Chocolate Box
CHOCOLATE BOX
a short story by Wolfgang Carnifex / Will Bernardara Jr
All Images by Flux AI (Apache 2)
For Nakecia Hershey (RIP)
“Once in his lifetime, every artist feels the Hand of God, and creates something that comes alive.”
Professor Henry Jarrod, House of Wax (1953)
“His sicknesses are infinitely more interesting than other people’s health.”
Jane Birkin
“They always want a body!”
Bruce Allison, House of Wax (1953)
Editor’s Note: What follows is the unabridged transcript of Sven Bergman’s audiotape divulgence to Black Wedding: Reports From Matrimonial Hell magazine / February 2024 Issue. The interviewer’s questions and comments have been removed.
It’s on? I’m not accustomed to talking to tape recorders so please give me a break if I come across as clumsy or unprepared. Danish is my native tongue as well, so bear that in mind. I declined many offers to be interviewed. A few years ago, The View and Jerry Springer asked me to come on and tell my story. I didn’t want to be on TV though. More comfortable doing it like this and being in a magazine. There was a true-crime author who wanted to do a whole book about me and what happened, but I turned him down because he just wanted to sell the book to Hollywood. Anyway, those books tend to be lurid; I’ve read a couple, and I don’t think my story is sensational in that way. Yes, the tabloids all reported on it, but I think they all missed the point. I don’t want Cocoa’s memory tarnished by that kind of pulp junk. Plus, I’d be portrayed as some sort of deviant or asshole, and I obviously wouldn’t want that. I like that you are letting me tell my tale. I don’t want to come across like a creep.
So, a lot of the media around my story has been preoccupied with the fact that I am a bookish, awkward, pasty, bespectacled, scrawny, unattractive Swedish boy-man who had a romance with a curvaceous black woman. I am aware that I resemble an ostrich. I was aware that she resembled Megan Thee Stallion. I am not blind or dumb. So no, Cocoa and I weren’t an obvious fit.
I was born in Linköping, Sweden. I was a data analyst for Maven, an airline there. My job was to inspect the contents of the black boxes, the flight recorders, after a crash. I would then type up reports for the insurance companies. The tabloids delighted in making jokes about “black box” with regard to my… tastes. Fetish, I suppose. Everyone has fetishes, I think, whether it’s collecting action figures or disco records. Why is it so funny to everyone that my passion is for indulgent, superlative chocolates and black women with large buttocks? Both melt in your mouth. Both are very sweet.
My affair with chocolate products dates back to my adolescence. I became infatuated with the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I envisioned nude African women bathing in rivers of chocolate syrup. It was how I got my first arousal. Naturally, I consumed a lot of chocolate as a child. And it rotted my teeth. But I couldn’t stop.
My second love didn’t happen until college. After acquiring my visa, I became a student at Georgia State University in Atlanta. I mostly stayed in my dorm room, collecting issues of Black Tail and Phat Puffs. I masturbated so furiously and regularly that my penis began to become chafed and scabby. I should have touched myself less, but the ebony globoid glutes had me: mind, body, and soul. Atlanta was an overload of sensory. Everywhere I looked there were wondrous weaves, buxom hips, and bloated backyards. Ass everywhere. Inescapable butts. My second year I ventured out and attended my first Freaknik Festival. The backdoors were big and they popped and bounced hypnotically. I was in Rear-end Heaven. I had found my home. My only problem at the time was the booty could never be large enough. I wanted a colossal caboose whose dimensions would blot out the sun. A titanic tush the size of the boulder in Indiana Jones. A supersized sitzfleisch that would crush all in its path like the ball in Katamari Damacy. No cheeks were gigantic enough for me. A truly kaiju derrière became my unachievable dream, one I would fixate on and lament for years.
Atlanta was an ass lover’s Avalon. I began to frequent the adult bookstores in the area and stocked up on VHS tapes: Butts ‘N Da Hood, Ebony Angelz’ Anuses, Tapping Tamika’s Tremendous Tush, Soul Rectum Part 5. However, I began to experience symptoms of depression. How was a gangly white dork such as myself ever going to be accepted into the anal sanctum of any black girl? I despaired that I would never so much as pinch a pair of ebony buns.
Though the media have parodied me and my situation - everyone from Saturday Night Live to The Breakfast Club - they are at least partly correct that there is a correlation between black women’s backsides and chocolate. Both are, of course, devilishly delicious. Both are fattening, only one fattens your tummy and the other stuffs your sausage. A sista’s seat and a gooey chocolate bar: yes, I suppose they are almost interchangeable for me.
I got my BSc without having gone on a single date. I began to use escort services. I mostly paid black women to sit on my face while I jerked off. I would lick their mocha monkeys and stroke until I shot my goo. I also frequented a strip club called The Butt Hut. It was a very low-end place full of cigarette burns and dancers with C-section scars. They never judged me there, and I felt comfortable after just a few visits. “You really like black girls, huh?” they would say. “You don’t know the half of it,” I would want to reply, but always just kept my mouth shut and nodded shyly.
One stripper called Baby gave me a CD of Kool Keith’s Sex Style album. She said, “This is right up your alley. It’s freaky. You dance? You should let me teach you how to move.” I began taking dancing lessons from Baby. And to my shock, I developed coordination, rhythm, and, ultimately, grace. I even learned how to break respectably when Baby’s Latino B-girl friend Myst decided to take me under her wing for a couple weekends with a boombox and a DJ Qbert mixtape.
The dancing prowess unlocked a door previously shut. I met a girl, at long last, named Nakecia Hershey. Yes, her last name was actually Hershey. Nakecia was doe-eyed and kind of lifeless; she spoke softly, almost sedatedly. But she was a beauty, and had a strikingly round rear, and she liked me. I would watch Nakecia gyrate on stage at The Butt Hut, the brass pole vice-gripped between her enormously bulbous booty cheeks.
I felt sorry for her as well. It seemed most men used her as a punching bag: her pretty face was often swollen like a catcher’s mitt, battered and bruised.
One night in October Nakecia got evicted from her apartment. I didn’t know she was homeless at the time, and at the club that night she flirted with me much more aggressively, much more desperately, than usual. It worked like a charm. That’s how Nakecia became my live-in girlfriend.
Nakecia loved vodka and she suffered from clinical depression. We didn’t have much in common. I don’t drink and my outlook is typically sunny. During the day she watched soap operas, what she called “stories”, and at night she shook her fat ass for cash at The Butt Hut or Cinammon Bunz. We rarely had sex. I would try to coax her into letting me bone her bountiful bottom but she’d sneer and say, “No rides up the Hershey Highway, Sven. Not tonight. How about I just suck your dick? I’m tired.” Mostly, I would just jerk off onto her bare bottom. The farthest I’d get was a digit in her derrière, which she would promptly swat away like a mosquito. “Not in the butt,” she’d say. “I told you a million times.”
Senses of Cinema: Tight, Tight Unlubricated Assholes
Our relationship lasted for seven months. One morning I woke up and she was gone. Her side of the bed was cold, but the mattress still held the impression of her immense rear. I buried my face in the rear-end recess and cried.
I reverted back to boinking escorts and haunting the ass-centric strip joints. Too Short’s lyrics thrummed in my brain: “All I want is hoes… Big booty hoes…”
Nakecia had cleaned me out before leaving. Emptied my wallet, stole my DVD player and my stereo. She even took my bath towels. So one day, about two weeks after Nakecia had bounced, I drove to the Seashell Mall to pick up a new DVD player. And the mall is where I met my wife, Cocoa Reese.
My first glimpse of my future spouse was a glorious one. I first saw her from behind. She was mall-walking with headphones on in a pair of beige stretch pants. Her ginormous ass bounced and jiggled supernaturally. Each ass cheek seemed to bob independently of the other, so large was her backside. That ass appeared to zoom in at me in 3D: voluptuous, zaftig, redemptive. Her dorsal dumplings were gargantuan, as though she had two basketballs stuffed down her thong. The Holy Grail of Tail. The Juvenile song “Slow Motion” poured through my head like honey. The gods of the glutei maximi were shining brightly in the Seashell Mall that afternoon.
Joyfully, we became a couple. Against all odds. It was a miracle. It really was. But the problem with miracles is they’re alive. And just like anything else that’s alive, miracles can die and decay.
Cocoa Reese. She worked as a typist for a speedboat dealership part-time. The rest of the time she attended school, working toward a degree in social work. Our conversations were breezy. We got each other’s jokes. Beneath the Puma attire and afro and hoop earrings and big ass and gold front tooth, Cocoa was a nerd like me. We watched Ladyhawke and Princess Bride in bed on weekends. We played Scrabble. I’d use her cushy ass cheeks as a pillow and read Star Trek paperbacks while she scrolled through WorldStar's feed on her phone or did her nails.
I knew Cocoa was The One when she asked me what I wanted for my 30th birthday. I mulled it over and said, “Chocolate mousse. It’s my favorite.” Cocoa beamed. “Really?” she said. “I can work with that.” I forgot all about it and a week later I came home from work to find something otherworldly in my kitchen. In the center of the kitchen stood a to-scale chocolate sculpture of a moose! It was detailed right down to the striations on the antlers. Best of all, Cocoa, stark naked, was astride this yummy carving, “riding it”, a naughty grin on her face. “Happy Birthday!” she said. Cocoa, so chocolate-skinned herself, mounting a chocolate moose… it made me dizzy. “You’re incredible,” I said, completely dumbstruck. “Who sculpted that?” She stuck a chocolate-gobbed finger in her mouth and sucked it clean. “Which do you want to ride, Sven? Me or the moose?” She fake-pouted as though I might choose the moose. I didn’t. After making love we devoured the confectionery animal. Every morsel of it.
Too good to be true? No. Too good to last. That should be the adage. Everything has a hidden expiration date. Even love. Especially love.
One Tuesday evening we were in bed together watching some of my college-era porn tapes, Butthole Bliss 13 and Backdoor Bubble Butt Bonanza, and we began talking about honeymoons, because the girls on-screen were mooning passersby in the flick. We’d gotten married at the courthouse downtown after dating for just two months, but we'd never had a honeymoon. After a short talk, we decided we were going to have our belated honeymoon in Utah, at Chocolate Village.
Can we take a break for a moment? Yeah. I need a minute.
Chocolate Village is in Porterville, Utah. The town where they filmed Troll 2. Chocolate Village is a kind of theme park / tour, the unrenowned, cult version of Hersheypark and its factory in Pennsylvania. Average chocoholics go to Hershey; real chocolate enjoyers go to the lesser known Porterville. Chocolate Village, though a rip-off resort, lathes some of the finest chocolate in the world, far superior in quality to Hershey’s.
The Village looked like a town gnomes might reside in. Quaint architecture, diminutive structures. It offered guided tours of its chocolate factory, a hotel, confection shops designed to look like businesses from the 1920s, rides, two restaurants, souvenir stores, and various lectures at Cacao Hall on the radix and evolution of chocolate.
Our honeymoon started off great. We were having a blast. But, as everyone knows, it ended in ghoulishness. We planned to stay at Chocolate Village for five days. The first three days were fun and sexy, what a honeymoon is intended to be. On the fourth day, the chocolate turned to shit, so to speak.
During the tour of the Village’s Chocolate Factory is when I first saw Daryl Albert Hall. He was guiding a large push-broom, sweeping the floor in front of an industrial freezer that housed tubs and pints of “Death By Chocolate” ice cream.
Daryl Hall looked then like he does now: wiry, unkempt, scraggly hair, a ringer for a Sawney Bean descendant. His white apron declared “CHOCOLATE VILLAGE!” in a playfully runny font. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but Hall was the only employee on the factory floor who wasn’t smiling. I did notice him ogling Cocoa as we passed by with the rest of the tour, but men often undressed Cocoa with their eyes.
I am a fetishist. I admit. But there are two types of fetishes: light and dark. My obsession with cocoa cabooses and creamy candy is a harmless kink. Daryl Hall’s interests, however - they were black. Pitch black.
That night, Cocoa and I dined at one of the Village’s restaurants. We enjoyed slabs of chocolate cheesecake and the best chocolate milk I’ve ever had. The detectives couldn’t figure out how Daryl Hall got access to the restaurant’s kitchen - he was essentially a factory janitor and had no connection to the restaurant - but the police theorized that Hall simply snuck into the kitchen and added something illicit to the chocolate sauce that Cocoa and I were served.
After dinner, we retired to our hotel room, with its milk-chocolate-colored sheets and pillows designed to look like marshmallows. A closed-circuit broadcast on the room’s TV looped a Food Network documentary on the history of the candy bar. Slikbar. Cocoa and I, exhausted from walking around the park all day, climbed into bed and began foreplay. That’s when I noticed: I couldn’t achieve an erection and I was feeling tremendously drowsy. Cocoa reported the same drowsiness. I began to suggest we go to the hotel’s gift shop for a coffee or a can of Bubble Yum Monster Energy when unconsciousness took the both of us.
The police learned later that Hall sometimes used poison, though he preferred using the durable red ribbons intended as garnish for gift baskets as garrotes. Hall, however, didn’t poison us with a lethal chemical. He’d dosed our chocolate sauce with tranquilizers. I surmise that Hall wanted to keep us alive. Why? I don’t know. Maybe to watch her squirm. Perhaps to hear her scream. It’s a small consolation, but the forensic team told me Cocoa hadn’t been tortured or raped.
I awoke many hours later to find Cocoa’s side of the bed vacant. It brought back the painful memory of when Nakecia had left me. Nothing there beside me except a butt-print in the mattress. I thought, “I’ve been here before.”
I checked my wallet. It was still stuffed with cash. I felt bad for suspecting Cocoa of doing what Nakecia had done. Still fully dressed from the night before, I hurriedly beelined for the hotel’s information desk. “My wife’s missing,” I told anyone within earshot. “We were drugged.” I detected a hint of doom radiating from the employees I questioned. As though they knew something sinister they weren’t telling me. Turned out, they didn’t know much. But what they did know was that, in the last five years, a total of thirteen women had gone missing from Chocolate Village. Gone without a trace. I called the police and made a report.
I refused to leave Chocolate Village. I would go nowhere until Cocoa was found. That night, I trudged around the perimeter of the park. I couldn’t sit still or think straight. I knew, somehow, deep inside, that something terrible had happened.
I came to a tiny cottage. Like something out of a fairytale. There were cottages like it dotted all around the edges of the park. Micro-houses for Chocolate Village staff who lived on-site. There was a light in the boxy window of this particular cottage, warm and cozy-looking. There wasn’t anything ominous about it.
Except for one thing: the door. There was a scrap of yellow polyester dangling from the door’s hinge. Canary yellow. Unmistakable. Cocoa had been wearing a canary-yellow, polyester Northface jacket the night before she vanished.
I should’ve called the police then but I didn’t. I was in an irrational state. I walked over to the yellow fabric omen and tried the doorknob. It was unlocked.
And I went inside.
Inside, the cottage looked as though it had been decorated by a rustic mountain grandmother. Kitschy little figurines and ornate doilies. An antique sewing machine. Could this be the home of a kidnapper? It seemed unlikely.
As I advanced slowly through the cottage’s short hall, I smelled peppermint and pine. Pleasant. But, beneath it, something strange. Something rotten, like a warning. Faint, the smell, but recognizable: the odor of roadkill, the stench of rot. Nearly as faint, I could hear the distant sound of machines grinding and clanking. Mechanical chugging. The noise was coming from below.
But what drew me to venture into the cottage’s unexpected basement wasn’t the rancid smell or the sounds; it was the scent of delicious chocolate mixed in with the rest - it wafted up and out of the cottage’s vents irresistibly.
I accessed the hidden basement through a concealed hatch, like a trap door, hidden by a rug with a stitched pattern of anthropomorphic country bears on it. As soon as I pulled open the hatch, the conflicting smells of chocolate and death hit me in the face, and the chunky whirr of machinery amplified. I descended the darkened steps into the subterranean chamber: a kind of makeshift cellar.
In the cellar is where Daryl Albert Hall kept his “work”. There were two what I would call showrooms. Like display cases without glass. Like the borderless rooms one encounters in haunted houses or wax museums. I saw silhouettes of women. Women with large backsides. They were posed, it seemed, and as still as mannequins. My brain took several seconds (that felt like minutes) to understand what my eyes were showing it. The women were not mannequins, and they had no features. That is because their corpses had been dipped from head to toe in chocolate.
I noticed then that the cellar was frigid, kept cold to prevent the chocolate cocoons from melting. I’ve never been a religious man, but I promise you, I felt true evil in Hall’s subterranean lair.
In the corner of the cellar were two vats of boiling chocolate. Metal fins motored by machinery churned and stirred the mixtures. I noticed two seatlike harnesses - like sex swings - suspended above each vat. These were how Hall dipped his victims.
Then I saw Cocoa. She was naked, facedown on a sheet of splintery wood that had been pushed against the cellar’s back wall. A rivulet of blood descended from her left ass cheek and striped her left thigh. I saw the red gift-basket ribbon wrapped and tied taut around her neck. I knew then that Cocoa was dead.
“Don’t move.” Hall’s voice sounded like the slimy film on an eyeball. I felt a revolver’s barrel pressed to my temple. “Your woman, she’s special. She’s my last piece. She helped me finish my Chocolate Box. I like fat asses too.”
Hall pushed a decorative box beneath my chin. “Go on,” he said. “Try one. You’ll be the first to taste.” He flicked open the box’s lid with his thumb. On the lid’s inside was a dismal parody of the legends on normal chocolate boxes, like the ones Russell Stover makes. In place of the types of chocolate and their shapes, however, were glued-on driver’s licenses of the murdered women. “Pick your woman’s. She’s in the middle there, the crown.”
Hall prodded my temple with the .38’s barrel. I knew he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot, so I selected Nakecia’s crown-shaped chocolate with a trembling hand. “Put it in your mouth,” Hall instructed.
Regrettably, I popped the chocolate into my mouth, as ordered. The chocolate melted away and I was left chewing something rubbery and tough, unsavory. I couldn’t chew it. It was like a plug of whale blubber. It was meat. Fat, to be exact, a cut-out cube of cellulite.
I spit out the hunk of flab and Hall cackled riotously. “See? You see? Each chocolate got a slab of a woman’s ass in it. You like eating ass?” He laughed some more.
I glanced toward Cocoa’s body. There was a bloodied cookie-cutter beside her corpse; her ass was the dough. “Bon appétit, motherfucker,” Hall said.
I never heard the gunshot.
The world turned black.
I learned later that after Hall shot me at point-blank range in the head, he strapped Cocoa’s body into the harness and dipped her in chocolate. He then posed her alongside the others in his cellar of confectionery corpses. The bullet glanced off my skull, fortunately. It didn’t kill me, but it did fracture my cranium. The ICU doctor said I was lucky, and that Hall had been holding the gun at an angle, which is why I’m here now, to do this interview.
The Chocolate Village supervisor had been canvassing the park when I was shot. He was looking around, hoping to find some trace of Cocoa or one of the other missing girls. He just so happened to be walking past Hall’s cottage when he heard the shot ring out, muffled somewhat by the depth of the cellar.
Hall’s bullet didn’t obliterate the memories. I still hear his voice every single day: “She’s my last piece… She’s my last piece…” It is a recursive Hell.
As the world all knows now thanks to trashy true-crime channels, Daryl Albert Hall, who the media dubbed The Candyland Killer, had a problem with black women. In the early ‘70s, Hall’s father was an employee at Chocolate Village. This is back when the vats’ stirrers weren’t automated, and Hall’s dad was one of the chocolate stirrers. He was high up in the factory, angling his paddle down and stirring a vat of brown, ambrosial froth, when a black woman with a very large buttocks - ironically, she was a factory safety inspector from OSHA - inadvertently backed into Hall’s father with her round rear, knocking him over the sketchy railing and into the vat of boiling chocolate syrup. That’s how Hall’s dad died. And that’s how Hall developed a lifelong grievance against big booty black women.
Yin and Yang. I wanted to eat black girl’s asses; Hall wanted to literally cannibalize them.
Daryl Albert Hall is currently on Death Row at Utah State Prison. He has exhausted all his appeals. In his one by-phone interview for Investigation Discovery, he said he is content on The Row, where he is allowed to order Hershey’s bars from the commissary. Hall is widely considered to be America’s most bizarre serial killer.
I objectified Cocoa. I objectified black women. Hall objectified them too, but in a different way. Despite that, I loved Cocoa very much. I still love her. My life isn’t a sleazy horror movie. I loved her.
I no longer eat chocolate.
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