Grand Guignol
by Paul Edmonds
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Margerie knew, even before their marriage, that Ted’s meekness would inform the dynamic of their relationship and that little guidance would be required. Thus, she allowed him small indulgences.
She let him have his model trains and his bowling league, the ugly HAM radio and his weekly card games. And honestly, she cherished the moments alone. Time unfettered, opportunities to ponder the demanding offices of her domesticity.
So, on Thursday nights, as Ted unwound in Cal Demmer’s basement rec room, she would slip her duties and enjoy a pot of tea, slumming with the misfits on Cheers and Taxi. All the while, she would picture her sweet husband betting nickels and dimes, perhaps trading off-color jokes, until the time to return to her loving arms.
The basement smelled like a whore’s bedroom: smoke, beer, and a foulness an unsuspecting visitor might’ve pegged as feet or pussy, but it was the primal ape-funk of four middle-aged men.
Ted hunched at Cal’s card table, his shirt sticking to his back. The game was over, and he was down two hundred dollars. He’d need some way to keep it from Margie, to slip it past her tight-fisted accounting.
His buddies had already drifted toward the couch and television. Cal cleared his throat and called the room to order. He was grinning like a perv at a peepshow. In his hands: a scuffed videotape. No sleeve, just a sticker on the spine with two words scrawled in black marker: “GRAND GUIGNOL.”
“Goddamn scat flick?” Eddie said.
This territory wasn’t new. Cal collected smut the way a smash-and-grab crook takes jewelry—greedy and undiscriminating. His library thrived in local lore, and every Thursday, after the last hand was played, he’d pull something from the archives.
“Ain’t no splat-fest,” Cal said. “This is what you’d call an art piece. French. Erotic.”
“The girl with the horses?” Frank asked, his face alight. Then, thoughtfully, “Didn’t she die?”
“Not animals, you psycho. Guy at the swap meet said it was… hell, I forget. Just shut the fuck up and watch.”
Cal powered on the Betamax. It sat under the 27-inch Sony, a black brick, its chrome buttons clouded with fingerprints and shame. The machine swallowed the tape with a mechanical cough.
Ted dragged himself over to the couch and sat beside Eddie; Eds was already rubbing himself, priming his chub for the evening’s cinéma français. Frank sat cross-legged on the floor, while Cal claimed the power seat—a mangy recliner that was more Petri dish than furniture.
Ted considered leaving. The guilt of these smutty excursions had started to weigh on him. His wife’s long reach tapped him on the shoulder with every thrust, every slap of flesh. But then Cal threw him a fresh beer, and he hung on in silent mutiny.
The video’s tracking jumped, fluttered, then settled on a lamplit parlor. It wasn’t the shag-covered fuckden Ted expected but the prissy Victorian fantasy of some sexless housewife. Velvet curtains. Silver candelabras. A grandfather clock with ornate scrolling.
And center stage, a round table draped in frilly lace. Beneath it knelt a naked man, his strained, flushed face poking through a hole cut into the top. His hairy legs and shriveled genitals showed where the lace fell short. A clothespin pinched the end of his cock, quivering with each ragged breath.
Three women filed into frame. High-necked blouses and long skirts and laced-up ankle boots. Their prim costumes were Swiss-cheesed with convenient rips—an exposed tit here, an ass cheek there. A trio of Brillo pad snatches. They moved with unhurried precision, setting teacups and tiny saucers around the man’s head.
“Dinner’s served!” Eddie trumpeted.
The tallest of the women, her face pale and cratered as old plaster, leaned close and whispered in the man’s ear. Ted couldn’t catch the words, but he recognized the quick, clipped cadence for what it was: a reprimand.
The man listened, nodded. His mouth trembled. He glanced offscreen, saw something he didn’t like, and began a low, pitiful moan, like a sick dog with a shotgun pressed to its ribs.
Another woman stepped forward and withdrew a small brass hammer from between her jugs. She circled the table and twirled the hammer, milking the moment. Then she stopped, winked for the camera, and brought it down on the crown of the man’s head.
Blood geysered from the break, painting tits and doilies and the tasteful wallpaper. The man’s legs cut a jig, went stiff, relaxed. His chin slammed against the tabletop, forcing another eruption that sprayed the chandelier. His eyes rolled white; his face turned purple.
The woman twisted the hammer free. A shard of skull broke off and bounced to the floor. She hit him again. And again. She passed the hammer off, and the other two got their turn. Soon they were down to brain. The blows grew squishier, wetter, but the spray kept coming, red mist clouding the air.
Ted stared at the floor but couldn’t mute the carnage. Each squelchy whap seemed to shake the room. He fixed on a cigarette burn in the carpet, tried to sink into that tiny black crater, but the clatter of teacups and the pulverizing of headmeat kept clawing through.
Eddie cackled. “Guess a guillotine was outta budget.” The clink of his belt buckle, the metallic rasp of his zipper.
“Looks real, dudn’it?” Frank added.
Ted raised his eyes. Frank, nearly drooling, had scooched up close to the TV. And Cal—Cal leaned forward in his recliner, eyes wide with queasy awe. He turned, caught Ted’s gaze, and for an awful second they shared the same grim understanding: this wasn’t just some bangflick.
Cal pressed buttons on the Betamax’s remote. Nothing happened. He smacked it against his palm. Didn’t help.
The grisly communion dragged on. The hammer passed from hand to gore-streaked hand. The lace tablecloth hung heavy and dripped. At last, the man’s head, reduced to fruit salad, could no longer anchor his body to the table; the pulpy wad of bone and gristle slipped through the hole, and his body heaped on the bougie carpet.
Each woman selected a spattered teacup, knelt, and dipped into the glistening man-slurry. They sipped with pinkies raised.
Ted lurched to his feet, dropping his beer. “I’m out.”
“Aw, c’mon!” Eddie whined, jerking with one hand and pointing with the other. “This is fine dining.”
Frank rocked back and forth, on the brink of rapture. “She’s going in for seconds!”
Cal said nothing. He looked at Ted, face bathed in the TV’s pale flicker. His fingers had sunk deep into the recliner’s tatty arms.
Ted started for the stairs. Then he heard it.
TAP. TAP.
He froze. Turned.
Onscreen, the tall woman stood in front of the table, leaning forward, one hand on her knee. She rapped the flesh-caked hammer against the inside of the glass. Her red-ringed eyes glued Ted to the bottom step. Chapped lips peeled into a hideous, gap-toothed smile. The others crowded beside her, filling the frame with their pocked, glowering faces.
CRACK!
The hammer smashed dead-center. A spiderweb of fissures burst outward, and a chunk of screen fell away. Dark liquid belched from the hole, puddling on the carpet.
Eddie scrambled onto the couch, his hard-on deflating like a punctured raft. “Christ on a chariot!”
Another blow. The fractures widened. A tremendous tsunami of blood—Ted was sure that’s what it was—swelled behind the glass. The rest of the screen blew outward, releasing the red flood. The Victorian parlor ruptured into the room—brains and porcelain and lace sluicing forward. The tablecloth writhed through the Sony’s shattered maw. The grandfather clock’s brassy innards—chiming crazily—crowded the opening before a bony hand knocked them aside.
Eddie waddled to one of Cal’s towering bookcases. He began to climb, kicking a stack of skin mags from a lower shelf. Dog-eared issues of Beaver and Swank got sucked into the current.
Ted watched, dumbstruck, as his portly friend clung to the wobbling bookcase. Ted reached out a hand, but at least ten feet separated them. Even in the midst of this nightmare, he felt like an asshole.
Eddie bumped against the drop ceiling and punched out one of the tiles. The tablecloth rose from the river of blood. It slithered up the bookcase and struck, coiling around his ankle.
“French cunts!” he bawled as the tablecloth pulled him into the rising, frothy abyss.
Ted’s eyes darted to the opposite side of the room.
Frank went down with a hollow glug! He shot back up a second later.
“Get it off!”
The headless corpse from the video had barnacled itself to Frank’s waist. A bright knob of spine poked through its ragged neck hole. Frank let out a strangled war cry and brought his fists down on its shoulders. They grappled, stumbled backward, then went under in a lover’s embrace.
Ted crept up the stairs, the flood lapping his legs. He’d just cracked the door to the kitchen when he heard Cal scream.
“Ted! Teddy! Come ba—ah, holy fuck!”
Ted paused with his hand on the rail, torn between safety and his sinking friend. Images flooded his head just like the blood swallowing the basement—what he’d be running back to. The reproach in Margie’s eyes. When she saw his ruined clothes, the gunk tracked onto her floors. When he inevitably confessed to his blown wages, setting it atop her disappointment like a rancid cherry.
He was a loser either way, standing before a hooded executioner who had a needle in one hand and a noose in the other.
He descended the steps until he was waist-deep in muck. Across the room, Cal sat marooned on his recliner. A silk-wrapped feminine arm had risen from the glop, one long, black-tipped finger hooked into his eye socket. The eye itself dangled against his cheek, staring back at Ted with a desperate gleam.
Cal’s mouth twisted over mute words, his hands flapping in a pidgin pantomime Ted couldn’t understand.
Ted sloshed through the soup of death and drowned porno. His foot thudded against something soft. A pale ass cheek rose momentarily, then vanished again with a gurgle: Eddie.
Ted stepped around him and plunged forward. He grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled. Cal yelped and jerked forward, still hooked to the offending digit.
“Fuck, man! You tryin’ to kill me?”
Ted readjusted his grip, tugged. The finger sucked free of Cal’s skull with a cheery pop. The shiny nerve tethering his eye snapped, and the severed orb rolled down Cal’s shirt. He slapped a hand over the vacant space.
The arm flailed, clawed at the air, and a shoulder emerged from the mire. A ruffle collar. A head, crowned in ruined curls. Her haggard companions popped up beside her, dresses hanging from their alabaster bodies like huge, juicy clots.
Ted recoiled at the sight of them, their stench: rot, cheap perfume, moldy videotape. He drew a long breath of rank air, went under.
He grubbed along the carpet, sifting through the detritus of Cal’s life’s work. His hands seized on something. It fought him. He heaved upward. He broke the surface and was smacked in the face with a tangle of cables and cords. In his hands, thick and grimy, the Betamax player.
He wiped blood from his eyes and swung for the broad closest to him. The corner of the metal enclosure drilled the center of her forehead. It left a flower-shaped dent that reminded Ted, absurdly, of Margie’s rose bushes. He hit her twice more for good measure. She fell into Cal’s lap, her gray tongue lolling onto his thigh.
Ted dispatched the second in similar fashion. Cal, not wanting an armchair threesome, hoisted a soppy work boot into her sternum, rag-dolling her into the wall.
Ted confronted the final woman, ready for his last at-bat. He brought the Betamax high. She looked at him and smiled, the torn HU of a Hustler cover caught in her front teeth. Ted brought the player down in a swooping arc. She swatted it aside, throwing him off-balance. The big box caught Cal on the ear.
Cal’s hand fell from his scooped socket. His orphaned eye glared stupidly upward. His lips parted, and Ted prepared for some dying declaration; a tribute to his loyalty, a beautiful summation of their friendship.
“Dumb shit,” Cal slurred, and slumped forward onto the dented murderess.
Ted was grabbed by the hair and pulled around. He stood nipple to nipple with the ghoulish biddy. The Betamax slipped through his greasy palms. She was still smirking with the ragged strip of porn mag flapping over her gums as her hand clamped onto Ted’s neck. His airway slammed closed. He saw pinpricks of light.
The woman bowed her legs and reached through a tear in her dress. She fished around and brought out the brass hammer. She ran it under Ted’s nose. It was warm and stank like roadkill, but it didn’t matter because he knew what was coming.
The hammer climbed by inches. It hung there long enough for Ted—husband and friend and shitty poker player—to wear his own thin smirk. Because although his pals were dead and he’d soon be dead too, he wouldn’t have to worry about that two hundred bucks.
Margerie rinsed her mug and set it in the dish rack. The eleven o’clock news whispered behind her, the world’s happenings incidental to her impatience. Ted was late, lost in the antics of male bonding.
She drew aside the curtain, then paused. A faint odor intruded upon the kitchen—sweet, oddly metallic. She wrinkled her nose and dismissed it. Whatever it was, it could wait. Soon enough the Buick’s big yellow headlights would turn the corner, swing up the drive, and deliver her husband back home.