The Birth of Athena: Redux

[Written with Peter Tennant and published in Sein und Werden]

'Christ, you've really gone and done it!'
'Yes, I've really done it,' said George, with a hint of pride in his voice.
He had been relentless with the lump hammer, striking his father so many times on the head that he had lost count of the damning blows, all the long years of humiliation and bitterness finally expunged in one moment of unparalleled ferocity. And afterwards, when his father lay on the carpet with a strange gunge oozing from somewhere inside his caved-in head, George had felt no remorse, just an overwhelming sense of closure, relief that at last he had settled things with the miserable bastard, would never again have to listen to that whining voice finding fault and picking away at his life until it all began to unravel.
'How come he's naked?' asked Cindy.
George shrugged. 'I thought I'd cut him up into little pieces and stash them in bin bags. You know, like all those psychos do on the telly.'
Cindy laughed. 'Neat.'
But after stripping his father George had developed cold feet, the shock of what he had done descending on his befuddled brain like a dark cloud. He had sought out the bottle of Bells that lurked at the back of the drinks cabinet, greeting it like an old friend. For a full half hour he had caressed that glass receptacle and sucked mother courage from its liquid contents, before ringing Cindy and confessing all. She had rushed round to his house straight away.
'He started on at me the minute I got in from work,' said George. 'On and on and on. I just couldn't take it any more. I had my tool bag in my hand. I took out the hammer and...'
Cindy patted his arm. 'You don't have to justify yourself to me, George. The old shit deserved it. I'm glad that he's dead.'
Cindy had never liked George's father. He had made no bones about the fact that he didn't think a hairdresser was good enough for his son, an opinion that hadn't prevented the dirty old sod from making his own leering suggestions whenever George had left the two of them alone together.
'Come on. Let's get him in his chair.'
'What for?' asked George.
'You'll see.' Cindy smiled enigmatically.
Together the two of them manhandled the corpse into the leather backed armchair that in life had been the throne from which he had ruled his shrunken kingdom. Humming, Cindy began to gyrate in front of him, swaying seductively from side to side. Her hand snaked down to the buttons at the side of her leather mini-skirt and she plucked them undone, allowing the garment to slowly glide down her long shapely legs.
'Cindy!'
She giggled. 'The old bastard always said he wanted to see me naked. Well now he can.'
'Cindy, I don't think...'
The words died in George's throat. He watched in amazement as Cindy did a slow striptease and danced naked in front of his father's corpse, caressing herself all over and thrusting her hips at him, stroking down between her legs and sighing with pleasure. Against his will he felt himself becoming aroused by this bizarre floor show, the juxtaposition of Cindy's young, vibrant body and his father's lifeless husk acting as a powerful aphrodisiac.
Cindy swayed over to him and unzipped his jeans. Her fingers pried loose his swollen cock and peeled back the foreskin. Grinning she slid down his front, rubbing her breasts against his cock and then taking him into her mouth, working him expertly with her lips and tongue.
'Oh God!'
George waited until he felt the moment of crisis approaching and then pulled free of her moist caress. He put his hands on her shoulders and tried to press her down to the floor, but Cindy shook her head.
Wordlessly she got to her feet, took George by the hand and led him over to where his father sat, watching them with his vacant eyes. She bent over and took hold of the chair's arms, bracing herself, legs parted in silent invitation, her face only inches away from his father's smashed and bloody visage. George clasped her hips and slipped his cock into her sopping wet cunt, no longer concerned with the propriety of what they were doing, indifferent to everything except his burning need.
Cindy began to moan with pleasure as he pumped away at her. When she came she would be gasping right into his father's face. George grinned at the idea of such a thing and swelled even bigger inside of her. Cindy's cunt tightened its grip on his cock, like a hand jerking him off.
George looked up over her shoulder and saw his father watching. He winked at the old bastard. His father had been a genius, for all the good it had done him, a professor of Greek mythology, widely recognised as the leading expert in his field, though perhaps a little too unorthodox in his thinking to win the acclaim he had always regarded as his right. George's own aspirations amounted to nothing more than to be a humble garage mechanic, and his lack of interest in scholarly matters had been a constant source of friction between them, one of many. Well now his father was dead and George was fucking a beautiful young girl in front of his corpse, which said it all for academic achievement as far as George was concerned.
George buried his face between Cindy's shoulder blades, rubbing his stubble against her skin, licking the sweat from her back. The room was silent except for their soft moans of pleasure and the sound of flesh slapping against flesh.
And then he climaxed. The feeling was so blindingly intense and euphoric. It felt as if his innards had been wrenched out through the tip of his penis. Cindy was screaming, her whole body trembling with the strength of the emotion she was experiencing. He tried to keep inside her, but she released her grip on his already softening cock and wriggled free.
'He moved!'
'What?'
'He moved!' shrieked Cindy, her voice teetering on the edge of hysteria. 'He's alive, George! Your dad's alive!'
George stepped back and put a reassuring hand round Cindy's waist. She clasped him in return with a strength born out of desperation, like a leaf clinging to the branch of a tree in a high wind. The two of them gazed at the dead man and George's eyes grew wide with disbelief. Cindy was right. His father was moving, slowly stirring in his chair, miraculously brought back to life like a zombie in some cheesy horror flick. If he had ever been dead in the first place... The idea that he had fucked Cindy while his father watched appalled him.
'Shit!' expostulated George. 'This can't be happening!'
But it was. The old man slumped forward in the chair and his hands began to move, waving from side to side, tracing strange patterns in the air. George watched him as if mesmerised. The whole scene had a feeling of unreality to it, some sort of weird hallucination induced by a combination of shock and too much alcohol. He expected to wake up at any moment.
'What's he saying?' asked Cindy. Her nails dug into George's side, hurting him through the flimsy material of his t-shirt.
His father's mouth had slewed open and he was making some strange noise, like chanting. George leaned closer and tried to pick up the sense of it, but the only word he recognised was 'Athena.'
'Some Greek shit,' he said, some of his previous sang-froid reasserting itself. It was just like the stupid old fart to start rabbiting on about the gods and stuff, even as he was dying. 'I don't know what the fuck it means. He's just babbling. Fuck! He should be dead!'
The whole thing was turning into some crazy farce. He just wanted it to end, to be over and done with.
George looked at Cindy, wondering if she had any idea what they should do, but she was oblivious to his inquiring glance. Her eyes were locked on a certain part of his father's anatomy, face screwed up in an expression that was as much grimace as smile.
'The dirty old bastard's got a hard-on,' she said, and began to titter like a schoolgirl who'd had one lager shandy too many. 'Why George, it's bigger than yours.'
'Shit!'
George looked at the inflamed cock jutting up from between his father's thighs, but only for a moment as he couldn't bear to leave his gaze on that thing. Cindy had raised a hand to her mouth and was trying to stop up her obvious hilarity. George glared at her, a cold rage taking hold of him. He felt angry with Cindy, angry with himself and angry with the world, but most of all he felt angry with his father. It seemed as if, even in death, the old bastard was still putting him down, still making him feel inadequate.
Looking back, George could remember very little of what had occurred next. It seemed to take place in some kind of alcoholic haze, so unreal that he believed he could have dreamt the whole episode. His memory could only call to mind snatches of what had happened, isolated images of violence and blood frenzy. Him grabbing the lump hammer again, that heavy object smashing down on his father's head, over and over, pounding his father's brain to a pink gruel, grinding the bone of his skull down to a fine powder, Cindy crying and laughing at the same time, as if she couldn't decide which was the appropriate response. And then, according to what Cindy told him later, though he had no recollection of the deed, he had raced into the kitchen and returned with the largest bread knife he could find and made sure that his father would never taunt him with an erection again. Never.
'Fuck!'
He did recall saying that. The word had a sense of finality to it, like the clapperboard slamming shut at the end of a scene in a movie.
'Do you think he's dead this time?' asked Cindy, reaching for her clothes.
George didn't reply. He was staring at his father's corpse, a thousand thoughts racing through his head as he tried to make some sort of sense out of what had happened. Clutched in his right hand, slick with gore, were his father's severed genitals.
'George!' said Cindy, her voice close to breaking. She grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him hard. 'George, snap out of it. We have to get away from here.'
George opened his mouth to scream, jaws stretched wide, but before any sound could emerge Cindy slapped him round the face.
'Come on, you stupid fuck. Get with it!'
'Get with it,' repeated George and laughed. Inside his head the blood haze was dissipating and everything was becoming clear again He knew exactly what they had to do.
'Get dressed,' he said. 'There's somewhere we have to go.'
George played the torch beam over the gravestones, bringing it to rest on one that had a familiar name.
'Hello mum,' he said and knelt reverently next to the stone.
Cindy giggled and he gave her a filthy look.
'Shut the fuck up Cindy!'
Her face crumpled at once and George felt a little bit ashamed for speaking to her so harshly. Cindy had been a brick, he couldn't have asked any more from her. He understood that she was only giggling because she was scared. He was still shaking himself, still feeling feverish after the brutal events of the night, so it was no wonder Cindy was having difficulty coping, especially now when, on top of everything else, he'd dragged her off to a cemetery in the middle of the night.
'Mum, I know I haven't come here as often as I should.'
George tried to conjure up an image of his mother, a face to which he could address what he needed to say, but it wouldn't come. His mother had died in mysterious circumstances while he was very young and George couldn't remember her; he had nothing except some vague impression of feeling loved and warm and safe, and an overwhelming sense of loss. People had told him that she had been a great beauty, a Greek woman his father had met and fallen in love with while attending a conference in Athens. His father had never spoken about her and kept no photographs to remind him of what he had lost, but George had heard whispers among his relatives to the effect that his father had treated her badly, been abusive and violent, slept with other women. There was the suspicion, never clearly voiced but there all the same, that she had taken her own life, driven to such a desperate remedy by his father's neglect.
'Mum,' said George, 'I never really knew you, but I've always loved you and I always will. If you'd lived we might have been friends, but that wasn't to be. I know that he, dad I mean, didn't treat you very well, but I've paid him back for all of the pain he caused us both.'
George plucked the dirty stone vase out of the earth and emptied its contents, foul smelling water and half a dozen long dead carnations. He prised loose the metal top and ran his thumb round the inside of the stone, peeling off a thick encrustation of dirt and dead worms.
Cindy knelt beside him and unwrapped the bundle of newspaper they had brought with them. George shone his torch over the bundle's contents, his father's genitals.
'Not so impressive now, is it?' said Cindy, and George laughed, glad of an excuse to let go of some of the tension he was feeling.
'These are for you mum,' he said and carefully pushed the bloody lumps of meat down inside the stone vase, then replaced the metal top and put the whole ensemble back in its rightful place on his mother's grave.
'Goodbye mum. I don't suppose I'll be back here, but I'll always remember you.'
Cindy took his arm and they walked away, picking a path through the gravestones.
'I want children,' said George. 'But not yet. Not this child. We're still young. There'll be time for a family later.'
'I'm not having an abortion.'
'But...'
'No George. There's nothing more to be said. I'm having this child and that's the end of it.'
Cindy turned on her side in a huff, presenting her naked back and drawing as far away from him as she could get in the big double bed.
'Honey,' said George. He tentatively ran his hand down the length of her spine and cupped her buttocks, but when he tried to slip a finger between her thighs Cindy's legs were firmly closed against him.
'I'm tired,' she said in a sullen tone of voice that George had come to recognise all too well over the past few weeks.
George sighed and reached over to the lamp beside the bed, plunging the room into darkness with a flick of the switch. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling, studying the murky patterns cast by the streetlights and traffic passing by on the road outside, trying to understand all that had happened in his life recently and fathom out why it was that he now felt so threatened.
His mind cast back to the fateful night, over five months ago now, that he had killed his father. At Cindy's suggestion he had turned on all the gas outlets in the house, so the building would be filled with fumes and transformed into a powder keg needing only a spark to set it alight. That spark would be supplied at six o'clock in the morning when the timer on the central heating kicked in and blew the house and its occupant to kingdom come, destroying all evidence of the terrible nature of his crime. Always distrustful of banks and other financial institutions, his father had kept a great deal of money hidden about the house. They had put together a sum in excess of five thousand pounds, then stolen a car and drove south, a modern day Bonnie and Clyde off in search of new adventure, leaving their old selves far behind.
Full of optimism they had finally come to rest in Brighton, finding lodgings in a cheap boarding house the proverbial stone's throw away from the seafront. They'd changed their names and dyed their hair. George had grown a beard, a small goatee that he thought gave him a certain raffish charm. He'd found bar work, and Cindy, perhaps inspired by her impromptu performance for his father, had taken up a new career as an exotic dancer. It was work she appeared to have a talent for and paid seven or eight times as much as she'd earned as a hairdresser. George hadn't been happy at first with the idea of loads of dirty old men ogling his girlfriend, but once he'd seen Cindy strut her stuff a few times he became reconciled to it. After all, the other men could only look. He was the one who got to touch her, to do all the things those sad wankers could only dream about.
Things were going really well for them. If it hadn't been for the baby life would have been perfect. No, that wasn't quite true, thought George. There were other things that bothered him, all of them going back to that night. Now that he looked back at it all with a calm head, so much that had taken place made no sense whatever, was just plain madness. Not killing his father; that at least made perfect sense. The old bastard had had it coming to him for a long time, no doubt about it. It was almost as if he had driven George to do it. But the other things, such as fucking Cindy right there and then in front of the corpse, that was insane, something he could never figure himself doing, but there was no denying that he had, or that Cindy had encouraged him. And taking his father's genitals to his mother's grave. Why had he done that? To George it made no sense, though at the time it had seemed like the only thing to do. Almost as if he had been acting under some terrible compulsion. And he'd been sure that his father had been dead. The old man's head had been completely caved in. There was no way he should have come round and started chanting the way he had.
The really strange thing though was that nothing about his father's death had appeared in the papers or on the TV. The house should have exploded, or if not the body would have been found. George had expected to become the subject of a nationwide police manhunt as soon as the story broke, but there had been nothing, as if none of it had taken place except in his own head.
Cindy had rolled over onto her back, her breathing gone deep and regular. George reached out to touch her, but then noticed the bulge of her belly and pulled his hand away as if afraid of infection. Lots of men liked to see their women with a fuller figure. At the club where Cindy danced her popularity with the punters had soared since her condition became evident, and the manager had told her that she could stay on as long as she wanted. For George though Cindy's rounded belly was the outward sign of all that had gone so badly wrong for them.
The baby. It was the baby that worried him most of all. Cindy should not have been pregnant. He had always been careful about using a condom whenever they made love. For as long as he could remember George had had a morbid fear of unprotected sex, with its risk of contracting some terrible disease. The only time he had ever had sex without using a condom was the night he had killed his father, and he could not imagine what had possessed him to do such a thing, to act so out of character. He could not believe that Cindy had been with anyone else, and so the child had to have been conceived on that night. Lurking at the back of his mind was the idea that somehow the child was not his but his father's, that somehow his father's sperm had impregnated Cindy. The old man had had an erection. What if he had ejaculated? What if his sperm had got into Cindy's vagina? Cindy had repeatedly assured him that such a thing was impossible, and George knew that she was right, but for all of that his fears remained to torment him, a gnawing doubt that would poison their lives together and in time surely drive them apart. George saw the baby as a rival, an enemy intent on his destruction. He would give anything to have Cindy abort it, but she stubbornly refused.
Naked except for a sequined g-string, Cindy moved between the tables, her body swaying sensuously in time to the music, long blonde hair whipping from side to side, always remaining tantalisingly just out of range of the eager hands that reached out to her. George sat in the shadows at the back of the club and watched her perform, a broad grin on his face.
The pounding bongo drums picked up their tempo and Cindy's body shook faster in response, becoming a blur of suntanned flesh and blonde hair. The men in the audience whooped with appreciation as she tore off the g-string and flung it into their midst. George rubbed at his temples; the incessant drumbeat was giving him a splitting headache.
With a sweep of her arm Cindy cleared the top of one table, dashing bottles and glasses and ashtrays to the floor, startled customers leaping out of their chairs to avoid getting hit. Lithely she jumped up on to the wooden surface and lasciviously gyrated, while the men clustered around the table and stared up at her, their mouths hanging open in amazement. She crouched down, putting her hands between her thighs and slowly parting them, giving everyone a look at her most secret places, letting them see pink. George blinked once, and then again, not sure if he could believe his own eyes. Between her legs there was nothing; no neatly trimmed pubic triangle, no moistly glistening labia, just smooth skin where her cunt should have been. He staggered to his feet, head hurting with the non-stop jungle beat.
Cindy had sunk down onto her back. She was lying stretched out on the top of the table, hands gripping on to its sides, her body arched, and the men were standing all around her, grunting and snuffling like pigs with their snouts in a trough. George walked towards them like a somnambulist. He hadn't realised before, but the men were all naked, their skin pale white and riddled with black spots, as if they were made of mouldy cheese. There were dozens of them and they surrounded the table, hiding Cindy from view. George pushed through their ranks, instinctively recoiling from contact with their soft, squishy bodies.
Cindy lay there, a look of ecstasy on her face. Her body had been split open from just above the pubic bone to below the breast. It was as if taloned fingers had been plunged into her midriff and prised the flesh apart, leaving a gaping cavity that was filled with red and white liquid. The men closest to her were masturbating, frantically rubbing their cocks and shooting their come into Cindy's open womb, filling her up with their seed. As each one climaxed another pushed forward to take his place. Each of them had the face of George's father.
George clutched at his head. It felt like it was splitting open. He lurched forward, trying to protect Cindy with his own body, to prevent them ejaculating over her. His arms sank up to the elbow into the red and white liquid, a gruel formed from blood and seminal fluid. It felt warm and thick, like frog spawn between his fingers. He raised one hand and examined what it held, something that resembled an egg yolk. It trickled between his fingers. He caught it back up again and lifted it to his mouth. It tasted oily on his tongue and went down his throat like swallowing an immense globule of snot. The drums continued to beat, louder and louder, until their sound filled his whole world and he clutched at his head, screamed and...
Woke, covered in sweat, the drums still pounding away, his head splitting. Coloured dots swam before his eyes and then coalesced to assume recognisable shapes. The familiar surroundings of his bedroom formed around him, emerging out of the kaleidoscopic confusion. Someone had turned on the big overhead light and the room was ablaze with hundred watt illumination.
George sat up in bed, panting for breath. There was some obstruction in his throat, something like a fishbone, and he coughed hard to dislodge it, sending the object, whatever it was, slithering down into his stomach. He clutched at his aching head. Half a dozen strands of hair came away in his hand. There were dozens more lying on the pillow where his head had been. A trickle of blood ran down his forehead and into his eyes. He wiped it away with the flat of his hand and then recoiled in horror. His hands were stained a deep carmine, covered in a thick coat of gore.
'Cindy!'
She didn't answer. She lay motionless in the bed next to him, her vacant eyes staring up at the ceiling and her mouth open in a rictus grin of death. The sheet over her midriff was bright scarlet, soaked through with blood.
'Oh God! No! No!'
Tentatively George reached out and took hold of a corner of the sheet. It was still wet to the touch. Feeling sick he peeled the sodden material back, exposing his girlfriend's body, shrinking away from the horrendous sight that met his eyes. Cindy's stomach had been sliced open, leaving a hideous gash that, seen side on, reminded him of nothing so much as a mouth gaping wide in a silent scream of terror. He looked at her only for an instant, long enough to see bloodied entrails churning in that dark cavity, and then turned aside.
The walls of the room seemed to be pulsing with an unnatural life of their own, closing in on him. George tumbled out of bed and staggered to the door. He had no idea what was happening, knew only that he had to get out of that room of death and away from the hellish sight of Cindy's butchered flesh. His head ached so much that he was incapable of coherent thought.
Hands on either side of his throbbing skull, George escaped to the safety of the living room, taking comfort in its darkness. He wandered aimlessly, knocking up against one piece of furniture and then another, like a silver metal globe on a pinball table, convinced that all he was experiencing was just a dream, a nightmare from which he would surely awake. And then he paused for a moment in his dazed perambulations and sniffed the air, like a hunting beast scenting fresh prey. The flat was filled with an unfamiliar smell, the cloying odour of something burning, of meat charred beyond all hope of consumption.
The smell seemed to be coming from the direction of the kitchen. The kitchen door stood slightly ajar, a sliver of light showing through the crack. George could hear something sizzling on the other side of that wooden barrier. He paused a moment, summoning up whatever reserves of courage were still left to him, and then pushed the door wide, dreading what he would find.
A cloud of acrid smoke billowed out to greet him. George stepped into the kitchen, one hand raised to his mouth to block out the choking fumes and the other waving in the air to disperse them. The smoke was coming from a frying pan on the stove. George pulled it off the glowing hob and looked down at the contents, a thick scum of grease that hissed and spat, and floating in the middle of it clots of some black, viscous material, like oil on top of water.
Against his will George's eyes wandered round the room, coming to rest on the table in the corner where he and Cindy ate all their meals. A place was set for one, dirty knife and fork on either side of a plate. He stepped closer, holding his breath. In the middle of the plate was something small and black, a lump of meat that might have been charred liver, shot through with tubercles and whitely glistening slivers of bone, awash in a pool of red liquid that resembled human blood. Whatever it was appeared to have been partially consumed. George peered closer and he could see teeth marks in the remains.
He prodded the foodstuff with the tip of his fingers, repelled by the greasy feel of it, like congealed egg yolk. Involuntarily he remembered his dream, the thing he had consumed, and crowding into his head came another memory, something he had barely registered at the time, the ghastly image of Cindy's womb, from which the foetus had been removed like a rotten tooth torn out of a diseased gum.
'Oh God!'
George wanted to scream but his lungs felt suddenly compressed and he ran from the kitchen, his head throbbing as if it was about to split open, the desire to vomit unravelling his guts. He stumbled into the bathroom, grabbing at the light switch as he passed by, and fell to his knees in front of the toilet bowl, flinging up the lid and gripping the cool porcelain with his hands. He was perspiring profusely, his whole body trembling in a violent fit of some kind. He found it difficult to breathe and his heart was thumping in his chest. The desire to vomit was an overwhelming need, but produced nothing more than a feeble bout of retching, streamers of blood streaked bile and spittle hitting the back of the bowl. Still coughing up sputum George gazed through tear filled eyes at the stained white porcelain and the clear liquid pool buried in its depths, from which a grotesque reflection stared back up at him.
Not believing what he saw, George regained his feet and stood with shaking legs in front of the mirror above the sink. He flinched at the sight that met his eyes. All his hair had fallen out except for a few odd clumps dotted here and there about his scalp. Even his beard had gone. His nearly bald skull was covered in a network of cracks, which were steadily increasing in size and number as each second went by, forming a tracery of blood across the top of his head, almost like a hairnet. It was as if something was trying to break free from inside his throbbing head, as if his fevered brain had swollen to such proportions that his skull could no longer contain it.
A lightning bolt of pain tore across his forehead. George yelled and instinctively raised a hand up to his face. His vision was obscured as blood filled his right eye. Holding the sink for support George bent closer to the mirror and used his fingers to pry apart his eyelids. It looked as if a crimson dam had burst behind his retina. Bloody streamers were running down his cheek and the eyeball seemed to be bulging unnaturally. There was a foreign body lodged in the corner of his eye, a lump of grit or something. George peered closer and then gasped with shock. Poking out from behind his eyeball was what appeared to be a small, perfectly formed human finger.
The image of his father filled George's head, the old man sitting there in his chair, his body broken beyond all hope of repair and the light of madness gleaming in his eyes, eyes that should have been devoid of all life. 'Athena.' He mumbled the word, scarcely aware of what he was saying, the pain excruciating as the cracks on his head spread more rapidly than ever before, like fault lines racing across a dry desert floor.
George screamed as chunks of skin and brain and bone flew in all directions. And the last sound that he heard was the plaintive cry of a tiny newborn voice.