"Hey, man, that wasn't scary! That story sucked more than these craptacular Grade-Z dogs!" Bart says, tossing the last piece of his hotdog to Santa's Little Helper. The dog sniffs it, yelps and hides under the couch.

"Why you little—!" Homer starts to strangle Bart but stops when the TV distracts him.

"And now it's my turn... Ha ha ha ha..." Bart dims the lights, hits the Off button on the remote and hides it.

"Ah! Turn it back on, Bart!" Homer begs, getting down on his knees, hammering at the couch with his fists and pleading. "Do what you want to me, boy, but leave TV out of it!"

"Don't have a cow, man. You'll get your TV after my story." Bart pulls out a flashlight and shines it under his face. Lots of shadows form, giving him a sinister appearance. "This one's really scarifying... I call it...

THE MODERN APHRODITE

1

THE women started turning up dead at the beginning of the year. A hooker here, a hooker there. An old lady here, a young schoolteacher there. Every situation had been different, and the murders were being discovered at such an infrequent rate. Some were strangled, others were stabbed, some raped, others not. Nobody was really putting two and two together, not until the calling card started showing up at the crime scenes.

The women's panties, right? Removed by the killer and then draped over the victims' faces.

But then the victims were found with their organs missing. Then limbs. But still the calling card. Always there, always covering their faces.

Of course, some specialists suspected the killer didn't like the way the dead stared, their eyes unblinking, wide with fear, with hate. Made him feel inferior, reminded him of his mother or some other woman in his life. Others just thought the killer was finally ready to make himself known, gradually rise up to the big-league status and get himself caught. Do they get sloppy through their arrogance, or do they just get tired of being unknown?

I didn't know what I believed. I guess I was too shocked, not as a woman—I'm a man, as you can plainly see—but as a human being, as a person who walks these streets. I might've passed these women by without realizing that by the end of the night they'd turn up dead. Fate loves to play these kinds of games with us, doesn't she?

So perhaps it's no surprise I stumbled upon the freak, during one of his late-night strolls... In retrospect, knowing what I know now, I wish I would've reported him way back when. If something had been done, some of those women would still be alive today.

2

CLUB Da Wall-E, as you know, is just past the cemetery when approached from the north. I was on my way there to meet up with some friends, just for some drinks and maybe to try and pick up some easy girls and get laid. When I say that now... it makes me sick due to the circumstances we're in. But I've gotta admit, those girls—the ones the killer took from this world—would've been a lot better off with me than with him.

I've walked to Club Da Wall-E many times before and never noticed any activity—let alone suspicious activity—at the cemetery, not at that hour of night. I guess the gravedigger does his duty during the day? Anyway, when I was walking past the graveyard that night, I saw a long, sweeping light in there bobbing back and forth, like someone was walking with a flashlight.

Again, I'd never seen anyone in there that late before, so I grew very... disturbed, I guess the word would be. I can't say why, really. Maybe it was in part because of the bodies being discovered, setting my teeth on edge in general. But I gotta go back to never seeing anyone there at such a late hour—and then... I did.

Stupid me. I just went chasing after them. Didn't even send my friends a text saying I'd be late, or anything like that. I could've been murdered and nobody would have known. I should've sent a text.

But I didn't. I crossed the street, I pushed open the creaky, already-unlocked gate. And before my eyes could properly adjust to the all-encompassing darkness, I jogged into that graveyard, trying to be as silent as I could. A few twigs crackled, but that flashlight never faltered, never spun around to meet me.

3

I followed him for maybe two or three minutes but what felt like two or three hours. The further in we got, the harder and faster my heart was pounding. I knew we were still in the cemetery because the guy would constantly shine the beam of his flashlight left and right, lighting up the tombstones ahead of him. I thought we'd never stop, had no idea who—or what—he was looking for.

And then we finally did stop. And when we stopped moving, I wanted to keep moving. I dreaded what his intentions were. In stopping, we were entering the next stage of whatever this was.

He kept his flashlight trained on a specific headstone to the right and marched towards it. Trying to keep my breathing under control—I'd started hyperventilating a little—I moved off to the left and hid behind a grave. Close enough to watch him, but still far enough away where I didn't think he'd spot me.

I can vividly recall the headstone.

Norma Watermill

Beloved daughter

2.12.2000 – 17.3.2015

A fairly recent death, and she'd died still a young girl.

He set his flashlight down on the ground near the grave and I was able to see him now. He was slim, sickly. He wore glasses that slid down his nose as I kept seeing him pushing them back up every so often. He had a shovel, which he used to dig away the sod and the dirt.

I watched him raptly, not daring to move, not daring to pull out my phone and check the time. I watched him dig. I could've called out and maybe spooked him, sent him running. I could've attacked him. Maybe could've overpowered him. Or maybe he would've killed me. I don't know. All I know is, he dug and he dug, and he kept digging until his shovel struck wood with a loud thud. And then he grinned. He had bad teeth, crooked and rotting inside his mouth.

He used the shovel for leverage now. Got the blade under the coffin and eased it up and down to try and lift the coffin up from the grave. Eventually, when this failed, he stomped the shaft—even got a few jumps on it. But that didn't work, either. At this point he started chopping at the lid of the coffin, really hacking at it. I could tell he was frustrated, could tell he wanted in no matter what, and at that point I knew I'd never confront him because I knew he'd kill me if I tried. This was a man who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, what he desired.

I mentioned before that some of the women were raped. Their genitals and anus would appear rather savagely used, ripped and bruised. But yet no semen was ever found.

That's because he used the handle of the shovel. And you won't find any prints because he wore these tight black gloves.

He managed to break open the lid of the coffin. The stench was awful. I saw him pull the girl's body out by her hair, and already—only a year after her death—she'd started to decay. I saw him toss the corpse to the ground, across from the flashlight's beam, where it landed with a sickening crunch. He ripped down the skirt she'd been buried in, twirled the shovel around and jammed it into her, repeating to himself over and over, "Such a dirty girl, such a dirty, dirty girl..." His soft voice trembled, more and more, until he could barely speak. Then he grunted, moaned and shivered, the shovel handle still buried deep in that poor girl's dead body.

When he'd regained control of himself, he slid the shovel out and wiped the handle with a glove, then ran his tongue along the fingers of that glove. I nearly vomited, more than a few times, that night.

I saw him drag away the girl's body, hauling her off like trash, with the flashlight and shovel in hand.

I waited until he was out of sight, then I waited five minutes more, and then I broke down and cried.

4

NEEDLESS to say, I didn't sleep much that night, nor did I ever get to the club. I sent a message to my friends when I got home, telling them I felt like crap and must've come down with something. They wished me a swift recovery, in so many different words.

I thought about calling you guys then. But I didn't. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was fear—fear of being accused of being the one to defile the girl's grave and remove her body. I don't really know. My head wasn't on straight then, what can I say?

All I remember is, I was super-glad to be back home. Though I did experience some paranoid thoughts that the guy would break into my apartment and murder me. After a week, the thoughts went away. But I still regularly recalled what I saw in that cemetery. I still read the papers each day, still watched the news, still saw that he was still out there... still having his bodies turn up, and even still robbing graves.

Because at some point, when it was becoming a regular occurrence, people had gotten tired. They'd decided to watch the cemetery, set down a couple of lawn chairs and a lot of lights and sit there, armed with an array of weaponry.

He stopped visiting the graveyard. His bodies stopped cropping up. A month went by and nothing new appeared. People started to forget, started to think it was now a part of the past.

But I still remembered. I still remembered well.

5

IT was a week after the guy had supposedly "disappeared." That's when I spotted him next.

My friends had been trying to get me to come out to Club Da Wall-E for weeks, and I'd always refused, always coming up with some lame excuse. You can only say you're down with the mumps so many times before people start calling you on your bullshit.

So, eventually I had to accept their offer. And I did, except I never made it to the club. I'd gotten past the cemetery this time, and when I went past it my stomach went overly acidic and I felt my gorge rise. I'd avoided that place whenever I'd gone out, wanted nothing to do with it, didn't want to even see it. Because of the memory.

But I made it past that place. Swallowed long and hard and pushed past. All seemed well. I was in the clear. Then I saw him. He was buying a hotdog from a late-night street vendor. I recognized him. I knew it was him. He was even wearing those same black gloves. I remember stopping, shocked, frightened, angry, sad. To save face, I bent down and pretended to tie my shoe. The guy got his hotdog and jaywalked to the other side of the street, then started walking back in the direction I'd come from.

Don't think I'll ever be able to eat a hotdog again. Not when I associate them with him now.

I followed him. Again. I know, I know. I should've called you guys. Should've reported what I'd seen. But it felt personal this time. He'd scared the hell out of me, given me nightmares, made me afraid in my own home. I felt like he owed me something, some peace of mind.

I kept my distance, but still I followed. He didn't look back, not even once. It's like he felt untouchable, invincible, all-powerful. We went past my place. I could've gone home, texted my friends and said I was sick with bubonic plague, but I didn't. Just kept following. He ended up leading me to the industrial district, where there were more warehouses than anything. The houses were dingy, like the types of places you suspect of containing a meth lab or a bunch of dirty drug addicts. Or even a serial killer.

He went into the nicest place on the block, and it still wasn't a place I'd like to call home. Though I don't know if that's just me hating it by mere association with the freak who lived there, or if it was something visually I despised. Possibly a mix of both, leaning heavily on the former. I hid behind some trash cans on the other side of the street. Saw the lights go on in that place. Saw his shadowed shape move around in there through the windows.

Then he came outside. Didn't look at me, didn't look in my direction or any direction, for that matter, except down towards his feet. He pushed his glasses up and went around the side of his house, lifted the cellar doors and descended.

I waited five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. When he didn't come out in that amount of time, I figured he was going to be down there awhile. I grabbed the best weapon I could find nearby—a pipe—and sped across the street. Hoping the cellar door didn't squeak, I lifted it and went down.

6

DOWN there, it was like a mix between a mad scientist's laboratory and a necrophiliac serial killer's tribute to himself. Murky but surprisingly spacious, the cellar contained rows of shelves, each containing glass jars of different substances, but also of various organs suspended in a clear fluid, perhaps formaldehyde. I crept through the cellar, eyes wide with fear, my heart pounding my chest like a sledgehammer.

I heard murmurs, so I moved towards them.

"You're beautiful, you know that? Don't I always tell you you're beautiful?"

I didn't hear anyone reply.

"Why do you do this to me? When I treat you so well? Such a dirty girl. Dirty girls need to be cleaned."

Hiding behind a bookcase and peering around it, I was able to see his laboratory. Was able to see what he'd been working on, and why he'd killed, why he'd removed body parts and organs, why he'd started robbing graves.

He'd been making a monster. Like out of Frankenstein. Only his monster was a woman, possessor of exaggerated features only a mad man could think to create.

As he powered up his machine and paced back and forth in front of the abomination he'd stitched together, I was able to get a good look at it, at her. She had an enormous pair of breasts sewn onto her delicate-looking chest, which he'd obviously carefully selected from a girl he'd considered to be a prime specimen. But that hadn't been enough for him. The thing on the table had as many as sixteen pairs of breasts, surgically attached to various parts of her mismatched body—some small and some large, some black and some white, some young and some old. In addition to the sex between her legs, he'd somehow managed to create new orifices for his own pleasure—the psycho had given her another vagina on one of her cheeks, for instance; the other cheek had another anus. Her bellybutton had been replaced with some kind of hybrid orifice.

His modern Aphrodite, fashioned to be his idea of the perfect sex toy.

He held what looked like jumper cables and pressed them to the cobbled-together woman's armpits. A blast of electricity surged through her and her body seemed to jump on the table, despite her supine position. He jolted her again, and again, and he kept doing it until smoke streamed out from her many holes, and from between some of the less-efficient stitch jobs.

And then she stirred, emitting a drawn-out sound that seemed to lack any identifiable kind of emotion. It just was. Her hands clenched and relaxed.

"Such a dirty girl," he said as he unzipped his pants and slid his erection into her smoking mouth. He gasped. "Still warm."

At this point I was sick of the horror, sick of even being alive. I was past fear. I stepped out, pipe raised, and clubbed him in the head. He looked back just before the pipe hit him, and I was able to see the fear in his eyes, the intrusion into his special place, where he though nobody would find him.

It felt good. Felt good to see the tables turned.

And then his lights were out. He slumped to the left and hit the floor, unconscious. I contemplated clubbing him again and again, never stopping until his face was a mess of blood, bones and brains, but I decided against that.

Instead my attention turned to the monster, to Aphrodite. She looked at me with blank blue eyes. No panties draped over them, so evidently the specialists had been wrong on that. Her face could have been beautiful once, back when it was many whole faces, before they had been torn to pieces and threaded into a morbid collage, before it had been turned into an elaborate dildo for him.

"You're free," I said to her.

She didn't respond.

"You're free," I repeated. "You don't belong here, Aphrodite, you don't belong with this monster."

Her head tilted to the side. She looked at me like I imagine an alien would look at a human. Or how a dog might.

I looked around for clothing and managed to find a pile of clothes over near a large freezer. And yes, I peeked inside. There were quite a few bodies in there, most of them missing pieces. I would guess they were his favourites, the prime specimens he used to fabricate his creature. I grabbed a blouse, a sweater, underwear and track pants.

I dressed Aphrodite. It became easy once I'd gotten her arms through the holes of the blouse. She'd learned quickly and had slipped into the underwear and track pants herself.

When she was fully dressed, she stared at me, her eyes searching my face. She glanced down at him and then back at me.

"You don't need him anymore," I told her. "You never needed him. He created you but he's not a part of you."

She made a sound, not unlike when she'd first stirred on the table.

I nodded, as if understanding her, and maybe part of me did. There was something primitive in that sound, it felt like she was asking me permission, or maybe even saying she loved me. All I know is, I told her one word: "Yes."

And I exited the cellar, fighting back tears every step of the way. I didn't want her to see me cry, didn't know how she'd react to my tears. Whether it would make her sad or angry—or perhaps even worse, whether she'd have no reaction at all. I let them out when I tasted the cool, refreshing air.

And then I finally called the police, finally called you guys. When I went back down into the cellar, Aphrodite was gone. But he was still there, as you well know. I'm not sure where she went. I hope to never find out. As long as she's free. That's all that matters to me.

As long as she's free.

---

Homer shivers on the couch, white as a ghost. "T-T-T-Too s-s-s-scary, b-boy. N-N-Need T-T-T-TV."

Bart laughs to himself with arched fingers. "I can't believe that made it past the censors. Stupid Fox." He turns on the TV and throws the remote to Homer.

Immediately, Homer regains his healthy yellow glow. "Ahhhh... Good, safe, innocent TV. Happy TV. You'll never scare me, will you, TV?" A commercial appears, showing the kind of belly associated with heart attacks and premature death. Homer looks down at his own belly. "Ahh!"

The doorbell rings. Bart goes to answer it and sees Nelson Muntz standing there in a hobo costume.

"Trick and treat!" Nelson says.

"Eat my shorts..."

Nelson punches Bart in the gut. "That's for shamelessly ripping off a timeless classic!" As Bart groans on the floor, Nelson steps past and takes all the candy from the nearby bowl. He points at Bart, shouts "Ha-ha!" and leaves with his haul.

"BART! Close the damn door!"