happy halloween
For whatever reason, up until now, I have tried to keep my personal journal and my fic self separate. After having a hard time tracking down all my fic recently (I gave up) I've decided to start using my journal in this way as well. I'm kind of embarassed and I don't really know why, but there it is. If you didn't know--yes, I write lesbian fanfiction. If you did know and you are awesome enough to enjoy reading it then this will make it easier for you.
Now, point of order... I wrote this little ditty for a Halloween challenge. It's a companion piece of sorts to a couple of stories, though neither has to be read to get this one but if you so desire further reading on the debauchery held within then please check out The Gambler by me and The Adventures of La Carmichaela and the Corona Kid by theholyinnocent
Author's Notes: An ode to Hunter S. Thompson who has impressed upon me how important it is to handle your drugs. And whose story's title--The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat--I riff. I'm sure he would also approve of episodic nature of drug use depicted here.
The Banshee Screams for Refried Beans
by heathers
“Two for the gorefest, darlin’.” Abbie slid a twenty onto the beat up card table. She held out her hand for a glow-in-the-dark stamp. Abbie grinned at her cohort as the rubber stamp rolled across her hand “G’wan give her your hand, Ben. Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”
Olivia Benson gave the toe-haired girl stamping hands the once over and then looked to the lanky Texan beside her giddy with an effusive energy, inspecting her own stamp. “I don’t know why this is necessary. Why would you need to go more than once?”
“Because it’s fun. Now tell me,” Abbie patted Olivia’s chest, “when exactly did you kill your inner child, Ben?”
“I don’t know, when did your inner child become so twisted? Maybe it killed mine.”
“So Halloween is better than Christmas for me.” Abbie shrugged. “That may make me a bit bent but I’m sure you knew that about me already now, didn’t you?” Abbie tilted her head and smiled lopsidedly.
Instinctively, Olivia smiled back. Abbie was always full of surprises so this year when she revealed that she was taking Olivia haunted house hunting, she railed against believing what that really meant. But now, standing in front of a gaggle of chatty teens, Olivia knew exactly what she had in mind: fake blood and body parts, cemetery scenes and roaming mad men. What it boiled down to was Olivia having to suffer through the maze of grotesque masquerading with Abbie, who was for reasons unknown, beside herself with excitement. Olivia, however, found herself wishing they had stopped for drinks before descending upon the first of what Abbie promised would be many, of these haunted houses that had starting popping up throughout the city this month.
Olivia offered her hand to the girl who had long since grown disinterested with their discussion. “Stamp away, kiddo.”
Five steps into the pitch black unknown Abbie was wrapped around Olivia’s arm squeezing like an anaconda. “This is gonna be great,” she whispered as if cozying up for a good movie. And Olivia could have sworn she bounced a little.
At that moment a strobe light started, flashing slow, steady bursts of white light blinding them as their eyes had already adjusted to the darkness. Steadily the flashes gained momentum until they reached seizure-inducing intensity. Olivia squinted at the scene before them. It was a tiled room smeared with blood, some of the tiles broken and falling from the walls, an operating table accommodated a prone figure with a vat of blood that sat on the floor beside it, body parts floating to the surface. Off in the corner a well camouflaged figure rose from the darkness and began to walk toward the small group Abbie and Olivia accompanied. Dressed as a patient rather than doctor, the figure raised an axe and advanced slowly, a low growl growing louder, the strobe flashing faster still. And then the axe came down on the figure-as it turned out to be the doctor-on the operating table, lopping off his leg at the knee. The leg fell from the table into the basin of blood and the amputee sat up and began to howl and spray blood everywhere. Soon the window dividing them from the scene was covered in blood but the howling of the wounded man persisted. The glass squeaked as the lunatic wiped a section of the window to peer out and, laughing manically, began to bang his forehead against the glass. The group screamed in unison, except for Abbie who laughed like she’d just heard a great joke as the others ran towards the next room.
Bringing up the rear, Abbie was still cackling when she goosed Olivia as they crossed the threshold of the next doorway, suddenly transported into the middle of a cemetery. Overgrown grass covered the floor, tangling around the gravestones, except where there was soil overturned in front of what Olivia presumed were fresh graves. Grab ass aside, a beer sure would make this experience more palatable, she thought.
A chorus of bats and owls was heard over the P.A. as they walked along a pathway through the cemetery. However, the lack of blood in the scene saw Abbie’s attention elsewhere.
“You know, Ben, random drug testing really is a fallacy.” Abbie chose this moment, surrounded by teenagers, to regale her with the reasons why heightening one’s experiences off the clock were none of big brother’s business. “Like the peyote in Mexico. That was top shelf-“
The pathway crunched as the group walked along when two arms shot out of the ground to their right. They clawed at the grass around the grave as another pair of arms to their left also tangled with its own sod. A coffin poised to be lowered into the ground in front of them squeaked as the lid was thrown open and the corpse began to rise. Three figures rose up from the background, faces in full decomp, chewing blood capsules and moaning for brains. Simultaneously the two clutching and clawing dirt dwellers were breaching the earth behind them with their grotesque, misshapen heads. At once they were crawling from their holes to join their undead companions, advancing on the group as they hastily retreated. Just then flash of black almost imperceptible and then again, this time accompanied by a blood-curdling scream filling the room and from above a mess of hair and fabric was seen as the banshee howled over top of them. Olivia jerked as Abbie jumped, though later Abbie would question who jumped first, but for the time being she was content to laugh enthusiastically, clapping as the rest of the group skittered away.
When they had rejoined the teens in the next room they found it dark again, though it was black lit, which meant it showed the fabric betrayal of Olivia’s black shirt, mottled with white fuzz.
“Nice shirt, Ben. You get that off the floor this morning?”
“No,” she muttered indignantly in spite of the fact that she had and brushed at her tits as if that would make a difference. Resigned she looked upon Abbie, whose teeth shone brightly in the black light. Confronted by this sight, Olivia laughed loudly eliciting Abbie to smile brighter, having deduced the true object of Olivia’s amusement.
In the black lit dimness of the room they could just make out the outline of a chair and a metal cap. Olivia stared at it and shook her head. Nah, couldn’t be. And then the sounds of electricity sparking filled the room. The lights came up to dim at best and sure enough it was an electric chair with someone strapped in it.
“Boring!” Olivia whispered into Abbie’s hair.
The executioner peered at them through the holes of his black mask as the prisoner struggled violently before the masked man finally threw the switch. The lights flickered dramatically, the prisoner convulsed and the room was alive with the hum of arcing electricity.
“Ah, Old Sparky,” she said wistfully, “makes a girl homesick.”
“So to recap: you’re for capital punishment and casual drug use?”
The prisoner began to foam at the mouth. On the scare-o-meter this room was nil to the detective and the lawyer. The designer teenage girls beside them however were hiding their faces in their jock boyfriend’s shoulders.
“Yes, I reckon I am.” She touched her thumbnail to her lip and considered this. “Except in the commission of a crime.”
“Of course.” Olivia sighed at the absurdity of her claim.
“You have to be responsible,” Abbie defended.
“Is this your way of telling me you want to drop E later?”
“No, I hadn’t thought of that, but now that you mention it… That idea has gen-u-ine fu-cking merit, Ben!”
Olivia shook her head and started to follow the group of high school kids as they proceeded to the next room. Abbie put a hand on either shoulder and bounced onto Olivia’s back, wrapping her lengthy legs around Olivia’s thighs. She wavered momentarily, adjusting to the weight and balance difference before stepping into the next room. One look at the scene before her and Olivia was suitably disillusioned.
“Now come on, this is just like work. And what’s fun about that?”
A room full of body bags, at least a dozen of them, the gurneys lined up six by six awaited them. The florescent light in the makeshift morgue hummed and flickered.
“Come on, Ben.” Abbie slid off Olivia’s back and once again teetered beside her. “The only drugs you’ve done is some pot in college-and who hasn’t, am I right?-and that fine-ass peyote in… Shit. Where was that?”
Olivia raised her eyebrows at the Texan. “Exhibit A.”
“Just a momentary lapse, I’m sure. But I know that you know that wherever that was you had a good time.”
Olivia thought back to the cerveza-infused, grunge-filled weeks in Mexico and had a number of other adjectives to describe their “holiday”. But the peyote they had eaten, button after disgustingly bitter button, in the middle of the Mexican wastelands had been not bad, though she’d never tell Abbie that. Not to mention the fact that she’d had a hangover that lasted a week after they’d come back to New York.
One of the bags jerked, a teen screamed and the other bags began to come alive. One after another they began sitting up, kicking, wiggling around before finally unzipping their bags to reveal the height of gore makeup they’d see thus far. A man with his brain exposed, blood running down his face stared at them with foggy, dead eyes; a female with a throat that had been slit, tissue ragged and raw around her wound; another man had been eviscerated, his innards pouring out of the bag as he moved, blood everywhere. A figure approached the group from the side: a surgeon dressed and prepped, though already covered in blood, he closed in on them snickering and dragging a thrashing body bag behind him. Olivia stared at him and despite Abbie’s warnings not to hurt anyone before they entered, she was daring him to touch her.
In Mexico it was Abbie that was entrenched in drunken battles. The very mention of The Alamo had started more than one taberna brawl so much so that Olivia had prejudiciously banned the topic for the rest of their trip. More than once Olivia was glad she had brought her piece to Mexico because it got them out of many a situation. Altercations aside, the beer flowed non-stop during their trip and the liquor polluted an otherwise pure beer buzz. That was until the peyote, of course.
They had rode burros to the middle of nowhere and spent three days camping as Abbie called it. Olivia, however, would have likened the experience to something well below roughing it. She might have even gone so far to say that they were homeless in the middle of the plains of Northern Mexico as they waited for the clandestine meeting with a Shaman and some peyote that would change their perceptions for days on end.
Olivia remembered watching as the Shaman trimmed the spines and cut away the buttons before offering them to Abbie. He then instructed her on how to harvest another cactus which she spent an hour fastidiously skinning as well. The Shaman left then, when night fell and the mescaline began to take hold. Olivia drew elaborate patterns in the sand with a stick as she fought the nausea that came before the high. And then as it subsided and her perceptions were perverted she made rock formations of rock formations believing she could be in both places at once and she stared in wonder at the beauty that had taken her on this trip into madness.
They danced naked by the fire, exploring each others belly buttons as they laughed at their supposed purpose. Later, when they were less jovial they made love beside it and later still watched rapt as the fire danced for them.
Lying on a woolen survival blanket, she was awestruck as the night skies transformed into a starry New York City skyline, the very one visible from her apartment as Abbie plucked at an old guitar she’d won in a poker game.
“I’m getting pretty good at this,” she proclaimed.
Olivia, enraptured by a can of beans bubbling on the fire, let her carry on. At first the plunking of the guitar was indistinguishable, notes sharp and flat, tempo all wrong and then Abbie had begun to sing, husky voice imbued with perfect pitch. Olivia was captivated. She always thought Abbie would be the type to sing Janis Joplin or Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette but she turned out to be quite wrong. The words slipped seductively from her mouth and there was no mistaking what they were.
“Long ago and oh so far away / I fell in love with you before the second show / Your guitar-“
Abbie riffed on the beat up guitar and whipped her hair out of her face. Abbie was singing The Carpenters and completely losing her mind in the process. Olivia paused momentarily, not knowing if she’d be mean to laugh or if laughing was expected in such altered states, not that it mattered because Abbie was oblivious to anything beyond her guitar. So Olivia had her laugh and then found herself once again completely seduced by Abbie’s showmanship and terrible guitar-playing.
By sun up she was still plucking away at that damn guitar and Olivia, plucking spines from a nearby cactus, was wishing she had said something around the time of “We’ve Only Just Begun” and long before “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” At least she was right about Tammy Wynette being in Abbie’s repertoire. And she was most pleased when the sun began to rise and Abbie finally set aside the wooden menace to look upon the most vibrant sunrise they had ever seen. Setting the tweezers down, Olivia’s sensory perception was flooded. Bright colors danced behind her eyelids when they were closed though her eyes burned from the sun’s rays when they were open, she was warmed by the dwindling fire beside her and chilled by an indistinguishable breeze. She felt dizzy and then, unlike anything she’d ever felt before. A moment later it happened; she arrived upon what could only be termed as enlightenment. In that moment, in a foreign land, dirt in her shoes and bra, everything in her life made sense and she felt for the first time utterly at peace. Abbie was sighing and humming alongside Olivia with fists of earth pouring from her hands and Olivia could only guess that she was also feeling the euphoria of satori.
Olivia made it to the next room of the haunted house without breaking anyone’s arm though still Abbie watched her knowingly. For its final act of gruesomeness, the funhouse delivered a four-hundred and fifty pound man sitting on a tiny stool that looked as if it might shatter into tinder. Surrounded by bloodied bodies and body parts, he gnawed on a human foot and laughed menacingly as he smacked his lips and licked his fingers. Olivia was now more than slightly disturbed. As the shirtless man smeared blood across his gluttonously broad chest and stomach Abbie bounced excitedly and cackled once more.
On the third day, as Olivia’s psychosis withdrew and reality became closer to what she knew before they once again mounted burros and set off towards town. The sun beat down on their backs and the dirt Olivia felt everywhere began to chafe. Abbie grew particularly distant in the peyote’s wake but Olivia was content to ride in silence.
Back at the hotel a lukewarm beer and shower did their best to wash the dirt from Olivia’s crevices. Lying in bed she took another swig from her long neck and looked upon the reason for her own madness. Naked from the waist up, Abbie toweled her long, dark hair.
“Well, Ben,” she finally spoke. “I don’t know about you but this just might become a mainstay for me. What d’ya say? Same time next year?”
Olivia got a little queasy at the thought. Companionship excluded, she was not sure if she could jump headlong into another adventure when she was still nursing a fractured psyche from the last one. “I don’t know, Abbie,” she muttered, rubbing her temples.
“That’s all you got for me, Ben? You don’t know? You can do better than that.”
“It’s just a little soon to be signing my sanity away, you know?”
Abbie’s long legs slinked toward her, hips perpetrating yet another crime as her navel arrived in front of Olivia. She gulped her beer.
“Now I’m disappointed,” Abbie pouted, stretching a long leg onto the bed and leaning over to touch Olivia’s hair. “I really thought we had a good time out there.”
“We did.” It was out of her mouth before her brain thought better of it.
“See, that’s what I thought. Abbie pushed her over with a perfectly arched bare foot and slid on top of Olivia to straddle her waist. “I couldn’t imagine how you didn’t have a good time when you were so… you know,” she smiled before plunging the proverbial knife deep, “excited.”
Olivia squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember why she was resisting in the first place. When she opened her eyes Abbie’s arms were on either side of her head, her eyes boring into Olivia’s.
“So what’s the hold up, then? You in or out?”
Olivia’s hips shifted with purpose and she was wide awake again. “I am definitely in,” she choked out.
“Good,” Abbie said into her ear, before taking her earlobe between her teeth. “I think this calls for a celebration.”
And like that she was awash in Abbie’s long, thick hair, secreting her away from the cruddy, dilapidated room that passed for hotel accommodations. From a campfire in the middle of the plains to a lumpy mattress in a border town, Olivia was beginning to get used to the stark turns of events in Abbie’s chaotic realm. Moreover she was beginning to realize that she had come to enjoy them. No, Olivia couldn’t complain about this adventure.
Emerging from the brownstone Olivia slipped into her jacket and inhaled deeply. The fresh air was a welcome change from the stale stench of the haunted house. Whether it was young panic or teen spirit it was hard to say, but the crisp October air was just what the deranged surgeon ordered. Abbie skipped down the steps like a schoolgirl until she got to the bottom and, hand on her hips, declared:
“Talk about amateur night. I still need my fix.” Abbie paced, pondering this briefly. “That’s it,” she snapped her fingers and pointed at Olivia, “we’re going to Blood Manor. You up for it, Ben?”
Olivia smiled as she had so many times before, lopsided and appreciative. “Lead the way.”