Ladies Night
Jack Ketchum
Language: English
Pages: 310
ISBN: 1887368353
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Tom Braun is sitting in his neighborhood bar. His wife and his boy are at home in their apartment just a few blocks away. He's had yet another fight with her and is looking to steady his nerves and drown his sorrows and maybe--if he's lucky--snag a little something on the side. But the women in the bar are very strange tonight.
Hermes in the Academy: Ten Years' Study of Western Esotericism at the University of Amsterdam
Stumbled on his way out the door — but here the long narrow barspace was already so crowded with people drinking, shouting over the music, hustling one another, that there was nowhere for him to go. The drunk stayed upright, blinking, spilling the beer of the guy in the cowboy shirt in front of him. Over on Amsterdam, the well-dressed, polite young crowd at Sweetwater were waiting for the show to start — Thelma Houston —and listening to a Marvin Gaye song on the juke in the meantime. On the.
In a dozen places and gleaming with blood, her blood where she had bitten them, bitten almost through them in some places and he started to say, Lydia, Jesus ! what've you done? but he didn't really think there was a Lydia there anymore to talk to. Her teeth were grinding so hard he could actually hear them. Her pale blue eyes looked contaminated with red, twitching in their sockets like caged birds. And he did not even consider seizure, epilepsy or something, because the look on her face was.
He was doing now, ambling out the door. He pretended to study the overhead menu, like here was a dude with one real big appetite back for seconds and then moved up to the counter. It was only then he realized that there was nobody there. What the fuck's this? Break-time, bitches? The Man went by outside, siren wailing. About the sixth in the past hour. But the squad car wasn't stopping here and that was what counted. He tapped the call-bell for some service. Nobody home. Come on, he thought.
With something first, blood was dark and matted over his face and hair and lay in a ripe, blackening pool at the bottom of the tray. His mouth and eyes were open. Protruding from the mouth was what at first looked like a tongue engorged in size and split into long attenuated segments that curled down at the ends into the bright gore pooling from the stump of neck — but it wasn't a tongue, it was a hand severed at the wrist and shoved deep down his throat, just the fingers and knuckles visible.
He opened them again she was tying the cord around his privates — the one she used sometimes to lead him around the floor like a puppy, lapping at her heels. She had never used the cord in bed before. He wasn't sure he liked this game. And it was his money. "Mistress . . ." he said. "If you don't mind . . . I'd rather not . . .” She looked at him once. Then laughed. Then pulled the cord so hard he screamed. And kept on pulling until he had to arch his back to lift himself off the bed to.