Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

THE VOICE Rex Miller

I am Dallas's Ruler of the Night, the voice in the shadows, whispering of Stardust and moonglow and bossa nova rhythm.

The scratchy cut be-bops through the coda and the automatic cart-light flashes a five-second cue as I wait to perform. The engineer pots me up full as the red light blinks and the final note slides under my first words to the faithful:

"Cliffie Brown. Joy Spring." The hand behind the ear, old style. I smile up at the face on the other side of the double-paned glass. My engineer McVey punches up a spot and twangs into the studio intercom:

"I never heard of the cat."

"You never heard of the cat because he's dead. He was very young. He was the Ritchie Valens of the jazz trumpet."

I open the turntable well where we keep the ice bucket. About a third of the Thermos gone. Drinking on the air seems unthinkable to a civilian. But contrary to public image, air personalities are often paranoid, quivering skin-bags of insecurities, their professionalism measured not in behavior but in air sound and ratings. Drink, smoke, attack the receptionist if you must, but just make sure you sound great. Total control is our brand of semi-pro ball. I take the Beefeater's Express nightly. That's my ticket out there.

"Those sloppy esses are gettin' pretty sibilant, bro,"

McVey laughs. "One more Beefy-Weefy and it's the Robert McVey show!"

"Whatever it takes, we can handle it," I assure him. The Friends-and-Groupies line, or FAG line as we call it, lights up and I stab at the glowing button.

"Yellow."

"Yellow yourself." It's my lady. The Voice.

"Heeeeeyyyyy, you're just what I need right about now."

"It's nice to be needed," she breathes. This lady Patricia has a voice that would peel a banana.

"You could say that. Yes. Can you, ahh, hang on?"

"What should I hang on to?" she breathes into the other end of the phone. I just about shove my pen through the logbook.

I turn on the intercom. "Don't give me the mic," I tell McVey. "It's your show. You wanted it. You got it. Just don't play anything weird." I kill the monitor.

"You must have McVey tonight," she purrs. She knows everything about me by now. So many long talks into the wee hours. "You miss me any?" Her VOICE — my Lord! My arms are covered with chill bumps.

"Yeah." It's all I can do to speak. She can do that to me. I suppose she could do it to any man. She has the command of a professional singer or announcer or public speaker. She knows how to use her voice.

"I've missed you so much," I say. "I can't take much more of this. You know?"

"I know, I know." She chuckles deep in her sexy throat. We'd talked for weeks yet the time had never been right to meet. There was a problem. Patricia was married. A cruel, extremely wealthy and equally possessive man several years her senior. By her account, he had kept her all but a prisoner in her own home.

I knew where she lived. I'd driven past many a time, hoping for just a glimpse of her through the windows. I knew I was playing way out of my league, but you know how it is.

"I just can't take his suspicions and his behavior," she says. "I've only stayed with him because of the children."

"Listen," I say, doodling furiously on the back of the log, "are we going to get together or what? At least let's meet, just to say hi in person." She starts to speak and I keep going. "Please — let me at least come over and say hello — or meet me someplace for a quick drink. I'll be very discreet." There is the sound of Patricia taking a long, deep breath.

"Promise you won't stay long. You'd just — you know — come by and say hello, then you'd go. I'm willing to chance it, but you've got to promise me you'll never come over without my permission or call me or try to see me without us setting it up in advance."

"Sure."

"It isn't really fair to you. I just can't offer you much of anything in the way of a relationship."

"Let me worry about that, okay? We'll play it however you say. I just want to be with you. Okay?"

"Okay. It's not very smart of us. But I'm tired of being smart." We breathe at each other over Ma Bell's lines. "He's going to be leaving town Friday afternoon. But just for a few minutes — okay?"

"Yeah, okay, sure." I'd agree to anything. I'm starting to feel the Beefeater's. Full of the gin and the rush.

I know I never did such a pulled-together show in my life as I do the rest of that evening. The show just cooks for miles.

For an hour I go on like I invented radio. I suppose it's my love song to Patricia — my lady of the telephone.

The days blur and the time between now and Friday is gone and I'm off the air, driving through the city, and before I know it, I'm ringing the doorbell, and I hear a voice over another intercom, my life now one big intercom conversation.

"It's open." God, what a sexy sentence. It's open. It just knocks me down and runs over me. I want to go home and build a shrine to her. Light candles around her statue. Pray to Our Lady of the Perfect Tonsils.

I open the ornate door and step into Patricia's world of wealth and taste. I move down plushly carpeted stairs into the most beautiful room I've ever been in.

I am drawn toward that voice again, this time from a darkened corner of what appears to be a sunken conversation pit, and I look in the direction of that sexy voice and see her for the first time.

"Ummmmm, you're a big one," she says in that unmistakable, throaty contralto.

My heart is in my throat as I say, "Wow."

"Do I pass?" She is sitting in profile to me from where I am moving toward her, perched on a kind of throne chair like some actress on a movie set. A regal princess on a throne, she is shockingly beautiful. I'm talking fucking BEAUTIFUL. Movie star knockout gorgeous stone beautiful, Daddy.

Porcelain white china skin, the way I imagined it in my fantasies. Dark eyes and long brunette hair under a white shawl of the most delicate and precious lace. Her body slim and lovely and perfect, profiled in a tight white dress that might have been a wedding gown or the courting costume of an aristocrat. White high heels that must have been five or six inches tall. Legs, reed-slim and long and heart-stoppingly sexy, crossed just so. And a dainty hand, reaching out of the shadows to touch me as I move closer.

"Hi," she says, and the love I feel for her is so real and all-pervasive and staggering that I can only say «Wow» and expel the breath I've been holding since I'd first seen her.

Such a theatrical moment. The light seems planned just so, to flatter and spotlight her, yet keep her shadowy and mysterious all at the same time. A princess sitting on the darkest edge of this circle of radiant light, she pulls me into its nimbus with an urgent whisper.

"I've waited so long to kiss you." Her voice, the voice of ultimate sex, sears me with its heat. She pulls my face down to hers. Like a teenager, I close my eyes and kiss that perfection and my heart feels like it will explode. Time has no meaning and reality can not be conceptualized.

A deft hand of fine china reaches for the zipper of my trousers and she takes my masculinity in her small, delicate fingers and leans forward and it is then that the shawl pulls back just enough so that, for the first time, I see all of her face.

A harlequin face. Only half a face. The other half is a skull — a slick, desperate screaming nightmare of a thousand sweat-soaked sheets. A latex mask of a skull, of hospital crocodiles man-eating swampscream tortured skin pulled tight werewolf gladiator wounds hell in the flaming river rubbery skin pulled thing stretched awful hideous oh my God I'm sorry baby inhuman red raw bleeding oh Jesus in Heaven skull pulled tight oh Christ it's okay, darlin', really, you're going to be all right, tell Daddy all about it, and the frightening apparition of the skull mask half-woman smiles up at me as the mask must have done a time or two before and whispers those hot, icy, agonizing hurt words, words that do not belong to a voice of Velvet, a voice made to whisper words of love and sex and beauty and stiffening erection-causing lust.

"I was in a fire," she says. Yes, I can see that. Where is my pulled-together shit now when I can only back up, back-pedaling like an idiot, turning, wanting to run, wanting to scream.

Maybe she says don't leave. Or let's have a cup of Maxwell House. Or maybe she tells me how many grafts had been done before they got that tight, rubbery thing over half the skull, before they got those hideous red things stretched across the face, before they made the other half scream across the white bone.

Or maybe she says, "I'm lucky to be alive," and I'm going oh baby oh my God bless you honey I'm sorry I'm so sorry but I'm fucking LEAVING you know I can't handle it. And maybe she says something about how it's like that all down the right side or the left side and would I like to "SEE IT YOU DIRTY CHICKENSHIT SONOFABITCH!"

Her voice is slashing out at me as I run for the car. "Come on back!" she shrieks at me from the intercom. "COME BACK AND I'LL SHOW YOU ALL OF IT, YOU NO-GOOD COCKSUCKER." The words, hard-edged as bad acid, stabbing me as I run.

"WHAT A FUNNY JOKE ON BOTH OF US," she screams from her throne, because she had seen me too.

And that is how I leave her, in her state of grace, the remorseless legacy of a God who will not be questioned. I go home to pray for us, for myself, of course, and for Our Lady Patricia.