Saint Augustine’s Boys Home, Grantsville Maryland – 1975

“Put them on Nancy!” the boys circled Nancy, taunting him.

“Yeah, put them on Nancy,” Will Logan shouted it a second time because he was a coward who was scared of the other boys and he needed their approval to make him feel accepted.

If you weren’t one of the bullies at Saint Augustine’s then you were prey; milquetoast for the predators. The reality was that every boy at Saint Augustine’s was scared: scared that they were never going to be fostered or adopted by nice people, scared that they would be fostered or adopted by horrid people, scared of the Brothers, scared of each other.

“Put them on you Nancy boy,” Butch Parnell threw the clothes at Nancy.

Nancy took off his shoes and then his grey pants, which although they were clean and pressed had been patched and repaired many times. His crisp white shirt with the frayed collar joined his trousers on the basement floor, soon followed by his socks and underpants. Most of the boys wore hand-me-downs.

Nancy picked up the clothes that Butch had thrown at him and put them on. First the pink cotton panties, then the knee-socks, which had once been white but were now ashen, the toes holed. Then he put on the white cotton blouse, struggling with the buttons because it buttoned right over left. He stepped into the grey pleated skirt which fitted snuggly around his trim waist and finally, he stepped into the scuffed black Maryjane’s.

No one really knew where the girl’s clothes came from. Some said they were a uniform left over from when Saint Augustine’s had been a home for both boys and girls but there were no records to support that claim. Some said that a girl had been smuggled into the home by bullyboys past and that she had ran naked and sobbing from the basement into the night after they had finished with her.

It made no difference to anyone really. When Butch Parnell had been given the clothes by Brother Ignatius and given instructions on what to do with them, he knew immediately who he was going to make wear them.

Nancy stood in the middle of the circle, head bowed, straggly blonde hair mussed, his breathing deep and ragged as his fight-or-flight response kicked in.

“Who’s got the lipstick?” Butch demanded.

“I do,” Will Logan held the gold alloy tube of bright-red lipstick aloft as it was a trophy.

Nancy was slim, with snake-hips, a round perky bottom and long toned legs. His face was effeminate, framed by his bedraggled long blonde hair which he refused to cut despite the insistence of the Brothers that he do so. It was an act of defiance which made him a target for the other boys.

Not that Nancy’s long blonde hair was the deciding factor that had sealed his fate. Butch was always going to subject him to what was about to occur in that cold dark basement anyway. Nancy was weak and the weak were easily intimidated and tamed.

“Hold her still!” Butch always referred or Nancy as ‘her’.

It somehow validated what was to follow.

Nancy’s fight response kicked in but he was no match for the four bullies who pounced on him and held him down while Butch smeared lipstick on Nancy’s girlish lips.

When Nancy was finally dressed like a girl and his lips painted slut-red, the boys dragged ‘her’ over to the dank, stained mattress in the corner and held her down and took their turns. Butch went first of course and the rest followed in pecking order with Will Logan going last.

“Boys! Boys! Boys! What on earth is going on here?” Brother Ignatius emerged from the gloom where he had been watching.

“We’ve made her ready for you Brother,” Butch panted, a little exhausted by his efforts, his shirttail protruding from his fly where it had caught in the zipper when he pulled up his pants.

“Leave her with me and go about your chores. The dinner bell will be ringing soon,” Brother Ignatius said calmly, his voice soft and comforting.

But there would be no comfort for Nathan Parker, which was Nancy’s real name. When the boys left them alone in the basement Brother Ignatius removed his hooded cloak and his habit. He was naked under the simple, scratchy, brown vestments; his skin pale, his penis rampant. He removed his sandals and lay down next to Nancy on the filthy mattress.

“There, there my sweet child, what have they done to you?” Brother Ignatius cuddled Nancy, holding her close, kissing her red-lipsticked lips.

Nancy’s anus was dilated and her breath musky with the scent of semen and her pink panties damp with the emissions of young men. The clotted semen in Nancy’s anus eased the passage of Brother Ignatius’s steely rod as he impaled her. Nancy had fought the bullies but she took comfort in the arms of Brother Ignatius. It was a coping a mechanism but it served its purpose and Nancy returned Brother Ignatius’s passionate kisses and she climaxed right along with him when he ejaculated deep inside her.

Brother Ignatius remained stoically silent while he dressed. He went back to his sparsely furnished monastic cell and knelt naked before the cross and flagellated himself with his leather whip.

While Brother Ignatius performed his act of atonement, Nathan Parker performed his own act of atonement alone in the deserted laundry. He dutifully washed the pink cotton panties, the ashen cotton knee socks, the cum-stained white cotton blouse and the grey skirt and hung them up to dry. He would return to the laundry later that night and press the blouse and carefully iron the pleats into the skirt then he would carefully fold the garments and roll up the knee socks and slip them inside the scuffed black Maryjane’s.

These were Nancy’s vestments and she would return them to the basement and put them in their hiding place along with the tube of red lipstick ready for when they would be needed again. The punishment for not doing so was unthinkable.

The ‘boys’ were in their eighteenth year and would soon be leaving Saint Augustine’s but Brother Ignatius had already identified his next crop of bullies and was grooming them. He had also identified a petite young man whom he had decided was to be called Alice. He thought that Alice would benefit from some new clothes because the ones that Nancy had been forced to wear were quite ragged now. Maybe Alice should wear pantyhose instead of knee socks and high heels instead of Maryjane’s. These thoughts were a conundrum to be savoured by Brother Ignatius as he crawled into his cot that night after evening prayers.

Mike’s Bar and Grill, US Route 50, Nevada - 1985

Will Logan had not aged well. He walked into Mike’s bar and grill: a truck stop, saloon and greasy spoon, his substantial gut hanging over the longhorn belt buckle that hitched up his baggy jeans. Will had never seen a rodeo in his life let alone ridden a horse. He was on his way to Tahoe City to drop off his illicit cargo and had stopped at Mike’s because he’d heard stories about the clientele who frequented the dive.

The jukebox was playing a song by Donovan. It’s folk-pop, but there is an undercurrent of implied menace that portents things to come.

Down through all eternity The crying of humanity ‘Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man Comes singing songs of love...

The woman sat at the bar, a shot of JD and a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale in front of her. Her beauty wasn’t really discernible under the heavy makeup, her face illuminated by garish neon lights behind the bar, but there was no doubt that she was sexy. Her shoulder-length Pat Benatar flyaway bouf framed a pale face augmented by too much makeup: the black eyeliner, caked mascara and gaudy eyeshadow enhanced her icy-green eyes. Rouge highlighted her sharp cheekbones and her lips were embellished with bright red (some might call it slut-red) lipstick.

She was wearing a tight black t-shirt emblazoned with a caricature of Joan Jett on the front worn over a long-sleeve black mesh top and a faded denim miniskirt. She was fingering a small hole in her sheer tan pantyhose, the runner extended from her thigh to her ankle where it terminated at her red high-heel fuck-me pumps which were the same colour as her slut-red lipstick.

There was no doubt what type of woman she was and there were a few more like her sitting at the bar and scattered around the booths. A handful of others of her type were located in the front seats of cab-overs or in the sleeper compartments of the heavy haulage vehicles parked in the dark recesses of the parking lot outside Mike’s, earning their money with their mouths or their pussies.

Mike, the owner of the sleazy establishment, didn’t mind one little bit because the ‘lot-lizards’ drew the truckers and the travelling businessmen looking for a beer, a burger and a piece of stray on the lonely highway. The ‘ladies of the night’ also had to kick Mike twenty bucks up front or maybe pay a visit to the mangy old sofa, which Mike referred to as his fart-catcher, in the back office. But only if they were pretty and disease free.

Will homed in on the pale-skinned floozy with the runnered nylons, attracted to her like a moth to a flame. Even from across the poorly-lit saloon Will could tell that she was different from the other whores. He clocked her for a tranny as soon as he laid eyes on her.

Will sidled up to her but the woman ignored him and downed her shot and washed it down with a slug of beer.

“What’s new honey?” Will caught her attention.

The woman gave Will the onceover: shit-kicker boots, stained Levis, snap-buttoned, flap pocketed western shirt ballooning over his beer belly. He smelled of cigarettes and old spice and had a three-day growth.

“You know what I am?” the woman asked causally.

Her voice was smoky, breathy and sexy.

“Yep,” Will tapped the bar and two shots and two long-neck beers appeared almost instantly, the bartender snatching up the bills that Will dropped on the bar which was pockmarked with thousands of cigarette burns and scarred with lewd graffiti carved into the varnish by bored travellers.

“Just don’t want any complaints or demands for a refund when you pull down my panties and find what’s inside,” the woman drank down the fresh shot.

“Who says I’m pulling down your panties,” Will swallowed his shot and leered at the woman.

“Oh, I know your type. You won’t just settle for head; you like to fuck,” the woman smiled sarcastically at him.

For a split second Will thought he saw her eyes glow maelstrom red but it must have been an aberration caused by the flickering beer signs above the bar.

“It’s thirty for head or fifty for half and half,” the woman turned back to her beer and began to swallow the cool nectar.

Will watched the woman’s throat work as she swallowed the beer and his cock began to harden.

“I ain’t doin’ it in my car and I ain’t payin’ for a motel,” Will sipped his Sierra Nevada pale ale waiting for a response.

“I know a place down the road a little. It’s a dump but it serves its purpose but you gotta drop me back here after,” the woman snatched up her purse and the denim jacket that hung from the back of her stool in anticipation of the transaction being agreed to.

Will noticed that the chipped nailpolish on her long fingernails matched her lipstick. Her fingernails looked almost like talons and her skin was alabaster white, almost translucent, which made her painted face look all the more gaudy and her sparking green eyes so distinctive. For a split-second she reminded him of someone, but he shook off the feeling of déjà vu.

Will downed his beer and the woman slid off the barstool, flashing her pink panties at him as she did so. Will had a thing for pink panties that went all the way back his youth when he lived at the boys’ home. He patted the woman on her ass and followed her out the door.

There was little to be said in the cab of Will’s pickup. The woman gave directions and Will pawed at her legs with one hand and drove with the other. It was always prudent to test the merchandise before purchasing it and Will’s cock was aching for release by the time they turned down the dusty potholed road that led to the their destination which was only ten minutes’ drive from Mike’s Bar and Grill.

The Chevrolet’s headlights illuminated an abandoned roadhouse service station. It looked deserted. The Texaco sign was faded and broken, hanging drunkenly from a rickety pole. The dusty driveway was choked with weeks, the ancient gas pumps were rusted; the hoses had been ripped off them, likely by some scavenger. The awning over the gas pumps was equally corroded; holed and lopsided, almost ready to collapse.

“This place used to be a thriving rest stop and then they diverted Route Fifty over yonder to make it a four-lane and the place went broke. Mike opened his bar to take advantage of the passing traffic on the new road,” the woman nodded to the spectral glow above the sand dunes issuing from Mike’s fine establishment that was only a few hundred yards away as the crow flies.

“I don’t need a lecture in Americana, I need my cock sucked,” Will parked his pickup under the skewed, rusty awning hoping that it wouldn’t suddenly collapse on his near-new Chevy.

“Kids use this place to party and us girls use it to conduct business with tricks who are too tight to pay for a motel room,” the woman gave Will a sarcastic glance and climbed out of the pickup, once again giving Will a peek of pretty pink panty as her fanny-skimmer skirt rode up her thighs.

Will was having second thoughts but the sight of those pink panties, those long legs encased in shimmery nylons and the woman’s pouty moue on her red-lipsticked lips rekindled his lust.

Will looked at the dilapidated roadhouse diner and shuddered. It looked even more forlorn than the gas stand. The sheet-iron roof that had once been adorned with a Texaco logo was hitched and broke-backed, holed in places and corroded. The few windows that were not boarded over were dirty and cobwebbed and most of them were broken or cracked.

As they approached the door, which hung drunkenly from its hinges, they passed a rusty old Coke machine with the faded decal bearing the image of a smiling woman in a bikini drinking an ice-cold beverage with the words ‘For Real Refreshment’ peeling off it.

The woman led the way into the ramshackle building and Will followed; eager to satiate his lecherous ardour and leave this shithole.

Most of the furniture had been taken away or vandalised beyond use. The place smelt musty; a lingering stench of mildew, stale cigarettes, stale liquor, ditch weed and a faint undercurrent of ancient fried food. The filthy floor was littered with beer and liquor bottles, drug paraphernalia, cigarette butts and decaying used condoms.

A pair of red lace panties had been hung on a nail protruding from the flaking dry wall. Hastily scribed graffiti on the wall beside the undergarment read: ‘I fucked this bitch good’. Whoever ‘this bitch’ was, she was long gone and was sans underwear. Will wondered if the girl in the denim moot-skimmer micromini who was accompanying him might be ‘this bitch’.

Beside the panties a series of nineteen-sixty era framed advertising posters had been hung from the wall, probably in an effort to provide cheap decoration and cheer up the baby-shit yellow painted walls. Besides the usual advertisements for cigarettes, beer, motor oil and other products one would expect in a gas station was an advertisement for Hanes Underall Pantyhose. It featured the buttocks and thighs of a woman clad in sheer pantyhose with the slogan ‘pantyhose & panties all in one’. Someone had drawn an ejaculating penis between the buttocks of the woman with a sharpie.

Will nodded at the red panties and then at the Hanes poster.

“A budding artist at work,” he said sarcastically.

The woman said nothing and led Will deeper into the gloom until they came to an old mattress in the far corner of the diner. On top of the mattress was a crumpled stained blanket and beside it were several used condoms, one or two of which seemed to have been recently filled.

“It’s not the Holiday Inn but it will do,” Will chuckled and began to undress.

The woman mooched around in her purse and produced a tube of KY personal lubricant and a condom. She waved the condom at Will.

“Up to you honey, I don’t care either way,” the woman said.

“I’ll risk it. I have Medicaid,” Will struggled with his boots.

The woman popped the Trojan back into her purse and dropped the KY Jelly next to the mattress, in easy reach. She sat down on the mattress and watched Will fold his jeans over the back of an old chair followed by his favourite snap-buttoned, flap-pocketed western shirt. He kept on his socks as he had no wish for his bare feet to come in contact with the filthy floor.

Naked, Will looked even more pathetic than he did dressed in his ‘pretend cowpoke’ ensemble. His skin was pasty white except for his arms and his face which were burnt by the sun. His beer-belly hung down to his groin where his erect penis sprang from a mat of wiry pubic hair.

Will was about to join the hooker on the mattress when he heard scurrying sounds coming from behind the counter. His neck swivelled toward the sound and he thought he saw a slight glimpse of beady red eyes. They were the same deep crimson that he imagined he had seen in the hooker’s eyes at Mike’s.

“What’s that?” Mike asked.

“Rats? Who cares? Do you wanna fuck or go looking for ghosts? You can kiss me if you want. Most of the girls won’t do it but I don’t care,” the woman lifted her skirt higher up her thighs and grinned up at Will salaciously, licking those red cock-sucker lips.

Will Logan never kissed prostitutes but there was something about this woman that intrigued him. Sure, she was attractive but there was something about that shade of ‘slut-red’ lipstick and those pink panties that elicited long forgotten memories. Back in his teens, somewhere in a basement not quite as rank as this roadhouse, but still dark and uninviting, he remembered a girl being held down by three other boys while Will lay on top of her, forcing kisses on her red lipsticked lips while he buggered her.

Of course she wasn’t a girl. She was boy dressed as a girl but that didn’t stop Will and his buddies. The memory inflamed his desires to fever pitch and he took his wallet from his pants and took out two greasy, rumpled twenties and a ten and tossed them on the mattress. The hooker made no effort to retrieve the money. She just smiled up at him and opened her arms, welcoming him to join her on the filthy bed.

The woman lay back and Will snuggled up to her. Her perfume was cloying: Dior Poison? But there was a very faint undertone of rotting flesh which Will thought might be coming from the mattress but wasn’t sure. He pressed his mouth against her red-lipsticked lips and any concerns he had about what she was and where they were dissipated when the woman slipped her tongue into his mouth.

Her kisses were fervid, almost demanding and Will became lost in the sensations of her mouth sucking on his and the perception of his cock rubbing on those nylon-sheathed limbs. The woman had made no attempt to disrobe and neither did Will want her to. For the hooker it was probably simply a matter of practicality, all she needed to do was open her legs and let Will have his way with her but for Will it was a fetishic necessity.

As much as he loved fucking transwomen, he had no desire to see or touch their genitals. It was the carnality and infelicity of fucking a woman who was, in his opinion, really a man that excited him. When Butch had goaded and incited Will to take his turn with Nancy Parker that first time in the basement of the Saint Augustine’s Boys Home he had baulked. But the look of apprehension and submission on the pretty face of the boy they called Nancy had incited him. That slutty-red lipstick and those pink cotton panties held a fascination that awakened a lust in him.

He remembered sliding aside Nancy’s panties and staring at her creamy soft buttocks before he slid his aching member into her tight void, lubricated by the boys who had been there before him. He remembered putting his phallus inside that warm wet mouth while the others held Nancy still.

Will was always the last to take his turn with Nancy but after he left the Boys Home he had from time to time indulged his fetish. If he found a suitable candidate he relished the pruriency of committing forbidden acts with women of undetermined gender. Will didn’t have to be last in line. These women were unsullied in his eyes until he defiled them.

The woman pulled Will closer and he pressed his body against hers, his hand scampering to her thighs where his fingers clawed at her already laddered nylons. He slid his hand under her skirt and kneaded her buttocks through those silky satin panties and she gasped into his mouth, encouraging him. She took him in hand and fondled him, kissing him deeply, bringing his cock to full tumescence.

“Forget the blowjob. I just wanna fuck you and get out of this dump,” Will gasped into the woman’s mouth and she smiled wickedly.

She reached for the KY Jelly while Will tore a hole in her pantyhose big enough to poke his cock through. She lathered his penis with the salve and lifted her legs, exposing her buttocks.

“Is this ok?” she asked, rucking her skirt out of the way.

Will could see that she was tenting her pantyhose and panties. She was aroused and she glared at him lasciviously and for a second her green eyes flashed red, which Will put down to vagaries of the light in the dank roadhouse diner. The woman’s age was indeterminate and she could have been twenty or forty for all he knew but there was no doubt that she was stunning. For a fleeting second he thought that he recognised her but the thought dissipated when she guided his swollen phallus to her puckered bud.

He lowered his face to hers and kissed her as his cock slid inside her anus as if it was slipping it into a silken glove. It was the most euphoric sensation that Will had ever felt. The woman’s anus was warm and inviting and seemed to clasp his cock with gossamer-like contractions. Her lips were soft and yielding and he let her slip her tongue into his mouth where it wormed and undulated, as if seeking out his essence.

Will fucked her, driving his cock in and out of her snug burrow, eliciting every scintilla of pleasure that he could from this whore. She wrapped her long legs around him and scissored them, her nylon-clad limbs rubbing against his flanks. She bucked beneath him, encouraging him, mewling into his mouth as she sucked on his tongue. It felt like her anus was milking him, softly rippling and undulating as she coaxed him to climax.

He sensed the woman climax, her milt soaking through her panties and nylons, her hard cock juddering against his belly as Will deposited his seed deep inside her as the most intense orgasm he had every experienced wracked his body.

Will was suddenly aware that her semen was ice-cold. How could that be? He opened his eyes to see that her face was contorted and misshapen, her eyes deep red coals. Razor sharp wedge-shaped incisors protruded from her blood-red lips.

Will couldn’t scream because the woman’s mouth clamped tightly against his, her eyes seemed to suddenly glower incandescently as she bit out his tongue and swallowed it. The woman’s strength was amazingly disproportionate to her slight frame and Will was unable to free himself from her clutches.

“You never asked me my name. It’s Nancy Parker,” she whispered in his ear before she bit it off.

The woman’s long fingernails became talons and she tore open the flesh of his back, her heels raked his flanks, ripping strips of fatty meat from his body. Her mouth clamped down hard on his and Will felt his entrails being sucked out of him through his oesophagus.

Then to his horror the woman’s penis, which was now crowned with a knifelike glans with spicules and hooks protruding from the shaft, sliced into his gut. The elongated appendage wormed and corkscrewed into his stomach and ingested his gizzards and then pierced his celiac artery and drained his blood.

Will died silently screaming, as the thing that was once a woman absorbed his life essences, holding him tight until he was just a desiccated husk of skin, bone and hair.

Nancy Parker pushed aside the integument shell that had once been Will Logan and lay still while her body digested his juices and viscera. Her body shook, becoming spectral as it morphed one again into the form of Nancy Parker, now radiant, refreshed and revitalised after feeding.

Nancy dragged Will Logan shrivelled husk behind the counter of the diner where the rodents and insects would devour what she had left. His hair would line a rat’s nest and his teeth would be carried away as trophies by other vermin. From her purse she produced a pair of pink cotton panties and a tube of red lipstick and placed them next to his skull; a little shrine or headstone if you will, to mark his final resting place.

The lipstick was in a gold tube. It was the same brand of lipstick that the bullies had made her wear at the Boys Home as were the plain cotton panties. Authenticity was important when one was taking revenge and keeping promises.

Nancy takes her time cleaning up the remaining detritus: a little shred of skin here, an earlobe there. There is no rush. She adjusts her clothing and fixes her makeup before stuffing the greasy banknotes in her purse. Outside, she searches Will Logan’s truck and finds the almost one kilo of fine grade cocaine that he was delivering to Tahoe City. She shakes out three quarters of the package and watches the cool night breeze scatter it across the desert sands. The rest she bestrews around the cabin of the Chevy pickup.

She takes the nine millimetre semiautomatic pistol that she found in the glove compartment and fires six rounds into the cab of the truck, ensuring that she doesn’t hit anything vital to the truck’s mobility. She tosses Will’s earlobe and a few shreds of his skin onto the back seat. His clothes will go into a dumpster somewhere far away from here.

Nancy wants any law enforcement agency that might get involved in Will’s disappearance to think that Will was stupid enough to try to rip off his connections in the white powder distribution business and had come to a bad end in the cab his own truck. There are plenty of bodies buried in the desert sands along US Route 50 and the officers investigating Will’s disappearance will assume that he has joined them.

She drives back to Mike’s Bar and Grill and parks Will’s Chevy next to her Caddy. She throws Will’s clothing and his shit-kicker boots in the trunk, jumps in her car and drives away. If the police questioned anyone at Mike’s, the most that they could say was that they saw Will leave the bar with a hooker in runnered nylons wearing a moot-skimmer denim skirt. How many hookers in runnered nylons wearing a moot-skimmer denim skirt plied their trade along Route 50? Nancy didn’t know but she guessed there were plenty.

Nancy drives along Route 50 sticking to the speed limit, paying attention to road. She sings to herself while she drives, her voice ethereal and harmonious: ’Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man Comes singing songs of love.

After a four hour drive, stopping briefly for gas and to dispose of Will’s clothing, his wallet and his gun and to change her clothes and fix her makeup, Nancy arrives at The Holiday Inn and checks into a pre-booked room. Nancy looks nothing like a tranny hooker. She presents as a well-dressed businesswoman and the clerk tries his best to flirt with the older attractive corpulent young woman but his efforts are in vain.

Alone in her hotel room, freshly showered and dressed in lycra tights and an oversize T-shirt for comfort to accommodate her distended belly, she takes two days to fully digest her meal. She opens a leather-bound notebook. The black leather is creased and furrowed in places, worn from constant handling. In faded gold lettering embossed on the front of the book are the words: Promises to Keep.

There are pages and pages of scrawled notes, some which make sense, and some which appears to be gibberish. If any human was to read the contents of the notebook they would at first be confused and then horrified at the contents, but every word is coherent and consequential for Nancy.

She skips to the back page where there is a list of five names. Nancy carefully rules a line through the second-last name on the list: William Logan. Nancy has kept her promises and now there is only one name left on list: Brother Ignatius

Saint Augustine’s Boys Home, Grantsville Maryland – 1975

While everyone else is sleeping soundly Nathan Parker returns to the basement carrying the neatly folded grey pleated skirt, the white cotton blouse and the pink cotton panties. As soon as Nathan enters the basement his psyche switches and even though he is not wearing her clothes, he becomes Nancy (Let us call her that too shall we? She thinks of herself that way so it seems only polite). Nancy balances the black Maryjane’s on top of the bundled clothing. The knee socks that were once white are rolled up and tucked into the shoes.