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  Time hangs garrotted. It is always midnight in the woods. Too ashamed to show his coarse, lithic jowls by daylight, Thickpaw Venn searches after dark for his dinner of truffles and mushrooms. The rank skin about his neck and armpits is already landscaped with variegated fungi, flaring like an albino cancer as he stumbles along beneath the slatted moon, whose tart, callipygous emissions steer him recklessly down unfamiliar trails. All roads lead to Jana.

  Venn beholds her cottage, the gargoyled gables, the rhombic oak front door resembling the tombstone over a zig zag grave; and directly above, a funereal wreath of flesh, the white fallout circling a solar corpse, gelid nova whose negative attraction already threatens to siphon off his top layer of skin. His ponderous jaw hangs open; drooling awfully, he shambles toward the convulsive lure. In this orifice, Venn sees a lightless looking glass sequestrated from its housings as if by holography, a protean bolt hole into the netherworld.

  He imagines that by fusing with such a passway he might elude misery, taste the weightless flux of galaxies, transcend the sagging mantle of meat that clothes his bandy bones.

  Jana drops from the balcony and kneels at the front door as if in prayer, her blonde head close to the soil, buttocks raised and parted.

  The scent of bitter confectionary emanates. Venn lowers over her, struggling with the belt on his misshapen britches, gouts of fetid sweat storming from his belly, his wrists flapping uncontrollably, spastic. His attempt to mount her is hideously graceless, as absurd as a pole axed pack mule trying to wrap its filthy dying hooves around a pillar of piss.

  The old willow shakes and moans.

  Venn is interrupted by a ferocious concert of rending and tearing, like the muscle being stripped from a madman's pelvis. Then comes a rustling, and an acrid, hollow tittering from within the folds of the tree. As he looks upward a vast, cool, kiting shadow lashes his ruddy brow. Gliding, slowly fluttering from the crescent branches comes a gigantic lepidopteran, its wings ebony, vermilion and gold, and dusted with desiccated human faeces. Adjoining the insectile thorax is the head and keening face of a lamia. In the final moments of Thickpaw Venn, he feels the creature's leg tips trawl through his flesh, ripping off his skin in huge, mildewed sheets before impaling his adipose sinew.

  He knows that he has fallen prey to a black angel from the wall at the end of space, a she beast that will suck out his brains and bear away his freak skull as a keepsake to unchartered zodiacs; scraping him soulless and smoking from the griddle of sexual fear.

  After the screaming, the lamia settles on Jana's breast, taking suck from her left nipple. Another flutters down, alighting tenderly, its human lips encircling the right. Only Venn's bones remain, gleaming, meshing with fallen pods; a distant wolf, howling, articulates the sorrows of the orifice.

  Table of Contents

  SATANSKIN

  credits

  I : SATAN'S SKIN

  II : HAVOC

  III : EGG CEMETERY

  IV : TROPIC OF SCORPIO

  V : THE VENUS EYE

  VI : DEVIL'S GOLD

  VII : SHADOW SICKNESS

  VIII : DOGSTAR PACT

  IX : THE TEARS TREE

  X : SUCCUBUS BLUES

  XI : SYPHILIS UNBOUND

  XII : DITCHFINDER

  XIII : CRIMES AGAINST PUSSYCAT

  XIV : TWIN STUMPS

  XV : WHITE MEAT FEVER

  XVI : THIRTEEN

  XVII : TONGUE CATHEDRAL

  XVIII : THE COLOUR HELL

  XIX : DEMON'S SPICE

  XX : ZODIAC BREATH

  XXI : THIRD EYE BUTTERFLY

  BACK COVER