the priestess lashed her breasts. Jules’ meanwhile, let Jessica and Amber suck him. Manga was transfixed by Fatima, but the sorceress wouldn’t let her near her; she was still bad luck. Allowed in only because she was Simon’s possession, the albino could simply watch.

Simon wanted Fatima – and he could only have her when she wanted him. It was torture. He fucked the others and waited for the blonde to become available, but he was bewitched by the sister of his quarry. By the time the ritual ended two days and countless lumps of cocaine later, in an orgy of dogs’ blood and incense, Lourdes’ pink skin black and blue, her mouth dripping with canine semen, Simon wanted Destiny, too. The girl he had to find had become the object of his forked desire; if he couldn’t have Fatima, he wanted Destiny ‘Laika’ Dawson. He wanted her all to himself.

xxxxx

Dipsomania gnawed at Detective Seize, Simon again sinking into vats of fear and starkest liquor. Watching Lourdes become one of _them_ had changed him, diminishing his obsession with the albino’s anus. Manga healed, and made more money in the toilet at night.

By day, the adolescent revealed herself to be a keen philosopher. She liked being pregnant by him, and cried when she miscarried. Manga was his child as much as she was his lover, giggling and drooling when he masturbated her and searched her skinny body for usable veins. High, she needed to fuck, and the detective knocked her up again and again, once letting her belly swell for several months before kicking her and slamming her against the wall until it came out of her little womb. After that, the kid was sterile.

He starved her, and within a year he could wrap his fingers around her candlestick thighs. He took her out only after dark, wrapped in a black silk sheet, to the Bar Do. He propped her against the porcelain god and took her home when Kim did last call, her hideously emaciated body twitching and dripping with come.

She sucked him while he slept, her pink eyes glowing like a rodent’s. In the late morning, he would dress her in a sailor suit and breakfast while the broken girl talked about Hermetica and read poetry. Her eyes were failing.

xxxxx

Meanwhile, the detective continued to lust after Fatima and look for her little sister. The elder Dawsons deposited a thousand dollars in his account each month, confident that the case would draw to a close. Destiny would be found, returned, fucked. Simon Seize had no intention of returning her. He would find her and cure the cruel obsession with which Destiny’s sister had cursed him.

xxxxx

Deng turned out to do nothing at all. Nothing criminal, that is. He hadn’t even fucked Manga in the months before Simon came and she became Simon’s. He would just drive her to a forest preserve and have her prance around in fancy dresses. He was an admirer. During the summer, Fatima saw Simon less and less, and in the fall she refused to answer the door. He was to bring back Destiny or disappear. That meant finding Siskin, the man responsible for the ruin of many a damsel displayed in the inexhaustible series of pictures with which Deng supplied him. Simon was waiting for lightning to strike.

xxxxx

Manga died in the tavern’s toilet, fucking. Killing a girl was a violation of the Bar Do’s code of conduct. Simon Seize was banned from the seedy saloon, forever. II EN EUROPE ORIENTALE. Simon Seize arrived in Russia precisely on the autumn equinox, the rickety Ilyushin with which he had flown trembling disturbingly as it taxied to the gate. He had nothing. A laptop loaded with j-pegs of Laika and other underage girls, a battered suitcase containing three thrift store suits and some other articles of clothing, a carry-on that held the necessary instruments of his inadequately practiced hygiene, some paperbacks, cash, travelers’ checks, and Manga’s diary. This last item he had found after her death. The recent sections were almost illegible, but the earlier entries were lucid, written in careful minuscules, exhaustive.

The albino’s journal troubled him. Simon had assumed that the dog sacrifices and other hocus-pocus at the Haitian’s house were merely a seductive veneer with which to hide the hard reality of repetitive rape, but it appeared that the opposite was true, if Manga’s narrative was to be believed; the sick sex in which Jules Poulet and Fatima Dawson indulged was incidental, a front for their actual business, which was devouring young souls in quantity.

Manga’s had been indigestible, and Destiny’s had escaped. Wandering Peter the Great’s decaying capital, the detective wept for the dead albino. Manga had wanted to be eaten, but instead was left on the periphery after helping the evil couple lure a few lost kids to their spiritual ends. She was clairvoyant, and could see what they were doing. She could glimpse the bloated witch hidden in Fatima’s spectrally thin form. Manga needed Jules. She felt him in her genitals even when away. She wanted him in her womb.

But the albino had appeared when Fatima’s sister Destiny had been called to them. With the eleven-year-old, the couple had failed. The Haitian blamed that failure on the hapless Manga.

Destiny Dawson had been sexually enslaved, but not possessed. The creepy child had become as orally, vaginally, and anally insatiable as the rest of Jules’ minions, but the bokor could not satisfy her and her soul remained intact. Violently promiscuous, the prepubescent secreted hallucinogenic poisons in her little pussy, secretions that even Jules could not understand. She could paralyze him, and had killed two customers at the Bard Do before Kim and Deng had realized who was responsible. The little redhead was dangerous, and she was banished.

Destiny the person was nasty. She stole, she tortured animals, she set fires. They couldn’t kill her for ritual reasons – once the criminal couple had bewitched a girl’s orifices, the creature could only be destroyed if she so desired. At least that was what Jules said. Most of the maidens they defiled wanted to die. Anything was better than a deranged body that felt as if it was on fire if it wasn’t ceaselessly violated.

Not so Destiny. She wanted to live, to be penetrated again and again by whomever would have her. And, even more surprisingly, the child had a remarkable aptitude for ritual sex. Her sister taught her some things, but Destiny soon surpassed Fatima in bed. Deng arranged for a meeting between Destiny and Siskin. The sinister trader slept with her only once, then used her only as a weapon. He loved her. Because he feared her. Meanwhile, Manga was being eaten from the inside by her insane glands. Like the others, she tried to soothe her need by starving herself, but unlike the others she wasn’t allowed near Jules’ penis.

That was the gist of the diary, and it stoked Simon’s fantasy. He wanted more than ever to find Destiny Dawson, to fuck her, to die fucking her. He dreamt about her, and composed wild and eloquent pleas of love in his sorry and sodden head. He convinced himself that he was meant for her; after all, hadn’t the Haitian hinted as much?

‘I make you juju, and you look Destiny, you look Destiny in face,’ he had said. ‘She had same problems you has, detective. Bad love. You find Erzulie together, I know it.’

Jules Poulet had given him a pouch containing some pungent powder. Simon carried it in his wallet.

The trouble was that Simon Seize didn’t know where to start his search. He spoke no Russian and knew no one in St. Petersburg. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t return to the States with his tail between his legs; Simon had given up in many a case. It was that he couldn’t – Simon’s tail, the one place his penis wanted to be, was Fatima Dawson’s bony butt, and the detective knew that the woman would have nothing to do with him if he went back empty-handed.

His addiction to the skeletal priestess had crossed the border into madness. He believed that the two young Dawsons held the secrets to the sexual world in their warped minds and wet holes. He knew he would die if he didn’t find Destiny and either possess her or bring her back to her sister.

So, Simon drank. He brooded over his diabolical lust, which made him drink more heavily than usual, a hundred grams of Moskovsaya before rising, two hundred more with breakfast, a couple hundred over lunch and another bottle before dinner. By dusk, the detective was always perfectamente borracho, and this habit made not the slightest dent in his resources. It is easier to be perpetually plastered in St. Petersburg than it is to stay fed, and Simon Seize, love-sick, soon ceased to eat.

And yet his penis plagued him. It stayed stiff even as he drowned himself in the ever available vodka. He lasted two weeks before he ventured into the underworld in search of female flesh. He was afraid of the seemingly ubiquitous criminals, was Simon, but he needed pussy. Mother Russia was only too glad to oblige.

xxxxx

Before his cataclysmic climax with Fatima and the many months of regularly ravishing Manga’s rectum, Simon Seize had preferred women. Skilled whores were his favorites lays, skanky, sleazy, mysterious in their self-destructiveness and above all carnally knowledgeable. Now it was that he wanted a talented adolescent. The hotel he was living in offered a selection of seasoned prostitutes, some of them somewhat young, but Simon’s prick pointed to the waiting rooms in the grim train stations. He wanted a dirty runaway, he did. His luck was with him – within two days he had found Natasha Ivanovna Gavrilova in the Finland Station. Raven-haired, with frightened gray eyes and chapped lips, the anemic child saw the drunken foreigner looking for chicken and approached him. The scrawny eleven-year-old stank like the devil. He took her to his hotel. Not only was she beyond his wildest hopes for such a sexual transaction – desperate and pathetically seductive – Natasha turned out to speak English.

She was from Saratov. Her stepfather had started raping her when she was nine, brutally and often. Natasha had run away at age ten and lived off of a series of men – some mean, some nice, most in between – and had been in the street for two weeks, evading the police and the many piratical pimps. He stripped her. She wanted to wash, but Simon wanted to fuck her first. Naked, Natasha looked unbelievably vulnerable. She was weak and flat-chested, with soft pink nipples. She was also indescribably filthy. Her crack was caked with shit and her pallid skin had the hue of a peeled potato. Natasha’s little slit was bald, the skin of her tiny labia dry and broken, the slime hole opening like a wet wound when he spread her legs. The fluid oozing from the sore fuck tube had a sour smell.

The child was easily aroused. For two years, her only contact with others had been sexual. Simon played with her cunny, rubbing her swollen clit, and Natasha lay back and drew up her dirty legs. Her small feet were deformed, the toes almost entwined. Natasha’s butt was cute, the cheeks as firm as two raw tubers. She held them apart, showing him her bottom, her thumbs spreading her diminutive snatch. Her anus was encrusted with dried feces. Beneath this cracked crust of excrement, the opening was candy apple red, moist, a dark blue bruise fading across her perineum. She gasped when he started to lick her.

“Nyet… no… I dirty…”

Her body was bitter and salty. Simon lapped the scum from between her tiny toes, fingered her slime hole and spat into her anus as it dilated, watching her taut tummy undulate and sipping the sour effluvia from the child’s fuck tube. Natasha started shaking when he stuffed her soiled panties into her drooling mouth. Her body had been hurt a lot, and went wild with fear as he pinned her skinny arms under her back and sat on her chest, a stream of pale yellow urine squirting between her quivering thighs. She relaxed a little when he diddled her, opening her legs wide, but closed them convulsively as soon as he slapped her slit with his fingers. Simon forced her legs back, pinning them under him, and stroked her crotch, fingering her little anus. Natasha whimpered into her gag whenever he hit her, shuddering, but they soon found a rhythm, her narrow hips looking for his hand when he rubbed her slot, then shivering and trying to jerk away when he slapped it.

He stopped hitting her and slid two fingers into the child’s vagina, rubbing her clitty with his thumb. Natasha moaned into her gag. Simon released her and crouched by her side, caressing her tit-less chest and masturbating her. Her gray eyes were open, pleading, the crotch of the filthy panty hanging from her mouth. He played with her nipples, then slapped her between the legs again. She arched her back and spread her trembling thighs, her body confused, desperate for orgasm.

She let him spank her, writhing but trying to keep her legs apart, clutching the sheets and crying. Simon pulled the soiled panty from her mouth and climbed on top of her. Natasha pulled his penis into her hole. It was slippery and small, but not tight. He fucked her slowly, letting her suck his nipples, then grasped her ankles and let her put his penis in her bottom.

Natasha bit her lip as Simon slammed in and out of her spastic anus. This was what most men did to her. She suffered, then softened, slipping away into a watery waste, letting him use her, lost in a glandular limbo, her rectum a reeducation camp, her entire being a taco de sesos tossed into warm menudo, her little brains rushing into her bowels and clasping his cock, sucking it into her empty head, swampy, then shimmering with marsh-fire, squirming like a perverted baby to get him deeper, beyond the head.

He let go of her ankles and Natasha grabbed his hips, pulling him into her poop hole, her eyes wild with wanton misery, wanting to come before she took it into her mouth, bucking, then curling her toes and drawing him deep inside, all the way into her wet rectum, feeling it fill her with hot meat, the fat prick throbbing and hardening, the bulb shoved up into turn in her bowels. She spread her cheeks apart to take it yet deeper, that last quarter inch, gurgling as the shaft filled her completely and the head pushed against the intestinal wall.

Simon squeezed her thighs and fucked the tight curve with short, hard thrusts, taking her breath away, watching the whites of her eyes as she found orgasm, coming like Krakatau, the tsunami afterwards, gasping for breath and squealing. He let her go, withdrawing, the stretched hole staying open, o, a gory gate, so wide, everything going backwards inside her, as if her shit would turn to food again as time reversed.

Cock after cock went into her mouth, back to the first rod rampant in Ur. He held her head, and she couldn’t swallow it that way, she had to lick and suck the head, washing the gamy filth from his penis with her tongue, tasting the bittersweet scum, her waste, her savage mouth slurping at the daddy-man, stroking him as the familiar pain dragged her lower body from heaven into hell, this sweet thing suckling her, feeding her the dark slime from the depths of her bowels.

Drooling, Natasha rubbed it with both hands, eager for the semen that loved her instead of others’ eggs, the sperm longing for her little mouth. She lapped at the bulb and looked up at him, needing to be wanted, wet, seeing how pretty her face was in his eyes, sexy, pitiful, infantile. She felt the surge of semen in his shaft before it gushed into her slobber.

Simon pulled away and spurted across the child’s face. She seemed to preen before his throbbing prick, the sense of her body vaulting into her upturned face, yearning, relishing his lust, licking the semen from her lips and sticking out her tongue, her gray eyes dusky, the soft skin a sudden mask of slavery, trying to be beautiful for him, to make him love her.

The detective climbed off of her and sank back into the lumpy bed. Natasha slithered against his sweaty body, forgetting her agony, desperate to arouse him so that the man wouldn’t throw her out into the street, it was worse there, she was afraid, afraid of men who didn’t love her, policemen – the _miltsiya_ – and pimps, the kind who had killed her friend with a bottle when she ran away.

Natasha sucked his wilting cock, trying to be sexy, to seduce him into doing her again. Simon drew up his legs, and the whimpering child licked his balls and tongued his asshole. She liked the taste, the nasty smell. She stared into his eyes so that he could see what she was, caressing his limp cock. Natasha wet her middle finger and tentatively touched the tip to his bunghole. Her stepfather hadn’t let her use her finger there, and another man had beat her up once when she did, but a few others had liked it.

Simon moaned, and Natasha smiled, slipping the finger inside and gently sucking the tip of his cock. It stiffened. Worming the finger deeper, she licked up and down his stiffening shaft, then sucked it softly, now and then withdrawing the finger to showily suck it. When Simon started to groan, she climbed on top of him and slid his cock into her shit hole, squatting down.

He moved her feet to the bed, letting her use her legs, and grasped her hips, helping her. Her eyes were hungry, her mouth slack. Fondling her flat chest, the child took him deep and shook her pelvis. He guided her right hand to her gash, the left to her lips. Stroking her slit and fucking her mouth with her fingers, shaking, Natasha twisted her butt and bucked, squeezing the base of his cock with her sphincter. He started to thrust up into her, then held her hands and met her desperate thrusts.

“Come, baby,” he cried. “Come!”

“Da… y-yeh… unngh… yeh…”

Grunting, the girl squat-fucked him, shuddering, grinding against him, and shrieked as he ejaculated, her own come tearing through her frantically bucking body as she felt his semen splatter her intestine. She fell forward, still gyrating, rasping.

Simon embraced her and wilted in her hot rectum, stroking her bony back. It was night.

xxxxx

There was no one to ask anymore, only the wind. He dreamt about the elder Dawsons, and woke when the telephone rang with an insistent buzz. Natasha’s face in sleep was strangely innocent, as if she had never done anything of her own free will.

“Hello?” — Seize?

“Yeah… hold on.”

He sat up and searched for his cigarettes. ‘Arktika,’ they were called, and tasted more like pipe tobacco than anything. It was dark. — Seize… this is Dawson. She’s in Estonia. In Tallinn.

“Hang on a second.” He lit a cigarette. Natasha twitched. “How do you know?” — She sent a postcard… to Fatima.

“Wire money, then.” — Will do. She wrote from the Viru Hotel.

“Why did she write? And I thought you weren’t speaking to your daughter…”

Click. Simon smoked and looked at his little lover. Then he left her, still asleep. He put a hundred dollars on the bedside table, dressed, swiftly, and then he was gone.

xxxxx

The detective spotted Natasha an hour before the train to Tallinn was due to depart. She was wandering through the station, dazed, her delicate face tear-stained, lost. He could avoid her or approach. He went up to her. The little whore threw herself at Simon. He missed the train. Not because he wanted to have sex with her, but because of something she said. Natasha knew the man who had killed her friend, smashing the bottle he had stuffed into her womb. Natasha feared this man, but… if Simon had money, Natasha could go with him to Tallinn as if in a suitcase. The child prostitute would do anything to stay with Simon, with anyone who would have her at that time. Her mind was slipping. The detective wanted a translator… and he was fond of his new child. He didn’t know her at all.

xxxxx

They reached Tallinn by car, then, in the company of a silent young man named Mikhail. It took a heap of the Dawsons’ money, but Natasha and Simon were spirited into Estonia and installed themselves in a luxurious apartment high on the hill of the old Hanseatic city. Cleaned up and happy, Natasha was unrecognizable. He braided her raven hair and put lotion on her little genitals. She wanted to be his daughter. She learned to keep her legs spread wide while he spanked her slit, his cock deep in her throat, her white thighs quaking when he slapped her hard, closing slightly as she fought her reflexes and parted them again, trusting him, rasping when he let her get some air, her cunt soon accustomed to his rhythmic slaps and the insane, numbing pain, then to the feel of his fingers stretching the tiny hole, almost tearing her as he ejaculated in her throat and forced his hand inside her.

xxxxx

Now that he was so close, Simon was afraid of finding Destiny. Hurting Natasha confirmed his conviction that he needed the dangerous child. He got off in Natasha, but it left him unfulfilled. The Viru Hotel was a massive modern edifice full of Finns who came to Tallinn to get drunk. The lobby bar was crawling with them – ‘vodka tourists,’ the Estonians called them; alcohol is expensive in Finland, and the men and women standing around the well-lit counter sucking down booze were already in la-la land. The detective showed the bartender a picture of Destiny, a chaste one. “No,” the man said, but Simon saw the glint of recognition in his eyes. Nothing to do but hang out, then, and Simon proceeded to get plastered. Why had she sent a card?

He had given up when he saw a hooker. A fantastic creature, not quite mature, her long blond hair in a tight braid, her rotten eyes bright green, an algae bloom. This was not a streetwalker but an expensive call girl, drowning in her own beauty, dressed in a fox fur jacket, a short, tight, bright green dress and white stockings, two-inch heels and what looked like actual emeralds, walking as if she had just been fucked up the ass.

She headed for the doors and Simon ran after her, catching the stunning blonde just before she stepped into a taxi. Barely fifteen, Tanya had been sensual as a child, though she didn’t understand the implications until her uncle started touching her, when Tanya was twelve. She had flirted with him shamelessly, eager for compliments, and though his kisses and caresses scared her at first, Volodya made her feel wanted, as her mostly absent father never had.

He seduced her gradually, gave her pretty clothes, told her constantly how incredibly lovely she was, getting her drunk and teaching her how to kiss, having her try on the sexy little dresses he bought for her and stroking her thighs through the countless silk stockings she got when she was good. After two months of this, she relaxed, a little guilty in the mornings but in need of the intimacy, confident of her allure and his appreciation of it, deriving pleasure from the occasional wetness between her long legs, from his whispers about the fragrance down there.

When Tanya was twelve and a half, her mother started drinking a lot and she asked Volodya if she could move in with him. He not only said yes, he got a larger apartment and showered her with gifts. Unlike most people she new, he was wealthy, and slowly Tanya began to think of him as more than a relative who stuck his tongue in her mouth at night.

So what if he was her mother’s brother and thrice her age? He took care of her, and she was different from everyone anyhow. He told her that she was far prettier than any other girl in Narva, or even Ivanogorod, that her body was more beautiful, that she was already a woman.

Volodya started asking her to try on the lingerie he bought for her, and his hand began to stroke her bare thigh, and then one night he kissed her when she was wearing only a bra and panties, fondling her feet, telling her how pretty they were, how soft, touching her tiny breasts through the lacy bra, making her nipples hard.

He didn’t go further until after she began to menstruate, soon before her thirteenth birthday. After her period, kissing her and caressing her taut belly, Volodya whispered to her that he wanted to see her naked. Trembling, Tanya unveiled her pert breasts and wet little pussy, her prominent pubis thinly downed with golden hair. She was already his. It was like uncovering a sculpture before the artist who had conceived it. She didn’t even masturbate; her libido belonged to him, and even when she thought about having babies, he was the father. She blushed as he spread her legs, then swooned as Volodya praised the pink, virginal cleft, softly brushing her mons. He told her that it was much too beautiful to ever be defiled, and then he licked her, her inner thighs. Tanya shivered, inhaling the odor of her intense arousal, and came as soon as his tongue flicked against her clit.

He licked her slit every night. They were like lovers – except that he didn’t fuck her. She wanted him to. She started to masturbate, imagining him entering her. One evening, Tanya put her hand on her uncle’s crotch, feeling his soft penis through his trousers. Volodya was impotent. It dawned on her slowly, but Tanya’s intuition said so. At thirteen and a half, she finally asked him. He would never fuck her. He couldn’t get it up. Her cunt and her womb, were addicted to a man who could not deflower her.

She tried to accept it, but Tanya was horny. She wanted someone inside her. When she played with herself, she started to envision other men, men with huge, hard cocks. They were as gentle as Volodya, but made her theirs. She wanted to belong to someone, and her sense of being his faded away, until all she cared about was money.

Volodya saw the change in her and began to manipulate his niece. They did not talk about his flaccid cock, but he smoldered with self-hatred whenever she licked the limp little prick. Soon he smoldered constantly. A month before her fourteenth birthday, he drank a bottle of Russian moonshine, Samogon, the rich, almost hallucinogenic liquor redolent of dark bread, tied her to the bed, and pierced her hymen with a poker.

Tanya ran away the next day, soon after he untied her, with nothing but the clothes on her exquisite back. The traumatized vagabond, having lost her hymen to a man she now hated and blamed for every cloud that had ever crossed her stormy brain, expected to be sacrificed. She saw the city not as haven but as the morbid metropolis where her inner virginity would be taken.

Tallinn was swiftly becoming an almost Scandinavian city. The Old Town, already spruced up for the Olympics, when the Finns built the Viru Hotel, had, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, taken on the look of a prosperous tourist trap – but only on the surface. Beneath was the weird atmosphere of a medieval port and a barbarous but modern underworld. This was not Narva, a backwater of Russian migrants, it was the capital of a free Estonia, a country with double-digit growth rates and an astonishing confidence, yuppies and a young government, hope and austerity.

But beyond the Old Town was what Tanya was used to, the gray expanse where homo sovieticus staggered still, preyed upon by criminals whose cruelty would infiltrate the West in only a few short years. Western larceny was baby stuff to these stout men. The old Russian saying, that thieves abhor wetness, was an anachronism. The men that Tanya found delighted in blood. She spoke no Estonian, but didn’t need to. She had no idea that her sharp little mind and beautiful body could seek its level. Instead, Tanya ended up at the bus station with a bunch of glue-sniffing waifs and their pusillanimous but cocky paramours.

Despite six months of perpetual rape, a period that transformed our semi-heroine into a whore, Tanya remained regal. It was not only her hauteur and physical loveliness, she was destined for something. Then she met Destiny. The twelve-year-old American girl had acquired Russian, interested as she was in the night life. Destiny ‘Laika’ Dawson looked for young females likely to be docile when they met their doom. It was her job. Siskin appreciated her predatory eye, and she had free rein. She did not care about what happened to them. She cared only about herself.

The girls who sniffed glue were destroyed. The ones with a trace of innocence became models and were slowly pulled into the murky waters of Siskin’s world, useful while youthful he always said, photographed, sold abroad, whored.

Destiny was feared. The other glue-sniffers knew who she was, but Tanya was new to this. They told her about Siskin, about how the girls who closed their fingers around the kroons in his carefully manicured hands never returned, sent westward without their passports to work as prisoners in terrible brothels. They whispered about what Destiny really was, and Tanya gaped in awe at the supposed monster.

To Tanya, Destiny was the woman she would have been if it hadn’t been for her uncle. The pubescent demon stank of money and perversity, a fabulous perfume emanating from the tense little body draped with jewels and only partly hidden be her haute couture. Her eyes were at once corrupt and weirdly joyful, ravenous and strangely sad. Now and then some uniformed hulk would sweep the children from the waiting room, but no one would ever touch Destiny. She did as she pleased. Her voice was high-pitched, yet hypnotic. Her aquamarine eyes landed on Tanya’s shoulders like miniature mechanical vultures clad in vivacious glass, and her words tinkled like sweet ice.

“Come with me,” Destiny said, “I want you to meet someone.”

Tanya handed her half-empty jar of glue to one of her girlfriends and followed the divine messenger into a waiting taxi and away. It was easy as slipping down the stairs.

“You don’t speak English, do you?”

“Yes… leetle,” Tanya said, studying her captor.

“I’m Laika.”

The little redhead mispronounced it with a ‘lake’ and not the ‘lie’ that her name ought properly to contain. Lie and like, and lye. Ka as in cuss, or one form of an Egyptian soul, a shadow, the sign of the upraised hands.

“I’m Tanya… where are you taking me?”

The taxi took them to the harbor, to the night ferry. Tanya didn’t need her passport. Laika – Destiny – had one for her. The horn, and then they were sailing for Helsinki. Tanya was frightened, but she felt a rush. It had been so long since she had seen things. She had been as though lost inside herself, dreaming of riches like a little girl and meanwhile sinking, her natural sensuality sheathed in sexual ice. What broke the ice – and what kept her submerged, her nights with the less beautiful, a bag full of vapors over her head – was getting her butt fucked. After her defloration by her uncle, she didn’t care about her vagina. She assumed that her pretty pink pussy was what men wanted, and didn’t mind that. Even abortions didn’t bother her – they were regular, cyclical, like menstruation. She knew that her beauty led to her cunt, and her cunt led to cash and clothes and more beauty, with dead babies on the side.

But Volodya had never even touched her butt. She didn’t know that men would spit in her face and do this disgusting thing to her. She didn’t know that she would get to like it, to like the slight initial pain of a penis pushing into her poop-hole, the utter humiliation she felt as it filled her anus, the way men looked at her then, the fantastic feeling of getting fucked hard and deep in the one place where she wasn’t pretty, her helplessness, her shame afterwards when they looked at the gaping hole with revulsion, before it closed up again, when they saw how she needed it, her self-regard a sham.

The first few times she was shocked, hurt, horrified. She still pretended to hate it. “No… not in there… I don’t do that…” She cried, later, farting their come into the toilet. But Tanya loved it in her butt – Little Tanya did, the girl who had once been afraid of how her uncle kissed her. The other Tanya, who even as a denizen of a prison with a bevy of abysmal young whores was haughty and addicted to seduction for its own sake – Tanya the Young Prostitute – still recoiled at the nasty pleasure.

The ferry swarmed with the same Finnish drunkards who wandered the Estonian capital. Destiny put Tanya in a stateroom, disappeared, and returned with two middle-aged men, a Swede and a German, and three young Russians. Tanya had been in bed with more than one man before, but she had never had sex with more than one at a time, and the girls with her had never touched her, at least not sexually. When she whored, she pretended to be in love. It was theater, and she lost herself in the role of a temporary lover. Now she was a good cut of meat. She couldn’t pretend anything. They talked about her as if she wasn’t there, the Russians telling Destiny how pretty she was. They had her do a striptease and took pictures of her.

No one had taken pictures of her since she was a little girl. Tanya started crying. They were taking pictures of her as a whore. They saw nothing but her beauty… and she had nothing but her beauty. She hadn’t realized that until then. She couldn’t do anything except be beautiful and sell her body. Those were her only skills. That was what her uncle had done to her. Destiny was suddenly hideous to her. The flame-haired child was enjoying Tanya’s degradation, immune to her own. And then the twelve-year-old started kissing her. It was like being fucked up the ass, but without the physical pain. It was unnatural. Sick.

Destiny undressed, and the men did, too, and then they were inside of her, all of them, still as though she wasn’t there, only her body, and Destiny fondled her breasts and stroked her slit while they sodomized her. The hurt felt good, really good, and so did Destiny’s caresses, and what was awful was that they could see that she was in ecstasy, that she loved being gang-banged, that she was nothing but a fabulously beautiful slut. She didn’t need affection, she needed to be punished and soaked with their semen.

Tanya sailed to the ceiling and hung there like the lamp above an operating table in a time of terrible midwifery, the hysterical country below a land of high infant mortality and madness, staring down at her adolescent body as penis after penis ejaculated into her mouth and anus. They didn’t fuck her cunt. That was for women who wanted to be married, as she once had. She watched her lanky limbs waving spasmodically, her soft fingers grasping the stiff pricks, gripping them, pulling them into her dripping mouth, her teeny butt quivering with desperate desire after one of them left it, the wet hole gaping, hungry.

She was beautiful, and that was all that mattered. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! The word blurred as her subtle body floated above her orgasmic form. Destiny kneaded her tiny breasts as the men moved deosil around her holy body, flooding her mouth and ravishing her rectum until it was too loose to please them. Tanya wailed with wild need and whimpered as they lifted her, semen gurgling from her ravaged ass, then moaned until they lowered her onto another hard penis, forcing the terrific pain back into her bowels. Tanya tensed and held still as a stocky man stabbed at her pussy with his stiff prick.

She howled when he got his dick in there, and Destiny tongue-kissed her.

Tanya licked the twelve-year-old’s mouth, her thighs stretched taut, the redhead caressing them as the man in her rectum raised her bottom some and the cock in her cunt slid deeper. She concentrated on kissing Destiny as the thick penis pushed into her front hole and the one in her shitter was shoved back in, the purple bulbs separated only by a sore membrane that suddenly felt as thin as her hymen had been, to be torn, a nervous skin that curtained the two stuffed caverns, and then they were fucking her, at first slowly, clumsily, searching for a rhythm, like an orchestra tuning up, then taking turns, the one cock throbbing deep in her rectum, the other sawing in and out of her cunt, stopping, letting the dick in her asshole move some.

Tanya sucked Destiny’s tongue and stroked a prick with her left hand, her other hand kneading the bedspread like a cat. The redhead stopped kissing her and Tanya turned her head and drew the nearest dick into her mouth. It was one that had been in her butt. She had never tastes her feces, and moaned as the man returned her filth, stroking and sucking, another penis in her free hand now, a wad of semen bathing her cervix and then her cunny was empty and she was crying, squirming, bucking against the big dick deep in her butt.

She felt a flood of sperm in her rectum and then they were flipping her over, passing her to the man in her mouth, her titties against his chest, his dick slipping into her dilated cunt. Someone else slid into her behind, and Tanya shivered as her nipples brushed the man’s chest hairs and the one in her ass held her hips and reamed her.

The blonde was beyond pain, a wet husk heaving with insatiable need.

They lifted her again, and the cock in her cunt entered her anus. She tried to take it deeper but they gripped her, and Tanya shuddered as she felt the second penis stretching her sphincter. They were ripping her open, forcing both rods into her rectum at the same time. She shrieked, struggling to hold still and trying to relax her little muscle. Someone stroked her hair. Her sphincter tore and a ball of lightning flew from her butt to her head, a horrible pressure there as the upper penis squeezed past the torn ring and into her rectum, her brain bursting as her bowels were widened by both hard cocks.

She couldn’t feel anything then, spinal fluid dripping from the roof of her skull, the upper penis rubbing against the lower one, disemboweling her, gutting her, tearing her apart. Destiny slapped her buttock and the huge pricks seemed to swell. Even her pelvis hurt. They reamed her. The upper prick rammed deeper, splitting her. The redhead slapping her until sperm gushed from both men and the cabin was a sea of moans, her rectum grotesque, a vast and vacant ruin, her green eyes lost in lunacy, her rosy body twitching like poisoned rats.

xxxxx

Her body recovered, but her mind never. And yet the latter was what Destiny desired, or both. Tanya became her plaything whenever the twelve-year-old was in Tallinn. The blonde was sexy enough for export, but Siskin kept her in Estonia for Destiny’s pleasure. What was remarkable about Tanya was that her arrogance could not be raped. Physically, she was perfect. The damage to her sphincter was minimal. Mentally, Tanya swallowed everything Destiny told her.

The redhead introduced her to sorcery. Tanya became her apprentice and by the time Simon Seize accosted her outside the Viru Hotel, Tanya was soulless. The kinds of things that Destiny was into would have made her sister and the Haitian seem like good samaritans. Tanya did whatever she was told – torturing, murdering, and vampirizing – because she couldn’t live without the twelve-year-old’s lovemaking. The blonde’s empty body was still orgasmic, even more so than before, but she only felt alive when her lover licked her and hurt her and gave her abortions.

Even drugs did nothing for her without Destiny there, devouring her fetuses, showing her how to get a girl to come while they killed her, helping Tanya restore her cold beauty before she left again. Destiny visited every couple of months, or invited her to Helsinki, or St. Petersburg. Alone, when her lover was gone, Tanya was a mannequin, a mechanical whore. Sometimes Tanya visited her in her sleep, taking her to strange cities to fuck animals and weird, violent men. But even in these lucid dreams, Tanya was human, capable of love. Destiny filled Tanya’s despair with wonder, and if this afterwards left her even emptier than she had been before, that only made Tanya need her more. When Simon called out to her, Tanya thought he was a customer. She turned and gave him her practiced seductive smile. Their eyes met, and Tanya realized intuitively that he was after Destiny. She called Ivanov, her pimp, Siskin’s local manager, and said she had another date. Then she suggested that they go back into the hotel.

The detective got a room and soon they were alone. Simon was in awe.

Tanya took off her clothes very slowly, standing a few feet away from him. His tastes now tended to ever younger creatures, but the fifteen-year-old was unlike anyone he had ever seen; she wasn’t bizarre, like Fatima or Manga, but Tanya looked like a fashion model, and Simon had never been with a glamorous woman.

Her skin was sweet cream into which a virgin had briefly bled. Tanya was tall, slender but not dramatically so, statuesque but small-breasted. She was made for breeding, with wide hips and a taut belly that would have been beautiful in pregnancy, a few marmoreal stretch marks showing that she had indeed been knocked up. Her little tits, however, were girlish, near her underarms, with raw, stiff nipples and puffy pink aureoles.

She climbed into bed and posed for him. Tanya’s feet were sore but sexy, well-formed, her legs long and muscular. Her hands were womanly, with strong fingers and short nails, her shoulders and arms slightly athletic. Her face was purebred, from the Golden Circle, the green eyes as cold as the stones around her slender neck. Her teeth were healthy for a Soviet, her lips full, painted to look even fuller. She spread her legs and stroked her slit. The same white gold hair that she had unbraided grew above her whorish gash, trimmed into a narrow rectangle.

Her outer labia were long and lavender, and within them everything was scarlet and wet. Tanya’s buttocks were firm and flawless, but between them was the anus of submissive crone. The wrinkled opening was swollen and the skin around it was a ruddy brown.

The detective stripped and wet his prick in her loose vagina, then shoved it into her rectum. Tanya moaned, staring up at him and holding his hips, hoping he would last long enough to get her off. She was still tight down there, nice and raw from the man who had just butt-fucked her. He slapped her titties, and Tanya arched her back and nodded, wide-eyed. He hit them hard, first one and then the other, and Tanya begged him to get her purse.

She turned around and crouched while he fetched it and rummaged inside. They didn’t speak. Simon found the lubricant, greased his hand, stretched her sphincter and slowly worked his fingers into the sleazy hole. Tanya whimpered, trembling, then masturbated as Simon forced his hand inside and fisted her. She shuddered when she came, whining, then went down on him.

He pushed her away. The cleaver of his infatuation with Fatima had again cut off his erection. Tanya was fine but solid. He hadn’t the same sense of being inside her, inside something that could envelop him.

“What you want from her?” Tanya’s voice was low, hoarse.

“Who?”

“Destiny. What you want?”

The detective dressed and took out his cigarettes, lit one, stared. Tanya was in pain, but used to it.

“You know her?”

“What you want from her.”

“Tell me where she is, or else.”

“Or else what?” Tanya smiled. “Kill me, lover.”

“I need to find her,” he sighed. “Her… I work for her parents. Her sister…”

Tanya was intrigued. She hadn’t imagined Destiny as having a family. She had thought of her as spawned in the abyss or sprung from nothing.

“She’s not here. I think she’s in Helsinki.”

“Tell me about her.”

“No.”

Suddenly Simon saw. Destiny had somehow gotten inside this prostitute. He slapped her.

xxxxx

And see a story had begun and a long one. See a story started. Flow, sweet Afton, etc. And a story is less than real experience isn’t it.

That she was gone was already ancient history. But by that time Simon was.

It was something he couldn’t put a face to and then, _then_ is always a sorry story, garbled by its interpreters.

Simon was interested in some simple crystal, hiss chrysalis, crisis. Simon wanted.

Simon slid again below, sinking to his knees. Flow gently, sweet Afton, until I end my song. He had sunk so far beneath himself and sang his song.

And he liked that, liked being gone in his song.

Oh, anything, said Simon to himself. Anything, he asked of himself. It was insufficient.

His ephemeral lover leapt back to before he met her and Ur. And if this becomes everyday, or any day an eye. Oh find this in me he said to anyone who looked but they never founded anything, did they.

Tanya turned into a _her_, id est, himself, _ego scriptor_.

He wanted to be back in the aluminum siding business. Here was this thing. It was human and he’d lost it.

And so Tanya walked the plank. They drown did it as was their wont, a sea city and Simon, wanton, slipping off the edge.

xxxxx

By the time Tanya befriended him, he had already recognized her as some terrible demon, and was in no condition to change his perception.

He was homesick, both for the things he could return to – his dingy apartment, the Windy City, the English language – and the thing that were gone: the Bar Do he couldn’t go into, Manga, his lost life or its sensibilities. If he started to think, Simon began to sink into the nastier forms of nostalgia.

But befriend him she did, or pretended to, thinking that Destiny might reward her for investigating this shabby man who seemed to be pursuing Tanya’s lover, or the ghost of Tanya’s lover. The detective did not tip his hand, however, not only because he did not trust Tanya but because he himself no longer knew why he was looking for Destiny ‘Laika’ Dawson. He knew where she was now, he could send her a message and report to her parents, tell them about Siskin and Tallinn and Tanya… wasn’t that enough?

xxxxx

He introduced Tanya to Natasha and had sex with both of them, mock ménages, for neither was interested in the other. They pretended they were, to please him.

xxxxx

When not engaged in interpenetrations, Simon wandered Tallinn and studied Laika. The famous one. It was nothing but sadness, and an innocence that led to despair whether broken or unbroken. The ground under his feet. Bouillon in Estonian was _puljon_, and he noticed that this Fenno-Ugric people seemed to make the letter ‘b’ a ‘p’ in foreign words, odd, since they did not lack the letter ‘b’.

Afternoon was a glass of wine and then another. It was a pretty city, and he let Tanya take him to town. The Old Town, the oldest profession, their procurers in expensive leather from the Levant, mobilniks, snazzy cars. He began to learn Russian, but couldn’t hack Estonian.

There was nothing to do but wait for Laika’s return. He did not want to look for her in Helsinki. He had fallen in love with Estonia, with the Estonians’ desire to ‘be part of Europe,’ that practically mythical continent that Hitler and Stalin had torn them from.

Because he had found a way in, and Simon had always wanted to be a part of a secret world, like a little boy.

Later, when he had recovered, when he was selling aluminum siding again on the outskirts of nowhere, he wondered what this was, what secrets he had come back with.

A good friend of his, a dying writer, had told him about this idea, ‘I is another,’ and he had the idea that he ought to recover some sense in all of these things, in his eye as a thing. That friend had also told him that it was a sin not to offer an end to a story, to let the reader sit before the face. Tough luck. If you’ve gotten this far, you trust me, and you know there is no answer, or I haven’t found it.

xxxxx

‘The blind eye that weeps,’ the fabled folk in Aegypt called the thing between your legs. As though the brighter eye you seek is less so, like finding a needle in a haystack by tooth and nail or the skin of your teeth. Simon sat beneath the Rathaus with a throbbing erection and imagined what she was and the reflections thereof, old sutric warrior he, he has cheated you out of an ending. So a subtle body, deftly in the deep. None of it was funny.

They had learned New World rituals, the Estonians had, and handed you a dish of salt and a sliced lemon if you got a shot of tequila. They had no limes, they called them green lemons, people counterfeited these.

Everything is a banister. ‘Friends, you drank some darkness,’ that same poet wrote, and you feel for that faithful thing, perhaps you find it. He had a long argument about whether he was a door or a doorman. Girls laughed like they did the world over and he knew that there was this phrase, there, ‘all ends are in the water,’ something he learned in the town of Valga on the Latvian border, Valka on the other side, and it mean – what? What separates us? What are you doing to me? O, infallible body. ‘O _mon_ bien, o _mon_ beau…’ What was it, ‘the atrocious fanfare that does not falter’?

Where it does not falter. He is trampling out the vintage where the la-la la-la. She was there across the water, imminent. Was that immanent? Poor Simon, ishyo sto gramm pazheloosta, so lost. He liked it best at dawn, the very same streets there, centuries of men like him breaking their skulls against these rocks. Fly and larvae, sorry Simon, the leaves redden differently. It’s about time. All fairy tales are about time.

THE END