A R C   T A N G E N T  
 LITTLE DEATH  
 
 N 


obody's sure who started the awful thing that happened in Sleepy Willow Cemetery, but I have reason to believe it was Mrs. Emmaline Pride. You see, Mrs. Pride was ninety-two years old, and since her heart had gotten pretty weak, and her children never brought her grandbabies home to visit, and she was terrible bored with Reverend Murcheson's sermons, she had taken to her deathbed. Well, one afternoon a couple of the widow ladies from Sleepy Willow Methodist were sitting death-watch with her, and just as Mrs. Pride --who seemed awfully spry for a dying woman-- was about to pass on a bit of gossip about who planted the baby in little Amy Gurtner's belly, she choked on one of her own hostess cookies, died, and went to Hell.

Now, there's some debate about the why of it, but most people seem to think Mrs. Pride earned her ticket downstairs by breaking a couple of commandments with old Dan Peyser back when she was just a girl. The story goes that Dan's daddy loaned him to Emmaline's daddy Emmett to help bring in a crop of wheat, and that Dan encountered young Emmaline in the barn one evening. Emmaline was an early bloomer and had herself the kind of shape makes men think with their hands, and Dan was said to sport a twelve-inch dick with an oversized knob on top the size and color of a ripe beefsteak tomato, so Dan and Emmaline decided to celebrate their natural talents by climbing up to the hayloft for three falls, no time limit.

Thing is, while Emmaline was on her hands and knees with her nipples scraping the hay and Dan churning her butter from behind, he gave her an overly enthusiastic poke and she fell out of the hayloft. Before they could disconnect, though, Dan squeezed his ass-cheeks together, which swelled the head of his pecker near to the size of a grapefruit, and it stuck tight in Emmaline's pussy and stopped her fall. Dan just laughed, snagged hold of her ankles, and went right on polishing her pipes, which is why, when old Emmett came into the barn a minute later, he found his darling daughter dangling upside-down from the loft, moaning crazily and chewing her own nipples while Dan juked her out like a post-hole digger.

Emmaline was a quick thinker, though, and when she noticed her daddy standing there bug-eyed, she managed, between groans of pleasure, to stammer the word "rape", which spurred Emmett into vengeful action. He dashed out of the barn, scooted up the ladder outside, climbed into the loft behind Dan, and sheared the top of Dan's head right off with a rusty shovel.

Dan's final heroic act was to pitch a massive pelvic spasm that hoisted Emmaline up by her pussy, flung her back over his head into the loft like a rag doll (with a small thunderclap of broken suction as their genitals regretfully parted company), and splattered her head-to-toe with one last, prodigious load of procreative gravy. Then he grinned back at her with his brains dribbling down his shattered forehead, said, "You're the best, baby girl," gave a rakish little salute, and keeled off the edge of the loft, deader than Elvis.

   
 
 A 


nd that's why Mrs. Emmaline Pride found herself standing stark naked on Hell's doorstep with cookie crumbs on her bosom. She looked around for a moment, didn't see any way out of the cave, shrugged in resignation, and pushed the doorbell, which tipped over a candlestick, which set fire to a string, which broke, releasing a bowling ball, which rumbled down a chute and dropped onto an old-fashioned fireplace bellows, which blew ninety-nine unhappy yellowjackets up Adolf Hitler's ass.

After the shrieking died down a bit, the door opened and Mrs. Pride found herself eye to eye with both Beelzebub (who was seven feet tall, red as the pecker she'd rode in on, and horned like a goat), and his permanent erection (which was as long and thick as one of his arms and thus hovered, drooling, a few inches in front of his pointy chin). "Afternoon, Mrs. Pride," Beelzebub said, "Step on inside and we'll have ourselves some tea and cookies."

Following him up the hallway, Mrs. Pride couldn't help but notice the way the Prince of Evil's dick kept thumping him on the chin as he walked. When he'd finally escorted her into a proper little sitting room and they'd occupied chairs on opposite sides of a steaming tea-kettle and a plate of sugar cookies, she gestured at the ridiculously intrusive organ wobbling gently in front of his face, blushed at her own brashness, and asked, "Isn't that thing a bit uncomfortable?"

Beelzebub smiled until the corners of his mouth tucked themselves behind his earlobes. "You tell me," he said, and leaping up, he threw Mrs. Pride over the back of her chair, plunged his Promethean root into her pussy, tucked a tea bag up her butthole, and reached for the kettle.

"Wait," Mrs. Pride groaned as the relentless piston of demonic gristle compacted her sweetbreads. "Let's talk about this!"

"Nothing to talk about," Beelzebub snorted over the rhythmic slapping of evil scrotum against condemned thighs. "This is eternal damnation, not musical comedy."

"But what if I was to show you a special trick?" she pleaded.

And being something of a trickster himself, the Devil stopped pumping and said, "I beg your pardon?"

"I spent most of my life milking the sap out of stud bulls on my daddy's farm," Mrs. Pride said with a lewd wink, "and I discovered a special trick, something you're bound to like."

The Devil narrowed his eyes skeptically. "Show me."

Mrs. Pride glanced down at her body, eroded by ninety-two years of gravity and hard living. "I can't, not like this," she said. "These old bones won't take it."

"Easily fixed," Beelzebub said, and snapped his clawed fingers. An odd shudder ran through the hanging flesh on Mrs. Pride's bones. For a moment, she seemed to age in reverse, wrinkles and liver spots shrinking and disappearing, and then she just exploded into youthfulness like a kernel of pink popcorn. Ligaments sang like harp strings as her skin drew taut over smooth muscle. Her waist tapered over a fertile swell of hip and buttock as if turned on a lathe. The dangling flaps of her deflated breasts filled up like wineskins, her nipples sailing north on an incoming tide of ripeness to crown the upper slopes of the fattest, creamiest-looking pair of belly-smackers that ever blew out the cups of a brassiere from the Woolworth's. Golden hair tumbled down in sumptuous waves until the final curl licked the crack of her heartbreaking ass. Transformed, Mrs. Pride dipped a finger into the flaxen muff between her thighs, tasted herself, and grinned. She was eighteen again, and sweet as honey.

"Oh my goodness," the Devil muttered.

"That's much better," Mrs. Pride said, and she squatted down and gently dragged her golden mound up the underside of Beelzebub's boner, which wept a wobbling, translucent tear of joy. Reaching the top, she wrapped her heavy breasts around his plutonic maypole, her pouting lips just a hair's-breadth from its oozing tip, and she looked the Devil dead in the eye and whispered, "Ain't it?"

   

Beelzebub felt a bit short of breath. "You mentioned a special trick," he grumbled, feigning irritability to cover the tremor in his voice. "What do you want in exchange?"

Mrs. Pride reclined on her chair and parted her thighs. "Set me free," she said. "Send me back to the world, young as I am now, and I'll fetch you a legion of adulterous men." She raised her legs and miraculously crossed her ankles behind her head. "I guarantee the trick will make you shoot like a cannon," she said, smiling wickedly as she teased open the swollen lips of her honey-pot with a gleaming fingernail, "but let's work our way up to that. Deal?"

"Oh my goodness gracious yes," Beelzebub gasped, and snorting out a fetid gust of brimstone, he dug his claws into her buttocks, hoisted her sweet ass into the air, and socketed his brawny red axle in her pussy. Mrs. Pride reached up, grabbed his horns like handlebars, and matched him stroke for stroke. He sucked one of her breasts halfway down his throat, and she caught her other nipple between her teeth and shook her head like a terrier killing a rat. He smacked her ass with his thrashing tail, and she captured it in a delicate fist and corkscrewed the leathery arrowhead into her asshole. Deeper and deeper he pumped, Mrs. Pride's guts metaphysically shifting to accommodate his pole until her neck bulged on each in-stroke, and all the while she moaned the nastiest things he'd ever heard in his eternal life.

Pretty soon, Beelzebub could feel Hell's legions massing in his bloated gourds, and he knew his time was short. "The trick," he cried as their bodies crashed together with bruising force, "do the trick!"

And with that, Mrs. Pride shoved her slender hand way up the Devil's ass, fished around 'til she found whatever she was looking for up there, and plucked it like a banjo string. The Devil made a noise like a steam whistle, his ruby eyes spun like pinwheels, and he unleashed a roaring torrent of satanic syrup that flung Mrs. Pride across the room and pinned her to the ceiling for a few seconds. Eight times Beelzebub's convulsing organ heaved geysers of evil sluice into the air while he bawled like a newborn calf, and finally, when the steaming stuff was pooled an inch deep on the floor and the draperies were completely ruined, something pretty awful happened.

For the first time in all of eternity, the Devil's dick went limp.

And suddenly, in every corner of Hell, the snakes stopped biting, the bugs stopped stinging, the maggots lost their appetites, the screws fell out of the giant scissors, and the chains and padlocks melted like chocolate. A great whooping cry of joy went up, and all the damned souls who'd ever sullied the earth with their sins -- the Cains and Bundys and Amins and Sinatras, and Mrs. Pride, too -- shrugged off their now-toothless torments and stampeded for the exits.

And Beelzebub, falling to his goatish knees in a pool of his own slime and cradling his exhausted crank like a fallen comrade, listened to the diminishing roar of a few billion feet running upstairs and sobbed, "Now we're fucked..."

   
 
 A 


nd I'm here to tell you the old boy was right. I had just tossed my second spadeful of dirt onto Emmaline Pride's coffin-lid in Sleepy Willow Cemetery when I heard a rumbling sound, and I straightened up to glance around just as two-thirds of the tombstones in the graveyard fell over all at the same time. A skeletal hand broke through the turf about ten feet to my right, and then graves were busting open all over the yard, and dead people were staggering around the cemetery in various stages of decay, dismemberment, and shameful undress.

Even worse, if my memory of the burial plot map tacked to the wall in the tool shed was any good, most of these dessicated residents were among Sleepy Willow's less popular former citizens. There was Frank Stubbs, who was twelve when he shot his daddy in the back of the head and thirteen when his mama bore his first wall-eyed, three-fingered whelp. And behind Frank was old Emil Cauters, whose surviving kinfolk discovered that his canning shelves were stocked with pickled hands. And Wanda Sue Jenks, whose preferred method of breaking off love affairs involved sticking an icepick in some poor fellow's ear. And over by the big oak tree was old Doc Wakely, who took a shotgun to anybody who came to his door for help during the influenza epidemic. And there were many more of them, but not a one you'd expect to see in Sunday school.

I would've taken off running right then if not for the lid of old Mrs. Pride's coffin flying open and the juiciest girl any man ever laid eyes on leaping out of it, naked as a shaved cat on its birthday. "Hey, Digger," she said, and I recognized Mrs. Pride's voice, which still had ninety-two years' worth of rust and grit and warble in it. I wondered for a second if I was imagining it, but one look at all those worm-eaten folks scratching and stumbling around in the moonlight convinced me that my hearing was probably the least of my worries.

"Miz Pride," I stammered, falling to my knees alongside the grave, "what in God's name's happened to you?"

"Everything's fine as fiddles, Digger," she said, standing up in the coffin and brushing dirt off of the fattest, sweetest-looking titties I ever saw. "We're just back, is all. Now why don't you act like a gentleman and offer a lady your hand?"

I hated to admit it, but she had me there. Mama raised us boys to be gentlemanly, and a quick, relieved glance at Mama's undisturbed grave suggested that her advice had been right enough. Little as I wanted to get close to anybody who'd just popped out of her own casket, Mrs. Pride looked peachy pink and plain delicious in the moonlight, and she gratefully took hold of the hand I reached out to her.

And pulled me down into her open grave.

I landed on my ass in the coffin because there was nowhere else to land, and Mrs. Pride thumped down on top of me. She was laughing -- which didn't quite seem in tune with the current goings-on -- and just as I was about to ask why, she crammed one of those glorious tits into my mouth and started unbuttoning my dungarees.

"Something went wrong down there, Digger," she muttered as she fished my pecker out of my pants, "but I guess a deal's a deal, and now's as good a time as any to get started." I couldn't figure out what she was talking about, but then her ass went up and her head went down, and she scooped up the knob-end of my dick with her tongue and slurped it into her mouth.

Now, I might've been scared, and I might've been confused, but Mrs. Pride could've given a straw scarecrow a knotty pine boner if she'd halfway set her mind to it. She had my poker pointing at the moon in short order, and then she clambered up and screwed her hot pussy onto it. I filled my hands with ivory tit-flesh that bulged out between my fingers, and worried her nipples with my teeth and tongue until they were as firm and plump as bing cherries, but none of that diminished my urge to climb out of that grave and put several miles of mindless sprinting between me and Sleepy Willow Cemetery.

Mrs. Pride was moaning by then. "You wanted this, didn't you, Digger?" she sighed. "A stiff pecker always tells the truth, and you're going to fall just like the rest of them." And with that, I started getting a vague idea of what she might be going on about, and wondered if the tombstones were tumbling in all the other graveyards in the world. I didn't think for a second that I could stop what I believed was happening, but I knew right then that I was going to have to do something I really didn't want to do.

"Climb on up here, Miz Pride," I said, "and take a seat on my face."

"Digger, you're so wicked," she said with a funny pinch of guess-I-was-right in her voice that only made things worse, and then she slipped off my dick and scooted her knees up alongside my ears. I had some doubts about what I was planning, but when she reached between her legs and skinned her folds back so I could get at her pussy-button, I saw the graveyard dirt under her fingernails and knew I could do what I had to. I grabbed the cheeks of her ass and pulled her golden mound to my lips, found her gumdrop, and sucked it onto my tongue. Then I flicked and stroked and circled that sweet little button until Mrs. Pride was hunched over the head-end of the casket, humping her pussy-meat into my mouth and screeching like a cat with its tail caught in a wringer.

And that's when I reached up and slammed the coffin lid with all the strength I had, and snapped her beautiful head right off of her neck. And even though her corpse was still grinding and creaming against my chin, I knew that Mrs. Pride was already plummeting back down into Hell and landing with a gooey splash on the soggy carpet in the Devil's parlor, where one look at her was bound to put the steel back into Beelzebub's bone.

And then I laid there in the dark between Mrs. Pride's thighs and begged for God's forgiveness while my stupid, sinful, truth-telling pecker spurted against the sweet, cold curve of her backside.

By the time I managed to haul myself out of the grave, the sinners of Sleepy Willow Cemetery were reburying themselves for the trip back to Hell, and all was quiet except for the scratch of fingerbones on dirt and an occasional rasping, clicking cuss of disappointment. I found my spade and laid in six feet of hard-packed dirt between the late Mrs. Pride and the world I live in.

   
 
 T 


hings have been pretty quiet since then. I just about lost my job because of all the ruined graves, but eventually the town elders realized I couldn't have made such a mess all by myself, gave the whole business up for unknown, and told me to just fix it. It took me two months to pack it all down smooth again, and another month to get in a good lawn of grass. Even so, every single one of the sinners' tombstones got broken on the night they clawed open their graves, so the cemetery will always look a little snaggle-toothed from now on.

   
The sinners stay dead, at least, but every now and then, late at night, the earth trembles a little under Sleepy Willow Cemetery, and I know our Mrs. Pride is still down there, matching the Devil stroke for stroke. And I wonder, of the two of them, who's tormenting who.
 
    model: TIFFANY TOWERS    editor: ST STEPHAN
  story: ©1999 ARC TANGENT    graphics: GONZO