vain does Adrian take Etta to the basement of Piedmont Tower, his architectural triumph, and in vain does he explain the concrete truss. Etta seems like a zombie.
Still she must somehow absorb part of his lecture on super-stressed concrete, the circular cantilever, the ‘primum mobile’ principle, etc., for later that night she returns to Piedmont Tower alone, with an acetylene torch. The watchman, having seen her in the company of the architect, suspects nothing as he lets her into the basement once again.
There she straps herself to one of the huge concrete beams – so like a bent bow – and cuts through the restraining steel support! The beam straightens suddenly, and as Piedmont Tower splits apart from top to bottom, she is flung one hundred thirty stories into the air – to fall impaled on the United Pin Company’s giant sign.
Adrian learns of her death that night. He at once books passage on the liner
Henkersmahl
, his hold luggage two steamer trunks. One is filled wit nitric acid in a delicate glass envelope; the other with plastic explosives, pickled in turpentine. He supervises their loading to make sure they are placed next to each other. The process of loading naturally breaks the glass envelope, and it will take exactly seventy-two hours for the nitric add to eat its way out through the thick metal of the trunk.
The second night of its voyage, the
Henkersmahl
sends out a call for help. ‘Some madman’ has poured gasoline into the lifeboats and set them afire. The ship is saved only by casting all lifeboats adrift. Only one ship, the
Vivisectress
, hears the call for help. It is too far away to alter course, just for the loan of a lifeboat or two, though it wishes the
Henkersmahl
well.
The following night a flaming explosion tears out the bottom and sets the ship afire. Blazing oil coats the water all about. The lifejackets are discovered to be soaked with fuel oil. It is suicide to enter the water wearing one.
Adrian seizes the ship’s wireless to explain to the world his crime: suicide.
‘The cut wrist, the gas oven were not sure enough,’ he shouts, over the screams of old people and children. ‘We all know how the life-principle thwarts our pitiful suicide attempts. I had to leave myself no escape at all …’
The transmission ends.
Theda has gone to work in a beauty parlour, where she soon falls into the hands of a vicious lesbian white slave ring. After contributing several articles to men’s magazines (‘Passion Darlings of the Hell Camp for Lesbians’; ‘Chained Virgins for the Half-Beast Women’; ‘I Was a Love Slave to the Handmaidens of Horror’; ‘I Was Possessed by the Harpies fromHell’; ‘T RAPPED ! – by Sex-Amazons of the Queen of Slaughter!’) she quietly succumbs, dildoed to death in an alley off a fashionable street.
At the other end of the city in the bohemian district lives her husband, Farmer Bill. No longer a foundry executive, he has become a starving frescoist. He loves Glinda, who has long since returned to her birthplace in the South. Now working as a group therapist in an exclusive brothel, Glinda cares only for her dashing husband, Van Cook.
Van, seeking still to impress Theda with his bravery, has quit his newspaper job and become a hot pilot, a cropduster. He limits his writing to a novel about this new life, THE CROPDUSTERS. (‘The story of those happy-go-lucky flyboys who daily face death over Nebraska, to combat the Third Horseman, Pestilence. The story of the planes they fly, the lives they live, the women they love.’) But this dangerous, manly occupation does not advance him in Theda’s favour at all; she loves Farmer Bill. When Van Cook hears of her death, he sends off a suicide telegram to Dick, then crashes his plane, a Mr Mulligan, into the corn.
Glinda, unable to endure life without her man, enters a pie-eating contest in the hope of exploding the walls of her intestines. She does not succeed. Having won the contest by consuming
Still she must somehow absorb part of his lecture on super-stressed concrete, the circular cantilever, the ‘primum mobile’ principle, etc., for later that night she returns to Piedmont Tower alone, with an acetylene torch. The watchman, having seen her in the company of the architect, suspects nothing as he lets her into the basement once again.
There she straps herself to one of the huge concrete beams – so like a bent bow – and cuts through the restraining steel support! The beam straightens suddenly, and as Piedmont Tower splits apart from top to bottom, she is flung one hundred thirty stories into the air – to fall impaled on the United Pin Company’s giant sign.
Adrian learns of her death that night. He at once books passage on the liner
Henkersmahl
, his hold luggage two steamer trunks. One is filled wit nitric acid in a delicate glass envelope; the other with plastic explosives, pickled in turpentine. He supervises their loading to make sure they are placed next to each other. The process of loading naturally breaks the glass envelope, and it will take exactly seventy-two hours for the nitric add to eat its way out through the thick metal of the trunk.
The second night of its voyage, the
Henkersmahl
sends out a call for help. ‘Some madman’ has poured gasoline into the lifeboats and set them afire. The ship is saved only by casting all lifeboats adrift. Only one ship, the
Vivisectress
, hears the call for help. It is too far away to alter course, just for the loan of a lifeboat or two, though it wishes the
Henkersmahl
well.
The following night a flaming explosion tears out the bottom and sets the ship afire. Blazing oil coats the water all about. The lifejackets are discovered to be soaked with fuel oil. It is suicide to enter the water wearing one.
Adrian seizes the ship’s wireless to explain to the world his crime: suicide.
‘The cut wrist, the gas oven were not sure enough,’ he shouts, over the screams of old people and children. ‘We all know how the life-principle thwarts our pitiful suicide attempts. I had to leave myself no escape at all …’
The transmission ends.
Theda has gone to work in a beauty parlour, where she soon falls into the hands of a vicious lesbian white slave ring. After contributing several articles to men’s magazines (‘Passion Darlings of the Hell Camp for Lesbians’; ‘Chained Virgins for the Half-Beast Women’; ‘I Was a Love Slave to the Handmaidens of Horror’; ‘I Was Possessed by the Harpies fromHell’; ‘T RAPPED ! – by Sex-Amazons of the Queen of Slaughter!’) she quietly succumbs, dildoed to death in an alley off a fashionable street.
At the other end of the city in the bohemian district lives her husband, Farmer Bill. No longer a foundry executive, he has become a starving frescoist. He loves Glinda, who has long since returned to her birthplace in the South. Now working as a group therapist in an exclusive brothel, Glinda cares only for her dashing husband, Van Cook.
Van, seeking still to impress Theda with his bravery, has quit his newspaper job and become a hot pilot, a cropduster. He limits his writing to a novel about this new life, THE CROPDUSTERS. (‘The story of those happy-go-lucky flyboys who daily face death over Nebraska, to combat the Third Horseman, Pestilence. The story of the planes they fly, the lives they live, the women they love.’) But this dangerous, manly occupation does not advance him in Theda’s favour at all; she loves Farmer Bill. When Van Cook hears of her death, he sends off a suicide telegram to Dick, then crashes his plane, a Mr Mulligan, into the corn.
Glinda, unable to endure life without her man, enters a pie-eating contest in the hope of exploding the walls of her intestines. She does not succeed. Having won the contest by consuming
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