Tom pushed open the door, and the scene that met Ken's eyes was bacchanalian. It took his breath away. Nothing he had seen could compare with this, not even an afternoon he remembered from sometime when he was about sixteen. Out hunting for any lonely country woman he had stumbled upon five willing gypsies camped without their men in a meadow north of Elkhorn. In the end the black-eyed pagans had taught him things he had not so much as guessed at till then.
The furniture in the long front room of the parks' s cottage was shoved against the walls. This left in the center a space some twenty to thirty feet in any direction. Eleven semi-naked girls and five equally unclad young men were within the cleared area.
Lying on blankets or sitting on cushions they were either drinking from whisky bottles, smoking cigarettes, or making love in a fantastic jumble of bared arms, legs, and torsos. A mingled scent of alcohol, marijuana, and of a sweet incense burning upon the hearth, hung over the softly lighted room.
The bellow of the hi-fi was a hammer of sound throbbing against Ken as he entered...
CHAPTER ONE
On Friday afternoon of the third week of September, Ken admitted Harlana might be partially correct. Certainly his sexual difficulty was not so easy to deny in Oakton as he had persuaded himself it would be. He had not let himself be disheartened by her at first. On the sunshiny Monday morning when he enrolled at the college, Ken had believed he would succeed.
He had hoped he could begin again in the city. He was unknown there. Nobody in Oak-ton-except his grandparents and Harlana- knew the thing the home folk had called him. As much as he wished to change, the transformation should have been relatively simple. "But you'll see, kiddo," Harlana had said last Sunday as they lay together in her bed while her husband and Ken's grandparents were gone from home. "You think you can become the celestial angel you look, eh? Simply because you want to?"
Harlana's pretty face had wiggled in scorn. She had brushed aside his protests.
"Don't think you're fooling me, Ken boy. I know what a storm is inside you. I've known you too long. There's no safety for any girl with a male like you."
A male like you!
The phrase that had crushed Ken in the past had not chilled him then. He had vowed this was the turning point in his life. That with the beginning of the Oakton College fall semester he would be different.
Harlana's nagging phrase did bother him now, however, as he walked her home through the late-summer streets, after having met her at the nearest supermarket. He felt the wall, still between him and other men. Between him and the male students at the college. He had felt it all week. The old barrier he had tried once more to deny.
"What is wrong with me, Harlana?" he burst out suddenly, as if the question were not one he had asked himself a thousand times.
They were crossing shabby Davis Avenue, heading toward their houses at the end of the block. As soon as they reached the sidewalk the sky was hidden by a cloud of sycamore branches.
"Do I seem so awful? They're avoiding me. It's as though they're afraid already. They can't have heard about the things that happened in Elkhorn."
Harlana chuckled at mention of the sleepy Texas farm town which had been Ken's home until this year. Shifting a grocery bag she patted his shoulder in sham sympathy. At twenty-two she was older than he, and in her manner there was a shallow trace of protectiveness.
"I've been waiting," she said, blunt. "That endless, stupid question. I passed the word to those girls to be careful. I told what you are, kiddo. You're a... "
"Stop it!"
Ken's handsome features crinkled in fury. In Elkhorn, where Harlana had been surrounded by a flock of males who kept her busy, her vicious tongue had not been so galling. In Oakton Ken's desperate friendship with her was wearing thinner every day.
"Don't ask me why it happened to you, or how you got this way," Harlana said flatly. "But you can't hide it long. Lord, the way you look at a woman, kiddo. Even when people don't know you, they recognize something peculiar."
The girl shrugged.
Ken knew from experience that Harlana liked having an inexhaustible lover. Her pretty, elfish face was serene under its curly thatch of hair.
Ken had halted while she was speaking. His blue eyes gazed down at the placid young woman sharply. Out in the brick-paved street a car loaded with girls from the college went by. They stared.
"I don't have to be this way, Harlana." He could feel his cheeks reddening. "You can't convince me I do."
He shook his head grimly. Harlana had called him this thing since two years ago, after getting her hands on some psychology books from a mail-order house. Ken had been stunned back then, when he was not quite seventeen, when she explained finally her meaning. He still hated the terms she used, hated the way it made him feel.
"You're wrong," he said in the growing rage he experienced whenever she mocked him. "I can be as self-contained as any man. In Elkhorn I was vile. But I've changed."
They had arrived in front of Harlana's house, a rambling old gingerbread freshly painted a gleaming white. Ken's home, next door on the corner, was of similar design and wore the same sort of snowy dress. The lawns and shrubbery of both places were trimmed to perfection. Three magnolias and a pair of embracing cottonwoods helped make the two lots the new show places of an otherwise grimy and run-down district.
"Of course you've changed, kiddo," Harlana said, laughing, turning in at the concrete walk which led to her porch. "Keep denying it."
She glanced at her wrist watch quickly, and Ken knew she was checking whether they had time for a session on her living-room couch. Harlana's middle-aged husband was a creature of habit. He came home from work, did almost everything at exact hours.
Since their marriage last year, when Harlana had come to Oakton in search of a husband with a bank account, the aging man had learned nothing about her. No two shoulders could have accepted the burden of marriage more cynically than hers. Harlana had left Elkhorn for the flagrant amusements offered her by a city, and she had unearthed them. She indulged her husband, then did as she pleased, and the preoccupied ex-widower remained none the wiser for it.
"Come on, kiddo," she said to Ken, going up the walk. "Your folks are nowhere insight. Let's calm you down before you do something rash. You're too worked up."
Passing under the lacy wooden arch above the porch steps, she went on toward the screen door. In its tight skirt and blouse her trim body was a dynamo of immoral energy. Seconds later Ken saw her pulling down the shade.
She was waiting for him, he knew. He resolved he would not go in to her. Ken despised Harlana, despised her use of him. He was determined not to betray his grandparents further.
"Kiddo," Harlana said softly at the door, "come on before someone sees you."
He was not going to let her dominate him, Ken said silently, sternly. He would never let her do this to him again.
"Ken!"
Suddenly, pulled by a force completely divorced from his mind, he found himself going swiftly up the walk.
CHAPTER TWO
"Sonny," a woman called to Ken from the bay window at the right of the Jackson porch, "is something wrong?"
The unexpected, drawling voice of his grandmother shattered Ken's reverie. Coming directly from the feverish interlude with Harlana, he had been standing for some minutes on the buckled walk in front of his house. Behind the screen Mrs. Jackson's faded gray eyes were regarding him with wonder.
Ken feigned a yawn.
"Nothing's wrong, Mama," he said, smiling. It had never been difficult to deceive her. "I've just got here. This warm September weather is making me sluggish."
Ken came up the unlevel walk and put his books on the concrete steps. The woman with the stroke-twisted face smilingly followed his movements.
Mrs. Jackson thanked God often these days that her prayers were being answered. Oak-ton was working miracles. She had known all the while Ken would cease being such a problem, once in college. There was nothing actually wrong with him, she had for many months assured her husband. Ken had simply gotten off to a bad start, as his mother had.
The naive old woman's hands were floury. A white streak was on her forehead, where she had touched it in a moment of forgetful-ness.
"I was positive you'd like college when you had time to make friends. It's a pity this neighborhood has so few young adults who aren't scum. Just be careful, dear."
His grandmother gazed at Ken with inane satisfaction, with no inkling of his state of mind. He nodded and let the admonition go.
"I'm making a pie. Papa's asleep on the sofa, so we won't be having supper till later."
Ken frowned as the gray head withdrew. Despite the series of shocks and heartaches he had caused her, his grandmother was blind toward him. He remained her daughter's unfortunate love child, his sexual cruelties notwithstanding.
His grandparents had been past fifty when Ken was born, and had they been out of touch with the thinking of their wanton daughter, his problems were all the more inexplicable to them. When he was in grade school, and distressed by his classmates' version of the nature of his birth, he had found it impossible to discuss the matter with the old people. He had long since given up any attempt to speak of it.
Across the street from Ken a neighbor, forty-year-old Mr. Belle Casper, was cutting her lawn with an electric mower. She was wearing a yellow halter and tight yellow shorts. She had on a pair of sunglasses, although the sun had already slid behind the mass of blackjack trees to the west of the yard. In the quiet of the afternoon the sound of the motor was a harsh hum upon the air.
His grandmother was correct in calling this a slum area, Ken reflected nervously, as he tried to keep his eyes away from Mrs. Casper. Not since the oil boom of the twenties had this section been a good residential district. He fought the hot glow seeping unexpectedly into the pit of his stomach. He had not realized the plain woman would be so desirable, semi-nude. For her sake he knew he must avoid her.
Against this resolution, immediately telling himself he would talk with Mrs. Casper a moment, Ken let his books lie on the steps and went down to the curb again. He moved oddly toward her, as though in a sleep.
He wondered if Mrs. Casper were clean, and if she smelled nice, with the pure, sweet, female scent that always crazed him.
Over in the neat yard Mrs. Casper followed the growling mower, doggedly. Ken stared at the large hips and bare back.
"Hey," he called shakily, cupping his hands to his mouth as the woman paced behind the crimson beds of late bloomers along the sidewalk. "Ma'am?"
He would ask her to let him mow a bit for her, he decided. That was all he wanted, he tried to convince himself. He would not harm her. He was finished with that sort of thing. However, honest toil before supper would be good exercise.
The naked back continued unheedingly on its way, the noise of the mower too loud for the woman to hear his voice. Ken was about to cross the street to her, when he saw an automobile coming slowly down the street. He stepped off the curb and waited for it to go by.
It was a magnificent automobile, a maroon convertible. Ken stared as it approached. The top was down, revealing a young man at the wheel, sitting beside two extraordinarily pretty girls.
With the electric pain he always experienced whenever females of this sort were near, Ken discovered he knew the trio, at least by sight.
Someone at college had informed him that the man and one of the girls lived over in Meadowbrook suburb, where people with oil money lived. On campus they seemed to be members of the topmost clique. Ken did not remember their names, only one of the girls' face, and the way her body glided as she walked.
He was surprised that the other girl, an auburn-haired beauty, was out riding with the more elegant pair. Ken and she had a class together, and he had thought her perhaps the product of a small town, like himself. Her clothes had not indicated she was from Meadowbrook.
The car was almost past him, purring so leisurely down the street that it was plain they were searching for something or someone. The brunette girl and the man were scanning the Casper side of the block. The second girl was looking the other way. Because a tree hung over the curb, she did not notice Ken until they were even with him.
She turned her head quickly as they went by, with an expression of startled espial. He saw her speak. The car came to a halt.
"I told you he lived on this block, Tom," he heard her say in triumph.
Ken did not know what to make of this. He regarded them with amazement. None of them had paid him any attention at college.
"That's him," the man said, not bothering to keep his voice low.
Without warning, a strange, intense mask stole over the man's face. The auburn-haired girl's gaze roved Ken swiftly.
"He'll do," the man said with a ring of authority. "We'll explain it to him Monday."
The brunette was more sensitive than her companions. She looked embarrassed and upset. She murmured something, objecting.
Ken caught the last of the sentence.
"... for Father's sake," she said.
"Are you kidding?" the man laughed. "Don't go soft again, Leta."
For the first time since the car had stopped there was an indication they were aware Ken was a person, not an object for their inspection. The man smiled. Apparently he saw nothing rude in their actions.
Over in the Casper yard, distracted by the automobile, Mrs. Belle Casper had halted the mower. She removed her sunglasses and stood looking narrowly at Ken's muscular frame. She glanced toward her house, rubbing her bosom with a musing gesture.
"Are you acquainted with these girls?" The man was breezy. "You know Marcie Devon in your chemistry class? And this is my twin sister Leta, and I'm Tom Parks. You've seen us on campus."
Marcie Devon grinned. She bowed teasingly to Ken. Her movements seemed blended into one liquid action.
"Wait for me after our next class," she said. "We'll have a Coke and an important conversation."
When the automobile was gone Ken leaned against the tree. He had concluded last Monday that the students from Meadowbrook were the finest, most preferable group at Oakton College. They were exactly what he wanted for himself. The bizarre invitation of friendship-if this it was-disturbed him. He did not understand.
He would change, Ken vowed earnestly, as he had often before. For his grandmother, for everything that was best for him, he had to win and keep the respect of these Meadowbrookers, if their companionship were really being offered him. His last chance seemed to be coming.
Across the street blonde, forty-year-old Belle Casper was staring fixedly at Ken. She glanced around her once more, making certain no one was watching. She nodded, gesturing to him as she did so. Turning, Mrs. Casper wheeled the mower away into the Casper driveway, down to the hedge-hidden, darkened garage.
He reached the garage just in time to see her enter the house via the inside door. Very cautiously he crept into the structure and followed her into the house. She was only ten or so feet ahead of him, when she entered a bedroom. He hesitated briefly, wondering if he should continue to follow her, without her asking him to.
Finally, he eased closer to the bedroom door, then stopped again within two feet of the opening. The door was well ajar, and he heard the familiar swishing of fabric, and guessed immediately that Belle was removing her shorts and halter. Still careful, like a cat ready to spring, he nosed into the room.
Belle was already free of her garments, and her massive breasts were aiming proudly toward him, and the wide region of medium brown hair glistened even in the subdued daylit room. He was able to wait only seconds longer, when he rushed forward and seized both breasts, taking one nipple into his mouth. For some strange reason he imagined that the huge breast was a male organ, and he tried to devour completely the bulk of the flesh.
"Harder, sweetie!" Belle begged.
Again Ken thought of the huge male organ, and he bit even harder, seemingly trying to draw something from the breast. Then, with a giant shove, he sent Bell sprawling backwards upon the bed.
"This is the only time with you," Ken told her hoarsely, as he fell upon the waiting woman, minutes later. "I swear, this has to be the only time if I'm to succeed!"
CHAPTER THREE
As Ken Jackson had been growing up in Elkhorn, Texas, the thought did not cross his grandparents' minds for some years that their daughter's illegitimate child was sexually disordered. There was no indication until well after the boy's thirteenth birthday. Then, almost overnight, and for no apparent reason, a fire struck him. Flames that twisted Ms vitals and made any moderately good-looking woman or girl his potential victim.
For the first few years the grandparents managed to ignore Ken's excesses. They loved him; he was the living link they retained with their dead daughter. They were unaware of most of his perversities, but in time, after obscene escapades with the town's lowest women and several near-rapes of decent girls whom he dated, Ken was notorious. He became quickly the despair of his perplexed and appalled family.
Ken was referred to as the local budding sex fiend long before the Jacksons' neighbor girl, Harlana Smith, decided to seek a prosperous husband forty miles away in Oakton. Harlana scoffed at Mr. and Mrs. Jackson's warnings concerning this plan. Thus had their daughter Nelda schemed years ago, to return home afterwards to die unmarried, and at childbirth. But Harlana had laughed at the " old peoples' misgivings about her own sophistication.
Months later, the removal of the Jackson family from Elkhorn was much less pleasant than Harlana's departure. The Jacksons had no choice. Ken's latest misbehavior, an outright attack upon a weeping white-trash girl some weeks after his graduation from high school, left Ken in danger from both a suspicious sheriff and the girl's moronic brothers. Only his grandmother's stroke the next night, plus her doctor's announcement that another shock of this type could prove fatal, had saved Ken from immediate physical violence.
Mr. Jackson sold his hardware store, retired on his small savings and veteran's pension, and bought a house in Oakton, next door to the new Mrs. Harlana Stringer's.
As for Ken, he was ashamed of the role he had played in his grandmother's tragedy. Shame had been his companion for years, even when he was in the throes of the ache and ready to take by force if necessary any girl foolhardy enough to let him put his arms about her.
Ken did not know why he was unable to control himself. He did not begin by intending to do violence, and because he was always repentant afterwards, he hoped the maddening hunger was a weakness he could eventually master.
Harlana Stringer's sketchy diagnosis of Ken's problem he would not accept. Harlana was evil. She was devious, and more than a little oversexed, herself. Long ago she had decided Ken was a sexual rarity, and she had used him accordingly. Harlana had been perhaps the only person of Elkhorn who had put any faith in mail-order psychology books.
In Oakton he would be different, Ken told himself that day in August, as the Jackson furniture was loaded into the moving van for the trip. Harlana's predictions to the contrary, he felt he could accomplish more in the city than he would ever be able to in Elkhorn.
At best, it had never been easy to be a bastard child in the small town. This was the new beginning he needed. All he required was a massive dose of will power, he reasoned, now that he had witnessed fully the repercussions his misconduct could bring. He had much to make up to his grandmother, both for himself and for the mother he could not remember.
Over a month later, when it had been torture to go secretly to Harlana Stringer no more than twice a week for a release from the incessant tension, Ken was no nearer his goal than he had been in Elkhorn. Not that he lost hope that month. He had waited for the college semester to begin.
It was then he expected to make contact with the friends he wanted. He knew precisely the sort. A quiet, sober group in the best old-fashioned style of Elkhorn. In this unfamiliar environment, the slate of his history, of his dissipations unknown, Ken would have every motive not to become unleashed.
Five days of college had left him shaken in his optimism.
Both in and out of the classrooms the females with but a shadow of a claim to morality were shunning him within a day or two. In addition to Harlana's spreading gossip, there was something about Ken when women were near, something hot and restless, that frightened them. Only the foulest tramps flocked to him. For Ken had black wavy hair, an excellent body, and an unusually handsome face. These things assured him attention from the younger sluts of Oakton.
This was not what he wanted. He was testing himself to prove he could gain self-respect and the social acceptance that had never been his, not even before the sexual explosion unchained a devil within him. By Friday afternoon, until the Meadowbrook automobile stopped in his street beside the tree, Ken had almost decided he must always be different.
CHAPTER FOUR
The week end-his Saturday job at a local filling station, the church service with his grandparents the next day-was a valley of anticipation for Ken. He stayed nervous. He waited for Monday.
He did not tell the old people about the encounter with Marcie Devon and Tom and Leta Parks. He did not know what to make of it.
He only knew it was the sole hint of progress he had received in Oakton.
Monday morning, immaculate in a starched shirt and neatly pressed trousers which complimented his boyish, almost angelic aspect, Ken walked to the campus by himself. He could have ridden with Harlana in her husband's new Ford, for she usually managed to go on an errand into town at the time of his departure for school, but Ken made an excuse to come along later. He wanted to concentrate on the task before him.
When he reached the college Ken avoided the parking lot where Harlana might be looking for him and went straight to the room in which the chemistry lectures were given.
Everything in Oakton was still strange to him. The two great reddish-brown stone buildings housing the college, and the babbling mobs, were as foreign as night to day to the little frame school he had attended before graduation in Elkhorn.
On the way to the chemistry room he glanced around the halls for Tom or Leta Parks, or any of the females of their group. None of them was in sight. Being the elite of the town they considered it a matter of honor to arrive at the last moment for any class.
On pushing open the door Ken was surprised to find Marcie Devon had preceded him into the room. The girl was slumped over in a seat, nibbling the tip of her tongue as she scratched her initials into a desk with a silvery nail file.
She looked up and swung around with a smile as Ken entered. They were alone.
"I was hoping you'd get here before the herd descended," she said. "Maybe we can talk a bit? I guess you're in a fog about that business in front of your house."
Ken walked warily into the room. It was often difficult for him to think as other men did. He did not know how, when an attractive girl was near. He could feel his chest tightening up, his breathing getting shallow.
Marcie Devon laughed, flicking the file to and fro with her thumb. The sunlight was spilling through the windows behind her, making that part of the room a narrow pool of light. In the glow it cast outward, the girl's auburn tresses were alive with subdued fires.
Her cordial manner caused Ken to relax somewhat, but he remained on guard. He could not afford to trust himself.
"It's the way those lunks do things," Marcie said. "They accept only the very prettiest chicks and the handsomest guys into the inner sanctum. They look the field over with a magnifying glass before they make their play. I've been through it. You were under consideration since last Wednesday."
Ken sat down on the top of a desk. His pulse was pounding in his throat. In his tension he failed to notice that Marcie had spoken as if she were not a Meadowbrooker.
"We like your style," Marcie said wryly. "Tom ordered the vote Thursday night. He runs the best group of snobs in Meadow-brook, you know."
She shrugged, filing a fingernail, sparingly.
"What we did Friday was arranged to keep you off balance, I suppose," she continued. "Lets you know you're under consideration for something... without easing any pressure. I can't tell you everything that goes on in their twisty minds. So far, I just do as I'm told."
She grinned to take the sting out of her words, most of which had added greatly to Ken's confusion.
He could hear the noise of voices increasing in the hall. More people were entering, many of the students passing over to the other building in the rear.
"You're not one of them?" he asked, frowning.
Marcie stared at him. A gleam of amusement flitted behind her eyes. She stood up and turned about quickly, displaying her plain and inexpensive green frock, the gimcrack bracelets on her wrists, and her shabby bargain-basement pumps.
Ken remembered his impression last week of her; his idea that the beautiful girl was as poor as he, a newcomer, also.
"But when I saw you with Tom and Leta Parks I... "
"Wrong, darling," Marcie interrupted lightly. "My folks would make yours look like Rockefellers. I've had a hell of a time just paying my tuition. I'm living in one of the worst shanties Fleaburg has. That's how much a Meadowbrooker I am."
"Fleaburg?"
Ken had heard the term at the filling station. A section of Oakton was called this. He did not know exactly where it was.
Marcie smiled.
"You live in the more ritzy part of Fleaburg, yourself. Anything east of Davis Avenue is in it. My house is several streets on, where things really get stale."
Ken raised a brow at the girl's strange tone.
"I've lived in Oakton only a couple of months," she said. "I moved here to be with my sister, now that her husband has deserted her. I've been lucky, though. One of Tom's followers spotted me this summer. I've had my three examination dates, and I'm ready for the initiation. I should be a full-fledged member by next week."
Someone went by the door, whistling shrilly. The noise flowed down the hall.
"You wondering how I got in?" Marcie asked, grinningly aware of his bewilderment. "The same way you will. Let's face it, you're damn handsome. Why not claw out a place for ourselves with the weapons we have? Believe me, these Meadowbrook swells think we're marvelous, or they'd not so much as spit on us. Only three students from Fleaburg have ever been considered."
It was dawning on Ken that, in spite of her offhanded manner, Marcie had a job to perform. The words seemed oddly not her own.
"Do you have any idea the sort of college this is, darling?" she said, coming over and putting a hand on his shoulder, then removing it quickly when she saw the tightening look on his face. She continued: "A Fleaburger hasn't a ghost of a chance to be anything here. They're left out of everything that's any fun. Don't think the Middle-town students living between Davis Avenue and Meadowbrook will take you in, either."
She was gazing earnestly at Ken. The casualness was gone.
"Of the Meadowbrook groups, the one with the most power and money is Tom's. The finest on or off the campus. His bunch is so exclusive they have this secret fraternity within the general gangs. By necessity it accepts both males and females as members. And you're hereby being invited to join."
She stepped back. She smacked the nail file smartly against the nearest desk. A note of challenge. Ken felt both sick and thrilled at the same time. His emotions went rippling between two poles of longing.
"What kind of organization is this?" he asked, knowing.
The girl was silent a minute, her eyes veiled. She pulled an ear lobe hesitantly.
"I don't know what's made you what you are," she said, on the defensive, "but I've had a hell of a life. I've never been anything. I'm not going through that here while I have this chance."
"What kind of organization?" he said softly.
"You blab a syllable of this," she said, serious, "and you'll see how these rich crumbs own this town. They can strike back in ways you've never thought of. They'll kill your grandmother, smelling like lilies while they're doing it. With a kook like you they could be experts."
Ken's palms were damp with perspiration as he glanced at the electric wall clock above the unfinished portrait of George Washington. The noise in the hall was becoming a steady roar.
"What kind, I said."
She took a deep breath.
"It's a silly name, but they call it Alpha Love."
For a moment he could not speak. He chuckled, fighting the insane desires rising within him. Marcie was angered.
- "Don't be cute. We know what you are. That Stringer woman has spread tales about you everywhere, to scare us off. She says its only a matter of time before you murder some chick who refuses you. Well, we're not scared."
Ken got jerkily to his feet. He was dizzy. His cheeks were burning.
"You've made a mistake."
The door opened behind him, letting in the gabblings of the voices in the hall. It shut them out again, and he turned to see Tom Parks standing inside the room. Tom Parks' back was to the closed door. In a darting, sweeping glance he took in the scene.
"So?"
Marcie was pale, her hands clenched at her sides.
"A hypocrite," she said in disgust.
"I've got to go," Ken said wildly. "It's late... The bell... "
He forgot he was in the right room for the chemistry lecture.
Moving with the grace of a panther, without his own volition, he was upon Marcie suddenly. His arms went around her waist. He pulled, and the sweet scent of her breath burned his face as he crushed her mouth with his.
Ken seemed to be grinding Marcie Devon into himself,, absorbing her struggling form into his hard, muscular body. The femaleness of her was overpowering. He could not stop, felt himself drowning in the lust she had awakened.
He clung fiercely to her, a terrible aggressor wanting a female. Any female. There, as he was, immediately. Only the savage blow Tom Parks gave him from behind could have shattered the spell ripping at him.
Tom Parks pulled Ken away while he was still stunned. Ken stumbled to the floor, and Tom was forced to kick him more than once before he would quit clawing for the girl. Gradually Ken's senses returned. From the floor he gazed at the pair, horrified at what his actions admitted. He got to his feet and rushed toward the door.
"We know, fellow," Tom Parks laughed. "We had you sized up correctly. You'll make a fine member. Don't fight yourself, kook. You can't worry about some sickly old woman the rest of your life."
"And keep quiet about this!" Marcie Devon shouted. "Nobody squeals on these people."
Bells were clanging over the building as Ken went out into the hall, into the swirling pack of students heading for classrooms. He did not hear the bells, nor see the milling mob.
CHAPTER FIVE
The weeks following the incident in the chemistry lecture room were torment.
Ken's existence in Oakton took on a pattern he was afraid to change. As the days passed without any alteration in his physical needs, he gave up his attempts to make friends, and he could not bring himself to brave the dangers and the certain defeat entailed in an acceptance of Tom Parks' male-female club.
He went back and forth to the campus, and he worked at the filling station. Other than the essential episodes with Harlana and Belle Caspar, whenever he could tolerate his bonds no longer, this was his life.
The trust his grandparents were placing in him made Ken all the more determined not to hurt them. They were foolishly confident. Knowing nothing of his bouts with Mrs. Casper and Harlana, they had convinced themselves Ken was cured.
In Elkhorn he had merely got off on the wrong foot, the Jacksons told themselves with a placid and maddening innocence. Such things sometimes happened; it had happened to their poor Nelda. Satyriasis was a term they did not, nor ever would, employ. They refused to insult their grandson with such an outlandish epithet. Ultraconservative and timid, as unaware as her dull husband of the affair between Harlana and Ken, they had conquered the distrust of Oakton that had been engendered in them many years ago by their daughter's calamity.
"It would kill your grandmother," Mr. Jackson said often, never guessing the effort Ken was making. "It will kill her if you harm a girl again, Sonny. A young man has to be careful of the tramps to be found in a district like this. Take your time about making friends, and everything will be fine."
His grandparents saw nothing incongruous in Ken's deliberate loneliness. In their eyes he was being intelligent, looking over the female candidates for friendship thoroughly before making his choice. Till then he had Harlana to help him stay out of trouble.
"Harlana has always been like a sister to Sonny," he overheard his grandmother saying one afternoon to Belle and to Granny Casper, Belle's mother-in-law. "She's very nice. We've known Harlana's family forever."
It almost terrified Ken to think that his grandmother was so naive. When he heard her talk like this his love and fear for her choked him. He felt as though he were walking a high, endless tightrope, carrying her in his arms. One misstep on his part could destroy them both.
Sometimes it seemed to him that he must shake the old people awake, must make them see him as he really was. For a while he toyed with the idea of revealing to his grandfather the details of Marcie Devon's invitation, but he told the old man nothing. Ken's condition was so foreign to Mr. Jackson that he would never be able to acknowledge the malady.
As soon as he learned that Tom Parks and Marcie Devon had read accurately the blot within Ken, the old man would not set out to try to aid him. In the years of Ken's troubles with females, such an obvious course as even a meeting with a doctor or a psychologist had never occurred seriously to Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. They had furiously rejected such occasions when they had been offered by outsiders in Elkhorn. The Jacksons had a horror of sexual abnormality. They had lost their daughter to the lion of sex, and they refused to admit her son was anything except a boy who had gone briefly astray.
Mr. Jackson would be so offended by the implications of the secret club that he would demand an investigation. In his indignation the old man would not care how many Meadowbrook toes were trampled on in the process. The Meadowbrook students had power through their families, how much power Ken could guess. It would be enough to destroy one old lady whose health depended on the conduct of her only grandchild.
Whenever Ken walked down a hall of the college building these days, he attempted to ignore the smirk on this man's lips, the glint in that girl's eyes, as they ambled by him. But the threat was there, warning him to be silent, though none of the fraternity had spoken to him since the second Monday of the semester.
As the weeks passed, and he fought to keep inside the careful routine of his life in Oakton, Ken came to know all the members simply by that signal. If he had dared he could have pointed out every one of them, in spite of never having talked to more than four or five of them.
Besides the look of recognition they reserved for him, there was another trait they had in common: their beauty. Male and female, they had been selected for their physical attractiveness alone. Nobody was allowed into the organization if his face and form were less than perfect.
Ken discovered that "fraternity" was more a misnomer than he had thought. Surprisingly, the females outnumbered the males. There were thirteen young women, all of them from Meadowbrook except Marcie Devon and a lone Middletowner, a sullen, voluptuous girl named Delia Jenkins.
The men were more varied. Four were from Meadowbrook, and three from Middle-town. Of the Middletowners, one was a college tennis champion, one a track star. The third had been co-captain of the football squad until he was discharged for breaking training too often. There was also an eighth male in the fraternity: a half-Mexican Fleaburg freshman with nothing to recommend him to the snobbish crowd except the body and features of a soiled archangel.
When Ken saw Marcie Devon now, she was radiant.
She moved in the highest realms of college society, for membership in Alpha Love had opened all doors to her. Tom and Leta Parks and all the Meadowbrookers in the fraternity were from the most prominent families of Oakton. The other Meadowbrook students fawned over them. If Tom or Leta accepted into their elegant home a student living beyond the exclusive circle, that person was automatically freed of any stigma of background. He or she was "Leta's friend,"
"Tom's pal." Therefore a superior type who should not associate with the inferiors of his own neighborhood.
Of all the members, Ken decided he disliked Leta Parks the most. Marcie Devon was contemptuous of him. Tom Parks mocked him with his grin.
But since the afternoon the three of them had halted in front of his house, Leta had seemed outright vicious. Whenever Ken met her she stopped abruptly, in thought, her smooth brow wrinkling. Then she would walk on, quick, as if he had offended her by being in her sight.
It was the last week in October before Leta spoke to Ken. He was in the college library. She and Marcie Devon came to the corner table where he sat, purposely alone, as always. They slipped into chairs on either side of him, creating a stir in the great room as several students turned to gaze curiously at the whispered-about Fleaburg youth the two were honoring with their attention.
Marcie had strolled into the room while talking loudly, a practice forbidden to lesser mortals. After more than a month of avoidance of him, her manner was unusual. She was quite genial. With a clarity of insight he had not possessed before, the puzzle of the Lovers' attitude began to fall into place.
It was as Ken had surmised. For some unknown reason Alpha Love wanted him yet. The treatment the past weeks had been part of a plan to intimidate him, to enforce upon his mind an inkling of the release he could have.
Watching him jump nervously as she touched him, Marcie Devon said matter-of-factly: "We're waiting. We know the hell you're going through. Tom has checked back on your whole career in Elkhorn. We know. Tom and Leta's family has had the same rare ailment in it. It's a legend around here. You see why Tom picked you out so quickly ?You're not the first case of satyriasis he's known. Give up the struggle, darling. All it requires is a word."
Her fingers tightening about Ken's hand, she said no more. Her eyes stared into his. She patted his arm and left the table as quickly as she had come, indicating the fraternity had no doubt what his choice would be.
Ken gazed in dismay after Marcie's retreating back; a dismay he felt not because the fraternity was pursuing him, rather, because of his hidden emotions. He found his chief feeling was one of gratitude that there were people ready to jerk him from the normality he had tried to build for himself since his grandmother's illness.
It was on this day toward the last of October that Ken admitted how much the fraternity had been in his thoughts. The growing lust was dissipating his resolutions. He had tried to bury the pressures, push them away, keep everything at arm's length, going to Harlana and Belle Casper only when the strain became unbearable. On each occasion when this had happened, and despite his best intentions, the tearing demands for further sex, for rape and cruelty on a woman's body, any well-favored woman he had seen that day, had come unbiddened into his brain. And every night he had wakened in the darkness, his legs twitching with the old desire for sexual violence, the bed sheets drenched in his sweat.
Ken was thinking of these things, his eyes fastened on Marcie Devon as she went out the door, when he heard Leta Parks scrape back the chair beside him.
He started and glanced round at her. He had forgotten her.
Leta's scowl as she rose convinced him that he was, indeed, hated by her.
Before she walked away, she said angrily: "Stay out of this. Don't get sucked in. We can't help you. I can't even help myself. We're all Tom's slaves now. If you're sick, go to a psychiatrist. That might help. As Marcie told you, my family knows this thing! Don't come to us for release."
CHAPTER SIX
November crept across the calendar, and Ken struggled to keep his life as it had been from the beginning of the semester. His days and nights were worse, the clawing devil inside him more his enemy. His grandmother's trust was ever heavier to bear.
By his admission to himself that the rejection of Alpha Love in September had not been total, Ken opened one more Pandora's box.
Doubts about himself, about his final ability to change, gnawed at him increasingly. He borrowed Harlana's psychology books and read the paragraphs in each which was devoted to the subject of satyriasis.
As a method of self-analysis the study of the pages told him almost nothing. In his fear of himself he could find little real sympathy for the hagridden men, the males with a constant desire for physical gratification at any cost to themselves and to their sexual partners.
"Because of deep psychological causes," and "to prove sexual adequacy," and "to relieve emotional tension," the books said.
What, Ken wondered, did these things have to do with him? Until the fire leaped within him after his thirteenth birthday, he had thought himself good. He had had a reputation in the community for being quiet and reflective, a good-natured, kindly boy. While it was true the reactions of many people to his condition of bastardy had often made him unhappy, he could not remember any dreadful childhood sexual experiences of his own. The very mention of sex, any honest allusion to it, had been forbidden.
Perhaps, Ken reasoned, this had somehow effected an aberration. Whatever the cause, the thing had happened, and from that point on his mind had concentrated on sex, and in dangerous, violent ways.
He was not certain the change he experienced had not been physical, chemical rather than mental. Few of the books seemed to consider this possibility when they spoke of satyriasis. The stress on psychological factors reassured him a bit. He had been taught since infancy that the mind and spirit are stronger than the body; he managed to retain some threads of his faith that he could conquer the demon.
Faith could not prevent him from being starved, however. He was achingly tired of Harlana's familiar embraces, of forty-year-old Belle's stale and rather disgusting efforts to fill his astonishing needs. He longed for girls, dozens of them to be taken in succession.
He had but to look at Marcie Devon to realize what he was missing. She was more desirable every day. By the end of the Thanksgiving holidays her appearance was devoid of a tinge of Fleaburg. She wore the borrowed dresses, the shoes, the jewelry of her sisters. She attended the best parties, was always laughing, always surrounded by merry youths and girls. Marcie was proof to Ken that the fraternity kept its promises.
Not till the Saturday following Thanksgiving Day did he have intercourse with a female of the city other than Harlana or Belle. He had spent the afternoon with Harlana, had in fact, quit his job at the filling station in order to meet her for the past three Saturdays at a hotel on Churchill Street.
Yet, he was anxious to get away on his own. He could not admit to himself that he was backsliding further, that he was going in search of a woman to rape.
Ken did not care for motion pictures. The technicolor musical playing at the Majestic, seven blocks away on Davis Avenue, would bore him thoroughly. But there would be females there. Exciting young women of the lowest type.
Harlana had already informed him that she would be unavailable that night. Harlana and Belle Casper were fast friends. Neither of them experienced any difficulty in betraying their much older spouses. While the husbands dozed at home that evening, Belle and Harlana were professedly going across town to a drive-in theater. Ken suspected Harlana had arranged dates for them somewhere with a couple of men.
Their design for the evening fitted in with his plan. Letting his grandmother think he intended to accompany the women to the drive-in, he waited on the front porch for Harlana to leave her house next door. When he saw her and Belle going toward the Stringer Ford, he went over to join them.
"Harlana," he said, falling into step, "you can drop me off at the Majestic."
Harlana stopped in surprise. Ken had never made a statement like this in Oakton. Always before he had been painfully careful to limit his temptations. She sensed by his manner, by the old, glassy stare, that he was deceiving himself into doing something ominous.
"You and Belle can let me off at the corner of Seton," he said.
As he had expected, Harlana did not like the suggestion.
As they were driving down the street, she said: "Kiddo, why don't you come on with us? Belle and I can fix things so you won't be in the way."
"What're you up to?" Belle asked gruffly. "Who are you meeting?"
The woman's bleached hair was silvery in the glow of the dashboard.
He did not reply to Belle's disagreeable questions. Though she had seduced a number of young men during the twenty years of her marriage, Belle had never experienced anyone like Ken.
She and Harlana had even worked out a cryptic partnership concerning him. Belle did not wish to lose such a handsome prodigy of masculine lust.
Her protest notwithstanding, Ken left the automobile at Seton Street. Harlana extracted a childish promise that he would speak to no girl at the Majestic, and that he would stay inside the theater until she returned to pick him up. She set the minute of rendezvous at midnight.
Ken had no doubt Harlana would drive the car up to the corner a good thirty minutes early in an attempt to forestall any follies on his part.
With this in mind he broke his promise. He left the theater less than an hour after entering it.
The theater had been crowded. It was packed with noisy Fleaburg young people without a particle of courtesy for others in the audience. From the instant he entered the dilapidated lobby until he came out under the garish marquee, Ken heard less than half the dialogue from the screen. All around him was a constant tumult of vulgar laughter, catcalls, bickering, outright fighting, as Fleaburg expressed its contempt for the elementary rules of decorum in a public gathering place.
The management had long since surrendered any attempts to control the Saturday night mob.
Twice Ken had gotten up and had moved. He had stopped moving when he discovered a drunken young woman who was alone. Her loud comments to herself as the movie progressed were stunningly lewd.
The woman was older than the college crowd, in her upper twenties. Ken had never seen her before.
His breathing became difficult as he waited in a darkened doorway for her to come out of the theater.
When she emerged he left the shadows and followed her quietly. She went down the sidewalk toward the 'corner where he had taken leave of Harlana and Belle.
This part of Davis Avenue was not so active at night as he had supposed. Few cars were going by. The shops were locked and dim, with an occasional bulb burning feebly in the rear.
They were approaching Seton Street when the woman realized she was being followed.
Ken came up quickly. His heart pounded. He glanced up and down the deserted sidewalk.
The woman was grinning.
"Hello, kid," she said. "What's the matter, good-looking, afraid to go home alone? Want me to show you a short cut?"
She doubled up in a guffaw, applauding her wit.
Ken had already concluded that she was a Fleaburg prostitute. Her clothing was rumpled, her hair untidy, her make-up too heavy. But she was a basically pretty slut, and that was all his demon required.
"Keep quiet," he said unevenly.
"Listen to him!" She mocked his countrified Elkhorn accent. "The-us hick say-ud for me to ka-eep quiet!"
She went into another gale of delight. They were half a block from the street lamp on the corner. The remainder of the stores and shops were darkened. The sidewalk was a mass of shadows. The woman took an experimental step away.
"You don't have any money, good-looking?"
The humor was gone from her voice. Ken raced around her and blocked the way with outstretched arms.
"That's no way to treat a lady!"
She tried to brush past him.
He shoved her roughly. He was overwhelmingly excited. She swung about, and he pounced on her, grabbing her about the waist in a tight vise.
He pinned her against the brick wall of a shop. In the thick shadows he could barely make out her anger-clouded face. The rasp of his breathing was magnified in the darkness.
"Let go! Without money, no deal."
Ken was quivering uncontrollably. Thundering layers of fog were rolling into his brain.
"Don't make me hurt you," he heard his voice pleading, as if from a great distance. "Don't make me do something terrible."
"You crazy? Let go, you damn loony!"
There was so much noise at the theater that no one could have heard the scream she gave as Ken struck her. He shoved the woman back into a narrow passage between two shops. His hand fumbled at her dress. He stumbled, almost letting her go. She cursed him. The woman's teeth bit into his arm. A whisky scent arid the smell of her body intoxicated him. Maddening flames roared in his stomach.
"Don't!" she said hoarsely. "God, quit!"
He was never able to recall what happened next.
The last memory he had of the attack, she was fighting him. When he had raped her he loosened his grip on her neck, expecting more resistance, but she had stopped gasping. He released her, and she lay on the ground in a heap.
Ken gaped. His mind returning he knelt beside the woman. Soon she began to breathe regularly, but she remained unconscious.
He waited till he was sure she would not die, then placed her in a more comfortable position and straightened her disordered clothing. He combed his hair.
He hurried out of the alley and went down the sidewalk to the street lamp. Shivering, he was about to cross the street when a convertible came across Davis Avenue.
Headed west, the big car slowed and stopped.
"Is anything wrong?" Leta Parks asked, staring from the steering wheel. "You look ghastly."
She was wearing the frown she reserved for Ken.
His tongue would not obey him.
Marcie Devon and James Ortiz, the Alpha Love half-Mexican from Fleaburg, were in the auto with Leta.
"I'm okay," Ken said finally, not looking at any of them. "I'm on my way home."
Marcie Devon raised an eyebrow. Sitting in the middle of the seat she put her arm possessively about James Ortiz's shoulders.
"What a dope you are, darling. We're going to a fraternity party. If there's anything I can't stand, it's a man with no discrimination. Do you think your grandmother will find out less about you this way?"
"Can we drop you somewhere?" Leta asked.
"Let me alone."
Her inquisitive scowl implied things about him of which he dared not think.
"I tell you, I'm on my way home!" he continued.
"Okay," she muttered. "Nothing can help you, I suppose. It's not my funeral." Her voice was oddly dispirited. The car moved off.
Ken stood trembling and alone in the pale-blue gleam of the street lamp.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Against his will Ken found lies and secrecy as much a part of his life in Oakton as they had been in Elkhorn. If his grandmother were to learn anything of what he had done that Saturday night on Davis Avenue, it could destroy her.
The rape had a powerful effect upon Ken.
No man as fundamentally honorable as he could have sloughed off the thing lightly. It taunted him. He pitied his victim, wondered what had become of her. On the wrong side of the law herself, she had apparently made no report to the police.
During the period while he waited in fear of arrest, Ken retreated into limbo. For a couple of weeks he went nowhere after dark, spoke only when spoken to, deafened himself to the whispers in circulation at the college about his past.
During this time he eschewed even Harlana's embrace, but the lusts of absolute satyriasis can be devastating. He began soon to burn once more for the harming sexually of a female. He could not be a recluse. It was impossible for him to remain apart from women.
If his grandparents were ignorant of the state of his mind, others were not. The Lovers were well aware of the process by which Oakton was draining him. They continued their puzzling, silent persecution on campus. They intensified the campaign.
As the Christmas holidays drew near Ken was swiftly approaching a complete collapse of his vows to reform. By then he was over the profound melancholia resulting from the attack on the woman. As he looked back upon that night he experienced a leaping thrill at the memory.
In the alley with the prostitute he had been alive as he had not been in months. He yearned for more women like her, yet knew he must avoid any other such incidents. It was the quickest way to disaster.
He was weary of Belle Casper. Harlana, sensing his growing instability, had become wary of him. When she could get away from her simple husband she was spending most of her evenings with men in another part of town. Belle alone could not begin to meet Ken's requirements. His lack of the usual physical limitations had alarmed her at last.
"What makes you the way you are?" she said to him angrily one afternoon a few days before Christmas. "I'm not a harem! You're crazy in that area, do you realize it? I'm walking on ice because of you. My mother-in-law is watching me like a hawk. I won't be able to see you at all after this. If you'd just beep more discreet when we met! I hate to lose both Harlana and you."
Belle and Ken were in the Jackson living room, trimming the Christmas tree in the bay window. A large Texas red cedar, it had been hauled in from the country, for Mr. Jackson refused to buy one of the puny firs sold by local salesmen. The aroma of the tree pricked their noses as they looped yards of tinseled ropes about it.
In the next room Ken's grandmother was rummaging in a closet for a box of ornamental balls. Belle had always made an effort to be friendly with Mrs. Jackson.
"Harlana's such a nice girl," the old woman called through the partition, overhearing Belle's last three words. "Since we moved here she's been like a daughter to me."
From the stepladder where he was affixing a star atop the tree, Ken did not reply. He felt ill just to be thinking of the things Harlana was doing those evenings. Though her caresses had never satisfied him he had relied on her to keep him from the excesses which would mean certain ruin.
He envied any man who could have a woman safely when he wished. The town was filled with girls who bedded males much less handsome than Ken, but he knew these men were capable of something he was not. They could stop themselves, did not have to harm any girl who aroused, then refused them.
"Are you and Harlana mad at each other, Sonny?" Mrs. Jackson asked.
Limping from the partial paralysis that the stroke had left upon her, she brought in the box of ornaments.
"Now that Mr. Stringer is working overtime every night," she continued, "you ought to be nice to them and take her somewhere, so she can have some fun before Christmas is over. Shouldn't he, Belle?" Ken got down from the ladder. "Harlana's busy," he said. "It wouldn't hurt you to be nicer to them, Sonny," Mrs. Jackson said, untangling a knot as she draped a rope across the green branches. "You and Harlana have been friends too long to get cold toward each other. If you'd take her somewhere for Mr. Stringer... " Mrs. Jackson was startled by Ken's waxy countenance.
"Mama," he said slowly, "you're being ridiculous."
His grandmother blinked at him in bewilderment. She had decided lately that she, perhaps, did not fully understand him.
"Sonny," she said reasonably, laying the box of ornaments in a chair, "I'd think you'd worry about Harlana's having to go about unescorted. This section of town is crawling with hoodlums after dark."
"No," he said, tight-lipped, "if she wants to take chances, it's her business." .
No one said anything for a time as they worked upon the tree, burdening its bending limbs with a great collection of ornaments. If Ken's spirits had not been in such a low condition, the ever-present spark might not have been kindled. But it was, abruptly, as fierce and unexpected as ever. He began to sweat, his fists clenching. As the blaze grew he started considering Harlana, thinking of her body with vivid, glandular pain.
"Mama," he said huskily, as they were draping the last glittering icicles on the tree, "I think I'll go over and see what the Stringers are doing tonight."
Mrs. Jackson and Belle stopped and looked at him. Smirking, Belle had been expecting the remark. Mrs. Jackson gave a sigh and pushed her spectacles up to her forehead.
"That's a good boy."
Ken threw an icicle at a branch disconsolately. He warned himself he must not stop fighting. He must not get into a sex situation with no exit.
"I'll go ask Harlana," Belle said. "I haven't seen her today, but I'd like to... " Her mocking voice was interrupted by a knock on the front door.
Belle's mother-in-law, at that moment a very flushed old lady, came "into the room. As she eased the door to behind her, Granny Casper's wrinkled face was set in a scandalized expression oozing disillusionment.
"Mrs. Jackson," the old woman said without preamble, pulling her woolen shawl about her shoulders, "have you heard? It's terrible, isn't it? I heard it from the milkman this morning, but one is in the hospital, and it's on the news now."
Having no life inside her home, pushed aside by Belle, Granny Casper had developed an abnormal interest in the foibles of humanity. Boredom had made her an inveterate talebearer. The three of them stared at her. She almost beamed. She relaxed and sat down on the sofa.
"Who's in the hospital?" said Belle.
"It's dirty. It's about someone you know very well," she said.
The mother-in-law pursed dry lips and gave Belle a spiteful look.
"There's been a stabbing over at a cheap hotel on the edge of the colored section. A real cheap hotel," she finished.
Ken paled beneath the old woman's squint. He wondered how much she knew about him. He wished he had not been so careless with Belle.
"Our milkman has an intimate knowledge of those places," Granny Casper said primly. "His son is a policeman, and the son went to the hotel when this business happened. A white man stabbed another. Not too seriously, but in one of those rooms, Mrs. Jackson! A fuss over a girl. And there were several other white people using the place for their dirty business, as well., As I said, the man is in the hospital. It's on the news, or I wouldn't be telling this."
She shook her silvery head righteously.
Ken did not doubt the story was accurate. He had been to the hotel a number of times, with either Harlana or Belle.
"The whites are from this district."
The old woman gave Ken another odd, lingering squint. She continued: "You've not heard anything about it yet? The girl the men fought over is Harlana Stringer."
If a bomb had crashed through the roof among them, Mrs. Jackson's surprise would not have been more complete. She let out a grunt and sat down on a step of the ladder. She clutched her breast.
"Harlana?"
"I regret to say so."
Mrs. Jackson was wide-eyed, the paralyzed corner of her mouth drooping further. She groped at the idea.
"Harlana Stringer? You're talking of Harlana?"
Granny Casper was highly satisfied with the reaction she was getting. It would indisputably awaken her son, and cause him to forbid Belle to associate with Harlana and Ken.
"The police have released her. She'll probably get a lecture to burn her ears, and that will be all."
"Harlana Stringer!" Mrs. Jackson mopped her frozen face weakly. "And Sonny has been... Good Lord! Has Oakton changed her so much? What does this city do to nice girls? My Nelda... Haven't you guessed anything, Sonny? You must never speak to Harlana again!"
Perspiration streamed upon her temples. She reeled and fell to the floor on her knees.
Belle Casper sent her mother-in-law a look of hatred that spanned twenty years of living together.
"The doctor," Ken said wildly, picking up the fallen woman gently, carrying her toward her bedroom. "Call a doctor!"
All he could think of within seconds was his physical hunger. A mammoth starvation, the intensity multiplying by the moment. Limply, unable to concentrate further even on the state of his grandmother, he began to plot the fastest manner by which he could get Belle Casper alone for a deranged session of sex which the scared, overmatched woman would never forget.
Ken knew then he had already surrendered. He no longer had the strength to flounder about. He could almost feel the exploding stresses hurling him downward in the one sexual direction he had sought the hardest to avoid.
CHAPTER EIGHT
On the second day of January, at the end of the Christmas vacation, Ken let it be known to the fraternity that he had changed Ms mind about them.
The holidays had been a terror of need, of fear of what he would do if he allowed himself to go out into the darkness of the streets. Afterwards he was uncertain how he had gotten through the nights with the help of neither Harlana nor Belle, nor any other female. He waited for the revival of the college semester distractedly, comforted only by the fact that his grandmother was recovering.
Marcie Devon was the first member of the fraternity to be apprised of his conversion. Ken went up to her as soon as the early-morning chemistry lecture was over. While the people around them were surging toward the door he held out his hand.
"You were right, Marcie," he said simply.
Scooping her books together she had not noticed him approaching. Her hazel eyes dilated. She plopped the books carelessly back on the desk. She regarded him a moment in silence.
"Darling!"
A few persons turned and looked at them. She hugged him enthusiastically. Ken discovered she even wore the perfume of a Meadowbrooker.
"Tom's going to be glad," she said, radiant. "He's hit the nail on the head with you. He bet Leta you'd join us in January, and she bet you'd hold out forever. You can't beat Tom. He's a winner in anything."
"Leta doesn't want me in," Ken said, helping Marcie with her books. "She doesn't like me."
"Leta is funny. She hates Tom, too. But you can't figure Leta by how she acts, darling. Maybe she's jealous of Tom and James Ortiz. Tom goes for James. Isn't that a scream?"
She chuckled blandly. Ken was aware of the girl's searching gaze. Marcie had sprung the subject calculatingly. It had not occurred to him that Tom Parks might be bisexual.
"Oh?" he said, wincing.
Marcie was amused.
"So you're adverse to that sort of thing," she laughed. "I have an idea you'd be a regular saint if it weren't for your twist, darling. You're just too sensitive and basically moral for the life you're forced to live. You'll be the first of our fellows who doesn't play both sides of the love street. Tom hasn't let any other type in before. That's why we have more girls than men, I guess."
The rest of the morning and afternoon was a triumph for Ken. Before his final class he was greeted and congratulated, with the exception of Leta Parks and one or two others, by each of the Lovers. Tom Parks had boasted frankly of their influence in Oakton when Ken and Marcie spoke to him that morning in the college auditorium.
"I know where he is," Marcie had said with a grin as they left the chemistry lecture room. "Let's skip our next classes. He'll be over there befuddling Mrs. Kent. He's been getting her alone in a dressing room when everyone's gone. He hires one of the janitors to be lookout, and she hasn't any idea they're in his pay. She's directing a play for a drama class. Tom's become her unofficial assistant."
They found Tom Parks backstage, chatting with a statuesque, stiffly formal woman in her late thirties. Wearing no make-up, her brown hair balled into a tight bun, Mrs. Kent was mildly attractive from the neck up, but her well-formed body was exceptional.
She was intent upon the young man, her eyes devouring him while out on the stage, six plodding actors mouthed their lines with wooden deliberation. She glared at Marcie as the girl beckoned to Tom.
He excused himself, brushing his leg against "the woman's thigh as he turned. She swallowed and pulled away hastily.
"Let's go to the fire escape," he said, giving Ken a slow grin. "Nobody'll bother us out there."
He did not seem startled Ken was with Marcie.
He led them to a heavy door on which was printed in large red letters: DO NOT OPEN EXCEPT IN EMERGENCY He opened the door, and they went out upon the landing. The wall faced eastward. The winter sun was reflecting its heat against the stones, making the small area warm and comfortable. Below them stretched an asphalt parking lot, surrounded on three Sides by a double line of leafless trees.
Back toward the wall any person on the landing could hide from curious eyes below him.
"Ken's done it," Marcie said, as Tom went out and perched dangerously on the steel railing. "As you predicted."
Ken wondered dizzily what it would be like to have a chain of affairs with the girls in the fraternity. The small-town tramps of Elk-horn could not compare with them. Each of the females of Alpha Love was almost as beautiful as Leta or Marcie.
His throat was beginning to feel mossy. He had the old indescribable sensation in the pit of his stomach. When Marcie let him put his arm around her, he began to shiver.
"I didn't know the exact day," Tom said, watching Ken intently. "But I knew you'd crack. I've found out too much about you."
"The way we work, darling," Marcie said, as Ken ran his hand into her blouse, "a pledge is kept in the dark about our activities. Till they prove themselves, you see? This isn't one of those silly kid sex clubs. We all have to go through it, so it's nothing personal. You'll have three dates with three different girls, and then there'll be an initiation, and you'll be a full-fledged member, eligible for all our outside entertainments. Till that happens you're expected to do as you're told and not ask questions."
Tom Parks was still looking at Ken. He seemed lost in his contemplation of him.
"So long as my grandparents don't suspect," Ken said, with a deep, ragged breath. "I can't go on the way I've been. I'd break loose soon, and I'd... There's just no right or wrong for me when I go too long. But my grandmother has to be protected from hearing anything. Do you understand?"
"No one can claim we won't Joe able to relieve you of your Dressures," Marcie laughed.
"I'll get the message around to the brothers and sisters right away," Tom said. "You will see a tremendous difference. Through our families we rule this town."
His smile was broadening when he left. When he was gone, Ken and Marcie looked at one another, and something in her eyes told him to draw her closely to himself, and he did.
"Finally! Oh, Ken, you're with us!"
He didn't answer. His eyes were glazed, and his mind was out of control. With one hand on her wrist, the other holding a goodly glob of her hair, he twisted her arm toward her shoulder blades and closed his fingers on her hair and issued pressure, all the while forcing her downward, backwards, until her knees began to buckle and bend. Soon she was supine upon the roofing paper, and her breath was coming in long and lustful gasps, enjoying his every bit of torture. "Ken, Ken, hurt me more!" He pulled harder on her hair, then pressured her arm until he was almost sure it would break. She went into sudden spasms, opening her legs widely, allowing him to fall between them. With her free hand she found his manhood and fiercely drew it out and to her. With one great thrust from him, and a mighty upward heave from her, they united, sending him the full depths into her.
From that moment onward Ken knew hardly anything of what happened, until some half an hour later, when he and Marcie reentered the building.
CHAPTER NINE
For the next few days it seemed to ken that he was at the beginning of a better and actually more honorable life than he had known in years.
Much more than he had dreamed of in Elkhorn, for in this there was both safety and sex, was rapidly coming into being. In the space of a week it was as if he had been friendly with the Lovers a decade. They welcomed him eagerly. They made the welcome so pleasant that he thought himself rather stupid for having waited so long to trust them.
"To get in with us anybody has to be superior," Polly Foster, a pretty, yellow-haired Meadowbrooker told Ken as he accompanied her to the college cafeteria one noon. "But a Fleaburger must be a knockout in every way. You are. That's why Tom's been out to get you for our group. You're a gorgeous boy. We're awfully glad to have you with us."
This was heady praise for a sensitive young man who had always been a pariah, first a bastard child in a small town, and then an unwilling threat to its women. Polly Foster's enthusiasm was typical. The sentiment was expressed in various ways by most of the members.
"It makes me humble," Ken confided to Marcie Devon. "I can't get used to it. These people are wonderful. And none of them even introduced himself till the day after Christmas vacation."
"You have nobody but yourself to blame for missing out on so much," Marcie said, smiling at his gratitude. "Quit pondering on this overdue shift in your fortunes, will you? Relax."
To Ken this seemed a logical view to take. He stopped mulling over the situation, as he had been doing. He let things slide along from day to day, abandoning himself to the unique enjoyment of being sought after by socially approved people.
From poverty-stricken James Ortiz and Marcie, to a senior twenty-four-year-old named Dorothy Lechester, whose father shared with Tom and Leta's mother the distinction of being a millionaire twice over, they were a charming group. They did not fit into any of the molds Ken had found unpleasantly standard in Elkhorn of persons whose conduct was based on sexual promiscuity.
With the exceptions of James Ortiz and Marcie, the Lovers revealed surprisingly good taste. They were anxious to impress Ken, and they succeeded. The college and the town were becoming friendlier with him and his family as a direct result of their intervention. This was enough to leave him with no regrets.
The over-all impact on the non-member students was astounding. Ken had difficulty believing Oakton College the same school, and he the same man.
He began to date non-member girls with the obvious assurance that he would not be goaded to an outright assault in order to have physical relations with them. He encountered smiles and greetings everywhere. A stroll through the halls with a wealthy Meadow-brook "brother" was worth more than a thousand character references.
The revolution in his social standing entranced Ken's grandmother. To prepare the semi-invalid for the alteration in his status, he began taking members of the fraternity home in the afternoon.
"You should see them!" Mrs. Jackson boasted to Granny Casper. "The finest-mannered, most well-brought-up girls imaginable. To be truthful with you, I've been worried about Sonny. He's been moody lately, and then there's this awful Harlana Stringer business. It makes you dubious about nearly everyone, doesn't it? But these polite and respectful young men and women, you can be with them half and hour and see they're all right."
The old lady would speak on and on. Perseverance, a new-found discrimination, the refusal to bend a principle again in any manner, she gave these and a host of other laudable things both tangible and intangible the credit for leading Ken away from the monster which had swallowed his mother.
Harlana alone had questions.
"What's happened to you?" she asked him in awe. "I never see you any more but that some rich wheel from that school isn't buzzing around. You're in with this town's big shots! Don't they know what you are? By God, I spread it enough."
They were in Harlana's front yard. She had driven up and had intercepted Ken as he came down the sidewalk with Marcie Devon. She had waited till Marcie went on up to the Jackson porch.
"I don't understand that girl, either," Harlana said distrustfully, peering after Marcie. "She and that Mexican kid are the only Fleaburgers who are ever seen with those rich creeps. There's something wrong. I'm not like your folks. I know what you are, and I know those snotty Meadowbrookers. I don't care if that Devon girl has made the grade with them. Why is she with you today, anyhow?"
Ken was so used to Harlana's insults that he ignored them. She had never looked more vicious to him than she did that Friday afternoon.
"I've invited her to have supper with us. And Tom Parks is coming over later."
He left Harlana gaping and continued up the walk. She had not suspected the Meadowbrookers' acceptance of him had progressed so far.
Since the scandal about Harlana broke, and the dazed Mr. Stringer had moved out of the house till a divorce could be arranged, Mrs. Jackson had snubbed Harlana. The revelation of her escapades had shaken the old people to the core. Ken considered it fortunate that the transgressions of Harlana had come to the surface when they did. The shock had placed him in a position where he was much less likely to hurt his grandparents, now that he had learned that the Lovers would be honorable with him.
With their clean features, refined bearing, and distinguished families, they seemed the answer to the Jacksons' prayers. It was clear to the old couple that they were being given an opportunity to see for themselves the sort of acquaintances he had made at Oakton College. An eventual wife for him from one of the families which had produced these girls was not a disagreeable thought. They decided a bonanza had tumbled into their laps: they really needed not to worry about Ken's future.
"It's been such a pleasure meeting you," Mrs. Jackson said to Tom Parks the night of his visit, as the young man was taking leave of them following a successful two-hour stay.
At the door, behind Mrs. Jackson's back, Marcie winked at Ken. Tom had been in fine form. He was an expert at charming people, at flattering them so deftly they had no inkling what he was doing. His visit was the culmination of the fraternity's task to convince the ailing woman her grandson was among fine companions.
"Call on us any time," Mr. Jackson added heartily, out on the porch.
"Your folks are safe," Tom said to Ken softly as he and Marcie walked with Tom down to the automobile at the curb.
Tom smiled, his perfect features partially obscured by shadows as Marcie's hand touched Ken's. Ken felt his heart give a quick flutter. He had not lain with her since the morning on the fire escape. He had been forbidden thus far to date any of the fraternity girls.
Marcie was magnificent in her honest earthiness. Ken wanted her fiercely, more and more. He had thought of little except her for days. He realized with soaring elation that he was on the verge of falling in love with Marcie Devon. He felt reverently thankful, at peace with the discovery. He had been afraid for many months that genuine love, the tender man-woman love of marriage, was an emotion his malady denied him. Ken did not think Marcie half so bad as she pretended to be. Remembering his own hapless past, he refused to judge her.
He could not help marvelling at her and the other members, that they wanted him. No one had ever before professed real friendship for Ken. In Elkhorn even the worst youths of the town had looked askance at him after his aberration became common knowledge. "We'll begin your trial dates tomorrow night," Tom said. "Not that you need a trial, but it's a rule. We generally have them at my family's lake house over in the next county. That's our regular meeting place, but we're having a party there tomorrow evening, with some guests from a brother fraternity from Dallas. They have more men than women, and we make swaps occasionally. You can't attend something like that till you're initiated. I don't want to wait further in getting you set, though."
"Yes," Marcie snorted good-naturedly, climbing into the automobile so that Tom could drive her home.
The old couple had left the porch and had gone back into the house.
"Everybody's crazy about Ken. Everyone except Leta. She's really off her feed these days, Tom," Marcie continued. "She and Dorothy Lechester are the only members who haven't welcomed him."
Tom's face darkened angrily. He hit his fist against the car door. Ken had grown progressively perplexed about the relationship between Tom and Leta.
Tom's affable mood dropped further.
"I told her I'd blast her if she got out of line once more," Tom said. "That stupid father complex of hers! Ken, your first date will be with Leta. Marcie's crocked for it, but that damn sister of mine is more important."
Ken was about to ask Tom what he meant by this remark when he noticed the man was staring narrowly at him. The gaze was so intense that Ken forgot Leta. That the look was somehow sexual, he had no doubt. He became both annoyed and nervous suddenly, and the two sensations quickly flowered into the dominant passion always within him.
Ken forgot everything else that night, wondering if Harlana, evil and insulting though she might be, would receive him after his grandparents had gone to bed.
CHAPTER TEN
Feeling as he did about Marcie, Ken was disappointed his first test date would be with Leta Parks. Leta's manner toward him bothered Ken. He was not sure what was behind it. He confided his reservations the next evening to Marcie and Tom.
"You're not serious?" Marcie held up her hands. "Darling, none of us think anything of this kind of date."
The moss was in Ken's throat.
"She dislikes me," he said. "I don't want to act like a thug with her. Tom, don't you care? I mean, your own sister? You know I can't take... resistance."
Marcie and Tom threw back their heads and laughed till tears shone in their eyes. Ken watched them ashamedly, knowing how wrong it was to be there under such ugly conditions, but still aching with a desire that would not let him go from the place. They were in Marcie's house, and he was sitting on Marcie's bed, an iron-posted, creaking bed that he and Leta would use soon.
The thought was tying Ken in knots. It was as if he had not had a woman for months.
Tom had chosen Marcie's home for the assignation, once the lake cottage was ruled out. The house was in a neighborhood where anything was accepted without curiosity, therefore an excellent location for illicit lovers to meet. Mr. and Mrs. Jackson could be counted on to accept Ken's absence for the night, without question. Since Tom had recently become their grandson's good friend, the old people considered it nothing but natural when he supposedly asked Ken to stay with him that night following a party in Meadowbrook.
They had no idea where Ken actually was, nor that Marcie's draggle-tailed sister's family would be in Houston for the weekend.
"You poor lad," Marcie said to Ken, wiping the tears of laughter, away, "don't be afraid to do as you wish with Leta. She's just being difficult to spite Tom. Leta will enjoy herself thoroughly, once you show her who's the boss. She's no innocent. She has a record of slimy affairs as long as your arm."
Tom Parks licked his lips and said: "You're a real nut, boy. You're what my mother would call 'decent at heart'. The way your mind battles your body, and loses, I think you will kill a woman one of these days, and they'll put you away for keeps. It's going to be fun having you in our outfit."
Ken flushed with anger. He clenched his fists warningly.
"This is temporary. My system will get back in balance. It has to."
Marcie shrugged and got up from the cane-bottomed chair where she was sitting. She went out of the door to wait for Leta at the front.
"One of the primary rules for these dates is no clothes," Tom said, snapping his fingers. "No false masculine modesty, please. These chicks expect it."
Ken was becoming ill with want. He could not keep his hands steady.
"Leta can calm you," Tom said. "She's very good, her fellows tell me. She and I inherited it, I suppose. Our mother is a pious creep, but father was a... Well, I hired a private detective to look into his past, and father was a corker."
He chuckled in ostensible enjoyment, and Ken felt a shiver run over him. He got to his feet, and for a second he thought he would faint. Blood rushed to his head.
He could not get adjusted to his surroundings. The last time Ken had felt like this he had been in Elkhorn. He had prowled the town in torment that night until he had broken into a farmhouse on the outskirts. If the lone woman there had not proved favorably inclined to please such a handsome boy, after her initial fright, he did not like to speculate on what he would have done to her.
Everything was misty here at Marcie's, as if in a dream.
The house was tumble-down, the paint peeling from its flanks. There was a faint sound of urchins shrieking out in the street. Marcie had said she shared the dim little room with two nieces. A tattered shade was pulled tightly over the single window. A quilt-crusted mattress, gray wallpaper, meager furniture.
Ken tugged at his shirt. He was unable to do anything correctly.
"I'll help you," Tom said, undoing buttons for him.
When Ken stepped out of his trousers, wearing only his white cotton briefs, Tom paused and stared. He ran a hand down Ken's side. Ken shoved him away roughly.
"Man," Tom said, smiling a sleepy, private smile. He picked up Ken's clothes and tossed them over the back of a chair. "You're something! You owe me a debt, fellow. I'm the one who picked you out. If I weren't in a rush I'd... "
"No, you wouldn't."
Fists clenched Ken was speaking in a firm whisper. His cheek twitched as he talked.
"No one is to blame for this thing inside me. It's not my mother's bad blood, I don't care if they did say unkind things like that in Elkhorn. It's an imbalance, somehow. I'll straighten out. And till I do I'm not going to lower myself into another sewer. You might as well not expect this of me."
Tom knocked the chair over with a bang. He cursed Ken, but acquiescently, as Marcie came back into the room. She whistled when she saw Ken.
"I wonder what's keeping Leta."
She took an atomizer from the splintery bureau. Pulling back the collar of her dress she sprayed herself with perfume. Both she and Tom were dressed for the party at the lake house.
"Darling," she said to Ken, "I never see a beautiful boy like you but what I have to go and remember the ape who broke me in. I was twelve, and he was our landlord's married son. Ugh. But Dad didn't have to pay the rent that month, you see?"
She laughed mirthlessly.
There were noises out front, and Tom went to meet Leta. Hinges shrieked. Leta came into the living room of the house. Ken could not swallow.
They heard Tom talking harshly. Marcie donned a fur coat one of the Meadowbrookers had given her at Christmas. She went to the door and listened.
"That skunk," she said, chuckling. "I swear he's a Nazi. He's roasting Leta for being late."
Ken was positive most of the females in Alpha Love would be happy for him to take them to bed. If Leta Parks regarded this as merely a chore, she would never be able to gratify him.
"Why do she and Tom bicker so much?" he said with an effort. "Doesn't their attitude cause trouble?"
"No questions, darling," Marcie said lightly. "Remember, you're on trial, not us. But I will tell you this much: Leta is the only one of us who ever defies Tom any more. She and Dorothy Lechester. Don't worry, dear, it doesn't concern you. You've got hours. Tom and I won't be back from the party till morning. You wait here for her."
She kissed him on the lips.
She sent a final, satisfied glance around the room. She was gone so quickly Ken scarcely realized what had happened. His teeth began chattering. There was a sound of voices up front. When the house fell silent, following a scream of hinges, he knew Tom and Marcie had departed.
He waited, the flames growing. Although the room was rather cool, an ancient gas heater sputtered feebly in a corner, he was wet with perspiration. He kept rubbing his palms against the quilt. Minutes passed, each adding to his tautness. Five minutes. Ten.
Where was she? he asked himself, agonized. He could not stand much more. If she did not enter in another minute he resolved to go search for her.
Tremors were running through Ken when Leta appeared. He did not hear her. He looked away a moment, and when he glanced back she was in the doorway, glaring at him with eyes of ice.
"So," she said, her voice dripping acid, "you're jumping from the frying pan, are you? You fool! I hoped you had more sense."
He saw the reason he had not heard her coming: she was barefoot. Except for her bra and panties she was naked. Mesmerized, he stared at her, unable to pull his gaze away. She seemed smaller somehow, more wonderfully a woman.
She was about five feet, five inches tall, but she seemed less now. He had not guessed she could be so beautiful. She looked away, reddening.
"All right," she said. "You're doomed. Oh, you fool!"
It was as if she were surrendering in a war.
She shook her head scornfully, moving no nearer. Ken was so ravenous for her that her denunciation rendered him speechless. The girl had grated on him since he met her. He boiled with anger.
"Come here," he said, standing up.
Tears flooded Leta's eyelids. She put a fist to her mouth and turned away, facing the door.
"And you look so fine, if a person avoids your eyes," she said dejectedly. Her tone mocked herself. "I thought it had to be an error, that day we found you in front of your house. Under that tree by the street. I thought Tom had us out looking for another bisexual bum like James Ortiz, until I saw you. I hadn't noticed you on the campus. But you want to be ruined! Nobody listens. None of us listens till we're trapped."
Ken could not wait for more. He grabbed her around the waist, pushing tightly against her. He kissed her ardently, trying to arouse her.
Leta fell upon the mattress. The springs squealed loudly. She was shuddering, causing the bedstead to rattle. She writhed on the bed, pushing at him.
"Be still," he said thickly, rabidly, so lost he did not know what he was saying. "I'll kill you if I have to!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ken could not tell how long it was until the bed shook once more. Leta was moving away, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. She picked the ripped slip from the floor and put it on.
"I'm sorry. Tom said you wouldn't care. I can't help myself when I get that way."
Ken's voice was soft, ashamed again. Leta dried her face. She regarded him with an unwavering directness.
"I know. I do know."
Her features were stony. Tom, Ken told himself, had made a grave mistake in choosing Leta for the date.
" How much have you learned about the... 'fraternity'?" she said, emphasizing the inaccuracy of the word. "How much have they lied to you? I don't know, because I thought the best thing to do was to treat you so unfriendly you'd steer clear of us. But that doesn't work, does it?"
Ken did not reply. He could not stay interested in what she was saying. He was already beginning to want her anew.
Leta rose to her feet and went to the heater in the corner. She stooped lithely, turning up the hissing flame. As she bent he saw the streaks on her back where he had clawed her.
He caught his breath.
"Tom organized the fraternity as a lark," she said agitatedly. "God, what it's become! It's been going almost two years, and we've made contact with brother fraternities or chapters in five other colleges and universities. It's inevitable that we'll be caught. I can't bear the idea of being exposed."
She sat down in the cane-bottomed chair, rubbing her bare legs, restlessly. For a second Ken imagined he heard a noise out in the living room. He listened, but it was not repeated.
"Tom and I've never gotten along, Ken. We look alike, I know. We favor our mother's people. But we don't think alike. Not any more. Father spoiled us rotten, and with Tom there's a craziness mixed in it, too. A need for power that so much pampering and money didn't make any better. No matter what he says of me, he is the one who has the fixation about father."
Ken could not concentrate on what Leta was saying. He wanted her. Wanted her to come to him immediately.
"I've had it easy in some ways," she said. "Mother saw to that, 'specially after she had to commit father to a sanitarium. His mind became unbalanced, you see. My grandfather was luckier; he shot himself at thirty-five. No one knows when this blight started, but two of my great uncles were affected, too."
Ken heard the noise again. He was certain he was not imagining it. Leta seemed oblivious to the sound.
"We were wild and bored the summer we graduated from high school," she said, getting up from the chair tensely. "Tom and I have enough of my family's heritage to be always ready to go sexually overboard. God knows I was no virgin saint even then. That summer Dorothy Lechester's fiance told us at a party about the police breaking up an Alpha Love chapter in a small college out west. He had some friends involved. The rebellion in it intrigued us. There were just a few of us at the start. I was fed up and ready to disband in six months. I saw what it was doing to us. Tom had gotten control by then, and the chapter grew. He loved it. He blackmailed those of us who opposed him. Ken, you're lost if you do this. Tom has hideous ways. You can escape if you leave tonight. Once you trust Tom, once the fraternity gets something on you, those rotten pictures, you'll never... "
"You traitor!"
Tom Parks was yelling from the doorway.
Leta swung around as Polly Foster, Marcie, Tom, and James Ortiz ran into the room. Ken knew then the reason for the noises in the front of the house. Tom was beside himself with rage, his jet eyes starting from their sockets.
Polly Foster and Marcie subdued Leta with savage swiftness. Both she and Ken were too stunned to put up an effective defense. James Ortiz and Tom grabbed Ken's arms, preventing his going to Leta's aid. Within seconds Marcie had her down upon the floor.
Polly Foster beat Leta about the head with her fists.
"I knew we couldn't trust her," Tom said fiercely, as he and the half-Mexican tried to hold Ken down upon the bed. "You don't believe any of that guff she was giving you? You know what's wrong with her? She thinks you're beneath us. This female Judas is jeopardizing all of us with her trouble-making."
From the floor Leta attempted to speak, but Polly Foster's blows prevented the words from being intelligible. Ken was horrified. Whether Leta was a Judas or not he did not like the punishment.
"Make them stop," he shouted at Tom.
Marcie clouted Polly Foster on the shoulder.
"You know not to hit her where the bruises will show."
Together the two girls bound Leta's arms and legs with strips torn from a housecoat. James, Tom, and Polly dragged her out of the room. Staying with Ken, Marcie shut the door.
The slap of leather against flesh began.
"Tom has to discipline her, darling," Marcie said solemnly. "If he didn't, there's no telling what she'd do."
"I don't like any of it," Ken said, striding to the door. "They can't treat her as they would an animal! I'm going to make them... "
With a shock he saw Marcie was undressing. Her lovely torso emerged from the confines of its clothing quickly. Ken's heart set up a thumping that drummed in his ears. The connection with Leta Parks might not have happened at all.
"What an idiot she is," Marcie said, moving toward him. "You don't want to reject Alpha Love, do you? Don't you want me as much as I want you? You can't go back now, my handsome boy, not if you want to."
As he embraced Marcie, Ken did not think of Leta again, did not think of anything except the reality of the clinging, yielding body that was abruptly his to do with as he wished. Not quite sane as his lust increased, Ken was never less so than on this occasion.
CHAPTER TWELVE
With Marcie in his arms Ken forgot everything but the bliss she brought him. He had never feasted so completely. The fraternity by-laws which gave him this, he told himself later, as well as protection, companionship, and social prestige, they could deal with traitors as they must. Ken felt something for Marcie he had not experienced with any girl before.
He spoke to her of his feelings the next morning, when the others had been gone for hours. He and Marcie were eating breakfast in the drab kitchen at the rear of the house.
"It was great," Ken said with an affectionate smile. "You're wonderful, Marcie."
He spread his arms widely, as if to hug the world. At the stove, pouring herself a second cup of coffee, the girl laughed.
"Don't go overboard," she said, putting the pot back on the burner. "I hope you're not going to be as silly about me as that Middletown junior, Delia Jenkins, is about Tom. She fancies she's in love with him. But then, Delia isn't a sex kook. She can afford the luxury of love."
Ken was pulled up short by these words. He was deeply wounded. He longed very strongly that morning for a genuine relationship, for an honest and upright normality. Guilt still gnawed at him concerning Leta, despite his efforts to subdue it.
"Delia Jenkins and Dorothy Lechester and Leta are creeps," Marcie said with scorn. "They're idealists. That sort of girl gives me a pain. Do you think last night taught Leta a lesson about letting our rules alone? It didn't, but Tom has her stymied. Tom's her master."
Ken saw she was serious. "Sure," she said calmly. "Tom could murder Leta if she endangered Alpha Love too much, and none of us would lift a finger to help her. A group like us, we've got to have a no-nonsense leader if we're to stay free. That's one of the reasons we've kept ourselves independent of all the various types of secret Love groups that are scattered throughout the colleges these days. Tom is re-elected president of our chapter with absolute power every six months. He has a perfect right to have Leta whipped for interfering with decisions."
She blew in her cup, testing the warmth of the liquid with her finger. She wiped the finger on her robe.
"This is the second time since I got in the fraternity that Leta has been beaten. Tom loves to keep her near him and make her eat crow."
Ken frowned, the sparkle fading from the morning.
"How about the rest?" he said, as placidly as he could. " Have any of them been punished since you've been in?"
Marcie nodded, sipping at her coffee.
"Two or three. Tom whipped Dorothy Le- Chester last month. Those Dallas fellows we run with adored that. Her booby prize for our outing with the Love chapter there was an assignment with a bunch of strange guys. It scared Dorothy. She wouldn't do it after we got the right dormitory boys spotted, so Tom gave it to her good. I hated that. I hate to see a man strike a girl. The earliest thing I remember is my dad staggering in drunk and whipping my sister and me."
With a change of mood that startled Ken, Marcie flung the remainder of the coffee into the sink. She seemed older, less the image of a flippant wanton than he had ever seen her be.
"You damn men," she said harshly.
It was plain to Ken that Marcie had depths of which she herself was but limitedly aware. This bothered him. It made him all the less certain of his own self-knowledge.
What of himself? he asked. He knew he had lurched so far from his Elkhorn repentance that he would not be able to retrace his steps. Yet these changes had been accomplished by forces which had been inevitable. It had been irresistibly simple to go from his noble intentions, to Harlana and Belle, to the Fleaburg tramp he had raped, to his despair, to Alpha Love. The descent had been so inescapable that it made him wonder if he had any control over his destiny left to him.
Ken did not, could not, dwell on this at any length. He had reached that stage of mental paralysis, where a sufferer from satyriasis recognizes little beyond his basic need.
His next test date, four nights later, was with Dorothy Lechester, the wealthiest Meadowbrooker in the clique, besides Tom and Leta Parks. Ken had no voice in Dorothy's selection. He barely knew her. The fraternity would allow him no opinions until the initiation was completed. He had no idea how she was picked. He was informed of the decision on campus, and that evening he called at her house ostensibly to escort her to a dance.
Ken drove Dorothy in the Jackson's old automobile directly to the deserted lake cottage five miles outside the city boundaries, in the next county. There in a back room he consumed nearly half an hour in courteous procrastination, trying to establish some sort of bond between them other than that of the primitive carnality which had debased Leta in his taking of her. Dorothy, however, made no pretense of tenderness. She was interested in personal gratification alone, and though Ken found her to be exhaustively experienced, he drew away at last with his lust un-dimmed.
During the evening with Dorothy Lechester Ken began to see that his desires were steadily increasing. If the advance continued it would soon be impossible for one woman to serve him adequately at any time. As he left the cottage with the sullen girl, he felt a bite of cold fear at the memory of Leta's remark about her father's ultimate commitment to an institution.
Two nights after this unpleasant assignation, Ken drove Polly Foster to the lake house. This was his third fraternity date, the final sexual examination of his worthiness before he was to be initiated. Polly was not brusque in her love-making, and she had an appreciation that she was giving herself to him. She was friendly, playful, and totally unequal to the task. Cradling the companionable blonde in his arms, Ken was a prey to tearing sensations that were never fulfilled.
He hated Polly then. Her amiable, detached manner was infuriating. If she had resisted him even slightly while the madness was upon him, he would have strangled her.
"I'm not in your class," she said, sighing, when she had done her best for him. "You'd destroy a house of French joy dolls. Tom knew I couldn't handle you by myself, but I asked for this just for kicks. You know why he agreed, don't you? It's because I missed out on the last party with our Dallas friends. So I could help him with Leta."
Polly's disclosure came as a surprise. Ken wondered what reward James Ortiz had received.
"I pity James," Marcie had said once, giggling. "You know his mother's a cat? It's her name that's Ortiz. One of his stepfathers made a switch-hitter of him when he was a kid. You know, while Mommy was out earning their daily bread walking the street? I tell you, darling, that Ortiz breaks me up. He's in constant demand."
It took Ken some days to fully comprehend the sexual freedom of the Lovers. He had thought bisexuality a state existing almost solely in earliest adolescence. It was difficult for him to believe it so common among blase college people.
He was discovering other things, as well. One of these was in the realization that a majority of the fraternity members were not the merry gods and goddesses he had thought them. Following his experience with Leta they let down the last barriers erected for his benefit in September. For all their charm and polish he found them to be strangely confused and incomplete as persons.
Rebellion, plus a childish exhibitionism, seemed the keynote of everything they did. They came from homes immoderately indulgent, but when they spoke of their families' stupidity their laughter had a hollow and sardonic ring.
Several of them admitted outright to a hatred of their parents. It startled Ken to see that some of the wealthiest students were the most caustic, while of the group, the three male Middletown athletes gave the least evidence of being maladjusted. These three were virile young animals who were in the fraternity for the orgies that went with membership. Ken doubted that more than a handful of the Meadowbrookers had entered Alpha Love from motives so simple.
The single Middletown female was no harder to understand than the three men. Delia Jenkins had joined because she was in love with Tom. She followed him constantly with her sulky eyes.
"Tom is awfully tired of her," Polly Foster confided to Ken the day before his initiation. "She gives him almost as much trouble as Dorothy Lechester and Leta. Delia wants Tom to disband Alpha Love and marry her."
Ken knew Polly had been brooding for days about her mother's current tour of Europe with a fifth bridegroom, a man young enough to be Polly's brother.
"The fraternity is better than marriage any day,"? she added shortly. "We're just more honest than our parents were with their divorces. Half the people in Alpha Love haven't had mothers and fathers who shared the same roof."
Broken homes from childhood, inattentive parents, unlimited checkbooks, hasty romances, quick marriages and quicker annulments- these things flowed like a dark stream beneath the conversations of the Lovers.
Gradually Ken ceased to like them very much. When they attempted to give him presents of clothing and money-just as they did Marcie and James Ortiz-he politely declined their gifts. He felt little gratitude, knowing that the expensive things, often purchased by paid flunkies, had small or no value to them.
To the Meadowbrookers the fraternity had assumed functions their families had never served. The men and women within the brotherhood meant more to them, he decided, than a trainload of bulging-walleted fathers and gently yawning, patrician mothers.
Because Tom Parks was the most dedicated of them all, because he was brilliant and inventive, and ruthless in his dedication to preserve the fraternity at any cost, the members revered him.
"Tom comes up with the damnedest stuff," Polly Foster said admiringly. "I'm a charter member, and let me tell you it was a tame kitten till he got control. That's when he and Leta fell out for good. When I think of our big bad rules back then I want to laugh."
Ken noticed that the language of his friends was more obscene and abusive as they came to accept him among them. Their manners lost the elegance he had admired. He was coming to see them as they were: confused malcontents.
In some ways they were like himself. None of them had his irresistible sexual problem, but they had been led into promiscuity because of unhappiness. The unhappiness might not be as overpowering as his, and the causes were different, but it was there in all of them.
It comforted Ken to think that most of the members were fanatical defenders of the fraternity after they joined. He had more respect for such people than for a craven girl like Leta.
On the Monday following the beating there had been no indication of what she had endured in Marcie's living room. She had avoided him since then, had refused to look him in the eyes when they met. But she was patently as much a part of Alpha Love as ever. There were many things about the fraternity Ken did not understand. He thought he would, perhaps, when the initiation was completed at the lake house Saturday night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The only Lover who dared be absent, Leta Parks did not attend the initiation. This was made known to Ken as soon as he arrived at the large, pine-log cottage. When he and Marcie drove up with Tom they were met by Bill Davis and Brad Stuart, two of the Middletown athletes.
Bill and Brad jumped off the front porch and came out to the grove of tall oaks west of the house. Tom was parking his convertible there among a half-dozen other glossy automobiles.
"Everybody's here but Leta," Brad announced, wide-eyed, leaning inside the car. "After you left the house she sent word by Dorothy that she's sick. What's to be done with her, Tom?"
Tom did not respond. His face was pale with anger and astonishment. Ken gathered from this that nonattendance at an initiation was one of the worst offenses a member could commit.
"Come on," Tom muttered as he stepped out of the automobile. "Let's get on with it. But when I get my hands on that... "
He did not complete the thought. Ken was sorry this mischief had marred the beginning of the evening. It made him more nervous, and his explosive passion was stirring already. He was worried about how he would behave during the initiation. He had no idea what it would be like, but if he became over-stimulated he could not be responsible for any of his actions.
As he was expected to do, he was following Tom's instructions without a quibble. He would spend the night with Marcie, for her sister's family was once more away for the weekend. He would return so late from the cottage that it was best for Mrs. Jackson to think him again a visitor in the Parks' home for the night.
"Listen to that music," Brad Stuart said, as the five of them left the car and went up the graveled walk toward the front door. "It's a new African record Polly got from one of her boy friends in the Dallas group. Isn't it sexy?"
To Ken's ear the hi-fi inside the house was beating out a weird conglomeration of noises that had slight resemblance to music. It seeped into the semidarkness with irregular persistence, despite the shade-drawn windows and closed doors of the house. He could see no reason for this shuttering of the cottage.
There was no need for caution. The highway was a good mile to the north. The road connecting it with the house was little more than a rutted and narrow lane. Tom had explained that his mother visited the cottage occasionally in the summer, but for the rest of the year the place was his and Leta's to use as they wished.
A few hundred yards from the porch the shore of a private lake was hidden from view by a mass of evergreen hedges and trees. The roof of a boathouse could be seen dimly above the topmost branches. The clean smell of the lake pervaded the air.
"If it weren't for the initiation," Tom said, "we might all go for a nude swim."
As they went up the stone steps Ken had been thinking of but one thing. Though tonight the Texas January weather was as balmy as that of late spring, it meant nothing to him. He was anxious to know what was happening inside the cottage. He could hear only the blare of the music.
Tom pushed open the door, and the scene that met Ken's eyes was bacchanalian. It took his breath away. Nothing he had seen could compare with this, not even an afternoon he remembered from sometime when he was about sixteen. Out hunting for any lonely country woman he had stumbled upon five willing gypsies camped without their men in a meadow north of Elkhorn. In the end the black-eyed pagans had taught him things he had not so much as guessed at till then.
The furniture in the long front room of the Park's cottage was shoved against the walls. This left in the center a space some twenty to thirty feet in any direction. Eleven seminaked girls and five equally unclad young men were within the cleared area.
Lying on blankets or sitting on cushions they were either drinking from whisky bottles, smoking cigarettes, or making love in a fantastic jumble of bared arms, legs, and torsos. A mingled scent of alcohol, marijuana, and of a sweet incense burning upon the hearth, hung over the softly lighted room.
The bellow of the hi-fi was a hammer of sound throbbing against Ken as he entered.
"You creeps," Tom shouted, going to the phonograph and switching it off, "we're here for an initiation. Who gave you permission to get in this shape before I got here?" He kicked James Ortiz in the ribs. "This is serious. If you want to get a taste of the medicine Leta is due for, keep this up."
"Later, pops." The Fleaburger winked at Kitty Fox, a languid, dimpled brunette who was noteworthy for having attempted suicide twice in the past four months. "Look at the state of this chick. Can't you see she needs my attention?"
James gave a cry as Tom knocked him to the floor with his fist. The boy landed atop Polly Foster, who laughed and stood up obediently. The others began untangling themselves, rising to their feet, also. In a minute everyone was standing. The seven men and twelve girls regarded Tom with respect.
At the door Ken was struck by the difference between them now, and the impression they created elsewhere. There was something pathetic about these classically beautiful people. He wondered if he, too, looked as pitiful as they.
Getting free of a panting Meadowbrooker named Hal Carson, platinum-blonde Dorothy Lechester moved away to the opposite end of the room. Already divorced from an aspiring actor now living in New York, she was rumored to have been in love with Tom at one time. She glanced quickly at Ken as she went by.
"You're the master, Tom," Mike Grant, the third athlete from Middletown, said placatingly. "Nobody is disputing that. James was joking with you."
"This is no night for jokes." Tom's voice was less oppressive. "Not only are we taking in a new member, but Leta is beginning to endanger us. If a member won't obey the rules we.. "
"What rules?"
Dorothy Lechester was interrupting bitterly. She stood by the hearth, away from the crowd.
"Aside from having to get your permission to date a non-member... or do anything, for that matter... we don't have rules any more! I'm fed up with it, and with your crummy decrees. I'm quitting the outings with those out-of-town jerks. I like sex, but you have things so dirty I can't take it any longer."
The people gasped, shifted, moved backwards. As if on command they made a path for their leader. Tom strode forward purposefully. Dorothy braced herself, but gave no sign of resistance. She stared at him oddly, a hint of a smile about her lips. A smile that implied she no longer cared what might happen to her.
When he was on her Tom dug his fingers into Dorothy's hair. He hurled her toward the cushions. The others crowded around them eagerly, blocking Ken's view.
"This I've got to see," Brad Stuart said to Ken in delight. "That's a nutty chick. She knows what he'll do, but she can't resist riling him further when Leta's already got him upset. You'd never guess she and Tom were sweethearts once, would you?"
Using his elbows Brad shoved himself into the laughing circle. Ken watched in a burgeoning fascination mixed with horror. He did not know what he had been anticipating, but it was nothing so turbulent as this. There was something bestial in the way the Lovers were straining together, jesting, striving to gain a better position.
"Ugh," Marcie muttered. "She brought it on herself, but this kind of mess gets me. This is the only thing about Tom I can't take. The entertainments with our brother chapters don't bother me a quarter as much."
She went out upon the porch to wait until the chastisement was completed. Ken could not tear his gaze away. Dorothy's shrieks were hideous. The curtain of gleaming bodies parted for a moment, and he caught a glimpse of the girl and Tom before it shut again.
Four girls were holding Dorothy down. Tom was upon the victim, slapping her mercilessly.
Suddenly the long, softly lit room was a steaming oven. The moose head above the fireplace was leering. The flaming tide surged within him, and Ken asked himself blackly how much he would really better his lot by joining the bizarre, apparently unknowable group.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Getting away from the facile cruelty in the room, Ken went out onto the porch. Marcie was there, sitting in a wicker chair. Delia Jenkins, the petulant Middletowner, had slipped outside, also.
Propped listlessly against a porch column she was talking to Marcie with the condescension she affected with Fleaburgers.
"You can believe me or not," she said, tossing her head. "Tom promised me. He gave me his solemn promise."
"Where did he give it?" Marcie asked with a sneer. She raised her voice over Dorothy's cries. "In bed? You fool, don't you know a man will say anything there?"
Smiling jeeringly at Delia, Marcie motioned for Ken to sit on the arm of the chair. He did as he was bidden. He reached around her, stroking her thighs. Marcie pushed his fingers lazily away. He was becoming so sexually worked up that he observed the girls through a haze.
"Guess what?" Marcie said, chuckling at his obvious mental disorientation. "Our Tommy is so madly in love with Delia, he's ready to break up the fraternity and save himself for her alone."
Another scream, followed by a roar of applause from an appreciative audience, cut into the night. Bathed in the pastel light spilling through the door, Delia shrugged as though stung by gnats. Her green eyes were fixed on Ken with dislike.
He could guess the reason for this. Delia was jealous of him. She hated anyone, male or female, to whom Tom Parks showed any sort of unusual interest.
"It's nobody's business but Tom's and mine," she said sullenly. "He's in his twenties, ready for marriage. He's had his fling. I'm not going to put up with evil stuff like this any longer. I'm a decent girl, and I won't have him chasing after boys as well as... "
"Decent?"
Marcie's lip curled. Ken's hand was back on her leg. This time Marcie let it stay.
"You do everything we do, darling. How much decency does that indicate?"
Her mouth set in a firm line, Delia did not answer.
"He'll marry me," she said imperviously, "or he'll regret it. I'm sick of this nasty two-sexed group. Leta warned me, but I didn't know it would be this vile. I thought when I joined I'd just have to sleep with the college boys occasionally here and in the other groups."
Ken listened blankly. He was shaking as his hands glided over Marcie.
"The last party we had with that out-of-state bunch," Delia shuddered, ignoring Ken, "the thing I drew was a freak. Oh, he looked okay. He was cute, in fact. But... Gah! I couldn't believe what he did. I want out of this awful thing. Tom promised to marry me, and he will. I'd have never lowered myself into this muck if he hadn't."
Marcie was gazing at the girl with grim suspicion. "And how do you intend to manage it, darling?"
A blast of noise sounded behind them, announcing the end of the beating. Ken shivered as he heard Brad Stuart calling his name. Lust scorched him.
"Come on," Polly Foster said cheerfully.
She came out upon the porch. Marcie got up from the chair. Putting an arm about Ken's waist she whispered into his ear. For a second he could not hear her advice for the buzzing in his ears.
"Remember, darling," Marcie said silkily, "this is the final test. It's rough, but it'll be over soon, and you'll be one of us."
As they went into the room Delia Jenkins shut the door behind them. Ken looked around vaguely. Dorothy Lechester was nowhere in sight.
The members were milling about, distributing cushions, creating a solid carpet along the middle of the floor. Several of them stopped their work, ogling Ken with undisguised savagery as he came across the threshold. Sensually rubbing the fleecy hair on his chest Hal Carson, an Oakton banker's son, said something Ken did not catch.
A hoot of laughter went up from the crowd.
"Hear that?" Polly Foster was smiling. "You're in for it, honey. You've made us wait too long. When I was initiated we were civilized. But we've gone far since then."
She punched James Ortiz in the side, jestingly. He winced, not from the blow.
"Haven't we, baby? Why were you in bed for three days after you were initiated?"
Another tide of laughter rolled over Ken. James Ortiz chuckled in a pretense that he appreciated a joke on himself as much as anyone.
"Don't worry," Marcie muttered encouragingly to Ken. "You can take it."
From the hearth, where he was sitting in an overstuffed chair which had been dragged up for him, Tom beckoned regally. A pregnant hush fell upon the room. The people quickly lined themselves on either side of Ken. Leather straps had appeared in the men's fists.
The smoking incense floating in spirals about him, Tom was calm, majestic, a heathen priest. There was nothing to signify he had whipped a girl moments earlier. As Ken moved across the cushions, supported by James Ortiz and Brad Stuart, he had a sensation of floating.
"Ken Jackson," Tom said soberly when they reached him, "we marked you for ourselves from the first day we saw you. Your eyes would have told us what you are, if Harlana Stringer had not. We have long wanted a handsome satyr worthy of us. You belong to Alpha Love. We are one with each other, and no person can destroy our unity."
As Tom Parks mouthed the pompous, silly sentences Ken struggled with a desire to laugh. He was on fire. His sense of unreality was overpowering. He barely noticed that James and Brad had started stripping his clothes from him.
"None of us can deny a brother or sister," Tom said sternly. Ken's heavy, feverish breathing shook his frame. "You must be obedient without reservations. This initiation will teach you an appropriate respect for us. Do you understand?"
Tom's stilted tone was like that of a child playacting. He was enjoying himself immensely. But he was not pretending.
Ken had no time to answer Tom, even if he had been able. Tom spoke sharply, and the people behind Ken made their move. Suddenly, as if coming out of a cloud, Ken realized to some degree what was about to happen to him.
His mind broke from the heavy veils enveloping it, and after a second of hesitation, he began to struggle. When their aim became totally obvious a minute later, he started fighting them desperately. Bloodying James Ortiz's nose and knocking Brad Stuart aside, he had gotten halfway to the door when the screeching crowd brought him down. Male and female, they clawed, cursing, fighting to get to him, to gain an advantage over one another. As he battled them upon the cushions, lashed to and fro by many arms and hands, Ken saw no more of Tom Parks.
Tom was present, however. He stood upon a chair, above the thrashing maze of nude forms surrounding him. He was laughing, his eyes blazing, his arms outstretched.
The light in the house was brighter. Bill Davis returned from an errand in another room. He grinned at Marcie, nodding with a smirk at the rectangular, metallic object he had handed their master.
"How long till he begins to plead?" Bill said genially, before he joined the fray.
It was not till then that Tom began to use the motion-picture camera Bill gave him, taking the pictures about which Leta Parks had attempted to warn Ken.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"They're not human," Ken said to Marcie, shuddering. "Don't tell me they've ever treated anyone else like this."
His body was a mass of wales, bruises, and cuts from neck to ankles, he was lying on his side. A wavy lock of hair fell disorderly over his forehead as he stared with sick eyes at the girl he loved. His body ached fiercely.
The jaded mob had abused Ken in an incredible manner. Urged on by Tom Parks they had performed perversions that, when pain and loathing overwhelmed him, revolted Ken progressively while the evening crashed onward.
Toward the end he had been tortured repeatedly as he tried to beat his tormentors off. The positions they assumed were monstrous. Ken realized he quite literally could not survive intact many such evenings. Nothing in his memory of sexual excesses could begin to match even the milder cruelties of the initiation.
Although it was midafternoon, he and Marcie were still in bed. Tom, accompanied by three other Alpha Love males, had not driven them up to Marcie's house until almost dawn. Ken had already been buffeted into unconsciousness at the lake house. Marcie, wearied by the orgy, was awakening him that afternoon well past the hour for him to be going home.
"It's a good thing I didn't warn you, isn't it?" she said sleepily.
She yawned and stretched with the amoral bearing of a drowsy cat. She sat up, leaning against the iron bedstead.
"If I had, you wouldn't be a member of the best organization in Oakton today, darling. You'd be the same sex-kooked hypocrite you were when the semester started. I'll admit, we did get out of hand with you last night. And I suppose we will again, once the boys overpower you. It's your fault. If you weren't such a good-looking loony, maybe Tom wouldn't get so aroused, and then get us on edge. Just think of your remodeled social position."
Turning over on his stomach gingerly Ken attempted to shut out Marcie's voice. Neither his endless bout with passion, nor his awareness of the perversities of Alpha Love, had prepared him for its incomprehensible malevolence toward him.
"I wish I were as lost as I was at the beginning of the semester," he said flatly. "At least when I had only Harlana and Belle I didn't have to worry about being crippled or worse! How could you do this to me?"
Marcie laughed, undisturbed. She had expected as much. She had known Ken would be maltreated as no one in the group had been before. By Tom Parks' actions she had sensed from the beginning that he either hated Ken very much, or desired him with a comparable intensity. Neither emotion from Tom, she knew, could bode anything except evil for its object.
She patted Ken's broad shoulder.
"Accept us, darling. There's no getting out of Alpha Love once you're in. Those scenes with the movie and flash cameras guarantee we stay in line."
The day was cooler than the previous day had been. There was a nip in the air. Wearing only her panties, Marcie slid out of the squeaking bed and lit the rusty heater in the corner. She snapped up the shade and let the sun in, not caring that a skinny mulatto youth was passing several feet away in the junk-littered alley.
"You witch," Ken said, twisting his mouth. "Nothing is worth this. I thought the club'd be the safest place for me, but it's more dangerous than any place I could have imagined."
Frowning at the gawking mulatto, Marcie moved away from the window. She got back into bed and pulled the quilts over her. She snuggled up to Ken.
Her hand wandered slyly down his raw, suffering body. He started to push her off, then, his extremity of disgust notwithstanding, found he could not. When the self-despising deed was accomplished he shoved her away dully.
"You're worse than a den of Nazis."
" What ?'-' Smiling serenely Marcie withdrew. "Though I've used it on Tom, that term is getting to be rather old fashioned, dear. In your case it's the pot calling the kettle black, besides. Did you ever read of Use Kock, the Bitch of Buchenwald? She was a Nazi nymphomaniac. That is, the same thing you are, only a woman. Your sister in sex, sweetheart."
Ken propped an elbow on the gray wall. He fingered his face and neck, and looked down at his arms and feet. These areas alone were unmarked. The. fraternity members had made sure no person would notice anything wrong with him when he was fully clothed.
He was certain he could not endure so much as a month or two of the things that had been done to him. He experienced a blinding urge for revenge. He had never felt so capable of murder.
"Marcie," he said, as calmly as possible, "can't you imagine what's going to happen? No group as bad as this one can continue. Somebody's bound to find out, and when they do the thing will ruin everyone." He paused, getting himself under control. "I'd give my right arm if I'd known everything."
Someone was outside, tapping at the windowpane. From his place in the bed Ken could see a shadow blackening the well of wintry sunlight on the knotted floor. Marcie flung back the covers and leaped to her feet.
"That colored boy out there!" she said, going around the foot of the bed. "I'll slap the... " She halted, staring through the glass in amazement.
"I'll be a bitch," she continued. "What is she doing here?"
She pushed up the window and leaned out questioningly. Her breasts grazed the sill. Pulling a quilt about him, Ken moved painfully down the bed till he had a view of the alley.
"I rang the bell," Leta Parks said in a voice. "Why didn't you answer?"
She was slim and immaculate in an expensive, dark-blue dress. Her black hair brushed back from the widow's peak on her forehead, she was very beautiful.
Ken gazed beyond Marcie, staring at Leta with a regard that, surprisingly, brought tears to her eyes. He knew she must have taken part in almost every initiation, but he was positive also that no man or girl had ever been abused at the cottage as he had been.
"You rang the doorbell?" Marcie said, motioning for Leta to come through the unscreened window. "Didn't anyone ever tell you these things never work in Fleaburg?"
When she was inside the room Leta was ill at ease. She bit her lip, a hand grasping a bedpost. Deathly pale, she kept looking at Ken.
"They're hunting for me," she said at last. "I don't know what they intend to do. I was hiding out at Dorothy's, but I had to find out how you were."
Marcie was incredulous. She let the window descend with a bang, rattling the panes.
"If I were you I'd dig myself a hole and pull it in after me. You're in trouble, Leta. You can disobey Alpha Love just so far. You know as well as I that nobody skips an initiation and gets by with it."
Shaking her head at the girl's waywardness, Marcie dumped a rumpled dress from the cane-bottomed chair and pushed it toward her. Leta did not sit down. Her concern for him puzzled Ken.
"I was right, wasn't I?" she said.
She could not meet his eyes. He had an idea that she would weep if he spoke to her.
"Wait a minute," Marcie said indignantly, arms akimbo. "Of course he's upset. Hell, James Ortiz bawled and vomited all the way home, the night he was initiated. But Alpha Love is a small price to pay for what we get. The initiation bothers every beginner."
"Ken's hardly a beginner!"
Leta took a comb from the bureau and handed it to him. She seemed unsure of herself, startled that she had felt compelled to come to him.
"The old initiations weren't anything like this one must have been," she muttered. "These newer ones came about when the wilder members began to get tired of Tom's dictatorship. He's taken up with the brother fraternities, and introduced the parties in other cities and the worst perversions and brutality to stave off restlessness. He doesn't care what corruption he drags us through, so long as he can be over us."
"If you've disliked it so much," Ken said, his curiosity momentarily outweighing his fury, "why have you stayed in? Those photographs? I was so anxious for relief I never really considered that."
He combed his hair rapidly. The subject of the photographs was a difficult thing for him to mention. As the evening progressed, and he was mauled into unspeakable groupings, he had become aware that the cameras were seldom trained on the others' faces.
He alone would be readily identifiable if the persons who possessed the films wished to expose him to his grandmother at some future date.
Leta riveted her gaze on the floor. It was as if, having watched his entrapment mainly from a distance, she could not support the aloofness for which she had striven. She began to speak, fast.
"Tom has some of me, too. You can imagine the kind of stuff. He has films of each of us. I don't know who besides him has the secret of the hiding place. You can't beat the information out of Mm, either. I hired two men last year to waylay him, but they bungled it. To scare me Tom mailed Mother some pictures that she came within an inch of seeing. He warned me in time, and I intercepted them, but it's a vicious circle. The longer you're a member, the more parties and sex outings you attend, the more they have on you."
"So?" said Marcie, shrugging. She popped the elastic in her panties, nonchalantly.
Leta disregarded the interruption. Plainly she wished to talk to Ken, to bar Marcie from the conversation.
"The fraternity can destroy individuals without killing itself, you see? If they have perversion pictures to select their victims from, they can stick together with Tom and throw the mud on whomever they wish. If any of us get so unruly that they want to be rid of us... A change of meeting places, a little oil on the troubled waters... They'd have no task at ruining someone like you, Ken. What would your grandparents do then?"
"God!" Marcie was exploding, irritated by Ken's blanched features. "What are you doing here, Leta? The loyal members have to protect themselves from informers. That picture deal bothered me at the beginning, but not any longer. To tell the truth, darling, it's funny."
Her brazen smile dimmed. She flushed. Leta was glaring at her in a silent imputation of the flippant manner. When several seconds had ticked away Marcie seated herself on the bed.
"All right," she said grudgingly, "so I dislike it, too, but they're necessary. To help preserve our unity, as Tom claims. Besides, I don't give a damn if my mother does find out."
She waved her arms angrily. Ken caught the smell of stale sweat that Marcie had brought with her from the lake house. It nauseated him.
He had a furry taste in his mouth. His head ached. His hair was dry and strawlike.
"My mother is a saint," Leta said, as he gave the comb back to her. "She loved Father, even when she realized he could never give up the scores of women he had to buy. Even when his mind became utterly unhinged. I wish I understood these severe, sadistic forms of satyriasis, but they just seem to happen on rare occasions. For hidden reasons. The man may be a good, fine person otherwise, but there it is: insatiable desire, and no ability to control it."
Leta turned aside. She went to the window so they could not glimpse her face. Ken shut his eyes in anguish.
"Mother depends on Tom and me," Leta said. "We can destroy her as easily as you could your grandmother, Ken. Tom doesn't care. He knows what it will do to me if anything happens to her. With what Father did I don't see how she could take the same thing from us. If you only knew the pedestal she's put Tom and me on!"
Leta's words sounded awkward. The sentiment seemed uncomfortably melodramatic, similar to his own situation, but Ken did not doubt her sincerity.
"I'm weak," she said in a strangled voice. "I just haven't had the moral strength to break free of the fraternity. I couldn't stand what Tom would do to punish me."
Marcie was fiddling with a pillow. She fluffed it into a ball. She destroyed the ball with the flat of her palm.
"I'm in it for what I can get out of it," she said stubbornly. "And I'm not sorry I joined. I'll not condemn Tom because he's hipped on the filth and brutality. I can take it. It happened long before I met him. You're a sniveling creep, Leta."
Leta remained at the window, staring into the alley. The mulatto was leaving.
"Tom corrupts or hurts everyone he touches," she said gravely. "He thinks he can have whatever he wants, and never pay the piper. He's not failed at anything in his life, except with Father. Tom worshiped him. Father was wonderful to us children, and neither of us learned of the sickness till the very last, when it couldn't be hidden. That did something Tom couldn't withstand. Father was the one person he'd believed in. After Father was taken away Tom lost every ounce of humanity. His feelings now are all mixed in love and in hate, and he seems somehow to want to punish both Father and the world for betraying him. Sometimes when I remember Tom's growing up, I can't hate him altogether."
The sun was shining on a broken bottle in the alley. It created a jagged reflection upon the ceiling of the room. Making a gesture to rub the beam from the air, Leta swung on Ken.
"I couldn't attend your initiation. I couldn't be a part of that obscenity with you. I knew what Tom had in mind. "Traitor."
Marcie draped the pillow about her ears. She yawned in a loud gust, proving to them how bored she was.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Stripped of glamour Alpha Love was frightening. In some ways its adherents were quite as sexually maladjusted as Ken, without his strong conscience and fundamental decency. For most of them the orgies and the increasing contacts with other groups of degenerates had become the only forms of entertainment they enjoyed.
Normal people would have grown weary of nothing but sex. There would have had to be other social activities to round out the diet of pleasure. But the members of Alpha Love had come to view all their inoffensive enterprises as convenient smoke screens behind which they hid the main, extravagant joy.
Ken's satyriasis, combined with his extreme handsomeness, provided a new toy for them. Like hateful children, they would not be able to let him alone. They would amuse themselves until they destroyed both him and their enjoyment of him.
"They think of you as a beautiful, deranged beast," Leta said to Ken bluntly as she drove him home. "The fraternity is worsening steadily. Tell me, can you go on with them?"
Ken did not have to weigh the answer. It had been evident to Mm last night. In the midst of the pain, while they were harassing him, transforming him into an animal for their pleasure, he had known.
"All I've been able to think of was what safety I'd have," he said, his eyes straight ahead on the road. "Everything I need. And now I want to kill them all. When I think of those pictures and of what they can do! I was willing to accept anything but this."
Leta wore a stricken expression. Ken realized she was thinking as much of her father's obscure tragedy as of him, but he was comforted by her unsuspected tenderness. In halting sentences she tried to explain Alpha Love.
After years of dissipation the members were like drug addicts, she told him tersely. To retain their initial thrills they were passing from one stage of vice to the next. They seemed unable to stop themselves. Their thirst for excitement was leading them into detours of corruption most persons did not suppose existed, and still this was not enough.
To stimulate themselves to the desired pitch, the most revolting combinations must be improved upon. The fraternity must retain its vivacity at any cost. Months ago the classic group perversions developed over the ages by many cultures of man had been discarded. With their salacious, ludicrous English names from antiquity, the simple chickens-on-a-spit, the towers of Babel, the eunuch's revenges, and all the other distortions of like character, had given way to much more intricate and often excruciating forms of sexual barbarianism. Under Tom's leadership the Lovers had studiously researched the bypaths of sex.
"The fraternity is everything to them," Leta said. "Any other thing in their lives is incidental."
When he got out of the car at his house, Ken understood a bit about Alpha Love which had been hidden from him. But the knowledge did not show him what he could do to help himself and Leta. His whole body hurt.
More important, he was shattered mentally, and in Ken relief from tension took but one direction. He wanted Leta. He needed to possess her physically in spite of his bodily injuries. Later, to talk further with her. There were so many things about which he felt they should talk. Everything concerning their danger was cloudy, unexpected.
"I had a feeling for you from the start," she said.
Ken was resolved not to let either of them become more implicated with the fraternity. To prevent it he was prepared for anything.
"I'm partly to blame for the trap you're in," she said. "I was scared, trying to protect myself. This can't go on. There had to be a way out, some way. I won't see you again or go on campus till we've both had time to think things over. I'll be hiding some other place besides Dorothy's, but I'll call you by Thursday at the latest. I do want out, Ken. Just as much as you."
Ken had never felt so sick as he did when Leta was gone. Looking up dazedly he saw Belle Casper sitting on her front porch, watching him. He had not spoken to her in days. Belle's husband had put an end to the friendship with Ken, immediately following Harlana's arrest at the hotel.
While he looked at the fortyish woman, his head swimming, Ken saw her make a gesture with her fingers, indicating her family was not at home. Ken glanced at the Casper garage. Through a mist of despair he saw Belle nodding her head.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"Now that you're a member in every respect," Polly Foster told Ken on Thursday, at the front entrance of the college building, "you can go to any of the Meadowbrook parties and dances you want. We'll see nobody leaves you out."
Ken had been absent from the campus since Friday. He had been too ill to attend. Only with the utmost difficulty had he prevented his salacious grandmother from learning the nature of his illness. Having little or no faith in the medical profession, she had not insisted he summon a doctor, and Ken had finally managed to convince her he was the victim of a virus. He had been careful to keep his torso covered at all times.
Still weak and in pain, he dreaded returning to the school, but he did not dare remain -at home for a longer period. The initiation had made him so wary of the people who had tortured him that he did not think he would be able to look at one of them again. He thought their manner must surely betray to others the atrocities they had committed upon his body.
Thursday morning, as he met Polly and Brad Stuart at the front entrance, Ken's mind was disabused of this particular worry. Polly and Brad were the same genial comrades they had been Friday afternoon. There was no suggestion that he was bound with them in a slavery from which he could not withdraw.
As the day wore on he found that most of the other members treated him in like fashion. They were ostensibly friendly. His status with them was fixed.
"Take it easy," Polly Foster smiled during lunch, noting his coldness. "You don't have anything to prove to us. Everyone knows you're in solid."
A chattering cluster of Middletown females went by their table while Polly was speaking. They eyed Ken covertly. One of the bolder girls smiled and said his name in a tentative greeting.
"You see?" Polly laughed, pointing with her fork. "Marcie went around Monday gabbing to Tom about what Leta said to you. I'll bet you'd forgot these advantages while you were talking to her. There was no need to panic. You can expect lots more than what you got at the initiation. You'll get used to us. James Ortiz and the rest who got in this past year had an adjustment to make, too. So what's with you and Leta, anyhow?"
To this question Ken had no response. He was not certain how he felt about Leta Parks. There had been much in her bearing Sunday that remained unexplained.
"She's chicken," Polly said derisively. "She used to be okay, but she's gotten as soft as a nun since we cast our net for you. Stay away from her until Tom straightens her out, Ken."
She patted his arm amiably, and Ken fought an urge to knock her to the floor. The depraved wretch of Saturday night was by no means the smooth and satiny girl of today.
How were the Lovers able to sustain their Jekyll-Hyde minglement from month to month ?
he asked himself with loathing. When he had lain with Polly on his third test date, she had been gentle and quite ineffectual. At the initiation she had been capable of anything.
"Get away from me," he said to her sickly. He pushed at her hand. "I'm lucky you monsters didn't really maim me. That was your only chance. I'm through with you."
"Garbage," Polly said curtly, as the smile was erased from her lips. "You'd better not let Tom hear you in this mood. He has a dozen things for you we haven't tried yet, any one of which would make a wonderful movie. Not that we need any more. How would you like your grandmother to find some pictures from Saturday night in her mailbox?"
Ken knew this was no idle threat. As a last resort the Lovers would not hesitate to employ any device at their command if they thought it essential to destroy him at once. They were foolhardily ready to endanger their own security, so convinced were they that Tom was invincible. Using his brains, manipulating the power of their families, they believed he could bring them through any difficulty.
"Polly reports you're acting silly today," Tom said when the last of the afternoon classes let out.
Ken had avoided him all day, had lingered in the building until only a handful of students and teachers remained. Thinking Tom would be gone he had walked quietly down a hall toward a back exit. He gave an involuntary gasp as he turned a corner leading outside. The eight males of Alpha Love were standing in front of him, directly in his path. They grabbed Ken and drew him quickly into a deserted classroom.
Tom and the seven men had been awaiting Ken with Delia Jenkins, Marcie, and two janitors who were in Tom's pay. All of them came into the room. The two robust, khaki-clad Negroes stood beyond earshot, just inside the door, which one of them closed and locked. In their early thirties, they fidgeted with anticipation.
Delia was weeping grievously. She turned her face to the wall, her shoulders hunched. Ken stared at the girl.
"Let's have no more whining, kid," Tom said to him abruptly. "Three days of loafing is plenty. You're no boy. That private detective I hired has found out plenty about you." His limpid eyes gazed candidly into Ken's. "I wanted you, and I've got you. Don't make me show what we can do if you disobey us."
Sensual and malevolent, he was more abominable at that moment than any person Ken had ever met.
"Leta has been given an ultimatum," Tom said, his fingers digging into Ken's throat while three of the men forced his back to the wall. "We caught her alone at a motel outside of town yesterday evening. But whippins is not enough for what she's done. Either she comes to the cottage tonight for more punishment, or Mother gets a rude surprise. I don't like the things Marcie told me about you two. I won't be spat at behind my back. Not by you or Leta or anybody."
Ken remembered something Marcie had said of Tom more than once, about his being a Nazi. The description was apt. Ken judged him to be as brilliant and ruthless a male as Oakton could offer. Alpha Love was his fatherland, over which he had gained mastery by treachery and sheer force of will.
Ken had decided since Saturday night that Tom's was a paranoiac personality. He had a pathological obsession for the "rules" of the clique. Except for the trial dates which served to ensnare an irresolute pledge, and the initiation, empty "unanimous" votes, and a vow of absolute obedience to the commands of the leader, the fraternity limped along from one month to the next. It was dependent on Tom's whims.
Because his prime goal was to remain a popular dictator, he catered always to the majority. He was highly intelligent, the most inventive in vice and cruelty of any member. Most of them were well contented to be his servants. In his thirst for power he had long since voided whatever constitution they might have had in the beginning.
"Didn't anybody ever like you as a child, other than your father?" Ken said, too upset to be cautious, while Delia wept and the janitors stood by the door. Beside Delia, Marcie glowered at Ken.
"You fear everyone, don't you, Tom? You want to constantly prove your superiority. Is that why Alpha Love has such a fascination? You must hate yourself, to want to hurt people so badly simply because your father failed you," Ken continued.
For a moment Tom blinked as if Ken had struck him. He let go of Ken's throat. His face crimsoned.
"You'll pay," he said, his gaze glittering. "We're going to have a house cleaning of everyone who's been showing insubordination. I'm starting with Delia. Then tonight it'll be Dorothy and Leta's turn. And you can count yourself in. What my employees are going to do to this slut is nothing to what you three are in for tonight. I was going to be lenient with you, but not now."
"Go to hell," Ken said. "I won't do your bidding. I'll find a way to... " Flinging up his fist with unexpected swiftness, Tom hit Ken as hard as he could. Ken slammed against the wall. The three men were barely able to restrain him. Her head down, Delia shook in silent misery.
Marcie scowled as Tom walked away toward the door.
"Okay," he said stiffly. "Cream him." The janitors began unfastening their belts. "No, you two are for Delia," he said, grinning. "Take that room in the back."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"Why did you have to anger him?" Marcie asked, her features set in disgust. "You're a fool, Ken Jackson. He's already so furious with Delia and Leta that he can't see straight! Listen, as your friend... "
"You're not my friend," Ken said bitterly. "You're nobody's friend."
The night had come on quickly, and they were on the darkened front porch of Ken's home. He stood in the doorway, blocking Marcie's entrance into the house. Despite his vehement denials that the girl's effort at companionship was welcome, Marcie had insisted on accompanying him from school after the male Lovers whipped him.
Ken was hopeful Leta would telephone this evening. Or send word where he could meet her. He did not want Marcie present, whatever occurred.
Ken realized he would be at the crest of his dilemma within the next few hours. He could not postpone his escape from Alpha Love. There would soon be more entanglements, more savagery, more intimidating photographs.
"Don't refuse to go to the meeting tonight when Tom comes for you," Marcie said grimly, guessing his thoughts. "If you do you'll wish you hadn't. This is going to be a tremendous one. He wouldn't wait till the weekend. He wants blood. I give up on you."
She pitched a stray lock of hair back from her brow with a toss of her head. Heels clicking, she disappeared down the steps.
"Do you understand yet why he turned his school guards on Delia?" her voice said curtly from the walk, as if to an imbecile incapable of mental judgement. "Remember what she said to us at the lake house? About how he was going to marry her? The stupid thing is pregnant. She is flabbergasted by Tom's attitude. She's so much in love with him she was certain his heart would melt when she told him how careful she's been to see that he's the father. She's waited for weeks to spring the news. Her brains are as addled as yours and Leta's."
Harlana Stringer's car pulled into her driveway. The lights were extinguished, and Harlana got out and entered the Stringer house. A young man was with her; they heard his drunken voice as the door shut.
"Do you wish she and that Casper hag were still all you had available to you?" Marcie said sneeringly. "They were really a comfort, weren't they?"
"Keep away from now on," Ken said with steely quietness. He fumbled for the door knob. "I've been pushed too far. I can't take any more of this."
Marcie laughed. He heard her spit on the ground in mockery.
She came back up the steps, till he could see her dimly.
"I think I'll tell you something, darling, and just show you how much more you can take if you have to." Her long lashes drew together in malice. "Something Tom has known for months. No wonder he intends to efface you from the earth! You're a symbol of everything he abhors. He only told me the secret today, and not even Leta knows the truth yet, though subconsciously, at least, she must've begun to suspect it. That detective Tom hired. You fool, haven't you guessed by this time who your mother went to bed with when she lived here in Oakton? Your dear daddy had a hundred cheap pigs like her scattered in this town. It seems, though, that you inherited more of his looks and the Parks ailment than Tom or Leta or any of his other bast... "
Ken did not intend to hit Marcie. He only wanted to silence her, to stop a searing revelation that had been locked away inside his own brain for the past several days. The inescapable, hereditary truth behind his sickness was too blinding to absorb. He had fearfully refused to look at the suspicion, to acknowledge its festering. Whoever his father might be, Ken had always pictured him as an uncomplicated, laboring, healthy minded man from his mother's social strata. But though he had resisted admitting even to himself the thought was present, Leta's statements about her family had nudged him mentally toward the unspeakable possibility that a girl from Elkhorn had somehow entangled herself with the Parks of Meadowbrook, as her son was to do years later.
So Ken lashed out to silence Marcie, where she stood on the steps abusing him and confirming a suspicion he had denied because it must strip him of any hope. He struck her with the force of the self-dread built up in a lifetime, struck her as if she were all the people in Elkhorn and in Oakton who had sneered at him and had despised him, and had used his twin misfortunes of bastardy and sexual irregularity for their own purposes.
Marcie did not have time to defend herself, or to make an outcry. The blow knocked her backwards, off the steps. She fell to the buckled concrete walk with scarcely a sound. When her head hit the concrete, there was a grisly crunching noise that sent icy spears through Ken's veins.
He knew she was dead before his groping hands told him her neck was broken.
For several minutes Ken was incapable of action. He knelt in darkness beside the body of the girl he had loved briefly, not a muscle moving, his brain repeating the predictions made about him since he was thirteen: that some day he would commit murder. That he had done so without sexual violence made no difference. The thing lying in wait for him so many years was accomplished.
At last he stirred. Moving with the false calm produced by shock, he dragged Marcie's limp body under the porch. Carefully he arranged the corpse until it was hidden behind the inky steps from which he had hurled her. Night blanketed his movements.
"Just a little while," he muttered weakly as he left her there. "I need only a little while to put an end to it now."
Ken had an unshakable sensation that everything this evening had happened to him before. That he had known and expected these hours from the beginning of life. After he had hidden the body he felt no emotion other than a terrible sadness, and a certainty that he could not escape the climax stored up for him.
Shutting the door numbly he went through the middle of the house into the lighted spotless kitchen. His grandmother was there, limping about as she washed supper dishes.
An odor of corn bread lingered in the room.
The gray head glanced up as Ken entered.
"Sonny," Mrs. Jackson said, surprised by his paleness, "you're very late. Your grandfather has already eaten, and gone to the store for tobacco. How are you, dear? You didn't feel ill again today, did you?"
Standing by the tile-clad kitchen cabinet she stared at Ken, anxiously.
"Mama," he said, sitting down in a chair tiredly, "I have something to... There's something... "
He stared at the blue linoleum of the floor, unable to gaze into his grandmother's questioning eyes.
"Mama," he began again, haltingly, "if something happens to me, try to understand. Don't let it hurt you so badly again. You can weather it if you'll lean on Papa and try to see how it couldn't be avoided. Sometimes, no matter how we try to protect people, we can't. It's not in our nature, or in the cards we were dealt when we were born. If you love me don't let me be the cause... "
He stopped once more, slowing down by degrees, like a handcranked phonograph. He would not be able to tell her any of it. No one could say why fate had played such an unpredictable and cruel joke.
"Sonny," his grandmother said, frightened, "Sonny, what have you done?"
She came over to Ken. Placing her palm under his chin she lowered her twisted face to his.
"What is it? What's wrong?"
Ken looked aside. His tongue refused to move. He would not even be able to speak the name of his father, the name, apparently, his mother also had refused to divulge to her.
He was lightheaded. It was as if he were on a roller coaster, plunging into endless blackness.
"I love you," he said. "Remember that, and remember what I'm going to do will be the best thing for both of us in the long run. We both need all our courage now."
The shrill cry of the telephone in the living room caused him to start tensely.
"That's for me," he said. "Leta Parks said she'd ring this evening."
He got up from the chair and went slowly into the living room. His legs were like match sticks under him. His hand trembled as he picked the receiver from its cradle.
When he heard the screaming voice on the other end of the line, his hand became steady. He switched a lamp on.
"You illegitimate scum!"
Tom Parks was shrieking. He had not waited to ask if it were Ken who had answered.
"We've caught Leta in the boathouse! You didn't think of that, did you? You'll come to the party tonight. Mister, it will be absolute hell!"
Ken pulled the receiver from his ear and stared at it. As he hung up, his hand began to tremble more than when he had lifted the receiver. He sat down at the desk and with much difficulty wrote out a long and lucid note. He carried the paper into a bedroom and put it under his grandfather's pillow.
Then Ken returned to the kitchen to say good-bye to his grandmother. A peaceful and affectionate farewell he knew she would not understand, but one which would comfort her and cushion the shock later.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"You drive from here on, James," Tom said harshly, when they were out of Oakton and across the county line, heading toward the lake house. "And let Polly up here with you."
The four of them, Ken, Polly Foster, Tom, and James Ortiz, were alone in Tom's convertible as it sped onward, the tires humming against the asphalt of the highway. The top was up,' and the windows were raised. The heater under the dashboard buzzed, creating a warm island of air moving through the winds of an increasingly chilly evening.
Polly was sitting beside Ken in the rear seat. She grabbed his shoulder as Tom spoke.
"What are you going to do to them, Tom?" Polly said, apprehensively. "Can't you wait about him till we get there? It'll just be a few more minutes."
Tom jammed his foot on the brake, the tires skidding as the car lurched and jolted to a stop. In the front seat James Ortiz had to brace his forearm on the windshield to keep from being thrown into it.
"I don't know what I'll do to her, once we're out there," Tom said in fury. "But I know what I'm going to do to him." He came over into the seat with them. "Get out of here, Polly."
"Idiot," Polly hissed at Ken. "You were warned."
Polly and James were scared. They had seen their volatile leader angry before, but never to such a wild extent. He was a madman this evening. They could not be sure some minor infraction of his commands would not bring his wrath down upon their heads.
"Tom," Polly said, summoning her courage, "I don't think Ken is in as deep as you've put him. I don't believe he knew what Leta had decided to do. He's... "
A backhanded blow from Tom drove her out of the car. Meekly, holding her cheek where he had struck her, Polly went around and got into the front seat with James.
She nudged James, and he pressed upon the accelerator. They sped on. Polly kept her eyes directed ahead.
"I don't know what's happened," Ken said soberly. "What has Leta done?"
After the ambiguous telephone call he had realized there was no alternative to his presence at the meeting tonight. Leta was a captive, and he intended to save her from Alpha Love before the discovery of Marcie's body by the police made it impossible. Whatever Leta had been doing in the boathouse, he knew it pertained somehow to their conversation of Sunday afternoon.
"You don't know she found the films?" Tom said, feigning remorse that he had misjudged Ken. "Leta or Dorothy didn't send you a message today, did they? Hell!"
This was the first information Ken had received as to the exact nature of Leta's crime. He had not known Dorothy Lechester was also implicated. Until this instant Tom had not spoken to him since he entered the automobile.
"I'd swear Ken's ignorant of the thing, Tom," Polly said hesitantly.
"Oh?" Tom pulled Ken forward, digging fingers into his neck. "After what she said to him at Marcie's house?"
That evening when he came to pick up Ken, Tom had been charming to Mrs. Jackson. As the two youths went down the dark steps together, above Marcie' hidden corpse, the old lady had stood weeping in the living-room door. Upset by her grandson's solemn kiss upon her cheek she had sensed vaguely that he did not expect to return.
"If you're going to knock him around before we get there," James Ortiz said nervously, slackening the speed of the car to give his master more time, "you'd better hurry with it, Tom. I'm nearly to the turnoff."
Ken jerked loose of Tom, slamming him against the seat.
"Keep your hands off me! You don't think you can do anything without your boys to hold me, do you? Get this straight, too: I'm not your father, come back for you to punish. You can't get at him through me with your hate. You and I are half brothers, and that's all we are to each other."
Tom blinked rapidly, staring at Ken a long moment without motion. Tom's face blanched.
"You know?"
"Half brother!" Polly turned to Tom in astonishment. "You mean your damn nutsy family is responsible for him, too?"
"Don't speak of my father like that!"
Polly screamed as Tom slapped her. He twisted a breast, and the sound of her voice was lost somewhere in her throat. He hit her with his fists until she was semiconscious. Ken lunged at Tom, dragging him back from the moaning girl. He pinned Tom's arms to his sides. Tom cursed him insanely.
An automobile passed them, the headlights glaring.
"That looks like Bill and Brad," James said, when the other vehicle swung into the dirt road ahead of them. "They were to pick up Marcie and Dorothy, weren't they?"
James pulled the car off onto the rutted and bumpy lane. Trees and bushes reached out for them on either side of the ditches. They moved slowly through a tunnel of evergreens that was checkered with the bare branches of oaks and hickories.
The subdued lights of the cottage loomed before them. James applied the brake and guided the car in under the grove of oaks west of the house. The inevitable half-dozen expensive automobiles were parked there. He stopped the convertible beside the car which had arrived in front of them moments earlier.
"Hi," Brad Stuart said, rolling down his window cheerfully. "We must be the last to get here. Why are you driving, James? I thought you were the rumble seat type."
"Tom is, tonight."
James Ortiz permitted himself the luxury of a grimace. He jerked a thumb backwards and got out of the car quickly.
"With the sex fiend?" The athlete was laughing. He stretched languidly. "We've got hours, but these guys have to degrade the public highway."
Bill Davis defended his own actions from the gray dimness of Brad's car: "Dorothy got me mad. She scratched me when I hit her."
Expressionless, Ken opened a back door of the convertible and released Tom. He pushed him outside. Polly had her head pillowed on her arms.
"Stop bawling," Tom said to her contemptuously.
When Polly did not speak he pulled her head up by grasping her hair and giving it a jerk. She did not resist. He pulled her out of the car.
"Come on, Ken," James Ortiz said, brusque and unaffected. "You give us any trouble, and Leta will take the punishment for both of you." The wind struck Ken with the force of a physical blow. He began to shiver, more with emotion than with the cold.
"Marcie wasn't home when we came by," Bill Davis said to Tom, stepping from the other car. "She must've ridden with some others of the gang. But we got Dorothy okay. She claims Ken didn't know what Leta was up to. You suppose she's telling the truth?"
Bill's brown hair was combed neatly, and he had on a warm turtle-neck sweater that fitted with snug attractiveness across his broad chest. With the exception of his shoes and socks, he was wearing nothing else. He reached into the back seat and dragged out a crumpled bundle, which he promptly threw to the ground.
In the semidarkness produced by the lights of the cottage and the two automobiles, Ken did not realize the bundle was Dorothy Lechester until he saw the girl's streaming platinum tresses.
"Ken didn't know," the millionaire's daughter said, sobbing. "It was just Leta and me. Don't you idiots see she's in love with him? That's where she got her nerve."
Dressed in only a torn slip the young woman retained a dignity that her present condition could not obliterate. Her eyes were swollen by tears, but she was glaring at Tom with a hatred all the fierier for having at its core a former love.
It touched Ken that Dorothy was trying to protect him from the inevitable disaster. Of the fraternity members Dorothy Lechester had been among those who were the least friendly in the past. He barely knew her, but he saw she would have saved him if she could.
"You lying slut. It's the three of you," Tom said to Dorothy wrathfully. "You plotted together, you'll be punished together."
He was slightly calmer than before. Ken's defiance of him in the automobile had drained the wildness from Tom somewhat. He walked quietly over to Dorothy. He kicked her in the stomach. She gasped and doubled up.
"Dorothy," Ken said, kneeling beside her, holding her forehead while she gagged, "what's happened? Where is Leta? Have they hurt her?"
"Not half so much as we're going to," Brad Stuart chuckled. "Nobody's ever tried to do to Alpha Love what you three have."
He and James pulled Ken away from Dorothy.
"They tricked us," Dorothy said hoarsely, swaying on her knees. "Tom wanted to see how far Leta would go, after the talk you and she had at Marcie's. When he dropped a hint to me yesterday about some removable boards in the ceiling of the boat-house, I thought it was an accident. I got word to Leta today, and she found the pictures before they jumped her. They've kept her a prisoner since... "
She broke off in a cry as Tom struck her across the back with a stick he had picked from the ground. Bill Davis guffawed, slapping his white thigh applaudingly. Polly Foster moved off up the graveled path toward the cottage.
Hearing the noises outside, several of the members were coming upon the porch. They looked curiously toward the automobiles. The light from the door revealed that most of them were braving the wind in their underwear.
Fully dressed, Delia Jenkins stood on the steps in an attitude of dejection. Obviously she had not recovered from her shock of the afternoon. Ken could not make out Leta's form among the group of people.
"What was Leta going to do with our films if she got them?" James Ortiz asked Dorothy mockingly. "Add them to her private collection?"
Tom hit Dorothy with the stick again, knocking her against the fender of Brad's automobile. She shuddered and groaned, but made no outcry. Her hair obscured her face. They could not judge whether or not she was weeping.
"With the pictures in their possession they could wreck Alpha Love," Tom said, rabid with anger. "Any chicken blabbermouth who wants out would have left us. Leta would always be able to publicize those films of us if we tried to force them back in. They'd have had a sword over us constantly. That's what these traitors would have done to the fraternity."
"I wanted to burn them," Dorothy said, her head bowed. "That's what I've wanted for a year, Tom. Just to burn the slimy stuff so you wouldn't have anything on me. That's it. Just to get out safely."
"You'll never leave us," he said. "I'll never let any of you traitors go. The fraternity... "
Suddenly, at the exact moment he saw Leta framed in the light of the cottage door, Ken had broken away from James and Brad. He raced up the path and fell upon the crowd on the porch before they realized he was among them. Using his muscular body like a battering-ram, he fought toward Leta.
Girls shrieked as he plowed through them. Men cursed and pushed forward, their fists flailing. A girl fell sprawling from the porch, dragging Mike Grant with her. Two undistinguishable persons in the shadows went down. They crashed into Kitty Fox, who tumbled backwards, screaming.
"My God!" Bill Davis said. "How did Leta get loose?"
CHAPTER TWENTY
Using a porch chair as a weapon, Ken beat off the attackers. As he and Leta cleared the steps Brad Stuart dived at him from the side. Ken cracked the man across the head with such ferocity that Brad yelped and went limp, lying upon the steps in a stupor.
The pursuing people were sobered by this evidence that Ken would kill. They fell back warily, watching for an opportunity to rush him. Attempting to encircle him they blocked off all avenues of escape, except that offered by the path to the automobiles. As he and Leta dashed toward her, Polly Foster ran out of the path, wanting no part of the calamity that Brad Stuart had brought upon himself.
Without warning, Delia Jenkins darted from the crowd and joined Leta and Ken. She handed him a large bread knife which she seemed to produce from nowhere. They came down the path swiftly, followed at a cautious distance by those of the group who were still on their feet.
"Delia untied her, Tom!" Hal Carson shouted ahead.
The short, silken hair formed a dark "T" on Hal's chest. He was leading the pack. A gust of wind blew from the direction of the lake, ruffling Tom's wavy locks as he stepped away from Dorothy.
"That pregnant bitch. I'll abort her, myself." He beckoned to Bill Davis. "Grab him, Bill. He won't use the knife. He hasn't the guts."
Ken asked himself if the knife could possibly buy Leta time to escape in an automobile. He looked at Tom closely, seeing a facet of his half brother's character that had not been fully revealed before. Tom was afraid of Ken and the knife, and incredulous that Leta had managed to shed her bonds. He motioned hastily to Bill, urging him forward.
"Let us go, Bill," Leta said grimly, as she and Delia edged toward the nearest car. "Don't make Ken slice you."
Seizing the initiative Bill Davis started toward Leta while Ken was being distracted by Tom. As Bill passed her at the fender, Dorothy Lechester brought her fist up from the ground with all the strength at her command. She plunged it into his naked groin, and for a second the youth gaped in disbelief, frozen as though by an electrical impulse. He howled, clutching himself as he pitched upon the dirt.
"Get Ken!" Tom was shouting frantically, to no one, and to everybody. "Get him, get him!"
James Ortiz thrust Dorothy aside and made a lunge at the knife. Ken gave him a long slash on the arm. James drew away silently, without further effort at violence. He stumbled through the small mob, none of whom moved to help him. He walked about purposelessly, staring at the welling blood in amazement.
Intimidated by Ken's fierceness the crowd hung back.
"Cowards!" Tom yelled at them. "You lousy cowards, get him! Are you going to let him ruin us?"
"You get him," Polly Foster said, astoundingly. She had walked up on the other side of the cars. "You're the leader, aren't you?"
"Bitch!" Tom was beside himself with passion. "Don't you dare... " From the corner of his eye he saw Ken coming for him, the knife uplifted.
Tom attempted to scramble into the convertible. Jumping over Bill Davis, who was vomiting on his hands and knees, Ken grabbed Tom from behind. He tripped him, and Tom fell to the ground on his back.
Ken pinned him to the earth. He sat down on Tom's stomach quickly, the knife menacing the hollow of his throat.
"Get him off!" The authoritative voice was as shrill as a girl's. "Somebody help me!"
The knot of people surged closer by no more than a couple of yards. They wore stunned, uneasy expressions. The upset was so unexpected, so far from anything that had occurred during the life of Alpha Love, that they were made helpless by the sheer grotesqueness of the thing.
Pushed by his friends, Hal Carson took an experimental step beyond them.
"I wouldn't do that," Ken said bluntly. The tip of the knife dented the skin of Tom's throat. "I want to kill him too badly. I've already killed Marcie tonight; I'm done for, no matter what I do. So don't tempt me."
"Keep away, you idiots," Tom said, fearfully changing his mind as the knife nicked him. "He doesn't know what he's doing."
He lay motionless, glaring up at Ken with dilated eyes. His mouth was twitching, and his olive complexion was bleached of color. His left shoulder rested in a pool of Bill Davis's vomit. He looked at Ken like a man who finds himself under the blade of a maniac.
"I'm not lying," Ken said, curt. "I didn't intend to kill her, but it happened, anyway. It had to happen. It had to be some luckless woman, sooner or later."
Leta aided Dorothy in rising, and they ran and got between Ken and the convertible. If the mob bolstered up its nerve eventually and made an assault on the three of them, they would not surrender meekly. In her hand Leta was holding a leg of the shattered porch chair, which Ken had dropped during the skirmish with James. Dorothy clutched the stick Tom had been using on her.
Ken saw there would be more than three to fight the crowd. Delia was solemnly following Leta. From somewhere in her clothing she extracted another knife, this one smaller than the first. Ken could not imagine how the girl had kept the objects concealed.
"I was going to knife him," Delia said. "He promised he'd marry me. He promised! If Leta hadn't needed me before he got here, I'd have knifed him for sure."
She stood staring down at Tom in sorrowful, vengeful contemplation.
The girl leaned dully against the car, teetering on the edge of hysteria. On the steps of the porch Brad Stuart was getting groggily to his feet. He had lost his sense of direction, and was heading into the cottage when Kitty Fox said something to him, pointing toward the cluster of people at the automobiles. She and Brad came down the path slowly. They were the last persons to leave the porch.
Ken glanced around, adding up the odds against three girls and one man if the members should concert a rush upon them, letting Tom take his chances with the knife. The situation was only a trifle less overwhelming than it had been.
James Ortiz was wrapping his arm in a strip of cloth he had taken from the glove compartment of an automobile, and Bill remained on the ground. This pair was plainly in no mood to go into combat once more in behalf of their master.
Polly Foster did not seem anxious to defend him, either, but several persons remained.
"Ken," Leta whispered, sinking to her knees, "did you really kill Marcie? You're not just saying that? You really did it?"
Ken put his hand on her back. She winced at his touch.
Her blouse had been all but torn from her, and red wales crisscrossed the smooth flesh. She had been beaten with leather straps until the whole area was a shower of bruises. On her breasts several inflamed dots showed the places where she had been burned with cigarettes. Dried blood was caked along the hairline of her forehead.
"I did it," he said flatly.
He put his free arm about her waist.
"Now that I'm beyond hope I'm actually relieved," he continued. "I'm sorry for her, but I've known for years I'd come to this, someday."
She was near tears.
"I can't shield my grandmother any longer," Ken said, "any more than you can your mother, Leta. Maybe it will turn out that they'll have more strength when the chips are down than we've thought. Mama suspects something is very wrong. That will soften the blow about what I've done, and what I am. All of it is in the lap of the gods from tonight on."
His statement affected Leta deeply. She began to weep, and Ken started to tell her of the kinship between them, then decided the story would serve no good purpose. He did not know how much Leta knew or guessed of the matter, but it was unimportant now. Their ways would diverge shortly, and forever.
"My grandfather will have called the police by this time," he said, pressing the knife downward a bit when Tom stirred. "They'll be out here soon and everything will be ended. By then, thank God, I won't have to worry about myself any more."
"Tom," a girl yelled from the crowd, "what are we to do? You've got to do something. " His loyal disciples gazed restlessly at their leader, uncertain what course he wished them to take. Such a bizarre disturbance had never arisen among them during the entire period of the fraternity's existence. It had not occurred to them that the films would not guarantee their safety.
They were disappointed in Tom, and beginning to become scared. He was the master, the decision maker, the one person upon whose inventiveness and wisdom they relied without hesitation. In their eyes he had no right to be lying in the dust.
"We'll murder them, Tom," Hal Carson said, his tone leaving no doubt he meant to be taken literally. "Give us the command."
"Shut up!" Tom was squaking in dismay. "Can't you see he's out of his head? Wait a minute. Let me think!"
He could not grasp the implications of Ken's abrupt fatalism.
Taking his arm from about Leta's waist, Ken slapped Tom disdainfully. The crowd gave a sigh of indignation, hardly able to credit the affront. Tom whimpered and closed his eyes.
"We'll get you," Mike Grant said, pushing toward the front. "We'll get you all. We'll stay here the night if we have to."
A roar of assent went up from the mob.
"Can't you see Alpha Love is finished?" Ken said. "My grandfather knows. I left a note explaining everything."
A rustle of nervousness swept the people. They were growing more confused, less able to take aggressive action. A number of them glanced involuntarily toward the lane that would bring the automobiles if any intruders of the law trespassed upon their sanctuary. They shifted and milled, some of the more timid persons edging toward the rear.
"The pictures, Ken. We have to burn the boathouse! We can save our families that major portion of the shame."
Leta was hissing the syllables at him. She tossed the chair leg aside. The fight was going out of the crowd. They were mumbling together, unsure what to do next. The majority paid no attention to Tom.
"I'll burn them in a few minutes," Ken said, composed. "When I see the car lights."
He smiled reassuringly at her. Dorothy and Delia shrugged in gloom, accepting the inevitable.
"Try to talk to my grandparents when you can," he said, holding Leta with his eyes.
"You'll understand everything by then. Try to explain to Mama how it was with me. Don't you see, Leta? If they lock me away for the rest of my life, the flame is the only part of me that won't be caged. I'd have to suffer with it, alone, for perhaps fifty years. I could not stand that. Have you ever thought what a terrible, insane hell your father must live in, shut up so many years in that institution? How much finer it would be for him, and for those who love him, if he had not let himself be barred up inside that living death."
Ken gazed steadily at her. He felt very calm inside. Peaceful and tired. He sighed, wanting nothing so much as to lie down and rest.
"Help me, somebody," Tom cried to his frightened and inattentive subjects. "When the sheriff comes we'll say... " He was interrupted by a scream from Kitty Fox. Kitty gestured at the lane. All eyes swung in that direction, where in the distance a long glow was blooming through the tunnel of trees.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The mob stood paralyzed, the discovery robbing them of their senses. Frozen in varying poses of shock, they were like beautiful, semi-nude statues. The night opened up about them as the shine among the trees grew brighter.
Ken lifted the knife from Tom's throat and stood up. He threw the knife under the convertible. He grabbed Leta's arm to prevent her running away.
"No," he said grimly. "You've got to face up to this thing once and for all. There can be a new life for you later, Leta. What I intend to do will help assure it for you. My birthmark doomed me from the start, but if you have courage, you can make a decent life yet."
His flawless countenance pale and drawn Tom began to cry softly. He made no attempt to get up from the ground. He flung himself over on his stomach, concealing his working features with his arms.
"My father," he said indistinctly. "My poor father."
Pushing at the dirt with his elbows he spoke no more. His body was shaken by the force of his offensive crying.
"It's too late, Tom," Leta said, frowning down at him almost pityingly. "You can't escape justice by becoming human at last. We're in another county over here. Mother's money can't handle this for you. You'll not get out of this scandal because you're a Parks from Oakton. Meadowbrook cuts no swath here."
As though the realization of this fact was too much to endure at that instant, the people broke from their petrified state. A few of them rushed toward the cottage. Others ran for the darkness. In their consternation none of them gave Tom a second glance. Dorothy and Delia held to each other tightly.
"The cars!"
Mike Grant was shouting with sudden inspiration. He loped toward his automobile in panic.
"The old logging trail. Loggers used to get to the highway by it!"
He did not look about to see if his suggestion was being heeded by his friends. Piling into the car with a trio of Meadowbrook girls, Hal started the engine and backed the vehicle away toward the back of the house. Sand and twigs spewed into the air when they blasted away. The front bumper narrowly missed Kitty Fox as she hurried to another car.
"Your clothes," Polly Foster called indecisively, standing in the path and watching the flow of people turn from the cottage and trees, toward the automobiles. "You can't leave without your... "
"To hell with clothes!"
Brad Stuart took her wrist and jerked her roughly down the trail. He motioned at the rapidly approaching headlights. Polly did not require any further urging.
The switch keys to only three of the cars were readily available. The other automobiles were being left parked under the trees. Hurtling themselves into the back seat of the last of the three after it had already begun to move, Brad and Polly joined the general exodus.
In taking flight the Lovers were giving no thought to anything except the escape at the moment. The threat of being apprehended and disgraced. It was inevitable that their identities would be uncovered by the lawmen within the space of a few minutes.
"The fools," James Ortiz said to Bill Davis caustically, as the third vehicle streaked behind the house.
James was pushing his wounded arm up and down. He stared at the bandage, shaking his head. The cloth was soaked with blood.
"That trail has been impossible for years."
Like Tom and Bill, James was eerily indifferent to the nearing lights. Too much had gone wrong too quickly. He was blocking Alpha Love's collapse from his mind.
He leaned against the fender of Tom's car with little display of emotion. At his feet Bill Davis rocked in pain and self-pity. Beyond them Tom still lay sobbing in the dirt.
"Good-bye, Leta," Ken said quietly, while two automobiles were pulling in among the trees. "I'm going to burn the pictures in the boathouse."
Leta could not look up.
"Yes," she whispered, her voice remote and infinitely sad. "You're braver, and better, than any of us."
Ken realized all at once how brisk the wind was. Above him the bare branches of the oaks were quivering in the gusts. Delia and Dorothy began to cry as the cars stopped a short distance away. The glare of the headlights swept through the grove, wavering over them like the gigantic, relentless stream of an ocean beacon.
Doors slammed. Ken could hear the exclaiming voices of men as he ran down the shore through the crackling weeds, toward the shadowy boathouse. He felt somehow as if he were floating, as if he were on his way to a welcome assignation arranged for him by his parents long ago. He pulled matches from his pocket, breaking off the stems of dry weeds as he hurried along.
By the time he entered a door and latched it behind him, he was carrying a torch of flaming weeds in his hand. The boards of the boathouse were old; the fire sprang greedily up them.
Within minutes Ken had surrounded himself with the last walls of safety and honor left him. Later he heard voices shouting outside, and a banging of doors, but he did not respond.
The hot yellow tongues that licked at his clothing were not half so merciless as the sexual fire he had known so long. He could feel it exploding in the pit of his stomach, gaining, giving small, frenzied leaps, fighting the final extinguishing. Ken swayed, for the first time in his life subduing the inner flame with ease.
It died, and he fell to his knees, unaware of the heat around him. He was smiling restfully, at peace and free of self-hate at last, when the roof caved in.
