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| LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf. |
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The NetFiction Horror Feature
is brought to you by 
Button's for Gaia - The Dark Side Of Sunny South Africa*
Hagen Engler
Extract from cult writer Hagen Engler's new novel Button's
for Gaia.
I'm scheming of a blunt before bed as I fumble for my keys in the lobby of my flats. I've also got to hatch some plan for when Dirk comes calling again, I'm scheming. What if that 2pm appointment is just a decoy so he can come back and fuck me again where I live? That's when I catch my first glimpse of them, as I'm patting myself down for my keys. They're in tracksuit pants. And kung fu slippers, it looks like.
My mind's still trying to make a connection, dark tracksuit pants… They look like pyjamas…
I look up and there are four of them, guys in dark tracksuits. I manage to say, "Where you guys off to?" just before a hand covers my mouth and the world becomes a shrinking dot, which soon disappears in a sea of blackness…
* *
*
…to reappear as a palatial lounge, or some kind of dining hall, with a sweeping staircase, marble floors, gold-embroidered furniture and a chandelier. A dining table stands in the centre, without chairs, and where one would expect a serving dish, or an arrangement of flowers, some conversation piece, there lies a woman. She is naked, except for a zippered leather bondage mask, and bound with duct tape, so she is spreadeagled, her legs hitched up and her vagina exposed, like a woman about to give birth. But she is not about to give birth.
I'm lying on one of two chaise longues in the vast room, cold from the marble, and I have been stripped. Somehow I have an enormous erection, but a strange, impersonal one, like those early morning ones, which really just mean you need to piss.
"Er wird wach," someone says in a voice I almost recognise.
Down each side of the room stand three men, clad in the same dark-blue tracksuits I was struggling to place.
"Mmmmmm," the woman moans, like someone dreaming a bad dream. My head is pounding, throbbing with pain in time with my pulsating hard-on. My vision is cloudy, and the room's all hazy to me, like someone has let off a burst of dry ice or something.
"Mmmmmmm," goes the woman again, and I notice for the first time, as I stagger to my feet, that she's been strapped onto something. It's some kind of machine and she's impaled on it! The machine is fucking her up the ass and she's strapped down!
She's moaning still, in a wasted kind of way. Woozy, like me.
As I stand, two attendants come to my side and force me to sit. They say nothing. It's like I'm dreaming, but I can feel their fingers digging into my biceps and the cold floor beneath my feet. I can't shake the fogginess out of my head. I try to speak, but my tongue is numb and there's a bitter drug taste in my mouth, down my throat. My head is screaming with pain, and somehow… somehow it's being caused by whatever's giving me this insane erection.
And the pain… the pain is getting worse.
I feel like a patient in a mental ward, and indeed, that is how the attendants appear to be treating me. They discuss me among themselves in what must be German. What's happening to me? I just can't… the dark tracksuits… and the woman?
The moans come again, but it's another woman's voice, several women. The moans reverberate around the marble hall and echo, reinforcing each other, women moaning in pleasure. But the woman I see has her mouth covered by the mask and she appears almost unconscious. It's not her moaning, the moans are recorded and being piped into this hall as the machine fucks this helpless woman. And my pain is getting worse still. It burns now, sending shooting blasts from the base of my spine into my skull. It's too much to think. I just need to stop this pain. Oh the pain.
What have I got inside me?
"Rolling," comes a voice from above. Some kind of… a mezzanine on the staircase, where another man is standing watching us, filming us. One of the attendants has another handheld and he comes towards me, focused on his viewfinder. He takes my hand and leads me to the table. Oh God, just stop the pain. The exertion of standing again just makes its throb worse.
The woman appears to sense our approach, because her body tenses even more, racked as it is by the machine's pulses. A smooth, chrome dildo pounds in and out of her rectum, like an erect kitchen tap fucking a woman until she bleeds from her anus. I'm seeing black spots from the pain. Do I fuck this woman? Is that what they want?
"Will this stop the pain?" I try to ask, but my mouth is thick. My penis throbs with pain. I've never seen it this big before, like there's an alien force within me, fighting to get out. It's the pain trying to get out of me. Oh God, please get it out of me. Out of me! Please.
The attendant guides my engorged penis into the spreadeagled woman's vulva and films the entry. I can feel the smooth metal of the machine through the walls of her vagina, and its violence.
"Mmmmmm!"
The woman reacts.
Her back arches and in an instant I feel her pain coursing through my body too. She's real!
This woman is a person. This is all real. What the fuck am I doing?
What hell is this?
And hell on camera. The attendant is hunched over our crotches, filming the blood and the fucking. The fucking. What the fuck am I? What is making me do this? God, oh please, help me.
As I drive into her, the woman convulses, and she's driven off the metal pole. My cock feels hard and cold, like a dagger. I'm stabbing her. Oh God forgive me. Whatever I do, I'm not gonna do this.
I clench my hands, and with all my strength bring both fists down onto the top of the attendant's head.
His face smashes into the metal cock, which penetrates his eye socket. He shrieks with pain, but his pain can be nothing like the agony pumping through my body, my soul. Oh God, make it stop!
He drops the camera and convulses now, his blood mingling with the blood from the woman's crotch and his neck snapping rhythmically back and forth as the machine fucks his head. Dying.
And being fucked to death.
Now I see what I must do.
I must kill these fuckers. Only then will the pain stop. Oh yes. I must kill them all.
The attendants come at me, but I have the rage in me. The rage and the drugs. Whatever evil they have put inside me will be their undoing. Their evil will be my weapon against them. I feel the rage rip through me like a wind.
"Halt ihn fest," comes the German. But the German will not help them. I feel my eyes peeling back with rage. I'm snorting as two attendants grab me by the arms, as they did earlier. But I will not be held.
Grrrrrrrrrn. Grrrrrrrrrrrn. The machine grinds and bores into the fallen man's skull. Still the canned, orgasmic moans fill the air. I'm seeing shooting lights in my head as I feel the quickening, the righteous, avenging rage of God himself surge through me like power.
I am the force for good and I will overcome evil. The attendants' heads crack warm and gooey from my fists and my elbow, bringing them down and exposing their soft throats, which I can crush with my foot like snakes. A fourth one comes with a syringe. He will not take me down.
The table is set for dinner, so it is a spoon that I seize and impale in his throat. His syringe ends up in the neck of his colleague, who shrieks with fright and fights feebly - then goes into soft-focus slomo as he sags to the cold marble floor.
Just two now. The man on the stairs does not move. He screams German to my remaining attendant.
We circle the table now, me and this man. His features mean nothing to me. He is just enemy. The woman moans again and struggles against her restraints. Soon my love.
With strength that comes from who knows now where, I vault the table from a standing start and seize my enemy by his throat. As I squeeze him I can feel my teeth grinding, the warm taste of my own blood, and I take the throat again. It works so well… Then the jaw. I plunge my fist into the mouth and the jaw comes away. Like soft, warm tissue.
One can grasp the throat like a cable and literally unplug a person. Like pulling a wire from a lamp, only instead of sparks, there's blood. And no darkness thereafter. Just that haze still. Smoke! What… is the place burning? This isn't dry ice… It's not my blurry eyes. I can barely… I can't breathe!
The woman first. I grab a steak knife and cut the duct tape from her, prising her loose from the fuck machine and the impaled skull of the first of them.
Now for the last one. There on the… stairs? He's running now.
There's smoke… the place is going up… But this last man is my ultimate adversary. I must have him.
I'm up the stairs on all fours like an ape. Yes. I am wild, murderous ape. And I feel it is this man who has made me so. So apt that I should now make him mine, like I did his comrades. My prey. Oh, yes, you motherfucker. I'm going to have you too!
Like an ape to keep below the smoke too, beneath the smoke. Am I in the now, now? Does the hunter's instinct make me adapt instinctively? Or am I thinking now? I…?
Cough! Cough! My burning lungs… what the fuck?
Well it's a death match then. Is it me against… what's his name… the guy… please, the thought. It… what?
It's just smoke now… cough… I couldn't stand if I wanted to… and the heat!
I must head down the stairs again. The heat is from above. And he will have to come this way too, eventually.
Leopard-crawl down the stairs now, back into the hall, where those poor, those guys are… and the woman. Oh my god!
The woman appears, stumbling through the smoke, staggering. She holds something…
Crawling down the stairs, I can see she has torn the mask from her face, her hair hangs wild and… It's her! But she sees me and now she's on me!
She's stabbing me!
I can't speak. And she's… Doesn't she know?
She's killing me!
Shee… uh.
Hagen Engler
is an established independent voice on the South African literary
scene and an underground punk publisher with no self-censorship issues.
He has published independent ’zines, released albums and put out three volumes
of his collected writings, as well as the cult novel Greener Grass.
Engler’s work has been hailed with acclaim from the word go and he is regarded
as an accurate mirror of the scenes he reveals in his writing. With a grip
on colloquial South African English so tight that it may baffle some readers,
he reflects and reveals exactly what young South Africans are thinking and
feeling today. . |
|
|
 *The
novel traces the story of one Wax Wilson, a Cape Town movie industry chaperone
with a reputation for being able to organise anything for his clients. His
serene life of casual sex, drugs and easy money is soon disrupted by something
so twisted and perverse he can’t even see his own hand in the events that
overtake him. Set in the underbelly of Cape Town that tourists never see,
Buttons For Gaia reveals the darker side of the Mother City and those that
visit her. It also addresses the universal themes of lust, evil, love and
redemption.
Caught up in the machinations of an evil sex cult
as he tries to work through his own bizarre handicaps, Wax finds himself
in a poignant love triangle. But he needs to get a grip on reality – he
may well die if he doesn’t. As his friends and lovers fall victim to the
cult, the action moves to dark, mysterious Berlin, where we find Wax on
a depraved vengeance mission. Now only love can save him from becoming what
he most despises.
Published by Pocket Assegaai Publications, Engler’s own DIY publishing company.
Buttons For Gaia is available exclusively online at www.hagenshouse.co.za. |
LitNet: 25 October 2005
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