Searching Pandora’s eyes for signs of compassion or a moment of vulnerability, and discovering only dead pools of festering resentment instead, Bvrenda felt a hot tear roll down her cheek. The moment of silence between them was a silent requiem for the child that Pandora never truly was, but had learned to pretend to be at Bvrenda’s house. Because Pandora had never been allowed to be a real child. She had never been allowed to be vulnerable, or to have needs, or to become lost in her imagination, or ever even been truly loved. All she had ever known was how to be used like a prop, or an extension of her parents’ malignant egos. Brvenda had been an enigma to her as someone who didn’t try to take anything from her, who anticipated goodness from strangers, and hadn’t been psychically scarred by rape or being forced to kill her own pets to prove her devotion to the Temple of Set on pagan holidays.
Pandora broke the pregnant moment of silence with her acidic cynicism. “So you’ve come here to save my soul!” She crowed, mockingly.
“I can’t save you, Mandy.” Bvrenda answered.
“I don’t need you to save me.” Pandora assured her. “I’ve got everything under control.”
“I can’t save you because you’re already dead.” Bvrenda continued, knowing, in her heart, that the words she was saying were sad and true. “I realize now that you’ve been dead for a long time. I just refused to see it. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to. I wish I had seen it sooner. Maybe I could have helped you. But it’s too late now. I’m sorry.” And she meant it.
Mandy bayed in shuddering uncontrollable fits of cruel, cacophonous laughter. As her laughter rose like smoke and echoed throughout the moldy room, something appeared to burrow in her bloated and distended belly, as if she were pregnant and about to give birth to a bucket of snakes. Bvrenda shrieked and stepped back, mesmerized by the horror unfolding before her. Pandora didn’t seem to care. She was too consumed with hatred to sweat the small stuff anymore. She was high on evil. It didn’t matter that it was literally eating her alive.
Dumbfounded, Bvrenda stared ahead with disbelief as she saw the distinct impression of a swastika appear, spreading out from the Pandora’s protruding belly, etching its way radially across her flesh like the legs of a spider that had grown out of a scare. The swastika twisted and morphed into a hideous face. The disfigured face looked almost like a man asphyxiating under a plastic bag, gasping for air. But this bag was made of human flesh. And through that flesh, cut crustacean claws, turning Pandora’s ardent laughter almost instantaneously into screams of traumatized amazement and excruciating travail, which only became more magnified and heart wrenching as the demon began to rip and shred it’s way out of her body, a ghoul infant delivering itself into the world by way of a spontaneous and deadly cesarean section.
Blood and viscera splattered all over the incredulous expression on Bvrenda’s face as the monster burst forth violently into the room like a jack in the box clown from Satan’s toy box. The face that ejected from the eviscerated remains of Mandy’s dead carcass reminded Brvenda of the evil clown that had always plagued her nightmares and given her so many sleepless nights, waiting for the sun to rise. Spreading its lips into a wide crocodile smile, the creature barred a mouth full of blood-crusted fangs, dripping with venom. As the creature hissed and continued to force it’s way out of the womb that had unwittingly harbored its foul incubation, it slithered onto the floor with its giant lobster’s claws, and gnashing its teeth, lapped up the entrails of its former host with a forked tongue longer than a bull whip resembling a giant black eel. As it greedily ingested Mandy’s entrails, it grew in titanic fits, amplifying it’s strength and size exponentially until it towered over Bvrenda and dwarfed the room, practically bursting through the walls and the ceiling.
The creature’s abdomen and hindquarters were similar to that of a Jurassic earwig, with a long slimy tail punctuated by two deadly pinchers, sharp as metal shears. In a panic, Bvrenda tried desperately to fly back up the stairs, but before she could make a get away, the demon lunged at her with it’s outstretched claws snapping at her like enormous bear traps, forcing her to duck, roll and cover, blocking her only plausible escape route back up the stairs. Just when she thought she was momentarily safe from the monster’s claws, a flick of its tail nearly crushed her like a whip swatting a fly. She dodged the blow and managed to dive to safety just in the nick of time to avoid being snatched up by the razor sharp pinchers that came groping for her on the blood soaked floor.
Bvrenda wanted to scream, but caught herself just as the face of the monster suddenly thrust itself seemingly out of nowhere straight into wide open eyes. She found herself face to face, staring directly into the monster’s two hypnotically spiraling red iris’s with overly enlarged pupils and blood shot whites that were stained the color of clouded urine. Those eyes! She knew those eyes only too well! They were the eyes that had haunted her nightmares and taunted her waking hours for as many years as she had known the Pinkertons. They were the gacked out bat shit crazy eyes of Uncle Rex! Upon this harrowing epiphany, her ears were filled with the sadistic echoes of Uncle Rex chortling fiendishly to himself at her baffled expression! His signature Cheshire grin and psychotic cross-eyed gaze locked onto her like a tractor beam. He licked his lips with his black forked tongue and beckoned hungrily to Bvrenda in a grating voice that sounded like rot gut whiskey straight up, “Come here, little girl. You got a pretty little mouth!” He drawled, steaming her face with nearly deadly halitosis that could have stripped paint right off a car.
Bvrenda had abandoned all hope of flight. Uncle Rex’s taunting laughter at her dazed expression like a deer caught in the headlights held her spellbound and at bay. But it also fueled her blind ambition to fight! Proving that there is nothing more dangerous than a girl with nothing to lose, Bvrenda gritted her teeth with volcanic rage. She secured her death grip on the ice-cold knife in her hand, where it burned with a holy light, turning her arm to flame. Closing her eyes, all she could see was Durga! All she could hear was Durga! Everything was Durga!
Fearlessly, she pounced into the air and soared like an eagle with her knife aimed at the beast’s throat without a care in the world for whether or not she lived or died. All that flashed through her mind were the words, “KILL! KILL! KILL!” Blindly, Bvrenda plunged the knife deep into the demon’s neck, and with a sudden surge superhuman strength she beheaded the cruel beast with her vorpal blade in one singularly frabjous snicker snack! All the while she chanted until she was almost screaming at the top of her lungs, “OM DUM DURGAYEI NAMAHA…” The lion in her heart roared, and the goddess was pleased.
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