Ghouljaw and Other Stories Read Online Free

now—new. Max felt the dull twinge of his headache re-emerge and change into something insistent and serious. The long fissure of pain, which began as a distraction, quickly transformed into a blurring throb. Gina slipped Max out of her and dropped down to her side, rolling on her back and pulling him over on top of her. Gina moaned coarsely as she reinserted his sex, grasping his buttocks and roughly urging him to resume.
    And now—through the fog of alcohol, smoke, and Ecstasy—he actually felt something, faintly tectonic, shift along his left temple. This time the pain was assertive and so significant that his thrusting ceased for a moment. Gina opened her eyes, scowling. “What?” she hissed, her chest rising and falling as she spoke. “Why’d you stop?—you didn’t come, did you?”
    Max shook his head, resuming his steady, but weak, plunges into the musky nexus between Gina’s thighs. The room wobbled again, and Max blinked back the pulsing pain coursing across his skull. His stomach hurt, and he was again struck with the image of that livid inky eel, writhing as it squirmed in the black coral of his midsection—keen only on freeing itself from his insides.
    Max looked down at Gina, who was suddenly no longer a beautiful girl but an emaciated hag, whose wiry frightwig hair fell over the pillow in a seaweedy mass. Her saggy breasts hung loose on her chest, under which the shadowy ridges of her ribcage her visible. Max flinched but the gaunt thing pulled him closer. He shuddered and closed his eyes; but when he looked again, she was an attractive, exotic girl again. “Don’t stop,” she breathed, “keep fucking.”
    Max fell forward, his spine was quaking, losing its shape—he convulsed, feeling muscles and bones begin to tremble, as if his entire body had suddenly become blackly obedient to the resonance of some unseen tuning fork.
    The room was rippling, the gyrating shapes and shadows flickered and spun on all sides like an aquatic cyclorama. The electric ache was close to unbearable, and Max sank down on top of Gina, whose raspy moans turned into a boggy wheezing in his pain-lashed mind. Max made one last effort to right himself. Darkness closed in as something inside—something ink-smeared and slick—tore itself free.
    Max woke to the sound of screaming and applauding. Lying on his stomach—cold, naked—he pried his eyes open and was met with a pervasive of numbness. The ache in his head had not subsided but had dulled a bit, as if it had spread itself evenly through his body. The room had, mercifully, ceased its watery wobble.
    “I’d get the fuck out of here if I were you,” Gina said from somewhere in the room.
    Max jerked up toward the voice, instantly regretting the movement. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. She had the sheet from the bed wrapped around her abdomen and was sitting cross-legged on the waist-high vanity, her back pressed directly against the oblong mirror, creating the illusion of two girls sitting back-to-back, like spinal Siamese twins. Her face briefly glowed orange as she took an agitated drag from a cigarette, her eyes glittering with nocturnal listlessness. The shouting and pounding music from downstairs continued to rattle the floor.
    Max wanted to ask what had happened. Instead, Gina spoke through an exhalation of smoke. “The condom broke.”
    Max, momentarily paralyzed, hesitated before reaching down and searching his groin. His fingers stopped, sensing the damage. “Jesus . . . Christ,” he mumbled, quickly shedding the torn piece of latex and flinging it, like a diseased piece of skin, to the floor.
    Through the inexplicable numbness and restless soreness coursing through his body, Max, sickly galvanized, scrambled, as best he could from the bed, searching the floor for his clothes and shoes. He heard cheering. “What’s happening down there?” he asked hoarsely, tugging on his jeans.
    “Sounds like Winston’s pissed off about something.”
    Max,