The story you are about to read is a true one. It is a sordid tale of sexual degradation and perverted sexual acts. It is a story of the freedom of sexual expression in today's society.
At first glance, and after reading the first thirty pages or so, this story may seem to you to be unbelievable, or even impossible. You will dismiss it as a sexual fantasy that is too bizarre to be true. But it is true all the same. It actually happened. The "impossible" acts that are described in the beginning and the middle of the book are all explained at the end.
When Paula and her boy friend Carl had gone into the woods together they had planned on making love, uninterrupted by prying eyes or curiosity seekers. What they did not know was that they were walking into a sexual adventure that was almost beyond belief. And yet it was true.
There really were such people as Paula and Carl. And this is the story of what happened to them when they went into the woods....
CHAPTER ONE
The racy green sports car pulled off the main highway and headed into the woods, into a place where the car's passengers knew that they could do what they had come her to do without fear of being disturbed.
Sixteen-year-old Paula Marcus brushed her long blonde hair out of her eyes and stole a glance at her boy friend Carl, who was sitting in the driver's seat beside her. Carl saw that she was looking at him and winked. He knew why she had asked him to drive into the woods, and he was looking forward to it just as much as she was. Perhaps even more.
Paula closed her eyes happily and nestled deeper into the seat's upholstery with a sigh. It was wonderful to know a boy like Carl Holden, she told herself. Paula could have had her pick of any boy in the school, but she had wanted Carl. And Carl wanted her. And now, now that the two of them were going to where they could be alone, Paula and Carl would both have a chance to find what they had been searching for.
The car drove along for several minutes in silence, and the dirt road gradually got thinner as the woods got thicker, until at last it would have been impossible to go any farther except on foot. Carl stopped the car and pulled the key out of the ignition.
"Tins far enough for you, Paula?"
The golden-haired girl opened her eyes and looked out at their surroundings. They were in the very heart of the woods, and at least twenty miles from town. Surely here was a place where they wouldn't have to worry about being disturbed. Paula turned to gaze at her boy friend Carl.
"Yes, Carl," the girl told him, and there was a dreamy tone in her voice, a tone of anxious longing. "This will be fine. This will be wonderful, as long as you're with me."
That was all the boy had been waiting to hear. He pushed himself out from under the steering wheel and reached over to kiss Paula, to hold her and make love to her.
She pushed him away gently but firmly. "No," she whispered hoarsely. "Not here. There's no room in the car."
Carl nodded to show that he understood. "Where, then?"
"In the grass," the girl told him. "In the grass it will be beautiful."
The boy did not have to be told twice. He pushed open the car door beside him, and a moment later he and Paula were standing up and feeling the soft forest floor beneath their feet.
And then the two of them were running, the boy and the girl were holding hands and running, laughing as they ran away from the car and in search of a spot where they could be alone with their passions and their desires.
Ahead of them was a forest clearing, and in the center of it was a pile of dead leaves. "This way!" Paula shouted, tugging the handsome youth along with her as she ran. "This is the place for us!"
And then they were both falling down in the leaves, bouncing and tumbling and laughing, and then Paula found herself in her lover's arms, and he was kissing her and she wanted it.
She tugged at her boy friend's shirt with feverish hands. "Undress, my darling," she pleaded. "Take your clothes off and let me look at you. I want to see what kind of man I've fallen in love with."
He kissed her lightly on the cheek. "And I want to see what kind of girl you are. I'll take your clothes off if you'll take off mine."
Paula did not answer, but no answer was needed, for a moment later they were grasping and snatching at each other's forms, each one divesting the other of his or her clothing to reveal the naked skin beneath.
Carl could feel his manhood rise within his body as he took off layer after layer of Paula's clothes, to reveal more and more of her soft flesh as the clothes came away. And then Paula was naked, and Carl was naked too, and for a long moment they both lay there gazing into each other's eyes with a fascinated look on therp faces, a look that could only be described as love.
"Oh, darling!" Paula shouted, as she felt the strong arms of her boy friend press her down against the earth, as she felt her body being pushed down under the weight of his. She wanted to feel this man on top of her, she wanted to feel his hard flesh being thrust feverishly into her own.
Carl's hot throbbing pillar of manhood was up and growing larger by the instant, growing larger and growing stiffer as it did so. Soon it would be rock-hard, soon it would be firm enough to be able to force its way into Paula's body and make love to her sultry interior.
Paula spread her legs and locked her arms around the body of her boy friend in a grip of passion. She pressed him down harder on top of him, pressed him down so that the two of them would be locked in a fevered embrace. She wanted to feel his body pressed so hard against hers that it hurt.
Carl's cock was up now, it was up and it was ready for action. Gently he inserted his legs between Paula's thighs, spreading them apart as he did so to reveal the jewel of erotic splendour that lay beneath. He wanted this girl. He wanted to feel her soft moaning body impaled upon his erection until she cried out in passion.
Paula shut her eyes and felt the hot, swollen hardness brushing against her thigh, tickling against her hip, trying to find its way in the jungle of pubic foliage towards the innermost receptacle of her passion. She could feel the thing coming closer now, she could feel it easing along and drawing nearer, ever nearer to the thing for which it longed....
And then the girl felt Carl give a thrust of his powerful torso, and she moaned slightly in pain and surprise, for his manhood had turned out to be larger than she had expected. But Paula didn't care, because she wanted it that way. She wanted Carl's cock to be huge, she wanted to feel it fill every inch of her inner anatomy. She wanted that cock to tear her apart.
Carl's organ pushed deeper, thrust harder and farther into her tender interior. Every millimeter, every fraction of an inch was a whole new torrent of passion for them both. It seemed to Carl as though his cock would never fill this woman completely; it would just keep on going and going forever. But he liked it like that.
"Fuck me, Carl, please!" the girl panted, practically breathless with anticipated passion. "I want you to fuck me until I fall apart in your arms! I want you to screw me until I explode! Stick it in me, Carl, please STICK IT IN ME!"
But Carl did not. have to be told what to do. He wanted this girl just as much as she wanted him. He wanted to feel his hot throbbing manhood go into her deeper than any man had ever been, deeper than any other man could hope to go.
He forced his cock deeper, he thrust his cock farther, until at last he could feel the slight pressure at its tip that told him he was in all the way. And now he started pumping, he started forcing his cock up and down deep within her. so that Paula would be able to feel the full benefit of its hardness within her.
And Paula was moaning now, gasping for air with her eyes shut and her mouth open and a thin thread of saliva at the corner of her tongue. It had never been like this before, it had never been this good. And somehow she knew, she knew without being told, that it was going to be getting much better quite soon.
The cock plunged faster and faster, harder and harder, until the soft flesh lining of Paula's pussy began to grow hotter and hotter. She knew what it was like to feel this man deep within her, but she wanted to feel more of him. She wanted his whole body plunging down into the open maw of her vagina, to make passionate unrelenting love to every corner of her body.
And then Paula became aware of a rumbling, a far-off tremor that told her that her boy friend Carl was fast approaching orgasm. And Paula could feel herself being brought towards an orgasm of her own. She was being sucked slowly and irrevocably into an ever-widening vortex of hot searing passion, of lust that thirsted and would not be appeased.
Gently Carl inclined his head, bent down his mouth to kiss the girl's nipples. Slowly he sucked them, teasing the soft brown lumps of flesh into hard red points of erectness that thrust upwards towards the sky. And as he did so he could feel his cock begin to quiver and shake, until suddenly it was bursting forth into an orgasm of passion that could not be denied.
Paula felt the hot liquid come gushing into her flesh, and it felt so good that she was unable to control herself any longer. In an instant her own body was squirming and writhing, and then she was gushing out her own hot pussy-juice. It shot up and played against the edges of Carl's firm hardness, and then the two of them creamed again and again and again.
"Oh, my darling!" Paula moaned, unable to contain her passion any longer. "This is what I need! This is what I need! I want to feel your hard cock inside me forever and ever!" She could feel her pelvis twitch and spew out its love-sauce again and again, and Paula was gasping on the brink of sexual ecstasy. She'd had men before, but it had never been like this. Carl was the best. He was the best of all. And what they were doing felt so good that Paula felt like applauding. In fact, she imagined that she could hear somebody applauding far off in the distance.
Suddenly she sat up and opened her eyes. Somebody WAS applauding.
Paula screamed. Out of the corner of one eye she could see that there were people here, other people besides Carl and herself. She pushed out from under him quickly, and then the two of them turned to see who it was that had intruded upon them in their moment of passion.
There were seven people standing there. Seven people in the shadows, their faces masked by the blackness of the surrounding undergrowth, their bodies enveloped in garments of denim and leather. It was impossible for either Paula or Carl to be able to tell anything about what these people looked like, or even whether they were male or female.
The sharp sound of sarcastic applause cut through the air, the sound that had made Paula look up in the first place. She turned in the direction of the noise, and saw a pair of hardened hands pounding against each other in midair relentlessly. The body attached to the hands was completely invisible in the dim sylvan light.
The hands stopped applauding as suddenly as they had begun, and then their owner was stepping out of the underbrush, stepping out so that the two naked people could see exactly who and what he was.
It was a man, if you could call it that. He would have been about five feet and nine inches tall if he had stood erect, but as he was he stood hunched over like some sort of monstrosity. There was a menacing look in his pose, and an even more menacing one in his face. Paula took one look at that face and screamed. This was not the face of a man; it was the face of a monster, a demon who lusted after human flesh and devoured it whole. The face of a ghoul....
The man-thing came closer, until it was only scant inches away from both Carl and Paula, who recoiled in horror. Even as they watched, the thing's mouth, which gaped obscenely like some sort of open wound that would not heal, thrust itself open even farther, and a glistening object that roughly resembled a tongue flicked out from the hole. "You will rise," croaked a voice, and it was a voice that was totally unlike anything that Paula had ever heard before. "You will rise and pay homage to Veena, Countess of Ravenspur."
Neither Paula nor Carl attempted to move. A moment ago they had been in each other's arms, throbbing and shuddering in the blissful conjunction of orgasm. What was happening to them now?
The thing came a step closer, lurching forward on protuberances that might loosely be called legs, and now Paula could feel its hot breath on her cheek. "You will rise," the voice repeated dully. "You will rise and pay homage to Veena, Countess of Ravenspur."
Silence. It seemed to Paula as though she ought to move, she ought to get up, but she did not dare.
"You will RISE!" rasped the voice, and then the thing was on top of Carl, attaching itself to his throat like a leech and squeezing remorselessly. The boy screamed, and Paula could see the blood vessels in his forehead grow purple and threaten to burst.
"STOP IT!" she shouted, and leaped to her feet, ran forward to help the man whom she loved. The half-human thing had dropped Carl as a dog drops a bone that has been gnawed free of all its meat, and Paula watched in horror as the boy fell to the ground, gasping and sobbing in his attempts to remain breathing.
"You will rise," the voice repeated, and the creature that the voice came from was bent so far double that it was unable to tell whether or not it was standing on all fours or squatting on its haunches like some sort of dumb, unreasoning beast.
Paula saw that she would have to do as the thing said. She slowly staggered to her feet, taking hold of Carl as she did so and leaning his body against her own, so that both of them were in a position that roughly resembled standing erect.
A dull gleam came into the half-human creature's eyes, an animal gleam of satisfaction at seeing its wishes obeyed. "You will now kneel," it croaked. "You will kneel and pay homage to Veena, the Countess of Ravenspur...."
Paula no longer even bothered to think. She sank to her knees painfully, wondering what was going to be demanded of her next. By this time Carl had recovered most of his wits, and he was kneeling beside the girl, his face looking even more puzzled than hers was.
Another figure stepped out of the blackness, and as it did so its six comrades fell on their faces in adoration. Paula found herself gazing into the eyes of a tall, Amazonian woman, a woman with crimson hair that fell to her waist and black eyes that blazed like two coals in the furnaces of Hell. The woman was slender, with a body that lay tightly enwrapped in a layer of form-fitting leather. In one black-gloved hand she clutched a spear that was even longer than she was, and the razor-keen edge of the blue-metal spearhead was tipped with a darkening stain that was brown and had once been red. Tucked into the woman's broad belt was a long leather flail, its ends braided and knotted to produce a lash that would send shudders of pain into any flesh that it touched. And behind this, protruding from the shoulder blades of the woman's tight leather garment, were a pair of black shiny objects that looked like wings. The wings of a bat.
Or perhaps of a demon....
There could be no doubt in the minds of either Paula or Carl that this creature, this monster in female form, was the thing that was known as Veena, Countess of Ravenspur. Even as Paula watched, the voluptuous vampire woman came closer, and then slowly extended her spear until the tip of it touched against Paula's naked flesh.
"Get up," said a voice. It was the voice of Death....
Angrily Carl staggered to his feet, not even bothering to hide his naked manhood with his hands as he stood. "Look, I don't know what insane asylum you people escaped from," he announced, "but all this stand up, kneel down, stand up again is getting me sick. Why the fuck don't you...."
CRACK! The whip was out and in the grip of the black-gloved hand, and it flashed across the air and bit into the flesh of Carl's face. He gave a sharp' cry of pain and fell over backwards, and then the whip had been returned to its position against the woman's hip. It had happened so fast that Paula was not quite sure she had seen it.
Paula wanted to turn, to rush to the side of her friend Carl and see whether or not he was all right and how badly he had been hurt. But she did not move. She did not move, because she knew that to do so without the consent of this woman who called herself Veena would be instant death.
Veena extended the spear again until the tip of it was pressing painfully into Paula's side. "Get up, female," the woman's cold voice announced. "You may leave your disobedient friend's body where it lies." She looked on in satisfaction as Paula hurried to obey. Then Veena's eyes turned away and refocused upon the form of the hunched-over thing that had spoken earlier. "Come here. Frog," hissed Veena's voice, and it was a voice that could not be disobeyed. "Come here."
"Aye, Mistress," croaked the aptly-named Frog, and then he was lurching forward to stand humbly before her. There was an obedience, a submissiveness in his manner that showed he regarded this woman as his overlord. But at the same time there was something within him, some sort of inner defiance, that made Paula think he could easily destroy this woman and anything else in his path if he cared to. The girl wondered what it could possibly be that Veena possessed that made this man-thing so willing to obey her.
The woman named Veena stretched out one black leather hand and pointed towards the car that Paula and her friend had come here in. "Destroy it," she murmured.
"Aye, Mistress." The car was twenty feet away, but Frog was on top of H in a single bound, clutching at the doorframe and pushing himself into the driver's seat. With one quick wrench of his powerful hands he tore out the dashboard and flung it aside. The auto horn honked, the signal lights flickered, and the car's radio blared into fife.
"Police are still looking," intoned a disembodied voice, "for the six men and one woman who escaped their dragnet earlier today. The fugitives are believed insane and are definitely dangerous, having killed...."
"TURN IT OFF!" shouted Veena, and with one twist of Frog's powerful hands the car's radio had been torn out of the dashboard and scattered in a dozen directions. "Make certain the car will never run again."
"Aye, Mistress." Now Frog was capering over the hood of the car, flinging it open and snatching at the wires and connections of the engine that lay beneath. Paula winced in pain as she saw pieces of iron and steel torn out and flung in every direction. As she watched the car's engine being dissected she felt as though her own body were being tom apart with it.
At last Frog had seen to it that the car would never, never run again, and with a single bound he was again at the feet of his mistress. Paula was unable to figure this out: Frog looked as though he could overpower Veena in a fight. Why then did he choose to obey her so thoroughly?
Paula's thoughts were seized abruptly by a groan of pain from Carl, who was still lying face-down in a puddle of his own blood, a puddle that was gradually growing larger. As he groaned Paula saw Veena and her followers turn to look at the boy.
The black-clad dominatrix extended her spear and pointed it towards two more of her followers. Paula saw that one of the men was chunky, with perhaps a thin layer of fat between his skin and his animal-like muscles. The other man was tall and rawboned, with a shiny black eye patch across one side of his face, covering the dark sightless hole that lay beneath.
"Tish," Veena called out. "Cyclops. The two of you take that boy who has dared to disobey me and dispose of him someplace. I will deal with the girl here." And as Veena spoke Paula could detect a glint of lustfulness in her eyes. Paula shuddered. She didn't like the way that Veena was looking at her. Was it possible that this woman was a lesbian?
Carl groaned once again, and Veena nodded in the direction of the thick man and the eyeless one, the two that she had called Tish and Cyclops. "Dispose of he who would disobey me."
The two men came forward....
"It's not fair," called out a voice, a thin whining voice that seemed born to complain. "It's not fair at all. You let Frog kill the car, and you let Tish and Cyclops kill this man. Why don't you ever let ME kill anything? I can kill good. I can kill real good...."
"Shut up, Estrogen," hissed the merciless voice of Veena. "I will let you kill something when you prove yourself worthy of killing something. Until then you will do the only thing that you are proven fit to do: suck tit and kiss ass." Her eyes narrowed to slits as she spoke. "Is that clear, Estrogen?"
"But...."
"Is that CLEAR?" There was a pause, and for the first time Paula could get a good look at the complainer, the one whom Veena had called Estrogen. He was short, scarcely over five feet high in fact, and looked as though he weighed less than a hundred pounds. There was a childish look of incomprehension on his ferret-like face, and Paula saw that the crotch and armpits of his ragged garment were overgrown with some sort of fungoid vegetation that mouldered and stank like nothing human.
"Is that clear?" repeated the voice of Veena, and the weakling half-man called Estrogen lowered his eyes in shame and submission.
"Yes, Mistress," he said, and there was a hint of a whimper as he spoke.
"Excellent." Veena made a gesture towards the thick man and the man with one eye, the ones she had referred to as Tish and Cyclops. "Now take the body of that young infidel and dispose of it somewhere."
"It shall be as you wish, Mistress," murmured Tish, and the one named Cyclops nodded. The two of them strode determinedly towards Carl, who was only now becoming fully aware of what was going on around him.
In an instant the boy was on his feet, both fists at the ready to deal out swift retribution. "You lay a hand on either Paula or me," the boy hissed, "and I'll break all your goddamn necks! like THIS!"
And then he had launched himself forward and had one hand at Tish's throat and one hand around the neck of Cyclops, and they were both writhing in his grasp. Each of the two men was stronger than Carl, but the boy's fear and his desire for self-preservation were giving him strength that he had not imagined he'd had. To Paula it looked as though he would snap both men's necks like matchsticks....
"FROG!" shouted Veena, but the command might as well have been left unsaid. As if reading the woman's thoughts the half-human homunculus named Frog had lurched itself forward and seized a piece of the car's engine block with long, snake-like fingers. A moment later the lump of twisted metal was sailing through space, and Paula screamed in horror as she-saw it crash into the edge of her boy friend's forehead.
"Carl, Carl!" she shouted. But the girl's entreaties would do no good whatsoever. Her boy friend's form had fallen limp and dangling, and now Cyclops and Tish were dragging it toward the bushes nearby.
No longer able to control her grief and anguish, Paula gave a howl of rage and flung herself towards the two men who were holding her boy friend captive. "Let him go!" she screamed, pounding both men with her useless, little-girl fists. "Let Carl GO!" In her fury
Paula bowled Tish over and sent him flying, but one hand from Cyclops flicked out and dug painfully into the nerves at the side of Paula's neck, and she moaned and whimpered and then fell in a heap.
Veena seemed to be amused at this worthless attempt to resist. "This child seems to think she can defy us," she rasped, "but she must find out for herself that any attempt to disobey my wishes will result in pain and torment for the disobedient one." Veena watched in satisfaction as Cyclops and Tish dragged the still-thrashing Carl behind one of the bushes, then gestured to another one of her men-a short, swarthy man with a dark complexion and piercing eyes. "Hernandez, you and Estrogen bind that girl's hands securely. Leave her legs free, though. She has quite a bit of traveling to do."
"Sure, Veena, sure," babbled Estrogen happily, in his child-like voice. "We'll tie 'er up good. Me and Hernandez, we'll tie 'er up good."
"Shut up, Estrogen," barked Veena. As she spoke the fingers of her right hand toyed idly with the handle of her whip. It had been a long time since Estrogen had felt the bite of it, she reflected. Perhaps too long....
Paula felt as though she ought to run, to flee for her life while still she had the chance.
Behind her she could hear Tish and Cyclops doing something to Carl, something that did not sound at all pleasant.
And then Hernandez and Estrogen were upon her, holding her hands behind her back in a death grip and binding them securely with a cord that Hernandez produced from his jacket. It seemed to Paula that Hernandez, who was half a head shorter than she was, was immensely heavy for a man of his size and the possessor of a strength equal to if not greater than that of Frog. As for Estrogen, who tied Paula's hands eagerly while Hernandez held her, the girl seriously doubted that he would be able to stand up to one punch from her if she got the chance to use it.
Paula was, quite understandably, scared. She was stark naked and helpless in the clutches of these seven raving maniacs, these men and this woman who were so far gone that they had almost passed the borders of humanity.
Paula noticed that there was one more man, one more person who had not yet moved. He was tall, perhaps even seven feet tall, and as thin as a rail. He stood behind Veena motionless, without twitching a single muscle. The man's hands and head were too large for his body, and his face was split into a maniacal grin that was certainly not human. There was evil in that grin, Paula decided. She wondered what must be wrong with this man's face, that made him hold it for so long in that same death's-head grin.
At last Hernandez and Estrogen had finished their work. Paula stole a glance in the direction of the bushes where Carl had disappeared and saw that there was no sign of him at all. Only the bushes, waving gently to and fro....
Tish, Cyclops and Frog were coming closer now, forming a ring with Estrogen and Hernandez around the naked, captive blonde girl. They looked at their mistress Veena, who nodded to show she approved. "Excellent. Estrogen, pick up the girl's clothes." The short, fungus-covered man did as he was told, and Veena turned to face Paula. "We are taking you to Ravenspur, where you will be given the punishment you so richly deserve for your crimes."
"What crimes?" Paula demanded. She felt Hernandez give her a dig in the back, and Frog growled.
Paula felt sick. She knew that these people were sadists, and probably rapists. The woman named Veena was almost definitely a lesbian. Paula was absolutely certain that she would never escape from them alive. She saw Estrogen casting a lascivious look in the direction of her naked breasts, and was sure of it.
Veena made a gesture in the direction of the sixth man, the one who had not yet moved. "Bertie, lead the way to Ravenspur,"
The sixth man came forward, and Paula screamed. She had the awful sensation that the man was not walking, that he was slowly FLOATING along the ground without moving his feet. It was hard to see the lower half of his legs in the dimness and through the underbrush, but still the impression was there.
Bertie slithered past Paula and went forward, and it seemed to the girl that the grass was parting before him as he walked. She felt Hernandez and Tish give her a prod in the lower half of the spine, and then she was stumbling forward timidly.
Paula's mind was racing at a mile a minute, trying to come up with an answer to all the questions she had. Undoubtedly these creatures, despite their outward appearances, had once been PEOPLE, although by now they were too far gone for it to show very much. They were definitely insane, and Paula was absolutely certain that she would be tortured, gang-raped and then killed as slowly and as gainfully as possible.
And there was nothing she could do to stop it-
Absolutely nothing at all....
CHAPTER TWO
It seemed to Paula that she had been walking for an eternity, that ever since the beginning of time she had done nothing but walk, nothing but walk surrounded by these half-human monstrosities.
It was getting dark now, so dark that Paula was tempted to think that it was midnight or perhaps even later. She had been goaded farther and farther into the very heart of the forest, and was chagrined to learn that the woods were much thicker than she had always thought them to be. In addition to the rapidly-falling darkness it was also getting quite cold, and several times the stark-naked Paula shivered. Her teeth were chattering in her head and it was an agony for her to continue.
Ahead of her was the mysterious figure of Bertie, gliding along seemingly a fraction of an inch over the grass on the forest path. Paula wondered how the man managed to move like that, to walk without appearing to walk. Bertie had led the blonde girl and her demented captors into a part of the forest that she had not known existed, along a path that was so thin Paula would never have known it was there if it hadn't been shown to her. Farther and farther the poor girl plodded, and there was nothing she could do but shiver in the cold and wonder what these maniacs were going to do with her once they let her stop walking. She was sure that she was going to be murdered, to be put to death slowly and painfully, but just how and when Paula had no idea. But it would probably involve multiple rape; these men looked a little too lecherous to kill a girl like Paula without raping her at least once. With this unpleasant thought uppermost in her mind, Paula kept walking. Every so often she stumbled, and when that happened there would always be a prod in the spine from Veena's spear to send her stumbling forward again.
The most agonizing part of the ordeal was not the pain, the coldness, the humiliation or the doubt as to her fate. For Paula the hardest thing to take, the factor that added insult to injury, was Estrogen. The short, rancid-looking man was continually leaping and capering on either side of her, babbling like a child and casting lascivious glances at various parts of her feminine anatomy.
Paula gritted her teeth and kept walking. It was bad enough to be accosted in the midst of making love to her boy friend Carl, it was bad enough to be attacked and abducted without explanation, it was bad enough to be made to walk stark naked and shivering cold for miles towards her own undeserved doom at the hands of madmen. Paula could take all that, she could suffer it in silence. But she was damned if she had to put up with this bastard Estrogen at the same time.
Estrogen was leaping about from side to side a few feet to the left of Paula and slightly behind her, so that he had an excellent view of her succulent buttocks. The demented pervert was keeping up a running monologue about how sexy he was, about how many uncountable millions of women had gone to bed with him and about how many further millions had pleaded for a chance to do the same. Paula wept with rage and hungered for one chance to hit this man, one chance to lash out and stuff his teeth down his gibbering throat. Paula was not much of a tighter, but even so she had no doubt that it would be extremely easy for her to spread this bastard all over the landscape. If she only had the chance....
Estrogen had stopped babbling about his conquests and was concentrating on the subject of Paula and his chances of bedding her. "You have nice titties, bitch," the dull-witted man prattled. "I'd like to fuck you, you know that? I'd really like to fuck you. I'd like to bend you over a table and stick my big meat right up your...."
Estrogen's tirade was cut off abruptly-as the man named Tish made a gesture with one hand. "Stop talking, Estrogen," Paula heard Tish mutter firmly.
Estrogen shook himself free of the other man's grip. "I'll talk if I want to. and when I want to...."
This time Estrogen was confronted from two sides at once; Tish to the left and Frog to the right. "Stop talking," Tish repeated, and Frog added: "Leave the lass alone." Then they both turned away from him and kept on walking.
Paula had taken advantage of the respite to do some very heavy thinking. She knew that she was being taken to an unknown place, to have unknown obscenities forced upon her body. She knew that the farther away from civilization she allowed her tormentors to take her, the less chance she would ever have of getting out of this alive.
I can't walk any farther, Paula said to herself. If I collapse right here what can they do to me? Kill me? They're probably going to kill me anyway; I'm sure of it.
The blonde girl gave out a pale, helpless groan, and a moment later she had stumbled and fallen face downwards. She did not look as though she would be able to rise.
Instantly the six men formed a circle around her, ready for action from any quarter. But Veena held out her spear and herded the men to one side.
Veena stepped over the prostrate body of the naked girl, straddling her inert form with both long legs, like some sort of omnipotent colossus. "Get up," said Veena simply and quickly. There was no threat attached to the words; the fact that Veena had said them was threat enough.
Paula did not move.
"You will get up," intoned Veena. It was not a request, nor was it a threat. It was merely a statement of fact, as though to remind the helpless girl that it was against the laws of Nature to disobey Veena. Paula did not move.
Veena stepped aside, and made a quick gesture towards the waiting Frog. "Work quickly, my bunyip," she commanded him.
Frog nodded obediently. He knew what was needed and he knew how to supply it with a minimum of fuss. Veena stepped to one side to allow her helper to pass.
Paula was still on the edge of consciousness, even in her exhaustion, and she was dimly aware of the fact that Frog was standing scant inches away from her, leaning over her with his twisted, wizened body.
"I know what you are thinking," she could hear Frog say flatly and quietly. "You think that if you do not get up we will either abandon you here or kill you, and that either fate would be preferable to the fate that awaits you at Ravenspur: slow and painful torture, centering on your erogenous areas."
One of Frog's hands was resting on the ground, helping to support his battered body. The other was slithering slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, across his stained clothing. The man-animal was still speaking, and the sound of those words rattling about in that twisted throat was perhaps the most obscene thing that Paula had ever heard. She did not know which disturbed her most: the sound of Frog, the sight of Bertie or the smell of Estrogen.
Frog had not finished speaking, and his hand began to gather speed as he spoke: "Let me assure you, lass," he continued, "that we do not plan to leave you here. If you do not come with us, immediately and under your own power, then I shall be forced to put you to death."
Here it comes, Paula thought. Well, it was better to die now and get it over with than to die slowly and painfully at Ravenspur, whatever that was.
Frog's hand was moving very quickly now. It was creeping an inch at a time, crab-fashion, towards Paula's throat, which lay bare and exposed nearby.
"I shall be forced to put you to death," Frog continued. "But not quickly, not mercifully. For the one thing my mistress Veena does not approve of is mercy." The hand was brushing against Paula's throat now, and her heart was pounding in her chest as she felt the obscene touch of the fingers. "I shall kill you in the most exquisitely painful way I know," Frog was saying. "A small amount-of pressure against the vagus nerve, against the nerve that controls the entire body. The pressure gradually increases, and as it does so, so does the pain."
Paula could feel the fingers at her neck now, slipping easily into place around the proper nerve. Frog was a man who obviously knew what he was doing. A wave of pain shot through Paula's body, and in a moment she found it difficult to breathe.
"The pain increases," Frog whispered soothingly. "It increases oh, such a little bit at a time, until finally there is more pain than you can take, and it seems to you impossible that the pain could get any worse." Paula could feel the madman's grip tightening about her throat as he spoke. "But it does get worse, the pain DOES get worse. Until finally you will get up. you will walk, you will do anything at all if it means that the pain will be lessened slightly, for even a fraction of an instant."
Already the pain was more than Paula could bear, and she could feel the contents of her stomach welling up and threatening to disgorge themselves. She had to get up, she had to stop the pain, but there did not seem to be any way to do so.
Her eyes rolled in her skull like marbles and she flailed at the air with one throbbing hand. Already Paula could feel the blood vessels in her forehead begin to pound. "Let me up," she gasped, and then there was something warm spilling out of her mouth-saliva and blood and perhaps something else. "Please. Please. Let me up."
"Let her up, Frog," said the voice of Veena. It seemed to Paula that the voice was underwater, was speaking to her from thirty fathoms down. "Let her up."
"Aye, Mistress." The grip like iron was gone, but the pain was still there. Paula knew that it would be impossible for her to stand, impossible for her to keep walking, but she also knew that the agony would continue if she did not do so.
Slowly, slowly, shaking and throbbing with more pain than she had ever dreamt existed, Paula managed to get to her feet. At a sign from Veena, the girl's tormentors stepped out of the way, and then Paula was standing reasonably erect, gasping for air in great racking sobs that sent her head pounding back and forth against the apex of her spine.
Veena made gestures to several of her followers. "Lead the way, Bertie," she intoned. "Estrogen, not another sound out of you for the rest of the journey. Tish and Hernandez, I want you two to walk on either side of our slave and make certain she does not fall again." Veena smiled thinly as she spoke. "It would be a pity indeed were she to die before we even reached Ravenspur. The two men fell into place at their mistress's command. "Frog and Cyclops, you are to walk beside me. I want my two bunyips close at hand in the event that I need them."
That was the second time that Veena had used that word, Paula noted. What in the name of God was a bunyip? Paula didn't know what the word was, but it sounded obscene. But then, practically everything about these people was obscene. There was an ever-lurking aura of filth and decadence that sent shivers of trepidation throughout Paula's innermost anatomy.
Veena made a gesture at Paula, and the naked girl turned obediently and followed Bertie's wraith-like form ever deeper into the forest.
Paula was desperately trying to learn all she could about her captors, to Figure out why they acted like this and why they served this woman. She guessed that Veena used Frog to do her killing, while Hernandez took care of the strong-man jobs and Tish and Cyclops were her attendants. And Bertie must be ... Bertie must be for scaring the hell out of people. And he's certainly succeeding, Paula reminded herself, shuddering inwardly as she saw the tall man continue his trek through the woods. It seemed to Paula that not a muscle in the man's body was moving, that he used his entire form as one solid unit.
And what was Estrogen for, Paula wondered, and how did he ever get a name like that? The man was too weak for physical jobs, too stupid for mental ones. Was he meant to serve as Veena's court jester, her personal fool? Paula decided that that was the only job which Estrogen looked remotely capable of, although even in that respect she had her doubts.
And who was Veena? Of all of these people she seemed to be the one that was least inhuman, physically at any rate. Paula cast a glance in the direction of the leather-clad dominatrix, and noticed that the two wing-like appendages on the back of Veena's clothing were beginning to flap, as though possibly they might really be wings. But surely that couldn't be true.
Or could it? After all that had happened to Paula so far she wasn't inclined to doubt anything.
"We are approaching Ravenspur now," Veena intoned as the eight figures continued their journey. "Frog, sound the call."
The creature named Frog nodded to show that he understood. From the hunched, lump-strewn garment on his back he withdrew some sort of sack-like object, into which he thrust some cylindrical wooden tubes. A moment later he was inflating the thing and skirling out a pipe tune that Paula estimated could be heard for miles around.
She began to wonder if there would ever be any hope of salvation, of being rescued by someone in the outside world. It certainly didn't seem likely. Ever since the moment when she had been led out of the clearing where she and Carl had made love, it had seemed to Paula as though the normal world of reality had ceased to exist. Paula's clothes, which were now being carried by Estrogen, were the only thing she could see that looked even remotely normal. Even the surrounding trees had been twisted and gnarled into frightening shapes, and the brilliant orb that burned and shone overhead looked like neither the sun nor the moon....
In the dimly-lit darkness Paula could make out a shape far ahead, a looming monstrosity in the form of a battered, broken-down edifice. In the eerie light of the not-moon overhead, and accompanied by the strains of Frog's pipes, the thing looked foreboding indeed.
"Ravenspur," Veena announced, and the word slashed through the still night air like the stroke of a butcher's knife. "We have reached Ravenspur at last."
Instantly Frog stopped playing, and even the prancing Estrogen seemed to be suddenly numbed with reverence for this awesome place. There was absolute silence now, and Paula could feel her own heart pounding inside her body as though it was desperately seeking escape. But there would be no escape....
Veena was leading the way now, carrying her flail in one hand and holding her spear on high with the other. Paula found that she was able to walk with less difficulty now, and she no longer needed to lean upon Tish and Hernandez for support.
The eight of them were walking across the surface of a bare stone pavilion, a flat plateau like a tabletop that jutted up towards the night sky. There were no trees to block the way now, and Paula could see the moon overhead. But it no longer looked like a moon. It looked more like an enormous bloodshot eye....
They kept on walking across the bare stone surface, and Paula could see that to either side of the stone's edge were upright columns, were stone menhirs rather like the pillars at Stonehenge. Occasionally there would be two erect columns right next to each other, with a third laid horizontally across them like a primeval lintel.
Veena made a halting gesture, and instantly all of her followers stopped. Paula felt sure that she would collapse again, and an instant later she sank to a kneeling position. The naked girl winced in pain as her kneecaps struck the stone and a torrent of agony swept through her body.
Veena tilted her spear towards the waiting Bertie. "You know what to do," she informed him. "Get it and bring it here quickly."
Again not a muscle' in Bertie's body moved, but he slowly turned until his back was directly towards Veena and he was facing in the direction from which they had come. Then suddenly his arms shot over his head like catapults and he was racing back into the woods, his shank-like lower limbs pulsing up and down like pistons. It seemed to Paula's fevered brain that the man was running at a speed of ninety miles an hour. And in less than two seconds he was gone. The darkness had swallowed him whole and then winked shut again.
Veena prodded Paula with her spear. "Walk," she said flatly. "Walk into the Chamber."
Ever since they had entered Ravenspur Paula had felt her strength begin to flow back into her body, and now that her strength was returning her defiance was beginning to come back with it. "First I've got to get some answers from you," she replied. "Who are you people and what do you want with me? Why did you kill my friend Carl? What's a bunyip?
Where did that fellow Bertie go, and why can he run so fast and how can he walk without moving? Why...."
Something huge and heavy shot through the air like a cannonball, and a moment later Paula was flat on her back and Frog was towering over her. His claw-like hand was reaching for her throat, idly twitching in its desire to destroy her. "I could easily kill you, bitch," the half-man hissed. "I could easily send you into spasms of pain so agonizing that you would pray for swift and sudden death. But I shan't. Unless you continue to ask such foolish questions, I shan't kill you. Not yet, at any rate." He moved away from her and then turned towards Veena, eyes lowered humbly as though he did not dare to look her in the face. "I trust that I did not act hastily, Mistress," he hissed grotesquely.
"Not at all, my bunyip," Veena assured him, and there was a hint of a smile on her sadistic face. "There is nothing you or Cyclops can do that will displease me." There was an unholy silence for a moment, and then the woman spoke again: "But there is little time left. Come, let us enter the gates of Ravenspur."
Paula felt as though she were in the midst of a trance. She walked forward without being told, and there were no longer any questions in her mind, only submission. She knew that she had to obey these people, because there was no alternative. To disobey was unthinkable, if not impossible.
Frog was tugging out his pipes again and letting loose on long, thin blast of a note A moment later there was a sound like stones being pushed aside, like the earth itself being riven in two. "Walk forward," Veena commanded, and Paula found that she had to obey.
Ahead of her was a solid wall of insurmountable stone, and as the madmen prodded their prize forward Paula saw that the rock was beginning to shake, and then that its surface was beginning to split. A long thin line appeared down the centre of the stone, a line that began to widen as the party came closer. And as they approached Paula saw that the stone was not stone at all but two gates, two gates that were slowly opening to admit the arrivals.
Beyond the gates lay a staircase, a winding stone staircase that led down into the very depths of Ravenspur. Paula knew that once she went down that staircase she would never go up it again. She would be raped and tortured, and then slowly murdered. In her mind's eye she could see herself naked and writhing in a puddle of her own lifeblood....
The girl and her six captors moved forward, and as they passed through the gates the gates swung slowly shut behind them. Paula expected to find herself plunged into darkness, but instead the entire interior of Ravenspur glowed with an inner light, like those forms of phosphorescent toadstool that blaze and glow in their own greenish aura.
Veena was leading the way now, and she did not bother to see if her terrified female captive was following or not. She descended the stairs one step at a time, and Paula was not far behind. Her wrists ached painfully where they had been bound, and her entire body was a mass of perspiration.
Paula's mind was racing frantically now. She had to test the limits of her tormentors to find out just what they were capable of and what they weren't.
Paula was several steps behind Veena on the downward-leading staircase, while behind the naked blonde girl were the five men; Frog, pulling himself down one step at a time and flopping over each one as he did so. Hernandez and Cyclops, proud and erect, cool and ever capable. Tish, doggedly obedient, turning over and over in his mind some subject the nature of which only he knew. And lastly Estrogen, leaping and prancing like a little boy, itching to call out, to make noises, but not daring to do so.
Paula knew that now, if ever, would have to be the time to act. Even in her weakened condition and with her hands bound tightly together she would be more than a match for Estrogen, but she knew that against any one of the other five she would die instantly. Frog and Tish, who looked the weakest of the crew, had proven that they were far stronger than they appeared to be. And Paula knew that even the tall stately Veena would easily outclass her in physical combat. So a fight would be useless, because Paula would be certain to be overpowered.
But wait a minute! All of these men seemed to obey Veena blindly, even though they were stronger than her and at least as smart. Did she exercise such strong control over their minds that, by destroying Veena all of the men would be helpless, like killing the queen bee in a hive full of drones.
Paula decided that it was worth a try. She took a deep breath of air and hurled her body forward, pushing it against the winged back of Veena, and a moment later both female bodies were lurching forward to tumble down the stairs....
What happened next Paula was never quite certain of. But it seemed to her that Veena's leather wings were FLAPPING, were lifting her just high enough into the air to allow Paula to hurtle past and tumble down the remainder of the stairway by herself....
When Paula reached the painful bottom her body was a mass of blood and bruises. When you are a naked young girl it is not the most pleasant of sports to fall down a stone staircase with your hands tied behind your back. Paula groaned inwardly, and felt a torrent of hot blood well up within her mouth.
Veena was standing beside her. "It was not wise of you to resist," she intoned. "Perhaps I should have one of my bunyips punish you for that. Frog could easily kill you, as you have discovered, kill you slowly and painfully. But Cyclops could give you more pain, and you would never die at all. You would keep on dying, but you would never die."
The flat of Veena's spearhead was pressed against Paula's shoulder, and she. whimpered in pain. "You will get up now," Veena murmured hoarsely, "and you will come to the Chamber. The Chamber awaits you."
There were those words again, Paula thought dully to herself: "the Chamber." She didn't know what kind of chamber it was, but she could just imagine.
Six pairs of eyes watched intently as Paula struggled painfully to her feet. Veena. nodded in what was apparently satisfaction. "Very good. You will now follow me, please."
And then Veena was walking down a stone corridor, spear held high and erect. Paula limped pain-ridden behind her, while the five men brought up the rear.
They walked on for several minutes in silence, until suddenly they came upon a twist in the passage, Veena turned it smartly, and Paula and the others followed. The corridor was a dead end.
A blank wall was all that met their gaze, and for a moment Paula felt like fainting. But then she saw Veena walking towards the wall and knew that something was about to happen.
Majestically and purposefully Veena reached the wall, then rapped on it smartly with the butt of her spear.
The wall slid to one side, and standing before them was a man.
Bertie.
Paula screamed. How had this man gotten here? He was frightening enough as he was, but his sudden reappearance here had scared the poor girl out of her wits.
Veena ignored the scream, turning instead to face the silent, grinning Bertie. "Did you bring to me what I wished you to bring?"
Bertie's head did not move, but still it seemed to Paula that he nodded.
"Excellent." Veena was obviously pleased.
She stepped aside from the doorway, and her tall mute servant followed suit. Gesturing imperiously towards Paula, the black-clothed woman said: "In here if you please. There is something that I wish you to see."
A nameless impulse held Paula back, but a second one pushed her forward. What would happen to her if she went into that room? Well, whatever it was, it couldn't possibly be any worse than what she had already undergone.
Or could it?
Paula stepped forward and into the room.
She was in a large, circular chamber, roughly resembling a medieval dungeon. Instruments and devices of torture lay scattered all about, and set into several crevices in the sloping wall were flickering torches, the winking light of which cast an unearthly pallor over the room.
Paula felt disturbed about something. A jangling noise reached her ears, a sound like that of shackles being rattled.
She turned to look in the direction from which the sound had come. On the opposite wall a figure lay, spread-eagled to the wall and moaning softly to itself, a figure that roughly resembled something that might once have been a man....
Paula found herself coming closer, trying to get a better look at the thing. Its head lay bowed down to its collar bone, but as Paula came nearer the thing gave a howl and raised its head so that it was looking directly towards Paula.
Suddenly she screamed. She was looking directly into the eyes of her boy friend Carl!
CHAPTER THREE
The echo of the scream reverberated through the chamber until Paula felt certain that she would go deaf from the sound.
It was Carl, it was definitely Carl. But what was he doing here? Why had these perverted monstrosities allowed him to live when they could have so easily killed him.
The answer came to Paula all to quickly: they hadn't killed Carl because they wanted him alive. They wanted him alive for the same reason that they wanted Paula herself alive: so that they could both be subjected to sexual torture.
Paula whirled to face her captors, to confront them with her discovery. "Why are you doing this to us?" she demanded. "Why don't you let us go? Or, if you want to kill us, why not kill us and get it over with?" Veena stepped forward into the room, and the points of her proud breasts gleamed brightly in the torchlight.
"We do not intend to kill you ... yet," she purred ever so softly. "We want to see you suffer, we want to hear you scream out your agony as your writhing limbs tremble with pain. My helpers and I find the sounds of a human being in anguish to be quite soothing...."
"You ... you BITCH!" Paula hurled herself forward, her fingernails clawing at Veena's throat. But a slight movement of one of Veena's hands, a deft manipulation of the handle of the spear, and Paula was flung bodily across the room to land in a heap beside an iron maiden.
Veena strode swiftly forward now, and her men were not far behind her. Hernandez flicked out one powerful hand and pushed the wall until it slid shut again, sealing them all in
SI as though they were entombed.
Paula found herself standing and then backing away from her tormentors, backing away from their lecherous glances. She turned and quickly ran, but even as she did so she knew that there was no place to run, no place to hide.
Something struck her in the ankle and she stumbled and fell. Stumbled and fell against the spread-eagled body of her semiconscious lover Carl. Straining at the cord that bound her wrists, Paula tried to caress the boy, tried to sooth his fevered flesh with the warm wetness of her tongue.
"My darling, I love you," Paula breathed. "Whatever else may happen to us I love you. Remember that. Oh, darling, remember that!"
Carl groaned. The boy shifted and opened his eyes, and then Paula screamed louder than she had ever screamed in her life.
For Carl's eyes did not contain the bright sheen of an intelligent, reasoning human, but the dull gleam of an unthinking animal.
He made a noise in his throat that was definitely not human, and Paula screamed again.
"Take him away!" she heard herself shouting. "Do anything you like to me, but don't let me look at him! Not like that! DON"T MAKE ME LOOK AT HIM!"
Veena's face was creased with a thin smile, an evil smile, the smile of a sadist. She came forward slowly and gripped Paula's chin, then turned the girl so that she was forced to look at the thing that had once been Cael, had once been the boy she had loved and had made love to.
"Feast your eyes on him, my dear," gloated Veena. "Is he not handsome? Is he not magnificent? You made love to him once before, back there in the woods. You felt his body within your own. Would you not like to make love to him again, and to feel him make love to you?"
Paula shut her eyes and screamed, but even them she could hear Veena's mocking laughter, Veena's triumphant howl of glee.
"This is why we brought you both here, wretch," Veena exclaimed. "My men and I wish to see you make love to this thing that has gone mad, this beast that was once a human being. We believe that we shall find it a source of great ... pleasure," Veena's eyes closed in ecstasy as she imagined what the spectacle would look like.
"I won't do it," Paula exclaimed. "I won't do it and you can't make me. I'd rather die, I'd rather die by slow torture then feel my loins get torn apart by that thing. It ... it's not even human!"
Veena no longer appeared to be pleased. "It would be wise for you if you were to obey," she murmured thoughtfully.
"Go to Hell!" Paula spat, no longer making even an attempt to hold back the fury and unfathomable rage that lay within her soul. "Go to Hell and don't come near me again! You've killed the person I love, you've killed Carl!"
Veena was giving the impression of being politely bored by all this. "But we did not kill him...."
"You killed his brain! And if you had any sense of human decency you'd at least kill his body too!"
Veena dismissed this thought airily with a wave of her hand. "We did not kill him," she repeated. The black-clad dominatrix let her eyes rove about for a moment, then settled her gaze on Frog. "My bunyip, if you would be so good as to show her...."
The twisted wretch nodded obediently, then began to hobble across the stone-cold floor. One knobby hand was out and extended towards Carl's hot throat. "It requires merely a reconnection of the nerve ganglia," Paula heard Veena informing her. "And then everything is as it was before now."
Paula looked on in horror as Frog stretched out his battered forepaw to gently stroke the side of Carl's throbbing throat. Paula thought she detected a flickering in the boy's eyes. Suddenly Frog squeezed the tendons sharply and Carl gave a gasp and looked up.
"Paula!" he shouted. "Where are we? What's going on here? We've...."
"Enough," ordered Veena.
Frog squeezed the boy's neck again, then continued stroking it.
The light disappeared from Carl's eyes, and he grunted like a beast.
"You see?" Veena said triumphantly. "His mind is not dead, merely ... resting. We do not care to return his reasoning faculties to him until after we have had our sport with you."
Paula gulped nervously, and she could feel chills running up and down her unclothed spine. "And what do you mean by THAT?" she wanted to know.
Veena smiled again, and that smile was the unholiest smile on earth, with the exception of Bertie's. "It is a source of amusement for my men and I," Veena said, "to watch a helpless naked girl being sexually ravaged by a monster that has the body of a man and the brain of a beast. I desire to see what will happen when we unchain your friend here and turn him loose on you."
Paula was backing away in terror. She had expected to be tortured, possibly even to be raped, but she had not conceived of anything like this. "You're ... you're SADISTS!" was all that she could think of to say to the black-clad woman.
Veena nodded calmly. "But of course we are. My men submit to my wishes, and in return I provide them with these amusing little entertainments. For you are not the First girl that I have brought here like this." She bared her teeth in a ferocious grin as she spoke. "Nor shall you be the last."
Paula was aware of somebody sneaking up behind her, and she caught a glimpse of Hernandez reaching far into his clothing and withdrawing a switchblade. A touch of the stud, and the blade flicked out and glinted keenly in the wavering torchlight. Paula tried to turn, so that she could at least look this man in the face, but Hernandez was too swift for her. His free hand shot out and seized Paula by one elbow, then brought her arms close to his body. In a moment he was sawing industriously at the cord that bound her wrists together.
Paula saw what the man was doing, and submitted gladly. She wanted to have her j hands free, so that she would have that much chance of escaping. Also, she certainly had no plan to struggle when a blade of that size was a fraction of an inch from her wrists.
Hernandez knew his work, and he did it quickly. One swift jerk, and the severed cord fell from the girl's throbbing wrists. She rubbed her chafed joints busily, striving to restart the circulation.
Veena was watching, and she seemed amused. "That will be of very little help Jo you," she remarked. "For, whether you wish it or not, we are going to subject you to the torture that I have just described. You are going to be raped by your own lover, although we have deprived him of his mind and turned him into an unreasoning, slavering beast.
Paula was beginning to think that perhaps apparent submission on her part would make it easier for her to escape. "All right," she panted desperately, trying to make her voice sound willing. "So I get raped. And then what? After you've had your fun do you let me go?"
Veena tossed her head back and laughed, and when she laughed her entire shapely torso shook up and down enticingly. "Let you go? You've got to be joking! Perhaps you think that being raped by this mindless beast will be torment, but you are wrong. Because that is only the beginning. After you have endured that we have other punishments in store for you. Other little sex-games far more painful, and far more humiliating...."
Paula felt her hands knot into fists, and then she was lunging towards Veena, her eyes ablaze with hate for this woman. But Veena, as though reading the girl's thoughts, reached out lazily with her spear and sent the girl sprawling in a heap in the far coiner.
Grasping her tall spear with one hand and her. whip with the other, Veena raised both instruments of torture until they were pointing towards the ceiling. "Hernandez, Cyclops, Estrogen," she called out. "Prepare our female captive for the Arena."
Paula tried to stand up, to fight back, but she was too weak. She saw the three men coming towards her, and then Cyclops and Hernandez were dragging her out of the room, Estrogen tagging along behind with Paula's clothes nestled in the crook of one arm. Paula cast one last desperate look in the direction of the beast that had once been her boy friend Carl, and then a steel door was clanging shut between them, echoing hollowly in the midnight stillness.
Paula found herself in a small, steel-lined room, the only exit from which was blocked by Hernandez. Estrogen tossed her clothes at her disdainfully, and the heel of one shoe struck Paula in the corner of her eye. "Put on the clothes," Cyclops rasped unemotionally, and his voice had a strange, alien quality that was even more unearthly than his one-eyed appearance. "And don't take all night about it, either. We're getting impatient."
Paula shuddered, then began to dress herself hastily. At least she had been given her clothes back, though she wondered how soon it would be before she was naked again. Perhaps now, fully clothed and with her hands untied, there might be some chance of escape.
Paula dressed herself as quickly as she could, which was not very quickly. Every inch of her body hurt, particularly the protuberances of her breasts and hips, and it was difficult to put the clothes on without screaming aloud in agony.
Estrogen was watching the girl with interest. "You have nice tits, bitch," he commented eagerly. "I'd like to fuck a girl with tits like that. I'd like to stick my meat in her and then...."
"Shut up, Estrogen," said Hernandez calmly, rolling a joint with one hand while the other toyed idly with the handle of his switchblade, ready to use it should the need arise.
Paula had noticed something odd, and something that she might be able to use to her own advantage. Once they were out of Veena's presence, her helpers did not act quite so bizarrely. Hernandez had stopped swaggering and was now acting almost like a human being, although not a very pleasant one. Cyclops, who had formerly been an emotionless robot, was now at least registering impatience. And Estrogen, who had been so meek and humble while Veena had been around, had now quickly reverted to his brash, cocky former self.
Paula had no doubt that she might be able to use this bit of knowledge to her advantage. She was still confident that if she could only get rid of Veena the rest of these people would be like a chicken with its head off, rushing madly about for want of a leader. But there seemed to be no way to get rid of Veena, not even temporarily.
Was there a chance of creating dissension among the ranks, of turning some of these men against Veena and towards herself? Paula doubted it. All of them seemed to be subservient to her, even the impossible-to-understand Bertie. The one exception to this seemed to be Estrogen. Paula had noticed that he appeared to resent being ordered about by Veena, and that he also resented being the scapegoat for all the other members of the group.
While Paula's body dressed itself her mind was working desperately. If she could manage to win Estrogen over to her own side, and if the two of them found a way to free Carl and regain for him his intelligence, what chance would the three of them have of escaping from the other six? Paula thought the question over realistically before she answered it: no chance at all.
She finished dressing, and saw that the three men were looking at her intently. "Good enough," muttered Cyclops impatiently. Why was he in such a hurry, Paula wondered. "Now you will come with us."
Hernandez had his knife out, and even though the blade was not out the message was clear. Paula allowed herself to be led to the far wall of the tiny cell. Cyclops stepped in front of her and depressed a small button in a corner of the wall. Instantly a section of the steel barrier slid inward on itself and Paula found herself looking into the room beyond.
It was the Arena A huge, almost cylindrical pit with gently sloping but insurmountable walls. Along the top edge of the wall was a ring of bleachers, and already Veena and her assistants were filing down a corridor to sit in these. Paula noticed that Bertie was strangely absent for some reason, and more than ever she wondered what could be wrong with this man that made him so grotesquely different from the others. Of all of Paula's captors, Bertie was the only one who did not appear to be insane or mentally afflicted. He was simply inhuman, an alien creature whose mind was totally different from any man's.
Paula saw that there was no way at all she could scale the wall of the Arena to reach the row of seats. The wall sloped upwards and outwards slightly, but not enough to improve the climbing appreciably, especially since it had been polished until it was metal-smooth and mirror-bright.
With the wall dismissed as unscalable, Paula could not see any other way out of the Arena except for the door through which she had just come and another door exactly like it on the opposite side of the ring. And these ways out were so conspicuous that Paula doubted she would be able to use them....
Cyclops and Estrogen pushed her roughly into the middle of the Arena, and then they and Hernandez were departing through the first steel door, which promptly slid shut behind them. Less than a minute later they could be seen emerging at the top of the bleachers corridor and picking their way downwards towards three of the empty seats. They wanted to be able to get a good look at this....
Veena was watching all of these proceedings with the calm, stately eye of an empress. Now, seeing that everything had been made ready, she turned and gave a signal to Frog, who sat beside her. "Now, my bunyip...."
Frog produced his pipes, and a moment later he was blowing one loud, clear note that shattered the stillness of the atmosphere.
As if in answer to this sound there came a second one: a clinking clattering as of chains being wound round a winch of some sort. Paula turned fearfully, and saw that the door at the far end of the Arena was opening. There did not seem to be anybody opening the door....
A low moaning was heard, and then Carl appeared out of the inky blackness of the void. He was walking on all fours like a beast, and the look in his eyes was not of something human. Paula looked with revulsion, and saw that a steel collar had been locked around his neck, a collar to which was attached a chain.
Bertie was on the other end of that chain, leading Carl along like some sort of dog on a leash. And it was this final touch that seemed to deprive Carl of any humanity he might have once had. His naked muscular body was sleek and glistening, the sort of hide that would be found on an animal of the night rather than on a human being. Even his cock, Paula noticed, even his organ of manhood seemed to have changed, so that now it looked like something worthy of a horse or a dog, rather than of a male human being.
And Bertie was still moving along without separating his feet, without using the muscles of his body. He moved like one solid unit, and this was the thing about him that frightened Paula most of all. For the umpteenth time she wondered how he did it. Mass hypnosis? Many small movements very quickly? Levitation? None of them seemed to quite be the answer, although at this point the panic-stricken girl would have been willing to believe any one of them.
Slowly Bertie brought the thing that had once been Carl to the centre of the Arena, to where all eyes would be upon him. Paula stepped back until she felt the cold hardness of the Arena wall against the base of her spine. She couldn't get far enough away from Bertie. Or from Carl, as long as he was in that condition....
Bertie turned his whole body at once until he was facing Veena and the others, and then he seemed to bend slightly at the ankles so that his entire gangly frame inclined forward a half an inch or so in a grotesque imitation of a bow, "They who are about to wish for death salute you," Bertie declaimed, and his voice fit his appearance perfectly: dead and hollow, with the smell of an open grave. It seemed to Paula that the voice did not come from Bertie's throat, but instead sprang to life inside her own head. And when Bertie spoke, THE MUSCLES OF HIS FACE DID NOT MOVE....
Veena made a sign to Bertie with her flail, and he straightened up and dropped the chain attached to Carl's collar. The man-beast that Paula had once willingly made love to now turned to face her. He looked as though he wanted to spring, as though he wanted to attack her, but for some reason he still remained motionless.
Paula turned back to the others and saw that Bertie was now in the bleachers alongside of Tish. How he had gotten up there so quickly was a mystery to Paula, until she remembered how fast she had seen him run. But even running might not be the answer in this case....
There was a low growl from Carl, a caterwaul of animalistic lust, and for the first time Paula realized how truly vulnerable she was. She was a good-looking young woman trapped in a small area with a naked creature whose brain had been stripped of its intelligence, stripped of its reasoning, so that the only thing that remained in the mind was Lust. And up above all this were six men and one woman in varying degrees of humanity, all thirsting for a chance to see this man-creature ravish this helpless female.
Paula knew that she was in trouble.
Veena turned slowly to satisfy herself that all was in order, and then she made a signal to
Frog with the flail in one hand. "Let the battle begin now," she commanded.
Frog understood. Again he picked up his instrument, the thing that was a cross between a flageolet and a bagpipe. He raised it to his lips and then blew two short notes that blended into each other in a way that was at once both sweet and harsh....
There was a low rattle in Carl's throat as the sound died away, and then Paula saw that he was slowly inching towards her.
There was a gleam in the man-beast's eyes, a gleam that indicated only one longing, one desire ... the desire for Lust. For Carl's brain had deteriorated to such a point that Lust, the most basic emotion of all, was the only thing that he could still understand.
The man-thing came closer, drew nearer an inch at a time, and Paula was too frightened to move. She was like a bird being hypnotized by a snake, and there was nothing she could do but wait to be devoured, wait until she was ravished.
The man-thing came nearer, and then suddenly it gathered its for feet beneath it and pounced, cutting through the air like a knife as it lunged towards Paula's captive virgin flesh.
She screamed and ran, but even as she ran she could feel the man-thing's hot breath warming her buttocks. Paula's feet pounded harder and harder against the floor of the Arena, but even as she ran she knew that there was no place to hide. Sooner or later she would be caught.
Suddenly the girl tripped and fell, and sprawled full length on the floor of the Arena. She looked up and saw that the thing that had once been Carl was directly over her, and now it was slashing at her body with both hands, tearing the clothes from her bleeding flesh and flinging them in every direction at once. In a few moments Paula was naked.
She screamed and drew her knees and elbows up over her torso, trying to protect her erogenous areas from the creature's erotic onslaught. One of the girl's knees came up and grazed the edge of the man-thing's temple, causing him to grunt in pain and stagger momentarily backwards.
"Oof! Ugh!" For one brief moment Paula saw a look of sanity, of pure reasoning returning to that face. For one moment Carl was Carl again. But then the veil closed over his mind once more and he was again an unreasoning beast, a bloodthirsty creature that slavered for this girl's throbbing flesh.
With a howl of lust he was atop her, lashing out with his hands to pin her wrists back to the ground, to bend her body over backwards beneath his own. And then his legs were forcing their way between her legs, straining them outward a fraction of an inch at a time to reveal the vaginal treasure that lay below, the thing that this creature lusted for and wanted.
A thrust of his hips, and his petrified manhood was forcing its way into the girl's interior, tearing her apart, impaling her tender flesh upon its hardness. Paula writhed in erotic agony and screamed again and again, shouted for help although she knew that no help would be coming....
CHAPTER FOUR
Paula was naked and she was helpless. The lusting creature, the thing that had once been her boy friend Carl, was now pinning her writhing body down to the floor of the Arena and thrusting his throbbing organ deep inside her captive flesh.
With a Herculean effort the sobbing girl pushed the half-man off of her body and ran, stumbling and staggering, towards the wall at the edge of the Arena. She could hear the sex-crazed beast behind her, scurrying to retrieve its prize, and the feel of its hot breath made Paula run all the faster. Her heart was pounding in her chest like a jackhammer, and her firm young breasts shook like jelly as she ran.
Sobbing and gasping, the girl reached the edge of the wall. With a mighty bound she leaped upwards, struggling to grasp a handhold on the top of the wall but knowing that she was attempting the impossible. She could hear the jeering laughter of Estrogen and Veena as she missed the top of the wall by at least five feet and came crashing down on top of the man-beast below.
The creature fell backwards in surprise, and Paula saw it stagger and fall. The thing's head struck the wall, and then it slid backwards, bestial forelimbs flailing through the air as it fell.
"Ayaagh!" For a moment the mists fell away, for a moment the thing that had once been Carl was Carl once more. For a moment the man and the monster both battled for possession of the mind within the body. But it was the lusting, slavering beast that won, and in an instant the reasoning look of intelligence was gone and it was a hulking, gibbering beast that confronted Paula on the floor of the Arena.
She screamed and tried to run again, but this time the naked beast was too fast for her. It brought her down in a flying tackle, and then it was upon her once more, pushing her arms down into the dust and forcing her thighs apart with its own muscular hind legs, thrusting her thighs apart and spreading them to reveal the tight glistening pussy that lay between them, the thing that was the object of the beast's desires. This was the only part of this girl that he wanted: her cunt, her sweet juicy cunt. He wanted to feel his hot tingling javelin rip apart the tender flesh of the girl's vagina, and hear her screaming and crying out in pain as his monstrous phallus did the job for which it had been intended.
He was upon her now, and Paula knew by the feel of his weight upon her body that he was there to stay, that nothing she could do would shake him off of her this time. He would stay on top of Paula until she felt his hot cream pour out into her innerness, and then and then only would he consider letting her up, letting her out of the grasp of his glistening cock.
And now she could see the beast's hot swollen organ begin to get bigger, begin to bloat from its own fullness and its own hot desire to possess her body. She screamed and closed her eyes, hoping desperately that by blotting out the light she would be able to prevent this monstrous atrocity that she was going to be subjected to. But even with her eyes shut she could still see the lusting lance forcing its way into her innermost flesh.
The cock went in farther, the cock went in deeper, and the deeper it went the bigger it got. Paula could feel it tearing at her flesh, scraping at her insides, and she squirmed and writhed to try to get away from it. But there was no escape, there was no chance of getting away. The only thing she could do was submit. Submission was the only chance that she had.
No longer able to stand it, the terrified girl opened her eyes ... and found herself looking into the lusting face of her captor. It was no longer the face of a man; it was the face of an animal, a slavering beast that understood one thing and one thing only: the pleasures of the flesh.
Paula was getting desperate. Even as she felt the swollen rod of flesh shooting up and down within her feminine tightness she was frantically attempting to hatch some sort of a plan, some kind of a scheme that would allow her to escape from these maniacs with her body reasonably intact. She knew that such a thing was probably impossible, but by now the girl was desperate.
She bit her lip and forced herself to gaze once again into the lust-filled visage of her animalistic tormentor. As she did so Paula suddenly remembered what had happened earlier: how, when she had struck this beast, his mind had temporarily reverted to that of Carl. Perhaps, she now realized, perhaps one good blow in the right part of the cranium would bring Carl back to his normal self permanently, or at least long enough for the two of them to escape from here.
Paula hesitated, and as she did so she could feel the rock-hard javelin of phallus forcing its way even farther into her pussy. She didn't want to hit Carl, she didn't want to hurt him, but she knew that she was doing this for the youth's own good. She tried to work one hand free to attack him as he ravished her body with his organ.
Suddenly a thought occurred to Paula: what if this didn't work? What if she hit Carl too hard, or in the wrong place, and instead of curing him she only sent him even farther into the pit of depravity in which he was now imprisoned. Paula shuddered at the thought. Then she realized that even if she killed Carl he could certainly be no worse off than he was right now. If she didn't take a chance while she had the opportunity she might not live to tell about it later.
With a little moan of pain Paula pushed one arm free and brought it down as hard as she could against the side of the creature's skull.
He never looked up, he never even slowed down. That powerful column of flesh kept on pumping up and down within her tender body like some sort of a mechanical piston. Paula gritted her teeth and lashed out again.
The only result was a snarl from the man-thing, and then it was snapping at her with teeth that seemed unnaturally sharp. Paula mouthed a silent prayer and then pushed up with both knees, hoping somehow to pull herself free from this grasping, gasping monster that hungered for the feel of her flesh wrapped around his own.
Paula pushed upwards with both knees, bringing the hulking creature off of her body and smashing its head and upper torso against the overhanging wall of the Arena. Nothing: the creature was as vicious and inhuman as possible.
Paula was weeping now; she knew that there was no way out of this, no chance of escape, but still she kept on trying. She pushed the thing away from her again and again, pounding the back of its skull and the base of its spine against the wall time and time again. She knew that if she stopped, or that if she so much as slowed down for an instant, the beast would regain its strength and would be attacking her once more.
Again and again the girl's knees' shot skywards, again and again the thing's skull cracked and rang hollowly against the firm concrete of the Arena's overhanging wall. She was dimly aware that the madmen up above were roaring with approval, that the one named Cyclops was bellowing "Ride 'em, cowboy!" and that another one, probably Tish, was yelling "Ole! Ole!"
Paula bit her lip until she could feel the hot blood pouring into her mouth. How many times would she have to keep doing this, until at last either Carl returned to normalcy or until she spattered out his brains on the Arena floor?
She shot another glance at that lust-ridden face, and saw that it showed no sign whatsoever of becoming the face of Carl again. Had his mind been killed and this man-beast taken over his body completely? Paula didn't know what to think. Once she thought she caught a sign of a glint in the creature's eyes that betokened intelligence, but before she could be sure, the look was gone, and then the creature was snarling and grasping her by the ankles and spreading her captive legs so wide that the girl cried out in pain.
And then Paula saw something that made her heart despair and her blood run cold in her veins: for the huge creature's cock, having been excited by the pummeling it had received against the wall, had now gotten bigger than ever. Paula took one look at the size of the thing and knew that it would NEVER fit inside her aching vagina. The thing would tear her apart!
"No!" the helpless maiden whimpered, and tears of genuine pain and fear were cascading down her cheeks. "Tlease don't! Please don't! It'll hurt me! IT'LL HURT ME!"
The beast did not answer. Possibly he was so engulfed in his own lusting that he was not able to hear her. Or, if he did hear her he didn't care. Because all he wanted was her flesh twisted around his bulging erotic erection. Just the thought of it was a turn-on to him. Just the thought of it made him want to....
"Araaaarggghh!" Suddenly the swollen monstrosity that dangled between the creature's legs quivered and shook, and in another moment it was spewing out its hot molten cock-sauce. Paula screamed in agony, and instantly a steaming gob of cock-cream shot its way into her mouth and down her throat. She coughed and spit, but could not get the stuff out of her body. It burned and stung incredibly, and she was sure that she was going to be sick.
The half-human creature screamed again and again as its hot load of cream shot out and stained the pure white flesh of the captive girl. And then she suddenly saw the face alter and change, and in a short time Carl had become Carl once more.
The orgasm had done it! In the excitement of sexual climax his fevered mind had returned to its normal existence, and once again Carl was not a beast but a man! He was the man Paula was in love with, the man that she had willingly offered her body to in the woods so many eternities ago.
She saw that Carl was wondering what he was doing here, that he was about to get up off of her and see where he was. Instantly Paula realized that if Veena and her followers became aware of Carl's reversion to normalcy all would be lost. She could see the twisted, inhuman Frog reaching out with one wizened forepaw to stroke the nerves in Carl's neck, to turn him into a slobbering slavering beast once more....
Paula screamed again, so as not to arouse suspicion, and then wrapped her arms around Carl and pressed him close to her own body. Humping her pelvis up and down so as to make it look as though she were still being raped, Paula whispered hoarsely in Carl's ear: "Listen to me. These people have kidnapped us and they think they've robbed you of your sanity. They think you're like an animal now. You've got to keep pretending, so that they won't catch on to what's happened."
Carl was an intelligent young man. He did not understand what his girl friend Paula was talking about, but he was all too well aware of the importance that he obey her. Lowering his head and growling inhumanly he seized the girl roughly in both savage hands and flung her aside, crawling away from her on all fours as a dog might crawl away from a bone from which all the meat has been gnawed.
Paula saw something then that made her think everything was lost: a minute ago, before Carl had regained his sanity, he had been galloping about on his hands and feet. Now he was moving slowly on his hands and knees. Would Veena or any of her hirelings notice the difference and realize what had happened? Paula hoped not.
There was an applauding sound up above, and for a moment Paula was reminded of what had happened in the woods, of how she and Carl had made love to each other, and of how they had been interrupted by the mocking applause of Frog. But now a look upwards told Paula that the applause came from Hernandez, while Frog and Cyclops were helping Veena to her feet, although to look at her she certainly didn't seem to need their assistance. She nodded to the two men gracefully and murmured something that sounded like "Thank you, my bunyips," and then Frog and Cyclops were both sitting again.
Paula felt as though she herself were going slightly crazy. By now she had heard the word "bunyip" spring from Veena's lips so often that Paula was desperate to find out what the word meant. She had an idea at the back of her brain that if she could only find out what in the name of God a bunyip was all her problems would be solved.
Veena was standing now, and addressing both Paula and the snarling Carl, who was still pretending to be a raging, inhuman beast. "It has been most enjoyable for us to watch you being molested by that mindless monster," Paula heard the female sadist proclaim. "We were particularly amused when he had his sexual climax all over your face and open mouth. It was not the sort of thing we expected at all, and it made a most welcome treat."
Brushing the hair out of her eyes and wiping away a drop of blood, Paula glanced upwards to face the black-clad dominatrix. "Then maybe you'll return the favor and let me get out of here." As if as an afterthought, she added: "You can keep my clothes."
Instantly the eyes of Veena, which a moment ago had been bright and almost amiable, now narrowed into dark-rimmed slits. "No female ever leaves Ravenspur alive except for myself," she intoned harshly. "You have been brought here for the purpose of entertaining us with the sexual indignities that we will force upon your body. You will continue to entertain us in this fashion until your flesh has been torn apart and your blood has been spilled out all over the ground."
Paula shuddered compulsively. She'd heard these people tell her before that the torture was going to get worse, that each successive thing that they did to her would be even more painful and degrading than what had gone before. If they had begun things by having Paula raped by a mindless monster, what would they do to her next? Paula didn't relish the idea of finding out.
Veena made a sign to several of her disciples. "Tish. Hernandez. Go and prepare our female subject for her next torture session immediately. Bertie, take our mindless pet back to his cage in the Menagerie. And if he shows any signs of returning intelligence, report it at once to me, and I will send Frog to take care of it."
"Hey," protested a thin, whining voice, a voice like the voice of a childish, undisciplined brat. "Hey," called out Estrogen petulantly. "How come you never give ME any jobs to do? Huh? Why don't you ever let ME do anything? Huh? Why? Huh? Why? Huh?"
"Estrogen," Veena said quietly, but in a tone that any sane person would not have dared ignore. "Estrogen, shut up before I have Frog or Cyclops shut you up."
"But it's not fair," Estrogen protested. "It's not fair at all. You're always yellin' at me but you never...."
"For the last time, SHUT UP!" Paula was intrigued by what had happened. For the first time Veena had actually lost her temper, had lost her control over the situation. Was it possible, Paula wondered, that if she herself were to keep chipping away at Veena in the same way Estrogen did, to keep on hassling her like that, would Veena lose her control enough to make her men rebel? It certainly seemed to be worth a try.
Paula shot a glance in the direction of Carl, who was still growling and pretending to be a mindless beast. He did not look directly at Paula, but somehow the light in his eyes told the girl that he had seen and that he had made the same conclusion that Paula had. For the first time the girl actually began to think that there might be a chance of getting out of this place. Now that she knew Carl was alive and on her side and that Veena had an Achilles heel, there seemed to be a fairly strong possibility of escape.
Paula heard a sound coming from behind her, and turned to see Hernandez and Tish approaching. She had not noticed when or how they had gotten into the Arena, but there they were.
Hernandez reached out with one powerful hand and dragged Paula to her feet by her blood-streaked blonde hair. "Come on, puta," he hissed at her mockingly. "You gotta get ready for your next little party. You gotta get ready." Hernandez wrapped both arms around Paula's shivering waist and stroked her breasts with a hand that was devoid of warmth. He nodded to Tish. "I hold her. You go get the ... come se dice?. . .the you-know what, and bring it back here. Then we put her in it, eh?"
Tish nodded, and there was a conspiratorial look in the eyes of both men that made Paula shudder. It was clear that these two men had something planned for her, something extremely painful and humiliating, and something that they would very much enjoy subjecting her to.
There was a movement at the corner of Paula's field of vision, and the girl turned her head slightly to see what was there.
It was Bertie. He was slithering along the floor of the Arena in that unpleasant way he had, reaching one hand out claw-like to snatch at Carl and take him back to the Menagerie, whatever that was. The sight of Bertie standing bolt upright, moving across the hard surface without lifting his feet, was perhaps the most grotesque thing that Paula had ever seen.
Carl was still doing his animal act, still running back and forth on all fours and lashing out with his hands like some sort of caged beast in a circus. He had not seen Bertie yet, but now he turned to see who it was that was coming towards him.
Suddenly Carl stopped dead in his tracks. The sight of Bertie, the sight of that rail-thin cadaverous grin sliding towards him with one arm extended was enough to scare anybody. Carl was scared, and he took a step backwards. "No ... no!" he called out, forgetting in his terror that he was supposed to be a brutish monster, not a reasoning human being. Paula saw the indiscretion, and right away she knew that the one chance they had had to escape had been lost.
Hernandez had seen it too, for he flung Paula violently into the dust and looked up towards his mistress Veena. "He is hooman again," the man spat out accusingly. "He is un hombre again!"
A moment later everything happened at once. Paula shot to her feet and brought the weight of her entire body crashing into Hernandez, who groaned once and then crashed against the wall of the Arena. A trickle of blood oozed out of his scalp and down the edge of his ear. At the same time Carl, realizing that the jig was up, shot erect and was bearing down upon Bertie, forcing himself to attack that grinning cadaverous madman with a face that was nothing human..
"FROG!" Veena shouted, and an instant later the Frog-thing was lurching across the Arena's rail and then catapulting through space directly towards Carl's head. Paula saw what had happened: Frog intended to rob Carl of his senses and bring him back to his bestial state once more.
Sobbing with grief Paula stepped over Hernandez's prostrate form and raced towards her boy friend, who was already scant inches away from the monstrous Bertie. Carl was heading towards Bertie and Frog was heading towards Carl. It would be impossible for either one of them to stop now....
"Duck, Carl, duck!" Paula shouted, hoping that her boy friend would hear and understand. For one moment she was afraid that he wouldn't, but at the very last possible instant Carl's body wavered and then suddenly stooped. But he was traveling too swiftly to be able to stop, and then Carl's body was crashing into Bertie's legs and shivering from the impact. But Bertie never wavered; he stood exactly as firm and unwavering as if he had been made out of stone.
Something flashed by Paula's eyes, something that caught her on the side of the head and flung her into the dust. She was dimly aware of the airborne Frog shooting past like a skyrocket, streaking straight towards the spot where Carl's head would have been if he hadn't ducked. Frog had seen that Carl was no longer there, but sailing as he was through empty space and having nothing to push against Frog was unable to change direction. He sailed directly over Carl and crashed heavily into the Arena floor beyond, howling obscene imprecations as he went. An instant afterwards Frog's body was a twisted mass of writhing limbs, quivering and bleeding on the concrete floor.
The next thing Paula knew she and Carl were in each other's arms, and then he had her by the hand and they were both pelting away from the half-human carnage. "We've got to run!" Carl was shouting, and even as he said it they were going even faster.
"Tish! Bertie! STOP them!" Veena bellowed, and from somewhere or other Paula saw Tish streaking straight towards them. Up until now Tish had looked like the weakest physically of all of these people-other than Estrogen, of course-but now there was a grim determination in his eyes that made him look as though he could move the Earth.
But Carl was determined too, for he let go of Paula's hand and rushed at Tish with a howl of rage in his lungs. For an instant the two bodies shivered with the brute force of the impact, but then Tish was on his knees and groaning, and Paula and Carl were once again hand-in-hand and running for their lives.
Ahead of them was a door, one of the two doors that led out of the Arena, and even before either of the two fleeing teenagers could reach it they knew that there was no way they could get that door to open. They both turned, panting from fear and exhaustion, to take on all who would oppose them.
Veena was down inside the Arena now, and beside her was Cyclops, while Estrogen was dancing around in the background and making puerile remarks. But this was not what frightened Paula, what made her despair of any chance of salvation.
What scared her was Bertie. Bertie was only a few feet away from them now, and coming closer with every passing second. It was nerve-wracking, the way he moved so slowly, so agonizingly snail-paced, especially because
Paula had already seen how rapidly he was capable of moving. Bertie's arms were sticking straight out from his body, and his hands were extended claw-like and grasping, reaching out towards his chosen prey.
"Get them, Bertie," Paula could hear Veena whispering, and the voice was all the more chilling because it was so quiet. "Do what you like with the male, but save me the female. I am not yet done with her."
"My God," Paula could hear Carl say beside her. "What the hell is wrong with this guy? How can he walk like that?" It was a damned good question, and Paula promised herself that, if it was the last thing she ever did, she'd find out how Bertie managed to propel himself without making obvious movements in any of his extremities.
Bertie was coming closer now, and as Paula saw the frozen expression on the madman's face she suddenly knew that this was a man it was impossible to stop. She could run from him, she could hide from him, but sooner or later he would be there, sooner or later he would catch her....
Carl was standing up now with both feet wide apart and his legs braced firmly in the position a man takes when something he cares for is being threatened. "Come one step closer," he called out to Bertie in his most challenging tone. "Come one step closer and I'll tear your guts out of your body. I'll spread your blood all over this goddamned Arena."
Bertie came closer.
Paula screamed.
"DAMN YOU!" shouted Carl, and then he was hurling himself towards Bertie, both hands reaching for the tall man's throat.
Slowly, mechanically, Bertie extended one arm and turned it in midair. The hand caught Carl across the side of the head, and he groaned and fell. He did not look as though he would be getting up for quite some time to come.
Veena was standing nearby now, and she was flanked by Cyclops and Estrogen. "Take the female, Bertie," Veena commanded. "Take the female and bring her to me. Do not hurt her ... YET. The time for hurting will be soon, but not now."
Bertie understood. He came towards the fear-stricken Paula. She screamed, and turned away, and closed her eyes, but even then she could feel the grip of Bertie's hands upon her flesh ... and the grip was like ice. No living, breathing man could have hands that cold, and at the touch of them Paula screamed louder than she ever had before.
But Bertie had her in his two powerful hands, and he was dragging her back towards
Veena and the others. Veena nodded to Bertie to release the girl, and a moment later Paula was on her knees before the black-clad Countess of Ravenspur.
Veena pointed an imperious finger down at the cowering blonde girl. "You have attacked three of my most trusted men," she accused. "Tish and Hernandez and Frog. I grieve for the first two, for they were faithful to me, but it is what you have done to Frog that is the least forgivable. For Frog was one of my two bunyips. Now I have only the other one, Cyclops, as well as Bertie. I shall have to make Bertie my new bunyip."
"You have me, Veena, you have me." Estrogen was dancing up and down at Veena's feet, like a little dog craving a single scrap of attention. "Remember me, Veena? I'm still here."
"I know you are, and I regret it deeply. Be still, fool." Again Paula found herself wondering why Veena tolerated this stinking slobbering thing called Estrogen, why she kept the man around when her other five underlings were so much more capable. Well, now that three of them were out of commission Paula reckoned that Veena would need every man she could get.
The woman in black leather was talking to Paula now. "When I brought you here I promised that you would be subjected to a series of sexual humiliations, each one more grueling than the ones that had gone before. You have been through the first one: the rape by a man who had lost his mind. It was amusing, it was stimulating-particularly the part where he ejaculated in your face. But it was not entertaining enough. I have plans for you ... very big plans."
She turned towards Estrogen. "At last you have a chance to be useful. I sent Tish to obtain the, ah ... apparatus for our next little sex-game. He was waylaid en route by our male prisoner, as you yourself saw. Be good and bring me the apparatus."
"Sure thing, Veena." In a moment Estrogen was off, like a boy on his way to a candy shop. Then Veena turned to face Cyclops. "Cyclops, my bunyip. I wish you to examine Frog, and Hernandez, and Tish, and tell me how extensive the damage is. I will need them shortly for the ... ah ... activities which we have planned for this voluptuous young girl here."
Cyclops nodded obediently. "Yes, Mistress." Then he trudged towards Tish, who lay moaning softly, to see exactly what could be done.
Veena was about to say something, but just then a loud rattling noise made her turn in the direction from which the sound had come.
Paula turned too, and she saw that Estrogen had returned. He was pushing some sort of wooden platform on wheels. The thing had a large vertical board like a monolith rising out of its centre, with a hinge running horizontally across the middle.
Attached to the board's four corners were four metal shackles, in just the right places for a girl's wrists and ankles, should anybody be in the mood to spread-eagle a girl to the board. There was absolutely no doubt in Paula's mind for whom that device was intended.
Paula turned to confront Veena. "You ... you can't put me in that thing!" she protested.
Veena gave the impression of being politely bored. "Do you think so? Then we shall have to prove to you how wrong you are."
Paula stepped back until she felt the hard coldness of the door against her naked buttocks. "But ... but I won't DO it! I won't and you can't make me!"
Veena closed her heavy-lidded eyes and blew out a languorous cloud of cigarette smoke, which made chills run down Paula's spine because there was no cigarette to be seen. "So we cannot make you obey our wishes, child? Not only CAN we but we WILL make you obey us. Very, very soon you will be in a position to appreciate the delights of sexual submission."
Paula was determined not to give up, to prove to these maniacs that she hadn't lost her nerve. "If submission is so nice then why the hell don't YOU submit?" she challenged. "Why don't YOU submit and let ME be the one with the whip and the spear for a change?"
Veena opened her mouth to answer this, but before she could do so there was a noise behind her and Cyclops came trudging forward. "What word have you?" Veena inquired of the single-eyed madman.
Cyclops stepped forward, reaching up with one finger to tap the black surface of his eyepatch as a token of his servitude. "Pardon, Mistress," he said. "Tish has been hit rather hard but I can't find any real damage. He should beon his feet again any minute now."
Veena seemed pleased. "Good. We will need him for the little sex-play I have planned for this female here. And what about the others? How are they?"
"Well, Mistress," Cyclops went on. "Hernandez hit in the side of the head pretty bad. Skull fracture, but a simple one. I don't think he'll heal fast enough for our next sex-act."
Veena scowled. "His services are useful but not essential. Neither are those of Tish. The one I worry about is Frog, my bunyip. How is he, Cyclops?"
The eye-patched man paused before answering. "Well...."
"How IS he?" Veena's eyes snapped and glowed with the red fires of Hell. Cyclops looked as though he were afraid to answer, but also as though he were even more afraid NOT to answer.
Finally he spoke: "Well, Mistress, Frog's taken a pretty bad fall...."
"He's taken worse ones."
Cyclops shook his head. "Not like this one, I'm afraid. Broken bones and lots of blood. If we ever glue him back together it'll be a miracle."
"No, it won't," Estrogen said, and there was a conviction in his voice that made the others take notice, even Veena. "You don't know Frog like I do, Cyclops. You could cut off that guy's arms and legs and he'd still keep comin' at yuh. Maybe he's a little fucked up right now, but he'll be in A-number I shape pretty damned soon. You wait and see. That guy's bones heal like they were never broken."
Veena dismissed this with a wave of her hand. "We have no time for that now. We must continue our course of sexual indoctrination and discipline for this unworthy child here before she attacks any more of you." Veena made a gesture to Bertie. "Bertie, until such time as Frog proves he has regained his worthiness, you are my second bunyip. Cyclops, I am promoting you to prime bunyip. Bertie, take our male prisoner here, the one that this girl calls Carl, and escort him to the Menagerie. I have uses for him, particularly for the part of him that dangles so invitingly between his legs."
Suddenly the look on Veena's face changed completely and she was once again the hard-core taskmistress. Turning towards Cyclops, she snapped: "Prepare her for the apparatus."
Paula tried to struggle, but there was no time. Cyclops and Estrogen had snatched her by both arms and a leg and were dragging her, kicking and screaming, towards the wooden platform that waited like some sort of executioner's scaffold.
"Please!" Paula entreated, trying to choke back the sobs as she beseeched them for mercy. "Please! Let me go! I'll do anything you say! Anything at all! Only let me go! LET ME GO!"
There was no answer. The girl was flung bodily face downwards upon the upright slab of plywood, and strong hands reached out and bound her wrists to two of the shackles. Then her ankles were seized, and pulled so far apart that she screamed in sheer unbounded agony. There was a double click as the hard bands of metal locked themselves round the sobbing girl's ankles, and then Paula was naked, spread-eagled and helpless.
Veena was pleased with their handiwork. "Excellent." She nodded to Cyclops. "Operate the crank, please."
"Yes, Mistress." The one-eyed pervert reached for a crank and turned it, and as it revolved Paula could feel her torso from the waist upwards begin to bend forward. The wooden slab was hinged, and now the upper portion was falling downwards slowly, so that the two halves formed a shape resembling a 7 or an inverted L. It was as though Paula had been bent over a tabletop, with her feet on the floor and her arms and breasts flat upon the table's surface.
The crank stopped turning, and now Paula's , naked ass was extended towards the world. She had an idea that her ass was the part of her these people were interested in right now.
Veena made a sound that seemed to indicate approval. "Good work, Cyclops. Now, if you will all stand back and give me room...."
Paula was unable to see Veena, who was standing behind her. But the girlraised her head and saw a mirror in front of her face, and in the reflection in the glass she could make out Veena standing a few feet from Paula's captive buttocks, standing proud and erect as she reached towards the leather belt at her waist and extracted the whip.
And, as Paula watched helplessly, the hand in the black leather glove tightened around the whip as it withdrew the flail from the belt and raised it towards the roof of the Arena....
CHAPTER FIVE
THWOCK!
The knotted-thong whip flew downwards, cutting the air as it went, and gently kissed the exposed flesh of Paula's left ass-cheek. The girl screamed and writhed in her chains as she felt the sting of the whip against her ass.
THWACK!
Again the whip came down, and again and again and faster and faster, and each time it came down it touched a place where it had not been before. And each time it came up again there was a line of scarlet on Paula's captive ass.
THWOCK!
Hot tears of pain were welling up in the blonde girl's eyes. She couldn't take this any longer. In the mirror she could see her throbbing buttocks, crisscrossed with the marks of a thousand lashes. And even as she watched, the whip began its downward course yet again and left yet another redness on the pale white flesh.
Veena was cackling in pure sadistic glee, plainly enjoying the opportunity to exercise her personal tastes in eroticism. "I want your ass, little girl," the black-clad temptress announced in undisguised delight. "I want every inch of your ass spread out all over this fuckin' Arena. I want you to writhe in pain and scream in agony and beg for mercy and bleed, and BLEED, and BLEEEEEEEED!" The word came out in a high-pitched shriek as the whip came downwards again and again and turned Paula's buttocks into mincemeat.
Paula was sobbing in earnest now. "Please!" she moaned, and there was no mistaking the agony in her voice as she spoke. "Please, please stop it! I don't WANT it! I can't TAKE it!"
THWOPK! "But you MUST take it, my child," the Countess of Ravenspur replied ever so gently. "And if you don't want it then my men and I must MAKE you want it. Mustn't we, men?"
"Yes, Veena," said a voice, a voice that Paula recognized as that of Tish. Her heart sank even lower than before; apparently at least one of the three men she and Carl had injured had recovered. Her chances of escaping were no better than before.
The whip came down again, and this time Veena's wrist twisted ever so slightly, and this imperceptible movement made the whiplash touch Paula's flesh at a completely new angle, and made her scream as loud as before.
"You are not screaming enough," murmured Veena, like a mother crooning her child to sleep. "Perhaps you need some more pain. Perhaps you need a new kind of pain. Perhaps what you need may be something like THIS!" And then Veena savagely brought the hard butt of the whip handle down full on the tight pink rosebud of Paula's ass, down in the middle of it so firmly that Paula could feel the hard leather cylinder force its way at least an inch into her ass-hole itself. "Take it OUT of me!" she cried. "PLEASE!"
"That is more like it, my child," whispered Veena. "We want to hear you scream. We want to hear you cry like a baby, or like a bad little girl who has been spanked by her mommy. We want to hear you cry out for mercy, to beg us not to hurt your flesh, not to ravage your anal regions. We want to hear you scream in agony!"
And then the lash rose and fell again, rose and fell again. Paula wanted to scream, but something within her own body kept her back. She knew that for her to indicate pain would give these people pleasure, and she wanted to deny them that pleasure even if it meant she herself would die from agony.
"I suggest that you scream," Veena cut in, as though reading her thoughts. "I want to hear your howls of unendurable agony. And if you DON'T scream, then it will be very simple for my men to MAKE you scream. Have you ever been ass-fucked? Have you ever felt the exquisite hot pain of a man inside your bowel regions? My men will be happy to show you. Have you ever felt a boiling vinegar enema? My men will be eager to administer one. We will go to any lengths for the pleasure of seeing you twisting and writhing in torment."
The whip's long lizard-like tongue bit down again, and this time Paula could feel the warm flow of blood oozing moistly to the surface of her ass....
The thin thread of thong rose and fell, rose and fell in a tireless rhythm, and each time it did so there was another whimper of pain from Paula, another streak of red across her buttocks' whiteness, another smirk of triumph upon the face of Veena. .
Veena paused for a moment. She was an expert at sadism, she had transformed it from a bestial crudity to a fine art. She knew exactly what to do and how to make her voluptuous victims writhe in the most exquisite of pains, to make them bleed but never die, to make their worthless bodies last until the final moment before snuffing out the flame of existence forever. Veena sensed intuitively that the blonde-haired captive before her had already passed the point at which an ordinary lashing would be of any service. It was time for something harsher.
Veena flipped the lash into the air and watched it circle lazily upon itself before falling. She stretched out a languid hand and with the utmost of boredom watched the whip land in the palm of her black-gloved hand, where it had been in the first place. The only difference was that before Veena had been holding the whip by the handle, but now she gripped it by the flail. The hard knotted butt of the handle was dangling limply below.
Again Veena's arm arced upwards triumphantly, again the broad leather stiletto flicked through the air and came down heavily upon Paula's pale flesh. But this time the part that struck Paula was the HANDLE of the whip, and the amount of .torment packed into that tight little cylinder of leather was tremendous. With a yowl of agony Paula rose straining against her bonds, the muscles in her neck tightened like whipcords. A white fleck of foam flicked out of the girl's mouth and spattered against the rim of one of her manacles.
Veena was pleased. It had been quite some time since she had had a victim with the staying power that Paula had, with the ability to take the pain and SHOW the pain without fainting or dropping dead on the spot. Veena was sick unto death of females who had agonizing torment pumped into them by the barrelful, and who merely lay there unflinching and took it. What Veena wanted was girls like Paula, girls who cried and screamed and bled and begged for mercy ... mercy that Veena knew would not be forthcoming.
At last Veena let the whip drop, then tucked it securely back into her broad leather belt. Turning to her male assistants, the woman announced: "I believe that our patient's anal region has been sufficiently prepared for the ... injection." She smiled conceitedly at her own wit, then turned away from the wooden platform. "You men can do as you please with her ... BUT DON'T KILL HER. I want that pleasure for myself, and only after every single drop of torment has been squeezed out of her delicious young body."
She stepped off the platform and walked towards one of the doors that led out of the Arena. "I shall be in my room, resting for a while so as to be fresh for the next little game," she announced. "In an hour or so I think it will be time for us to put our little sex-slave into the Menagerie."
The men nodded, and then turned back to the moaning girl who lay chained to the platform. They did not see their mistress leave the Arena, but they heard the door open and then swing closed again, and when they looked back later she was gone.
For several long seconds Tish, Cyclops and Estrogen stared down at the prostrate figure on the platform, the thing that moaned softly and jangled its chains as it lay there. Finally Tish broke the silence: "Well, what'll we do with her first?" he wanted to know.
"I know what I'd LIKE to do with her," piped up little Estrogen.
"We're going to fuck her," declared Cyclops firmly, who was after all the most practical of the three. "Whippings and chains are fine, and I like 'em just as much as the next man and maybe more. But when y' get right down to it, there's nothing like a nice good fuck."
The other two nodded in silent reverence. They knew that their comrade was speaking the truth.
"Now, as to HOW we fuck her," the one-eyed lecher went on eagerly. "It's pretty simple, I think. We've got three cocks and she's got three holes, and if we put three an' three together we get sex."
"Fine by me, Cyke," Tish nodded sagely. "And if you boys don't mind I'll take the mouth. Cunts are fine and asses are too, but there's something about getting some head that really turns me on somehow."
"Good." This time it was Cyclops's turn to nod. "I guess I'll cut me a slice of that nice white ass with the chocolatey filling. I like a tight hole, boys, and after all the fucking this girl's twat has been through it ain't likely to be the tightest part of her."
Estrogen laughed in that high, thin tone he had. "Are you kidding? The way Veena tore up this kid's ass-hole she won't be able to tighten it for a week. Well, I guess I get the cunt, then. Fine with me; I think it's the best part of a chick."
Paula had been slowly crawling back to the edge of consciousness, and now she was unable to believe what she was hearing. These men were slicing her up like some sort of piece of meat, not treating her as if she were remotely human at all. What Paula didn't know was that, in these men's eyes, a sexy teenage girl like Paula was NOT a human being. She was merely a plaything, an object for them to satiate their lustful desires upon, and then to fling aside like a useless piece of filth.
There was a slight rocking sensation now, and she realized that Estrogen was shaking her by the shoulder. "She won't wake up," the small man complained.
"Then we'll just have to WAKE her up," Cyclops declared. "Tish, hand me that electric cattle prod."
Suddenly a veritable deluge of torment shot through every pore of Paula's frame, and she was writhing and panting like some sort of rabid animal. The chains at her wrists and ankles quivered and shook, and a thin thread of saliva appeared at the corner of her mouth. There was a touch of red in that saliva....
Cyclops seemed to be pleased with his handiwork. "Unchain her ankles," he instructed his two comrades. "I want those legs of her spread WIDE. I'm going to be shoving every inch of my meat inside this bitch and I want her to be able to FEEL it."
Paula groaned inwardly. She knew what these men were planning to do to her and she knew that she wasn't going to like it. "Please," she entreated. "Please, don't hurt me. I won't be able to take the pain. I'll die if you fuck me." She licked her lips frantically before she continued. Her tongue was strangely dry. "You don't want to kill me and you know it. Because Veena doesn't WANT you to kill me. You've got to lie here and let me rest."
"We'll do nothing of the kind, bitch," Tish spat out venomously. "There will be no rest for you, and no mercy either. You're going to get all three of us shoved up inside you at once, whether you like it or not. And, frankly, I hope you DON'T like it, because that way it's so much more enjoyable."
Paula squirmed uncomfortably and tried to get up. Her ankles were free now, but her wrists were still chained. As she watched in helpless terror Cyclops made a gesture with one hand to Estrogen. "Turn that crank over there," he instructed him, pointing towards a crank protruding from a corner of the framework of the torture platform. "And for God's sake be quick about it. My cock is in a big hurry to climb inside this girl's tight little ass."
"Sure thing, Cyclops," breathed the smaller man quickly. With eager and feverish hands he stepped to the winch and then turned it.
There was a creaking sound, and then the upper half of Paula's body began to slowly rise into the air. She looked upwards, and saw that the chains that bound her wrists were gradually being pulled upwards, towards a winch that was suspended over the framework of the torture board. In a matter of moments the poor girl was dangling in midair, her hands chained together over her head and her naked battered body twisting slowly in the wind. In another few moments the platform beneath her was pushed away and she was dangling a few inches from the ground. It was sheer agony to know that solid footing was so close beneath her toes, and that she would be unable to reach it.
The girl's ass and cunt were now on a level with the bulging crotches of Cyclops and Estrogen, and she knew that this was no coincidence. She knew that these men were planning to put their meat inside her body, and she did not relish the thought. Paula knew what it would feel like to be impaled on those two twisting organs, to be sandwich-fucked by these demented sadists, and suddenly she was more afraid than she had ever been before.
The blonde girl was hanging in space, dangling painfully by her swollen wrists from a length of metal chain. She glanced upwards and saw that her wrists were puffed and bleeding, and that the flesh had turned an alarming shade of lavender. Paula seriously doubted that she would ever regain the use of her hands.
But then, she might very well never come out of this thing alive anyway, in which case she had nothing to worry about.
One of the levels of the torture platform had been elevated with the aid of a windlass so that it was extended directly before Paula's face. Tish was standing on that platform now, and as the helpless girl watched he slowly opened his trousers and took out his quivering manhood. The thing was still slightly flaccid, but even as Paula looked on it began to get larger and suffer.
"You're going to suck my cock," Tish gloated rapturously. "I'm going to stick it in your mouth and you're going to give me head and you're going to like it. I'm going to shove my hot meat down your throat and cream all over your body. And you're going to like it, bitch. You're going to get down on your knees and beg me for more.
The cock was stiff now, and pointing straight out from the man's body, pointing straight towards Paula's mouth. The poor girl shuddered in violent revulsion, but she knew that she had absolutely no choice in this matter. She was going to have to suck that cock whether she liked it or not. She was going to have to let this man come in her mouth, and she was going to have to swallow it, and she had absolutely no choice in the matter.
Tish reached out with hot, feverish hands and seized a double handful of the girl's soft golden tresses. For a moment the hard, sadistic look on Tish's face melted away as he stroked the softness of that hair. It reminded him of another place and another time ... and of another girl.
But there was no time for that now. Forcing himself back into reality, Tish gripped the girl's jaws and ripped them open forcibly with his ham my hands, then suddenly thrust the girl's bowed head forwards so that her ripe red lips closed reluctantly and unwillingly upon the meatiness of his manhood. "Suck it, you little bitch," the man crooned. "Suck every bit of it. Suck it until you drop. And then keep on suckin', keep on suckin'. . . " He squeezed the sides of the girl's head until she was terrified into obeying his commands.
"SUCK ME OFF!" he repeated. "SUCK ME OFF, YOU LITTLE BITCH! SUCK ME OFF, SUCK ME OFF!"
Paula sucked. Even though she did not want to, she knew that she had to make oral love to this man. It was the only protection she had against death, against her being murdered. It was either feel this man's hot come pouring into her throat, or feel her own blood gushing out onto the floor.
Cyclops laughed mockingly at the spectacle, and Paula felt very embarrassed. It was humiliating enough to have to give this man Tish a blow job, but it was even more degrading to have to do it in front of Cyclops and Estrogen.
The single-eyed sadist turned to his filth-encrusted comrade Estrogen and tapped him conspiratorially upon the shoulder. "Well, boy, now that Tish is gettin' his, I guess it's time we started gettin' ours."
Estrogen nodded in agreement. He'd seen the tight hole of that girl's juicy cunt, and he wanted it all for himself....
Cyclops and Estrogen were reaching for the flies of their trousers now, eager to begin what they had come here to do. While Paula sucked on Tish's glistening phallus she caught glimpses of what was going on down below. She knew that she wasn't going to enjoy it. But these men didn't seem to care about that.
A pang of hot stabbing pain lanced through Paula's twat, and she knew then that Estrogen had rammed his hot meat into the space between her legs. Paula found herself wincing in pain, not from the feeling of the cock stretching her in sides (Estrogen's cock was small and therefore stretched her very little) but because of the sudden shock of feeling the thing inside her.
For a moment Paula unwillingly wallowed in the pain, in the weltering torment, but then suddenly she was filled with an even deeper and more agonizing pain. For Cyclops had taken hold of her still-aching ass-cheeks and spread them wide, and then suddenly rammed his cock deep into the exposed ass-hole beyond. Paula had never been ass-fucked before, and the pain was enormous. And that cock was huge....
The cock in her twat and the cock in her butt both plunged farther and farther into the helpless maiden's soft virgin flesh, and it seemed to Paula as though the farther the twin organs went the more unendurable was the agony. She felt the taut flesh of Cyclops's firm stomach press painfully against her aching buttocks, and she felt Estrogen's own stenching stomach pressed against hers, and the pain for Paula was truly unbearable. She was literally being sandwich-fucked, she was being pressed agonizingly between these two sex-hungry men, and the results were certain not to be very pleasant. As a crowning indignity, the organ in Paula's mouth was getting bigger and bigger, and she knew that any moment now it would be spewing out is molten cock-lava down her parched and aching throat.
And now the two pile driver penises inside
Paula's crotch were beginning to pump in and out of her with ever-increasing speed. She was rapidly being knocked back and forth like a raft in a monsoon. She could feel the breath being squeezed out of her body until Paula was sure that she would suffocate from the pressure of these thrusting bodies against her own. If that happened then she would literally be fucked to death....
Faster and faster the organs moved, faster they pulsated. The longer they fucked this girl the better they felt, and the better they felt the bigger the cock got, and the bigger the cocks got the tighter Paula's mouth, cunt and ass got, and the tighter these got the better it felt for the cocks. And on it went like this, on and on and more and more and faster and faster until Paula could no longer think, could no longer breathe, could no longer do anything at all but feel these hot throbbing organs pounding up and down within her.
"Spread your cheeks!" panted Cyclops eagerly, thrusting his seething javelin of man-flesh even farther into the helpless girl's wriggling bung-hole. "Spread your cheeks and let me in! I'm going to fuck that ass of yours until it drops off! I'm going to fuck that ass of yours until your shit gets pregnant! Spread them fuckin' cheeks, bitch, because I want your ass!"
And then suddenly the hot wad of manhood inside Paula's mouth exploded, and Tish was creaming out his dick-juice across her slavering tongue and into the raw red throat that lay beyond.
"I'm creaming! I'm creaming! Holy mackinaw, I'M CREAMING!" Estrogen was shouting now, shouting triumphantly as his own hot dick burst forth into a torrent of molten sperm. It barreled its way deep, deep into Paula's twat, and just the feel of its sliminess inside of her made the girl shudder with revulsion.
"I'm creaming, too, but you don't see me bragging about it." And even as Cyclops spoke the golden-haired girl could feel his cock shiver and quake, and in a moment her tight reddened ass was bursting with the sting of this man's cream within it. Paula had been given her first enema: .an enema with hot cream instead of water, and with a cock instead of an enema bag.
There were three men creaming inside of Paula at once, three men spilling simultaneous orgasms into her flesh. And as they did so Paula suddenly realized something very strange, something that both frightened and disturbed her.
She LIKED it!
She WANTED the feeling of these men inside her, feeling them dominate her and humiliate her, having them subjugate her with the staffs of power that dangled between their legs. For Paula was a woman, and she suddenly realized that it was her purpose in life to give pleasure to men, no matter how violently they wanted their sex.
And she wanted that. Suddenly Paula realized that she wanted that.
"You're good," she heard a voice whispering passionately to the three men, and Paula was surprised to realize that the voice was her own. "You're fuckin' good, every one of you. You've got the best cocks I've ever had, and I want them. I want more of them. I want every last bit of them, and then I want even more."
Paula was surprised and startled to hear the words coming out of her own mouth in such a fashion, but somehow she inwardly knew that she MEANT these words, that they were the truth. She really DID want these men's cocks, and the thought of being subjugated and disciplined by these men and their organs was so delicious that Paula almost had an orgasm. But the pain in her wrists and her buttocks was too great for her to be interested in pleasure right at this time.
"Cut me down," the girl pleaded sonorously. "Take me out of these chains, so that my hands will be free. So that I can make love to all of you with every single part of me.
With a whoop of lustful glee Estrogen leaped forward to comply, and Tish was not far behind him. But Cyclops, who was the most trusted of all Veena's men with the exception of Frog held back.
"I don't think Veena would like it," he drawled. "I don't think that Veena would like it at all."
It was then that Paula had the idea that she knew would be her only chance of salvation from this sex-trap. It would liberate her from the lesbian clutches of Veena, and at the same time it would leave her free to have sex with these men or with any other men that she pleased.
"Never mind about Veena," she whispered softly, temptingly. "You don't need Veena, you need me. I'm so much nicer than Veena. Cut me loose, and the four of us can go away together to some place where we'll be free from Veena forever."
Paula's plan was a simple one: she hoped to bring these men over to her own cause and away from Veena's. With their aid it would be simple to find Carl, and then the five of them should be able to deal with Veena and her three remaining disciples, particularly since two of them. Hernandez and Frog, did not look as though they would be in fighting trim for some time to come. Paula had no idea of how to combat Veena, and even less idea of how to combat her assistant Bertie, who seemed to be growing more and more inhuman with every passing moment. But the blonde girl was confident that, with the help of Cyclops and Tish and even Estrogen, she would be able to find Carl, and then they would all escape from here.
She saw Cyclops wavering on the edge of indecision, and hastened to tip the scales of his mind in her own favor. "You don't want Veena," she insisted seductively. "You want me. Veena is mean; she whips you and gives you orders you can't carry out. She won't let you be in charge. But I WILL, Cyclops. The three of you will be the masters, and I'll be the slave. Not like Veena, Cyclops. I'll never give you orders like Veena does."
"Let's do it, Cyclops," Estrogen was panting. "Let's do it right now. Who cares about Veena? Veena's an ugly old bitch who never lets us have any fun."
"Veena is Veena," Cyclops insisted. "She is the Mistress, and I am her bunyip."
"Yes," Tish intoned dryly. "Veena is Veena. You can crawl around on your hands and knees and kiss her ass, or you can disobey her, and either way she'll try to whip you. You can't win with Veena. For once in his life
Estrogen is right, Cyke."
There was a very long pause, during which the only sounds that broke the silence were the slight creaking of the chains from which Paula hung, and the soft whisperings she murmured to these men that promised them so many erotic delights.
At last Cyclops looked up with his one gleaming eye. "Oh, hell," he muttered at last. "I'm spoiling for a change anyhow. I might as well try this."
"Good," whispered Paula seductively. "Then let me down. Take these chains off my wrists and let me down, before my hands fall off my body."
The three men rushed forward with a will, and less than a minute later Paula was being laid tenderly on the floor of the Arena, with Tish's jacket resting beneath her buttocks as a pillow to ward off the pain. All three men were doing their best to return the vital blood flow to Paula's wrists, the veins in which had been practically severed by the ordeal.
Finally the girl was strong enough to sit up and face her newfound allies.
"We don't have much time," she told them. "We've got to find my friend Carl, and then the five of us will escape together."
"Who cares about THAT dumb guy?" whined Estrogen. "We want you all to ourselves."
Paula was firm on this point. "And I want you. But I also want Carl. I'm not going to leave Ravenspur without him."
There was a momentary silence while the three men absorbed this piece of information, and then Tish nodded. "Fine. We'll help you get Carl, and then we'll all bust out of here together. And if we have to we'll kill Veena. We'll even kill Frog and Hernandez and Bertie."
"There's no way to kill Bertie," Cyclops commented glumly. "There's no way to kill a man who ain't alive in the first place. No way at all."
Mention of Bertie made Paula sit up and take notice. "Who IS Bertie, anyway?" she enquired. "And why does he act like that?"
For what seemed like a minute none of the men made a sound. Finally it was Cyclops who spoke. "None of us know who or WHAT Bertie is," he confessed. "When I first met Veena, Bertie and Frog were both with her already, and none of them would tell me who they were or where they came from. Personally, I think Bertie's a zombie. Or maybe even a ghost."
"The hell with Bertie," Tish snorted in disgust. "He takes his orders from Veena, the same as we did up until a minute ago. The thing for us to do is get rid of Veena, and then the whole Ravenspur mob falls apart in our hands."
"We'll worry about Veena later." It was Paula herself who spoke now. She knew that they had to work fast, because any moment now Veena and her henchmen might be coming back. "Right now what we've got to do is find Carl and set him free."
"Finding him is easy," Cyclops announced. "Because we know just where he is. Veena ordered Bertie to take him down to the Menagerie...."
CHAPTER SIX
When Carl returned to consciousness there was a ringing in his ears and the smell of human dung in his nostrils.
He stirred idly and stretched himself. He was conscious of a tremendous necessity for getting up, but at the same time it was so nice just to lie there, just to lie there and rest. To close his eyes and instantly be back in the woods with Paula, and the two of them were lying on the soft forest floor and making passionate tender love to each other.
Something touched Carl's cheek, and in his semiconscious state he knew that it was Paula's hand. He reached out and stroked it, basking in the delicious feel of the twisted fingers, the warty skin, the smell of dead animals and....
Suddenly Carl was wide awake and bolt upright. He saw the hand that was nestled in his own, saw what it looked like and screamed. He flung the hand away and then got up and ran. He could never get far enough away from that awful hand, that appendage that was human and yet not human, and so horrifying to him because of this very half-humanness.
Carl stumbled over something, and then he was rolling in a thick heap of human filth. He screamed and sobbed and shuddered, and then he was trying to get to his feet again.
It was dark in this place, wherever "this place" was, but even so Carl had the undeniably strong sensation that he was being surrounded, that dozens of someones or somethings were slowly coming towards him from all directions, slithering and crawling and rolling across the surface that his feet rested on. Carl remembered what that hand he had seen had looked like, and he shuddered when he realized the kind of creatures it would take to have a hand like that.
The things were coming closer to him, and now and then soft moaning voices, plaintive little protests cut through the stench-thickened air and reached Carl's ears. Bright pinpoints of light began to appear in the darkness before him, glowing coronas with dark at their centres, and suddenly Carl knew that these myriad rings of light were EYES. Dozens of eyes, all looking at him in the darkness. Green eyes and yellow eyes and red ones, and even a few that looked positively orange. Eyes wide open and eyes half shut. Pairs of eyes, single eyes by themselves, and once Carl was sure he saw three eyes in a row and less than an inch apart quite near. Unable and unwilling to move he merely sat there and blinked, and the eyes blinked obscenely right back at him.
Something reached out and touched Carl in the blackness, something moist and slimy, and in sudden terror and panic he reeled away. He fell over backwards, and then a score of other hands were grasping at him, and in indescribable fright the boy fell in upon his own body, shutting his eyes and drawing his arms and legs tightly against his torso in the hope that this would in some way ward off the demons.
"Who are you?" said a voice. It was a slurred voice, a voice that sounded as though it came from a throat that had never been the possessor of a whole palate. But it was a human voice nonetheless, and all the more shocking because it called out to Carl in such a place as this.
"Who wants to know?" Carl demanded. "If you want to talk to me come out and show yourself. Where are you?"
"We are here, we are here," breathed a thousand voices at once, and then a thousand hands were reaching out from the gloom to touch Carl's naked body. Hands with four fingers and three fingers and sometimes even no fingers, and once a hand that had so many fingers they seemed to brush against Carl's face like fur.
"Wh-where am I?" he quavered, trying desperately not to show the rising panic in his voice. "What am I doing here and where am I?"
"You're in the M enagerie., . .the Menagerie ... nagerie ... " The voices lisped and grunted and croaked out their dry refrain. "The Menagerie ... nagerie ... agerie...."
Carl felt as though he were going to be violently ill. He remembered Veena, and that thought made him realize that he had to get out of here, he had to find Paula and then the two of them would escape.
"You are one of us now," crooned a voice, and it seemed to Carl's fevered imagination that the sounds were uttered by a mouth that did not have a head, a mouth that protruded from a pair of monstrous shoulders and that opened and closed, opened and closed. "Soon Frog and Hernandez will come with their bright shiny knives, and then you will be one of us. You will be Veena's slave, as we are!"
"Why does she put you here?" the boy demanded. It was very difficult to speak to voices that belonged to bodies he could not see, but he realized that if these bodies looked the way he THOUGHT they looked, it would be even harder for him to talk to them. "Why does Veena put you here, what do you do and what do you eat?"
"We are Veena's slaves," hissed a voice from twelve feet above him, and the others echoed: "slaves ... slaves...."
"We do nothing but wait, nothing but wait for Frog and Hernandez to come with their knives. And in between whiles we have sex. And we eat. We feast upon ... human flesh."
Carl knew then that he was going to be sick. He tried to move away from these monstrosities, but it Was like wading through a cesspool of human filth. One of the grasping hands reached out and touched the boy's genitals, and for one awful moment Carl was sure he would die then and there. But he brushed the hand away and started to crawl.
There was no room to stand and no light to see by and no way of telling which direction led out of this place and which farther into its iniquities and filth. But Carl crawled, for want of anything better to do, and for every half-human homunculus that he brushed from his path, a half a dozen more fell into place behind him.
"They will come with the knives," said a voice, said a voice. "You will soon be like us, you will soon be like us, when they come with the knives."
Carl was getting desperate. "What is the way out of here?" he demanded of the hissing things that drifted around him.
"There is no way out ... no way out ... way out ... out. There only are ways further in ... further in. There is no way out ... no way out ... no way out."
Carl was sure that he was going insane. He shouldered a half a dozen twisted figures out of his path and kept on crawling. He kept on going, even though he was sure by now that there was no way out of here at all.
But there HAD to be a way out. If he'd gotten in, he would be able to get out.
Probing, tendril-like hands closed in around his cock and balls, pressed tightly against the smooth round hemispheres of his ass-cheeks and began to spread them apart. The boy squealed in terror and lashed out with both fists at once, and he felt the hard knuckles come into contact with something that was flesh and yet was not flesh. He swung again and again, until at last the gibbering tongues and glittering eyes were a safe distance away. But he knew that he could only hold them off for so long....
"Tell me how to get out of here!" he demanded. Something struck him, and Carl reached out and snatched it with both hands, snatched it and twisted. The thing felt like a head and a neck, and he had the unpleasant sensation that the head had fallen off of the body and was now CRAWLING AWAY into the darkness. Carl felt a wave of sickness climb halfway up his throat, but fought it down gamely.
"Tell me how to get out of here!" he repeated, and the voices answered: "Bun yips!"
"I want to know the way out."
"We are bunyips."
"You're insane!"
"We arc bunyips ... bunyips ... bunyips! Yes, and you're a bunyip too!" And then the eyes were coming closer, leaping and bouncing up and down in the darkness like balloons on a string, and the boy screamed and fell backwards into the darkness. A thousand eyes saw him, and a thousand hands touched him, and a thousand tongues licked him ... "CARL!"
Something was grabbing him, something that didn't feel the same way that these other things did. Carl opened his mouth and screamed to shut out the nightmare. He knew that he was going insane, unless he had gone insane already.
"This way, Carl!"
More hands were grabbing him, more hands were pulling him, and a thousand tiny voices squealed out in protest: "You cannot! He is ours! He is ours, he is ours ... " And then Carl was being pulled along bodily by several hands that felt reasonably human, and he knew that whatever was happening to him now he had no control over it.
"Thank God I found you, Carl!"
With a dazed moan the boy opened his eyes. He was sitting in the middle of a circular chamber, and kneeling in front of him was Paula, a look of tender compassion on her beautiful face.
And behind her were Cyclops, and Tish and Estrogen.
"You bastards!" Carl howled, and hurled himself at the three men that he loathed. But Paula was holding him back. "NO, Carl!" she was saying. "They're on OUR side! They helped you escape from the Menagerie. And now they'll help us both escape from Veena!"
Carl sat down again and blinked dumbly. "Is this true?" was all he could think of to say.
Tish nodded slowly. "Listen to her. She made us realize that we're not interested in Veena. We're going back to the normal world, where we can be free to make love to girls and women as we please." He looked hungrily at Paula as he spoke, and Carl could feel the anger rising in his body again, but Paula held him back with a restraining gesture.
"All right," the boy breathed, reaching up with one trembling hand to brush a drop of saliva back into his mouth. "So you helped me escape. But escape from what? A minute ago I was in a dark crowded room full of God-knew-what. How did I get here so quickly, and where was I a minute ago?"
"You were in the Menagerie," Paula repeated.
"I heard that. And what's the Menagerie?"
A firm hand was rested on Carl's shoulder, and the boy looked up into the single eye of the man called Cyclops. There was a look of infinite sadness on the man's hardened face. "Carl," he whispered thickly. "I want you to promise me that as long as you live you will never ask us WHAT was in the Menagerie, or how you got there. I want you to promise."
Carl was about to protest this, but he saw the expression on Cyclops's face, and somehow he understood. "I promise," vowed Carl, and even though his mind was bursting with questions he allowed them to go unanswered.
Tish, who had just sat down on the floor, now leaped to his feet again and ground his hands together determinedly. "Right, then!" he exclaimed. "And now it's time for us to be leaving."
"And now it's time for ye t' be dyin', " croaked a harsh, guttural voice. The four men and the girl turned to look into the battered face of Frog, who was limping towards them in a lurching, obscene gait. It seemed as though his four limbs all took turns in supporting his body as he struggled along.
Paula was aghast. "I thought you were crippled," she hissed. "I thought you had your legs broken."
"Aye, perhaps they were," Frog muttered, and the words were a dusty rattle in his throat. "But ye see I'm still movin', I'm still hirplin' along. An' there's not a single one o' you who'll be leavin' this room alive."
"That's what you think," vowed Cyclops, and as he stepped forward Paula caught the flash of a knife blade in the man's right hand. "I've' got a knife here, Frog, and I plan to use it."
"I see you've got a knife," Frog countered thickly. "An' I've seen it afore. You've USED it on me afore."
"That's right," Cyclops agreed, and even in the dimness Paula could see his fingers tighten about the blade until his knuckles gleamed white. "That's right, Frog. You ASKED me to use it on you."
"Well, you'll not be usin' it now!" And in the flash of an instant Frog had hurled his battered frame into the air and was streaking through space towards the single eye socket of Cyclops. The one-eyed man saw the inhuman projectile and threw up both hands to ward it away. But a single splay-toed foot found its way through the barrier, and there was an alarming CRACK! as the foot pushed Cyclops's head backwards and farther backwards on the slender support of his neck. The fist that held the knife turned into an open hand, and then the knife was skittering across the cobblestones in a shower of sparks.
Cyclops fell backwards in a heap on the floor of the chamber. His head lay at a very odd angle to his body, an angle that made Paula feel she was going to be sick....
With a shout Tish made a dive towards the knife, the glinting weapon that Cyclops had let fall from his hand. But Frog was shooting towards it too, and a pair of powerful splay-toed feet pushed Tish violently out of the way as a set of gnarled fingers closed around the knife.
"I think I'll be keepin' this now," the beast-man muttered. "And you'll be a-comin' with me to Veena, or you'll be a-goin' nowhere at all." He brandished the burnished blade in the direction of the prostrate Tish. "Get up!" Then the knife was pointing towards Estrogen. "And you too, ye flamin' scobberlotcher! Traitors! That's what ye are: traitors to the Countess of Ravenspur, the Mistress of us all!"
"You're a damned fool, Frog," Paula heard Tish saying. "Why obey Veena just because she wants you to? You're stronger than she is, you're smarter than she is and faster than she is. You do all her work for her; without you she'd be helpless. Why do you let her dominate you like that?"
"Aye, she'd be helpless," nodded Frog, and for a moment it seemed to Paula that there was a strange moistness in the creature's eyes. "And perhaps that is why I be servin' her."
"But you need her more than she needs you, Frog." It was Estrogen speaking now, and he was sidling towards the crouching figure as he spoke. "Because she's the only person who ever treated you like a human being. The only one who didn't treat you like a FREAK!"
Frog's beslimed knuckles were ashen around the handle of the knife. "You wullna be repeatin' that," he hissed.
"You're a freak, Frog!" Estrogen shouted. "You've got a body like an animal and a cock like a battering ram! Your children were freaks, and the woman you loved was a freak! Your parents abandoned you at birth because you were a FREAK!"
Frog was coming forward an inch at a time now. "I'm no more a freak than you be," he whispered. There was a curious catch to the voice.
"Bertie knows you're a freak," Estrogen shouted. "That's why you murdered Gwynplaine! And then you took Hernandez's knife, and Cyclops's knife, and cut up your own body. So that you'd be deformed! So that you'd be a FREAK!"
"You flamin' BASTARD!" Frog hurled himself at Estrogen, and the two of them grappled and rolled in the dust. One flailing limb struck a wall, and a glimmering torch that was suspended above fell, its red tongues of flame licking at the clothing and flesh of both figures.
Paula and Carl stared, mesmerized with morbid fascination, as the two smoke-enveloped figures continued their battle to the death. Only Tish had the presence of mind to move.
"We've got to get out of here!" he said, desperately shaking both the boy and the girl until they were brought back into the real world. "We've got to get the hell out!"
"Huh?" Carl was stammering. "B-but what about Estrogen? What about Cyclops? We can't just leave them here!"
The flames were spreading now, and Tish cast a nervous glance in their direction before he answered. "Forget about them both and think of yourselves!" he entreated. "Estrogen had nothing to live for, and Cyclops was Veena's bunyip. Right now he might rise up against her, but sooner or later he'd succumb once again to her dominating ways. The bunyips always do."
"What the hell is a bunyip?" Carl demanded, putting into words the question that had been gnawing at Paula's brain for hours.
"There's no time, no time!" shouted Tish, herding the two teenage lovers towards the door. By now the body of Cyclops had joined the other two in the flames. "We've got to get out of here before Veena discovers us!"
Ahead of them was a door, a huge oaken affair with leather hinges. An iron ring hung from the centre of the door, and now Tish leaned forward and tugged at this ring to pull the door open. The door creaked open wearily and Paula and the others could see into the dimly-lit corridor beyond.
Standing there was Bertie.
"You will come," he commanded, and even as his voice spoke his mouth did not move, it merely continued its jackal grin upon his pumpkin-headed visage. "You will come to Mistress Veena, who will mete out swift sexual punishment for your rash disobedience." The hands reached out towards Paula with fingers that were like ice.
There was a howl of anger, and then Tish was attacking the ghoulish form. Suddenly Bertie's limbs snapped out of their paralysis and began a series of spasmodic, angular movements, as he struggled to overpower the babbling Tish. And there was no doubt in the minds of either Carl or Paula as to which of the two would emerge the victor. It would not be Tish....
"Let's get out of here, darling!" Paula begged, tugging at the arm of her naked companion.
"Not yet!" In a trice Carl was at the opposite wall and snatching a glowering torch from its bracket. He whirled the gleaming firebrand once, twice, three times, and then brought it down with, a crash on the top of Bertie's head.
Instantly the man's body was a mass of writhing flames, and the infernal heat was overpowering the body of Tish, who squealed and cried out like a dying animal. A strong odor of burnt flesh assailed Paula's nostrils....
"NOW we go!" shouted Carl, flinging the torch back into the chamber and taking his beloved by the hand. Then the two naked people were racing down the corridor and towards ultimate freedom, freedom from the Countess of Ravenspur and her demented minions....
"Which way is out of here?" Paula demanded, hot tears of fear stinging in her eyes as she ran.
"This way!" Carl rejoined. "It's the only way there is!" And the corridor they were running through was indeed the only way out. Until they came to a turn or a branching there was no choice to make regarding which way to run. There was only one corridor....
Ahead of them was a door, a door like the first with an iron ring and leather hinges, but a door that opened outward instead of inward. Carl pushed his full weight against the door now, and roughly shouldered it open until he and Paula could step into the room beyond.
They were in a torchlit chamber, and the floor of the place was in flames. In one corner lay the fire-blackened body of Cyclops, while elsewhere Tish lay dying and Estrogen appeared to be already dead. There was no sign of Bertie, and it was hard to believe that the throbbing mass of protoplasm against the wall had once been known as Frog....
Paula screamed. "It's the same ROOM!" she shouted. "We went the wrong WAY!"
On the other side of the chamber was a door, a door with an iron ring and leather hinges, and now the naked girl and boy were running towards it and opening it. Paula was ready to scream in case when the door was opened they saw Bertie standing there.
Ahead of them was a stone corridor, and now they were both racing down it towards the freedom that lay beyond.
At the other end of the hallway was an oaken door, a door with leather hinges and an iron ring dangling from its centre, and now the boy and the girl were pushing this door open and stepping into the room beyond.
They were in a torchlit chamber, and the floor of the place was in flames. In one corner lay the fire-blackened body of Cyclops, while elsewhere Tish lay dying and Estrogen appeared to be....
Paula screamed louder than she ever had before, louder even then when she had received the anal assault at the hands of Veena and her lash. "There's no way out!" the girl whimpered. "We just run out of the room and run back into it, over and over! There's no way out at all!"
"There's GOT to be a way out!" Carl vowed, pulling the long-haired girl across the room and towards the oaken door that lay beyond. "I'll bet that this door is it!" He opened it, and both lovers breathed a sigh of relief when they saw that what lay beyond was not the same familiar corridor but another room. They stepped into it eagerly.
They were in a torchlit chamber, and the floor of the place was in flames. In one corner lay the fire-blackened body of....
"I can't STAND it!" the blonde girl moaned. "I'M GOING CRAZY! LET ME OUT OF HERE! SHOW ME THE WAY TO ESCAPE!"
"There IS no escape," said a voice ever so softly. A woman's voice.
Carl and Paula were standing in the middle of a vast expanse of sand. The sky above and the sand below were identical in color, were both the same flat tone of everlasting greyness.
Standing before them was Veena, and she was the only patch of color in this colorless world. Her voluptuous body glistened black and crimson in the dimness. Held high aloft in one black-gloved hand was her spear, and her flail was in the other. The leather bats' wings on the back of the woman's garment flapped in the wind as though they were a part of her body, and perhaps they were....
"There IS no escape," Veena repeated, and there was no attempt to mask the obscene cackle of triumph in her voice. "You have been chosen as the sex-slaves of Veena, and the sex-slaves of Veena you must remain. You shall be forced to spend the remainder of Eternity performing degrading sexual acts for my pleasure, and the more pain that you receive at my hands the more I will enjoy it. I promise you both that there shall never be any escape from my dominion.
"There is no way out of Ravenspur...."
CHAPTER SEVEN
"There is no way out of Ravenspur...."
The words repeated themselves. They were words of mockery, words of cruel jest, and even as they were spoken Paula knew that they were true.
"I have many things in store for you both," Veena was saying as she took a step towards the two frightened people. "Many things that you would not believe the nature of even if I were to tell them to you."
She pointed her spear at Carl. "A touch of my spearhead on your unworthy flesh," she announced, "and your penis would develop a life of its own, twisting and struggling between your legs like some kind of serpent that hungered to sink its fangs into some maiden's flesh."
She came a step closer. "And your fingers will turn into penises, each one twisting and squirming independently of the others, each one a living creature wholly independent of yourself, yet growing out of your body. And your eyes will become penises, and your tongue, and your ... " She saw the expression on Carl's face and laughed. "Perhaps the thought is a bit too sickening for you, eh?"
She turned towards Paula. "And as for you ... you have such a deliciously large cunt, I wonder if you would allow me the liberty of making it oh, such a tiny bit larger. It would grow another inch, and then another inch, and then another, until it would be a hole the size of your stomach. And your legs and your hips would disappear into it, and it would keep getting bigger, and your tits would fall into it as well, and then ... " Her eyes narrowed to darkened slits of unadulterated sadism. "Or perhaps another means of torture. I could have you molested by one of my creatures, and the moment you felt the beast's sperm within your loins you would now that it had mingled with your own eggs, and that a creature even more monstrous than the one that had raped you was coming to life inside your body. And it would get bigger and bigger, before your very eyes, and it would CRAWL out of your cunt, literally CRAWL out, and you would see the awful inhuman thing that you had mothered, that had come out of YOUR body. And then your own monstrous offspring would rape you, and you would feel the product of THAT grow large within you, and you would give birth to a child more monstrous than the last one, and THAT would rape you, and...."
"Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!" Paula screamed until she was sure that she would go deaf from the sound reverberating through her eardrums.. She could not tolerate the thought of sexual torture at the hands of this sadist any longer.
"I am sending my creatures to torment you now," the woman intoned. "You thought that you had done away with my servants, with Frog and Cyclops and Bertie and the others, and perhaps you have. But I have other servants. You are going to spend the rest of Eternity here, performing acts of sexual degradation for my amusement. This will be your jail. So it is only proper that I summon the Jailers."
Veena extended her spear towards the sky, and a moment later there was heard a far-off "thump ... thump ... thump ... " The Jailers were coming. They were miles away and they were approaching very slowly, but Paula knew that they would be here eventually. There was nothing in the universe that could stop them.
"Now then," Veena was saying. "What is the next act that I shall have my two prisoners subject themselves to? Something simple, I believe, and only moderately painful. The pain and the degradation shall increase slowly as the punishment progresses."
Thump ... thump ... thump ... The Jailers were coming closer.
"GOD DAMN YOU TO HELL!" Carl bellowed. No longer, even bothering to think, he was hurling his hate-ridden body directly towards the laughing Veena, and it happened so quickly that neither the tall woman nor the blonde girl had time to see it happen.
Thump ... thump ... thump....
"Ouf." Veena's spear went flying in one direction and her whip went in another. And then Veena was lying face upwards in the sand, and Carl was on top of her, pinning her down beneath the weight of his body, and suddenly both he and Paula knew without knowing why they knew that without her spear and her flail Veena was absolutely powerless....
Thump ... thump ... thump....
"Damn you, damn you, DAMN you!" the boy shouted. Flecks of foam spattered out of his angry mouth and across the face of his struggling captive, the woman who called herself the Countess of Ravenspur. "You like to see people suffer? You like to see people get hurt? I'll make YOU hurt, and see how you like it! I'm going to RAPE you! I'm going to stick my dick in you until you beg for mercy!"
Even in the eternal dimness of this twilit world Paula could see the look of unfathomable horror on the face of Veena. A moment ago Veena had been the overlord, the taskmistress, the person in command and the one who gave the orders. But now she was naught but a helpless sexual plaything in the hands of the angry Carl. It was more than embarrassing; it was downright humiliating.
Carl could feel his manhood surge within his body as his cock began to stiffen and a surge of sexual excitement flowed into it. For what had seemed like an eternity this woman Veena had subjected him and Paula to the most painful and degrading acts that any mortal mind could conceive of. And now he was going to get even, now he and Paula were going to get their own back. The youth licked his lips hungrily as he saw the trembling Veena pinned so enticingly beneath his own body. She looked ' so helpless, so powerless, that suddenly the boy knew just how Veena must have felt when she had seen Carl and Paula struggle in her grasp.
The breath was rising hot and heavy inside Carl's throat now, and Paula was startled to see that the boy was actually DROOLING! He was almost like an animal now, a mindless beast that understood nothing save the concept of pure driving Lust. And now, even as Paula watched, the man's powerful hands were reaching out to grasp Veena's body and to hold it captive against his own flesh.
Veena shrieked as she felt Carl's hands against her, tearing the leather from her helpless form. Again and again the clothing was torn away, faster and faster, until white patches began to form underneath it: patches of Veena's naked white flesh. Crisscrossed against the bare white expanse were lines of scarlet, lines that showed where Carl had been a little too rough for Veena's good. For the first time Veena knew what it was like to bleed....
The woman who called herself the Countess of Ravenspur was naked now, naked and trembling in the grasp of this sexual madman. And he himself was naked, and his corded muscles rippled beneath his gleaming and sweat-glistened flesh as he pressed forward to push Veena's body even farther beneath his own. His hands were on top of her arms now, pressing them down into the harsh gray sandy expanse, making it harder for her to escape the onslaught of his ravishing phallus. And then his legs were forcing their way between her legs, forcing them apart, forcing them open to reveal the thing underneath that was what this man lusted for: the Countess of Ravenspur's cunt.
Paula felt her breath leave her body in one long, drawn-out gasp. For it seemed to her that the thing between Veena's thighs was not a vagina but an EYE, a glistening orb surrounded by thick black ciliate lashes. And then the eye turned to look at Paula, and then it blinked several times, and Paula groaned and turned away, for she knew that she was going to be sick.
Carl looked down at the thing between his captive's legs, and he saw that it was indeed a vagina; a raw, red, practically bleeding, clean-shaven vagina. He wanted that thing, he wanted to plunge his hard meat into it and feel this woman cry out in pain and protestation. He wanted to feel his cock explode into hot love-lava inside this woman's cunt, and he wanted her to feel his hard hotness.
"I'm going to FUCK you!" Carl bellowed, and with a howl of inhuman glee he thrust his powerful torso forward and sent his throbbing cock-javelin deep into the confines of Veena's innermost womb. Deeper it went, and deeper, until suddenly he could hear the woman cry out in pain, scream out in agony, and he knew that she was feeling his bigness inside her.
"Stop it! Please STOP it!" The woman was moaning. "You're going to give me an orgasm!"
"Damn right I'm going to give you one," the boy muttered darkly, and there was no mistaking the sound of the words as he bit them off and spat them out. "I'm going to make you cream from here to Kingdom Come! I'm going to give you an orgasm to end all orgasms!"
"But you MUSTN'T!" the frightened woman bellowed, and there was an undeniable aura of panic attached to the words. Her eyes had widened until the whites seemed to be an inch across. "You mustn't do this! I have never had an orgasm! And if I have one the spell will be broken!"
But Carl wasn't listening. He wanted this woman's flesh, he wanted to feel her pelvic regions shudder and gasp out a sexual climax in time to his own, and the harder it was going to be for him to do this then the more he wanted to do it. He spread the girl's thighs even wider apart, wider apart until she screamed in agony, and then he rammed his huge cock even deeper into the chasm that lay waiting below.
And then his buttocks were rising and falling, rising and falling to the beat of the cock, and his voluminous pillar of manhood was shooting up and down within Veena's body, harder and harder, faster and faster. More of it, more of it, more of it, more....
The speed picked up, and the cock went faster and faster, humping and pumping and bumping and thumping, and as it beat out its thumping rhythm Paula could hear the thumping of Carl's heart as his desire for this woman increased. Thump ... Thump ... Thump....
Suddenly Paula screamed and drew back. That thumping was not the sound of Carl's heart, nor was it even the pounding of his organ inside Veena's shaking flesh. It was the approach of the Jailers, the faceless unmentionable things that Veena had summoned before Carl had taken away her power. Her power was gone, but the Jailers were coming closer....
"CARL!" Paula shouted, and her call was the call of a person who must be answered. Carl did not stop his raping, his sexual ravishment of Veena, but he managed to look up. A glance at Paula's face told him that something was wrong, something was very wrong indeed. "What is it?"
"The Jailers!" Paula stretched out one quivering fear-stricken finger towards the gray-fogged horizon. Somewhere in that direction lay the Jailers, the Jailers that were coming closer, and both Carl and Paula knew that when those creatures got here then any hope they had of salvation would be dashed to the rocks....
T h u m p ... T h u m p ... C I o se r and closer ... Thump ... Thump ... Closer and closer....
"You FOOLS!" Veena laughed, and her mocking yowl of triumph reverberated darkly in the hollow stillness. "You bloody FOOLS! You thought that you had me, you thought that you took my powers away! Well, when the Jailers get here you'll see which of us is victorious! When my Jailers come you shall not have a prayer!"
"We'll see about that, bitch." A grim line of determination slashed across Carl's face as he spoke. His cock was still inside this woman's body and he could feel it getting bigger with every passing second. "I'm going to give you an orgasm. I'm going to make you come. And then WE'LL be the winners."
"NO!" shouted Veena, and as she said it both Carl and Paula knew that the outcome of the battle had already been determined. If they could only make Veena orgasm before the Jailers arrived, they would be free. If not, then they both knew that all would be lost. The Jailers would be here and the Countess of Ravenspur would emerge triumphant and glorious. And then neither Carl nor Paula would ever be shown mercy again.
"I'm going to FUCK you!" Carl bellowed, and as he spoke he plunged his organ even deeper into Veena than it had gone before. She moaned softly in anguish, but she knew that nothing she said or did would make this man pull his cock out of her body until both he and she had had a climax. Veena had never had an orgasm, and she shuddered at the thought of being forced to receive one now. It was very humiliating....
"You're SCARED of an orgasm!" hissed Carl, as his rock-hard pillar of manhood boomed up and down within her loins like some sort of erogenous pile driver. "You're SCARED to have an orgasm! Admit it! ADMIT it! ADMIT IT!"
Thump ... Thump ... Closer and closer ... Closer and closer they came. Thump....
Paula shuddered in panic. She could hear the oncoming sound of the Jailers and she knew that they would be here soon, very soon. The eternally unceasing thump sounded like stone against metal, or the bounding of a one-footed behemoth as it leaped again and again across the barren half-formed wasteland.
Faster and faster Carl pumped. He was determined to make Veena orgasm, determined to make her cream out her sensuous guts on the sandy stretch of this oceanless beach. His huge hairy cock rose and fell, rose and fell deep within her. Thump ... Thump ... Thump, it went Thump....
Veena moaned softly in pain and self-pity. Against her will she could feel herself being dragged slowly and inexorably towards the edge of a swirling vortex of sexual climax. Against her will she knew that she was being forced to have an orgasm....
NO! She told herself it was impossible for her to climax. She had never had an orgasm before and she was not going to have one now. It was against all the laws of Nature....
THUMP ... THUMP.. THUMP....
In the dimly lit twilight of this godforsaken world Paula was sure that she could see the Jailers coming. The distant horizon was scattered with rocks and boulders and menhirs of every size and description. And far off, on a high hill of mineral matter, she was sure that she could see a movement, she was sure that she could see a change, that she could see a shadow passing across the face of the void like some sort of gigantic hand to snuff out their lives and their hopes of salvation. The Jailers were coming closer....
THUMP ... THUMP.. THUMP again ... THUM P....
"Take my meat, you bitch!" Carl ranted incessantly. "Feel my hot meat up inside that worthless cunt of yours. You're going to cream! You're going to cream out your fuckin' guts all over this god-blasted planet!"
And he fucked her, he fucked Veena harder and harder, and as his cock rose and fell he could feel a far-off rumbling, a distant sensation that swirled and echoed within his own organ of manhood, and Carl knew that he was going to have an orgasm. And the thought of it, the knowledge that he was going to have an orgasm and Veena was not, somehow brought him to the peak of an interminable rage.
"You bitch!" he shouted. "You BITCH! I hate you! I HATE you!" And he brought his big booming cock down farther into this woman, sent it so far down into her that Veena screamed out in bottomless anguish. She was being crucified on the hot redness of this big man's organ. It was filling her body with pain, and her heart was pounding out a death-riddled rhythm....
THUMP ... THUMP ... Faster and faster....
THUMP ... THUMP ... Faster and faster....
"Ayaaarghh!" And then Carl's cock was exploding in a shower of erogenous fireworks. He had creamed, he had blasted out every last drop of his glimmering love-sauce like some sort of red-hot lava. And he knew that the battle had been fought and he and Paula had lost, because he had shot his wad and Veena had not ... THUMP.". .THUMP ... The Jailers were coming....
THUMP ... THUMP ... The Jailers were near ... "You fools! You fools! You gambled and lost!" And Veena's mocking laughter rang out hollowly in the distance, and as if in response to it the sound of the oncoming Jailers increased, the tempo got faster, and now they were near....
THUMP! THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP! Paula could see the shadow on the distant hill coming closer, crawling towards her, and now she could see something SOLID coming over the crest of the rocks, and she knew that the Jailers were arriving. There was not very much time left....
"DAMN you!" Carl shouted, and he gave one last thrust to his cock, and it blossomed out into hot steaming orgasm that shot and reverberated around and around inside Veena's cold body.
And then suddenly she screamed. She had never felt a man's hot creaminess inside of her, and yet Veena was feeling it now. It was like a key that had opened the vault, for now all the years of pent-up sexual tension were spilling out of Veena's pussy as she creamed in an orgasm that could never be equaled.
"NO!. . .NO!. . .STOP it!" she cried, but there was no stopping the orgasm now. It tumbled out of her like a sensuous flood, it poured out and bled onto the landscape like a thousand gallons of sexual tidal wave. More of it, more of it, and as Veena's vaginal muscles shook in the welter of orgasm her voice rose until it was a high-pitched squeal of damnation, and it seemed to both Carl and Paula that her body was melting away into flames, into the flames of a thousand hell fires of Hades.
And then suddenly Carl and Paula were in each other's arms, sobbing and gasping and laughing and crying and moaning and shouting all tumbled together. They had won. They had WON!
Suddenly Paula looked up, and her soft golden hair whipped over and across her young face as she did so. A high wind was rising, and it was slowly getting stronger.
They were back at Ravenspur, they were back at the huge stone altar at the entrance to the fortress of torture. It was daylight now, but near dusk. The sun glowed dully on the western horizon, and it was far too big and too red for any sun that had ever warmed Earth. And the wind was getting stronger.
And then Carl and Paula heard something that made their blood turn to ice water in their veins.
THUMP ... THUMP ... THUMP....
The Jailers were coming! They were miles away but coming closer, coming steadily towards them from over the hills. And then there was another sound, a rumbling sound, the sound of centuries-old masonry beginning to powder and crumble at last.
Ravenspur was dying.
The girl and the boy watched in horror as the castle began to shrivel, and swivel and wizen, and then it fell in upon itself with a crash and a shower of dust. And the THUMP of the onrushing Jailers was still heard, a bit closer and a bit louder, and mixed in with this sound came another sound, an even more bone-chilling one.
It was the squeal of a thousand inhuman voices in a thousand inhuman throats, and a dark black-blotted shadow crawled out of the depths of the ruins and across the empty expanse towards the two lovers. A SOMETHING was coming out of Ravenspur and crawling towards them in the darkness, a Something that had a thousand limbs and a million eyes....
Paula knew what it was, and just the thought of the nature of the thing made her blood run colder still within her. The half-human creatures of Veena's grotesque Menagerie were escaping, were crawling gradually towards them with ever-increasing speed. Things that had too many limbs or no limbs at all, things that had two heads or three heads or mouths in the tops of their necks that opened and closed, opened and closed.
The Menagerie's beasts were loose upon the face of the earth.
And the Jailers were coming closer ... THUMP ... THUMP....
From the throats of the beasts rose a shrill piercing whine: "We accept them ... we accept them ... we accept them, freaks like us ... " And the things came nearer, the things came closer until both Paula and her boy friend were too petrified with panic to move, to stiffened with fear to turn and run....
"We accept them ... THUMP ... THUMP ... We accept them ... THUMP ... THUMP ... " The twisted half-humans came forward, and behind them was a death-blackened shadow, a shadow that fell slowly across the countryside and turned it into a vast and barren wasteland.
The twisted limbs came closer to the naked girl and the naked boy, the limbs with feet for hands and stumps for feet, the limbs with fingers like spidery tendrils that seemed to reach out and grasp at the emptiness as they slowly and gradually came closer and ever nearer to their unclothed prey.
"THUMP ... THUMP ... Freaks like us ... We accept them. . .Freaks like us ... THUMP ... THUMP:. . " Closer they came....
A single limb, a single half-human appendage that might once have been christened an arm reached out from the mass of teeming inhumanity and probed delicately towards Paula's naked foot. She watched in rapt fascination mingled with horror as the thing crept closer, as it slowly raised like some sort of snake ready to strike, as it came up slowly and then flung itself at her foot.
The spell was broken, and Paula screamed.
Instantly the squadron of beasts were upon her, flinging themselves obscenely on top of both Paula and Carl, who battled and twisted and fought to shake the things off. Hands snatched and grasped and closed tightly around Paula's breasts, Carl's cock. Fingers and lizard-like tongues tried to force their way into the tight buttocks of both the girl and the boy, spreading the ass-cheeks to get into what lay beyond.
"RUN, Paula!" Carl shouted, and as he opened his mouth a horde of black beast-things tried to force their way inside it. He bit down on something soft and hairy, and he felt the sickness rise within himself, and then he was running with both arms outstretched to ward off the inhuman attack of this bestial Menagerie.
Paula was running blind now, her long blonde hair streaming behind her and her naked white flesh gleaming in the yellow moonlight. She knew that Carl was running too, but she did not know where he was, or even if the two of them were running in the same direction.
An awful thought occurred to Paula: how did she know that she was running in the right direction? For that matter, how did she know that ANY direction was the right direction? It seemed to the terror-crazed girl that the Jailers were coming from all sides at once, and that she was in the very centre of a maelstrom of gibbering beasts, the contents of Veena's awesome Menagerie spilled out over the face of the planet. The freak-things were on all sides of her now, on all sides and coming closer.
"CARL!" the girl shouted, and as she yelled it she saw the thing that convinced her that now there was absolutely no hope at all. For a dozen yards away stood Carl, legs spread wide, frantically doing battle with a half a score of the monsters at once. And more were approaching from every direction. Two were attached to his forearm like leeches, a third was entwining itself round his body like a tree root, and another was attacking his penis, sucking it fiercely like some sort of inhuman leech....
Tears of agonized anguish shot through Paula's mind as she stumbled forward, into the very thick of the swirling mass of monstrosities, the clicking clittering creatures that called out "We accept them ... Freaks like us!"
Paula was being attacked from every angle by a couple of dozen of the creatures, and they were crawling and writhing all over their flesh. They tried to force their way into her mouth, into her ass, and especially into the moist redness of her vagina ...
Paula was only a few feet from Carl now, and she tried to get closer. He didn't see her, he didn't know she was there, he only kept on battling the writhing lumps of twisted bleeding flesh that surrounded them both. But the Menagerie beasts saw Paula was there, and they struggled to hold her back, to keep her from touching her lover.
"No! No!" shrilled a chorus of voices. "You mustn't! You mustn't! You mustn't go near!"
THUMP!
THUMP!
"DAMN YOU TO HELL!" Paula wept in her rage as she fought against the mass of Hell-spawned creatures, the beasts from the Menagerie of Ravenspur. The leaping, prancing, quivering things were just human enough to be terrifying, and Paula knew that she was about to be sicker than she ever had been in her life.
With a moan of exhaustion and grief she slipped, she stumbled and feel against the throbbing masses of quivering flesh, and as Paula fell one of her hands flew out and touched against the torn flesh of her boy friend Carl's ankle.
THUMP!
THUMP!
And that touch was the touch of Creation, of everything beautiful that had ever been or would ever be upon the face of this or any other planet. It was the touch of a man and a woman, the most beautiful combination of objects that had ever been made. Those ill-brained agents of the Devil who would sever that combination, that teaming of Male and Female, to match Male with Male or Female with Female, or something more odious than that, could never hope to succeed. For the touch of a man and a woman, of a boy and a girl, is the most beautiful damn thing that there ever will be.
"Oh, Carl!" Paula moaned. "Oh, darling! I love you!" And as the words came out the thumping sound stopped, and the clittering creatures of the night fell back in horror, and glinting through the trees in the distance was a single golden beam of sunlight, marking the way for freedom for both of these people.
"RUN!" Carl called out. "Run with me, darling!" And then the two of them were holding hands and running, their naked bodies gleaming in the stillness. And then a many-throated squeak of anger was heard from behind them, and the beasts of the Menagerie were pressing forward, and the Jailers came near with a THUMP, with a THUMP....
The boy and the girl ran, faster and faster, harder and harder. Once Paula looked back and saw that the creatures were almost upon them, and when she saw that she gripped Carl's hand tighter in her own, and then their pursuers fell back another few inches. That was when Paula knew that Love was the answer, that the physical attraction that she and this boy had between each other was the shining weapon they had that would defeat the powers of Evil.
Faster and faster the boy and girl ran, but no matter how fast they went or how quickly their naked feet pounded against the earth they could still hear the squeakings and the clitterings of the obscene creatures behind them, and the never-ceasing THUMP! THUMP! of the oncoming Jailers that grew louder and more insistent as it came.
Paula was beginning to stumble, was starting to slip and fall, but each time she did so Carl pulled her closer to himself, and then they were running again. They had reached the edge of the woods, and Paula recognized them as the woods that she had been in before, when Veena and her minions had first abducted the girl and brought her to Ravenspur. They were running back down the forest path that Paula had once been forced to walk along so many interminable eternities ago.
Far ahead of them Paul and Carl could see a thin golden thread of daylight, that called to them and beckoned from the far edge of the woods. They ran towards this, but it seemed to Paula that the faster they ran the farther away the daylight was. As though they were running away from it, rather than towards it.
"We'll never make it!" Paula called out, and as she did so she could hear the squeakings in triumph of the creatures behind her, shouting to each other: "She won't make it! She won't make it" And the THUMP! THUMP! of the Jailers grew louder in her ears, until it seemed to Paula that the noise was booming out from inside her own naked body, from inside her feverish brain.
"We've GOT to make it!" Carl replied, and as he said this he pulled Paula closer to himself. And then the beasts of the Menagerie groaned in consternation when they saw that their prey had been snatched from their jaws.
"You've got to keep on telling yourself we're going to make it!" Carl called out to the girl that he loved, and then they were both running faster and faster. They were Adam and Eve in a Garden of Evil, and now the Serpents were closing in on all sides at once.
THUMP!
THUMP!
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!
Faster and faster the two of them ran. "We will not be cheated!" squealed the Hell-spawned demons that pattered behind them. "You belong to us all ... you belong to us all ... the Menagerie calls!"
This only made the two run even faster.
Suddenly Paula slipped and fell, and she felt her hand slip out of Carl's, and then she was face downwards in the mud and the slime and she could feel the myriad horrors of Veena's Menagerie crowding around her, gnawing at her body, licking at her flesh.
"CARL!" the girl whimpered, trying to get up. She turned, lashing out at the gibbering creatures with both hands, and as she turned she could see that the shadow from the hills was almost upon her, and over the crest of the horizon she could see the first of the Jailers. And it was a sight that, made Paula faint in terror, too frightened even to scream. Her heart raced in her unconscious body, with a loud and interminable THUMP THUMPTHUMPTHUMP....
"Who ARE you?" Carl bellowed at the slavering beasts that darted around them, that nibbled at the prostrate body of Paula and that reached out to grasp hold of Carl's organs. In the distance Carl could see the Jailers, and the sight of them made his heart pound faster than Paula's, but he managed to remain standing upright. "Who are you and what do you want?"
"We are bunyips! Bunyips! Bunyips! Yes, and you're a bunyip too!" And the voices kept up their unsavory rattling, their lecherous whining, their bestial shrilling as they flung themselves upon the helpless boy and his golden-haired girl, and the Jailers joined in with a THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
The gibbering creatures pressed Carl back against the stump of a fungus-encrusted tree, and he cast one frantic look backwards and saw that the single thread of daylight was beginning to fade. And when he saw that the boy staggered backwards and fell to the earth, and the last thing he heard before he lapsed into oblivion was the THUMP of the Jailers ringing in his ears.
And then the bunyips began to feed....
CHAPTER EIGHT
Silence. Stillness.
Nothing was moving, nothing was noising, all was silent and still. Paula had the vague impression somewhere in her mind that she was alive, that there was breath moving in and out of her lungs. She shifted her weight slightly and found that she could MOVE, that She could FEEL! With an almost superhuman effort the girl sat up and opened her eyes.
She was sitting in the middle of a forest clearing, and it was broad daylight. Lying beside her was Carl, stark naked and covered with scratches and cuts. Paula examined her own body and saw that she too was naked, and in fact her own flesh bore even stronger signs of physical damage. '
Ten feet away loomed a large object, a thing that looked both lovingly familiar and frighteningly alien. With a groan of pain Paula stood up and took as many steps as she could towards the thing, until at last she could see what it was.
A green sports car.
Carl's sports car.
The one that he and Paula had come here in.
"CARL!" the girl shouted, scarcely able to control her joy. "We got back! We made it! We made it!"
"Huh?" Carl was breathing but scarcely conscious. The blonde girl had to run over and shake him with all her might, shake him as hard as she could. "We're back, Carl! We made it! We made it!"
"We did?" The boy was wide awake now, and he and Paula were in each other's arms. "But how ... ? "
"I don't know! I don't care! But the important thing is we're both alive!"
"We're alive, yeah," the boy muttered morosely. "With no clothes and a car with no engine. It's about twenty miles back to town, and I don't look forward to hitchhiking stark naked ... " Suddenly Carl stopped in his tracks, and pointed at something. "Look," he whispered, in the tone of voice of a man who does not dare believe what he is seeing.
"Look at what?" Paula asked, straining to see what it was her boy friend was pointing at.
"The car!"
"What about the car?" Paula frowned. Apparently the ordeal had taken its toll on her boy friend's sanity.
"Don't you SEE?" And now the naked youth was running towards the green sports car. "The engine! Frog pulled the engine out of the car and tore it apart! He threw it all over the place! But now it's all right!" He yanked open the car's bonnet and glanced at the motor inside. "There it is!"
Paula was bewildered. "But how ... ? " And then she saw something even more amazing. "Look, Carl!" she shouted. "Our clothes! Yours and mine! Lying in a heap!"
"But that's right where we left them," Carl pointed out.
"No it isn't," the blonde girl countered. "I know that you left YOUR clothes here, but mine were left in the Arena back at Ravenspur. So how did they get here?" She shook her head. "This can't be happening."
"I know," Carl agreed. "If all the things that we think happened to us really HAD happened, we'd hardly be ALIVE right now, never mind walking and talking and running."
Paula's nose wrinkled in exasperation. "Do you think it was a dream then?"
The boy shook his head. "No. Not a dream. It's too REAL to be a dream." Suddenly an inspiration sprang to life inside his eyes. "But I think I know what it COULD be...."
"What, Carl?" the girl inquired. But Carl didn't answer. Instead he was striding resolutely towards the front seat of the sports car. He yanked open the glove compartment and pulled out a small object that glinted brightly in the sun. "Here."
"What is it?"
Carl tossed her the thing, and Paula caught it. It was a tiny plastic cylinder, hollow, with a white plastic cap on one end. A pill bottle. A bottle that was used to keep pills in....
"Don't you remember?" she heard Carl asking. "Before we came out here we dropped acid. You told me you wanted to see what it was like to fuck in the middle of an acid trip. Well, we've been ON that trip. And now we're back!"
Paula didn't know whether to believe this or not. She saw the scratch marks on Carl's naked body and pointed to them. "But if it was all an acid trip how come we have these scratches all over our bodies? How come I'm still bleeding?"
Carl pointed triumphantly at the spot where he and Paula had been lying a minute ago. Paula looked, and there stood the twisted wreckage of a mass of vegetation that might once have been a bramble bush.
"Don't you see?" Carl was laughing out loud now. "We were such damn fools that we went and fucked in the middle of a bramble bush, and we were so laid back on that acid that we never even felt it! No WONDER we're so cut up!"
Paula nodded sagely. It was all beginning to make sense now. She felt something hard pressing against the palm of her hand, and she looked down to see the empty pill bottle. She remembered being fucked by Carl, and how beautiful it had felt. Then she remembered the Arena, and Bertie, and Veena's eyes, and all the other things that she had seen and heard and felt under the influence of the acid. I must be a damned fool, Paula thought, to fuck around with acid, to make myself see and hear such awful things that aren't really there, when I have something so much nicer than acid. I have Carl. And I have Sex. That's the nicest trip of all.
Paula didn't speak. She turned away from Carl, and started walking, walking towards the edge of the clearing. And then suddenly she was running, and as she ran her right hand flew upwards and a small plastic object shot out of her hand and deep, deep into the darkness of the woods beyond, where Paula would never find it again even if she wanted to.
When Paula turned around Carl was right behind her. She kissed him lightly on the corner of his mouth.
"Let's go home," he heard her whisper hoarsely. "Let's go home and fuck."
The two of them turned, and started walking back towards the sports car.
CHAPTER NINE
The two of them dressed in silence.
It was very painful for Paula to pull her clothes on over her battered and still-aching body, but she managed to do so. She was in a hurry to get out of this place. She was eager to get into this car with her boy friend, and then the two of them would go back to Paula's house, and they would make sweet passionate love to each other. They would have Sex.
Sex was so much nicer than acid, Paula told herself. She and Carl must have been crazy to ever have fooled around with the drug in the first place. They got such a high from Sex, such a super-powerful trip from it, that any chemical substance would only seem pale by comparison anyway. The blonde girl promised herself that from now on drugs and pot and booze would have to take a back seat to Sex.
She finished putting her clothes on, and when she turned towards Carl she saw that he too was fully dressed, and that he was looking at her intently.
He took her in his arms and kissed her, and when he kissed her Paula could feel something in the space between Carl's legs grow hard and press against the space between her own. She couldn't wait to get home with him.
"Ready, darling?" the boy asked her, and Paula did not have to answer. The look on her face would be answer enough.
"I'll always be ready ... for YOU, Carl," she breathed.
The girl and the boy kissed again, and a moment later they were walking towards the green sports car at the edge of the clearing. They paused only a moment while Carl slammed down the hood over the engine, and then the key was turning in the ignition, and the steering wheel twisted in Carl's strong capable hands, and then they were going off back down the road towards home, towards the place where they would enjoy the indescribable delight known as Sex....
* * *
"My father is gone on a business trip," the blonde girl told her boy friend. "And my mother is with him. They shan't be back till tomorrow. So you can leave the car in the driveway and come right on inside."
Carl nodded obediently. If any of the neighbors had seen the boy's car in this driveway, or if they had seen the girl who lived here go into the house with a boy her own age, they would have thought nothing of it, being reasonably fair-minded people. But Paula's parents were extremely conservative, and would have gotten angry if they had known Paula was even LOOKING at Carl, let alone going to bed with him....
The boy parked the car and they both got out of it, then started walking towards the front door. As Paula started to unlock it she stopped suddenly, frozen in her tracks as though in the middle of an epileptic fit.
Carl didn't like the look of this. "What's wrong, baby?" he asked.
"Huh?" Paula shook herself back to reality. "I was just ... just thinking about something. Something I don't want to think about."
Carl was interested. "What is it?"
She shook her head. "I told you I don't want to think about it. I don't want to talk about it either."
Carl kissed her lightly. "Then you SHOULD tell me about it. That way you'll get it out of your system."
"Well ... -" There was a pause, and then Paula spoke: "All this time, ever since you showed me the pill bottle that we dropped acid from, something's been bothering me like crazy."
"Like what?"-
"Well, you mentioned you had thought some guy named Frog had torn apart the car engine. It so happens that I thought I saw the exact same thing. So what I want to know is: HOW COME WE BOTH HAD THE SAME ACID TRIP?"
Carl's eyes widened for a moment in what looked to Paula like horror, but then the boy grinned. "Don't worry about it, baby," he muttered. "Scientists don't know all about LSD yet. Things like that can happen...."
"No, they CAN'T happen!" Paula was firm. "Two people having the same acid trip is like two people having the same dream! It's impossible!"
Carl frowned. He didn't like to hear Paula talk this way. "Now, Paula ... " he cut in warningly.
But Paula wasn't listening. "What if THIS is the dream and THAT was the reality? This could be another one of Veena's little tortures, you know! What if we go into my room and fuck, and then all of a sudden we're back in the Arena, and Veena and her men are laughing at us? What if they're watching us right now,. Carl, and listening to every word we say? What if...."
Carl didn't want to hear any more. He pushed his face up against Paula's and kissed her hard and squarely, firmly on the mouth. Running his own lips across hers, the boy whispered thickly into her ear: "Everything is all right now, Paula. Everything is all right. Come into the house with me. I want to make love to your body...."
For a long moment the girl said nothing, only looked deeply into her boy friend's eyes. "Oh, Carl," she whimpered, and kissed him. And as soon as she did that she knew that everything WOULD be all right from now on, for both of them and for all time to come.
She opened the door to her house. "My bedroom is upstairs," she whispered.
The boy nodded. "Yes, darling. Yes, darling, She heard a noise out in the hall. For a moment Paula was seized with panic: Veena and her friends were alive again! But then she realized that that was nonsense: Veena and the others had never existed in the first place, except in Paula's own imagination.
The footsteps came closer. Oh my God, Paula thought, my PARENTS are back! She knew that they would walk into her room without knocking and see her lying on the bed naked, and in broad daylight, arid then they would see Carl come in with a liquor bottle, and then that would be that.
The door started to open slightly, and Paula froze in terror. She knew that if her parents saw her like this there would be more trouble than she cared to put up with.
The door opened all the way. "Hello, Paula," whispered Carl.
CHAPTER NINE
Paula sank back into the pillow with a sigh of relief. From now on, she knew, everything was going to be all right.
The door closed softly, and Carl was corning into the room. "Here I am, baby," he murmured. "I want you, Paula. I want your body."
"And I want you, Carl." Breathless with excitement, the girl climbed out of bed and took hold of the boy she loved, pulling him into bed with her and crawling under the covers.
Panting in anticipation, Paula began to undress the boy. Carl closed his eyes and basked in the pleasantness of the sensation. He had never been undressed by a girl before. He had undressed plenty of them, but up until now he'd always taken his own clothes off before he got down to sex. But now this was nice, feeling Paula's soft gentle hands run over his body, divesting it of its clothing and flinging the garments onto the floor. Carl knew that he would not be needing his clothes for some time to come.
"Darling," Paula breathed, and then Carl was kissing her. She felt his hard tongue force its way into her mouth, probing the delicious moistness of the hot interior. And then she could feel something else growing hard too, something that dangled between Carl's thighs and was now pressing against one of her own. She knew what it was: it was Carl's cock. She wanted that cock. She wanted to feel its bigness inside of her, tearing her apart with its hard firm thrust.
Carl was taking Paula by the shoulders now, pressing her gently but firmly down into the warm white softness of the mattress. He straddled her hips with his body and tenderly stroked her breasts. They were beautiful breasts, he thought to himself. So round, so firm, so fully-packed. He bent his head gently and kissed them, teasing the soft brown nipples into red hard points of erectness that thrust upwards towards the ceiling.
And now he was spreading her legs with his hands and his knees, gripping her ankles and spreading them wide. He did not even have to look at Paula's cunt; he knew that it was there, and he knew tthat it hungered for the ripeness of his cock.
The boy and the girl both watched in reverent silence and awe as Carl's huge dong began to rise slowly until it was pointing directly at Paula's beautiful twat, and as the cock got higher it became bigger and more tumescent. The longer the girl looked at the thing the more unable she was to resist it.
"It looks so GOOOOD!" the girl moaned, and before Carl knew what was happening the girl sat up and rammed the huge organ into her mouth, sucking it, making passionate oral love to it. She wanted to be able-to taste this thing, to be able to feel its hot moist maleness inside of her.
A wave of delight passed over her boy friend's face. It felt good to Carl to have this hot mouth over his organ, to feel the red tongue moving across it in quick, delicious strokes. And suddenly, watching Paula eat that huge cock of his, Carl realized that he felt very hungry, so he suggested they sixty-nine.
Paula was more than delighted.
But suddenly they could both hear noises downstairs.
"I hear someone," Paula whispered.
"Oh, that." Carl laughed to himself. "When I went to the liquor store I met Wayne and Cindy. I told them I was going to be over at your place for a while and invited them up. I figured four could have more fun than two ... if you get what I mean."
Instantly Paula's face was wreathed with smiles. "Oh, that would be wonderful," she murmured. Her eyes went longingly to the door, "I'll invite them in."
"You do that," Carl replied.
The naked blonde girl walked lightly across the bedroom and threw open the door. "Come on in," she called out. She could see somebody standing in the hallway.
That somebody was Bertie.
The house reverberated with the sound of Paula's scream.
