Herb Dome slid the sheet of white foolscap into his typewriter, pecked out a few words with his two index fingers, and crossed them out. Then he banged back the typewriter carriage, and started in again. "It was learned yesterday," he wrote. And once more he crossed out the words. This time he pulled the paper from the machine, wadded it into a ball and tossed it at the wire waste-paper basket in the corner of the city room. It hovered on the rim for a moment, and then fell inside. "Basket!" Herb said sardonically, and then inserted still another sheet of paper into the typewriter.
He sat and stared at the blank page. There wasn't much sense in writing the story - or even beginning it - until the old man came in. He glanced up at the clock on the wall; he was later than usual, he thought. But wasn't it always that way, when something was urgent? And by Jesus, this was urgent.
He tipped his chair back, teetering on the hind two legs, clasping his hands behind his head. Dome, he told himself, you've got a story there, a story that's going to make this whole sleepy little town sit up and take notice. And not only the town, the state, too. Maybe the whole country!
He could almost see the front page The Monitor, with headlines that big, when the story broke. And underneath it he could see his by-line - Herb Dome. He'd waited a long time for a story like this, and now, God damn it, it seemed a lousy thing, damned unfair, to have to wait another hour or so for the boss to come in.
His mind dwelt briefly on "the old man" Blake Najar editor and publisher of The Monitor Something strange about him, he thought. Something he couldn't quite figure out. Like the way he ran the paper, like a tyrannical old-time editor, from that cluttered little office at the front of the building. Jeez! He even wore a green celluloid visor, when he worked, just like a character in one of those novels Sinclair Lewis wrote, back in the 'thirties'. He even had - and Dome sputtered a little with laughter at the idea - he even had a naked light bulb hanging from a cord over his desk, the only means of illumination in the room. It all added up to a home-spun image, one which was supposed to give the local citizenry confidence in the publisher of the town's only newspaper.
Oh, he was a pillar of the community, Blake Najar was. The kind of newspaper editor who led the local charity drives, and was the first to cough up money for the needy at Christmas time. The kind who waged a campaign against corruption, and battled for better sewage disposal. The kind who could influence elections, and did, by his editorial position, but who wouldn't get involved in politics himself. No sir! He was above that!
But there was something fishy, somewhere, Dome thought. For all his homespun philosophy - who did he think he was, anyway? Will Rogers? - despite all that, and the rolled shirt sleeves and the baggy pants he wore to work, Najar had another side to him. And Herb had seen that side.
He'd seen him once in L.A., at a theater there - wearing a tuxedo, yet! - with that snobbish wife of his, in her best bib and tucker, which had probably set her spouse back the equivalent of two week's salary for any one of his employees, and enriched I. Magnin's by that amount. They weren't speaking to each other, Herb remembered, but that at least was par for the course. Had they ever? Still, he thought wryly, Lil Najar didn't speak to anyone else, either, at least as far as he knew. "Damned snob," he muttered under his breath.
He'd been surprised to see the two of them there that night, though. He almost never saw his boss's wife at any of the local events. If she did go to them - the raffle to raise funds for the new orphanage being built nearby, or the pie and cake sale for the P.T.A., or even one of the carry-in suppers at one of the local churches -she left early, usually escorted by her husband. He was likely to come back later, alone, and to regale the whole gathering with some of his favorite stories. It was a strange, strange life. It was indeed. Where did Mrs. Najar go, at times like that? What did she do?
Blake was a strange character, too. Still, Herb was sure he could count on the editor on this story. Count on him! God, it was right up his alley! A major scandal, breaking on the doorstep, practically, of the town. A house of - well, it wasn't exactly a house of prostitution, Dome admitted to himself. But it was a hell of a lot more of a story! A place out on the lake where some of the fanciest people around had their private estates, where they were putting on exhibitions. Where night after night, young girls were getting screwed while others watched! That itself was enough to make the front page of any paper. But when those characters were the leading citizens, well, that made it a once-in-a-lifetime scoop.
It was one that Dome meant to take advantage of, too. He'd slaved in this place long enough, without anyone really taking notice of him - at least not the way he deserved. Oh, people stopped him on the street, often enough, to tell him they'd read something of his, something that had appeared under his own by-line. He was, after all, The Monitor star reporter.
But being the star reporter for The Monitor wasn't such a big deal. Big frog in a little pond, he thought. Little pond? Mud puddle was more like it. He shook his head, looking at the clock again, then checking it against his watch. Najar really was late this morning. Dorne got up, walked the length of the city room to rap on the door of the publisher's office,, making sure he hadn't somehow missed him when he had come in - if he had. But no, the place was empty, the desk piled high with letters and copy of the thumb-worn dictionaries he made such a show of consulting. The desk was even a roll-top, Dorne thought, as if he'd never noticed it before! A real little one-horse, one-man operation, in a real little one-horse, one-man town. Well, by God! He would put the place on the map. Once the story broke, once he wrote it up the way he knew just what was going on who was doing what and with which and to whom. He chuckled, remembering a limerick he'd heard once at a stag party he had gone to before he was married - he blushed now at the thought, then shrugged it off. He was surely entitled to sow a few wild oats. The limerick, as best he could remember, was something about a fellow named Bloom. Yes, that was it. . .
"There was a young fellow named Bloom, "Who walked into a lesbian's room, "They spent the whole night "Arguing who had the right "To do what and with which and to whom."
Well the characters who headed out to the old McGee place, up on the lake, didn't spend any time aruging. They popped into bed with the little girls the management so kindly provided for them, and then did what came naturally. Or more likely, unnaturally. He hadn't seen any of the shenanigans, himself, but he had it on the best authority - God! the very best authority - that everything man ever did to woman was done out there. Kids, mere kids - not any older than his own daughter Diane were sucking cock like it was lollipops. And getting their own little pussies sucked, too, by a lot of dirty old men. That was a story in itself. But when those dirty old men had names that everybody knew, well, that was the kind of thing reporters, even on The Monitor, got the Pulitzer Prizes for.
The thought Dorne had been suppressing all morning surfaced once more. A Pulitzer Prize! Why not? He was as good a writer and as good a reporter as any leg-man in the country, and here was his heaven-sent chance to make something of his talent.
He leaned back in his chair again, tipping it up once more on the two back legs, putting his hands behind his head. He could just see the face of his wife, Helen, when she learned of his kudos. And that of Diane, his daughter, too. And then he blinked, and passed the back of his hand over his forehead. "Hold on there!" he cautioned himself. "You're letting things get out of hand, aren't you? Winning the Pulitzer Prize, before you've even written the story!" Well, anyone could dream, and that was what he was doing. It made him feel good all over, too, and even if it was only a dream, he still liked to think of their faces, when they learned about the award.
He felt a little tingle of pride at the thought of his daughter. Fifteen years old, and couldn't be cuter. Nice, too. Really nice. Unspoiled, and well-brought up - he and his wife had seen to that, and had brought her up the way they'd been brought up themselves. They'd never let her run wild, thank God! Never let her go around with some of those boys over at the high school, the ones who were likely to get girls as young as Diane into trouble. They'd been damned strict with her, in face. "In by eleven!" was the word around the Dome house, and the kid was back by then, or else! That was one of the reasons they didn't have to worry about her getting involved in any scandal like the one he'd uncovered. He wondered what he would do if he ever caught Diane in a place like that, caught her with some old geezer who was screwing her silly. Jesus! Just the thought of it came close to giving him apoplexy.
Well, he'd do to her what somebody should have done to those other little girls who were hanging around the McGee place these days. He'd like to do it now. Go out there, and take each of those kids around his knee. God! He would pull their little mini skirts up around their necks, practically, and then he'd bring his hand down so hard on their quivering little buttocks that their screams would be heard clear on the other side of the lake. He clenched his teeth at the thought of their jiggling white ass-cheeks turning as red as freshly boiled lobsters under their flimsy nylon panties.
They would thrash and squirm, do anything to get away from him, but by Jesus, he would be relentless! Those kids had the spanking of their lives coming to them, and he'd like to be the one to give it to them. Sure, they would sob and beg for mercy, beg him to stop the cruel punishment, but he wouldn't listen. He would go on and on, raining one blow after another on their defenseless little bottoms, until he was exhausted.
And some day they would thank him for it, too. It would be a long time before they did Jesus, it would be a week before any of them could even sit down again - but someday they would thank him. He smiled grimly with satisfaction. And then he heard Blake Najar's heavy footsteps as he strode across the city room to his own office, heard the slam of the door as he entered his private sanctuary.
Dome waited a few minutes, to give the boss time to settle down, go through his mail, scratch out the directions for the staff the way he did, first thing every morning. Then he got up from his chair and walked through the city room himself. Aside from a rewrite man sitting at his desk near the back, and the feature editor studying a set of pictures spread out on his desk in front of him, the place was empty. The society editor wouldn't be in until late in the day; since it was Wednesday, the woman's page editor wouldn't be in at all.
He stopped at the door, and knocked. Behind the frosted glass he could see the distorted shadow of Najar, his shoulders humped ' and rounded like the hunchback of Notre-Dame, the head set atop them grotesquely enlarged by the refracted light. Then, at the sound of his knuckles tapping against the door, the shadow shifted, blurred into a shapeless mass^- took form again. A voice issued from the form, calling out, "Come in!"
Dorne turned the knob and pushed the door open. Once more Najar was hunched over his desk, scribbling something on a lined pad in front of him. "Be with you in a minute," he mumbled, continuing to write. It was one of his favorite tricks, Herb thought, a not-so-subtle reminder that even though he and his employees were on a first-name basis, there was a gap between them a mile wide. Master and slave, it said more plainly than words. Teacher and pupils, boss and hired help; he wondered if he was supposed to shuffle into the office sideways, cap in hand, mumbling, "Yassuh, boss! Yassuh!"
Najar shoved the papers away from him, then, swiveled around in his desk chair, and smiled condescendingly. "Morning. Herb."
"Morning, Blake."
"Great day, isn't it?"
Dorne hardly thought so. Great day? Not for him! He was off to a lousy start, sitting around the office all this time, waiting for Blake to show. And something told him the rest of the day wasn't going to be much better. He didn't know why he knew that; he simply knew it. Well, it wouldn't help any to argue with the boss. "Yeah," he said, "it's a great day."
"Well, what's on your mind?"
Dorne shuffled a little uneasily. Couldn't the old man at least suggest that he sit down - take a load off his feet? Obviously not. He cleared his throat, and began, "Well, I think I've run across a terrific story, a really great one ..."
Najar looked up, his face bland, expressionless. "Just a second," he said, picking up the telephone and dialing a number. "Mind?"
"No!" Dorne shifted uneasily again, waiting for the seemingly interminable conversation to end.
It did at last, and Blake swiveled around in his chair again, tapping the desk with the end of his pencil. "You were saying . . . ?"
"I was saying," Herb said, speaking slowly, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice, "I was saying I've got a tip on a story that I think could blow this town wide open."
"Yeah?" Najar picked up his pencil again, and tapped out a few indecipherable dots and dashes. He waited, running his hand across his cheek, rolling it down like a Venetian blind.
Finally he said, "Well, let's hear it."
"I got a tip from someone I know ..." "Who?"
"Let's just say it was a friend."
The other man looked dubious. "Have to be careful about things like that," he said. "Tips from friends, I mean. Sometimes you get a story out of them; other times, you only get trouble."
"Well, this is a story," Herb said. He pounded his fist on the palm of his open hand for emphasis. "Probably one of the biggest, ever to break around here."
"Well, okay." Najar still looked dubious about the matter, still seemed to singularly lack interest. "Shoot."
"You know that old McGee place? The one up on the lake? Big rambling house, that they haven't lived in for years, but that they've been keeping up, renting out for parties and that sort of thing?"
He stared into the eyes of the publisher, thought he saw the faintest flicker of something - was it fear? there. But it disappeared almost at once, and now he saw the guarded look that was more habitual.
"I know the McGee house," the old man answered. "Everyone does. What's the story in that?"
"The story is in the parties ... do you know what goes on at them?"
He shook his head. "Haven't the foggiest," he said. "But I suppose there's a lot of drinking.
There usually is. And it's a big place, so there are more people there than you'd have at your own place. That's all. "
"Well, it isn't. Not all, I mean. Those parties up there are real orgies. Sort of stuff that caused the collapse of the Roman Empire."
Najar permitted himself a tight-lipped smile.
"You're getting pretty dramatic about this, aren't you?" he asked.
"Maybe with reason. Do you know what goes on up there?"
"You just told me there were orgies going on. I'd heard there were parties. Matter of fact, I know the caretakers of the place. Curt and Louise Pardon. She makes the best goll-darned scalloped oysters I've ever had!" He licked his lips, remembering. "But serving scalloped oysters hardly constitutes an orgy, you know."
Dome felt a slow flush crawling over his face. It was just like this big baboon to give him the brush-off. Well, he wasn't going to take any more shit from him. He had a hell of a story, and by God, Blake was going to listen to it! He fought to control his voice; even so, when he spoke, it was choked with fury. "I'm not talking about any penny-ante poker game," he said. "I'm not even talking about any strip-tease - any of your ass and tit shows. I'm talking about filth and rottenness and vice and . .. God damn it! I'm talking about teenagers getting screwed silly out there. Kids no older than Diane putting on exhibitions, with a whole gang of dirty old men watching them."
"Watching what?" Najar's steel-cold, hard grey eyes were boring into Dome's skull, as if they could see everything he was thinking. "Watching just what?" He shook his head, and then laughed mirthlessly. "Look, chum, if you want to interest me in this story you say you've got, you've got to be more explicit."
"Okay. There was a fifteen year old out there the other night. Little redheaded kid. And she was lying there on the bed in one of the rooms, naked as a jaybird. And some guy climbed on top of her, while half a dozen others watched, and first thing you know he had her legs spread wide .. . God damn, so wide she came close to splitting in two .. . and then he had his head down, right there between her legs, and God damn if he wasn't licking that wet little pussy of hers!"
Najar looked at him for a long time, then said, "Excuse me," and picked up his telephone. "Personal call," he said. "Mind very much stepping outside for a minute?" As Herb closed the door, he heard, "Hello! Lil? I just wanted to know ..." But what he wanted to know, Dome never found out.
A few minutes later, the door opened, and he stepped inside again. "Sorry about that," Najar apologized.
He nodded. Yeah, he thought. I know. "That's all right," he said.
The old man stared at him again, not saying anything, his eyes boring through him once more. "Well?" he asked at last. "Well, what?"
"What else happened up there at the McGee place ... if anything?"
"There was another kid - she couldn't have been any older than the first and pretty much the same thing happened to her. Except that she was sucking cock herself, sticking her tongue out, wrapping it around some guy's penis that was stiff as a pole. And then, by God, she took the whole damn length of it into her mouth, and almost choked on it."
Najar shuffled the papers on his desk, cleared his throat, spat into the brass spitoon he kept in the corner - for even more atmosphere, Dome thought - and took out a cigarette. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth, fumbled for a kitchen match, scratched it on a piece of sandpaper attached to an ashtray and sucked in deep on it. He blew a smoke ring out, and watched it float off in little rivulets of white, disappearing into the stale air at last. "Seems to me," he said, finally, "that you've got a bunch of juvenile delinquents on your hands. And that's not a story for The Monitor, or any paper. You know as well as I do that you couldn't print the names of the girls..."
"That wasn't what I was thinking of, Blake."
"No? What then?" But Najar wasn't ready to let him answer. "Seems to me the best thing to do . . . the decent thing, Herb ..." he emphasized the word, staring straight at him coldly, "the decent thing would be to keep the story quiet. Turn the kids over to the juvenile authorities - yes, I think you ought to do that - but keep the thing quiet."
"And what about the men involved? The men who are taking the innocent kids - God, they're still children, they're hardly out of diapers -and doing every dirty thing you can imagine to them. Hell! A lot of these girls were virgins, and these sons-of bitches have... well, you know ..."
Najar raised an eyebrow, and Herb saw the slightest sign of a smirk on his face. "Well, what?"
He shrugged. "Well, they sure as hell aren't virgins now," he said. "That happens." "It doesn't have to."
"It did, though. Look, Dorne," Najar said, acting almost human for a change. "There are always a lot of dirty old men in the world who will do what they want to young girls - and if you ask my opinion, the girls asked for it, themselves. But there's no reason to get all excited, to think you've got some earth-shaking story, some prize-winning scoop. It happens all the time. You know that as well as I do." He tilted his chair back, clasping his hands in front of him, looking the reporter up and down.
"But for Christ's sakes, Blake. I know it happens all the time. But it doesn't happen all the time here in town, and it doesn't happen all the time in public, this way, with these kids putting on exhibitions - yes, exhibitions! And there's a reason why it's happening here, now." He paused, wiping his forehead, surprised that it was covered with cold sweat. He hadn't really realized before that this damn thing meant so much to him. Not only the story, and the importance of it, and the idea of the by-line that was exciting, of course. Like an actor seeing his name in lights on Broadway - but there was more to it. He cared about these kids, cared what was happening to them. And why didn't Najar? What the hell was the matter with him, that he didn't go wading into this filth the way he waded into sewage disposal?
The publisher was staring at him again, his mouth a tight, grim line. What the hell was eating him?
As Herb stared back, the line softened a little, relaxed, as if by some great effort of will on the part of the publisher. The steel grey eyes bored into him again, then they, too, softened somewhat, then seemed to become almost shifty. What the hell was the matter? If the guy could go all out, the way he did, for some God damned Christmas party for a bunch of orphan kids, why didn't he do something for these girls? Sure, it was their fault, too - but there was a song, wasn't there, which went "A Man is the Cause of It All?" You weren't going to stop this stuff - these perversions - my God, they were going to step it just by blaming the girls. There was another song that popped into his mind: "It Takes Two to Tango," he thought. Well, the musical comedy stuff wasn't getting him anywhere. Suddenly he said, "What about the police?"
A tiny shudder, almost imperceptible, seemed to run up and down Najar's spine. In an instant, though, he had regained complete control of himself, had shaken off whatever shock had hit him. "What about them?" he asked, languidly, picking up a pencil again, tapping it on the desk.
"Why haven't they done something about this? Why haven't they raided the place? Picked up the people involved?"
"Why should they?"
"Because that place is a den of iniquity, a cesspool of vice and sin . . . "
"That's your story, Dorne. But do you have any proof?"
Once again, Herb slammed his fist into his open hand. "No," he said, "but I mean to get it."
They stared at each other once again, for a long time. Dorne felt the tension rising, felt the atmosphere thicken like a London fog, finally heard the old man's voice cutting in like a knife. "How?" he asked. "And where?"
"By going out to the McGee place some night ..."
"Think they'll let you in? If what you say about it is true, do you think they'll let you in?"
He thought about it for awhile, and then shook his head. "They aren't going to invite me," he admitted. "But I'll get in some way ..."
"And if you get in some way, do you think you'll get out?"
Again he thought. That hadn't occurred to him. But they couldn't really keep him there - couldn't hold him hostage - couldn't kill him. Or could they? No, he decided. They couldn't. "Yes," he said, "I think I can get away."
Old Man Najar folded his hands in front of him, looking a little bit like a praying mantis. He fiddled with the things on his desk again, picked up the telephone, as if he planned to make a call, and replaced it. When he spoke, his face was serious, his voice low. "You've been around here a long time, Herb," he said. "Just what do you think you'll get out of this story - if you ever do get such a story? A Pulitzer, maybe?"
Herb was afraid he blushed a little, at least he stammered in embarrassment, then said, "That doesn't have much to do with it, does it, Blake? I think it's an important story, one that people should know about. I think orgies like this should be stopped. They're against the law. And I think it's time someone got to the bottom of this whole mess, found out why the police haven't done anything. Christ! They'll pick up some stumble bum who feels up some under-aged kid in the streets - why don't they raid the McGee house?"
Once again, Najar clasped his hands, and stared over them for a long time. "Any ideas?" he said at last.
"Yes." Herb's voice was cold and cruel, and filled with courage, too. "Yes. They're obviously protecting some high muckety mucks - somebody who'd damned important around this town."
"And if they are?"
"I want to find out who."
"And after that?"
Dome laughed. "That's where you come in, isn't it? Once I find out - and once The Monitor prints the story - there will be a public outcry. The police will be called in - they'll have to come in - there will be so much pressure they won't be able to resist it - and eventually this whole mess will be cleaned up."
For the first time, Blake Najar seemed to notice that Herb was standing. He motioned to the straight, hard back chair in the corner, saying, "Pull up the chair and take a seat. Take a load off your feet."
With a wry smile, and a "Thanks," the younger man seized the chair, and pulled it across the room. It screeched against the floorboards, as if in protest, and he wondered if any other reporter in the history of the paper had been so honored - actually allowed to sit down in the presence of the boss. He wondered why he had been so singled out.
He pulled out his cigarettes, offered one to Blake, who took it, then took one himself. He found his own lighter, while the other man was still searching for a match, snapped it, and when the flame shot out said, "Be my guest." He held it out to Najar's cigarette, watched the flame die into a tiny red glow as he sucked on the white cylinder, then lit his own. The two small points burned slowly, like a pair of fiery eyes, and both cigarettes had burned almost to the end before either of the men broke the silence. It was Najar who spoke, his voice firm, and yet almost friendly as he leaned forward, clapping his hand on the other's knee. "I know how you feel about this," he said.
"I felt this way once, about a story I thought came my way, oh, years ago, when I was just a cub reporter, up on a paper near Chicago." He cleared his throat, and looked around for the spitoon, decided not to use it, and cleared his throat again. "Don't get me wrong," he went on. "I'm not calling you a cub reporter ..." he smiled - genuinely smiled -for the first time since Herb had come into the office ... "... because you're not that. You're a damned good newspaper man, and you know it and I know it."
It was obvious that he was waiting for Herb to say something, so he said, "Thanks." There was a long pause, and he asked, "What was the name of the paper?"
Doesn't matter. It's gone out of business now. Maybe the reason it did was that I didn't - the publisher - the editor - didn't follow through on stories like the one I wanted to do ... "Could be!"
He ignored the interruption, going on, "But there was a reason for that, and I've found it out, since I've had my own paper here." He paused, found his own pack of cigarettes, and lit one. "I found there are plenty of people in this world who are likely to tip you off on something they think is big, some story that sounds like it will blow the local citizenry out of their seats. And I've found that, almost always, it isn't. You think you've got dynamite on your hands, and it turns out to be flea poweder. Not that these people who tip you off aren't sincere, a lot of them. They just get to feeling all puffed up over their own importance, and then they puff up the story."
"Then again," he continued, "a lot have a personal ax to grind. And they get so steamed up over that end of it that they exaggerate. You know the kind - they turn the guy who yells at his wife into a wife-beater - that sort of thing. And it seems to me that's what's happened here." He picked up his steel-rimmed glasses slipped the stems behind his ears; the glasses themselves slid down over the bridge of his nose, and he peered at Herb over the tops of them.
Dome squirmed, and clenched his fists. God damn it! That wasn't it at all! And there was no need for the old man to go into his homespun bit again - he'd seen it often enough to know the routine by heart - and he knew how phony the whole act was. He shoved his chair back and got to his feet. "I think you're dead wrong about this, Blake," he said, turning to the door, ready to leave.
"Sit down!" Najar bellowed, and a copy-boy, coming towards the closed door turned and scampered back to the safety of a distant corner, like a frightened mouse. Herb shifted his weight a little on wobbly legs, literally standing up to the old man briefly, then he collapsed on the wooden chair hitting it hard. "You're dead wrong," Najar said. "You got a tip from someone that there were a lot of indecent acts going on, you say at the McGee place. The tip came from someone who didn't have any proof, right? It was only a rumor. And whoever passed it on to you built it up into a sort of superscandal. He hints at a lot of important people being involved, because that's what makes scandal juicy. That's right, too, isn't it?" Najar apparently assumed it was, because he didn't stop his tirade. "So you come to me with a sensational story. And I must admit, it would be just that, if it were true. But it isn't true. And you know why?"
This time Blake stopped, pushed his glasses up over his nose, waited until they slipped off and peered over them, waiting for Herb's answer. "No, I don't know why," Dome said.
"Well, I'll tell you!" He snapped the words out as if they were spitting bullets. "It's because none of the important people in this town would do such a thing. I know them, chum; they're my friends. And they're as fine a lot of men as you'll find anywhere." He shook his head dramatically, pushing his glasses up on his forehead now, then sweeping them back until they settled, like storks nesting in chimneys, in a thatch of silver hair. "All you've got boy, is a lot of allegations, not a story at all. And if you print those, all you'll get will be a lot of libel suits. That's something, I can tell you, that I'm willing to pass up."
He nodded, letting Dorne know that he could leave - that he had nothing more to say, and no intention at all of listening, either.
Herb got up, scraping the chair across the floor again with another blood-curdling screech. He went out, slamming the door behind him, tramped the length of the city room again, sat down at his desk and once more inserted a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter.
This time he pecked out: "Sorry, Boss Man, but ol' Herb here is leaving you." He sat staring at the words, wondering if he really had the guts to quit. He decided he didn't, tore the paper out of the machine and burned it in the ashtray on his desk.
He pushed his chair back from his desk, opened a drawer, rummaged through it, slammed it shut again, then pulled on his jacket, and headed for the door.
The copy-editor sitting there looked up inquiringly. "Taking the day off," Herb told him, and went out.
Chapter Two
It was almost dusk when Herb Dorne finally drove up and parked his car in front of the little house on Grove Street. He had spent a fruitless day searching for proof of what he had heard, and now he was tired and grouchy. As he set the brake, the front door opened and his wife, Helen, stepped out onto the porch of their white-painted split level home. She lifted her hand and waved. "Hi!" she said, "Home at last?"
Herb slid wearily from the car. "I'm home," he called. "Why?"
"I was worried about you, darling. I called the office and they said you'd left early, and I thought you might be coming home. And then, when you didn't show ..." her words trailed off into a whisper.
She came quickly down the flagstone path to the car now, while Herb's eye roved carelessly over her. Goddamn it! Why did she have to go around in those itty-bitty pants she wore - yeah, he corrected himself, hot pants - and the answer to his question was she does because everyone else does. He sucked in his breath as she stood for a moment, in the big round spotlight formed by the setting sun. Jeez, but she was gorgeous! He let out a low whistle at the sight of her long slim legs, her full rounded breasts, her tiny waist - he could still span it with his two hands - the voluptuously curved buttocks that swayed enchantingly now as she walked towards him.
And the outfit she was wearing didn't do a damn thing to hide any of her attributes. The skin-tight blouse was open halfway down to her navel, and her midriff was bare. And the hot pants clung to her thighs like skin does to a peach. Damn! If it got him all hot and bothered, looking at her, what the hell did it do to that old lech who lived next door? He'd caught him a couple of times, giving Helen a going over with his obscene little pig eyes. Not that he thought his wife would ever fall for whatever line he intended to hand out. Even so, it made him mad as hell.
"Goddamn it, Helen," he sputtered. "I wish you wouldn't go out unless you have some clothes on!"
She looked at him in surprise. "What do you mean?" she asked, her china blue eyes opening wide to stare at him.
"I mean just look at you!" he snorted.
She stared, baffled, for a moment, then glanced down at herself. "I'm dressed just as much as anybody else," she said, a hint of anger in her voice. "What's the matter, Herb? What's eating you?"
What was eating him was the sight of her dressed like that, the way that sent bolts of boiling hot lava through his loins. "Nothing," he said. "Not a solitary, Goddamned thing!"
"Well, you don't have to yell at me," she said.
He shrugged. "Look. Let's just say I had a bad day, and let it go at that, shall we?"
"Sure." She still stared at him, waiting to hear what it was that had gone wrong.
He didn't feel like telling her. Not yet. He'd like to get a couple of stiff drinks under his belt, first. "How about mixing me a couple of martinis?" he asked. "Icy cold."
"Okay!" She turned and started up the flower-lined walk to the house, the firm spheres of her ass-cheeks quivering provocatively beneath the tight-stretched fabric of her pants. Halfway up the path, she stopped, stooping over to pick a full-blown rose, and the tiny strip of fabric between her thighs tightened firmly between them, slipping excitingly into the crevice between her buttocks, outlining the little puckered opening of her anus there. He felt his cock lurch in his pants, felt the dull, throbbing ache move on down into his balls. Christ! At a time like this, she had to go sexy on him! He wondered what would happen if he grabbed her, dragged her into the bedroom, and pulled that doll-sized outfit she was wearing right off her.
He sighed, and mopped his brow. He knew damned well what would happen. Jennifer would let out a scream that would wake the dead, and then she would fight him off as if she were some sort of wild-cat protecting her young or one of those plain Janes in a Salvation Army bonnet, protecting her honor.
It was funny, he thought, staring at the smoothly molded hips, the slim legs, the trim ankles of his wife swaying sensuously just ahead of him, at the voluptuous curves that were an open invitation to him or any man - it was funny that with all that equipment, Helen didn't seem the least bit interested in using it. She might - and did - look like the hottest little lay under the sun, and then once you got her stripped naked, and her legs spread, you realized she was nothing but a cold fish. Oh, she let him take her all right - wasn't that her wifely duty? And didn't she do her duty always, like the well-brought up, respectable wife and mother of a respectable, respected man that she was? Yes, she did - she most certainly did. But somehow, she never seemed to let Herb forget that that was just what she was doing - her duty. And there wasn't much fun in it for either of them. Christ, it had been years before he could even get her to undress in front of him - he gave a short laugh thinking of her nearly naked in that hot pants outfit she was wearing. But that had been the way it was, then, and it wasn't really much better now.
And yet she was a good wife! God, at least she wasn't a slut, like the wives of a couple of characters around this town he could name. She was decent, and kind, and God knows, she loved him. And took care of him, too. Cooked and cleaned and kept the house running like a Goddamned clock, or something, with dinner promptly at six every night of the week except for Saturday, when they went out to dinner with the couple across the street.
She was a damned good mother, too. You only had to look at Diane to see that. He stopped on the steps of the front porch, looking around. Where the hell was she? Usually she came bouncing out to greet him, throw her arms around him, give him a kiss and a hug. Well, maybe she was in her room, tonight. Probably had a new rock 'n roll record, and couldn't tear herself away from it.
Helen held the screen door open for him, and he went into the living room, dropping his jacket on the chair near the door, leaving the copy of The Monitor he carried, still folded, on the coffee table, strewing coins and keys alongside it.
Dutifully, Helen scooped them up, put them where they belonged, where he would find them in the morning when he dashed out, late to work, as he so often was. She smiled at him, a little diffidently, brushed her hands over her pants, trying to cover her thighs with them, then said, "Do you want me to change into something else?"
"I sure do. But get me a drink first, will you?"
She nodded and went out. When she came back she had a pitcher of martinis on a tray, along with a couple of glasses, and a bowl of potato chips. She set it down, poured a drink for Herb, and handed it to him. "Be right with you," she said, before she disappeared.
He sipped the drink slowly. Jesus, he thought. He sure needed something. And that something was a perfect martini - the kind that Helen mixed.
He began to feel a little guilty, jumping on her that way because of the way she was dressed. Well, his nerves were frayed as hell today - probably looked like an old lamp cord or something. Couldn't expect him to keep his cool under all circumstances, could you? And after all, he'd managed pretty well with Old Man Najar. Damn it, he thought, why wouldn't he let him go ahead with the story? It would put The Monitor on the map, too - make the boss out to be the crusading publisher, the mighty muckraker he pretended to be. Then why?
He let his thoughts wander to the men involved. Who were they? Oh, he knew they were the pillars of the town's society; he had that on good authority. But who? The Chief of Police? Probably. The Mayor? Could be. Who else? And why? Why did they get involved in something like this that could ruin them? Were they really that hard up for a piece of tail? He thought of their wives then; plump, fluttery little ladies in flowery hats who twittered all the time, some of them. Or the double-breasted clubwomen, fat, fifty and frumpy. Jeez, who could blame them? He thought of Helen, too, and then of the little girls, the fifteen year olds who were getting screwed silly by all those lewd bastards. For a brief moment he wondered what it would be like to fuck a kid that age - they must be good, he thought, because the men he'd heard about it who'd had it from them, they weren't complaining. What would it be like?
He sipped his drink again, felt the soothing oblivion it brought slipping over him, closed his eyes. When he opened them, Helen was standing in front of him, the pitcher in her hand, reaching out for his glass. "Another?" she asked.
Wordlessly he handed the tumbler to her. He shook his head. Oh, God! He was as much of a bastard as the others! Here he had the greatest little wife in the world, and he was sitting around thinking about screwing a baby no older than his own daughter. It was obscene, that was what it was! He shook his head again.
Helen poured herself a drink and slid down onto the couch next to him. She was wearing a pale green shirt-waist dress that set off the sheen of her shoulder-length bob, making it glisten like pure gold. It clung to her the way lint clings to blue serge, pulled so tight across the firm mounds of her breasts that he could see the taut, hard nipples outlined beneath it. With one hand she held her drink up to his, clicked glasses with him, said, "Cheers." Her other hand was busy smoothing her skirt down over the bare, slim, golden thighs. "Is this better?" she asked. "Not much."
Her eyes opened wide again. "Really, Herb," she said. "I don't know what's the matter with you. You asked me to change and I did, and now you don't like what I'm wearing ..."
"It isn't that ..." What was there to say? "Look, Helen. I've had a hell of a day. Just leave me alone for awhile, will you?"
"If that's what you want."
"That's what I want," he said, knowing it wasn't at all what he wanted. But it didn't seem to matter much, because she got up and went into the kitchen. He could hear her there, busying herself at the stove. When she came back in he said, "Sorry I bit your head off."
"I know you've had a hard day," she said. "Want to tell me about it?"
He nodded. "Had kind of a run-in with the old man again."
"Another?"
"Yes."
"What was it about, hon?"
"About a tip I had. A big story. Goddamn, I think it's a great story. Sort of thing that he caught himself, and stopped. No use talking about that pipe dream.
"Yes?"
"There's a big scandal, big story ..." he started. He stopped abruptly as the screen door slammed, and Diane called out, "Hi, Mom, what's for dinner?"
"I'll tell you later," Herb said. "I don't want to talk about it in front of her. " He nodded as the girl came into the room, her mini-mini skirt flouncing above her slim, golden thighs, barely covering the twin half-moons of her buttocks. - "Hey!" he said, "where's the rest of your dress?"
She laughed and whirled around, while Herb stared at her. God! She looked like her mother! Younger, of course, and tinier, slimmer. But her face had the same perfect features, the high cheekbones, the generous mouth, the pert tilt to the tiny nose, that her mother's had. And her figure was as perfect as the older woman's, too. Her ripe young breasts were smaller, but just as round, just as firm. Her hips and thighs were full, too, but somewhat slimmer than Helen's, her waist even more wasp-like. But it sloped in the same exciting way to the hips, and the smooth little mounds of her ass-cheeks, quivering now under the little fringe of fabric that formed all there was of her skirt, as she bounced across the room.
"What's for dinner?" she asked again. "Like man, I'm starving!"
Helen hastily finished her drink, got up again, heading for the kitchen. "I've fried some chicken," she said. "And there's potato salad, too."
"No dessert?" "Apple pie. Okay?"
Diane darted across the room and threw her arms around her mother. "Super," she said. "Gee, Mom, that's just super."
"Well, go and wash your hands then, while I set the table." At the door, she turned to ask Herb, "Want me to mix you another?" And when he nodded, she went out. From the kitchen he heard the sound of tinkling ice, the gurgling of gin being poured from an almost full bottle, the slam of the refrigerator door as she put the ice tray back. After she brought the drink to him, and went back to the kitchen, he heard the rattle of silver, the clack of plates set down on the table, and finally his wife calling out, "Dinner's ready."
Helen and Herb ate in almost total silence, but Diane chattered brightly and incessantly. "Guess who's asked me to the prom, Mom? Just guess . . . Can I have another piece of chicken? ... a drumstick .. . Can I have a new dress for it, Mom . . . the prom, I mean, not the drumstick." She laughed at her joke, as she polished off the last of the meal, and dug into a slab of apple pie. She had barely finished it before she was up and running off to her room, her miniscule skirt flying above her quivering buttocks visible through her sheer nylon panties. Goddamn it! Why didn't she wear some clothes, make some effort to at least look decent?
"Hey," he called out after her, "what are you planning to wear tonight?"
Her voice, when it came back from her room, had a tinge of surprise. "Why, this skirt," she said. "And the same blouse. Why? Don't you like them?"
"No," he said bluntly. "I don't." She scampered back into the room, wearing only a wisp of a brassiere, about the size of a small Band-Aid, and a tiny patch of panties, trying but not succeeding very well, to cover her nakedness with a towel not much larger than a face cloth. "But I just bought it," she said. "I spent my whole allowance on it."
"You got taken, then," he said. "There's not enough material in that outfit to dress a doll. So put on something else."
"No," she protested, but at Herb's insistence, she changed into another mini-skirt, scarcely any longer. But before he could get a good look, she was out the door and off. "Be back at eleven," he called as the door slammed behind her.
He got up from the table, and went into the living room, sat down, picked up the folded paper and began to read it. He looked up when Helen came in.
She sat down beside him, her face worried. "What was it," she asked, "what happened?"
Herb put his paper down, took out a cigarette and lit it. "Well," he said, "I had a tip on a terrific story. A real scoop, I mean. And when I told the old man about it, he nixed the whole thing."
"Why?" Helen's eyes were wide, puzzled.
"I don't know, honey. There's something strange. Maybe it was the story itself - but it was the thing I'd thought would be right up his alley."
He paused, got up, went to the kitchen, poured a scotch for himself and one for his wife, carried them back to the living room and sat down again.
"What was the story?" she asked, clucking her tongue in sympathy with him. "Or don't you want to tell me?"
"Sure. It was about a bunch of orgies taking place up at the old McGee place - you know, out on the lake."
A look of shock, a little shudder of horror passed over her face. "Orgies?"
"Yeah," Bill's voice was dull, dispirited.
"How did you find out?"
"I got a tip on it from someone I know," he said. "You wouldn't know who it was."
"Had he been there?"
"No. But he had talked to one of the girls involved. She was just a kid, just Diane's age. And my God! The things they were doing to her!"
"What?" Helen's eyes were wide again, her voice scarcely more than a whisper.
"I don't want to talk about it, honey. It's so rotten. Lewd and evil, that's all. I can't tell you, and you wouldn't want me to."
He sat staring across the room. He didn't want to talk about the things that went on at the McGee place, but he couldn't help thinking about them. Once again he thought of what he'd heard, of a young girl lying on a bed, her slim white thighs spread wide while some dirty old man ran his fingers along the sensitive skin up between them, stopped at the little dark triangle of curly pubic hair, teased at it, and then flicked his middle finger towards the glistening hole half hidden within. Jesus, he could almost see it, almost see the lewd expression on the man's face, as he traced the narrow slit of her cunt, then stopped to burrow in between the moist, warm walls. He could almost see the leers on the faces of the men watching - how many would be there? Two or three? A whole roomful? He didn't know, but he knew one thing for sure; he'd like to break every one of their Goddamned necks.
And were they in the room with the girl, and the man who was fucking her so obscenely? Or were they watching through some sort of two-way mirror, the kind he'd read about once in a news story that had come over the wires, and that Najar had put on the front page of The Monitor? He tried to picture such a thing and found he couldn't. And were there mirrors - other mirrors - on the other walls, and on the ceiling, too? Yes, that Dome was sure of. He'd never seen such a place himself, but he'd heard about them for years. Christ, the whole idea made him sick. He got up, started pacing restlessly back and forth, got himself another drink, finished it, and shook his glass back and forth, rattling the melting ice cubes until Helen looked at him with an annoyed expression. "Sorry," he said, and set the glass on the cocktail table. "I think I'll go out, and walk around a little, honey," he said then.
Her expression changed to one of worry, and Herb hastened to reassure her. "I'm all right, Helen. It's just that. . . that ..."
"It would have made a terrific story," she said. "I know you're disappointed, darling. I wish I could do something to cheer you up."
"It's not the story, Helen," he said, shaking his head.
"Then what?"
He couldn't tell her. Jesus! She was so good and decent; the kind of wife any man was lucky to have. A wonderful woman, the very best. How could he talk to her about such depravity, such filth? God! She wouldn't even understand. What if he told her about some of the other things that went on there - at least, what he had heard. The way some men like to lick the pussies of these little girls. They would get them on a bed, and spread their legs out, and begin by running their tongues over the snowy mounds of their round little breasts, stopping long enough to fasten their mouths on the tiny ruby-like buds of their throbbing nipples, licking them into a taut erection. And then they would begin to trace the narrow valley between the two firm spheres, running their tongues the length of it, running them down, too, over the young girl's slightly swelling belly. It would be a matter of moments before the man would have his head poised above the little patch of softly curling pussy hair that lay between her widespread thighs. And then it would flash forward, and his tongue would dart out, to slip deep into the narrow channel there. Christ! He couldn't tell Helen that. And he knew he couldn't stay here any longer. "I'm going out, honey," he said again.
"When will you be back?" "I don't know." "I'll wait for you."
"No," he almost shouted at her. "For Christ's sake, don't do that."
Again Helen looked shocked, and then puzzled. "But why not?" she called after his receding figure. He didn't answer; he just didn't know.
Dome wandered around for awhile, then sat down on a wooden bench in a park nearby. He was alone there, with only the whisper of the breeze in the trees and the full yellow circle of the moon overhead to remind him of where he was.
He put his head in his hands, closing his eyes, trying to set his mind on something besides the orgies he was certain were taking place even then, out at McGee's. He tried to think of Diane, of Helen, but his mind kept slipping back to the scenes that were being - must have been enacted right at that moment.
There was something about the idea that began to send little shivers of excitement up his spine, to make his balls ache, his penis jerk and lurch. He tried to think it hadn't happened, wasn't happening, tried to put it out of his mind. But the bulge in his pants was proof that it was physical as well as mental.
He closed his eyes and seemed to see Helen, ' lying in bed, beneath him. Christ, he thought. What would she do if he did anything like that to her ... ran his tongue down over her voluptuous body, sent it slithering deep inside her. . . Oh, God! What was the matter with him? His wife was a fine woman, and they loved each other, and here he was, thinking about her as if she were some sort of whore.
He closed his eyes, clenching his fists, trying to turn his thoughts to something else. But the image of all the perverted acts going on up at the McGee place refused to disappear. God! What would it be like?
He felt the excitement again, felt the tingling in his balls, the throbbing there, felt that it would drive him crazy if he stayed there on the park bench any longer. He got up and walked briskly away, turning towards town. His heels clicked sharply on the cement of the sidewalk, and he hurried along. Maybe there was a bar open someplace; maybe he could get another drink. He sure as hell needed one.
He came at last to a place with green and blue and yellow neon lights that blinked at him invitingly and went in. The place was empty, except for a couple at a booth in the corner, and he didn't bother to look at them. He sidled up to the bar, and ordered a scotch on the rocks, then amended it to "Make that a double."
He drank it quickly, sitting on the bar stool staring at himself in the mirror. The face that stared back at him was sullen, discontented. What the hell was the matter, he asked himself. Blake Najar? Yes. And the story, certainly. But there was more to it than that. Goddamn it! What he wanted was to screw Helen silly, throw her down and fuck her until she couldn't walk. Do everything to her, too, that he'd never dared to do. Maybe he was a bastard. Sure he was! But Christ, he was a man, too. And he couldn't stand her prudishness much longer.
He rapped on the counter with a quarter and ordered another double scotch, swallowed it quickly, then paid up, slid from the stool and went out. The door slammed behind him, startling him. And then, trying to brush all thoughts from his mind, he walked towards home.
The house was dark when he got there, except for the light in the living room that Helen had left on for Diane. He let himself in with his latch key, and went into the living room, stumbling a little, bumping into an end table, almost knocking over a lamp. "Ssh!" he whispered to himself. "Mustn't wake Helen."
And then he laughed. The hell he mustn't. Wasn't that what he had come home for? He peeled off his jacket, dropped it on the floor, then kicked off his shoes. As he crossed the room, he unbuttoned his shirt.
The bedroom door was closed; he pushed it open, still undressing. His shirt fell to the floor, and he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants. He could already feel the stiff hard bulge of his penis, rigid as an iron rod, pulsing hotly against the cotton fabric of his undershorts. He stripped his trousers off, and they slithered to the floor, with a sibilant whisper. He stepped out of them, tugging his undershorts down, now, too. His desire-hardened cock sprang forth, suddenly freed, jutting out before him. He stood for a minute, staring first at his throbbing rod of flesh then at the quiet form of his wife, lying still under the thin summer blanket. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep, and he wondered if she really was.
He pulled his socks off, then muttered, "Helen?"
She lay still, eyes closed as tightly as ever. Goddamn! Why the hell did she have to play possum tonight? She'd done it often enough before, he knew, but he wasn't in the mood for it now. Brusquely, he ripped the blanket back off her out-stretched body, then seized the flimsy nylon gown she wore, jerking it up to her shoulders.
Her eyes fluttered open, the bewildered look in them changing quickly to one of fear. "Herb!" she half-screamed. "What's the matter? What do you want?"
"What the hell do you think I want?" he snarled. And when she covered her mouth to stifle a scream, he said, "I want to fuck you, that's what!"
An expression of disgust filtered across her face, and she pursed her mouth as if she'd been sucking raw rhubarb. "Really," she said primly, "do you have to be so vulgar?"
"I don't have to. I just want to. Just feel like it, that's all."
"You're drunk, Herb," Helen said. She slid across the bed, away from him. "You're drunk. Why don't you sleep in the guest room?"
"Because tonight I'm going to screw you silly," he said.
She gave another little scream as he lunged forward, seized her nightgown again, and tore it into bits. He wadded up the strips of sheer material, shredded now and threw it across the room. Suddenly, he flung himself on the bed, hunching over her, while she cowered against the mattress, trying to burrow into it as if she could hide herself there. But his hands were all over her, running harshly, brutally almost, up and down her fearfully quivering body, squeezing her soft, sensitive flesh, kneading it until little white ridges of it stood out between his straining knuckles.
His head shot forward, and he fastened his mouth cruelly over her moist, warm lips. She gasped and struggled against him, and then his tongue darted forward, pressing relentlessly against her lips, forcing them apart sliding into the warm, moist cavern of her mouth. His tongue flicked farther forward now, deep inside her mouth searching and exploring roughly and obscenely. She squirmed against him again, trying to free herself, but he pinned her down, and then, as suddenly as his tongue had crashed into her mouth, he withdrew it.
In a moment his head had dropped to the small ruby-like buds of her nipples, and once again his tongue shot out, to lick first one and then the other into a taut, quivering erection. Helen writhed beneath him, murmuring little protests, which only served to arouse her husband further. His teeth closed over the stiff little tips, and he nibbled hungrily on them, while Helen moaned over and over, "My God! Oh, my God!"
The words fell on deaf ears. Jesus! How many years had he waited to be satisfied - really satisfied? And for how many years had he tried to satisfy her? Make her respond like a living, sensuous woman, not a well-trained robot. Well, by God, tonight he would do it. Tonight he would fuck his wife as she'd never been fucked before, and as she might never be fucked again. He lifted his head again, let out a short, obscene laugh as he looked at her pale, frightened face, then dropped his face forward again. He let his tongue trail slowly over her firm white breasts, then on down, over the slight swell of her naked belly, down toward the little patch of sparsely curling hair between her thighs. She arched her back, uttered another stifled cry, and pressed her legs close together. "Oh, God, no!" she moaned. "Herb, oh, please. No. Not that way!"
"How then?" he snarled at her, his eyes blazing in anger. "What way?" "Not like that," she said, sobbing. "Don't you mean not at all?" he asked bitterly. Helen made no answer, and suddenly he rolled on top of her, his heavy chest pinning her struggling, writhing body to the bed. Her legs scissored out as she thrashed beneath him, trying to free herself, and as they did, his hips fell heavily between her widespread thighs, and he pressed forward, forcing her jerking buttocks deep into the mattress. He felt the softness of her pubic hair grazing against his wildly throbbing cock, teasing, tantalizing, until he thought he would go mad with lust.
He wedged his knees up between hers, holding them wide apart, while his pelvis crashed against her defenselessly pinioned loins. He groaned as the electric contact sent darts of lustful fire shooting through his veins, felt the jump of his thickly rigid penis, that throbbed and ached unbearably. His hand shot out to grasp the lust-stiffened length and guide it towards the small, glistening hole of her cunt. She choked back a scream as she felt its blunt, bulbous head against the soft, tender lips of her unprepared vagina, felt it spread them open, thrust against the sensitive flesh until it found her clitoris.
Herb began to massage the miniature phallus with the smooth, hard tip of his cock then moved it up and down the sensitive pussy slit. He arched back, leering drunkenly at her - Helen cringed fearfully beneath him - then suddenly lurched forward, aiming his lust-bloated penis at her moistly quivering hole.
His penis sank deep within her, scraping against the tight, dry walls of her vainly resisting cuntal walls, and she gasped with pain, squirming as though she had been impaled on some medieval torture instrument. Her agonized cry rang through the room, resounding in his ears, only to go unheeded. In his semi-drunken state he could think of nothing but his own satisfaction, and with another forward thrust he pushed his rock-hard staff deeper and deeper up into her warmly yielding flesh.
Helen lay helplessly beneath him, while tears of humiliation mingled with the tears of pain that welled up in her eyes and flowed down her pale cheeks. She felt as if she were being torn apart inside by his brutal entry. Again she pleaded with him, groaning, "Oh, dear God! Please, darling. Oh, please. Don't! You're hurting me!"
Yet nothing could stop her husband. The thoughts of the tale he'd heard of the lewd ravishment of the young girls had fired his own loins, aroused him beyond endurance, and that coupled with the amount of alcohol he had consumed had stripped him of all gentility. He pounded his hips deep into her, thrusting his thick cock in and out unmercifully, oblivious to the cry of pain that spilled from her throat.
He rammed in and out, now, in and out, like a maniac, his lust-incited cock sinking into the hilt, until it seemed to Helen that it would reach her throat. He locked his mouth to hers, mashing her lips cruelly back against her teeth. Her tender breasts, the sensitive skin bruised from his torturing finger, were crushed painfully against his chest. He grunted, then slid his two hands under her softly quivering ass-cheeks, lifting them to meet him even more, and now his sperm-heavy balls slapped against her nakedly upturned crotch in a steady rhythmical pattern.
He felt his throbbing, blood-engorged cock sunk all the way inside her trembling belly, begin to ache as it seemed to grow bigger and bigger. Christ, his balls were throbbing too now, the pressure building up in them until he thought they would explode. He fucked deep into Helen's passage that was sore, now, and still dry and burning, fucked until she was afraid his huge thick cock would split her in two, would tear her literally to bits. She whimpered again, and then, as he pistoned in and out she felt the first faint stirrings of excitement begin to pulse through her. It grew quickly, seeming to set fire to her loins, and then to spread like leaping flames showering sparks in her racing blood. As the agonizing rapture began to take possession of her, she began to thrash and buck beneath her husband, rising to meet his pounding thrusts, moving her pelvis up against his hotly plunging cock.
Herb's hands slid beneath her gently undulating buttocks, spreading her cheeks wide, forcing her legs backwards, until her knees were bent nearly down to her heaving breasts, the full soft plane of her naked cunt exposed to his impaling shaft. The white-hot sperm in his lust-bloated balls began to churn insanely, and then he let out a long, loud shriek. "Aaaaaaagh! I'm cummming, I'm cumming," and with a monstrous thrust drove his wildly climaxing cock all the way down inside her quivering belly, while the warm wet walls of her cunt wrapped tightly around it, clasping it as the hot, sticky load exploded from his sperm-tightened balls surged the length of his penis to spurt forth into the narrow receptacle of her cunt.
Helen squirmed beneath him, bucking and sliding her wetly contracting pussy desperately up and down his still-hard penis, as her own ecstasy raged and mounted. She was almost there, had almost reached that pinnacle which had always before been beyond her, when suddenly he stopped. "Oh, God!" she begged him. "Don't stop now. Don't. Please, honey." But she felt the slow withdrawal of his rapidly collapsing penis as he pulled it slowly from her still frantically sucking passage, felt the emptiness begin to build within her that she seemed almost always to have known. And then he rolled over beside her.
A feeling of helpless guilt flooded over Herb. Christ, what a bastard he was! He'd wanted Helen so much, he'd wanted to take her in the most depraved way, wanted to treat her like a whore. And wasn't that just what he had done?
He slid off the bed, hearing the faint cry that rose from her throat, seeing, by the light of the moon, the stifled sobs that shook her lovely body. He couldn't stand watching her, knowing that he was responsible. He fished around on the floor and found his clothes, and began pulling them on. Then, partially dressed, he stole quietly from the room. At the door he stopped, turning back to look at the pathetic figure of his wife lying on the bed, noting that Helen had pulled the thin blanket over herself once more, as if to hide her shame and humiliation beneath its white warmth. "I'm sorry," he said softly, but she didn't hear. He closed the door behind him and went into the living room. He sat there, huddled in the large easy chair by the window until almost morning, thinking.
By God! He would do something for Helen, do something to make amends for the lousy way he had treated her. His mind went back over the events of the day, and suddenly it came to him that nothing would please his wife more than to go ahead on his own, dig out the story he had heard about, expose the men who were behind all the evil goings-on. There might be risks involved, he knew. But he was willing to take them.
He crept back to the bedroom at last, crawled into bed beside his wife. He slept awhile, but awoke before she did, turning her frightened face to his, a look of pain in her eyes that slashed into his heart.
"Helen," he said, taking her hand, "you know that story I told you about yesterday?" She nodded, and he went on. "Well, I've decided to do it on my own - and the hell with the old man."
Her slender fingers curled around his. "I think that's the decent thing to do," she said. "I'm glad, Herb. And I'm proud of you, too."
He knew that Helen might not forget what he had done to her the night before, but he knew, too, that she had forgiven him.
Chapter Three
Blake Najar made a few telephone calls, looked over the copy on his desk, and shot a couple of memos off to members of the staff. He called in the feature editor, too, talked to him about a story he thought ought to appear soon, then called in the Sunday editor, giving him a few orders discreetly disguised as suggestions. But all the time, the memory of Herb Dome's request was gnawing at the back of his mind.
Jesus! What if he went ahead, looked into the story on his own, tracked down the people involved, stirred things up? It would be a regular hornet's nest. Not that The Monitor would ever publish any such information. Not on your sweet Nelly. But Dome was just the kind of crusading young fool to go to someone else with what he had learned. And he would learn plenty, too. He might be a fool, in a lot of ways - like sticking his neck out on a thing like this - but he was a damned good reporter, and he'd get what he went after. And Najar knew, damn well, that he was after this story.
The old man shook his head, then pushed the palm of his hand up across his face. He'd have to do something to stop him; he couldn't afford to take any chances. He'd probably guessed already that Phil Tonno, the Chief of Police, was involved; that would be pretty obvious. And the next one he'd identify was almost sure to be Abe Helmut, the mayor. And it wouldn't be long before, along with all those other prominent citizens whose names he would find, he'd come across that of the editor-publishers of The Monitor. And that, Blake mused, would never do. It would simply never do.
Some way would have to be found to head that pig-headed young man off. By mid-afternoon, Blake was sure he'd thought of one. But he wanted to check it out first, with some of his cronies, some of the others involved, before he went ahead with his plan. He decided to drive out to the McGee place that night. Most of them would be there, he knew. Someone had invited a girl he'd picked up somewhere, and she was to be - uh, "initiated" Blake thought - then. As he remembered it, the honor of "breaking her in" would go to Rob Svenson, who owned the town's largest - and only - department store. That was only right and proper, since he'd spotted the kid when she'd come in to apply for a job. He'd hired her immediately, and sent her off to work in kitchen appliances. That had been just a few days ago - ten, maybe, or two weeks. And since then, Rob had made a point of stopping to talk to her, in a friendly, fatherly fashion. And finally he'd made a date with her, inviting her to a "show". Najar laughed aloud. As far as she knew - what was her name? - oh, yes, Kitty - as far as Kitty knew, they were going to a movie. She'd even admitted to Rob that Tab Hunter was her favorite actor.
Well, there'd be a show, all right. But it was going to be a live one. And little Kitty Albright was going to be the star of it. Najar licked his lips lasciviously at the thought, then bent his head over his work again. It would be business and pleasure, too, at the McGee place, later on at least as far as he was concerned.
Blake Najar was late leaving the office, and drove straight home. His wife, bleary-eyed as usual, and smelling of gin, greeted him at the door. She was a little unsteady on her feet, too, but that didn't surprise Blake. She often was, especially these days.
He followed her into the living room, and noticed that there was a pitcher of martinis, less than half full now, on the table near the sofa. There was an empty glass beside it, too, and Lil Najar poured it full before she sat down. "Like one, darling?" she asked. Blake nodded, but she made no effort to get another glass for him, and so he went to the kitchen and found one for himself.
He brought it back and poured a drink for himself; his wife had already finished the one she had poured a few minutes before, so he filled her glass again. The two sat drinking silently, until Lil said, "I suppose you're going out again tonight?" "That's right."
She got up, picked up the martini pitcher, saw that it was empty, took it into the kitchen, and mixed more. When she brought it back, she swayed, and the contents sloshed over the sides. Blake looked at her with disgust. Christ, she really was a drunkin slut. He wondered why the hell he'd ever married her. But he knew the answer to that; her old man's money. It hadn't brought happiness for either of them, though, he thought. But there wasn't any use in philosophizing about things like that. He wanted to eat, and to get the hell out of here. He knew that she would sit around drinking alone until she passed out. He hoped she'd make it to the bed before she did, though. Scraping her up off the floor was getting to be a bore.
"Dinner ready?" he asked.
"I'll see." She went into the kitchen again, carrying her drink with her. She came back a moment later, a silly grin on her face. "Guess what?" she asked, slurring her words drunkenly.
"What now?"
"I forgot to turn the oven on."
Jesus! She couldn't even cope with a TV dinner! He looked at her again with disgust.
When she brought the two trays in at last the meal was only partially cooked. Blake pushed the peas and carrots around in their compartment, tried vainly to saw the still cold steak into pieces, gave up finally, and settled for the soggy apple pie, the pastry on it pale and unbaked, too, that made up the dessert on the pre-fabricated meal. When he had eaten all he could manage to swallow, he took the two trays into the kitchen, and dumped them into the garbage disposal. His wife's meal, he noticed, was almost untouched.
Quickly he got ready to go out, changing his suit, putting on a bright tie, slicking his hair back over the bald spot on his head. He went out through the living room; his wife was sitting on the sofa, another drink in her hand. He didn't bother to say good-night.
He drove directly to the lake, turned off at the narrow unpaved road that led towards the McGee place, then parked his car in a grove of trees a short distance from the gates of the estate. He walked back, noticing as he approached, that the lights were on in the kitchen and dining room.
He knocked at the front door, saw the shutter pulled back over the tiny peep-hole, then, as the caretaker recognized him, heard his voice: "Evening, Mr. Najar. How are you tonight?"
The door swung open, and Blake stepped inside, as he answered. "Just a little bit worried, Curt. Just a little bit worried."
"What about, sir?" Curt managed to look worried, too, in deference to the other man.
"About being caught out here sometime," he said.
Pardon's worried look was real, this time, the frown that creased his forehead genuine as the leather upholstery in Najar's car. "Jesus! That's bad," he gasped.
"Could be. On the other hand, I think something can be done about it, and done about it now."
"You got something in mind?" Najar nodded. "Yep," he said, adding, "Is anyone else here yet?"
"Yes, Sir! I think Mr. Svenson's here already.
And I think Mr. Spencer might have come in, too. Maybe a couple of others. I'm not sure."
"Go and see, will you, Curt? Tell them I want to see them. I'll be in the bar."
He wandered into the bar himself and settled himself on a stool. Curt's wife, Louise, was behind the counter. "What will it be?" she asked.
"Make it a double scotch," Najar said. "On the rocks." He looked up as the swinging door at the other end of the room was pushed open, and a couple of men came in. "Hi, Rob," he said to Svenson, and then he nodded at Spencer and another man he didn't know, a friend that Rob had brought along. They ordered drinks, and waited until Louise had brought them before any of them spoke. Then Rob asked, "What's up, Blake?"
Najar shrugged. "You know that half-assed reporter I have working for me? Herb Dorne? Well, he's on to us up here. And he wants to expose the whole thing." He looked around at the shocked faces of the other men, waiting for his words to sink in, for them to say something.
No one did, and finally he went on. "Well, I think I know a way to fix his wagon! I sure as hell do!"
"What have you got in mind?" Svenson asked.
"Well," he said, "I thought I might invite him up here. Let him see a show." He looked around, saw the startled expressions on the faces of the others.
Someone whistled; another exclaimed, almost under his breath, "You must be mad!"
Najar shook his head. "I just thought we'd give him a surprise," he said. "And I thought we might make it more of a surprise if we got that wife of his, you know, Helen, up here to perform for him."
There was another whistle, this time in admiration. And then the question was asked, "How you aiming to do that?"
Blake smiled and looked from one to the other. "I was kind of counting on my own wife," he said.
Svenson let out a lewd laugh. "You're not planning to fuck your own wife, are you, Rob?" he asked. "Of course," he added, "it would be something of a change. For you, at least."
Najar ignored the implications. "I'm not planning to fuck my own wife," he said. "I'm planning to fuck Helen Dome. I'm planning to do it in front of Herb, too."
"And you're counting on your own wife to get her here? Is that it?"
Dome smiled again. "That's it," he said. "Clever boy."
"And just how are you going to arrange all this?"
"I'm going to get Lil to invite Helen out for dinner - I thought this Friday might be a good time - and bring her up here, instead. She'll have to get her drunk, first, of course, but I'm sure that won't be too hard for the old bag - beg pardon. I mean my better half - to do. Christ, if Dome's wife has only half as many drinks as my wife does - she'll be under the table. So there shouldn't be any problem, there."
Svenson's friend - he had been introduced as Sam Mason - sucked in his breath. "Got to hand it to you, man! I don't think I'd ever have thought of that."
Now Najar's smile broadened, until he positively beamed. 'That isn't all," he said. "I thought I'd add that little extra something -you know, like the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae. Though I'd get that kid of Dome's up here, too. What's her name? Diane? Get her in on the act, too."
"And how do you plan to do that?" Joe Spencer asked. "Seems to me as if you'll have your hands full with the other."
Blake's chest swelled out like a pouter pigeon's. "My kid," he said. "Sonny. Regular chip off the old block."
"I thought he was off at college."
"He is. But he's coming home Friday morning for a week or so."
"Vacation, Blake?"
"Not exactly," he said, grinning, pleased as punch. "He got suspended for awhile. Seems to have been doing the same sort of thing up there that we've been doing here. And someone saw him screwing a freshman. From the way Sonny tells it, it wasn't that so much - I mean, that sort of thing is bound to happen in any co-ed school - but it was after hours!" He laughed lewdly, raucously, slapping his thighs in delight. "Quite a card, my kid," he said proudly. He looked around, noticed that his own glass, as well as those of the others, was empty. "How about another?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he pounded on the bar for Louise Pardon, ordering her to "fill 'em up".
Svenson slid off his stool. "Where you going, Rob?" Najar asked. "Not having another?"
He shook his head. "I've got other things on my mind," he said.
Blake Najar glanced at the bulge in the front of Rob's pants. "That your mind?" he asked, with a leer. For answer he got a good-natured laugh, and then Svenson disappeared.
A few other men came in, all old friends of the men still sitting at the bar. They ordered drinks, finished them and ordered more. It was obvious, though, that they were becoming impatient. They glanced at Blake a couple of times, glanced at Louise behind the bar, called Curt and spoke furtively to him. Finally one of them asked aloud, "When does this show begin?"
"Might be going on right now," Blake said laconically. "Shall we go take a look?" He led the others from the bar, and into a small darkened room. They seated themselves there, and he pressed a button. Almost at once the mirror on the wall lit up, and then, as they watched, they saw the room behind it light up, too, like a stage behind a scrim curtain, and then even that seemed to lift, like a fog, or float away like a cloud. Everything was as clear as if it were a foot or so in front of them.
Rob was talking to a young girl - Blake recognized her as Kitty Albright - who was nursing the drink she held in the glass between her hands. At his urging, she finished it, and then took the cigarette he handed her. They seemed to be discussing something, although no one could hear what was said, and then the girl began to smoke. She inhaled a few times, and seemed to relax a little. God, Blake thought.
She's melting like a candle. "He's really giving her the works!" he said, grinning, and rubbing his hands together lasciviously. "Liquor first, , and now hash. She's a ripe little number, and she's going to be ready for plucking before you can say 'Jack Robinson'."
"He'll have to get her clothes off, first," Joe Spencer said. He licked his lips in anticipation of seeing the young girl naked, standing before the mirror, unaware that she was being watched. "That'll take some time."
"Not for Rob!" Najar said. "He'll get her out of that little outfit she's wearing in no time flat!"
They were silent again, watching with rapt attention as Svenson spoke rapidly to the girl, gesticulating with one hand while the other he pointed to the bed behind her. The girl seemed to understand only slowly in her half-drugged state. And then at last it dawned on her that she was being ordered to undress. With a smile of comprehension, and a little nod towards Rob, she grasped the hem of the tight black dress she wore and slowly pulled it upwards.
Watching, Joe Spencer sucked in his breath, then let it out with a long, low whistle as the girl's slim, tapering legs were fully exposed, and then her tight well-rounded thighs. At the sight of her voluptuous torso, even Blake Najar emitted a little groan of pleasure. "Rob sure knows how to pick 'em," he muttered to himself. And then he reminded himself that he did, too, and that it wouldn't be long before he had Helen Dorne in just the same position. Now Kitty reached behind her back, to quickly unhook the restraining band of her brassiere. It fell to the floor at her feet, and her firm ripe breasts were revealed to the watching men, the derisive hoot.
"You ain't goin' ta pinch Svenson," he said, almost doubling up with mirth. "If you pinch anything, it's gonna be that sweet little ass of Kitty's."
"Like Rob's doing now?" the Chief asked, as once again everyone turned to stare at the department store head so lewdly pawing at the young girl's soft, resilient breasts.
"Doesn't look much like her ass to me," Joe sad, with a grin. "Looks more to me like her tender little titties."
They stopped talking, and stared in silence as Rob's huge hand cupped the full rounded ripeness of Kitty's right breast, squeezing it until the girl's mouth opened with an evident, obvious gasp. Someone had pushed a button somewhere by now, and suddenly the sounds of the lewd lovemaking were audible. Her moans, half of pleasure, half of pain, came to them clearly as Rob, still not satisfied, commenced to pinch the small rubbery nipple between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it tightly between them. Suddenly he thrust his head forward and his tongue shot out, swirling around the taut little bud, licking it lasciviously before his mouth closed over it. He sucked on the quivering bud as if it were some sweet, honey-laden fruit ,of which he could never get his fill, while his hand reached out to the nipple of her other breast, to tweak and twist it, too, into a throbbing erection.
Suddenly he lifted his head, flung it , backwards, and then with an equally brusque movement, threw it forward again, to fasten his mouth harshly on her warm, moist lips. His flicking tongue pressed cruelly against them, forcing them open, slipping between her clenched teeth, to seek shelter in the deep cavern of her mouth, slithering in almost to her throat. Kitty, gasping for breath now, began to struggle against him, fighting for the fresh cool air she needed to soothe her searing lungs.
She broke free at last, gulping for oxygen, her voluptuous young body trembling visibly. Svenson ran his hands down the sides of her naked body, then up again, rounding them over the luscious flare of her hips for a moment, and on to her slim waist. She stood still, trembling again, her eyes wide and round, like those of a young fawn, not quite sure, not quite confident, unable to decide whether this was friend or foe.
Before she could make up her mind, she felt herself scooped up in Svenson's powerful arms, cradled there a moment like a tiny infant. And then, with two huge strides, he crossed the room, and placed her on the bed. Again her eyes opened wide in partial bewilderment, partial fear, while Rob stared down at the luscious form laid out before him. She was his, he knew, and he would do with her whatever he wanted. And what he wanted to do was to fuck this kid so that she would never forget it - he laughed mirthlessly, thinking it was best that way for the first time. All her life she would remember what looking at these characters; they'd go stark staring bonkers, he thought, if they ever got a chance at either of them.
His head shot back to the mirror - the kind of two-way mirror he'd once read about in a story that came over the wires, he remembered now - and he felt another flash of excitement stir through him as the woman on the right - the older one, the aggressive one - slid her hands beneath the flimsy little white panties of the other, twisted and turned them, manipulating them until they slid from her still tense body, eased down over her hips to her knees. And then, at the command of the older woman, she lifted her legs, and let her draw them off. Her whole body was exposed now, outlined in front of the two watching men like a sculptured bas-relief on an ancient Egyptian temple. Her smooth, white buttocks, sensuous and provocative, were round and full like a couple of melons. He heard Najar suck in his breath at the sight of them, and then heard the heavy breathing of someone else. He whirled around and saw that two or three other men had joined them - how was it that he hadn't heard the door open or close? - and that they too stared, mouths open, at the evil, depraved sight of the two women making love in the other room.
Now it seemed to be the turn of the younger woman to strip the clothes from the older woman, and she did so clumsily but quickly, until the two sat on the sofa side by side, their naked bodies revealed in the full lights that shone on them.
"Christ" Look at that," one of the newcomers of the group exclaimed.
"Haven't seen anything like it since last March," another said.
Herb thought he recognized the voice. Was it - could it be - that of Phil Tonno, the Chief of Police? He turned to look at the man who had spoken, but the room was in darkness; it was impossible to make out his features.
"Who the hell are they?" another asked.
"I don't know. I can't tell. It's too damned dark," still another person answered. "Why doesn't somebody turn on more lights."
"It isn't the lights. They've just got their heads turned."
"Jeez, it doesn't matter much, does it? I mean, we don't have to see their faces, do we - not when we can see that?" He flicked his hand at the mirror, through which they could see, more closely now, the younger of the women lying back on the sofa, her legs spread wide, one hanging slackly over the side, the other doubled back, so that the full wide plane of her crotch was completely open to their view.
"Christ, what a pussy!" someone exclaimed. "Man, I'm going to get me a little of that, later."
Sitting in the dark, Blake grinned. Maybe he would, whoever it was who had spoken. But after me, he thought. I come first around here. He glanced around, almost gloating now, then, turned to stare, fascinated, at the folds of pink flesh surrounding her vagina, at the warm, moist slit, and, as her legs were spread even wider, at the quivering little bud of her clitoris half-hidden within.
The two women were talking now, the voice of one becoming harsh, almost strident as she seemed to give commands, the other's plaintive, pleading. "Sound!" one of the watching men shouted. "For Christ's sake, turn up the sound. I can't hear a thing they're saying."
Blake rose, went over to a panel of buttons on the wall, pressed one, then fiddled with a knob, and the voices floated into the room where the men were watching, open-mouthed, the two women in the adjoining room. "You know what I'm talking about," one said. "You're a big girl now. You know what a dildo is."
"I don't think so," the second answered. Tonno, watching with as much relish as the others, pricked up his ears. God! That voice sounded familiar. It sounded like Helen's. But what the hell would she be doing up here? No, that was all nonsense. He erased it from his mind, as if it were a ruined band on his tape recorder.
"If you don't ..." the woman went on, "it's time, darling that you found out. Now, isn't it?"
There was a faint whimper. "I guess so!"
And then, as the men watched, the woman who had spoken first showed her what seemed to be a male penis made of rubber, and strapped it around her waist. "Darling," she said, "Now I'm going to fuck you the way you should be fucked. The way that husband of yours never in I his life could."
"Oh no!" There was a little groan of outrage, and then a whimper of fear. And yet in a moment, the woman with the obscene instrument hanging between her legs had knelt above the second, and was ordering in a voice which had lost all traces of softness, and taken on the harsh, rasping tones of some she-demon, "Take it! Take it, Helen! Take it and put it in!"
But the sound of his wife's name struck Herb Dome with the force of a hurricane. He closed his eyes, as if, somehow, he could shut his ears to the sound, and the name reverberated in his mind, whirling like tumbling leaves. He did his best to blot it out. It couldn't be Helen - it just couldn't be - and then he heard her voice, and it was unmistakable. "Oh, no, Lil," she whined. "No, Lil!"
Lil! My God! Blake Najar's wife! What on earth was this? How had he wandered into this nightmare? And what about his boss? Did he know? How was he reacting? He darted a surreptitious look his way, and saw the lewd, lecherous grin on his face. Oh, my God! He knew! And he loved it! He was enjoying every minute of this sordid performance. Herb felt a little sick, a little dizzy, and then a blinding flash of anger seized him. He sprang to his feet, letting out a roar like the bellow of a wounded lion.
Immediately, he felt two or three pairs of hands clapped on his arms, his shoulders, pushing him down. "Sit down. And shut up. And watch, God damn you! WATCH!"
In front of him, beyond the mirror and in the other room, his wife, still muttering little protests, had at last grasped the thick rubber phallus hanging between Lil's legs, positioned there expertly so that it seemed to spring from her loins as naturally as that of any man, and was guiding it cautiously towards the narrow, hair-lined slit of her own vagina. He could see her face now, too, and as he watched it, he saw her expression change from one of fear and horror to one of excitement.
With Lil's help, she probed gently at the coral flesh of her cuntal lips, teased them open, ran the dildo up and down over the soft, quivering surface. When at last she found the moist little orifice there between her thighs, she paused, the tip of the obscene artifact poised, pointed directly at the pinkly glistening hole. And then, with a sigh, and a little cry of part pleasure, part pain, she slipped it through the small tight opening.
The hands of both women had now encompassed the thick length of life-like rubber, and had commenced to ease it into Helen's moist cuntal passage, pushing it in slowly, but even deeper inside her. She began to mewl with pleasure as it scraped against the sensitive inner walls of her vagina, pushing the soft, pulsing folds of flesh before it. Her face was visible now, her expression one of lust-contorted passion.
Above her, Lil began to fuck in and out, withdrawing the artificial penis almost to the tip, then thrusting it forward, almost to the hilt, while Helen writhed ecstatically beneath her. "What am I doing to you, honey?" she drawled, the hint of the South, of magnolias and honeysuckles in her voice again. "Tell me. what I'm doing," she pleaded. "Go on, honey, tell me."
Helen hesitated a moment, and then she answered falteringly, "You're . . . you're making love to me ..."
"No, honey. Tell me! Tell me! You know the words, tell me. I want to hear them!"
Again there was a moment of hesitation, and this time, when she spoke, it was barely above a whisper. "You're - you're - fucking me," Helen said.
"Oh, honey. That's right. And where am I fucking you?"
Again the young woman hesitated. "There," she said at last, pointing vaguely towards her vagina.
"What's 'there' honey?" Lil said. "Come on, now, you tell me. What's there?"
"My ..." Helen hesitated again. "My cunt," she said at last.
"Do you like this?" she asked.
Again there was a long pause. And then she said, "Oh, my God, yes! Yes, I love it!"
"Has anyone else ever done this to you?"
"Not like this."
"But in any way?"
"Herb did," Helen answered. "Herb. My husband."
"What did he do it with, sugar?" "With his ... his . . . " "Yes? His . . . " "His penis."
"His . . . cock. His prick ... his ... "
"But you like this best, don't you, Helen."
She lay back on the couch, an expression of sheer bliss, of pure ecstasy on her face. "I like this best," she said, as Lil fucked in and out, the thick, hard rubber dildo spearing deep into her velvety passage. Suddenly she wrapped her legs around Lil's hips, as she struggled desperately to absorb the whole rigid bit of molded rubber into the fleshy pink folds of her hungry cunt. She slithered up and down its full length now, as her softly flexing buttocks began a rhythmic beat up and down the long smooth pole.
In the room, there was a loud, shrill scream, and then Herb slumped forward, cradling his aching head on his two arms, folded before him on the table.
His eyes were shut, and although he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, of low-pitched voices, he made no effort to raise his head.
Blake Najar, on the other hand, turned, saw his son, Sonny, striding by, pulling Diane Dome along behind him, his hand grasped tightly around her wrist. "Come on," he whispered loudly at her. "What the hell's the matter with you?"
"But you said you were taking mo home," she protested.
"Later," he said. "Later."
"But where are we? And what are we going to do here?"
"It doesn't matter much where we are, does it?" Sonny asked, still dragging her along.
She shook her head. "But what are we going to do here?" she repeated.
"More fun and games," he said.
"No!"
"Yes!"
"The same?" she asked, her voice hushed with fear.
"Different ones," Sonny answered, with a lewd laugh. "What kind?"
"You'll find out."
They passed on down the hall, out of Najar's hearing. He turned to look at Herb again, still slumped over the table, at Helen Dome being fucked by his own wife, Lil. He felt his own excitement mounting, his cock throbbing like a pounding trip hammer, his loins burning like a furnace. Jesus! He couldn't wait much longer. His thought raced ahead to the moment when he'd be throwing something to Helen, himself. But that thought was obliterated by her ecstatic cry, ringing through the room. "AAAaaaggh! I'm cumming . .. I'm cumming ..."
His eyes were glued to the scene in front of him as she rose to meet the thrusts of Lil's hips, sending the dildo deep into her nakedly writhing belly. She writhed beneath her now, impaled on the obscene, lewd instrument that plunged in and out of her lewdly sucking vagina. She screamed again, and her wail split the air. And then the room on the other side went dark, and the lights went on in the room where the men had gathered to watch. Looking over at Herb Dome, Blake saw that his head was still pillowed on his arms, and that his entire body shook with an uncontrollable fury.
Chapter Four
Herb sat with his head on his arms for a long time, trembling with the violent rage that held him in its grip. Christ! He would kill him - he would kill her - he would kill them all!
Who had brought his wife here, anyway? And why had Helen let them? And why - why - had she submitted to this terrible obscenity he had just witnessed? She was drunk - she was obviously drunk - completely potted. He had been able to see that as he watched her. But why-had she been drinking, at least to that extent? Christ, she was no more a teetotaler than he was, but he'd never seen her stinking before.
Instinctively, he knew that Najar had something to do with this whole thing. But what? And why? And where was he now?
Herb looked around. The lights were blazing in the small room in which he sat, now, but everyone else had disappeared. Sitting at the table, alone, looking up from his folded arms into the brightness, he felt like a prisoner in some precinct house undergoing questioning at the hands of some none-to-gentle sergeant. They were giving him the third degree, he decided, Oh, not physically; they didn't have to do that. It was all mental, and it was one hell of a lot worse than any physical torture, any beating could have been.
He pulled himself to his feet, shaking so with fury that he found it difficult to stand. With a great effort of will he steadied himself, and then, his mouth set in a hard, grim line, went off to look for Blake.
He found him in the bar, his elbow bent - as usual, Herb thought - laughing obscenely at what had taken place. "Christ," he bellowed. "Did you see Dome's face when he recognized his ever-lovin' wife?"
Phil Tonno, sitting at the bar next to him looked up, and saw Herb standing in the doorway. He nudged the publisher in the ribs. "You ought to take a look at his face, now," he said, with a ribald guffaw.
His sneering laugh, his contemptuous words were the final straw for Dome. The world around him seemed to sway and swing, and he saw it all through a flash of red. With a sudden, wild scream of "You son of a bitch! You Goddamned son of a bitch!" he sprang across the room, lunged at his throat, closing his bare hands around it. As suddenly as he had jumped the old man, a fist shot out, knocking him flat. A sharp, searing pain slashed through the side of his face, and he tasted the sweet warmth of his own blood. He wiped his mouth with his hand, touched the throbbing bruise on his cheek, the split on her lower lip. He opened one eye and peered up, to see Phil Tonno standing over him, hands on his hips. "Careful there," he said, "or I'll have to charge you with assault and battery."
The Chief of Police leaned over, helping Dorne to his feet, cautioning him once again. Even so, even in spite of the pain, the swelling beginning to close his eye, Herb lashed out once more with his fists. Tonno caught him, and pushed him into a chair, and Herb sank back, muttering to Najar, "You Goddamned son of a bitch. You're responsible for this, aren't you?"
Blake grinned, and nodded. "That's right," he said. "Hadn't you guessed?"
A low moan escaped Herb's lips. Oh, sure! All the way up here, he'd known something was going on - something crooked, something rotten as hell. But this? No, he hadn't believed it - hadn't let himself believe it.
With difficulty, he opened his blackened eye. Najar was still staring at him, still grinning. "You want the story you were after?" he asked.
"You know, the one you were counting on to get you the Pulitzer Prize?" Someone behind him let out a mocking laugh. "Okay, kid. Ill give it to you. Get your pencil out, and your notebook, too. Write it all down, so you won't forget it. And the story won't be the only thing you won't forget. You're going to remember what went on tonight as long as you live."
Herb nodded dumbly. He had no doubt about that, after what he'd seen. He looked around, wondering where Helen was right now. He started to ask, but thought better of it. Instead, he cleared his throat, and said, "Okay. Shoot."
"Maybe you'd rather begin by asking questions."
"Yeah, but you won't answer them." "Oh, yes I will, boy. I'll answer every one." "Okay, then. Are you the guy behind all this?"
Najar lowered his eyes modestly. "Not entirely," he said. "That is, I'm only one of them."
"Who are the others?"
He waved his hand at the men standing at the bar, at the Chief of Police still holding Dorne in his chair. "They are," he said.
"And how long has this been going on?"
"Oh, quite a while, I would say. Quite a while."
"And it's all true? Everything I heard, then? That you - and the rest of these guys - you've been staging orgies up here? With young girls, too?"
"That's right."
"I suppose you've got something special planned for tonight," Herb said, his voice harsh with bitterness.
"That's right," Blake agreed amiably.
"What?"
"Well, tonight's show will be in two acts, you might say." He looked at his watch. "I guess we'd better get started, too." He clapped his hands. "Curtain going up!" he shouted, and slid off the bar stool, starting towards the room beyond.
Herb tried to stand, too, to follow him, but found himself pinned down by a couple of the burly characters standing around. "Not yet," one of them said. "You can see from here. And you'll see plenty, too. I can guarantee that."
Herb turned his head; this time there was no mirror, no wall, no window between him and the next room. The door to it was wide open, and he could see all that passed, hear every word. He watched Blake go in and sit down, wait for the drink he had ordered to be served, snap his fingers for Curt Pardon for a second drink. And then he saw Helen come in, a negligee of some sort wrapped around her - my God, Herb thought, she looks like a two-bit whore! - walking unsteadily, as if she were still drunk. It took her a moment or so to recognize Najar, and then she gave a bright little laugh and said, "Why Mr. Najar. What on earth are you doing up here?" She seemed to realize that that was a foolish thing to say - Herb thought he saw a blush color her face - and then, at his suggestion, she sat down opposite him. "Why yes," she said, as he offered her a drink, "I think I will."
She sipped at it slowly, and then accepted the cigarette Najar held out to her. It looked as if he had rolled it himself, which seemed rather strange to Helen. Surely he could afford to buy regular cigarettes.
He lit it for her, and she inhaled, tasting the sweet smoke that swirled in her lungs, and then began to cough. "It's strong," she said. "Isn't it?"
"It's different," he assured her. "Be careful at first. Don't drag too deep on it."
She inhaled again, more carefully this time. It was strange, she thought, the feeling that began to creep over her. Somehow she was more relaxed than she had been in a long time, more at ease. She took another drag, and now she began to feel good all over. Nothing seemed to matter any more. Everything was good and beautiful. She began to notice things she hadn't ever noticed before - to see everything more clearly. She heard more clearly, too, perking up her ears to take in sounds that had always before escaped her notice. An expression of contentment seemed to settle on her face. Najar leaned forward and took her hand. "I see you like marijuana," he said.
She shook her head, blinking. "I've never had it."
"You're smoking it now."
She looked at the cigarette in her hand, studying it. It looked different, certainly. And it tasted different. And it made her feel different, too. But marijuana was supposed to be a dangerous thing, and it wasn't legal anywhere. So how could this cigarette that was so soothing, so comforting, be marijuana? Why, it just couldn't be! "I thought marijuana did strange things to people," Helen said. "I thought it -well, you know - sort of made you do wild things."
"Like this?" Najar said, his lips curling in a lecherous little smile, his eyes gleaming evilly. He slipped his arm around her shoulder, drawing her to him, and then his hand slid down along the edge of the kimono she was wearing, slipped beneath it to trail across the soft sensitive skin of her breast.
She started at his touch, while a little chill of excitement flickered up and down her spine. She tried her best to suppress it, to make it go away.
Chapter FIVE
It was wrong, she knew. Even the effect of the marijuana could never make her forget that. But it was a delicious feeling at the same time, she thought, her mind whirling in confusion. She stared at Blake, surprised, a little bit shocked, and then she said, "Oh, you shouldn't have done that."
"Or this, either?" He had pulled her close, and his mouth closed over hers, his tongue sinking deeply into the warm wet cavern of her mouth.
Oh, that was wrong, too, Helen thought. And yet, somehow, in her now hazy state, nothing mattered but the sensation of the moment. And it felt so good - so good - when Blake Najar did that to her. She tried to remember if it had ever been that good with Herb. But that didn't seem important at all because now Najar was running his hands up and down Helen's slender body, beneath the loose kimono that covered her, his hands sliding across her tender, pointed breasts to her slim waist, moving back and forth, gently caressing the pale skin. Suddenly he pushed his chair back and stood up, hovering above her, then pulled her, too, to her feet. As she stood before him, he quickly, deftly pulled the kimono from her shoulders, and the soft, silky stuff of which it was made slid to the floor.
He sucked in his breath as he stared at her voluptuous body, completely naked now. Christ! She was gorgeous. He'd known she would be - God! Watching her with Lil a while back had sent him practically out of his ever-loving mind - but he hadn't really expected anything quite like this. Najar, he told himself, maybe you should have had your eyes examined a while back - you've been missing something. Her breasts were magnificent, erect and full, their ruby-like nipples distended at the tips. The voluptuous contours of her body were absolutely breathtaking - her skin, set off by the pale silken fuzz between her legs - was like alabaster. He let out his breath, with a soft, low whistle. "Dear God!" he whispered. "You're beautiful. Just beautiful!"
From the room beyond he heard a piercing scream, and then the sound of smashing glass, as Herb rose to his feet, too, struggling free for a moment from the men who held him prisoner. "Fuck you, Blake Najar!" he was screaming, his face, red as a beet, contorted with rage. "Fuck you!"
Najar turned slowly, smiling inscrutably at the hysterically shrieking man. "I was planning," he said, "to fuck your wife!"
There was another ear-splitting scream, and then the sound of a struggle, followed by the smack of a fist against soft flesh, as the Chief of Police hit Dorne again, knocking him back onto his chair. When the commotion had died down, Najar turned back to Helen. "Be my guest," he said.
She looked at him, her face blank, her eyes wide and questioning. What on earth did he mean? She shook her head; nothing seemed to make sense any more. Even so, there was something exciting and wonderful about what was happening, that made her whole body tingle, her blood race. It had something to do, she knew, with the cigarettes she had smoked - as Blake offered her another, she took it, and felt the same fuzzy, happiness settling over her that she had felt before - and something to do with the way she was standing there in front of him, completely naked, without a stitch of clothing on. It made her feel like a whore - and yet the thought of what he had said, the knowledge, almost unconscious, of what he was about to do, sent her soaring off into space. She nodded her head, feeling a little foolish. "Yes," she said, "Of course." That didn't make much sense, either, but it seemed the polite thing to do.
Najar took her by the hand and led her across the room. There was a large chair there, a velvet covered easy chair, and he sank down into it, pushing Helen to her knees at the same time. "Come here," he said, straightening his legs and spreading them apart. She hesitated a moment, not quite understanding. And then he ordered again, "Come here!" He slid down in the chair, so that just his buttocks rested on the edge of it, and Helen still kneeling, swiveled towards him. He caught her, and pulled her between his knees, then tangled his hands in the silky strands of her shoulder-length hair. He pulled her face down, and at the same time ground his steaming loins up against it so that she could feel the throbbing hardness of his already-erect penis beneath the rough tweed of his trousers.
"Like that?" he asked lewdly. "You go for that, kid?"
Helen looked at him, not quite understanding. But that didn't much matter; she liked him, she decided. Blake Najar was so nice - and besides, he was her husband's boss, and she had to do what he wanted. It was obvious that he wanted her to agree with him. "Yes," she said.
And once again, she heard her husband's voice, raised in an agonized scream. What was the matter with him? She didn't know, and she couldn't quite focus her eyes, now, on the place where the scream came from - everything there seemed to blur. But she knew that didn't much matter, either. She would talk to Herb later, explain to him that she was busy with Blake, because Blake was his boss, and she had to be nice to him if Herb wanted to get the raise he had been promised. And now Blake was pointing to the bulge between his legs, the bulge under his pants. "Come on, kid," he said. "Take it out."
Again she looked at him, not quite understanding. "Take it out," he ordered again, his voice suddenly cruel. And now he took her hand and placed it between his legs, curling her fingers around the pull that closed the zipper of his fly. Oh! So that was what he wanted!
Even though she understood, she had a little trouble. Her fingers seemed unnaturally clumsy, and she fumbled with the closing of his fly until Blake became impatient. "Come on, for Christ's sake," he hissed at her. "What are you waiting for?"
She didn't know the answer to that, either. She only knew that he was in a great hurry, and so she concentrated on the task ahead of her, wrinkling her forehead, trying desperately to focus her eyes on the elusive bit of metal which seemed to be the key secret of success with Blake. Suddenly, it gave way, and his fly split open, while his giant throbbing cock burst into the air.
He grabbed her hand and wrapped it around it, at the same time pulling back the thick foreskin so that the bulbous purplish head popped out. Then his hands were at her lips, opening her mouth. "Come on, kid," he urged. "Let's see you open wide!"
Once again, she did as she was told, and then she felt the hard hot flesh of his lust-engorged cock rubbing lightly against her teeth, and a moment later felt the thick pole of flesh rammed forward into the moist saliva of her mouth. The gland of the giant head slid wetly up the full length of her tongue, now, while tiny drops of his lewd male fluid seeping from it spilled out, to fill the warm cavern of her mouth with their distinctively masculine taste.
Blake began to undulate his hips slowly, as he sat on the chair, sending his rigid cock sliding in and out of her mouth, while he twisted his hands in her hair once again, gripping it tightly, pulling her face hard against his loins. Opening her eyes, Helen could see the full length of his rigid member as it slid between her widely ovaled lips with a wet, sucking sound, and a little shiver of fear wrapped itself around her. It was gigantic, she thought! That was the word for it. Gigantic! She could hardly imagine any man possessing such an enormous penis, least of all Blake Najar. And yet here she was, kneeling between his legs, while the long, thick instrument speared so deep into her mouth that it seemed to brush against her throat.
For a moment she was afraid she would choke on it. She shook her head, trying to free herself, and uttered a muffled gasp. But Blake yanked at her hair so hard that tears sprang to her eyes, as he pulled her head violently up against his lust-hardened loins.
"Suck!" he hissed at her. "Goddamn it! Suck!"
She raised her eyes, feeling excitingly submissive, captive, even, ready, under the influence of the mind-controlling drugs he had administered, to do whatever he wanted. "Suck!" he ordered again, ramming his huge blood-swollen penis into her face held, as if in a vise, between his two hands. She nodded obediently, almost swallowing the hardened male flesh that filled the moist cavern of her mouth, and then her cheeks began to hollow in and out, as she clasped her roundly straining lips around the giant penis he forced between them.
She swirled her tongue around it now, licking the lewd little drops of pre-cum that dripped from its tip, swallowing them with relish. She felt his hands relax though still entwined in her hair, then leave her head to run along the smooth ivory-white flesh of her body, along the sides of it, over the voluptuous curves of her breasts and hips. He leaned over her lewdly bobbing head and his hands slid to the full, rounded mounds of her buttocks, kneaded the flesh there hungrily. He let his middle finger dip into the deep crevice between the soft white cheeks of her ass, tracing the pencil-thin crevice between them, sending little jolts of unexpected pleasure through Helen's tingling body.
The thick sword of flesh continued to saw in and out between her wide-stretched oval lips, as her head rose up and down on the huge lust-engorged shaft. She could see small tufts of dark pubic hair curling out around the base where it left his open fly, could feel the scratch of the rough tweed of his trousers against the tender flesh of her cheeks. That was wrong, she knew. It was spoiling half the fun. Why was he wearing his trousers? Why didn't he take them off?
She could find no answer to the question, could find no words even to pose it. But she knew she must help him. She stretched her hand out, feeling for his belt, ran her fingers along it to the buckle, and then worked it free until the belt and the trousers, too, hung loose. She slipped her hands down under them, under his cotton undershorts, too, easing them down, and then, as he rose from the chair to shrug them off, she lifted herself from her knees, still sucking on his cock, still running her tongue softly around the wetly glistening head. There was a quick lurch, a sudden twist, and then they slid over his hips, and she ran her own hands down the sides of his body. Sinking back to her knees, she pulled his trousers off him completely, and then dropped her head once more to rest it between his widespread legs.
She bobbed wantonly up and down over the thickly swollen shaft now, sucking on it as if it were a stick of candy, her tongue licking all around the hotly throbbing blue-veined surface as if it were an ice cream cone. From somewhere off in the next room she heard Herb's voice, sharp and shrill and filled with fury. For a moment she thought of rising to her feet, of running to her husband, of reassuring him. She thought, even of unzipping his fly, of taking out his penis, of licking it and sucking it as she was doing his boss' cock.
But somehow she found herself too weak to pick herself up off the floor, to go into the next room. No, she would stay here for the moment. Later - yes, later - she would go to Herb, and she would submit to him in this marvelously wanton way that she was submitting to Blake Najar - and she would make him as happy as she seemed to be making this man - but that would be later. Just now she could think of nothing but the man groaning and twisting above her, playing with her kneeling form, as he watched with delight her lewdly ovaled lips closing around his hard rigid cock, sucking him as he had insisted she must.
She closed her eyes, then opened them. Everything seemed near and clear to her. She no longer had the slightest inhibition, the slightest fear or remorse. The marijuana she had smoked had wiped everything away. She only knew the marvelous sensations that were new and strange to her, and made her come alive with a fearful joy.
She bent her head towards Blake's lustfully quivering loins once more, sucking deep on the hard swollen length of his penis, spearing up into her mouth, and then she felt herself being lifted up, being lifted off the floor, and being carried across the room to a couch there, one she had scarcely noticed.
And then she was lying on it, her legs spread wide, limp and unresisting, hanging over the edge of the couch while Blake dropped down beside her. His fingers crawled over her naked body, trailing across her throat, down to the soft sensitive flesh of her breasts. He began to knead the gently trembling mounds, stroking them with ever increasing intensity, while new ripples of unwanted pleasure washed through her.
Something, somewhere, at the back of her drug-fogged mind told her that she had sunk to the depths of depravity. And yet she was powerless to resist it. Her whole body seemed to tingle with an excitement she had never known before; it was as if little lights were going off in her blood, currents of electricity sparkling against her skin. She let out a gasp of excited surprise, and then held her breath as Blake's fingers wandered to her nipples, as he took them both between the thumbs and forefingers of his two hands, tweaking and twisting them into hard little erections. Oh, God! It was sublime! That was the only word for it. She had never felt so alive in her life, so vibrant, so excited.
The blonde-curled triangle between her legs began to throb and ache with a longing which had never yet been fulfilled. And now, she knew, it would be. Waiting anxiously, she spread her legs even wider.
And then she thought she heard a voice in an adjoining room, and turned her head that way, away from the room with the bar where her husband still sat, pinned down by the strong arms of the Chief of Police and some of his associates, a look of stark horror on his face. She felt sorry for him, once again, but once again brushed the thought of him from her mind. Later, she told herself as she had done before, later she would make it up to him, would make him as happy as she was now. But now her attention was diverted to the room on the other side of her to the voice she heard there. It was a girl's voice, and it seemed terribly familiar to her. She had known it all her life, she was certain, and yet now, when it seemed almost a matter of life and death to place it, she found that she couldn't. She struggled again, trying to identify it, and then gave up, staring into the room instead.
There was a young girl there - she had known it would be - who was on her knees, just as she herself had been a short while before. And just as she had been sucking Blake Najar's penis, her cheeks hollowing in and out, this girl was sucking someone else's thick, stiff cock.
But whose?
That of a young boy, she thought, and she thought, too, that there was something familiar about his figure. She had seen him somewhere, too. But where? She couldn't tell; his head was turned away, and she couldn't make out his face in the half-light of the small room. His voice was vaguely familiar, too, and yet she couldn't really recognize it. She listened, perking up her ears as he repeated insistently, relentlessly, "Say it! Damn it, SAY IT!"
There was a long pause, a silence that seemed as loud as any words Helen had ever heard, and then the girl's clear young voice startled her like the crack of a whip across tender naked flesh. "Fuck me!" she begged, her voice light and clear as a child's "Fuck me - oh, dear God! FUCK ME!"
A tremor of depraved sensuality wracked Helen's whole being. A child! She could hardly be older than her own daughter Diane! And yet she was here, in this evil wicked place, begging in the most lewd language imaginable. The sheer obscenity of it was somehow thrilling, and once again her body was alive with an ecstasy she had never before known.
And then her passion soared even beyond that as Blake's hands descended down again toward the narrow valley of her buttocks, pulling them wide apart, and lingered there while he ran his middle finger teasingly up and down the crease. She writhed beneath his hands, gasping out her pleasure as his fingers curled down to rummage in the wetly seeping slit of her vagina between the soft hair-lined lips there.
Chapter Six
She felt the moistness surging from her achingly throbbing vagina, up between her legs, and felt a little twinge of pride at the fact; she would please Blake - she would make him happy. And wasn't that what a woman was supposed to do? Wasn't that a - what did the psychologists call it? - a woman's role? Of course it was, and now she was being a woman, a real woman, and she smiled happily at the thought.
She felt Blake moisten the tip of his middle finger in the warm wetness of her cunt, and then gasped as he slowly stroked it up the crevice between the cheeks of her ass towards her tight, tiny anus. For a moment, it circled around the tight nether ring guarding the entrance to her rectum and then with a sudden thrust, it plunged deep inside. Helen gasped at the pain, sucking in her breath in the agony of the moment, and then, as she became accustomed to the unnatural invasion, she began to moan in a frenzy.
"Like it?" Blake asked, leering down at her, his middle finger skewering deeper into her asshole, impaling her lewdly on it.
She moaned again, rotating her hips now, grinding her buttocks deep into the cushions of the couch, while Najar turned and twisted the tip of his finger in her narrow anal passage. His hands spread outwards to cup the smoothly straining mounds of her buttocks, while his finger continued to spear into her. At last he lifted her up toward his loins, poised above her and she felt his stiffly erect penis touch tentatively at the moistly throbbing flesh of her cuntal lips.
"You like that, too?" he asked, leering down at her.
"Yes," she managed to murmur. "I ... I like that, too."
"That's great," Blake said. "Just great!" He flicked his head back, bawling over his shoulder, "Hey, you guys, she likes it. She told me herself."
There was a chorus of half-muted answers from the next room, the sound of chairs being pushed back, of heavy footsteps, and then it seemed that the room was filled with a lot of men. Through a marijuana haze Helen saw Herb among them, his arms pinned to his sides by the Chief of Police and a couple of other important city men, his face a livid mask of rage. And then she shut her eyes, as she felt Blake's hugely throbbing penis part her sparse pubic hair, searching for the glistening little hole of her cunt.
He found it at last - the touch sent another glorious thrill through her - and then Najar flicked his hips forward, and the soft, rubbery cock-head forced its way into the tight elastic opening of her sensitive pussy. "Oooooooooh!" she gasped as he pushed again, sending his hugely swollen cock burrowing in between the moist, soft-ridged walls of her cunt, pressing the folds of tender pussy flesh before it. "Oh, God!" she moaned softly, "Oh, dear, dear God!"
As suddenly as he had entered her, Blake withdrew, the thick, bulbous head of his penis barely brushing the lewdly glistening lips of her vagina. "Beg!" he commanded suddenly.
"Beg?" But wasn't that what the man - or the boy - in the next room had demanded of the young girl? Of course it was. And what had the girl said? Why she had pleaded, "Fuck me, fuck me," hadn't she? Yes, Helen was sure that was it. And that must be what Blake wanted her to do, too. She half-raised herself, opening her eyes again. "Fuck me," she said, her voice soft and dulcet at first, then rising with passion as the meaning of the words sank into her heavily drugged consciousness. "Oh, my God! Fuck me! Fuck me!"
"Jesus, yes!" Najar shouted. And once more he used the thick blood-engorged head of his penis to part the silken strands of her pussy hair. The little mouth lay open to him again, and with a sudden lurch he forced his rock-hard cock far up into her moistly throbbing cunt, thrusting it forward inch by inch between the softly yielding walls. He settled his body down on Helen, now, and began to grind his hips between her openly welcoming thighs, sinking deeper and deeper between them, withdrawing momentarily, penetrating her again until the head slammed relentlessly up against her cervix.
Helen moaned beneath him, her head lolling from side to side, her mouth slack in obscene, wanton abandon. Blake rotated his hips and she moved against them, rotating hers in turn, while little beads of perspiration formed on her upper lip. With one hand, he cupped her nakedly squirming buttocks, pulling her closer to his own surging loins, while his middle finger continued to twist and turn within her tight little asshole moving against his plunging cock that speared lustfully in and out of her vagina.
Her body was alive with pure passion now, and she moaned softly, "Oh, God, oh God, oh God!" while Najar quickened his strokes, lengthening them at the same time. Nothing seemed to matter but this joy she felt, this ecstasy, and she was only vaguely aware of the group of men standing around, watching with lust-filled eyes, the sordid spectacle of the young wife being fucked by her husband's boss. She was vaguely aware, too, that her husband was among the group - it dawned on her that his face was white as a sheet, his expression one of the most intense suffering she had ever seen, as if he had been tortured beyond endurance.
She remembered that earlier in the evening, he had been held back like a leashed tiger, about to spring at his prey. Now, though, he seemed about to slump to the ground, and she saw that he was supported, held upright, by the same men. It seemed very strange, but Helen had neither the time nor the inclination to think about it. She wanted nothing more than to lie here beneath Blake Najar, thrashing ecstatically as his huge hard penis filled her belly to the point of bursting.
She writhed furiously now, as the pleasure of being fucked spiraled through her, filling her loins and belly with unbelievable rapture. Her own little moans and mewls of ecstasy rang in her ears, and were joined, it seemed, by similar little sounds from the room beyond. She managed to clear her mind with a tremendous effort of will, to concentrate for the briefest moment on those sounds, to identify them in some way, and then it somehow penetrated her consciousness that whoever it was in the next room was being fucked, too - that she, too, was impaled on the sword-like cock of a man lying above her, sawing in and out as Najar was. Somewhere, too, deep in her sub-conscious, she recognized the voice again - it was the voice of the young girl she had heard before - but again, could not identify it.
Once again she put the whole matter from her mind, as Najar pounded, pounded, pounded into her, yanking his middle finger from her rectum with a lewd wet sucking sound, while he pressed his hands behind her knees, thrusting them back hard, almost to her shoulders. Her legs jerked, her toes curling as she approached her climax, and she tossed her head wildly from side to side again.
As Najar continued to hammer into her, he felt the warm, wet fluid seep from her cunt walls to flood around his hard-fucking cock, and then he felt the spasm of her contraction, her convulsion, beneath him. "Ooooooo! Aaaaagh!" she screamed, "Oh, my God! I'm cumming . . . I'm cumming!" And his own hot sperm churning like boiling lava in his fiery balls raced the length of his penis to spurt far up into Helen's nakedly quivering belly, as she ground her frantically climaxing cunt up tight against its deep-buried depth.
Helen moaned aloud, her thighs, quivering as her own white hot juices mingled with the thick viscous liquid still shooting deep into her. At last her legs fell limp, splayed out over the edges of the couch, and she closed her eyes, feeling completely fulfilled.
From the room beyond she heard the voice of the young girl, crying out her own ecstasy now, just as she, herself had. "Oooo! I'm cumming . . . oh, my God! My God, Sonny! I'm cumming ..." There was another long, low, incoherent cry, and then an even longer silence.
And finally, she heard the shrill scream of sheer and utter horror that came from the throat of Herb, struggling desperately to his feet. "Oh, my God!" he shrieked, his voice rising and falling like that of a wailing banshee. "Oh, my God! That's my daughter in there! That's my daughter Diane!"
Chapter Seven
Herb Dorne was seated now, slumped back in an arm-chair, his hands grasping the sides with such force that his knuckles stood out, white as mountain tops. His face - white as that of a clown a short while before - had now turned ashen. His mouth was open and he gasped for breath. His eyes seemed bleary, and from time to time he closed them, as if to shut out the sights he had seen. But there was no way to shut out the knowledge of what had happened. That had seared his soul, and would remain with him as long as he lived. His only thoughts, now, were as to how he could escape from here, how he could get away with his wife and daughter.
He gathered his strength at last and stood, then walked over to Helen. "Get your clothes on," he ordered. "We're going home." He strode into the next room, where Sonny lay, her arm Diane lay, her arm entwined around Sonny's lean, lithe body. "Get dressed!" he ordered. He gave her a swift, sharp slap on her naked buttocks, repeating his command.
And then he found himself surrounded, as he had been before, by a group of men, holding him back. He recognized most of them; weren't they all familiar figures around town? "The pillars of local society," as he told himself wryly.
"What's with you?" one of them asked. "I'm getting the hell out. And I'm taking my family with me." "The hell you are." "Why not?"
"Because we need them for the show."
"You bastards," Herb screamed. "You dirty, low-down rotten bastards."
Blake Najar moved forward now, still buckling his belt, still tucking his shirt inside his pants. "Sit down," he ordered, pushing Herb back into the depths of a chair. "And get out your notebook. You wanted a story, didn't you? Well, now you've got it!"
"Oh, Christ!" he moaned, burying his face in his hands. "Oh, sweet, loving Christ!"
He looked up to see Blake standing over him again. "You wanted a story about young girls, didn't you? Young girls being fucked by dirty old men?" His eyes, searing into Herb's, were evil, as vicious and cruel as any he had seen. He waited a brief moment, and when Herb made no answer, said, "Well, watch this, boy. Watch this!"
Dorne felt a little faint, and his head whirled. It was hard to focus his eyes, and yet he was certain he saw his daughter's voluptuous young figure swimming past him. It seemed that Phil Tonno had Diane by the hand, and Herb was certain, even in his agitated state, that she was out of her mind with drugs. What was it, he wondered? The hashish they had drugged Helen with? Or LSD? Or worse? Oh, Christ Almighty, something worse? He didn't know, and he didn't want to know. He only wanted to get her out of this place of hell, to get Helen out, too.
And then he saw that Tonno - the Chief of Police, Phil Tonno! - was running his hands over the plump, newly ripened curves of Diane's breasts, cupping them in his huge hands, stroking her nipples until they stood out from the two rounded spheres as if they had a life of their own. Herb closed his eyes, and a shudder shook his whole body. Oh, sweet Christ! Now what?
He opened his eyes, to see Tonno lean over, leering, and then heard his rasping voice demand, "Ever been fucked in the ass, kid?"
Diane shook her head, not seeming to understand. "No," she said at last. "I don't think so. I don't know."
"Well, if you had been, you would know all right!" Tonno said. "And since you haven't, it's time you were. Don't you think so?"
It seemed to Herb that his daughter nodded - it was hard for him to tell - and then he closed his eyes again, waiting for the blow to fall, the executioner's ax to strike. When, after an eternity, he opened them again, he saw the two of them - his daughter Diane and Phil Tonno, the Chief of Police, in the room just beyond. Diane was down on her hands and knees, her small, slender form naked, while Tonno, stripped too, knelt behind her, his heavy torso pressed against her buttocks. His long, thick cock was coupled to her, thrusting brutally into her young, quivering body.
"Oh, my God!" Dome moaned. "Oh, my God! He's done it to her. He's got it right up her ass-hole. Oh, Christ!" He turned away, clenching his fists. He would kill Tonno for this, he vowed. Tonno and Blake Najar, too. And yet, for the moment he knew he could do nothing but watch in utter horror as the Chief shoved his huge thick cock up into her, his hands grabbing lewdly at her small firm breasts dancing beneath her. Then suddenly he grabbed her hands and pulled them back between his legs to cup his obscenely swaying balls.
Herb couldn't watch it any more. He slumped forward once again, feeling faint. "Oh, God!" he groaned. "Oh, God!"
"Something bothering you, boy?" Najar sneered at him. He looked up, wishing to Christ he could pull himself together, paste Najar one, break his God damned neck, beat him to a pulp. He thought he was going to be sick and dropped his head, his eyes closed. Blake chucked him under the chin, then landed a right that sent his head reeling back. "I said, 'Something bothering you, boy'?"
"Nothing," Herb spat at him bitterly.
"Nothing?" Najar laughed. "Well, let's see how you feel about this, then." He lifted him up by his armpits and marched him in front of him to another room. Helen would be there, Herb knew, she would be there with a man, submitting to some other degrading act. He wondered idly what it would be. And then he wondered if it really mattered. Did anything, after this?
He let himself be led into the room, making no resistance. As he had thought, Helen was in there lying on the couch again, her legs splayed open. One of the men Herb seen in the bar was there, too, and Dorne saw that he was toying with the fleshy pink lips of her vagina with his fat, stubby middle finger. He parted the sparse blonde hair, exposing the narrow hair-lined slit, while she moaned above him, her breath coming in short little gasps of ecstasy. He dropped between her legs now, poised on all fours, and placed his hands against the warm soft flesh of her inner thighs, gazing down hungrily at the narrow furrow there, fringed so delicately with soft golden hair. And then, as the two of them, husband and wife, watched - Helen's eyes still glazed with drugs, her flesh still quivering with the lust they had induced - he placed his thumbs on the soft coral lips of her cunt and drew them slowly, deliberately apart.
Herb felt a moment of sick revulsion - my God! that was his own poor wife lying there beneath that bastard, that rapist, oh that . . . that ... He could think of no words vile enough to describe his depravity, his evilness. And yet, even as he watched the repulsive scene, he felt a flash of shocked excitement in his own loins, felt his balls begin to throb and then to ache, his penis lurch in a quick spasm. Oh Jesus! What the hell was the matter with him? What was he? Man or beast? A human being or some sort of sub-human species who hardly deserved to live? Oh, Christ!
He didn't know, and in his near-desperate state, he hardly cared. All that seemed important now was that this beast, this sex-fiend, this despicable bastard in human form had dropped his face to the wide split up between Helen's thighs, and that his tongue darted forth to slide its full length up into her quivering vagina.
Her body responded automatically, jerking spasmodically as his tongue slithered in and out of her hotly seeping pussy, racing up into her openly receptive cunt. Oh, God! It couldn't be happening, Herb Dorne thought. It couldn't! Not to Helen! Not to my wife!
And yet she twisted and turned beneath him, her face contorted with the most depraved pleasure, the most degraded expression he had ever seen, as the man continued his scurrilous defilement of her white trembling body. Now she was raising herself up to meet him, thrusting her legs forward, tangling his hair between her fingers, grasping it with all her strength to pull his face closer into the openly presented cunt-slit up between her thighs.
His tongue darted forth again, and she began to mewl and whimper with pleasure as it licked the trembling length of the narrow furrow. Suddenly his probing lips found the erectly pulsing button of her clitoris, and Herb heard her sharp whine of agonized pleasure as the man - oh, Christ, who was he, anyway? - as he took the tiny pulsating bud between his teeth, running his tongue around and around it, opening his hungry mouth at last to move his tongue back again, downward, to the moist hot opening of her vagina.
He flicked his tongue deep inside, swirling it and probing it around the velvet-like clasping walls, while her body alternately contracted and relaxed beneath him in spasms of ecstasy.
Suddenly he seemed to flip himself over, to whirl around like some sort of demented dervish, and then Herb saw, with an anguish he had never believed possible, that his body was poised transversely above hers, his heavy sperm-filled balls brushing against her small pointed chin. The short wiry pubic hairs surrounding them grazed her lips, while his great rigid penis seemed to dig into the soft resilient flesh of her heaving breasts. She groaned again, gave another whimper of mingled delight and agony, and then in a frenzy clasped his rock-hard cock between her hands. Lewdly, obscenely, she drew the thick heavy foreskin back and forth, while he shivered with obvious excitement at her touch. Her own sharp, cat-like tongue darted out to lick at her pulsating purplish head, to savor the drops of thick lubricating fluid oozing from it.
"Oh, God!" she moaned. "Oh, my God!" She ovaled her moist red lips, held them open expectantly and waited with eyes closed.
A moment later she had taken the rigid throbbing shaft deep into her mouth, had begun to suck at it, pulling it almost to the back of her throat, her cheeks inflating around it, then hollowing. At the same time, the man - who the hell was he, Herb wondered? He had seen him a dozen times before, he was sure of that - the man continued to plunge his long, curling tongue deep into Helen's seething, clasping vagina, while she thrust her hopelessly aroused loins up against his face in total submission.
Herb let his own face sink into his two hands, covering his eyes. How in God's name had he come to be here? It seemed centuries ago that he had driven up here with Blake Najar - oh, my God! Blake! Where was he?
He heard a voice at his elbow and whirled around. Speak of the Devil - or even think of him! "What the hell do you want?" he asked, as Najar's heavy-jowled visage was shoved against his cheek.
"Enjoying yourself?" Blake was laconically. "You shit."
"Flattery will get you nowhere," Blake said, throwing his head back, howling with laughter like a coyote baying at the moon.
Herb glowered at him, wishing to Christ he had the courage to break his neck, to take it between his two hands and twist it into little curlicues, to snap it with a crackle and a pop as if it were a breakfast cereal - oh, for Christ's sake, to beat this bastard to a bloody pulp. He took a deep breath, puffing out his chest - by Jesus, he had the courage all right, he thought, with a sound that was half laugh and half sob -he had the courage. But what the hell could he do with his arms pinned to his sides?
"Look," he said, swallowing his pride, his amibitions, his ideals. Putting aside everything he had ever believed in, submitting completely, admitting - God, yes - admitting defeat. Well, he couldn't take this any longer. Sure, he had pride. But he was outnumbered here, ten to one. What the hell could he do?
"Look," he said again. "Look, Blake. Why don't you call these characters off. . . ?" He shook his head at the men still surrounding him, still holding him back. "Call them off. And I'll take Helen and Diane home. And that could be the end of it, couldn't it?" He looked at Old Man Najar with haunted eyes. "Okay. I know what's going on up here. And I should have had enough sense to keep my trap shut ..."
"Right!"
"Okay. But I didn't!" "Right again!"
"Look, Diane." He was shaking now, and he hated himself for it. He took a deep breath, trying to regain control. "Look," he said. "We could call it quits. Okay? I thought I had something great going for me. And now I see I didn't. Okay. So I was wrong. So let's just forget I ever mentioned it, shall we?" He wrestled his hand free from the almost over-powering hold of the man standing beside him and helf it out. "Let's forget it all. No hard feelings, Blake? I just want to get the hell out of here - get out with Helen and Diane - that's all!" His voice cracked and he was ashamed.
Blake patted him on the shoulder, making him feel more humiliated than he'd been even before - what the hell did the Old Man think he was, a child? Yes, he admitted to himself. That was what he thought of him. In that case, there was nothing for him to do but to play the game. His thoughts flew back to the day he had first broached the subject of the old McGee place, of the orgies he'd heard about up there. "Yassuh, boss," he'd wanted to say. "Yassuh, boss."
But he said nothing and listened instead. Blake patted him on the shoulder again. "Now, look, boy. I know how you feel..."
"Who?"
"All of us up here. Me. My friends."
"And just how do you feel?" Herb asked.
"Disappointed," Blake said, his mouth dropping slightly, a series of wrinkles stretching across his forehead like the furrows in a newly plowed field. "Disappointed," he repeated. He slapped Herb on the shoulder again, making his knees buckle. "You see, boy, we were kind of counting on you to be part of the show ..."
Herb listened, not quite understanding. Part of the show?" "What show?" he finally managed to ask, his voice a sick, querulous whisper.
"Why, the show we're putting on up here," Blake said, whacking him again, nearly knocking him over this time. "You see, there are certain things we like to do - but there are certain things we like to watch, too. And one thing we all thought we'd like to see . . . " he stopped, scratching his chin thoughtfully.
Herb felt the butterflies stir in his stomcah, felt the emptiness engulf him, felt the weakness it brought with it. "Yes ..." he managed to say at last.
"Well, we haven't seen anyone, well - I can speak frankly with you, can't I? - you know," he shook his silvery mane, the epitome of earthly virture. "Well," he repeated, "we sort of took a vote, because that's the way we do things around here - we're pretty democratic when you come right down to it - and we all decided that what we really wanted to see was to see you and Helen together." "You bastard!"
Blake drew himself up to his full height and glowered at Herb under beetling eyebrows. "My parents were married," he said. "A couple of weeks before I was born."
"You bastard."
"Well - maybe. But let's get to the point, shall we?"
Herb stared, speechless. What, after all, was there to say?
It was Blake who found the words. "Ever fucked Helen in the ass?" he asked suddenly, his words slashing through Herb's mind like the edge of a razor-sharp sword.
Dome's jaw dropped, his mouth hung slack, open as he tried to understand what it was that Najar had said. "Fucked Helen in the ass?" Christ, that was sodomy, wasn't it? Oh, my God! That was sodomy! Lewd and depraved and about as evil as you could get. And he'd just seen it happen to his poor little fifteen-year-old daughter! How much lower could these guys go?
He felt his stomach churning again, felt shocked and disgusted and sick, too. Finally he managed to say "Of course not," adding, under his breath, "you God damned bastard."
Blake heard the whispered words and grinned lewdly at them. And then he shrugged. "Look, Herb," he said. "You're a big boy, now. Isn't it about time you did?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well ..." he shrugged again. "You see, boy, we were sort of counting on that for tonight. You know. Part of the show. We just all had our hearts set on seeing you fuck Helen in the ass . . . "
"You bastard!"
"I've already explained about that," Blake said. "Now let's get down to business." His voice had lost its touch of humor, his words any element of humanity. "We want to see you fuck Helen in the ass. You know. Shove it up her. You know."
"I won't."
"Then I will," Blake said. "And you can watch it. And when I get through with your wife, I'm going to take on your daughter."
"You wouldn't!"
"Why not?"
Why not, Herb thought. This was a madman he was facing a maniac, a sex-fiend. "You wouldn't!"
"I would! And when I get through with them, there are a dozen others waiting in the wings." He nodded, tossing his white mane back over his shoulder, towards the other men who stood in a circle, now, their faces mean, vicious. "Know what I mean?"
Herb nodded. After a long, long time he said, "I know."
"Okay. Then what do you want to do?"
He waited again a very long, long time he said, "I know."
"Okay. Then what do you want to do?"
He waited again a very long time. Then he said. "Whatever you want me to do."
"You know what we want. Now it's up to you."
Blake seemed to float away and he was left alone. It seemed too that the scene in front of him dissolved - it was all.like a stage show he had seen once - with whirling lights and fading figures and disappearing stages - with psychedelic effects that were mind-blowing, and then he saw that Helen was alone, that whoever had been with her had gone away. He looked at her for a moment and then crossed over to where she still lay on the couch.
Oh, Christ! He couldn't do it, he thought. He couldn't do it! But he knew there was no alternative. He had to, if any of them were ever to get out of here. And once again, degrading though it was, he felt a little thrill of excitement run through him, felt his loins catch fire, his cock throb in anticipation of the lewd, bestial act he was about to commit on his own wife. The sight of Helen's voluptuous body, stretched out before him, offered to him as nothing more than a lewd receptacle for his illicit, unnatural ravishment, was driving him crazy. What the hell was the matter with him? He was nothing more than a maddened animal himself, deprived of every vestige of human decency, incapable of resisting this vile debasement of his own wife.
Helen turned and smiled wanly at him as he entered the room. The efforts of the marijuana she had smoked, the huge amount of alcohol she had consumed, had begun to wear off, and the events of the past few hours were beginning to sink into her consciousness now. Earlier she had seemed to know nothing but the unbelievable pleasures of the moment, had given herself up to the sensual sensations that had permeated her entire body with hardly a thought. But now the memories of those passionate moments began to haunt her, and the sight of her husband made her already confused mind whirl anew. Oh, dear God! What had happened to her? What had she done? And with whom? Blake Najar? Certainly. Lil? Yes, that, too.
And what was going to happen to her now?
She searched her husband's face for a clue, and now the memory came back to her of the way he had taken her - how long ago was that? A few nights? A few years? All eternity? A shudder of fearful expectation went through her. Whatever happened now would be more terrible, more shameful, more humiliating than anything she had yet suffered. And at the same time it would be more wonderful. Oh, God! She wanted him to hurt her, she wanted to submit to him, she wanted to be subjugated. Dear God! She wanted to be his whore!
She looked at him again and their eyes met, with an understanding they had never known. She was going to be taken by him, be plundered and ravaged. And somehow - was it possible? - she would find the fulfillment she had never known.
She quivered on the couch, her firm ripe breasts heaving almost imperceptibly, the little triangle up between her legs tingling in a spasm of wanton desire. An electrifying shock rippled along the flesh of her thighs, and she squirmed her buttocks down into the softness of the cushions beneath her as she waited. And then she heard his voice, harsh with lust, as he brusquely ordered, "Turn over!"
The words slowly penetrated her clouded but now clearing mind. Oh, no! No! Not that! She was only dimly aware of what he meant to do, but even in her drugged state of consciousness was certain that what he demanded was the one thing she could never permit, could never submit to.
It was wrong, wrong, WRONG! It was evil. It was degrading, depraved, bestial. "Oh, no," she whimpered. "Oh, my God, no," she whimpered. "Oh, my God, no!"
With a quick, sudden movement, he seized her ankles and then viciously, brutally, twisted her over onto her stomach. She gasped for breath from the sudden impact as her body hit the couch, and her legs splayed out to the sides. Quickly she clenched them together, the muscles of her buttocks straining to protect her fearfully quivering anus.
There was a brief moment of nothingness - her heart seerried to stand still, her breath to stop - only the clock on the wall in the next room continued to show some sign of life, ticking off the seconds with a monotonous regularity - and then she heard the metallic rasp of a zipper as Herb opened his fly, heard the rustle of clothes being shed, and knew, without looking, that he stood before her partially naked.
"And ready for action," she thought, a sudden sick, hysterical laugh shaking her body. Why did things like that - slogans she had heard so long before - keep coming back to her? Was it only to blot out the reality of the moment? Ready for action, she thought again, and then she felt Herb stroking the softly rounded flesh of her buttocks, running a finger lightly over the sensitive white half-moons. She flexed her nether cheeks, clenching them tight together, sucking in her breath. Oh, God! Now what? And then she felt her husband's lips moving slowly, lightly over her buttocks, kissing them, nipping at them, flicking his tongue against them.
Oh, no! She couldn't let him. Not even Herb! Not even her husband. It was wrong, she thought for the hundredth time, for the thousandth, perhaps. It was wrong. She would do anything - almost anything, she corrected herself - for him, but not that. She began to kick, thrashing about on the couch, writhing and bucking furiously, trying to escape. Her desperate efforts merely excited her husband more, maddened him, like the proverbial red flag waved before a bull. A bull! That was what he had become - something no longer human, something devoid of all decency, all sensibilities. He lunged forward viciously, grasping her by the ankles again, his fingers tightening around the white flesh until it was marked by angry red welts, as he pinned her down. "Spread your legs," he ordered, his voice cold and hard as tempered steel.
Helen thrashed about once more, in one final, hopeless attempt to save herself, and then winced, and screamed in pain as the flat of his hand slashed across her quivering buttocks in a swift, stinging slap. "Spread your legs apart," he ordered again.
She tried her best to do as she was told, opening her legs wide until she was afraid she would split in two. Her only reward was another swift slap, one that brought tears of pain to her eyes, another scream from her throat. "Spread your legs," Herb thundered.
"I did. Oh, my God! I did. What do you want!"
"By Jesus! I want you to spread your legs!" And before she could move, could even try to comply with his command, he seized her by the thighs and forced them apart until she thought her bones would break, her flesh rip into shreds. She screamed again, then closed her eyes as the terrible searing pain slashed through her naked loins. And then she gasped!
Herb's middle finger was running up and down the narrow crevice between the trembling cheeks of her ass, sending tingles of excitement traveling up and down her spine. It stopped to tease at the tiny puckered orifice of her anus, circling its tight elastic ring. Then, as he flicked his wrist, the tip of his finger ploughed in deep, sliding through the cringing and periphery, sinking in to the first knuckle. The sudden movement brought a scream of agony from Helen. She screamed a second time, but Herb seemed deaf to the sharp, spine-curdling sound, oblivious to her pain and anguish and terror. He plunged his middle finger in deeper and deeper.
And then gradually Helen felt the terrible searing pain turn to a burning soothing pleasure. She wiggled her hips as Herb sent a second finger plunging deep into her rectum, prodding and probing, widening her tight little anus, expanding it while she skewered back on them, gasping for breath again.
Herb was breathing hard, panting over her prone body; he was almost ready. Suddenly she felt his hand on her hips, jerking her to a kneeling position with her buttocks waving high in the air behind her. His knees pushed her thighs wider apart while his hands held her hips steady. And then she felt his long, thick cock as it brushed against the rubbery little circle of her rectum. "Reach back and put it in," he rasped, his voice that of a stranger, an animal she would have avoided in the street, a sex fiend from whom she would have defended herself and her child to the death if he had not been - oh, God! - her husband.
He took her trembling hand and placed it around the thick aching shaft of his blood-engorged cock. "Put it in," he ordered again, guiding it down towards the hairless little circle. With a feeling of revulsion and yet the terrible need to comply with the request of her husband, Helen clasped her fingers around the swollen throbbing flesh, and placed the tip of it against the tiny opening between her ass-cheeks. There was a quick sudden thrust, accompanied by an animal-like grunt from Herb, and then Helen felt the tight resisting nether ring give way before the relentless pressure, as the blood-filled cock-head popped up inside the cringing little orifice. He pressed forward slowly, implacably, forcing the hotly throbbing hardness further and further up between the vainly resisting walls of her rectum until he was sunk deep in the tightness of her bowels as she screamed and lurched wildly beneath him.
He began to fuck back and forth, his sperm-bloated balls smacking hard up against her cunt, while an overwhelming sense of excitement spread through her body, a sensuousness she had never know, and which nothing on earth could suppress. She moved back against Herb, arching her body, thrusting her buttocks upward and outward, rotating them in tiny teasing circles, meeting his forward thrusts. She was possessed again with a sense of the most ultimate ecstasy of which a woman was capable, and at the same time with a sense of sin that nagged at her relentlessly, that made her feel wicked and wanton. She remembered that she had hardly let Herb touch her beofre, that she had been shocked, disgusted, even, when his tongue had trailed across her belly towards the little patch of pubic hair down between her legs. She had clenched them tightly together, had pulled his head back, away, with a vicious gesture. And now .. . now!
She knew he was ready to cum, ready to shoot his boiling sperm deep inside her. And yet he held back for a moment, to enjoy still more the climax he was so close to achieving. He withdrew his lust-swollen penis, and almost to the huge bulbous tip, then shoved it deep into her naked belly again with a loud groan that filled the room.
He fucked rhythmically in and out now, spearing into the soft spongy depths of her anus, lunging with long smooth strokes, pulling out with tiny ridges of her pink, clasping flesh clinging to the base of his cock. His body jerked and quivered, and then with a sudden spurt, his white hot sperm gushed forth in an abundant torrent into her openly clasping rectum. Helen bucked furiously back to meet his violently thrusting movements, and then she let out a little scream of pure delight as she felt the boiling male cum fill her throbbing little passage. It splashed back out again, around his still wildly driving penis, to run down the crevice between her wide split buttocks, and then she felt Herb's final withdrawal as he pulled his now softening penis from her rectum with a slight sucking sound.
She lay still, her head buried in her arms, feeling strangely satisfied, and then the sound of a familiar voice roused her. She turned to look around and saw that she and Herb were not alone, had not been for some time now. She shook her head, blinking a little as she opened her eyes wide, and then she recognized, in a sudden flash of anguish, that Diane - her own daughter - hers and Herb's - was in the room with them.
Her mind whirled; she couldn't think. Had Diane seen them? How could she know? Had she? Had she? Had she watched the lewd, evil spectacle? Had she seen her own father lewdly sodomizing her mother?
Helen raised herself up on her elbows, looking again. And then she saw that Diane was not alone either - not alone at all. In the semi-darkness, she could still make out the features of Blake Najar standing behind her, while Blake's son, Sonny, faced the young, defenseless girl. And then she saw that her own young daughter was impaled on the father's enormous cock skewering into her from behind - that she, too, was being forced to submit to sodomy, just as Helen herself had been - while the Najar boy rammed his own rock-hard penis deep into her daughter's cunt. The two of them were fucking into her with long hard strokes, pumping her up and down as she thrashed about, impaled by two of them, her legs dangling just above the floor, suspending her, like some weird, strange art object that might have been hung from the ceiling.
The young girl whirled about, buffeted by father and son, their evenly pistoning cocks matching in their lewd rhythms, while she began to moan, softly at first, with the pleasure-pain of the complete and utter ravishment, this double invasion of her hot moist parts. The moans and whimpers began to swell, with the throbbing urgency of the moment, the intense, incredible joy that swept in breaking waves across her feverishly vibrating body, until they became screams of pure passion. She began to move up and down on the two lust-driven cocks spearing into her, writhing, thrashing about now of her own volition. And then the voices of the two men - the Old Man and the young boy who had defiled her such a short time before - blended with hers, and they groaned as they pistoned in and out of her two wet, warm openings. And then, almost in unison, their hips jerked forward and they sent their long thick jets of white semen spurting deep into her belly, deep into her bowels. There was another long scream of ecstasy, and then with a wild shiver of the purest joy, the most unimaginable pleasure, Diane's newly ripe young body convulsed in her own orgasmic spasm.
Helen stared speechless, shocked beyond endurance at the sordid sight, and then one scene after another chased itself through her troubled mind, one thought crowded out the one before. Little Diane! Her child! Her little girl . . . but . . . ! Oh, no! She was hardly more than a baby, really. And now this . . . this had happened to her. She wanted to rise from the couch, to swoop her up, to cradle her in her arms as she had when she was still an infant. She twisted her head, straining to see her, expecting, somehow, to look at a mere toddler, struggling to her feet, coming towards her with outstretched arms, asking to be picked up.
And then she knew! Diane was a woman, too. She had the same needs, the same desires that she herself had. And she had experienced the same pleasure, the ultimate ecstasy. She was a woman - a real woman - even at her age, and Helen could only blink back her own tears of joy at the thought.
Something had happened - something incredible had happened to the two of them. She was still too confused to understand what it was exactly. She only knew that everything was different.
Chapter Eight
Helen stood at the top of the step-ladder, threading the lacy white curtain onto the metal curtain rod. Beyond the window she saw the well-manicured lawns of the brand-new housing development, the kind that dots the landscape of all of southern Florida, and sighed. She wondered if they would like it out here. She hadn't met many of the neighbors yet, but those she had seemed pleasant enough. Mrs. Crocker, who lived across the street, had stopped by with cake and a pot of steaming coffee the day they had arrived. And several of the other women had spoken to her in the supermarket, saying they would call. Yes, she thought, Florida might be very nice.
She knew that Herb was lucky to have found a job down here, on the Examiner. Reporter jobs weren't so easy to come by these days. And he'd had to apply for it cold, when he left the Monitor. He could hardly have asked Blake Najar for a reference, she thought bitterly. And if he had - well, Helen could imagine what the Old Man would have written. It was bound to be obscene - something to do with how great he was at exhibitions; he probably would have added something, too, about how he was especially good with his own wife, and even gone on to describe that awful moment when he'd had his . . . his thing . . . stuck up her behind.
No, it hadn't been possible for him to get any sort of reference. Dear God! He hadn't even been able to face going back to the office to clear the things out of his desk drawer. She began to laugh, a little hysterically. If she knew Herb, there was probably a half-eaten apple still rotting in it.
And God knows, it was better for Diane to be here, too. The boys around here seemed a lot more decent than the ones back home. Although it was hard to tell, wasn't it? She'd thought Sonny was such a nice boy - so well brought-up - such a gentleman! She laughed again, her mouth twisted in bitterness, in disappointment. Live and learn, she told herself. Live and learn, Helen!
She was doing that all right. Or maybe she'd learned enough already to last her the rest of her life. Lil - an alcoholic, a pervert, a sick woman! Blake Najar, sadistic, cruel, as perverted as his wife, or even more so. And they had somehow fallen into his clutches! She wiped her forehead, wet now with beads of sweat, teetering on the top of the ladder, as the whole horror of that awful night seemed to sweep over her, enveloping her in the evil, the terrible degradation to which they had all been subjected. But finally, she told herself, they had escaped! And now here they were in Florida, ready to start new lives.
She adjusted the curtain, squinting at it, making sure it was straight. They had escaped, she thought again.
But had they?
The memory of Herb's face, his lips set in a tight grim line as he munched their breakfast toast came back to her, his eyes, with their scarcely concealed hatred boring into her. It hurt - oh, God! it hurt. And yet how could she blame him? He had had to watch her evil, wanton performance that night. He had seen her while she was - well, screwed - yes, that was the word. No, she thought; the word was fucked. He had had to watch her while every lewd, lecherous old goat in town had fucked her until she could hardly walk. No, she couldn't blame him if he hated her now.
She climbed down from the ladder and stood looking out the window for a moment. She felt, as she so often did these days, the scalding tears well up in her eyes, spill over, coursing down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand.
It was bad enough, she thought, that Herb hated her. No, she couldn't blame him for that. But he hated himself, too. And that, somehow, was worse. Her mind went back to the early days of their courtship - God, they'd been like children, then - innocent as lambs. And he had been so full of hopes, so starry-eyed. He'd been ready - and he'd considered himself able - to change the world, back in those days. And that was why he wanted to be a reporter. He'd had heros, editors who went out and fought evil and corruption wherever they found it; he was going to do the same.
He might have, too, if it hadn't been for her.
She sank down onto the couch, buried her head against the back of it, letting the tears flow now. He'd had his heart set on exposing the filth he'd ferreted out, saving kids like Diane from the fate she'd actually met. And it was she, Helen, who had made all that impossible. How could you be a knight in shining armor, when your wife was little more than a whore? She had betrayed him, but he would never betray her.
And so here they were, in this shining little house, all chrome and tile and polished wood, circling each other like a couple of dogs, ready to spring at one another's throats, but somehow too civilized to let themselves go. Something she had read years before came back to her. "Hell is other people."
And they had made the damndest little hell for each other that anybody could imagine!
Automatically, she glanced at her watch, saw that the hour was late, knew that Herb would be home for dinner soon, that Diane would be coming in with her usual cry of "Gee, Mom! I'm starving!" She couldn't sit there any longer; she had to do something.
She got to her feet and went into the kitchen, got the vegetables from the refrigerator, the meat from the freezer, found a cook book and looked up the recipe for a raspberry charlotte, Bill's favorite dessert. She beat the eggs to a froth, folded in the cream, her mind on her husband. What did he want?
Her mind went back, once again, over their whole life together, and she knew that they had never really been happy. There had been something missing between them, something other people had. What was it? What did Herb really want?
And suddenly she knew! He wanted a whore! She remembered the way he had taken her at the old McGee place, in front of all the others. In spite of all the horror, the sordidness, they had found a satisfaction they hadn't known before. She remembered, too, that night just before, when he had brutally raped her. That was what he wanted. None of this sweetness and light.
She dumped the box of fresh berries she had taken from the refrigerator into a colander, held it under the ice-cold running water, letting it flow over her wrists, her hands. The freezing stream seemed to awaken her, to bring her to her senses. Of course, she thought. Of course! She'd read all those magazine articles too, the ones she'd given to Diane. And my God, she'd believed them. Be a brilliant conversationalist. Listen to him, talk to him about what he's interested in! Go to football games with him, if that's his bag!
But that wasn't what it was all about. That wasn't where it was at.
Well, now she knew. She'd seen the whole bit in one big blown-up moment. Dear, sweet Christ! It was as if a curtain had been pulled back, revealing her whole life to her, in much the same way she had seen everything in the most minute detail - every stitch in the draperies, every pore in her skin enlarged a hundred times - under the influence of the hashish she had smoked.
She'd heard the music clear and loud. And now she saw her whole life, clear and stark before her, all pretenses stripped away, like bits of gauze torn to shreds. It was pretty damned basic, after all, wasn't it? What she wanted and what Herb wanted?
Yes, she decided. It was. And by God, she would give it to him.
She heard the squeal of tires as he drove up, parking the car in front of the place, heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs, on the front porch, the slam of the screen door as he came in. He called her from the living room where he had dropped the evening paper on the floor, had kicked off his shoes, had folded himself into an easy chair. "How about a martini?" he asked. "Coming up!"
She brought him one - well-chilled, perfect, the twist of lemon not too big, not too small, just the way he liked it - sat down and had one with him. When Diane came in, she stopped to have a Coke. And then Helen went into the kitchen and fixed dinner.
She served it in silence, and they ate it in silence, although it was one of her better efforts, as even she had to admit. After dinner, Herb went back into the living room, looked through a couple of magazines, watched television for a while, and then got up, yawning, to go into the bedroom. "I think I'll turn in," he said, closing the door behind him.
Helen finished the dishes, waiting until she knew that Herb had climbed in between the sheets, and turned the light off. And then she turned her back to him, bending to pick up the dress at her feet, and he saw the thin nylon strip of her panties tighten snugly between her firm full thighs, slipping tauntingly into the crease between her buttocks, catching there as she straightened up. She walked across the room towards the closet, the dress folded over her arm, her smoothly rounded ass-cheeks quivering voluptuously.
Herb gaped at her, his mouth open. Christ! He'd never seen his wife like this. She'd been such a prude before, embarrassed to undress before him even after all these years. And now she turned around, as quietly as before, slipping the straps of her brassiere down off her shoulders, unhooking the clasps at the back, sliding it off, so that her full, resilient breasts fell free. Just as nonchalantly, as gracefully, as much at ease, she slipped her panties down over her firm quivering thighs. She stood before him for a moment, and he thought he had never seen anything quite so beautiful. The sight of her magnificent breasts, the breath-taking contours of her body, even the little triangle of golden hair at the base of her smooth white belly sent little shivers of joy through him, set his loins on fire.
As slowly, as deliberately as she had undressed, she walked across the room towards her husband. He sucked in his breath as she approached him, feeling his penis jerk and lurch, feeling the hardness encompass it. She dropped to her knees beside the bed, rolling the covers back. Herb lay on the bed in the silk pajamas she had bought him for his birthday. With a quick but gentle gesture, she eased her hand inside the fly and began to stroke his hotly throbbing penis, pulling the foreskin back and forth, sending new thrills up and down his spine.
"Jesus!" he said at last. "What's happened?"
"Things are different, now," Helen said. "At least down here in Florida."
