TRANSMASC OF THE RED DEATH
SUDDENLY A REVVING engine growls through the ballroom’s speakers and JACK O’DIAMONDS hits the stage. A ring of sparklers kindles up counterclockwise around the circular platform at the end of the catwalk, suburban backyard gunpowder scent mingling with the chemical aroma of artificial smoke hissing in from above. The boys at the party shut up for a moment before they whoop and applaud.
Jack’s encased in head-to-toe black leather. Biker cap, moto jacket, skintight pants, riding boots, fingerless gloves, toolbelt. It’s all very Tom of Finland: he’s ripped, all right, but without the extreme caricatured muscularity or the dated pornstache, not that one can see under the red bandana cloaking the lower half of his face. Stage lights glint off his silver aviators and jacket studded with ruby-hued rhinestones—all diamond-shaped, naturally, and forming a great red diamond across his back—flashing daggers of lightning. An array of drone cameras hovers above the platform like digital vultures, projecting the action on screens nearby, megachurch-style. The boys in the crowd would have their phones hoisted, too, if not for the mandatory phone check at the door.
The soundtrack abruptly cuts to “Diamonds are Forever.” Jack whips off his shades, revealing wide, piercing eyes roughly encircled in black war paint. His body is bathed in blue, purple, green track lighting as he flexes, struts, and poses for the boys, across the catwalk and around the platform; one at a time, he plucks out and displays various implements holstered in his belt, a switchblade, scalpel, butterfly knife, twirling them deftly between his fingers with utter contempt in his eyes. Many of the boys in the audience find this a turn-on.
Jack tosses off his cap. His dark hair is slicked back: one thick strand has escaped the pomade, falling in a rakish forelock above his grim-set brow. He gives a sharp two-fingered military salute to his host.
That host is one Rexroth Invictus Wickersham. A cool white spotlight illuminates a comically tall wingbacked chair on a pedestal at the end of the ballroom where a lissome twink slouch-sprawls, caught in the act of sucking nitrous oxide from a balloon before saluting back at Jack. A boy’s curly head bobs and burrows between his legs. A bucket of truffle-oil popcorn is tucked under his arm by a minion.
Tonight Rex fancies himself the King of Hearts: a child’s plastic party crown nestled on his well-coiffed head at a jaunty angle, a ruffle-collared shirt open to the navel, a thigh-high-booted leg slung over one arm of the chair. Aiming to resemble Sir Francis Dashwood—or more likely, given his basic cultural tastes, a stereotypical de Sade. Jack would characterize it as a goddamn Ren Faire pirate costume had Rex ever asked him.
Rex funds these parties from the overflowing coffers of his family fortune. All boys, all under 30, all worth at least seven figures, all-natural plumbing. The lone exception is this evening’s entertainment.
Jack o’Diamonds unzips his jacket, revealing the compact, sinewy musculature of his bare torso. A matching pair of jagged horizontal scars under his pecs have been overlaid with tattoos, running halfway down his ribcage, meant to resemble the gills of a shark. As he swirls a combat knife above his head, Shirley Bassey croons about the sensual superiority of cold sharp objects to the fickle hearts of mortal men.
The song fades into a tense, rumbling ambient pulse, indicating shit’s about to get serious. The track lights turn maroon, scarlet, crimson.
A young, handsome man stumbles onto the catwalk, pigeon-toed, wearing only a jockstrap and a goofy smile.
Jack had asked Rex not to drug this one too much. It’s one thing to dull the worst of it so they don’t freak out. It’s another when they just flop back and starfish with eyes dead as a doll’s. And anyway, they pay for this: they should feel it as much as possible.
The jockstrap boy nearly towers over Jack, who is not a tall man. Jack gives him a sudden bro-style backslap which knocks him down to his palms and shins. Jack moves quickly: a knee dug into his lower back to keep him prone and a fist clenched in his hair, pale neck bared to the crowd. Jack crouches, tugs down his bandana, and speaks low into the boy’s ear.
“Do you know what’s gonna happen tonight?”
Jack’s co-stars have to sign a detailed contract—which they’re forced to read to the end, repeatedly, under the eyes of two Wickersham family attorneys—when they’re still fully sober and aware, but Jack still wants to confirm here and now, avoid any extra mess.
“Uh . . .”
Jack tugs his hair, hard. “Tell me.”
“You’re gonna kill me and it’s gonna be ffffucking awesome.”
Jack slaps him. Giggling stoners are such a turnoff.
“Gonna be cool as shit,” the boy mutters, still smiling.
There’s an Ace of Spades printed on his jockstrap because he’s marked for death. Not the bluntness of Clubs. A sharp death.
Jack draws him up into a lazy, stumbling sex-dummy waltz, like the limp-limbed corpse he will soon become, fondling his growing bulge through the thin cotton. A periodic smack or knee to the balls and the boy groans in pleasure.
A minion has brought out a Fosse-style folding chair in which to prop him up. Jack selects a boxcutter from his toolbelt and slices off the jockstrap with a faint red line marking the Ace’s hip. He tosses it into the crowd, upon which one guy immediately presses the crotch to his nose like one of his 19th-century ancestors at an ether frolic.
Another reason the boy couldn’t be overdrugged: he has to stay hard.
Jack doffs his pants in one quick motion: hidden snaps have been sewn into the sides so he can rip them off like a stripper. His toolbelt is affixed to a leather harness girdling his hips and upper thighs.
The Ace druggily stares at Jack’s crotch, at what’s there and what isn’t. Has he forgotten so goddamn soon?
“Do I get the front hole?” he blurts.
“Shut the fuck up.” Yeah, he does, but that’s no excuse to be fucking weird about it.
Jack maneuvers the boy’s cock inside him, straddling his lap and riding him hard, nails denting his bare shoulders, until they’re both on the verge and—
“Off with his head!” shouts Rex, the King of Hearts. “Off with his heaaaad!” The crowd takes up the chant.
Jack dismounts. He reaches into his toolbelt and selects an old standby: the pearl-handled straight razor.
He makes sure the drones get a good look before he slices clean through the base of his co-star’s cock.
It’s a clean cut, balls intact, shearing away some pubic hair with it. Jack hoists it like a prize. A pale stream of semen spurts out of the wound on a tide of blood. The audience cheers and hollers.
Before it can deflate, Jack spears the Ace’s severed erection onto a modified icepick, plugging its base into the crotch of his harness. He quickly hollows out a new hole amid the draining blood, goring up his gloves but whatever, he has spares. He spreads the Ace’s legs: what he fucks now is not a pleasure canal but a genuine gaping wound, penetrating raw muscle and tendon. He’s learned with time to avoid prodding the bladder.
The boy’s face throughout is glossy, entranced. He stares through Jack to some greater truth. He can’t orgasm any more, but he can know the perverse ecstasy of an exceptional experience, a sensation indescribably intense.
He’s barely conscious when Jack finishes. Sweating and pale, bleeding onto his own cock.
Before pulling out, Jack slashes his throat: a last mercy.
He cradles the victim in a pietà, blood spilling across his thighs, puddling under his boots. The soundtrack segues into Jack’s exit music: Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs.”
Jack remains seated with the victim’s body, blots out the drunk and coked-up party boys. This is not for them. Not for the world. This is a sacred moment. A sacrifice. He gave his life to me. To Jack and to his demon. This anonymous man whom Jack would only ever know as the Ace of Spades.
They were all the Ace of Spades.
***
Behind the buffet table stands Rob, face impassive, hands folded, and behind Rob on this wall of the ballroom are cheeky posters referencing this party’s chosen demographic. ALL BEEF / NO FISH, says one; another, more obliquely, ALL TURF / NO SURF, atop a stock image of a hearty slab of ribeye juxtaposed with a sickly gawp-eyed salmon.
The name tag affixed to his respectable black dress shirt says ROBIN. His co-workers at the catering company have nicknamed him Silent Rob since he’s quiet to the point of mumbling. He has reason for that.
Rob’s a respectable height at 5’9” and has a naturally strong nose and jaw—family traits his mother and sister loathed in themselves—but with suspiciously wide hips and a certain softness to his eyes, his lips, his skin. “Sir, uh, ma’am?” he often hears, too self-conscious to admit they were right the first time. He wears a binder beneath his work shirt: it’s the best he can do. He’s not on testosterone. It isn’t covered by his insurance. Not as a part-timer.
This late in the party, the buffet table has been picked clean aside from a couple of Kobe beef sliders embellished with 24-karat flakes. Reverse alchemy, Rob thinks: their own bodies will transform gold into shit.
He’s worked for rich people before, even in well-guarded manors deep in the woods like this one, even at other gigs which mandated he sign an NDA. But this was the first time he’d unexpectedly witnessed a live snuff show.
Only the sternest, most discreet employees were sought for this job, and all male, per client request. A modest pay bump was attached. Yet Rob’s the only one who didn’t run to the staff toilet to puke or to a disused bedroom to faint, or else stand there paralyzed in blank-eyed shellshock.
A guest walks up wearing only spray-tan lines and a carpet that clashes with the curtains, pointing at a floppy-haired hipster nearly passed out on a wraparound couch.
“Yo, bro. Hellmann needs more Veuve,” he slurs, briefly confusing Rob by pronouncing it Vooov. He stares at Rob a bit too long, as if unsure whether to clock him or grope him.
“The bar is over there, sir,” Rob says, in a low, even tone.
They were supposed to fade into the background, like the household servants who ran this manor from the beginning alongside the roaches and rats. A silent pair of eyes and hands.
And for Rob, a silent lust.
Observing the bared and bound flesh, knowing this was the furthest he could ever come to the unbridled hedonism of men for men for men. And moreover—
What was that show? That was extreme even for a nepo baby Beggar’s Benison like this one. The guy seemed to like it? And that leather man . . . was he really . . . ?
After a piss break in the staff toilet, Rob slips out to the courtyard, his skin still flushed with arousal in the cool night air.
Leaning languidly against an Ionic column, a black Dunhill between his lips, is Jack o’Diamonds. He’s cleaned off the blood, shucked off the gloves, wiped away the greasepaint, slipped into a sensible pair of jeans.
“Hot in there,” says Jack.
Hot out here, thinks Rob.
Jack stubs the butt beneath his heel and flicks out a penknife to pick his teeth.
—if only he’d hold it to my throat if only—
Jack holds his eye an uncomfortably long time, drops a noticeable glance down his body, holds his gaze again. A light smirk.
He realizes Jack is cruising him.
“Do you like doing it?” Rob says.
Jack cocks his head.
“Did you like watching it?” His voice is a honeyed drawl.
Rob’s immediate response isn’t shock, fear, disgust, or rage—and he knows Jack knows he’s got him.
“Have you . . . done it a lot?”
Jack steps so close Rob can smell his sweat and tobacco.
“Y’know, kid, I’ll level with you. Since you seem like the type of man who knows how to keep a secret.” He lets that line linger a few beats. “Believe it or not, I’m 200 years old. Made a pact at the crossroads. Anyone can do it.” He slides down the left shoulder of his jacket to show off a tattoo resembling a Goetic sigil.
“Used to be a graverobber in London. See this?” He lifts a small, roughly triangular bone on a cord knotted around his neck. “My dad got the gibbet. After they hanged him, they stuck his corpse in a metal cage, as an example.” He taps the bone. “This is from his index finger. First grave I ever robbed.” He smiles. “So you understand, not much rattles me.”
It’s total bullshit—he doesn’t even have an English accent, Rob thinks, before realizing that’s the least remarkable thing about this story—but Rob is intrigued. Of course it’s calculated to intrigue a fucking weirdo like himself.
The left hand caressing Rob’s neck and jaw leads to teeth nipping his lower lip. The right hand at Rob’s waist slides to his forearm, twisted around to the small of his back with no resistance. He lets Jack push him face-forward against the outer wall, behind a hedge bordering a quiet window. Jack presses against him, deftly unbuckles Rob’s belt, and reaches into his creased black pants.
“Just so you know, uh, I’m on my period—”
Jack chuckles, his stubble grazing Rob’s neck. “That’s okay. You think I faint at the sight of blood?”
Rob’s never been with a man who treated him like a man. For years he kept pretending to be a girl, assuming it would increase his odds, but straight men expected him to act like a girl and quickly lost interest when he didn’t. They mentally cordoned him off into a separate suspicious, unknowable species, which he suspected would rankle even had he liked being a woman.
He wants it to be sharp, rough, brutal. Dangerous.
Crickets and cicadas perform to the creak of Jack’s leathers, to Rob’s gasps and moans as Jack works him expertly. When he finally withdraws his hand, Jack pins Rob’s gaze while licking thick blood off his first two fingers.
Rob reaches out when he finally stops quaking.
“Should I—”
“You can’t touch me. You wouldn’t know how. Not yet.” Jack claps him on the shoulder and strides back indoors.
Later Rob will find a spreading bruise on his neck and a card from his company tucked into his pocket, on which is written:
I’ll call you.
–J♢
***
Rexroth Invictus Wickersham is the youngest son of Dennison Kingsby Wickersham. That venerable businessman made his fortune in natural gas and has since acquired a pharmaceutical hedge fund. He has major if low-key ties to a private military contractor. He’s a prominent donor to the American Evangelical Defense Foundation. Few major museums nowadays lack a Wickersham Wing.
The senior Wickersham does not want to know what occurs at his bachelor son’s debauched parties in his least-used country house so long as nothing emerges to tarnish the Wickersham name or lower his stock value. Between them lies the vague promise that Rex will someday marry, procreate, and keep his future mistresses discreet.
“Sure you wouldn’t want to bear my heir?” Rex asks, sprawled out on satin sheets.
Jack slaps him.
“Absolutely the fuck not.”
Rex giggles. Fucking fool.
Jack is his kept man. His chained wolf, more like.
Jack has his own room at the isolated manor, though Rex spends most of his time jet-setting through various cities. Jack takes his money, takes his cock. And it’s a decent enough cock when it’s not hindered by Cocaine Dick.
Shame who it’s attached to.
“Would you fuck my dad?”
“No.” Jack lights a post-coital cigarette.
“Would you kill my dad?”
“In a normal way, not in a sexy way.”
Truthfully, Jack’s gotten bored. Rex doesn’t want to bottom enough for Jack’s taste and is more into watching pain than receiving it. And his standards for Aces are so strict: they must be white or white-passing, no older than Rex himself, below a certain BMI and, even though they pay out the ass for the privilege of being sex-murdered for an audience, below a certain income level (on that last count, because “it would feel too Freudian, like I’m, like, killing myself?”).
And, of course, cisgender.
“He’s actually, um. He’s having this AED Foundation donors’ gala next month so you should, uh. Make yourself scarce probably?”
Rex breaks out the ket and chops some lines with his black AmEx.
“I should introduce you to this one tradfash buddy of mine. I think he’d get a kick out of you.”
“Your what buddy?”
“Tradfash! Isn’t it funny? He’s a Russian Orthodox convert.” He takes a long snort. “He’s into, like, Radical Traditionalism and Esoteric Hitlerism? He works at Raytheon.”
“Yeah, I’d rather not meet some far-right shithead.”
“Pfft. Politics don’t matter.” He might’ve appended: you silly goose! There’s earnest confusion in Rex’s face. He’s rich enough to genuinely believe this.
“So yeah, my tradfash buddy founded this tech startup. And his angel investor is this one billionaire, this Silicon Valley guy my dad knows, who gets infusions of teenage boys’ blood so he can stay young forever. Isn’t that wild?” Snoooot. “Think he’s gonna be at my dad’s party, too.”
***
Fortunately Rob’s not a brat like Rex.
Since that last party, they’ve become regular fuck buddies. Jack motorcycles out from the manor when Rex is away, a bulging leather satchel across his back, to a suite he’s booked at a decent hotel with his monthly stipend. Rex wouldn’t like him fucking the help for free, but what does he know?
Rob lies back in masochist bliss as Jack tends to his latest knife cuts.
The more he can take, the bolder he gets, as a lover and as a man.
“Rex? He’s a stupid chaser,” says Jack. “Loves this idea of being a libertine hedonist but tells himself he’s not fully queer if there’s a cunt involved. He still lies to his dad and says he goes to church every Sunday.”
“Then why stay with him aside from the money?”
“Well, he could blackmail me with all that footage. But also . . . he promised me a lab-grown ten-incher. State of the art.”
Rob smirks. “Just ten?”
Jack gives him a quick smack on the ass. “I’m 5’6”, let’s not go crazy. I’m not Vlad the fuckin’ Impaler.” He leans back. “I’ve seen it. Just there in a tank, waiting. My ransom cock.”
“Think you’ll ever get it?”
Jack rolls his eyes. “Maybe if he gets bored of me.”
“Couldn’t you just ask your demon?” Rob pokes his tattooed sigil.
“I’m already paying off one debt.” Jack sighs, shakes his head. “You don’t understand. The more you want something, the greater the price. Would you be able to pay that price?”
In Rob’s face is the grim determination, the sheer hunger, of a man who believes his masculinity must never be doubted again, in his own mind or the world’s. Whose true manhood cannot be barred by money, law, or government.
“Can I?”
“Yeah, you can. But you have to embrace being evil. None of this ‘we go high’ horseshit. You have to get your hands filthy. You have to sacrifice for real. The worst sort of person they think you are? You’ve gotta be worse than that.”
Rob’s smile grows lupine.
Jack reaches for his ritual implements. He already has a target in mind.
Later, the maid on duty will wonder at the stubborn remnants of a circle in curious script marking the carpet. And at the lingering smell of sulfur.
***
The manor’s domestic decor is a mélange of old-money heirlooms and tacky, overpriced artwork depicting foxhounds since Dennison Kingsby Wickersham is fond of blood sports. Tonight it’s been strung up with bunting and miniature U.S. flags for the American Evangelical Defense Foundation gala.
The guests are all male, but not in the fun way. The hue of their collective flesh is a rainbow of cold cuts. Rexroth is here, presence mandatory for networking purposes, in a brand-new suit he automatically had tailored too snug at the waist and crotch. He clutches a champagne flute and quietly mingles.
“Feh! The gays aren’t really persecuted in this country. It’s not like we’re in Jamaica or some Islamist state,” opines Reverend Tessier.
“I cannot stand having to hire females,” grouses Lord Yockey-Rockwell. “Of course production suffers, considering they’re all competing for the men. It’s their chthonic nature, you know. Hardwired for hypergamy.”
“. . . And then we bussed the whole darn load of illegals to an inner city Taco Bell!” Governor Weyland chortles and slaps his thigh.
“Hold, sinners!”
The courtyard doors burst open on two robed men in matching skull masks. One wears a priest’s cassock and wields a large scythe.
Rex cringes: that’s obviously Jack. “Ohmigod, what is he doiiing,” he hisses to himself.
Another, slightly taller man—Rex feels a nagging familiarity—follows, carrying a large basket from which he distributes a gilded manacle onto the left wrist of each guest.
The interruption provokes a ripple of amusement.
“Oh, Blangis, is this one of the Order’s shenanigans?”
“You know, I think Goffard mentioned this same show at the Grove.”
Nobody’s alarmed except Rex and his father, both cuffed before they can protest. This must’ve been planned, or else how would they have gotten past security? How would they have known of this thoroughly private event at all?
The strangers mount the platform, join hands, and launch an obscure incantation. Between their feet is an occult summoning circle . . . from which emerges a thick, purple, suspiciously phallic maypole.
“Presenting a tribute to true manhood!” says the priest, to light applause. “The golden sperm of the Great God!”
He raises his left hand in a Roman salute, bidding the guests follow.
“Now, gentlemen: pray.”
A cluster of golden threads shoots out the top of the maypole, clamping onto each man’s manacle. Almost immediately, the threads withdraw back into the pole, along with the cuffs.
And their skins.
The lucky ones go into shock. Pandemonium reigns in the ballroom, stumbling fleshless and screaming through the slick of fallen fat and organs, pink and purple and red. The priest follows, laughing, scythe slashing off their flaccid cocks and sagging balls like ancient war trophies.
“If you can’t use them correctly, you don’t deserve to have ‘em!”
His accomplice collects the severed genitals in his basket and arranges them, glans inwards, around the summoning circle, in which the maypole has mysteriously descended.
At best, Jack thinks, they will know true pain for the first time in their lives, perhaps learn some truth for the only time. In endless pain is ecstasy.
That is their gift.
Rex kneels before the priest, gripping Jack’s cassock. His lidless eyes and gritted teeth ask what his throat no longer can. Jack holds Rex’s glistening face in silence.
The dying heir’s blood, licked from his thumb, tastes thoroughly unremarkable.
As dawn creeps in, blowflies spread larval life within the peeled corpses of the Western world’s finest men, strewn across the ballroom in a wet red heap. The household staff have fled, never to return except much later, under baffled investigatory duress.
And atop the platform, within the circle of cocks, stands a thick, throbbing patchwork of flayed skins fashioned into a tight cocoon the approximate height of an average man. Swaddled in demonic manhood, the former caterer within awaits his final transformation.
Jack o’Diamonds zips up his leather jacket, mounts his bike, and disappears into the pines with the sunrise.
***
Dedicated to all Christian Nationalists
and their enablers
Everywhere