Eighteen years ago, a boy was bound to a bed by his wrists and ankles. To his right, on an adjacent bed, lay a woman. He could not look at her directly, but a dresser mirror several yards from his feet gave him a reflected view of her cunt. Her legs were spread and her skirt was bunched up above her hips. The shaggy jowls were peeled back so that he could see the ruffled edges of the inner lips. These reminded him of a picture of a giant clam, which he had seen in a book called South Sea Lore. They were slightly parted at the bottom, and bright coral in color. The chamber beyond the opening was hollow and pitch-dark, except for a bright node of flesh that resembled an eye or a pearl or a tongue. All this was raw and moist, and bracketed by two curved rows of dense black curls, shaped like fangs, or ice tongs, connected at the top by a hump-backed crossbar of even thicker hair. There were also two little patches of fuzz on the insides of her buttocks, just below her cunt; these were not connected to the tongs and seemed out of place to the boy.
There was at least one other person in the room; probably more, but his memory of them is muddled. Sometimes he could make out bits of conversation, like, How long till it takes effect? and How much longer, Claude? and Take it easy, Trudy; it won't be long now, and Are you sure he won't know me? But their words were growing less and less distinct.
Beside the dresser, near one corner of the room, there was a crack in the wall. Inside the crack it was very dark, and the only thing that kept the darkness from flowing out into the room was the yellow light from the lamp on the dresser. Beside the lamp, a cat was washing herself. She washed her face and her belly and her genitals and her asshole, and then jumped off the dresser and into the crack. The boy thought she had gone on into the wall, until she looked back at him and he saw her eyes glowing red; but then she turned away and disappeared.
He was surprised at how easily his hands and feet slipped out of the ropes. He walked over to the dresser and took a gun from the top drawer. No one seemed to notice. He hesitated for a moment, and then followed the cat into the crack. The darkness swept over him like a warm wind...
CHAPTER ONE
Once in the street, he had no trouble deciding which direction to take, even though the surroundings were unfamiliar to him. The street was dingy and gloomy, and there was no sign of life. There was no way of telling whether it was night or day, because the sky was invisible, but it may have been near dawn. There were a lot of garbage cans along the sidewalk, and from time to time he would pass an obscenity scrawled on a wall in whitewash or chalk. The gutters were littered with the usual debris--cigarette butts, broken wine bottles, automobile parts, bouquets of dead flowers and the like. I said there was no sign of life, but the boy had the feeling a large crowd had recently passed through, and that he was somehow being carried along in its wake. A less pronounced sensation was that he was climbing, moving along a very slight incline. This was imperceptible to the eye, and noticeable only by a certain strain in his knees and at the backs of his legs, but it was intensified by the occasional flights of stairs which elevated the pavement like some of the streets depicted in Across Europe by Bicycle, except that there were no goats. If there had been goats, he would have heard their bells. The only sound here was the muted surge of running water under the street.
At the top of one of the flights of stairs he saw a beautiful woman with long black hair. She wore high heels, and a white satin sheath which gripped her flaring hips and moonlike buttocks like thin rubber. She was walking at a slow, sensual pace, swinging her ass from side to side. He could have overtaken her easily, yet he hung back. He grew nervous, and his step faltered. The woman did not look back.
Soon the boy came to a kind of pavilion built on the sidewalk. It abutted a soot-covered wall without windows--a warehouse, perhaps--and over its entrance was a sign that said JESUS SAVES. He went in and saw his friend Cory, whom he had not seen since leaving the old neighborhood several years ago. Cory was shooting pool, running the balls off the table with careless confidence, never a miss. Beside the table sat Julie, a girl the boy had dated a few times last year. She wore a low-necked blouse that showed the crease between her big tits, and she sat on the stool with her legs slightly parted, showing off the black net panties under her skirt. She had teased blonde hair and big brown eyes. The boy went to get a cue stick from a garbage can by the door, but instead lifted a fishing rod from a parked car. It was a deep sea rig, with a big black and chrome reel and a long butt, bound in tarred cod line.
When Cory saw him, he said, "Hey, what's happ'nin', Jack?" in an offhand manner as though he weren't at all surprised to see the boy. He balanced his cigarette on the edge of a corner locket and chalked his tip, ignoring the boy's silence. After he had made his shot, he took a drag off the butt and sighted along his stick, pointing it directly at Julie's pussy. "You never did get any of that, did you, Jack?"
The girl laughed and hugged herself, almost squeezing her tits out the top of her blouse. She wore a black net bra to match her panties, but it only covered the lower halves if her breasts. The boy remembered that she had large, almond-colored nipples, although he had only seen them once. That was when she'd pulled her bathing suit down one day to show him how sunburned she was. "Let me see the rest," he'd said, tugging at the bottom part of her suit. Julie had squealed and run into the water. Later she said he would show him, but not there, with all the people around. "Let's take a walk up the beach." But he said no, he didn't have time, he had to pick up his mother from work. "You want to go to the movie tonight?" he asked. "I guess," she said. "Good. You can show me then." But his mother wouldn't let him have the car that night, and the text time he took Julie out, she wouldn't even let him open her blouse. She let him feel her tits while he kissed her, as long as he kept his hands outside of her clothing. When he put his hand under her skirt, she clamped it between her thighs and told him to stop, but when he stopped she became even more irritable and called him a humiliating name. The next time he'd asked her for a date, she said she already had one, and he'd never gone out with her again. Now, as she bent over the table to take her shot, he saw hat her tits had grown since then. The nipples, however, were still the same color--or at least the left one was; the right one was flattened against the felt so that he couldn't quite see it.
"Sure I did," he told Cory in an undertone. "What do you think?"
"Fine piece of tail, ain't she?" Cory said through a cloud of smoke.
"Oh shit!" said Julie as she missed her shot.
Cory said, "Three ball." He leaned over the table and stroked the cue ball in an offhand manner, light as a feather, straightening up and bringing the stick over his head in a horizontal position. The cue ball rolled lazily up the felt in along curve, slow as molasses, toward the three ball lying dead against the head rail.
This pool hall, as I said, was a sort of pavilion built on the sidewalk. Its peaked roof was supported by a number of square white concrete columns smeared with grease and decorated with graffiti. The front and two sides were open, the back closed off by the sooty brick wall of the warehouse. Through the gloom of dust and debris at the far end of the enclosure came an old woman in a tailored suit and spotless white shoes. The boy was suddenly conscious of his shabby, blood-stained clothing. He turned aside to see Cory pissing on the brick wall. The cue ball was still creeping along on the table, carefully threading its way through the other balls.
"Excuse me," said the old woman, tapping the boy on the shoulder with one finger and quickly withdrawing it as though she bad received a mild electric shock, or had, with apprehension, touched a small, slimy creature of some sort. The boy turned, and the woman smiled down at him. She smiled with her mouth, but not with her eyes, which were cold and gray. "I thought that was you, Johnny," she said.
"Oh, hi, Mrs. Frank." He wanted to run away, but his feet were rooted to the spot. He was embarrassed by the sound of Cory's urine trickling down the wall, and Julie made it worse by putting her elbows on the pool table and cradling her chin in her hands so that her half-naked tits hung out over the cushion.
"We missed you in church last Sunday, Johnny." The boy told her that he'd been up in the tower, but she seemed not to hear him. "Sorry you were sick. There must be a bug going around. Are you feeling better now? My Joe's feeling a little under the weather too. Oh, what a shame you had to miss your mother's solo! She sang 'Rock of Ages,' you know. Don't you think she just has the most mahhh-velous voice?
"Yes, ma 'am."
In a sarcastic voice, Julie intoned the same humiliating name she had called the boy last year, but Mrs. Frank didn't seem to hear that either.
Lowering her voice, the old woman said, "Are you lost, Johnny?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, Johnny, you know this isn't the place for nice boys like you. It really isn't. Does your mother know where you are?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"My, what a nice pole you have!" she said, stroking the butt of his stolen fishing rod. "I have a pole, but it isn't like this one." She towered over him, smooth and streamlined, like a large bullet. "Psst! That little hussy there. What church does she go to? Is she Jewish? They dye their hair, you know, so you can't tell. Do you ever hear from your father? Do you like to fish, Johnny?"
"Yes, ma am.
"Well then you simply must come to the church picnic tomorrow! And be sure to bring your pole. All the young people are coming. Oh, but of course! I'm just not thinking today! Your mother already told me the two of you are coming. She's bringing a pie. Or was it a cake? No, I believe it was a pie. I'm bringing the potato salad. It's going to be such fun! We're having it at the preacher's house, down by the lake, so you can fish all day if you like. Won't that be nice? Psst! Johnny, what is that young man doing?"
"Uh... I don't know, Mrs. Frank."
"He's taking a piss," said Julie, squeezing her tits together so that the crease between them deepened and reached up to her throat.
Just then, Cory turned around and faced them, shaking off his long, flaccid prick. His cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, he swaggered back to the table, pausing on the way to tuck his member in and zip his fly. He tossed his long blond hair out of his eyes, scrutinized the rolling cue ball and squinted at the dead three, which lay in wait against the rail. He blew a smoke ring, and it settled down around the right corner pocket at the foot of the table.
The boy stepped out of the shadow of the old woman and walked up behind Julie, pressing the bulge of his cock into the crack of her ass. She tittered with pleasure and snuggled against him. A curtain of gloom, similar to coal dust, closed in around the table so that he couldn't see Mrs. Frank. He hoped, though, that she could see him, and he had a feeling that she could. He pulled the tail of Julie's blouse out of her skirt, then drew the front of it down tightly over her breasts until they popped out of the neckline and hung free, except for the wisps of nylon that adorned them. He raised his hands and cupped them over her big tits and felt the hot, soft flesh bulge between his fingers as she inhaled. Her nipples got hard, and drilled into his palms, and the cheeks of her ass opened and closed delightfully on his twitching cock. She reached back and opened his fIy, and then with her other hand she reached between her legs and pulled his naked member out against the soft, damp cushion of her crotch. He could feel her moving flesh through the nylon net, opening and closing... .
There was a faint click, and the boy looked down to see the three ball wobbling aimlessly back down the table. The cue ball was doing ponderous pirouettes just off the head rail. He had the sickening feeling that the momentum which was supposed to drive the balls had leaked away, and that they were being moved now by some vast unseen force, as though caught in a sluggish current of thick syrup or magma. It was with a great effort that he tore his eyes away.
"Unhook me, willya, sugar?"
Julie had already slipped out of her blouse and was in the process of pulling her panties down. The boy released the hooks of her bra, removed it, then refastened it, hooked it over one thumb and shot it into the air like a rubber band. It climbed high into the dark cloud and then floated slowly down, like a big black spider or the skeleton of a parachute.
Julie tucked her skirt up into her belt and turned to one of the concrete columns. Across its face someone had drawn an enormous cock in red crayon; it was covered with telephone numbers and dirty words and airplanes going down in smoke; in place of testicles, a pair of tits was drawn in. Her arms straight out before her, Julie flattened her palms against the column, her body inclined forward, her feet set well apart. Her left hand was on the head of the giant penis, her right on the scribble of pubic hair at its root. The boy bent his knees and guided his prick up into her fuzzy hole. Inside, she was moist and alive. Everything was moving in there. "It's like putting your hand in a sack of worms," he thought. As he got a grip on her big sweaty tits and began moving his member in and out of her squirming snatch, he noticed these words scrawled on the column just below the picture of the cock: Hey, Claude, let's untie him.
The huge red three-ball came drifting erratically toward him through the green meadow of woolen fur. It meandered a little to the left and crept up, heavy as death, to the brink of the right corner pocket. It teetered on the edge. Cory blew another smoke ring. The green fibers of felt seemed to wave lazily back and forth like sea grass.
Further down, the column said, He's ready, man.
A voice from beyond the screen of darkness, possibly Mrs. Frank's, said, Get away from him, you little whore! Stop doing that! Trudy's got firsts on him!
The boy asked Cory if he'd ever done it with a newspaper--"a rolled-up newspaper?"
"Shut up and shoot," replied Cory.
Later, they were in a car, he and Cory and a girl--a hitchhiker, apparently. An anonymous man was driving; call him X. They were following the woman with the long black hair.
CHAPTER TWO
The terrain was mountainous and the road was steep and treacherous, full of hairpin turns and vertical undulations. The hitchhiker took the boy's hand and pulled it up under her skirt. She was wearing a red dress and black mesh stockings. The stockings were secured just above her knees by elastic garters decorated with tiny red-roses, and a slit in the side of the tight skirt revealed the bare white skin of her thigh all the way to the hip. The mass of hair between her legs--she wore no panties--reminded the boy of a Persian cat he'd once owned. The cat had slept in bed with him until she had her kittens. Her name was Sim-sim. He worked his fingers through the long, thick fur until he touched the raw meat. Inside her cunt was a lump of hot flesh, and when he stroked it the girl turned to him and inserted her tongue in his ear, and her saliva ran down his neck. The cat had had her kittens in his bed, and then she had eaten them. That was why they'd gotten rid of her.
The woman sitting beside X said, "I want her put to death."
The hitchhiker breathed in his ear, "Deeper! Oh, get it in deeper!"
The boy pushed his whole hand into her cunt, except the thumb. Her juice squirted over his palm in warm little jets, and she said in a voice which only he could hear, Oh, I've waited so long for this! The boy's thumb stuck straight up from the top of her slit, and her skirt was stretched over it like a tent--a red tent like the exterminators had put over the house when they killed the roaches. Now, drawing her skirt up above her cunt, she spit into her hand and began to stroke his thumb with rapid up and down motions of her fist. Even in the dim light, he could see the blood accumulating under his thumbnail.
"Oh, damn you, you little bastard!" said the girl, jerking her hand away. "You've gotten blood on me!"
"It wasn't my fault!" the boy cried, bursting into tears. "I begged her not to have the roaches put to death! I begged her!"
"It happened in your bed, and you did nothing to stop it!"
"I did too! You're a liar! 1 did too!"
She pressed her soft breast against his arm and stroked his cheek, saying, "Oh, poor baby, don't cry. Here. Kiss away the bad words." She stuck out her tongue, and the boy kissed its tip. It came further out of her mouth, and its edges curled up like old newspaper, making it tubular. It forced its way into his mouth and he wrapped his lips around it and sucked it like a straw. The sucking made a rattling noise, like when you come to the bottom of a milkshake. She made her head go back and forth, and the long, thick tongue went in and out, in and out, faster and faster, until saliva spurted out the end of it and filled his mouth and nose. It tasted sweet and warm, but it burned his nostrils and made his ears pop. It was probably the elevation, though, that made his ears pop.
"Pull out your thing," said the girl, "and I'll play with it for you."
"Right here in the car?" the boy whispered. "The others will see."
Go ahead, Trudy. Don't mind us.
This is a sacred rite. You make it seem vulgar.
Sacred rites are always vulgar.
"I will when we're in the tunnel," said the boy.
The road took a sudden dip down a steep decline which led to the mouth of a dark tunnel beneath a huge stone cathedral with towering Gothic spires.
"Would you like to see my tits?"
"Yes."
She straddled his lap and tossed her hair to the side, placing her forehead on his shoulder. "Unzip me," she said. The boy undid the catch at the nape of her neck and opened the back of her dress. She straightened up and hunched her shoulders, grinning down at him. "Go on. Pull it down, sugar. Wait till you see them." He hooked his fingers in the top of the dress and drew it slowly off her shoulders. The sleeves slid off her upper arms, revealing the depth of her shadowy cleavage. When he peeled the thin silk from her nipples, her breasts leapt straight out at his face as though they were spring-loaded. They were smooth and heavy against his cheeks. She took a deep breath, and they closed in on him as the car plunged into the tunnel.
He felt her hands fumbling in his lap, and then she had his pants open and his cock between her palms, rolling it to the left and right as one rolls a lump of clay to make it cylindrical. He felt his cock getting very long and slippery, and the long hair between her legs tickled his balls. Her naked buttocks began to roll to and fro on his thighs, and then her grasping flesh was slithering up and down the underside of his member. She pressed it into the gooey groove with her fingertips, and in the rushing darkness he felt her sex juices flowing down around the top of his scrotum like molasses. She began to pant, and her breasts grew tumescent. She thrust a nipple into his mouth; it was as long and stiff as a stubby pencil. He ran his tongue around the perimeter of the swollen areola until it began to twitch and pulsate like a penis, and something thin and hot jetted into his throat...
Suddenly the darkness was gone, and the tunnel was bathed in garish electric light.
Must you have that on?
You bet your sweet ass!
They were now in heavy traffic, and the boy turned his head to see an old woman peering down into the car from the window of a bus. Her eyes were open wide, and her hand was over her mouth. The boy peeked up at her over the hitchhiker's tit, trying unsuccessfully to stop the copious flow of milk by pressing his forefinger to the end of the nipple.
"Look at that old bitch gawking," said X.
"Let's give her something to look at," replied the woman in the front seat, hoisting her skirt and pulling off her panties. She squatted on the seat and thrust her ass out the window. The old woman look a pair of spectacles from her purse and put them on. Everyone laughed, even the boy. Then X put the top down to give the people in the bus a better look, and Cory took off his pants. He climbed over the seat and straddled the woman's back, holding his prick up for the old lady to see. It was erect, but very small--only a quarter the size of the boy's. Holding onto the woman's narrow waist, Cory bent over, his hair flying in the wind, and began licking the crack of her ass, making nasty noises with his mouth and rubbing, his little prick up and down on the back of her dress. Her shrieks of pleasure echoed through the tunnel.
Turning sideways under the wheel, X took out his penis and began to masturbate, steering with his left hand. Cory was now balanced on his knees atop the sill of the car door, his face buried in the woman's cunt. He sucked and slobbered loudly, and yellowish froth streamed away on the wind. X swung his arm over the seat and held his cupped palm up to the hitchhiker's face. She spit into it several times, and he smeared the saliva on his cock for lubrication, aiming it at the woman's face and pumping faster than ever. But the old lady in the bus seemed to take no notice of all this; her cold gray eyes were locked on the boy--and especially on his terrific erection, which jutted up out of the hitchhiker's wind-tossed cunt hair like a huge peeled sausage, impossible to conceal. At the moment when X's semen started spurting into the face of the woman in the front seat, the old lady bared her teeth and held her purse up to the window. The purse looked like a small, furry animal of some kind, with some of its limbs eaten away. Now she tore it open, and out of its belly came a swarm of black roaches. They streamed out of the bus and descended on the car in a great, crawling, chirping cloud of darkness, and the boy screamed in terror... .
At last they broke from the tunnel and sped away up the mountainside. The air was thin and crisp, and there were only a few cars on the road. The girl lifted her buttocks from the boy's thighs and started his prick straight into her hole. Tiny hands seemed to play about the rim of its head--tiny hands of warm, raw meat--and her seething juices ran heavily down the shank.
She's going to fuck him.
Look out, cherry, here comes Trudy!
Shut up!
The boy hooked his fingers in her garters and toyed with the little roses.
"Ready, sugar?"
"Ready, bitch."
"Here I come, then." And with that, the girl sat down hard, spindling herself on the boy's cock. He sat still and watched her big round breasts bob as her ass rose and fell. Cory and the woman watched from the front seat.
As X pulled out to pass a car, a semi loomed up on the curve ahead and came bearing down on them at the speed of a freight train. Right behind the truck was a long black sedan, following close. The road here had been blasted out of the face of the mountain, so that to their right a sheer wall of raw rock soared out of sight overhead, and to the left a steep wooded slope dropped thousands of feet into a cloud-filled gorge. They were fender to fender with the car in the right lane, and it matched X's every change in speed with diabolical precision, like a mirror image. The grill of the semi now filled the entire sky, and just at the instant when collision seemed only a split second away, the huge truck roared off the road to their left, and the sedan behind it, as though made of rubber, leaned toward the center. X closed his eyes and shot through, miraculously.
But now the car was out of control. It was suddenly raining, and they were slipping sideways toward the precipice. The glistening pavement curved away into the streaming gloom like a long black fang. X was contemplating the floorboard with a sort of detached frown, pumping the limp brake pedal as though trying to get to the heart of the problem.
"Aha!" he said triumphantly. "No brakes!"
The boy looked at the steering wheel. It was spinning freely, its spokes a blur. Up ahead, the road hooked abruptly to the right, and he could see nothing but a yawning void beyond. Just before hitting this curve, the car slid up a slight hump--which at their present speed was more like a ski ramp--and sailed off into the rain.
Up, and up, and up...
Far below, through a ragged hole in the silvery mist, the boy could see the ancient, twisted trees at the bottom of the gorge, pointing upward like spikes. He and the girl Had their arms tight around each other, gasping with fright. As the car reached the top of its trajectory, it began to revolve heavily in a clockwise direction, and the whole valley spun drunkenly upward.
This is it!
But somehow they came down smoothly on the road again, skidded up another ramp, and took to the air once more. This time the boy forced himself not to look down. He closed his eyes and tried to think of something pleasant. It would have been well if he could have remembered some of the good times he and his friend Flemming had had the previous summer, before they began going out with girls; like the time his Uncle Farley Smollet rented a rowboat and took the two of them up the lake to Stone's Island to spy on the girls who went there on the weekends to sunbathe in the nude. How brightly those naked bodies had shone in the sunlight! The three of them had lain low in the bushes just west of the terrace of the old ruined mansion, and watched the girls spread their towels around the base of the Dragon Gate, then remove the tops of their bathing suits, stretch, lie down and smear each other's bodies with suntan lotion. He remembers even now how he rearranged his erect penis in his trunks so that it lay up along his belly, and how the warmth of the sand made a pleasant sensation on its underside when he moved his hips up and down... subtly, so the others wouldn't notice... . Then one of the girls--the one with the biggest tits--stood up and stepped out of the bottom part of her suit, and the boy felt warm waves run up and down his stomach when he saw the hair on her pussy.
The other girls let out little yelps and giggles, and then they too finished undressing. There were four of them that day. The one with the big tits asked one of the others to put suntan oil on her ass, and while she was doing so, his Uncle Farley said that one time he'd seen two girls eat each other, right there in the middle of the terrace, and that maybe if they were lucky they'd see it today; but the boy didn't understand exactly what he meant; he thought about Sim-sim, and momentarily lost his erection. He wouldn't have wanted to remember that.
Nor would he have wished to recall the image of the Dragon Gate--those two stone monsters that formed the arch, their hideous fangs locked together at the keystone. From where he lay, the distant bell buoy beyond the mouth of the inlet was centered in the archway. Further out, the ocean was bright and warm and blue, all the way to the horizon, but the buoy was blood-red, and made the boy think of unpleasant things. He tried not to look at it, as he now tried not to look down into the blood-chilling abyss.
When it was Flemming's turn with the binoculars, he said, "Wow! Look at the cunt on that one! The black-haired one!" And the boy's uncle took a look, and said, "Mm-mm! Ain't that sweet, though! Now, that there's what you call a snapper. See how it sticks up higher'n the other girls? Take a look, Johnny." The girl had her feet toward them, her legs spread. The boy focused the binoculars on her crotch, and saw how her snatch rose sharply from her belly in a broad, fuzzy hump which narrowed to a double ridge as it curved down between her legs. "That thing's just like a mouth, boys, only it ain't got no teeth. Sink your cock in a cunt like that, and it might never come out again. Hee hee! But I can't think of no better way to get gelded. Gawd! I only fucked one cunt like that in my whole life. I was just a little shaver at the time--younger than you guys. Johnny here knows her real well. Hee, hee! Ought to. He's lived with 'er 'bout fourteen years now." In the dark midst of those fluttering tufts of maidenhair between the blazing thighs of the busty brunette the boy saw a single spot of red flesh. "Course, I can't claim no great conquest, her bein' in the family an' all. Hee, hee!"
He wouldn't have wanted to remember his embarrassment and shame. He had tried to conceal it, but Uncle Farley must have known, because later, after they'd taken Flem home, he'd said, "Hell, kid, what do you think sisters are for, anyway? That's your trouble: You don't know about things like that. In my opinion, Trudy made a big mistake not havin' no sisters for ya to play with before she got 'er cunt scraped out. Seems like she'd of remembered how it was when we was kids. Hee, hee! If your daddy was here, he'd tell ya what..." The boy had stopped listening, then, in order not to start screaming. He'd hung his head out the window of his uncle's car and watched the slag pavement whizzing by, and--just like now--tried to think of pleasant things, such as how the brunette's big, rosy-nippled breasts had yielded yet resisted under the caresses of her friend's hands as she applied the oil, and how her hairy cunt had sprung out into the sunlight like a blackbird when she first pulled down the bottom of her suit; his uncle's voice grew very distant, and when his erection returned he tucked it between his legs and manipulated it by flexing and relaxing the muscles in his thighs until he achieved an emission. But now, when he closed his eyes to shut out the sound of screaming--his own and that of the others--all the pleasant memories were instantaneously canceled out by unpleasant ones, leaving nothing behind the fear and horror but a dull blankness, a gray emptiness characterized only by a kind of lethargic pulsation, an almost imperceptible sensation of rising and falling, like the rhythm of the tides or the seasons.
Again, the gyrating car landed on the pavement in a wobbling swoop, crabbing onto a steep downgrade which stretched out before them along the mountainside in a long, undulating curve. To the left, the slope fell away dizzily into a bottomless canyon, and just off the lip of the ledge stood row after row of bare, iron-trunked trees, their branches hooked and barbed and scaled with rust. The car careened sickly and zoomed off the pavement at better than a hundred miles an hour, skidding along the rocky shoulder toward the precipice. The boy clung desperately to the girl, unable even to whimper. This was the end; everyone was certain of it. There was no way to pull out. The thought of pain and broken bones and mutilated organs filled him with nauseating dread. He prayed to God that he wouldn't survive the first impact.
The wheels left the gravel, and a snarl of jagged trees came shooting up toward them, and he buried his head between the girl's breasts and waited for the crash....
He's coming!
Oh, God!
Uhn! Uhn! Uhn!
CHAPTER THREE
Then they were safe, stopped, back on the road. They were stunned. Lost in thought, the boy pulled his wilting prick out of the hitchhiker's cunt and wiped it on one of her rose-covered garters. There was absolutely no way out of that.
Oh, Trudy, that was--
Please. Pour me a drink.
Down at the lake there were two small skiffs and a long wooden dock. The skiffs were tied up at the shore, one on either side of the dock. In one of them--the left one--was a human form, curled up in the bilge. Some distance back from the shore, a big gray house, shingled and gabled, loomed against the sky. Inside, the party was in full swing. The boy turned from the lake and mounted the landscaped knoll on which the house stood.
All the lights were on, and music and the laughter of girls filled the air. Someone handed him a drink, but it tasted bitter, so he poured it out. He sat down on the floor, feeling vaguely uneasy. True, he'd been invited, yet he felt somehow that he shouldn't be there. He huddled beneath the overhanging fronds, of a potted palm, and whenever a pretty girl passed close by, he would lift her skirt and have look underneath. No one minded this, nor even seemed to notice. He was surprised at how full the crotches of the girls' panties looked. They were like pouches of tobacco, stuffed to the bursting point, or like those bright red codpieces worn by the men in the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch. Another thing disturbed him: Not one of the cunts he looked at appeared to have a slit in it--not even the ones inside transparent panties. Some of them resembled stuffed animals, particularly the hairy ones; others were smooth and round like billiard balls, and still others were lumpy like beanbags, but none had a crease in it. Once, he put his hand under the skirt of a sandy-haired girl who wore a tight T-shirt with no bra; he touched the bulge of her cunt... and found he had no feeling in his hands. He puzzled over this for a few moments, but forgot about it when the sandy-haired girl lay down on her back on a little table in the center of the room and invited everyone to pour their drinks on her, which they did. Soon her clothes were so wet that they clung to very bump and hollow like a second skin. Her T-shirt had become almost transparent, and he could see the fat, dark hills of her nipples, the tips of the knobs creased like tiny buttocks. Even the rows of little bumps around the edges of her swollen areolas showed through quite clearly. Then someone tore off her skirt and poured an entire bottle of champagne over her pubic mound. Her panties shrunk up and gripped their contents like thin rubber, and the boy saw a tumescent ridge curving down between her dripping thighs, pulsating slowly as though it were breathing, twitching as though dying. He looked at his hand, and saw that there was blood on the fingers that had touched the girl. Then someone called him, and he climbed a flight of stairs.
The hallway at the top was long and dark. It was illuminated by several yellow globes of smoky glass, but they gave out very little light. At the far end of the hall, standing with some other people, he saw the woman with the long black hair, her white satin sheath shimmering in the gloom. Emotion welled up in his throat, and he ran to the spot, but when he got there she was gone. Leaning in a corner was a man with fine, strong features and a bald head. The boy felt as though he should know the man, but couldn't place him. "I knew you a long time ago," he said, trying to be friendly. But the man glowered at him angrily, his brows bristling like thunderheads. "Why do you think I called you up here?" he demanded.
Gripped by fear, the boy turned and ran up another flight of stairs, then another and another. His feet were numb, and he stumbled on every step. The pursuing footfalls of the bald man boomed through the darkness, gaining on him constantly. The man's hot breath hissed up the shuddering stairwell like fire shooting up a flue. At last the boy burst out onto a balcony with a balustrade and found himself gazing in terror into a deep, mist-filled ravine. The whole house teetered on the edge, as though at any moment it would plunge into the abyss. But then the boy saw that it was the same gorge they had flown over in the car, and realized that it was only a painting--a large fresco done in the style of Charles Burchfield--and that he was still within the walls of the house. At that moment the bald man appeared at the far end of the fake balcony, shrouded in mist like a ghost. The boy tried to run again, but his legs wouldn't work.
The man put his hand into the depths of the gorge and opened a secret panel in the wall. "Listen," he said, "to what I have to endure."
Hideous half-human sounds issued from the opening, like the moans of the damned. Powerless to do otherwise, the boy approached the slot and peered in. He saw the interior of a small room, with a dresser and two beds. On one of the beds a young girl was tied down in spread-eagle position. She had no breasts, and only a small amount of hair between her legs. On the other bed, looking at the girl, sat two women and a man, all naked. One of the women had long black hair and a tremendous erection. They played with themselves as they talked.
Why did you do that?
What?
Pour that on him.
To baptize him; huh, Claude?
To christen him. We'll call him Giton from now on.
Who?
Ha ha! A literary reference, love. A little over your head.
Fuck you.
Give me a towel. I'll dry him off.
Oh, let me, Trudy! Let me do it! Come on! You had your turn!
A shaggy mat of orange hair, which looked like a scalp and which had hung in front of the mirror, suddenly detached itself and came floating toward the open panel where the boy stood. Some kind of suction from within the room prevented him from retreating. As the scalp drew close, it parted in the middle and revealed its mouth of rubbery red flesh. It clamped itself over the hole in the wall like a toilet plunger, and a greasy plastic membrane ballooned out against the boy's face, stopping his mouth and nostrils. He groped for the extended arm of the bald man, but the man wasn't substantial; and the boy couldn't get a grip on him.
Meanwhile, someone had brought out a pool table and set it up in the front room. The sandy-haired girl no longer wore a T-shirt; she had changed into a scoop-necked dress and when she bent over to shoot, the boy saw a pendulous club of flesh, a sort of tumor, growing out of the inner surface of one of her big breasts. She wore no bra. When she shot, the tumor swung heavily to and fro. The boy felt embarrassment for his friend Drake, who was standing behind the girl, his hands on her waist, bumping her in the ass with obscene thrusts of his pelvis. Perhaps he didn't know about the tumor.
Then a bunch of children came in, yelling and laughing and squirting each other with pop bottles. One of them spilled the contents of his bottle on the pool table, and the sandy-haired girl cried, "Hey! If you get this thing wet you'll ruin it! Somebody get me a towel!" The boy got a towel too, and helped her mop up the mess, but there was something funny about the felt. It sagged when he rubbed it, as though there was nothing but cardboard underneath and then all of a sudden the whole table began to wilt before his eyes. It started at the pockets. One corner at a time, the felt and the cardboard beneath it went limp, and then the pockets themselves began to decompose around their edges, growing larger and larger, and as they grew, the wet felt drooled down into the widening holes. It appeared that the liquid dripping into the pockets and down the table's legs had set up some sort of siphon system, drawing water up from the floor. At first it was only a few spurts, spraying up an inch or so above the table, and the boy
assumed that what was being siphoned up was the soda pop and champagne and what-not that had been spilled on the floor. But then it started gushing out of all six pockets in great, hissing fountains, and he realized that the table-leg siphons had somehow tapped a secret flow that ran through the floorboards of the house like a subterranean river. The falling water was rapidly enlarging the wilting pockets, and soon they had nearly merged with each other, so that there was only a thin green skeleton of dry material supporting he streaming green. The felt wept on the fragile frame, exactly like Dali's watches in the painting. The boy got a sort of sinking feeling in his stomach, and went into the kitchen to get a drink.
Outside, in the back yard, the pleasant aroma of meat cooking on an open fire filled his nostrils. Someone handed him a Coke and said, Maybe he's not hungry.
"Who?" the boy asked.
"Come on," said the man. "You must be famished!"
The boy nodded toward the sandy-haired girl and said, "I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole."
The man clapped him on the back and replied, "Why, we're delighted you could come! This way, please."
See? It's swelling up again.
He led the boy to a broad circular patio in the depths of the garden, lit by flambeaus. By the subtle dancing firelight--the light of the torches was softened by screens of fern--the boy saw a number of paths leading out from the patio into the dense jungle of gumbo limbo and banyan, all draped in luxuriant tangles of wild grape and flowing lianas. The paths were cut out of moss-covered limestone, several inches deep, and through the shadowy foliage, mingling with the whisper of a fresh breeze among the upper branches, came the music of water trickling over rocks.
The boy's companion took him to the center of the patio, where a woman in an apron was cooking little sausages, one at a time, over a bed of red coals blazing with tongues of white flame. She held each sausage over the coals until it turned black and burst open in a splatter of hot grease, then popped it into her mouth, devouring it noisily.
Mmm!
When she saw the two of them watching, she scooped some sort of black pudding or gruel from a large iron pot and handed it to them in little ceramic bowls. "Here you are, gentlemen," she said. They sat down at a concrete table and ate the stuff. It was warm and delicious; it had the consistency of plasma that had just begun to coagulate. But near the bottom of his bowl, the boy discovered something moving, and when the man looked away, he dumped it out in the flower bed.
Aw!
"Now, come on," said his friend, rising from the table. "Right through here. Did you enjoy that? Good, eh? Just wait! Come on, come on!"
The boy followed him into one of the dark paths. It wound around tree trunks, in and out among banyan roots, between mossy outcroppings of damp stone, and even across a bubbling stream by means of stepping stones. There was a torch overhead, driven into a rock beside the stream, and the flat stones appeared to be surrounded by a current of cool liquid fire, disappearing a few yards downstream into a tunnel of ferns and creepers. Finally they came out into a small clearing paved with flagstones.
Claude--
"Here we are," said the man, rubbing his hands together.
--don't.
In a corner of this little patio was a chef cooking huge cylindrical lobsters over a stone barbecue grill. They crackled and popped and sputtered in the flame. He was basting them with wine, and it smelled wonderful. When he saw the newcomers, he sliced open two loaves of French bread and spread them out beside the grill. Then he took one of the cooked lobsters, pointed it downward and squeezed it like a tube of toothpaste. Thick coils of mushy pink meat oozed out onto the bread. This he covered with a heavy yellow sauce, then closed the loaves and thrust one of them at the boy's face.
Take it, kid! Take it!
They sat on a big rock and ate the sandwiches. When they finished, they asked for two more, and carried them as they strolled off through the garden. After they'd walked for ten or fifteen minutes, the boy heard the faint sounds of automobile traffic ahead, and saw bright lights flickering through the screen of jungle. Suddenly the path made a sharp turn to the left, and they were standing on the sidewalk of a busy street, blinking in the glare of the headlights and the neon.
"There," said the man, pointing. "You see?"
The boy squinted up the sidewalk, and saw the white satin sheath swaying sensually in the distance. The woman's voluptuous buttocks cast blue shadows on the backs of her thighs as she walked. The boy brushed himself off and started up the street, but he hadn't taken more than a few steps before he was swept up in the current of the crowd and carried away in the opposite direction.
Somewhere along the way, he realized that he was on the main drag of Lake Leethy, and was headed for the bridge to the island. It was useless to try to break out of the surging crush, and soon the boy relaxed and let himself be borne along. He doesn't remember how long or how far he was carried by this living river, but when at last he was tossed out like a chip of wood into a relatively calm area, he found himself entering a movie theater. Some boys had told him recently that in one of the theaters on Leethy Avenue there was a girl that went along the front row of seats on her knees and sucked off all the kids sitting there. But it wasn't this theater; it was the other one. He had come too far. Well, he'd just have to get out and fight his way back up the street. In the darkened auditorium, he steadied himself on an iron railing for a moment to get his bearings. He took a sighting on the red exit sign glowing in a far corner, and set a course for it. Just before opening the door, he glanced up at the screen and saw a huge eel slithering into a tiny hole in a coral reef. "I wonder how they do that," he thought.
Outside, the boy closed his eyes and leaned back against the wooden door. He wondered why he was breathing so hard. After a few moments rest he opened his eyes and looked around. He was in a dim, arched corridor. A diffusion of light was seeping in from somewhere up ahead, around a bend; it seemed to be carried along by the polished tiles which covered the walls. There was only one direction he could go, since the passageway began--or ended--right there at the exit door. He set out toward the light.
First around the bend to the right, then through a sharper curve to the left, then a right-angle turn to the right... and after that he lost all sense of direction, and just went wherever the passage led. He wasn't tired now; this was rather exciting, like when he was younger, exploring the mansions in Sago Beach when the owners were gone for the summer. He must have traveled quite a distance before finally coming out in an enclosed courtyard.
At the center of the court, a big banyan tree grew out of an irregular hole in the stone pavement. Its branches reached out to every wall, forming a huge, leafy roof through which the boy could see only a few stars. All around the circular perimeter were what looked like store fronts with plate glass windows and recessed entrances. There were cafes, dress shops, souvenir shops, a stationery store, and others not so easily recognized, all closed and unlighted. About midway around the circle the boy saw a building that looked more like a residence than a shop. It had a high stucco facade, trimmed in wormy gray wood, and a broad set of French doors at the top of a flight of stone steps. He crept up the steps and pressed his nose against the glass.
It was very dark inside, and at first he could see nothing, but then he could make out a few indistinct objects. Something moved inside. Something white and ghostly. The boy felt his legs growing heavy again. With trembling hands he tried the handles, and they turned. He opened the doors and went in.
When his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, he saw that the place might be a library. There were two tables, and the walls were covered with bookshelves, perhaps he had stumbled into the back door of Leethy Memorial. But then he saw a sofa and some easy chairs. His legs carried him against his will to the place where he had seen the movement. His outstretched hand touched a curtain; it was sleek and smooth, like felt. As if on cue, the moon broke over the tile rooftops and filled the room with an eerie green light, and the boy flung back the curtain.
There at his feet squatted a toothless hag, her gaunt scabby body draped in a ragged white shroud, her gaping cunt seething in the moonlight. She was eating a small furry animal of some kind, gumming the bloody meat from its bones, drooling and smacking her lips.
"See?" cried the boy, "It wasn't my fault!"
Get back, you bitch! You'll dirty him'!
"It was your fault!"
He's mine!
Don't worry, little Giton. I'll protect you from their filthy bodies.
"It was your fault!"
CLAUDE!--
For one terrifying instant the sun, in the form of a flood lamp, welled up out of the black sky and blazed into the courtyard, filling the air with an incandescent vapor of yellow plasma, but then the hag scooped a handful of roaches from her cunt and threw them in the boy's face, and everything went black.
Back at the house, the party was still going strong. The boy stood outside near the back porch and watched his friend Drake playing with the sandy-haired girl. She was the sort of girl that really aroused the boy sexually--big round tits, full hips, heavy thighs, sexy face... She was very much like Julie, who would have shown him her pussy if only he'd gone with her that time. But there was the damned tumor. Disgusting! Why didn't she do something about it? At least you'd think shed wear a bra, instead of just letting it hang out like that, like she was proud of it or something! Surely Drake knew about it by now, yet it didn't seem to bother him. He had the girl bent over a table, and he kept lifting the back of her skirt and tickling her asshole. Once, when Drake went to get drinks, one of the children came out and handed the boy a long pole with a tongue on the end of it, and he poked it through the screen and guided it up between the girl's thighs. He could feel the vibrations of her cunt right through the pole when it clamped down on the tongue with its hairy jaws.
Later, when he was inside the porch, he put out his hand and touched the girl's tits, and didn't feel the tumor--nothing but soft, swelling flesh, tipped by hard knobs. The girl laughed and asked him if he liked her tits, and he said yes, he sure did. But he hoped nobody heard him, because he was embarrassed to be in her company. She had a bad reputation around school, because one time the principal had caught her in the boys' bathroom with her clothes off. She sat on one of the lavatory bowls and everyone stood in line to fuck her, but the principal had come in before it was the boy's turn, and he'd hidden in a toilet stall. Another time they caught her in the parking lot behind the girls' gym during lunch hour, taking on all comers. They said she laid about fifteen guys a day for two weeks, but the boy didn't hear about it until too late. Now, he had actually touched her with his hand. The warmth of her tit was still on his palm. The sight of her body was actually making him feverish.
He sat down in a chair in a corner of the porch, and she stood before him with her legs spread and her hands on her hips. "Watch this," she said, and started shaking her tits back and forth. Faster and faster she shook them, until the wide neckline of her cotton dress began to slip off one shoulder, then off the other. She took her hands off her hips and put her arms down at her sides so the little puffy sleeves could slide down. They fell almost to her elbows, and the neckline crept down, down, down, revealing more and more of the milk-white skin of her violently agitated bosom, until it hung on the very tips of her big pink nipples.
The girl went over to where Drake sat on the floor, and threw her full skirt over his head, spreading her legs wide and bending her knees in a very obscene pose. The boy could see Drake's head moving under the cloth, and the slurping noises were loud, like those he sometimes heard through the wall of his bedroom when his mother sent him to bed early. Drake's hands slithered up inside her clothing and clutched her breasts. He moved them up and down and around and around, pushing them together, then pulling them apart, and soon the girl began to foam at the mouth. The slobber ran copiously down her chin and drooled onto her tits, flowing into the deep valley between them. She made moaning, blubbering noises and began to twitch and shudder all over.
An elderly woman in a white suit came out onto the porch, leading a little girl by the hand. She looked at Drake and the sandy-haired girl for a moment, frowning in disapproval, and then lifted the girl's skirt from Drake's head. His whole face was buried in her shaggy cunt. He rolled his eyes at the woman and kept lapping. The girl's foaming syrup was all over his hair, flowing into his ears and running down onto his clothing. The little girl peeked out from behind the woman, a sort of detached look on her face. Just then, with the woman still holding her skirt's hem between thumb and forefinger, the sandy-haired girl hunched over a little and started to come.
Honey-colored juice spurted from her cunt, splattering the woman's suit. It came out in heavy but rapid pulsations, squirting past Drake's cheeks with terrific pressure, and with every burst she squatted lower, until finally she fell over backward with her partner's head still between her thighs, her hips lurching up violently and the golden juice from her cunt flooding over them both in surging cascades.
The woman now turned to the boy, who pretended not to have noticed the pair on the floor. She presented the little girl to him. "Johnny, this is my daughter, Nancy. She's been tied up until now." The boy looked at the little girl and saw that she wasn't so little after all; it was true that she had no breasts yet, but nevertheless she was about his age. She was the same girl he'd seen on the bed in the room upstairs. "She will suck," the child's mother added, "but she will not fuck. Is that quite clear?" And before the boy could say, "Yes, ma'am," the woman had turned and stalked back into the kitchen, leaving Nancy standing there beside him.
"Hi, Johnny."
"Hi, Nancy."
"Show me your dick and I'll let you see my pussy."
"Show me your pussy first."
"All right." She hoisted her frilly skirt and pulled down her flowered panties. Her little mound looked plump and soft as a pincushion. There was only a thin puff of light-colored fuzz, shaped like an upside-down U around the dent where her slit started; the rest was slick and hairless. "Now let me see yours." She dropped to her knees at his feet and unzipped his fly, groping inside with her hot little hand. "Hey! Where is it?"
Stricken with embarrassment, the boy dashed out the back door into the darkness.
He went down to the shore, and sat on the end of the lock until it was morning. When he saw the island out in the middle of the lake, his spirits began to rise. The sun came up so bright and yellow that its light transformed everything--land, water and air--into luminous pastels without depth or shadow. Everything, that is, except the Island, which was all in warm but rather somber earth colors, and outlined in stark black. It drew the eye like a magnet.
Like ants coming out of an anthill, people began to trickle out of the house and wander aimlessly down the slope in the general direction of the lake. When the boy noticed that the corpse was still curled up in the skiff, he dropped silently off the end of the dock into the warm water, and struck out for the island.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was more like flying than swimming. The water was so clear you could see the bones on the bottom. It was difficult at times to tell where the water ended and the air began. The surface of the lake up ahead, the far shore with its rosy lawns and fuchsia foliage, the pink and yellow sky... all these looked as though they had been painted in thin washes on a huge canvas backdrop, and the island was like a dark, egg-shaped hole cut out of the center.
Soon the boy stood behind a large boulder, peering up into the cool, shadowy recesses of the apartment building that rose up among the rocks and trees on the shore. The architecture was in the Spanish style, with a lot of stucco archways and wrought iron railings and red tile roofs and stone staircases. The sky-blue water was reflected on the white walls, giving them a cool, rippling appearance. The boy climbed a flight of stairs and sat down on a balcony. "I'm safe now," he said to himself with a sigh of relief. "No one knows me here."
There was a fairly large crowd of sunbathers on the beach. Directly below the boy, stretched out on a large blanket, were two curvy young women--a blonde and a brunette--and a boy, possibly in his early teens. The boy lay between the women. Off to one side sat a man with wavy blond hair, watching the three on the blanket. The boy reached up and plucked a ripe fruit from an overhanging bough. As he began to eat it, a pleasant sense of euphoria came over him. He felt warm and secure; he didn't want to leave this island. Once he had the disturbing sensation that a snake was crawling up his leg, but immediately realized that it was only the hand of the brunette. Her hand was warm and soft; it seemed to him that he could feel the blood flowing under the skin of her palm as it crept up his shin to his knee. Her fingers traced out the bone structure of his leg--the ankle, the tibia, the knee cap, the femur, the pelvis. With a sharp knife, she slit open the crotch of his swimming trunks and folded them back from his genitals. She held his testicles in her hand and looked down at them as one might look at two robin's eggs which had just fallen from a tree. Lifting his relaxed prick by the neck, as though picking up a kitten, she stroked its head with her forefinger, gently and lovingly, but it remained flaccid. She bowed her head and kissed it on the mouth, her black, silky hair spilling over his hips in warm coils. Now she sucked both his prick and his balls into her mouth and caressed them with her tongue, cupping his buttocks in her hands and lifting them a few inches off the blanket. The boy stretched his limbs and breathed deeply of the island's perfumed air.
He felt warm breath against his cheek, and opened his eyes. The blonde was on her knees, bending over his face.
Smiling down at him, she reached into her bikini bra, pulled out one of her tits and dangled the bright pink nipple above his lips. He touched it with the tip of his tongue, and it tasted sweet, like peppermint candy. She bent lower, and he sucked the nipple into his mouth. Her big, soft breast was a warm darkness over his face, and as he sucked, the nipple grew larger and stiffer. He ran his hand over her hip and found that she had removed the bottom of her suit. She took his hand and put it between her legs, and he twined his fingers in her strawlike bush as he felt his prick begin to swell in the brunette's mouth, growing longer and longer, thicker and thicker, until he felt it nosing into her throat, which opened for him.
The blonde let out a little cry, tore off her bra, and straddled the boy's face. Her blazing white body filled the whole sky, and suddenly the boy realized that they were on a crowded beach. His erection fell, and he began to struggle.
"Get off!" he cried. "They'll see us!"
Easy, Johnny-baby! Easy now.
He wriggled free of the women, and looked around. No one appeared to be paying any attention to them. They were on a sort of ledge, and when he looked down at the sunbathers on the next level of the beach, he saw two other women mounting a boy. All three were naked. "Such things are commonplace on the island," said the man with the wavy hair, nodding toward the trio below. One of the women had just taken her lips from the boy's cock, and for a moment they saw it standing tall and straight in the sunlight, twice as big as a hot dog and glistening with saliva, before it was hidden from their view by the woman's ass as she straddled the boy's slim hips and guided it into her cunt. As she began to slide up and down, she slipped her hands under the arms of the other woman, who was squatting over the boy's face, and gripped her breasts. Through a screen of tawny cunt hair, the boy watched the brunette's fingers opening and closing overhead, and saw how the white flesh of the blonde's bosom bulged and yielded. His tongue slid out of his mouth like a snake, and entered the bubbling crevice of flesh which covered his lips.
Oooh!
Ah! Ah! Ah!
Eat him up, girls!
The boy was jerking his hips up and down now, to meet the brunette's savage assault, and his tongue was lashing the blonde's cunt into a boiling swamp. He felt he would shoot at any second. Then his tongue touched something strange--something dead and curled up, like a snail without a shell--and on a balcony high above, leaning over the wrought iron rail, he saw a boy pointing a gun at them, an expression of utter hatred on his face.
"Drop that!" boomed a voice behind him.
The boy threw down the gun and spun around in alarm.
The French doors by which the apartment communicated with the balcony were flung wide, and in the opening stood three figures--a tall, broad-shouldered man in a golden crown and a long purple robe, flanked by two voluptuous but stern-looking women in gowns of red gauze. In his right hand the man held a scepter or staff, shaped somewhat like an elongated chicken leg. His face looked vaguely familiar. The women looked very stately and proper, with their gold sandals and their hair coiled high on their heads... except that they wore nothing beneath their gauze gowns; you could see their tits and their bushy cunts and everything. Then the boy noticed that there was an oval hole in the front of the man's robe, through which his genitals protruded. His penis--if that was what it was--was a good twelve or thirteen inches in length, and its girth was greater at the end than at the base. It seemed to be in a state of semi- tumescence, and was adorned by a little gold bracelet, just behind the head. It was shaped like the tumor the boy had seen earlier, growing from the breast of the sandy-haired girl.
The man pounded his scepter on the floor and roared, "Face the Triumvirate! The Triumvirate! That's us, you idiot! We are the Triumvirate!"
"Oh. B-but I am facing you, sir."
"Quiet! Impudence will not be tolerated! Repeat!"
"Impudence will not be tolerated," said the two women in unison.
"Correct," said the man. He cleared his throat and went on. "Well, young man, what do you have to say for yourself? We have been expecting you, of course, but if you wish to stay here, you will have to undergo the Ordeal. Understand? A bicycle, you know, will only take you so far and no farther. After that, it's every man for himself. Understand? I myself was behind the wheel once upon a time, you know. But now it's up to you. Repeat!"
"But now it's up to you," said the women in one voice.
"Right! And you don't need to feel-- Stand up straight! That's better. You don't need to feel that way about it. I am either the King or I am not the King. Look!" He pointed down at the beach, and the boy turned to look, but immediately the King pounded his staff on the stone floor again. "Do not turn your face from us when we are speaking!"
"But--"
"Quiet! Repeat."
"Quiet!"
"Now then, do we make ourselves quite clear? Speak up, lad!"
"Er..."
"Quiet, you upstart! Impudence is dealt with harshly and swiftly here, and you'd better get that into your skull. Now, are you or are you not quite clear on this matter? Well? What's the trouble now? Cat got your tongue? If there had been goats, you would have heard their bells, eh? Come on! Out with it! You don't need to feel like that about it, either. Just look!" This time the boy did not turn when the King pointed. "Just look at what I must endure!"
The boy felt around for the gun with his foot, but touched nothing but cold stone.
"Very well then. Speak your piece."
"Er, I--"
"One more outburst, young man, and you are banished from our island! Repeat!"
"One more outburst, young man, and you are banished from our island!"
"Now, for the last time, do you agree to the Ordeal? Not that you have a choice, of course."
The boy said nothing.
"That's better," said the King. "It will begin, as usual, with the tolling of the knell. We go!"
They turned and entered the interior of the apartment, and the boy watched the gauze-veiled buttocks of the two women swaying seductively into the gloom. He waited a few moments, then followed them through the apartment and out into a long, stone-gray corridor. He saw them at the far end, just as they were rounding a corner. When he reached the spot, they were turning another corner. When he got there, it was the same. No matter how fast he ran, they were always the same distance ahead, always just rounding a corner. At last his legs would carry him no farther, and he collapsed in a heap.
Later, someone shook him by the shoulder and said, "There! You see?"
He looked up, in the direction indicated, and saw the woman with the long black hair climbing a flight of narrow stairs. The angle was so steep that he could almost see where her thighs came together beneath the white sheath. In a moment she had reached the top, and disappeared.
The boy dragged himself up the stairs with all the speed he could muster, burst through a door, and found himself on a balcony overlooking a small open court. In the center of the court, stretched out on his back on a sort of dais draped in scarlet, he saw a naked boy with an erection. Through a large archway came the King's women in their gauze gowns, their big, egg-shaped breasts swaying and bouncing as they walked. They approached the dais and began running their hands feverishly over the boy's body, kissing his lips and stroking his prick. The King sat to one side, watching, and toying with the enormous lump of flesh that hung between his legs.
One of the women now mounted the dais and stood over the boy's face like a colossus, rolling her pelvis with languid undulations. With his head entirely encompassed by the crimson tent of her gown, the boy gazed up at the hairy mouth at the apex of her pillar-like thighs. It opened and closed, swooped and dipped, and descended lower and lower, closer and closer to his face in complex hypnotic spirals. He felt as though he were caught up in a rosy, sweet-smelling bubble, drifting along on a mild, warm wind over a sea that went on forever. He looked into the hollow beyond the ruffled gates of flesh, and saw a sky full of stars, and when he inserted his tongue, his cheeks were flooded with meteors.
Now the other woman was on him too, straddling his hips and stroking his belly with her fingertips. He felt the heat of her cunt on the insides of his thighs, and the tickle of hair on the head of his prick, and then he heard the fluttering gurgle as she opened her vise of meat and sucked him in.
"After all," said the King, "this is a common occurrence here. He needn't act the martyr over it."
The boy's body was tingling all over, and he began to have violent spasms in his bone marrow, but his gun was nowhere to be found. Blood pounded in his temples, and his loins rumbled like a volcano. The mild wind became a furious storm, and the sea turned to boiling blood. The waves rose higher and higher, and the boy felt his body starting to surge--
Go, Johnny! Go!"
--but suddenly the veil of red gauze was torn from his face, and out of the glowering sky, with a shattering crash of silence, came a bolt of tubular lightning, and the boy found himself alone in an arched arcade that stretched away to infinity.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was announced that X was throwing a party, and everyone was invited. The boy got on a bicycle and rode for miles along the arcade. The shops were all closed, and all the fountains were dry. He noticed that the bike's handlebars had a strange shape; they dipped down from the pivot point and then swooped gracefully upward, somewhat in the form of a cursive W. He would have asked someone about it, but there was no one to ask. Except for an occasional insect, there was no sign of life at all. Presently he came out into a large plaza with a fishpond in the center. Sitting on the edge of the pond, feeding the goldfish, was a pretty girl in a yellow dress. The boy dismounted and approached her, delighted at his boldness.
"Hello," he said.
"Hi," she replied with a flirty smile, glancing down at her half-exposed thighs, but not pulling her skirt down.
"Come on inside and I'll show it to you."
"Okay," he said nonchalantly. But he was trembling inwardly with excitement.
The girl led him into a small shop--an antique shop, apparently, filled with old divans, and hung with ornate chandeliers of brass and crystal. There were several doorways, closed with curtains of green felt. The girl sat down on one of the divans, and the boy sat beside her.
"Isn't this cozy?" she said,
"Yes," he answered, slipping his arm around her shoulders.
She turned her face up, and he pressed his lips to hers. They were warm and moist. He slipped his tongue between them and ran it along the inner surfaces of her upper teeth. Her hand crept up along his thigh, and his moved down over one of her breasts. It was her right hand that now gripped his hips; with her left she pressed his palm to her chest, and he felt the hard button of her nipple through the fabric of her dress. Her lips slowly came together and pursed around his tongue, and its edges curled up to form a tube which she proceeded to suck like a soda straw. He felt his saliva go gurgling into her mouth. Her fingers slipped around his hip and dug into his left buttock, pulling him onto her lap. It wasn't until then, when he felt the heat of her thighs on his bare ass, that he realized his bathing trunks were gone, and that there were several elderly couples browsing around the shop.
Noticing his alarm, the girl said, "Aren't you enjoying yourself?"
The boy said, "Wh-what do you mean?" and one of the men came over and reminded him that when the King's women had told him how ridiculous he looked in those trunks with the crotch cut out, he had taken them off.
"Don't you remember?" the man asked.
"Yes," replied the boy. "I do now. I'd forgotten it."
The man said "Hmph!" and went back to his browsing. The boy felt reassured.
"Undress me," said the girl, stroking his bare flanks, "and I'll let you fuck me."
The boy got up on his knees, reached between his legs and pulled the yellow skirt up the girl's smooth, suntanned thighs to her hips. She lifted her behind slightly off the cushion, and he bunched the skirt at her waist. Her panties were made of blue lace, and they clung snugly to the swell of her dainty little pussy. The boy ran his hand lightly over her crotch, and the little hairs that stuck out through the lace brushed his palm.
"That tickles," said the girl with a giggle.
The boy unbuckled her belt and worked the dress up her torso, but it got stuck at her tits.
"You have to unzip it first, silly," she said, tossing her hair to one side so he could reach the zipper at the back of her neck.
"Stupid," muttered the people in the shop. The boy tried to ignore them.
He unzipped the back of the dress, and to demonstrate his casual attitude and worldly experience, he pulled on the backhand of the girl's bra, then let the elastic snap back. It was louder than he'd anticipated.
"Ouch!"
"Disgusting!"
"Crude!"
"Childish!"
"Impudent!"
"Sickening!"
"Someone run and tell the King!"
"The King is dead."
"Tell his mummy, then."
"Very well!"
"Let's go!"
But to the boy's relief, no one left the shop. "I'm sorry," he said to the girl.
"That's all right," she said, raising her arms over her head. "Don't pay any attention to those old farts. They'll be dead before you know it. Pull it off."
The boy worked the dress up over the firm cones of her tits and lifted it off her arms. Her bra cups were of blue lace like her panties, and her pink nipples peeked through. The boy inserted a finger in the warm, dark hollow of her cleavage, then moved it sideways over the rounded inner surface of her left breast, slowly, watching it, savoring the feel of forbidden flesh on one side and crisp lace on the other. He passed the finger back and forth across her nipple, entranced by the wonderful way it doubled over and sprang back when released.
"Aren't you going to take it off?" she asked.
"Sure," said the boy, drawing his finger from the bra and sliding the straps off her shoulders.
"Isn't this fun?"
"Yes."
"There isn't anything wrong with it, you know."
"I know."
"In spite of what they tell us. I used to be Mrs. Frank's daughter, for instance."
"You did?"
"Before I came here."
And there won't be any after-effects?
He'll never know what hit him. We used this stuff on Frank's daughter last month, and it worked like a charm.
Stop worrying, Trudy. He's enjoying this as much as we
are.
"That's the great thing about this island," said the girl. "And everything grows to giant size. Look at you, for instance." She grasped the stiff shank of his cock with both hands, one above the other, as one would grip a baseball bat.
I must congratulate you, Trudy. You've raised a fine little cucumber there. What a pity John isn't here to see it.
Hell, she's been pulling it since he was born!
Shut up!
"That's all very well," said a decrepit old woman, tapping him on the shoulder, "but you're forgetting one thing."
"What?" asked the boy.
"The Ordeal," they all said at once, filling the shop with their fiendish cackling.
"Fuck you!" shouted the girl, and they all fell silent. "Don't pay any attention to them, honey. They'll all be dead before morning. Unhook me."
The boy reached around and unhooked her bra. She slipped it off her arms and threw it at one of the old men, who ducked just in time. She arched her back and shook her shoulders to demonstrate the resilience of her tits.
"Do you like them? " she asked.
"Oh, yes!"
"Touch them."
The boy pressed his palms against her jutting nipples and kneaded the firm fullness of her ripe young bosom with his fingers, while she smeared the oily leakage from his prick up and down its throbbing length.
"Careful," said the boy. "You might get a facefull."
"Ha!" said one of the bystanders. "Get him!"
"The way he talks!"
"Just think," thought the boy with mischievous exuberance. "I was once a humiliating name! If she could only see me now!"
"I don't care," said the girl, still stroking his member.
"What?"
"I don't care if I get a facefull."
"Wouldn't you rather have a cuntfull?" the boy asked, marveling at the boldness of his words, and hardly believing that he'd spoken them.
The girl blushed and said, "You're going to embarrass me, you nasty thing."
"I'm going to fuck you, is what I'm going to do," said the boy, putting his tongue into her mouth and his hands between her legs. She moaned with passionate eagerness, sucking his tongue and struggling to get out of her pants. The boy jerked them off her buttocks, and somebody pulled them the rest of the way off. She fell over on her back and pulled the boy down on top of her, wrapping her legs around his waist and stuffing the bulging head of his prick into her fuzzy slit. It slid smoothly and snugly into the slick warmth, and a wave of pleasure swept through the boy's body, and he was floating again on that mild blue sea, rising and falling on the gentle swells, sounding the ancient depths, swooping, plunging, diving .. .
Oh, give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me!
You're hurting him! You're going too fast for him!
Shut up and leave them alone!
Just then a boy burst through the front door with a machine gun in his hand.
Uhn! Uhn! Uhn!
He lined the old people up against the wall and mowed them down.
Oh! Ahhhhhh!
With a kind of fearful listlessness he approached one of the doorways and flung back the curtain. A tall woman with large breasts and broad hips stepped out into the shop.
"Now, put that down and come on," she said, starting for the front door. "We're going to be late."
"Yes, ma'am," said the boy timidly, dropping his machine gun and following her with downcast eyes.
Out in the plaza, the woman was already sitting on the handlebars of the bicycle, waiting impatiently. "Hurry up," she said. "You know how I hate to go in late."
"Yes, ma'am."
When the boy had mounted and shoved off, he saw why the handlebars were shaped that way: Their curves perfectly conformed to those of the woman's ass. The voluptuous satin-sheathed cheeks fitted precisely into the rounded chrome W, and the contours held true all the way up to the handle grips, which pressed so snugly against her waist that the boy could scarcely squeeze his thumbs in between her flesh and the rubber. Even the hex nut at the axis seemed to be in perfect alignment with her asshole.
The boy pedaled across a plaza and entered another arcade--or rather, not another arcade, but a continuation of the one by which he had arrived. The corridor seemed gloomier now than before, and to make matters worse, he had to pedal against a chilling draft which blew the woman's hair into disarray and made the long black strands whip into his eyes. When he complained of this, she told him not to worry, she would do the steering. And she did. All he had to do was pedal and keep his eyes fixed on her buttocks, which, no matter how dark it grew in the arcade, seemed to glow with an eerie white light of their own, like moons.
In a cul-de-sac with a fountain in the center, people were beginning to gather. High stucco walls with iron-grilled windows towered on every side. Besides the mummy cases which lined the north wall, there were statues and all kinds of pottery set around the fountain and in shadowy recesses in the shrubbery. The heavy scent of jasmine hung in the still air like a thick, sweet gas, and the atmosphere was so dense that the boy felt as though he were treading the sea bottom in lead shoes, every step laborious and painful. Leaning the bicycle against a hedge, he had taken the woman's hand and followed her into the house where the party was being held. It was being given by their friend--his and the woman's--and this was apparently where he lived. To distinguish this man from other men--for the boy has long since forgotten his name--I will call him "the man with the beard." The woman helped herself at the punch bowl, and let the boy have a few sips from the crystal dipper.
The boy held onto the woman's skirt as she moved about, talking to this one and that one, drinking cocktails and eating hors d'oeuvres. Whenever a man patted her on the ass or pinched one of her tits, the boy politely turned his head. At first their friend was nowhere to be seen, but later he came down and murdered one of the guests. The ceiling of this room was high and vaulted, with enormous cypress beams riddled with worm holes, and the candles of its great iron chandeliers cast huge, dark, quivering shadows on the stone walls. On these walls hung numerous displays of antique weapons--spears, swords, shields and the like--and beneath these were row on row of earthenware jars and Greek amphorae and large green glass bottles such as the boy used to find on the beach--the sort in which you always expect to find a note, but never do. Angling steeply up the rear wall was an iron staircase that resembled a fire escape, and it was up these stairs that their friend with the beard had fled after the murder. Later he was put to death, and people came from all over the world to view his mummy. The boy joined the procession of pilgrims in the cul-de-sac, a strange mixture of relief and dread in his heart.
Some of the mummies were in egg-shaped cases of smoky glass, tinted green or blue or yellow like Easter eggs, and others were in transparent domed cylinders like the cases of those so-called perpetual motion clocks that are driven by little whirling brass balls. The egg cases were leaning against the walls at various angles, but the cylindrical ones were all vertical. The mummies themselves looked flat and inanimate, their features reduced to geometrical patterns by the embalmers. The faces were triangular--somewhat like the face painted on the sail of the raft Kon-Tiki, only more so. The bodies, when the boy thought about them later, reminded him of some of the statues on Easter Island as depicted in South Sea Lore. But the mummy of the man with the beard, while bearing a superficial resemblance to the others, was quite another thing.
For one thing, it was larger, standing a good fifteen feet in height and measuring probably ten feet across the base. By "base" I mean body. The head was triangular, the body pyramidal, both approaching the equilateral in proportion and set point to point, so to speak, the lower point of the triangle (i.e., the chin) slightly overlapping the peak of the pyramid. The head had a much more geometrical appearance than the body, the latter being grossly corrugated by wrinkles, as though it had been soaked in brine for several years, and quite bloated in abdominal region--pot-bellied, I should say. But this is difficult to describe; let me start at the bottom. (Not that these eighteen years have blurred his memory; even without the little sketch he made of it, which now lies beside my typewriter, the image would remain crystal clear in his mind. It is only the "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings," as T.S. Eliot says in another context, that gives me trouble.)
At first glance--that is, at a distance--you had the impression that the embalmed figure was sitting cross-legged on the floor of its cylinder, but closer scrutiny showed that this was not quite the case. Either the bones had been removed from the legs, or else they had been "rubberized" in some way, so that what had been legs were now only shrunken tubes of flesh, perfectly flexible and no bigger around than lengths of a good-sized garden hose. They began, apparently, somewhere at the rear of the body cone--it was more a cone than a pyramid--and were wrapped around its base. The elongated, boneless toes, which resembled eel skins, met at the front and were partially woven together, or rather tangled together, and fixed in place by a coat of something like wax or shellac.
The arms were shrunken like the legs, and came down from the apex of the cone in jointless wrinkly curves which roughly circumscribed the distended belly; but unlike the toes, the fingers did not meet. These crinkly, twisted tentacles were plastered to the paunch, their tips just touching the swollen navel--or perhaps it was the shrunken penis--which bulged out just above the mesh of toes.
The chest, shoulders, neck and chin were all drawn together as though by purse strings in the region where the cone and the triangle merged. This was the most grotesquely wrinkled part of the mummy, and the scraggly, goat-like beard made it worse. As for the nose, it seemed to have been removed altogether, leaving nothing but a vertical gash of scar tissue, partially sealed by the wax or shellac or whatever. But the most prominent, the most staggering, the most bizarre aspect of the mummy was its eyes. Notwithstanding their prominence, the boy noticed nothing particularly unusual about them until one of the mourners, who happened to be a policeman, tapped him on the shoulder with his nightstick.
"You were there," said the policeman, tears running down his cheeks. "Tell me, please! How did it happen?"
He has the most beautiful--
The boy turned from the weeping man and looked up into those great, sorrowful eyes of the mummy. His heart leapt into his throat, and it all came back to him in cold flash.
The eyes were on a plane approximately two thirds of the way from the chin-chest region to the top of the flat, hairless head; horizontally, they were centered roughly on the bisectors of the two upper angles of the face. They were almond-shaped, but slanted neither upward nor downward, and each was about two feet across by one foot high. They had no distinguishable lids or brows, though these may have been obscured by the wrinkles. All this the boy had already noticed--the size, the shape and so forth; it was not this that froze his blood. It was the movement of the eyeballs.
As he stared up into their fluid depths, they seemed to quiver and flow, as though swimming toward sight, caught in some ghastly limbo halfway between life and death, and with a spasm of profound emotion he remembered how it had been, how he had stood at the top of a high stone tower, leaning over the railing, watching the tiny white-clad figure moving through the throng far below...
Hearing a sound behind him, he whirled to see a girl climbing up through the hatch, followed by another, and then another. Soon the top of the tower was crowded with girls, all of them dressed in pretty, bright-colored dresses that kept ballooning up on the breeze to reveal their golden thighs. Then a portly old gentleman in a black suit hauled himself through the hatch and took his place behind a little wooden podium on which lay an open Bible, and the boy realized that this was a Sunday school class.
The girls sat down on folding chairs, and the man began to read from the Bible. At first the boy was acutely conscious of his nudity, but no one else seemed to notice it, and the uneasiness soon passed. There weren't enough chairs to go around, so some of the girls lined up along the low wall to the boy's right and left, facing the podium which stood in the center of the roof, their elbows on the iron railing, their breasts thrust out boldly against the fronts of their dresses.
Sometimes they would throw back their heads and let their hair stream out in the wind. None of them challenged the presence of the boy, they seemed to accept him as one of them. A tingle of excitement raced up his spine. He had the feeling he was viewing something forbidden--something on the order of a secret puberty rite--or that he had stumbled into a harem. It was like the time he had locked himself in a toilet stall in the ladies' restroom at the beach, and watched the girls undress through the crack of the door. Now, as then, he began to get an erection.
Beyond the podium, on the far side of the circular rooftop, some of the girls started loosening their clothing. Some removed their belts; others unbuttoned the fronts of their blouses or unzipped the backs of their dresses; those sitting in the chairs pulled their skirts far up on their thighs and spread their legs. The boy watched one of the girls standing at the rail pull the tails of her sheer pink blouse from her skirt, unhook her bra with one hand, cleverly draw it out through an armhole and drop it off the tower. Her nipples were dark as walnuts, vividly apparent through the thin nylon. Now another girl jerked up her skirt, pulled down her panties, stepped out of them and hung them on the rail. Others followed suit, and soon the entire circumference of the tower was decorated with lingerie--pants and bras alike, black ones, white ones and all shades in between, fluttering and flapping in the breeze like festive pennants. The teacher seemed wholly preoccupied with his text, totally unaware of the mass strip show that was in progress all around him. At the time his words came through quite clearly, but except for the last line, the boy no longer remembers them. The tone of his voice, however, left a lasting impression; it rose gradually, by stages, from a sort of mechanical listlessness to a fever pitch of intensity, at which time the man raised his fists to heaven and in a terrifying voice that reverberated through every hall and hollow of the island, cried out--
But I'm getting ahead. At present he was somewhere between these two extremes.
The boy felt a warm hand on his hip, and looked around to find the girl in the yellow dress beside him, smiling up into his eyes. The front of her dress gaped open, and he saw that she wore no bra--or rather that she had removed it.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," said the boy.
"Look." She turned and lifted one foot to the low wall, her skirt slipping slowly up her leg to her hip, which was quite bare.
"She's forgotten me," thought the boy, delighted at her promiscuity.
The girl who had been standing on the other side of the boy, a buxom redhead, now reached across in front of him, bumping the head of his horizontal cock with her arm, and jerked the yellow skirt the rest of the way up, uncovering the other girl's fluffy bush. It was the color of wheat.
"Well," said the boy, feeling his short-lived boldness returning. "I see you're a real blonde after all."
"Why you--!" She called him a humiliating name, and slapped his face.
"Who in the fuck do you think you are, anyway?" said the redhead, stepping out of her dress. "Come on, Julie."
The blonde spat in the boy's face and tore her dress off over her head, and the two girls sank to the floor at the boy's feet, their faces between each other's legs, with the redhead on top. The teacher's voice rose higher and higher, and now dresses and blouses and skirts were flying in all directions. The entire circle was full of writhing naked girlflesh. The boy saw the redhead's tongue plunge into the blonde's parted slit and slide out coated with honey and froth, and then he saw something stir in the gooey depths of her gleaming hole. He clutched his throat with both hands and staggered back against the rail. All the girls were pairing off, and the sounds of their lapping and slurping filled the air, and everywhere the boy looked, he saw the phallic flesh oozing out of their cunts--thick, sausage-like tubers of raw meat. And there was a pair of hungry lips waiting for every one of them, devouring, licking, sucking...
With a choked cry of horror and desperation, the boy turned his back on that sea of bobbing heads and driving buttocks. "I knew it!" he gasped, "I knew it couldn't be true!" Locking his gaze on the tiny white vortex of the crowd at the foot of the tower, he spat on his hand and began to masturbate, his fist a blur of motion, his cock bulging like a bloated tick, tears of rage and fear and desperation streaming down his face. He pitched forward over the void, losing his balance, and his seminal bombs went hissing down toward their target.
"VENGEANCE IS MINE, SAYETH THE LORD!"
The cul-de-sac crackled with the rattle of automatic gunfire.
--eyes.
He has his father's--
The boy turned from the mummy in a cold sweat, and said, "I think he did it with a knife, but it may have been a gun. There's no way of telling. Nobody did anything. They just stood there, and it got so quiet... Oh, it was so quiet!" A sob caught in his throat.
"I know, I know," said the policeman, wiping his eyes on his sleeve and trying to control his emotion. "But please go on."
"Well, after that he went back upstairs, up that fire
escape-- "
"Yes, yes!"
"--and there wasn't anybody in the whole house that didn't feel sorry for him."
The policeman pinched off a sob in the middle and peered down at the boy, curiously. "Who?" he asked suspiciously.
"Who?"
"That's what I said. Impudence is a felony here, you know."
"Uh... Why, the man with the beard, of course," the boy said timidly.
"Ah, yes! Of course, of course. Stupid of me. Please continue."
"Well, when he was gone, everyone started talking at
once--"
"Yes. I remember that."
"--but of course nobody went up to the door. It was big wooden door, with iron straps on it, and you could see it from down below. And then there was this place like big patio sort of, and there was a crowd of people there--"
"What? A crowd of what? You're treading on thin ice boy!"
"A... A crowd of p-people."
"Speak up!"
"People!"
"Keep your goddamn voice down, you--!" He called the boy a humiliating name. "Have you no respect for the dead? Continue!"
"Uh... Well, so everybody went out in this patio, and there were high walls and turrets all around, like a castle or something, and way up high on one of the walls was a window with iron bars, sort of, and that was his window, I think."
"Whose?"
"The man with the beard."
"Ah!"
"I remember the sky was all reddish, like a desert, and everyone kept pointing up at the window and yelling and everything, and then the police came and found him... and found him..."
"Huddled in a corner?"
"Y-yes."
"Well, say it! Come on, now, spit it out!"
"F-found him huddled in a corner." The words tasted bitter in his mouth.
The policeman embraced the boy, and they both broke down weeping.
"He was put to death," the boy went on, "and then we all came out here to visit his mummy."
The policeman straightened up, wiped his nose on his sleeve, cleared his throat and said, "Congratulations, kid. Full confessions are always welcome here. Put these on, will you?"
The boy took the handcuffs and snapped them on his wrists. The policeman took from his pocket a little black book with gilt-edged pages, thumbed through it for a few minutes, found the page he was looking for, and read: "I hereby arrest you in the name of the Triumvirate." He closed the book and put it in his pocket. "Let's go."
The boy took one last look at the great, looming bulk of the mummy...
--eyes.
... slipped out of the cuffs, and made a miraculous escape, the details of which he has forgotten.
A little later he came upon two little boys shooting marbles on the sidewalk. They were shooting with little sticks, instead of in the usual way, and the sticks were dry and rotten and kept breaking and crumbling, so that the marbles could hardly roll more than a few inches without being deflected by the wood chips that were scattered all over the scrap of green satin on which they played. One of the boys lost his entire sack and stomped off in a huff, saying, "Aw, shit! They were brand new! I hadn't even used 'em yet!"
CHAPTER SIX
He paid the price of admission and took a seat in the amphitheater, which was about the size of a football stadium and shaped like a Viking ship. The boy always paid--or almost always. There was only one time he could remember not having paid, and that was during the year after the War ended, when he and Flemming had sneaked in under the girlie tent at the carnival. But that was five years ago, when he was ten and a good deal bolder than now. Now, of course, is a literary device meaning then, but "take it in what sense thou wilt," as Shakespeare said. As a matter of fact, the boy was not remembering this then--that is, in the then-now--but rather is as it comes back to him in the now-now, i.e., the present, the time of writing twenty-three years after the fact, according to the generally accepted laws of mathematical progression. He is certain he was ten, because afterwards his father had said, "Oh, stop your goddamn blubberin', Trudy. When my granddaddy was ten, he ran away from home too. So did my daddy and both my brothers. And when I was ten, I ran away too. Why, shit, there ain't a kid in the S-- family that didn't run away when he was ten, and probably there never will be!"
He had been staying with his aunt that weekend. She had given him a kitten, and he wanted to show it to his father, who had just gotten out of the Army. "Please, Aunt Fran!" he pleaded, "I'll come right back, I promise!"
"That's no place for a boy your age, Johnny," said his aunt. "Now you just sit down and play with the kitty. There'll be plenty of time to show it to your father."
His father was down at Arnie's, shooting pool with his Uncle Farley, who is the younger brother of Aunt Fran. The boy didn't see what was wrong with Arnie's; his father lad taken him there twice, and once he'd even let him take few shots with his pool cue. He told his aunt that, but it did no good. And later he heard her talking to his cousin: "I declare, Ruth, I'm afraid that man is going to spoil everything Trudy has accomplished with the boy. It was bad enough with Farley hanging around all the time, but with him home... Well, I just don't know. If Johnny were my son--" Etc., etc. "He used to read all the time, you now. That's Trudy's influence. Always had his nose buried in a book. Good books, too. You know what I saw him reading one time? Hamlet. Would you believe it? Hamlet, at ten years old! And so engrossed, he didn't even hear me peak to him. But now! I declare, since John came home, he hasn't read a word! All he wants to do is go to that bar with his father and Farley. You'd think the man would have the decency to stay home with his wife and child once in a while, after being gone for three years, wouldn't you? How Trudy ever got mixed up with such a man in the first place is more than I can understand. They have absolutely nothing in common. I don't mean to be snobbish, heaven knows, but 1 just can't help believing that a girl should marry within her own class. Like you and Claude, for instance. You have no trouble, no friction. And why? Simply because--"Etc., etc.
Disgusted with this drivel, the boy put his kitten in the pocket of his windbreaker and quietly slipped away.
When he got to Arnie's, he didn't see his father at the pool tables, but his uncle was there, shooting with a man the boy had never seen before. The boy walked up and said, "Is Dad here, Uncle Farley?"
"Huh? Oh, hi, kid! No, he ain't here now."
"Where is he?"
"Where is he? Oh, he's around. What's up?"
The boy took out his kitten and said he wanted to show it to his father.
"Ain't that a coincidence!" said his uncle, pointing at the other man. "This guy came in a minute ago and said exactly the same thing!'" The two men doubled over with laughter.
"Only he's one up on ya, kid," gasped Uncle Farley, wiping his eyes. "He had two pussies to show yer old man! He's with 'em now! Hahahahaha!"
The boy laughed too, though he didn't understand.
Then his uncle told him to sit down, his father would be back soon, and the men went on with their game. But after a few minutes Uncle Farley got a mischievous look in his eye, and the boy saw him wink at the other man. "Hey, Johnny, on second thought, why don't you go on up an see yer dad now? Why wait, eh, Mac?"
"Hey, now wait a minute!" said the other man, but Uncle Farley cut him off.
"Up the stairs, first door to your left. Go ahead, kid. and tell him to hurry up! I ain't got all night!"
The boy ran eagerly up the stairs and burst through the door. "Hey, Dad! Look at the--"
His father was sitting up in bed, between two women, all three were bare-chested. One of the women was a platinum blonde, and the other had curly orange hair. The one with the orange hair had big, round breasts that sagged, and the blonde had pointed ones that stuck straight out. The blonde knocked his father's hand off her breast and jerked the sheet up to her chin, but the other woman just laughed and winked at the boy.
"Johnny!" said his father, bounding out of bed stark naked, and starting toward the boy. "What the hell're you doin' here, boy? Who sent you up here? Farley? Ha ha! That son of a bitch! "
The boy could hardly take his eyes off the enormous club of flesh that jutted from the dark forest below his father's belly.
"Hey, where ya goin', skinhead?" one of the woman called.
"Hold your ass a minute, baby. Be right with ya. Whatcha got there, boy? A cat, eh? Cute little bugger, ain't he? Hey, listen, Johnny--"
"Hey, Johnny," said the orangehead, "how ya like this kitty?" She threw off the sheet and spread her legs, and the boy stared at the bright pink mouth, framed by shaggy brown curls. The blonde giggled as the other woman made copulatory motions with her pelvis.
"Haw! Nasty bitch, ain't she, Johnny? Hey, look, son, I ain't runnin' ya off, but I'm gettin' low on funds, you know what I mean? You came just in time to save yer old man's ass. I want ya to go back to the apartment and lift a couple tens from yer mama's dresser. It's in the bottom drawer on the left, under her pants. Now don't worry, she won't mind. All I need's another twenty. Anyway, she ain't there. I dropped her off at church. It's choir practice night. We'll explain it to her when we get home, see? And, John," he added with a grin, glancing toward the girls, "there's plenty here for both of--Hey, where'd he go?? Hey, Johnny!"
The boy ran down the stairs and out to the street.
When he reached the courtyard of the apartment building where he lived at the time, he was happy to see a light in his mother's bedroom window. He knew by the dimness and the blue tint that it was her bedside lamp; she was back from choir practice, and was sitting up in bed, reading. He would go up and show her the kitten, and then he would get a book and lie beside her, as he used to do. Maybe she would ask him to brush her hair. He liked doing that.
When you are ten years old, stairs are faster than elevators. He took three at a time.
Neither his mother nor the blond man on top of her heard it when the boy opened the door. The hinges creaked a little, but compared to the squeaking of the bedsprings it was nothing. Their feet were toward the boy, and they lay at a slight diagonal to the long axis of the bed, so that he had a view straight up their crotches. His mother's ass was jacked up on three or four pillows, and her legs were spread out to either side of the naked man, who crouched on his knees, hunched forward, his big, smooth-fingered hands or her breasts. Her head was thrown back and lolling violently from side to side, and the boy noticed that she was drooling. By squatting slightly he could see the reddish fuzz around the man's balls, and by getting down on his knees at the foot of the bed he could see the thick, livid shaft sloshing in and out of the mass of hair, flesh and foam between his mother's thighs.
His father had been wrong about the money being under her panties; he saw it lying on the chest of drawers beside the door--a ten and two fives.
He took the three bills out on the fire escape at the back the building tore them into little pieces, which fluttered
down into the street like confetti, but when he got down
there, he couldn't find a single shred.
They would never have known he'd been in the apartment, except that he left the kitten there. Perhaps that is why his mother never liked Sim-sim. (But why do you suppose he left the kitten? So she would know? Intriguing, what?)
It was still early, so he went to Flemming's house and they rode their bikes out to the carnival together. It had been the boy's idea to slip under the tent. And so this was how it happened that the boy did not pay that one time. And it was after the girlie show--which was all "hair and hide" in those days--that he ran away. It was the first time he had done so, and being somewhat naive about the perils of the open road, he had thumbed a ride with a deputy sheriff in an unmarked car... But I digress. This time, to return to the now, he paid as usual, and took his seat in the bleachers. It occurred to him later that it was odd that he was the only one in the audience, but at the time it seemed natural enough. He sat on a seat at the extreme south point of the amphitheater--the bow of the ship, as it were, on the very prow, and though the theater was so long that he could scarcely see its north end through the mist, he had a perfect view of the proceedings below.
At the center of the vast stage was a stone slab about the size of a small dining table, oblong in shape, set on four large boulders. On the slab, stretched out face-up, lay small male figure which the boy recognized as his own, and standing beside it was a tall, stately-looking woman wearing a cape of black net decorated with sequins. The cape was fastened at her neck, and its two front edges hung down in a long, swooping inverted V, so that it covered her tits and the flare of her hips, but left her thorax, belly, cunt and legs exposed. Not that the cape hid her tits--it only covered them; the salmon-hued, orchid-rimmed nipples showed through with striking clarity. Besides, it only covered them when she carried her arms down at her sides, forearms crossed at her waist in an attitude of repose. As soon as she extended her arms, the cape parted, and there they were.
A word about those tits, for they were like none the boy had seen before. Their length was as great as, their girth greater than, and their shape similar to, footballs. They stood straight out from her chest, like torpedoes just starting from their tubes, and they looked as though they might explode at any time. In color they were milk-white, with just the finest tracery of blue veins radiating out from the domelike nipples. They would have gone five pounds each if they weighed an ounce, and yet as the boy gazed up a them, their fantastic profiles silhouetted against the slate-gray sky, he saw that there was not the slightest trace of a wrinkle where their underbellies met her torso. There wasn't a bra in the world that could have contained them. And they definitely had the aspect of deadly weapons; if one fell on you, it would kill you.
Some time passed before the boy realized that she was sawing off his prick with a rusty knife. He was surprised at the lack of pain. Actually, it was rather a pleasant sensation--a sort of tickle that reminded him of his first orgasm, which he'd had while lying on his stomach with his chin in his hands when he was eleven. The knife had a curved blade, worn thin from many whettings, and as it worked its way through the flesh, it made a sort of brittle grating noise like when you slice a loaf of stale French read. Lying on the slab near his left hip, he happened to notice, was a small cheesecloth marble pouch with a drawstring. It was empty and open, and close by lay two very large agate marbles, teetering almost imperceptibly, as though they had just come to rest after rolling out of the bag. These, it occurred to him, were his testicles, and the pouch was his scrotum. He didn't remember their having been removed; it must have happened during his miraculous escape. Was that the price he had paid to get in here? Possibly. It didn't seem important.
The remaining fibers parted with a dull snap, and a roar of applause filled the amphitheater. The woman held the severed member on high for a moment, then dropped it unceremoniously onto the slab between the boy's knees. It was about three inches in diameter, a foot or so in length, and curiously without features, like a salami. The woman rolled it back and forth a few times, as one rolls a cue stick on the table to test its straightness, and then, apparently satisfied, picked it up, and mounted the slab. She stood over the boy's waist, lodged the penis between her dugs, and with both hands threw the cape back off her shoulders. This brought another burst of applause.
The boy gazed up into the wooly darkness of her cunt, and at the looming undersides of her missile-like tits, between which his bloodless member was sandwiched. The air became close, heavy and pungent. He found it difficult to breathe. Not that this was painful; it was only that when he inhaled, the air seemed to be escaping somehow from his lungs, though as far as he could recall they had not been punctured.
Bending over him, the cock still held firmly in the vise of her bosom, the woman put the marbles back into the pouch, drew the string, tied it, and hung the pouch around his neck. It was then, when he lifted his head to look at this pouch, that the boy perceived the source of his breathing problem. The inhaled air was escaping through his nipples which had grown into swollen turrets, pink in color and twice their original size. Now the flesh around them began to swell also, and before long he had a regular set of tits--smooth, firm, and very pleasant to the eye. The applause was deafening. But between each burst of applause, an uncanny silence fell abruptly over the empty auditorium--a deathly, echoing kind of silence, like the inside of a warehouse in the dead of night. During these silences the boy was careful not to move his head, because his balls clicked so loudly in their sack when he did so, that it embarrassed him.
From time to time, a man's voice came over the loudspeakers, one word at a time.
Nowwwwww--
The woman drew the penis from her cleavage with a flourish, like Gene Kelly drawing his rapier in The Three Musketeers. Squatting slightly, she inserted one end of it--which end was uncertain, since they both looked alike--into her cunt. Once she had it started, she took her hands away and extended her arms straight out at her sides, head well back, legs spread wide and bent at the knees. For a moment, the disembodied phallus hung out of her gash inclined slightly toward the boy's face in a thick, heavy arc apparently in a state of semi-turgidity. But as she began to flex the muscles along the insides of her statuesque thighs, the member stirred, stiffened and straightened. Glancing up through the looming V of her cleavage, the boy saw that her nostrils were opening and closing, slowly, ponderously, like the gills of a dying fish. Then, fully erect, the member began to slide upward through the tightly stretched labia. She was sucking it into her vagina by some mysterious means known only to her. The boy felt a strange admiration for her. Again the voice boomed across the stadium.
--Giiiiiitonnnn--
And the crowd went wild with applause. Green confetti lined down on all sides.
Deeper and deeper went the phallus. The woman's entire body broke out in sweat, and saliva flowed from her open mouth, trickling down to her breasts and dripping off the nipples. The drops fell on the boy's belly like molten solder, exploding on impact with his skin. It was like the time he and Flemming had dropped bags of water on the cars passing in the street below his apartment. The hot fluid flooding his navel and running down between his legs filled him with a sort of melancholy euphoria, vaguely resembling nostalgia. This feeling soared even higher--or plunged even deeper--when at last the butt end of his member disappeared completely inside the woman's hole, and the shaggy doors snapped shut.
Mountainous seas of applause.
Cries of "More! More!" rang out.
Then silence.
--I--
Then, with a suddenness that brought the boy's heart into his throat, the woman squatted lower, clasped her hands together, gritted her teeth, shut her eyes, and with a cry halfway between a grunt and a shriek, ejected the foreign body from her cunt. It shot out with the force of an artillery shell, headed straight for the boy's groin, and if it had struck him, it would have killed him, but it didn't. It's momentum was checked just a split second before impact by a thin sinew issuing from her vulva and attached to the nose of the phallus. It sprang back, fell, jumped, fell again bounced a few times, and finally came more or less to rest jiggling nervously on the end of its fleshy tether like one of those balls attached to a wooden paddle by a rubber band. The lower end of the member hung about half a foot above the slab, which made the actual length of the tether, from the point where it emerged from the woman's crack to where it was attached to the boy's cock, approximate fourteen inches.
Grasping the upper end of the sinew in her left hand, the woman whirled the member around a couple of times, as one twirls a watch chain, caught it on the upswing with her right hand, raised it to her mouth and took a big bite out of its side.
--ammmmmmmm--
"Yaaaaay!"
She took another bite.
"More! More!"
Again her fangs tore into the gray flesh, and a greenish fluid issued from the wound.
"Hooray! Hooray!"
From his seat high on the lip of the amphitheater, the boy stood up with the others and cheered her on. "Bravo! Bravo!"
In the midst of this clamor and excitement, the boy happened to look down and see a man in the shadows beneath the bleachers, leering up under his skirt. It seemed to the boy that he could actually feel the touch of those eyes in his crotch. It was a pleasant feeling, and thereafter he stood up at the slightest provocation to let the man look. Before long his panties became damp at the crotch, and his nipples began to tingle. He did not, however, acknowledge to the peeper that he was aware of his presence; he was too shy for that.
The crowd soon began to thin out, and by the time the amphitheater was empty, the woman had eaten the penis down to a nub. She wiped the loose shards of flesh from her lips with the back of her hand, and dropped the ragged remains with a sigh of satisfaction.
"Aaah!"
--goinnnngggg--
The boy smoothed down his skirt, adjusted his bra, and descended the bleachers. The woman shook her long black hair and left the theater by a side exit, the boy following a few steps behind, holding tightly to the sinew which trailed out from beneath the sequined cape. As he went through the door, he shot a coquettish glance over his shoulder at the peeper, who was lurking in the shadows on the far side if the stage.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The woman left the boy in an inner room of a large house near the south coast of the island. At first he had wept and begged her not to go, but then he'd become angry and driven her out. Now he turned his profile to the dresser mirror and ran his hands lovingly over his breasts. They were high and nicely rounded, and more than adequately filled out the front of his cotton sundress. They felt soft and resilient under his palms. He faced the mirror and leaned forward, pressing his tits slightly together with his upper arms and admiring the resulting crease of his cleavage. The straps of the dress were little strings tied in bows at his shoulders; he undid these and worked the bodice down his bosom until almost the entire upper halves of his boobies were exposed. Now, when he bent forward he could see the pink flesh of his nipples peeking out. Satisfied, he retied the straps and turned his attention to the skirt.
--toooooooo--
It was definitely too long; it reached to his knees. He took a pair of scissors and cut eight inches off. "That's better," he thought. While examining his newly revealed charms, the thought crossed his mind that this might be one of those trick mirrors, and that there might be a man lurking behind it, watching him. The thought gave him a thrill, and he saw himself blush.
Facing the mirror again and the man behind it, if there was one, he bent forward with his curvy legs together, put his hands on his knees and slid them slowly up his smooth white thighs, picking up the hem of his skirt on the way. When he stood straight, the skirt was bunched at his hips, and the delicious white nylon W at his crotch gleamed in the lamplight. Holding the skirt up with one hand, he let his other slide down over his mound, and having gone that far, he couldn't resist running his middle finger in along the warm groove between his thighs. When he felt the tight vise of his lower buttocks...
--plummmmmmmmb --
... he was nearly overcome with sexual excitement, and abruptly dropped the skirt and turned his back on the leering mirror.
There were bars on the windows, as usual, and the door was locked, but the back of the room opened out onto a walled terrace with an oval swimming pool in its center. The water was sky-blue and as clear as ether, but the bottom was invisible. Flowering vines covered broad areas of the walls, and little palm trees grew out of circular openings in the stone floor. A number of brightly colored air mattresses, all inflated, lay about the terrace. The boy walked barefoot out onto the cool paving stones and stretched his limbs in the sunlight, thrilling to the feel of his half-exposed tits pressing against the thin cloth of the dress, straining to be free. He brushed his dark, shoulder-length hair back from his face with his fingertips, and stretched out on one of the mattresses.
He put on his sunglasses, folded his hands behind his head, took a deep breath which almost forced his nipples out of the dangerously low neckline, and spread his legs. Hearing a sound beyond the terrace wall...
--theeeeeee--
... he drew his left foot up toward his ass, raising his knee, so that the short skirt slid down to his hip, exposing his nylon-covered pussy again. Blood pounded in his temples, and his legs felt tingly. He wondered if any hair was showing at the leg holes of his panties, and was about to put an exploring hand in his crotch, when a man's face appeared above the wall. It was, of course, the peeper.
For a moment the boy's blood ran cold. Had he hidden his clothes sufficiently--the ones with the bloodstains? And the fishing rod! What if he'd left it lying out in plain sight? What if... ? But these fears subsided as abruptly as they had arisen, and it was a long time before he could remember what he had been afraid of.
The man dropped lightly to the terrace and slouched against the wall, his hands in his pockets, the collar of his trench coat turned up around his unshaven face. At first the boy pretended not to see him, and spread his legs a little more. Now a warm breath of air swirled into the enclosure, and he felt a slight tickling sensation along the left edge of his crotch. "So there is some hair sticking out!" he thought with intense excitement. "And he's looking at it. At my pussy. Mmm! It feels so good. His eyes. I shouldn't have worn panties. Would I dare take them off now? With him watching? Why not?" But he couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, he untied his shoulder straps, stretched his arms and faked a yawn. Just at the moment when he felt one of his nipples squeezing out the top of the dress as his chest expanded, the man started toward him.
--tennnnnnnnderrrrrr--
Those leering, quivering eyes.
Those twitching cheeks.
Those parted lips.
That thick.
Slick.
Slow-moving.
Tongue.
Seized with panic, the boy screamed and leapt up, running backward, nearly falling, and finally coming to bay against the stone wall, speechless with fear.
The man kept coming at the same slow pace, hunched slightly forward.
Now his huge blue-jowled face loomed over the trembling boy.
One of the boy's tits had come all the way out of his dress, but he was too petrified to tuck it in. The mossy stone was like ice against his back.
The man reached inside his trench coat as if to draw a gun from a shoulder holster, but his hand emerged holding something small and black between thumb and forefinger. The other three fingers of the hand were extended outward in graceful curves, like the fingers of his mother and their friends when they picked up their teacups, so that at first the boy thought it was a roach that the man held. The voice of the loudspeakers hissed faintly at the periphery of his hearing.
--depthssssssss--
The boy glanced at the pool, and saw that the face of
the water had turned dark and smoky. The man spoke.
"What's the matter, baby? Don't you remember me?"
The boy forced his eyes to focus on the thing the man was holding up to his face.
"You gave me this."
It was a hair. A single black, curly hair--obviously pubic.
Suddenly the boy remembered. It had happened after leaving the amphitheater. The woman in the black cape had led him down a long, narrow flag-lined avenue to a tent, which they had entered through the back door. The tent was partitioned in the middle by a curtain, and the boy remembered peeking past this and watching the men file in through the front door, where the woman stood, taking their tickets. When he saw the peeper come in, he let the curtain fall into place, and smiled. Some of the other girls noticed this, and made rude comments: "What's the little slut grinnin' about?" "Maybe she thought o' somethin' funny." "Think's she's hot stuff, don't she?" And things like that.
But then the music started, and the boy stepped out onto the low stage, grinding his hips and shaking his breasts. He wore long gloves, high heels, and a tight-fitting gown that came off in sections. Under the gown, he wore a bra made...
--ovvvvvvvv--
... two tiny triangles of flesh-colored gauze, held in place by thin black straps, and a short skirt of red tassels over a purple G-string.
First he removed the gloves. There was no applause, but he didn't mind; that gloomy sea of hungry eyes was enough to fire his blood. At first glance the tent seemed to be filled with zombies, all standing with their hands in their pockets as though waiting for a bus, their faces devoid of expression. But this was only the superficial appearance; the eyes were very much alive, and full of a lust that could not be concealed. It was to this lust that the boy addressed his every gesture, and the eyes quivered their famished approval. They Were more like mouths than eyes, gnashing at his ripe, dancing body, snapping at his bouncing tits, lapping his lurching cunt. As the music rose to a dirty, cymbal-crashing crescendo, he released a hook, executed a seductive veronica, whirled his satin skirt free of his hips, and the eyes charged in like a herd of bulls.
--yourrrrrrrr--
"--gonna see it all tonight, boys!" he shouted, waggling his plump ass at them and running a finger down inside the back of his G-string until it touched his asshole, smiling over his shoulder at the audience, watching them staring at the obscene motions of his hand.
It was just then, just when the hot tremor surged through his body like a sunburst of fire centered on his anus, that he saw the two little boys crawl in under the canvas at the back of the tent. They were the boys he'd seen playing marbles on the sidewalk. One of them had his marble pouch hung around his neck.
The boy removed the upper part of his gown and flung it into the wings. The eyes cheered, and drank in the sight of those perfect tits, swinging and bouncing in their tiny transparent envelopes as the boy strutted across the little platform to where the peeper stood slouching against the chain that separated the audience from the stage. He spread his shapely legs and ran his hands up the insides of his thighs to his crotch, cupping his subtly jerking mound. They loved that-- especially when he stroked the thin cloth of his G-string and pushed it into the tight slit of his pussy with his middle finger. The little boys, half-hidden behind the peeper's trench coat, gawked up at him like frogs.
Then he straightened up, legs slightly spread, one hip cocked, and looking down at his cunt with half-closed eyes and pursed lips, he pushed the upper edge of the G-string down until a few sprigs of curly hair sprang out. This brought an audible response from some of the men, but not from the peeper, who was doing the Humphrey Bogart bit; he looked as though he might start slapping people around at any minute. But the boy knew it was only an act. His eyes were like those of the famished wolf in Call of the Wild; they gave him away.
Thrusting his pelvis out slightly, the boy plucked out one of his longer cunt hairs and held it out to the peeper, who took it casually, looked at it, smelled it, tasted it, grinned coolly up at the boy, and put it in an inside pocket.
The voice of the loudspeakers, which sounded strangely close--just outside the tent, perhaps--made the little boys cringe in alarm behind the peeper's trench coat.
--lasciviousssssss--
But their faces reappeared in time to see the boy release the catch at his hip and peel off the G-string. Now he bumped and ground his way around the stage several times, teasing the men with the tantalizing semi-exposure of his dark, fluffy bush, which peeked out at them through the red tassels dangling from his belt. He turned his back on them a few times, bent over and smiled at them between his legs, wiggling his butt to part the tassels and give ,an unimpeded view of his asshole and lower part of his cunt. Once when he did this, someone in the audience said, "Hike!" in a nervous voice, and a rattle of embarrassed laughter traveled through the tent.
Then he went into a fast spin, which made the tassels stand straight out from his hips, exposing everything in a whirling blur of black hair and white skin. Coming to a halt before the peeper and his two stowaways, he tore the gauze bra from his breasts with a graceful flourish. An appreciative murmur stirred through the crowd, and its collective respiration rate increased audibly.
"How ya like them apples?" said the boy, cupping his hands under his naked tits and holding them up for approval. They liked them. The little boys stared with open mouths, their faces cherry-red. The boy laughed and did a backbend, giving everyone a good, long look up his cunt. Then, by some deft maneuver such as you might expect to see in a magic act, he shed the tasseled belt and stood up, naked except for his high heels.
The peeper leered openly now, and--though he may have imagined it--the boy saw a sparkle of drool at one corner of the man's mouth. The stage was only about two feet off the sawdust floor, and the chain was less than an arm's reach from the stage, so that the peeper--as well as the little boys--had a striking close-range view of the boy's hairy little pussy as he squatted at the edge of the boards with his thighs wide open. He laid his fingertips along the fuzzy lips, drew them open, ducked his head and peered into the pink, juicy hole for a moment. Then he looked intently at the man and said, "It's empty, honey."
The man reached over the chain and slipped four fingers into the oozing sheath. "Now it's not," he said.
The fingers began moving, and the boy thought he would swoon with ecstasy. But then a noise below brought his eyes back into focus. One of the little boys--the one with the pouch around his neck--had apparently become so flustered or frightened (or sickened?), that he had tripped over the peeper's foot and fallen to the sawdust. The man looked down. It was the first time he had noticed the boys.
"Hey," he said. "What are you little peckers doin' here? Wanna see some cunt, huh? Okay, have a good look! Ha ha!" And with that, he picked the child up by the collar of his shirt and the seat of his pants, and rammed him face-first into the boy's open gash, rubbing his mouth and nose in it.
The little boy tried to cry out, but nothing emerged but a terrified farting noise. It sounded like someone screaming with his face in a bucket of slop. Long before the man put him down, his little legs were pedaling frantically, as though he were riding an invisible bicycle, and as soon as he touched sawdust, he plowed straight through the hysterically laughing crowd and out the front door of the tent, bawling like a baby.
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho
He He He
Ha
The man's brawny hand gripped the front of the boy's dress and sent him rolling over and over toward the darkened pool, ripping the flimsy garment from his body in the process. The boy teetered on the slippery brink, flailed desperately, lost his balance, but saved himself at the last moment. When he peered over the lip of the pool into those evil depths, his heart stopped cold.
The man grasped him by the hair of his head, jerked him over on his back, and with his other hand ripped the panties from his hips. The man no longer wore his trench coat; he was stark naked, like the boy, and his cock looked big as a baseball bat.
"You remember now, baby?" he said, waving the huge member back and forth above the boy's face.
"Yes," the boy replied, following the hypnotic sway of the phallus with his eyes, and feeling his legs slowly opening as though of their own accord, ponderously as a drawbridge. "I remember."
(That has always been the boy's trouble, and it remains so to this day: He remembers too much.)
The man wiped his palms on his gleaming dome, and with a cry of animal lust, fell on the supine boy and covered his budding body with passionate kisses. He was all teeth and tongue and clutching claws, and his lips were as hot as branding irons. The boy writhed in ecstasy beneath the brutal assault, and his love nest flooded itself with simmering honey. His breasts swelled up so from the man's savage biting kisses, that he thought they would burst at the nipples.
A wave of electricity surged through his body as he felt the head of that gigantic cock battering its way into his...
--rump!
... cunt, and he heard himself crying, "Go ahead! Do it! Stick it in! I don't care if you hurt me! I want you to hurt me! Oh, hurt me! Hurt me!"
AAAAHHHHHHHHH!
Claude!
A shadow fell over the terrace, and the boy heard a hollow gushing sound. He looked into the pool, and saw that the water had drained away and that the pool was an abysmal shaft, plunging straight into the bowels of the earth. The walls of this bottomless well began to shudder and groan, and for a moment the boy thought he was staring into the bore of a volcano on the verge of eruption. But then breaches appeared along the sides, and from them gushed powerful fountains of heavy gray water which fell away into the dizzying depths.
At the sound of crumbling and the rattle of falling stones, he turned and saw that the tremors were destroying the terrace walls. From these ragged fissures came trickles of dark red fluid which flowed out along the seams between the flagstones. But the man and the girl fucking beside the gushing pool seemed unaware of the devastation occurring all around them. The brawny, hairy buttocks pounded away, and lithe white hips rose to meet their assault, blow for blow.
Then the terrace itself trembled and seemed about to give way. The boy noticed the bloody end of the sinew lying across the splintering threshold. He made a desperate dive for it, and the woman hauled him into the house like a mule dragging a log.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Passing along an apparently endless row of tall arched windows which overlooked a rocky plain, the boy noticed that his abdomen was grotesquely swollen. This puzzled him until someone--this "someone", it should be mentioned, did not in any way detract from the stark emptiness and deathly silence of the huge gallery along which he walked--until someone, I say, made some remark from which he deduced that he was pregnant. This knowledge at first gave him a strange erotic thrill, which passed quickly, however, to shame, and then to fear. He stepped up his pace.
The rocky plain beyond the windows, while it gave an impression of vastness, nevertheless seemed to come to an abrupt end several hundred yards out, and the misty void beyond gave the landscape an eerie "edge of the world" aspect. The floor of the gallery was highly polished and pleasant to walk on; gazing down into it, one could see the arched vaults of the ceiling rising into shadowy obscurity. The boy pushed on.
When his time came, he squatted down and gave birth to something through his rectum. There was little or no pain involved; actually, it was rather a pleasant sensation, like squeezing a large blackhead. He stood up and looked down at the thing. It was about eight inches thick, a foot and a half long, and was wrapped in newspaper like a bundle of garbage. At first the boy felt no emotion whatever; then he burst into tears, and hugged the package to his chest.
"Oh, Sim-sim!" he cried. "Oh, poor Sim-sim!"
But when he removed the wrappings, he discovered the thing to be a gigantic cockroach with gnashing jaws and flailing legs. It hit the dark mirror of the floor with a loud thwack and began scurrying about, giving out a high-pitched piping noise that pierced the boy's eardrums like needles. He rolled up the newspaper and began to club the roach with all his strength, and after several blows its black carapace cracked down the central seam. He struck again, and the creature exploded in a gush of melted butter.
The boy adjusted the thong around his neck and continued up the gallery. He walked until he heard the distant tread of heavy boots behind him, and then he began to run, but with great difficulty. The floor was slick as greased glass, and he could hardly get a foothold. Time and again he fell sprawling. A great weight seemed to be pressing down upon him. The pursuing footfalls grew louder and louder, until they resounded through the hollow gallery like gunshots.
The windows were on his right, and beyond them the plain. He noticed that several people were escaping over the ledge, and he tried to break out through the windows, but they had bars over them and it was useless. He stopped and asked one of the policemen--there were two of them--how those people got out there. The policeman looked puzzled. He thrust his face forward and peered through the window with a kind of blankness in his eyes, as though he saw nothing but the glass. He asked his partner, who did not reply, if he had heard the knell.
"What's your name, sonny?" asked the first policeman.
"Uh..."
"Ah-ah-ah! Let's have none of that!"
"What school do you go to?" the other policeman asked, drawing paper and pencil from his coat pocket.
"I..."
"This kid's askin' for it, ain't he?"
"Just keep that up, punk. Just keep it up."
"Now," the other went on, wetting the point of his pencil with his tongue, "do your parents know where you are?"
"Er..."
The first policeman whipped out his nightstick and shook it threateningly in the boy's face. "Just give me an excuse to use this thing, you little shit! There ain't nothin' I'd like better!"
"All right," said the one with the pencil. "Where do you live? State your home address in full."
The boy said nothing.
"Okay," said the policeman, "if that's the way you want it" He held his pad against his knee and began to write, intoning the words as he did so: "Refusal... to... cooperate... with... interrogators."
"All right, let's go."
They marched the boy up the gallery a distance of perhaps three miles.
"Halt!" commanded the first policeman.
The second policeman stepped up to a heavy wooden door on the left side of the gallery and pounded on it with his fist, whereupon the door swung open, and the boy was dragged up to the threshold.
"Turnaround!"
The boy turned, and the first policeman pushed him backwards over the second policeman, who had dropped to all fours behind the boy's legs.
"Oh!"
Laughing hysterically, hitting each other on the arms with their fists and in the ribs with their elbows, the two policeman staggered off down the gallery. An old man with a beard and a funny hat made the door close by a trick of magic, and helped the boy to his feet. He was apparently the doorman; a ring of keys hung around his neck. Suddenly the boy realized the old man was none other than X, whom he had abandoned so long ago. Tears came to his eyes, and in his heart he forgave old X for everything, but he couldn't force a single word from his quivering lips.
"Come, come," called the woman, who was the mistress of the house, and who had evidently reclaimed the throne following the King's demise. "We can't wait all day, you know!"
His ears burning with shame, the boy took one last look into poor old X's long-suffering eyes, and then ran away up the long purple carpet to the Queen, who awaited him on her dais with open legs.
One day, after what seems to have been a fairly long stay in the palace, the boy was summoned to the Queen's bedroom as usual, but this time she wasn't alone.
What are you doing, Tru?
Two girls were on their hands and knees beside the bed, lapping something out of a bowl and snapping and snarling at each other because the bowl wasn't big enough for both of them. They were naked except for their silver-studded collars. The queen bent over and whispered to one of them.
He always liked this nightgown.
The Queen was wearing a long negligee of sheer red nylon that plunged to her navel and hid none of her voluptuous charms. Her large, dark nipples and the broad, dense delta of black hair between her thighs seemed to the boy even more vivid through the scarlet veil than if she had been nude. Standing behind the two girls, she bent over, and the boy thrilled at the delightful way her big tits hung down, swinging slightly from side to side and almost coming out of the negligee. She rubbed the girls' cunts with her palms, and they made little whining noises and pumped their legs like cats in heat.
The Queen laughed, and wiped her hands on their naked rumps. She straightened up, spread her legs slightly, folded her arms over her head and closed her eyes.
Feel me, Johnny.
"Yes, ma'am,'' said the boy, reaching for her tits.
He remembers this part in far greater detail than he can put in words. It seems to him as though it happened only yesterday, or last night, or only a moment ago. These eighteen years have failed to obscure a single sensation. He can close his eyes and transport himself instantly to that sweet-smelling room with its huge silk-covered, lace-canopied bed, its broad French windows overlooking that barren plain, its deep plush carpet, its cherry-blossom wallpaper, its pink-ruffled dressing table, its dark mirror, its crack...
Again, he remembers too much.
He closes his eyes, and he is standing there before the Queen of the Island. He extends his hands and feels the soft, warm fullness of her breasts against his palms...
His fingers could not contain those swelling moons; they struggled in his grasp like huge, firm jellyfish in the grip of their lovers, the squids. He concealed his entire hand in the perfumed cleft between them. He slipped a finger into the negligee and watched it flutter up and down over the stiff, rubbery knob of her nipple, and he saw the soft, olive-skinned areola puff up like a miniature balloon. While pumping up the other nipple in the same way, he let his other hand slide down over her gently rounded belly until it touched the crisp cushion of curls that began at the rise of her prominent pubic hump. When he gripped this hairy mound through the sheer nylon, hooking his middle finger into the hot hollow at the upper end of her slit, he felt a thrill of response run through her. She smiled and purred, and held her pose--except for a slight involuntary swiveling of the hips.
The boy moved around to her side and ran his hands several times up and down her magnificent profile from thighs to neck, both front and back. Then he gathered up the long flowing skirt of her gown, slipped his hands underneath and stroked the thigh nearest him--the right one--slowly at first, up and down, up and down, then faster, both hands moving together, the one in back making her right buttock jiggle when it struck it on the upward stroke, the forefinger of the other hand at the same time flitting into the dark jungle of cunt hair. Faster and faster flashed his hands, up and down, up and down, as though he were masturbating a gigantic penis, and her skin grew fiery, and her muscles began to tremble, and now the swamp in her crotch was beginning to flood. On each stroke, his forefinger carried away more juice, until the entire front and inner surface of her thigh were slick and gleaming in the rosy light that permeated the room. If he'd kept it up, she would have had an orgasm; he is certain of it.
While gently caressing the crack of her twitching ass from top to bottom and from bottom to top with the middle finger of his left hand, the boy ran his other up over the shaggy, jutting hill of her cunt and the sensual swell of her belly, into the undulating hollow of her navel, then on up her petal-smooth midriff to her magnificently lust-expanded breasts, both of which he set into violent motion, like a pair of punching bags. When he pinched her nipples, he could feel her asshole tighten in response.
Oh...
Now he brought his right hand down to her crotch again, and his fingers burrowed in her bush, through the crisp, dry tufts to the warm, damp ones, until they met the fingers of his left hand in the dark and tender region of her perineum. There his two hands collaborated, and arm in arm, as it were, entered the oozing vestibule of her vagina.
Oh...
Her juices flowed into the wrinkles in his palms in the same way the fluid from the bleeding terrace walls had filled the seams between the flagstones. And as his fingers probed deeper and deeper, searching for the sunken gates of her womb but finding only an endless, flooding, flesh-bound void, the boy experienced the same sinking desperation as when he had peered into that bottomless abyss.
Oh...
But the feeling passed.
And then he was on the floor, on his knees, tented by her negligee, his entire body shrouded in rosy nylon, its fluted folds crackling with electricity. And before his upturned face, the hairy jowls of the Queen's hungry cunt swelled and spread like the hoods of cobras, and the scalloped lips of its inner mouth smacked and drooled.
His tongue, like a minnow swimming willingly to ecstatic death in the noxious jaws of a sea anemone, slid out past his inflamed lips and touched that writhing flower of forbidden flesh...
0...
"We can no longer tolerate these creatures," said the Queen, handing the boy a tommygun. "They are vicious. They have devoured their young. Exterminate them."
In answer to a question concerning a shovel, the Queen replied, "Never mind. The roaches will take care of that. Burial is much too expensive these days. A newspaper will do the trick. Well? What are you waiting for?"
The boy untied the girls' leashes from the bedpost, walked them out the door, down the gallery and out onto the plain. The air was chilly, the sky overcast. The girls strained at the leashes, each in a different direction, and it was all the boy could do to hold them back.
Presently he came upon a sort of shallow arroyo, or wadi. It was bone-dry, and its meandering course seemed to lead in the general direction of the ledge. The bed of this gulley was littered with dead bodies wrapped in newspaper, so the boy knew he was on the right track. He moved on along the left bank, whistling a little tune and tickling the assholes of the crawling girls with the muzzle of his tommygun from time to time. On the surface, his mind was more or less a blank, but I believe he felt an inward dread of the impending descent into that trench of death.
The girls seemed to enjoy being goosed by the gun. They pumped their legs and frequently rolled over on their backs, slobbering happily. Sometimes one of them would catch a whiff of the other's ass and investigate with her nose, and then they would go around and around in a tight circle, each lapping the other's crotch. This made the boy laugh, but he had to break it up after a half-dozen go-rounds, because the leashes got tangled. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant distraction.
The girls were easier in the boy's presence, but still they didn't quite trust him. Whenever he tried to stroke their heads or their behinds, they would snarl and back away. But after he gave them a couple pieces of raw meat that he happened to have in his pocket, they became as tame as puppies, and he could do anything he liked with them. He would push them over on their backs and rub their bellies, and they would yelp with joy and snap playfully at his hands. He probed their gooey, smelly cunts with his feet, enjoying the way the slime oozed between his toes when he did so. It was like when he and Flemming used to walk barefoot over the sun-warmed mudflats at the south end of Stone's Island at low tide.
"Ha ha!" the boy crowed. "Do you two ever need a bath! Wow!"
"Bark! Bark!" the girls answered cheerfully, rearing up on the leashes and shaking their dirty tits.
They moved on down the lip of the winding streambed, the girls on their hands and knees, crawling less eagerly now, but still keeping their leashes tight, the boy walking along behind, his weapon cradled in one arm. The smell of the girls' rear ends was not altogether unpleasant to his nostrils--perhaps because it overpowered the stench of death which rose from the ditch--and he rather enjoyed the way the sand and dust clung to his sticky toes as he trudged along. It also pleased him that the course of the arroyo was so tortuous, almost convoluted at times, thus making his progress toward the precipice very gradual. "Who knows?" he thought. "Maybe it goes on forever."
But this feeling of blissful suspension was short-lived.
One of the girls stopped to take a shit, and as the boy stood waiting for her to finish, he noticed to his horror that he was wearing his old clothes, the ones with bloodstains. Suddenly a shadow fell over the land, and a distant bell began to toll ominously across the rock plain. It was the knell. The dread Ordeal was about to begin.
Desperate now to accomplish his task before it was too late, the boy heaved on the leashes and hurled the girls into the arroyo. Yelping in alarm, they tumbled down among the rotting corpses, the boy right behind them, his gun at the ready. As soon as one of them came to rest, the boy put his foot on her neck, rammed the muzzle of the tommygun into her cunt and pulled the trigger.
There was a sort of dull rattling noise, like marbles rolling through a wooden funnel, and the girl began to giggle and pump her legs. The bullets only tickled her. And when the boy withdrew the gun barrel, the spent projectiles spilled out and went rolling harmlessly away down the gulley. They rolled easily, for they were round now, instead of bullet-shaped. The boy felt weak in the knees, and a lump came into his throat.
The shadow darkened, and the boy threw his gun away in terror. He tore the pouch from around his neck and began beating the girls with it, but this only angered them. They broke from his grasp and bared their yellow fangs, snarling at him and backing slowly toward the ledge where the arroyo emptied into the howling void.
Again the shadow deepened and stirred, and the boy whirled in terror to see a huge, ghastly monster moving toward him in the trench, engulfing the dead and the living alike as it came. It was covered with shaggy, matted black hair, and had an enormous mouth that worked from side to side like that of an insect. Both sides of this mouth were lined with long, sharp, scimitar-like teeth, dripping blood and carrion. The body of the thing was roughly egg-shaped, and the mouth ran from its upper to its lower extremity. It lad no eyes, no nose, no limbs; it was all mouth and hair. It propelled itself over the ground by some mysterious means, possibly similar to that of a slug or snail, yet its speed was unbelievable.
The boy was petrified. He felt as if he were tied down to a railroad track in the path of a speeding locomotive. Inside the cavernous maw, he could see the bodies of the doomed, writhing in boiling syrup.
Some people ran past the boy and escaped by hurling themselves over the precipice, and their screams blew away in the chill wind out of the abyss. The boy at last broke free of the invisible hand that held him, and dashed with the others toward the bliss of that yawning void, but the monster was almost upon him, and he found his path blocked by the snarling girls. He barely had time to whirl about and fling his tiny pouch down the creature's throat before he was sucked up and swallowed alive.
--h!
Look!
Why, he's--
STOP-TIME: THE HOUSE OF THE SUCCUBUS
shut the door. It is warm and pleasant inside. Dust yourself off. We're all right now.
we?
you and I. I'm in control now.
ha!
that'll be enough of that. Impudence will not be--
knock it off, will you? I'm sick of that shit.
all right, but stay out of this, you're making the page too white. I wanted to start out with a nice solid block of print, as dense as possible, black and sexual. It's my book, after all.
but I'm the hero.
(some hero!)
and the boy is the--
father of the man, I know. Now, if you will kindly keep your stupid proverbs to yourself, we'll get on. You dust yourself off and look around. Apparently you have suffered no severe injuries: no broken bones, no punctured lungs, no cleft palate, etc. The first thing you see, characteristically enough, is a bed. You take a step toward it. Nothing happens. Reassured, you approach to within a few yards of it, stick your hands in your pockets, and, whistling a little off-key tune--
you could do better, I suppose.
damn right. I used to play bass.
you faked it.
true, but--
and besides, it wasn't you, it was me.
has it been that long?
longer.
well, just because you faked bass doesn't mean you can whistle.
you're impossible. The point is, there's no reason for you to try to degrade me any more than you already have. Where would you be without me?
a hell of a lot better off, no doubt.
oh, all right. Have it your own way. Whistling an
exquisitely melodic little sonata in A-B-A form, you scrutinize the bed out of the corner of your eye. Pillows, sheets, mattress... A few wrinkles, but no apparent inconsistencies. You reach out with something--I forget what--and prod the mattress a few times to check for booby traps.
I do that with my tommygun.
I thought you threw it down outside.
yes, but now I have it again. And in here it works. RATATATATATATATAT!
all right, all right! Now cut that out! Jesus Christ! So after shooting up the place a little for good measure--just in case somebody is hiding behind the drapes--you hang your gun on the bedpost and stretch out on the bed.
aaahhh!
immediately you get a hard-on. Something about the way the mattress grips your buttocks. As if on cue, a beautiful blonde with fabulous tits steps into the room and greets you with a smile, her dark, limpid eyes lingering on your erection.
I don't remember taking off my pants.
nor do I, but they are off nevertheless. Agreed?
agreed. Shall I tell what she is wearing?
I am the narrator, you are the protagonist. Try to keep that in mind, and things will go a lot smoother. She is wearing a . .. a... Well, it's a little hard to describe. It's a kind of--
bikini?
what do you know about bikinis? They didn't even wear them in your day!
I keep up.
yeah; that's just the fucking trouble. You refuse to die, you little shit. You keep crawling out of your goddamn coffin like a motherfucking vampire! What the fuck are you giggling at?
you have a clever way with words.
no thanks to you.
what? Who did all your reading for you? Across Europe on a Bicycle, South Sea Lore, Children of the Sea, The Man in the Iron Mask, Poe from cover to cover, Moby Dick, Kon Tiki, The World of Ants--
The World of Ants?
don't you remember that?
no. What about Dracula? You didn't mention that,
my, what a large wooden stake you have, Grandma!
(The better to drive through your heart, my dear.)
what was that?
nothing. All right, then, wise guy. What, in your opinion is the blonde wearing?
a G-string and something like pasties, only they are in the shape of X's or crosses, and--
stop! I have it now. She's wearing short strips of black friction tape on her tits; two strips crossed over each nipple. Her areolas are quite large, so you can see their rosy edges at the corners of the crosses. A ruby flashes at you from her navel, which is deep and plush. Your eyes move on down her belly and fasten boldly on her cunt, which is only partially concealed by her snakeskin G-string. This is due partly to the smallness of the G-string and partly to the largeness of the cunt. It is one of those cunts--with which I unlike yourself, am quite familiar--which rise steeply from the belly in a broad, flat slope, narrowing to a definite ridge at the summit. Immediately below this summit begins the indentation, which divides the ridge into two muscular jaws with tight lips and strong, taut jowls. It is one of those cunts which seem to have a life of their own, independent of the bodies that carry them. It has a certain autonomous, self-asserting qualify. One almost expects such a cunt to answer back when spoken to. As for the bush, it will vary from cunt to cunt. This particular bush is very full, and thus accentuates, the inadequacy of the G-string that is attempting to contain it. The hair is tawny in color, fine in texture, extremely dense on the hump, and rather straight, like the beard of a goat. Since it begins at the toe of the upper slope, and since the G-string dips down to a point just above the dimple where the slit begins, it follows that a good deal of hair is exposed above. Also, since this slit has apparently gobbled up a considerable portion of the snakeskin, thus drawing the outer edges of the crotch pouch inward, there is a good deal of sideburns showing too.
sideburns?
so to speak. In a word, she is very hairy, and --
the cunt hair grows all around, all around. The cunt hair grows all around.
cool it, kid. With sensual hip-wiggles and tongue-hardening titty-jiggles she comes over to the bed and sits down beside you, one foot on the bed, the other on the floor.
yeah! And I--
shh! You put your hand on her thigh, in an offhand manner, surprised at your coolness and self-control. "How do you feel?" she asks, shaping each word smoothly with her full, honey-coated lips. "Fine," you reply. Perhaps this is some sort of rest home, and she is the nurse assigned to you. While speculating on this and other possibilities, your eyes probing freely the minutest secrets of her voluptuous body, you are suddenly aware of a sound outside the room--something between a rumble and a moan. A flash of your old timidity ignites momentarily in your brain, and your hand stiffens on her leg. Sensing your anxiety, she laughs, covers your hand with hers, leans over and kisses you on the head of your prick, then says, "Don't worry, honey. You can do anything you like here without fear of the consequences. You see, this is an interstice in space-time."
oh boy. Do you expect me to sit back and let you distort everything like that?
distort, my ass! I was about to explain, before you butted in, that those were not her exact words--needless to say, since you don't even know what an interstice is--but rather--
I do too.
what is it?
a crack.
well, you didn't know it then. That is, "now." You see how you're confusing me? What I'm trying to do is to give the meaning of her explanation, rather than put it down word for word.
you're explaining her explanation?
if you like.
I don't.
you don't have to. All you have to do is keep your opinions to yourself. And if you don't stop harassing me, I'll slap you back into the third person so fast it'll make your head spin. What do you think of that?
I'm shaking in my boots! (Ha!) Oh, go ahead, big man, have it your own way.
that's better.
(for now.)
what?
nothing.
she goes on: "You can do anything you like here--"
she repeats, awkwardly.
"--because afterward you won't really have done it at all." She cups your balls in her palm and tickles the crack of your ass with her middle finger. "Isn't that nice?" "Yes," you reply, not quite certain whether she is referring to her explanation or to what she's doing with her finger. The former somewhat diminishes the impact of the latter, and you tell her that you'll have to think it over later when your head is clearer. "Right now," you go on, "I'd like to get down to some serious sex." "Crazy," she says with a sultry smile, dangling a tit in your face. "Peel me." The Friction tape makes a thin hissing noise as it comes off her skin. And by God, her tits look even bigger with the tape off--as big as your head! You stick out your tongue and lick the tip of her left nipple. Mm! Sweet as honey! She gives you a little humming purr, then stands up on the bed, straddling your chest. She puts her hands on her hips, looks down at you between her boobs, and says, "Pull it off." You slide your hands up her legs to her hips, hook your fingers in the narrow strips at the sides of her G-string and work it slowly down her thighs, savoring the gradual exposure of skin and hair. The snakeskin oozes reluctantly from the viselike grip of her vulva. She lifts one foot and then the other, and you free the garment from her ankles. You turn the snakeskin crotch inside out and look at it. It's damp down the middle, where--
wet, you mean.
wet, then. Where--
sticky, too.
--wet and sticky where it was tucked into her cunt. And it has a strong musky odor. "Go ahead," she says. "You've always wanted to." "It's sickening," you protest, "isn't it?" "Certainly not," she replies. "In this house, nothing is sickening--if it gives you pleasure." "All right, then," you say. "It's true, I have always wanted to do it." "I know." You spread the crotch of the G-string and--
you're trying to make me look like a pervert!
well?
you're the dirty old man, not me.
ah, but what was it you said a while ago? The boy is the father of the man; that's what you said.
you have no right to--
oh, shut up, you little punk, before I delete you! You raise the garment's crotch to your lips, sniff those pungent vapors into your nostrils, and start licking up the warm slime. It tastes vaguely reminiscent of a fish sauce Mother made one time, in a sudden outburst of her ordinarily latent culinary instincts.
it's more like soy sauce.
you say that because you're afraid of the truth. That's why I'm writing this, and not you. You could never muster enough honesty for such a task.
says you.
do you know what they just found out about soy sauce. It's loaded with monosodium glutamate, you know.
what?
soy sauce.
I mean what did they find out?
that monosodium glutamate causes brain damage in rats.
why do you mention that?
partly to date the narrative, partly to suggest that maybe that's what's wrong with you. All that Chinese food you used to put away.
are you calling me a rat?
well, if the shoe fits...
fuck you.
you're out of character. You never talked like that.
this is a special case.
granted; but don't take advantage of it. You're hanging by a thread as it is. Now: After you've had your fill of soy sauce (I'll humor you this time), you smack your lips and look up at the smiling blonde. "Good, isn't it?" she says. You nod in the affirmative. "Want some fresh from the pot?" she asks, squatting and tickling your chin with her cunt hair. You grin, secure a double hand-hold on her tits, and dig in. Slurp, slurp, slurp! Mmm, boy! Hot soy sauce! It froths up like green tea, sputters like hot fat, and trickles into your ears. When you come up for air, she says, "Hey, want me to suck you off?" You wipe your mouth and say, "Uh... Yeah! But--" You were going to say that that would be fine, but you'd rather have a piece of ass, but she cuts you off, saying, "Don't worry about that. We'll do both. You'll see." She dismounts and stretches out on her back, with her head propped on a pillow. "Come on," she says. "Sit on my tits and fuck me in the mouth." She licks her lips hungrily as you comply. Holding her tits up against the cheeks of your ass, she wraps her lips around the head of your cock and takes it in all the way to her throat, so that her nose actually burrows into your belly fuzz, and her tongue flickers up and down your circumcision scar like an electric eel. You get a good steady hip-stroke going, and it feels just like you always thought it would. Oh, God, it's feeling better and better! Mmm! Wow! Oh! You run your fingers into her thick blonde hair and clutch her bobbing head, gasping, "I... I'm... going to... sh-shoot!" Just at the right moment, she slips her mouth off your cock and starts pumping it like lightning with her hand, holding her lips open and ready just an inch from the muzzle, so that you can see it shooting in like you've always wanted to. Spurt! Spurt! Spurt! It comes squirting out like pressurized yogurt, filling her mouth and flowing heavily down her cheeks. Gulp! She swallows it hungrily. Gulp! Gulp! Gulp! Down the hatch it goes. Wow! Whew! "Mm, good!" she says when it's all over. "Now give it to me in the cunt!" Suddenly you realize that you still have a hard-on. So that was what she meant! "You can just keep going here," she laughs, "as long as you want." "Let's fuck, then." You have wanted to say that to a girl ever since you found out what it meant. "Crazy!" she replies, spreading her legs am running her fingers through her tawny bush. Cock-first, you slither downstream like a salmon in reverse, through pleasant valleys and fruited plains and dairy farms dotted with brown-eyed milk cows, over rapids of warm cream and cataracts of flaming gasoline, through poisonous swamps and dead-end bayous of smoking sludge, down, down, down, watching your limbs drop off and drift away, one by one, first the arms, then the legs, then the spine, then the brain, until there is nothing left but a smoothly functioning tumor composed solely of penis and autonomic nervous system, a compact phallic entity, leaping, jumping, diving, gamboling through the ancient slime, ever backward, down, down, down toward the streaming delta. In every hall and chamber of the house, an eternal white night reigns supreme. You are moving down a corridor with a floor of rich black mulch and arches of fruit- and flower-bearing greenery. The warm muck oozes through your toes. With every step you drive home, pounding the shuddering mouth of her womb with the head of your cock until it cries out in echos of ecstasy. Her fiery thighs grip your waist as you walk her along before you like a wheelbarrow. Entering at length into a crowded vestibule, you fill her cunt with several quarts of semen, and the white night pulsates with a ponderous fluidity, like slow lightning. "Did you enjoy it?" she asks breathlessly. "It was wonderful," you reply. "It felt just like I always knew it would!" "Shall we go to the concert now? It's about to begin." "All right." Arm in arm, the two of you pass through the vestibule with the others, and enter a large, domed auditorium with --
we're dressed now, don't forget.
I was coming to that. You are wearing a dark suit--
the same one I wore at Aunt Fran's funeral.
yes. And the blonde is wearing a white skirt and a bright blue sweater--
and yellow sandals.
will you let me tell it, please? And yellow sandals. Moving down the aisle with you are a lot of bosomy women in evening clothes. Reading your thoughts as usual, the blonde says, "Go ahead. They'll enjoy it too." So you reach out and grab the tit of a luscious redhead in a strapless gown. It's more than a handful. You squeeze it, and it responds by twitching like a penis. She looks at you and winks, without breaking off her conversation with her gentleman, who doesn't seem to notice your hand. You try it on a brunette with equally fine jugs, this time slipping your mitt inside her bodice and pinching her nipple. She loves it. By the time you reach the front row, you have squeezed every tit within reach, and grabbed a few twats as well. "Fun, huh?" "You bet." "She's playing the cello tonight, you know." "Yes." You take the two empty seats in the middle of the first row. The black curtain looms overhead. For a moment you think you hear that rumbling moan again. Off to the left? In the wings? Perhaps you were mistaken. Suddenly a loud hiss fills the auditorium. You stiffen in alarm. But it is only the curtain opening. The cellist walks out on the stage, her long black hair streaming down her back, her big breasts bobbing subtly in her strapless gown of red satin. The audience applauds, and she bows slightly before taking her seat, showing a wondrous expanse of milk-white bosom as she does so. The cello is of a rather odd design; actually, it is more like a large mandolin, except that it has a ridged spine resembling the shell of a snapping turtle. She sits down, spreads her legs, clutching the cello between her knees, and you observe that the ridge fits snugly into her crotch. Behind her, in broad semicircular tiers, sits a large choir of elderly women in white suits. The purpose of the choir is uncertain, since she is to play Bach's Suites for Solo Cello. The house lights dim, but you are certain that she can see you and the blonde quite well. Your prick jumps in your pants. As she begins to play, your left hand slides over to the blonde, who is sitting on your right. Your fingertips touch the outer surface of her left tit. She gives a little start of surprise, and you realize that she is not the blonde. She is a blonde,
but not the blonde; not the same one you fucked in the room. A thrill of excitement runs through your body. You are touching the breast of a girl you have never met, never spoken to, never seen before. She is young, like yourself; her breasts and hips are wonderfully mature, true, but her face is young and innocent, and she has freckles on her cheeks. She is wearing a pink sweater, a yellow skirt and red sandals.
and lacy blue underwear.
you don't know that yet.
I can feel the lace of her bra cup through her sweater.
yes, but not its color. You stroke the yielding fullness of her tit with your fingertips, working up toward the nipple.
You can feel its stiffness through her clothes. She continues to look straight ahead, her eyes fixed on the cellist, as you cradle her ripe roundness in your palm, while your other hand moves to her right knee, which is crossed over her left. Now you notice that the cellist is watching you as she plays, her bow slithering sensually across the strings in the Praeludium of the G major suite. You smile at her, and one corner of her mouth twitches nervously. Your right hand slides slowly up the blonde's thigh, carrying her skirt with it, and your left drops to her waist, wiggles under her sweater and creeps up her silk-smooth midriff to her tit. She neither protests nor encourages you, yet it is not as though she is unaware of you. Quite the contrary; her body responds to your every caress. Her bra, you find, is extremely flimsy and flexible. It is a simple matter to push the cups up above her nipples. Now you are massaging the bare flesh of her bosom, tickling her nipples until they stand erect like tiny pricks, and with inflamed eyes the cellist watches the movement of your hand inside the sweater, going back and forth from tit to tit, and her own breasts look as though they will burst their red satin wrapping. They nearly double their size each time she takes a breath, and her pelvis seems to be undulating somehow against the sharp spine of her instrument. The music becomes more and more intense and passionate, almost harsh at times. Your right hand has reached the blonde's crotch. Her thighs are bare, and they seem to glow in the dim light. Your middle finger burrows into the soft, tight warmth between them, pressing on the lace-covered groove of her pussy, and--
and she uncrosses her legs.
let me tell it! She uncrosses her legs, and your hand slips down over her hot little box. Gradually her thighs open wider. And wider.
and wider.
and your finger noses into the crack of her plump little ass, and the cellist's tongue is flickering hungrily over her lips, her nostrils flaring, her breasts straining at their bonds. By now it is apparent to all that the lady is wearing nothing under the top of her gown, because her big, bulging nipples are perfectly outlined by the tissue-thin satin. The upper slopes of her areolas gleam and flash in the spotlight under which she sits, and the thick, blunt knobs cast long shadows on her lower bust. Somehow her gown has worked up her legs, so that her knees are now bare. There is something wonderfully obscene about the way the cello is moving between her thighs, and the music of the Gigue has taken on a definitely erotic quality.
dirty, is the word.
all right, dirty, then. Strange how we equate sex with dirt, isn't it?
that's her fault.
whose?
the cellist's.
I see what you mean.
and we're stuck with it.
you're pretty honest, I notice, when you can pass the blame on to somebody else.
me? What about you?
how do you mean?
well, what's the purpose of this book if not to absolve yourself of blame? And you are the one who's writing it, as you keep reminding me; not I.
I wouldn't be, though, if it weren't for you, you little bastard! You keep coming back like garlic.
that's not my fault.
you're a cancer in my groin. You're like the hair of a
corpse. You keep growing. (But not for long.)
does that really happen?
the hair? I don't know. I'll dig up a grave sometime and let you know.
isn't that what you're doing?
how would you like a one-way ticket to Limbo?
it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
(you'll get used to it.)
what?
nothing. This conversation is pointless. You are now in the process of divesting the blonde of her underwear, beginning with her bra. Keeping your eyes on the cellist--whose performance is rapidly degenerating, or escalating, into a veritable dance of lust--you feel out the flimsy straps and break them one by one. No sweat. The thing comes apart as easily as cheesecloth. With your thumb and first two fingers you part the narrow strip of lace that connects the cups, drag the garment out from under her sweater and drop it on the floor. When the cellist sees that blue lace spider lying dead at your feet, her face takes on an expression of... What?
pain.
painful ecstasy is better. And her tits break out in a sweat as she lurches into the D minor Sarabande. Now your left hand roams freely over those warm domes of girlflesh in the blonde's sweater, and your right hand goes to work on her panties. The elastic snaps easily under your thumb, and the lace-fringed leg-bands present no problem at all. You rip the garment open at both hips and draw it out from under her ass. Oh, what a lovely little box she has! What fine, silky fur, what sweet, pouting lips, what soft, downy cheeks! And the cellist is staring right into it! Her cello is beginning to take on the shape of a living thing.
It isn't that the instrument itself changes; it's the way she is manipulating it that seems to transform it. It looks to you like some grotesque autonomous entity, swollen and deformed with desire. It no longer resembles a turtle; it has metamorphosed into a one-legged hunchback with a long neck, and a shrunken head topped with golden curls. His penis has been sliced lengthwise into five strands and stretched tightly from his groin to his mouth.
He is holding it between his teeth.
yes; between his sharp little teeth, and when she saws over it with her bow, he howls with ecstasy. That is the source of the music. His sharp hump is lodged in the jaws of her cunt, and the ripples along his spine are driving her mad. Her mouth is gaping open and she is beginning to drool. One nipple has burst out the top of her gown and the other is close behind. Her tits are heaving like storm-tossed seas on the ocean of Bach's Minuet. You plunge your fingers into the blonde's slippery hole and she gasps with pleasure. Her legs open all the way and she hooks her knees over the arms of the seat and thrusts her pelvis against the heel of your hand. You wiggle your fingers inside, and her secret flesh seems to come alive, writhing and bubbling, grasping and twitching. In an uncontrollable spasm she tears her sweater off over her head, and the cellist can now see your left hand massaging the girl's naked tits, and the cello sees it too, and he drives his hump brutally against the woman's lurching cunt--uhn! uhn!--and the tears spurt from her eyes as though her tear ducts were having orgasms, and the saliva pours from her open mouth. You tear open your pants, and your cock springs up like a white-hot poker. When the cellist sees that, her other tit breaks out of her gown and the whole thing sags to her waist, but she continues to play. The music of the C minor Courante rises and falls in the rhythm of a frenzied fuck, and now the girl is on your lap, and the old ladies in the choir are panting and putting their hands inside their gowns. You tear the blonde's skirt from her waist and ram your prick into her gasping cunt-- uhn!--all the way on the first stroke. The cellist's long black hair is flying wildly about her jerking head as she watches the blonde's naked ass bouncing frantically on your lap, your cock flashing at the mouth of her foaming twat like a neon tube blinking on and off. The crowd thunders its applause as you pump your load into the girl's belly, and with a cry of anguish the cellist jerks up her gown and jams the scroll of her instrument into her gaping cunt. Flinging the spent blonde aside, you mount the stage and proceed to kick the living shit out of the cello, who shrieks the last notes of the final Gigue and explodes in a burst of splinters. You jerk his hideous head from the cellist's grasping gash and turn your tommygun on the audience.
RATATATATATATATATATATA!
you like that, don't you? Mother always said you had a destructive nature.
it's because I'm an only child.
there you go again, passing the buck!
we had no brothers to take out our frustrations on.
and no sisters to fuck, as Uncle Farley would say. But don't say "we." I am in the process of disassociating myself from you.
ha!
you, my friend, are a zombie in the process of being dismantled.
we'll see about that.
indeed we will. But now you fill the auditorium with a blizzard of tracer bullets, and the black curtains that drape the walls burst into green flames. Everyone is killed instantly, transformed into a skillfully embalmed cadaver with sightless eyes and bloodless lips, each sitting bolt upright in his seat. Satisfied, you turn and massacre the choir.
RATATATATATATATATATATATA I
They die happily with their hands between their varicose thighs and their tongues lolling out the sides of their mouths. There is no blood; the bullets leave smooth black holes with only a little smoke around the edges. A vast silence falls over the theater, and the soundless flames flood the whole place with eerie green light. The calm of death descends on you as you remove your funeral suit and look down at the sprawling, pale-bodied woman at your feet. You bend over and tear the shreds of her satin gown from her hips.
rrrrrrrrip!
she stares up at your glistening cock, panting with need. You chuckle and place your bare foot on one of her tits, rolling her nipple around with your heel. Then you haul off and give the tit a good swift kick. It rebounds like a punching bag.
boombiddy boombiddy boom!
you kneel between her legs and lift her broad ass off the stage, your fingers digging into the hot heavy flesh of her buttocks. You ram your iron-hard cock into her drooling hole.
uhn!
she whines with pain and joy as you drive deep into her body, battering down the throbbing door to her uterus.
wham, wham, wham!
silent bombs begin detonating in her cunt, and the molten discharges come spurting out over your balls in surging cataracts. You plow into her like a butter churn, and everything starts shooting out the end of your prick--guts, bones, balls, eyeballs, brains, toenails... everything. Days pass, during which the world undergoes certain subtle changes of a clandestine nature. The first sound you hear is the rumble-moan, but now it is different somehow. In what way? It is difficult to define. For one thing, it seems closer now. That is to say, it now seems to have a source, whereas before it seemed to come from all parts of the house at once. You open your eyes--figuratively speaking-- on total darkness.
yet I can see perfectly.
did I say you couldn't?
"total darkness" gives that impression.
though it is totally dark, you can see perfectly. Obviously, light now has nothing to do with vision. The black roaches scurrying up the black walls, for instance, are very clearly defined, as is the stairway which ascends steeply into the wings. The rumbling moan resolves itself into a voice, and you look up to see the bald-headed man standing at the top of the stairs in an attitude of austerity. "If you want out of here," he says, "you'll have to break down the door. That will kill her." "I know," you reply. "But I'd rather watch it on TV." The voice again becomes random and disorganized, losing itself among the nooks and crannies, and the image of the man dissolves into the blackness, whereupon you shoulder your tommygun and leave the auditorium. You thread your way along a narrow catwalk, elevated on stilts. The structure is extremely rickety. It creaks and sways sickeningly in the darkness. It must be very high, perhaps miles high. From far below comes the sound of running water, and from above, the crackle of flames. Yet you know you are still within the confines of the house, and that you are on the right track. The unmistakable smell of cunt grips your nostrils with its pungent tentacles and draws you on along the teetering bridge. There is a handrail, but whenever you touch it, it crumbles and falls away into the void, so that you are forced to proceed on your hands and knees. Notwithstanding the immense emptiness of your surroundings, it is not as though you are outside, in the open; you have the feeling that you are in some huge room--a warehouse perhaps. Far in the distance you see an oblong box of indeterminate size. At first it appears to be hanging magically in space, but then you see that it rests on a skeletal wooden framework, like the catwalk. It is to this box, or room, that the catwalk leads, but it is not possible that you will reach it before the scaffolding collapses. The whole structure is decaying beneath you, large segments of it now crumbling and sifting away into the darkness. A rotten plank gives way under your knee, and the jaws of the abyss unhinge themselves with a yawning groan. You enter the room and shut the door behind you. There are the usual things--a table, a chair, a bed, a mirror--and a girl, who says--
hi, honey.
hi--
got a nickel?
uh--
gimme a nickel and I'll let ya see my thing.
now cut it out, goddamn it!
ha ha! Don't you remember that little girl in the third grade who let all the boys see her pussy for a nickel?
of course I remember, but what's that got to do with anything?
this is the same girl.
all right. But nobody asked you to play her part.
had you going there for a minute, didn't I?
certainly not.
ha ha! I'll bet I could put the make on you without half trying.
I'm warning you... !
aha! Now who's afraid of the truth?
truth, my ass! You're trying to assert something that's not only irrelevant but totally without foundation in fact, and--
oh yeah? What about the time you put on Mother's bra and panties and tried to seduce me in the mirror?
that was you that did that!
okay, so it was me. What's the difference? You'd have fucked me if you could have gotten to me.
well, kiss my ass! Do you realize how absurd that is? It wasn't you I wanted, you stupid bastard. I wanted a real girl!
but I would have done in a pinch, eh?
fuck you.
that was my idea. You wouldn't be getting a cherry, after all. Don't tell me you've forgotten all our rendezvous in the bathroom.
listen, why don't you--
remember the time you tried to glue hair on my hand to make it more realistic? Hee hee!
this is so utterly ridiculous, I can't believe it's taking place! How can you distort everything like that... and then laugh about it! This is a serious matter!
hear, hear!
you know, you're worse than incorrigible! You're stagnant! Oh, sure, you can learn about bikinis and interstices, but in matters of importance you're as unprogressive as a cesspool, and that is exactly why you must be done away with once and for all!
ah, so you admit your motive now!
yes, I admit it.
a minute ago you said I kept growing like dead hair, and that that was the reason you didn't love me anymore. Now you say the opposite.
knock off that "love" shit. Where you're concerned, growth and stagnation are synonymous. You grow, all right, but you don't develop. You're like an ingrown toenail. And you know what has to be done with ingrown toenails.
if you should be able to kill me... I say if--
don't worry.
--you'll have seven years' bad luck.
very funny! Very fucking funny! Keep it up, though. Where you're going, they could use a few laughs. Now, if you don't mind, I'll do this scene alone.
if that's the way you want it, honey.
you just make yourself look bad when you say things like that, you know. Anyway... You hand the girl a nickel, and she puts it in her purse. "Come on," she says, taking your hand and leading you to the bed. Her behind wiggles pleasantly as she walks. "Nobody will see us here," she whispers, reaching under her skirt and pulling down her panties. "Wait a minute," you say, crossing the room to switch on the television--an old-style model in a mahogany cabinet that resembles a cathedral. The screen flickers to life, and you see yourself, armed to the teeth, moving at a crouch down a broad hallway whose walls extend to the vanishing point. You return to the bed, where the girl waits. Her small breasts push proudly against the front of her frilly dress. She has not yet begun to wear a bra, and when you put your hands on her chest, you can feel the little buttons of her nipples through the thin cotton. Her titties are like shallow mounds of firm milk custard. "Wanna see my tits, too?" she asks. You nod. "That costs another nickel." You pay up, and she unzips, pushing the puff sleeves down her arms and baring her boobies. They are snow-white, and tipped with the tiniest, brightest nipples you have ever seen. They are like miniature Christmas lights. On TV you proceed cautiously along the corridor, your tommygun at the ready. Coats of arms, lances and swords deck the stone walls. A flickering green glow lights the passage, though in the room it is white night--that same transparent blackness in which you awoke in the auditorium. The TV screen gives off no light at all. The girl is slowly raising her skirt. She has dimpled knees, white thighs. Slim, but not skinny. Ominous-looking statues with hollow eyes are spaced along both sides of the corridor, standing in arched alcoves. Some are mounted on horses. With an innocent grin, the girl hoists her skirt to her waist, and her genitals jump out at you like a jack-in-the-box. Startled, you grab a large ringbolt on the wall and pull on it with all your strength. Out of a crack in the stone comes a huge, sausagelike tumor, a good ten feet long. "Like it?" asks the girl. You nod, get a firm grip on the ringbolt, and drag the tumor on down the hallway. It's as heavy as lead and as solid as a rock, but you have a feeling you're going to need it in the coming crisis. "Wanna play on the bed?" she says as the steps out of her dress. "Why not?" you reply, mounting the mattress on your hands and knees, still facing the TV. The tumor sweeps a broad swath through the dead roaches that cover the floor, and the stones groan under its weight. She is moving in behind you. You can feel her warm breath on the bottoms of your feet, and her dark eyes on your private parts. Your flanks quiver with anticipation. But of what? A chill draft hisses ominously up the tunnel, and far ahead, swimming in the flickering phosphorescence, you see the great doors. Incandescent coal dust snorts from the nostrils of the bronze horses, and their hooves strike sparks on the stones. Your fingers open and close on the bed sheets, and you shift your weight from knee to knee. Her tongue touches your instep, and your asshole begins to twitch. She sucks your toes and licks your heels, and then her rosebud lips work slowly up your calves. Her hot breath caresses your crotch. Her tongue slithers like a snake up the back of your right thigh and mounts the dome of your buttock. Your rump lathers up, and you become swaybacked like the doomed horses in Death in the Afternoon, and a huge cast iron bull on your left paws at its pedestal. You open up on it with your tommygun, and black sludge spurts from the holes and flows like lava among the hollow roaches. The ponderous tumor crackles along behind, slow as a glacier. Her pointed tongue sweeps the hollow at the base of your spine, and a trickle of acrid saliva erodes your anus. The tendons of your groin begin to hum, and your bones are vibrating like tuning forks. The domed vaults overhead are shuddering and crumbling, and out of the darkness comes a rattling rain of testicles. They skitter about the stone floor like drops of water on a hot griddle, and they pop under your feet like rotten walnuts. You hook the ringbolt in your crotch and push on. Her tongue passes over your asshole, and the wall wavers before your eyes. The hideous laughter of the cello booms through the corridor. As the tongue ascends the crack of your ass and traverses the small of your back, you feel her rubber-tipped tits flatten out on your buttocks, and horses, bulls, roaches, tumor and all are transformed into a shadowy whirl of kaleidoscopic needles, and suddenly the great doors loom up before you, their red-hot rivets chattering like death rattles. Something warm and thick and long slides between your thighs, parting your fuzz, and you feel her firm young belly on your ass, her nipples on your back, her cheek between your shoulder blades. She massages your chest, your ribcage, your belly--
my mound.
--your--
my slit.
stop!
oh, don't stop! It feels so good! Mmm! Your finger slipping in and out of my pussy, your other hand rubbing my chest, your tits pushing down against my back .. . Oh, I'm getting all juicy! Mmm!
please!
oh! What was that? Oh, gosh! You're so big! You'll... you'll hurt me!
no--
mmmmrnm!
--I won't hurt you. I'm going to...
what?
to--
fuck me!
yes!
do it!
yes!
stick it in!
oh, you little .. .
slut?
yes!
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
I'm going to tear you apart! I --
good! Ram it in! Tear me apart! Split me down the middle! I want to cry and bleed with love! Oh, you have such soft, hot tits!
you've always liked them, haven't you?
oh, yes!
you've always wanted to suck them, haven't you?
yes!
and this... ?
oh!
you've always liked this, too, haven't you?
yes!
always wanted to feel it--
yes!
to wrap your fingers around it--
yes!
--to feel it enter your body...
yes!
to die with it stuck up your little cunt!
aaaaaahhhhhh!
uhn!
oh!
uhn!
don't stop. Keep it up! Fuck me!
uhn!
fuck me!
uhn!
f-f-f-f-f-fffffffff--
YOU!
don't stop--
LET GO OF ME! Please!
beg, you little shit! Grovel! Ha! Did you think you could trick me that easily, you... you obscenity?
ha ha ha ha ha ha!
laugh, you bastard! Keep laughing while her massive ramrod of a cock plows in and out of your cunt, pounding your insides to hamburger! Your crotch is nothing but a swamp of red foam! Her nipples are burning holes in your kidneys, but you keep laughing! Keep it up! Using the tumor as a battering ram, you charge the great doors, bellowing like a mad elephant. BAROOOOOM! The sound of the impact is deafening. Statues topple to their deaths with a rolling clatter of bronze and pot iron, and stones hurtle through the corridor as though shot from cannons, but the great doors are undamaged. In frantic desperation you charge again. BAROOOM-oom-oom! Only now do you realize that this battering is the source of the rumbling moan which drones constantly through all the halls of the house. Undaunted, you resume your assault, and the roach shells fly in all directions. Your blood boils, and jets of black steam shoot from under your fingernails as the girl grips your hips with her birdlike hands and slams her cock into you with the fury of a pile driver. Boom! Boom! Boom! The house shudders from its dungeons to its lofts, and the corridor is choked in a hail of bones and bicycles, but the great doors stand intact like ironbound monoliths, scornfully defiant in their utter invulnerability. By the time your orgasm begins, your body is a hollow shell, smoking at the pores, and her seminal oysters come flapping into the howling void like a flock of featherless condors. Struggling to your feet in the collapsing corridor, you shoulder the bleeding tumor and make one last frantic charge. BAROOOOOOOOOOM! The coffin-like room sways drunkenly on its splintering stilts... and crumbles into the screaming abyss.
far off, silhouetted against a flaming wall, the woman with the long black hair beckons to you like Captain Ahab on the whale. She moves placidly through the blazing maze, wise in the ways of fire. You wend your way upstream along the left bank of a gasoline river, the green flames singeing your nerve-ends. The interior of the house has been scraped free of the last shred of flesh, and has taken on the aspect of a vast petrified sponge of geometric lineaments, full of hollow sockets and burnt-out organs. You yourself are nothing but a charred skeleton with a fossilized penis and cauterized eyeballs mounted on aluminum, rods. The trail is plainly marked by her footprints in the sludge. You move at a stumbling but unhurried pace. From time to time you stop and cry out across the flaming stream, but no one replies. Even the echoes have been annihilated.
the voice crying in the wilderness. That's you.
no, my friend; that's you.
you really believe that, don't you?
you bet your sweet ass. I am in full control. You won't trick me again.
what makes you so sure?
I have emancipated myself.
from?
you, of course.
and her too, in the process, I suppose.
correct.
in what way, may I ask, have you accomplished this miracle?
by becoming a writer.
ho ho! You write, therefore you are, eh?
in a sense, yes. My typewriter, you see, is the instrument of your execution.
what a fate! Death by circumlocution! Pecked to death like a stranded mackerel! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
yes, you laugh as you trudge along on the stubs of your legs, but it is a hollow laugh--as hollow as the scraped-out hell of a house, in whose poisonous labyrinth you are loomed to wander forever.
so that's your plan. But you've overlooked one thing, old man. You see, in filling your wilderness with ears--that is, with readers (though from the evidence, "filling" is hardly the word)--you have inadvertently given me a voice as well.
I can pinch you off whenever I choose.
you think so, eh? Well, there's one other thing you've forgotten.
and what is that--Giton?
does it stimulate you to call me that?
certainly not.
we can fuck again, if you like.
shut up! What have I forgotten, in your irrelevant opinion?
the eyes, old man. The eyes.
eyes? What eyes? You mean the mummy? Don't be childish. I'm free of him too. The King is dead, long live the--
no, not those eyes. The red eyes. The ones behind you. The red, glowing eyes that have been following you along he burning river. The eyes of the black beast that has been on your trail from the beginning.
your trail! Not mine!
every time you turn around they are closer. All along you have considered yourself the hunter. She is always just ahead of you, just out of your reach. Only now, as you hear my claws scrape on the iron path behind you, do you begin to realize that you are the prey.
it's you, goddamn it! You are the prey! And now that you've seen the truth, you're trying to distort it, trying to put me in your place. Well, it won't work!
it was you who gave me fangs--that I admit. Long, sharp ones, shaped like ice tongs. And it's too late for repentance, old man. Fortunately for me, it is much easier to create a monster than to destroy one. Ha ha ha!
we'll see about that. Like an automaton, you push on through the green flames. In a half-hearted effort to elude the pursuing eyes, you step through a ragged hole, climb a smoke-filled stairwell, and enter a brothel run by a man all covered with hair.
all except his head and face, which are pink and shiny. I'm right behind you.
"Ah, so there you are!" says the man, clapping you on the back. "I got 'em all ready for you. Plenty here for everybody. Right this way, m'boy!" He explains that--or rather it is apparent that--he is not the owner of the place, he only runs it for a lady by the name of Mrs. X. The main ballroom is brightly lit by crystal chandeliers, and the walls are draped with white lace curtains. Everything is bright and cheery; no hint of the destruction going on outside. There are a series of doors, and behind each is a room. You move with a kind of lethargic momentum, without hope or despair--
but with a strange inner dread, for though you cannot see or hear it, you know that even now the black beast is lurking close by, its red eyes shining in the gloomy catacombs. In the first--
shut up!
all right. Go ahead. I'll just wait quietly out here. Try not to think about me pacing back and forth before the door, my claws scraping quietly on the rusty iron, a hungry smile on my shaggy face... Well, go ahead. What are you waiting for?
in the first room--
grrrr.
in the first room--
snarl!
please! Will you stop?
are you asking me or telling me?
I'm... asking.
well, that's better. All right then, I'll pace in silence.
in the first room--
but you won't forget me, will you?
I wish I could.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
in the first goddamn room is a redhead in black lace underwear. It crosses your mind that in all probability she is some diabolical phantasm, which may at any minute shed its sleek form and reveal the fiendish horror of its true self. But whatever cautious tendencies you may have had prior to the cataclysm have long since boiled away with your bone marrow along the banks of the gasoline river, and without hesitation you crawl into bed with her. Seeing you, she puts down the newspaper she is reading, rises to her knees, pulls her panties halfway down her thighs, turns her ass to you, assuming a four-point stance on knees and elbows, spreads the newspaper on the bed before her, cradles her chin in her hands and continues to read. The hairy man takes a seat beside the bed, folds his brawny arms and says something about "dog-style". You nod politely and take up your position between the woman's wide-set calves. The sight of the red beard that adorns her deep-cleft cunt reminds you that it was you who started the fire.
in the auditorium, with your tommygun.
with your tommygun. I use a different weapon.
equally ineffective. But really, old man, you must try to ignore me; try to put the sound of scratching claws out of your mind. Hee hee hee!
you spread the redhead's cunt lips with your fingers, and insert your cock into her oily bore. You are rather pleased to find it hollow. Surprisingly enough, you feel not the slightest regret for having started the conflagration. "I see here," says the whore in an offhand manner, "that the murderer was hanged in the valley and is still at large." "Yes," you reply. "I believe I read that somewhere." You unhook her bra, push the straps off her shoulders, and the garment drops to the bed, in a perfectly natural manner. Her tits are pendulous without the bra, but also very full-bodied--in excess of handfuls--and quite pleasant to the touch. You fuck her at full stroke with a steady rhythm for what seems a sufficient time, and then ejaculate with all the proper motions. You can hear your semen trickling thinly among her organs like water in a mountain brook. Placing your palms on the cheeks of her broad ass, you pull your prick out of her hole, which makes a small farting noise as the head pops free. Hearing this, the manager opens his eyes--for he had dozed off--and says, "Ah! Finished, eh? Right this way, then." Some of your semen runs out of the redhead's open cunt into the crotch of her panties, but no one seems to mind. In the second room is a platinum blonde with pointed tits and slim hips, fully clothed and standing in the corner like a mannequin. The hairy man says something irrelevant, snaps his fingers, and she come to life. In the middle of the room is a window frame, with glass panes, crinoline curtains and Venetian blinds; it is either hung from the ceiling or set up on saw horses. The man nudges you in the ribs, whispers something in your ear, grins from ear to ear, and points toward the window. You creep up stealthily--
just as you used to do in the alley behind the apartments.
... may I ask you one simple question?
certainly.
if you really think that I am the same person who did that, then who in the hell do you think you are? How do you explain your existence? Where did you come from? Answer that.
simple. I came through a crack in the brick wall beside the garbage cans. I was behind you all the time, just like now. I saw you peeking in all those windows. I saw you playing with yourself. I tracked you every step of the way. I was the black shape that made you tremble with shame and fear. I saw you beat your meat and shoot your nasty cum all over the wall under the window of that high school girl, and on the wall of the cottage where the newlyweds lived, and on the house of the woman who always went naked and had a lover... I was the thing with the red eyes that shone in the shadows. I was what I am now, except that my fangs have continued to grow. Now do you understand?
y-you--
your voice is trembling.
you--
ha ha ha ha ha ha!
YOU... creep stealthily up to the window and peer through the half-open blinds. The crinoline curtains are parted conveniently in the middle. The blonde is standing before her dresser mirror, brushing her hair, her profile to the window. After several dozen brushstrokes, growing ever more rapid, as though it were a sexual act of some kind, she drops the brush and arches her back, thrusting her breasts out toward the mirror, the thin silk of her red blouse stretching almost to the breaking point. In this position--bosom stuck out in front, ass stuck out behind--she puts her fingertips on the points of her tits and rubs them until you can see the nipples poking through, You hear heavy breathing close by and realize that it's your own. The hairy man takes some money from a dresser and sits down to count it. The blonde too is breathing heavily now, you notice. Her hands slide down from her tits to her belly. They cup the prominent hump of her cunt, over which her tight black skirt is stretched snugly. She jerks her pelvis against her hands and says, "Ahn!" through her open lips. Next she draws the red blouse out of the waistband of the skirt, unbuttons it with trembling fingers and slips it off. She is wearing a strapless bra of black net. Her nipples cover half her tits, and you can see their bright pinkness over the top of the small-cupped bra, as well as through the net. She turns her stunning profile to the mirror, facing you at the window, running her hand lovingly over the jutting peaks of her bust and saying "Mmm," and "ahh!" Still facing you, and as a matter of fact looking right at you, she puts her hands behind her back and unhooks the bra, letting it fall to the floor. Has she seen you? Does she know someone is watching her? Your hand goes automatically to your prick. Her tits stand proud and firm, without need of support. She caresses them, squeezes them, pinches them, pushes them together pulls them apart, lifts them, depresses them, and at last spits in her hands and gives them a vigorous rubdown with saliva. The knobs of her nipples are at least a half-inch long and the areolas are swollen like over-ripe peaches. She lifts her skirt to her hips, examines her beautiful legs, spreads them, rubs her crotch while she opens the zipper at her hip. Turning her back to you and wiggling her hips, she slithers out of the skirt and kicks it away. Now she is wearing only black net bikini panties, red high heels and nylon hose held up by black and red elastic garters, Jane Russell style. She tightens and relaxes the cheeks of her ass several times. You watch them open and close. Each buttock has a dimple over it. Her panties are so low that her crack sticks out over the top, and she is so close that if it weren't for the window screen, you could reach out and touch her. The manager snaps his fingers, says, "Ah!" as though he has just remembered something, and by a clever feat of magic removes the screen. You hesitate. A faint, eerie sound shivers your eardrums--
sssscrape, ssssssscrape, ssssscrape...
you put it out of your mind and--
hee hee hee!
--carefully slipping your arm between two slats of the blind, you insert your hand between her legs. "Ooo!" she says, thrusting her ass down on your forearm and spreading her thighs. Her crotch is hot and damp, and her cunt fits your hand like a small football. You probe through the net with your middle finger, and she vibrates like a church bell. "Come on in," she whispers, without turning around. You crawl through the window--
just like you always wanted to do.
--and she skins out of her panties. You come up behind her and cover her tits with your hands, easing your cock in between her legs. The rock-solid cheeks of her butt grind and undulate against your belly, and she lets her head loll back on your shoulder. Her hot red lips brush your ear, and in a breathy hiss she says, "Have you heard that the murderer has been hanged in the valley and is still at large?" "Yes," you reply, as your fingers part the crisp bleached curls of her bush. She invites you to the bed, adding, "He has taken the shape of a cat, they say." "I know." Everyone has. a good laugh over this.
ha ha ha ha!
with some difficulty, you focus your eyes and find that the blonde is already in bed, lying spread-eagled on her back. The hump of her cunt--not even counting the hair--stands as high as her tits, and the slit looks at least a foot long. Its fleecy lips are rippling and bubbling, opening and closing. You crawl between her legs, cover her naked form with yours, and slide your dick into the swollen sheath. "That's it, kid!" calls the manager from his chair. "In and out, in and out! That's the ticket! Go to it, boy!" The insides of her cunt grip your cock like an oyster, rippling up and down the shank, and as you pump her bouncing belly full of semen, you are surprised to find that you are no longer anxious about your blood-stained clothing. As you enter the third room, you look back over your shoulder to see the blonde once more standing stiffly in the corner, fully clothed again, her eyes glazed, face devoid of expression. In this room is a little girl on the brink of puberty. She is dressed in a bright yellow frock with full skirt and starched bodice, and she is sitting in a straight chair beside a window, her hands folded in her lap. The glass of the window is opaque, yet she seems to be gazing off into the distance. "Here, here!" says your shaggy host, running up to the girl. He unclasps her hands and places them on the arms of the chair. The girl seems not to notice. Then he lifts her stiff skirt about halfway up her pretty thighs and moves her knees apart. "There," he says, stepping back to examine his work. "Get down on your knees and you can see it." The girl continues to stare out the window--or at the window. You drop to all fours and peer up under her skirt, and sure enough, there it is--her pussy. No panties, and very little hair; only a few wisps of peachfuzz about the top of the crease. You put out a hand and run your finger along the plump, soft, hairless groove. "The murderer, you know, was hanged in the valley," she murmurs, brushing a strand of soft black hair from her face and fixing you with her bright blue eyes. "And he is still at large in the form of a black cat." You nod, and continue to stroke her twat. She spreads her thighs a little more and goes on. "They say he eats any traveler who wanders into his territory."
snarl! Smack! Drool!
"Yes, I know," you reply. "Do--
ha ha ha!
--"Do you have tits yet?" "Sure," she answers with a smile. "Wanna see 'em?" "Uh huh." "Okay." She unzips, slips her arms from the sleeves, and peels to the waist.
go ahead, Johnny. Feel 'em.
her tits--
I've been waiting for you.
her tits are just beginning to fill out, and --
you're the one who wants to--
shut up! Please! I'm not going to leave anything out.
he he he!
"You're the one who wants to jack off on me, aren't you?" she asks. "Yes," you reply. And--
like when we used to meet in the bathroom--
stop it!
--the one with the long mirror on the door. I'm glad you haven't forgotten.
she pulls her dress off over--
you see, I can take any shape I like.
she pulls her dress off over her head, looks at your cock with admiration --
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
--and kisses it on the tip. The window pane rattles slightly, and you can hear the distant clatter of horses' hooves on stone.
and the scratchy-scratch of cat claws on iron.
"Lick it," you say.
tap, lap.
"Suck it."
suck, suck! Mmm!
"Watch the teeth," you say.
fangs.
teeth!
he he he!
"Spit on it." She spits on it, and you begin to masturbate. She leans back, hooks her knees over the arms of the chair, and rubs herself between the legs. From time to time you stop pumping to let her spit in your palm.
splat!
soon her hand is going as fast as yours--
nh, nh, nh, nh!
--and her middle finger is all wet and slimy, and her long black eyelashes are quivering, and her smooth white thighs are trembling, and her slim, boyish hips--
ha ha!
--are jerking, and your first jet of semen strikes her between the eyes-splat!
--and the second full in her mouth-- gulp!
--the third between her pretty little white tits--
splush!
--the fourth in her bellybutton--
splooish!
--and the fifth dead in the cunt--
yeah!
--flooding her lurching crotch. She turns her head from side to side, and you give her a short shot in each ear for good measure. Her little naked body looks as though it has been doused with curdled cream --
yum, yum!
--and the clippity-clop of the horses fades away in the distance.
I sheathe my claws for the time being and settle down outside the door, nibbling contentedly at the blood clots in my coat.
"Right through those French doors," says the woolly whoremaster. In the fourth room, as you expected, is an old hag with bony limbs and floppy tits resembling the ears of a mangy Dachshund. She is stark naked, and squats in the middle of the floor, pissing into a cracked teacup which never fills up. Her cunt is a gaping wound surrounded by a scabby rat's nest--
with real rats.
--and--
hee hee!
--and her urine is greenish black in color, like bile. Your guide draws a pentagram on the dirty floor with white chalk, and instructs you to stand in the center of it. The hag, without stopping the putrid flow from her bladder, brushes the cobwebs from her lips and says, "So, you've come at last!"
You--
there's a pair of bloody ice tongs around my neck, and my yellow fangs are visible when I speak.
--"You are aware, no doubt, that the murderer has been put to death in the valley." "Yes, ma'am," you reply politely. "He was hanged, I believe." "Correct," she croaks.
"And he is still at large, in the form of a black cat with murderous fangs and red eyes that glow in the dark like hot coals." "And I heard that he eats all travelers who wander into his territory." "That is true," says the hag, with a fiendish grin. "He eats them alive."
heh heh heh!
"He has long, curved daggers for claws," she goes on, "and is known to burrow under the earth at times, like a mole, in order to dig pitfalls for his victims. Once your scent has reached his nostrils, there is no escape." "I know."
do you, Johnny?
I...
you're weakening, Johnny.
"Is all this quite clear?" asks the hag.
ha ha ha ha!
"Yes, ma'am," you reply, trying to concentrate on the far-off boom of the tumor as it pounds bravely--
but futilely.
--against the great doors. "And you are prepared?" she asks. "Yes, ma'am."
ho ho!
"Very well, then." And the hairy man sticks his head through the door and says, "The top drawer is full of shit. Right, kid?" "Yes, sir," you say, turning your head carefully, so as not to violate the boundaries of the pentagram. "Bring me a turd about the size of an egg, and we'll call it even." "Yes, sir." "'Bye, now," he says with a wink. "Good-bye." "Good-bye," says the hag, pulling on a rusty chain.
bye-bye, Johnny! Take care! Don't forget to brush your teeth and say your prayers!
the pentagram falls open under your feet--
ha ha ha ha!
--and you are falling through a vast, empty darkness, down, down... The silence here is not the silence of death; it is a silence which never lived, a virgin silence never violated by sound; it is the primieval silence that preceded the Big Bang. You fall like a drop of semen, full of dead sperms, into the scraped-out womb of Infinity.
you're making that up.
I have that right.
have your fun.
you're having yours.
quite right--thanks to you.
the darkness is annihilated--
postponed.
--in a flash of yellow light--
ha ha ha!
--and you find yourself in what at first appears to be an ordinary bedroom with two beds, a dressing table, a chest of drawers, a chair, a window. But then you notice that the door and the window are fake, and that the chair is fixed firmly to the floor. Moreover, the four naked figures on the bed farther from the door, which you took to be real people, are in fact dummies--life-sized statues, done with the most startling realism. "Must be some sort of a wax museum," you say to yourself, approaching the bed with the figures. Noticing a rope hanging from one corner of the bed, you give it a tug but find it rigid and immovable--a fake, like everything here. One of the statues--a beautiful, full-bodied brunette who appears to be in her late thirties or early forties--
she never would tell her age.
(shut up!)--is wearing--
ha ha ha!
--is wearing a sheer crimson nightgown, but it is pulled up to her waist, and one tit--
the right one. Don't neglect the details.
--is hanging out at the top. She is lying on her back with legs spread and knees up. Her arms are at her sides, and her hands clutch the sheet some distance from her hips. Her face is frozen in an expression of sheer ecstasy, the eyes nearly shut, cheeks flushed, her nostrils flared wide, her full red lips parted in a certain vulgar way difficult to describe. There is even a trickle of spittle at the corner of her mouth. She looks almost alive, as do the others. At her feet, on his hands and knees, is a naked boy in his early teens. He has his face between the brunette's thighs. Close examination reveals that his mouth is open, his tongue thrust into her cunt. You attempt to part some of the shag of her thick black bush with your fingers to get a better look at the tongue, but the hair is like steel wool and utterly unyielding.
do not touch the art work!
The other two people--a man and a woman, both nude--are not altogether on the bed; they are kneeling on the floor at either side of it, leaning forward on the mattress, their heads beneath the brunette's raised knees, their eyes trained on the boy's loins. The man is well-built, but slightly effeminate perhaps, with wavy hair and an erect penis the color of raw salmon. His mouth is open in a smile of delight, and his eyes seem to twinkle with glee. The woman opposite him is a blonde, possibly a bit younger than the brunette. Her tits are smaller than the other woman's, and are flattened out in a very realistic way against the sheet. Her face bears the same look of surprise and delight as the man's, but her mouth appears to be frozen in the midst of speaking--in mid-word, perhaps. Bending over the blonde to scrutinize the boy's genitals at close range, you discover the object of the couple's excitement. The artist, in a brilliant portrayal of the youth in the act of attaining a spontaneous orgasm--nay, at the very first moment of ejaculation--has cleverly molded a translucent jet of semen coming from the end of his prick. You touch it with your finger--
do not touch the art work!
--gently, so as not to snap it off. It is solid, and as cold as an icicle. You recoil. Seized by sudden panic, you dash across the room and squeeze out through the crack in the wall beside the dresser.
Ha ha ha ha! Run, you little shit! Run! I'm right behind you! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...
The hot wind is hot in your face. All around you, the dead are dying like flies. You are on a horse, a black gelding with its skin in smoking shreds, galloping madly along the crumbling bank of the gasoline river. It is the last horse in the world, and when it dies under you with a clatter of bone and iron, you dart into a ruined bomb shelter and bolt the door behind you. Curling up in a nest of steel wool, you try to get some sleep, but the scratching on the walls keeps you awake, trembling with fear.
scritchy, scritchy, scritchy...
the walls are nothing but rusty shells, so thin that you can see the glow of the cat's eyes through them as it paces to and fro outside...
gnashing its fangs and drooling with anticipation.
you can hear the rust flaking away under its claws, the hissing rattle of its hot breath. Suddenly the room is lit with a shuddering green glow, and you notice a large circular opening in one of the walls. It is a corrugated iron culvert--
--a sewer pipe--
--leading down to the flaming river. Its entire length is littered with pottery shards and fragments of bronze horses and shattered swords. You leap into the pipe and make a dash for the river, stumbling and falling at every step. When at last you stand teetering on the brink of the outfall, struggling to regain your balance, gazing in terror into the fiery gorge below, three things happen at once. First, you fall into the river. Second, the cat devours you at a single gulp.
third, a woman takes my hand, and in a voice full of warmth and compassion, says, "Come. Follow me."
no! You can't do this! You--
I pause briefly to crush an old man under my heel like a cockroach, wipe the blood from my lips with my free hand, and proceed at an easy pace along the smoldering path, behind the woman in the flowing gown.
oh! Oh, God! No! --
a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I walk with a light step. I remember what someone told me a long time ago--that when this is over, none of it will actually have happened. I have passed through the fire of death and attained new life. I have eaten of the rotten flesh and broken the curse. I have devoured myself like the hoop snake, and risen from the grave intact. I can say what I like, because I am autonomous and irresponsible. Having stepped off the wheel of time, I have no further need of growth. Like green slime, I thrive on stagnation. All around me, the old ghosts are going up in flames. The smell is pleasing to my nostrils. For hours, days, weeks, years, we climb the winding mountain path toward the headwaters of the burning river. I keep my eyes glued to the woman's sensually swaying, thinly veiled buttocks, her soft warm hand gripping mine securely. At length we enter a broad circular place, a sort of sunken patio high in the mountains, near the ceiling of the house. In the center is a black bowl full of rainbow-colored fire--the source of the river. "There," says the woman, pointing. I step boldly up to the lip of the bowl and piss into the fire. Instantly the flames are extinguished in clouds of hissing stream, and everything goes black. Six million are slain with the jawbone of a cunt, the fiery chariot goes down in smoke, and all the continents wash away into the sea. The Great Flood is upon us. "Lie down there," says the woman, in a soothing voice that carries easily over the raging waters and seems to come from all directions at once, "and we will be together always." I curl up in the black bowl, my head on my hands, and a vast, warm peace falls over me like a pall...
floating upon a boundless sea
night without end
dreaming
i am a little boy playing cowboys and indians with my mommy
i am shooting from behind a chair
bang bang i gotcha
you missed me ha ha ha ha
mommy put war paint on me with her lipstick and i got a hanky between my legs tucked in a belt like indians and a rubber knife and a gun and all
mommy's in a wagon train and there's a lot of men but i kill 'em all and then she's all by herself and she's got on this pretty pink slip that you can see her booboos through
i get on my horse and ride round and round shooting and yelling and mommy shoots back but she can't hit me
bang bang bang
i can hit her if i want but she says play like you wanta capture me alive and take me back to your camp so i dive off my horse and grab her around the waist and knock her down and we roll over and over
i get on top of her and pin her arms down with my knees and she laughs ha ha ha ha ha ha what are you going to do to me and i say i'm gonna take ya back to my camp on the back of my horse and she says am i gonna make her my squaw and i don't know what that means but i say yeah so i tie her on my horse and ride off across the prairie giddyup giddyup yippee yippee
whoa
then we're at my camp and i throw her off the horse and we roll over and over and over again on the ground ha ha ha ha
and one time her slip comes up and i see her cooty and she says ooo and pulls it down again
ha ha ha ha ha ha
you naughty boy
it has a lot of black hair on it
i gather wood to build a fire
aren't you gonna tie me up i might get away
so i tie her up but not really and she says why don't you go get that clothesline rope in the kitchen so i go get it and she puts her hands behind her back and i tie them together really and one of her little pink straps falls off her shoulder and i put it back up but she wiggles her shoulder and makes it fall down again so i leave it
mommy's skin is real white and pretty and soft like
there's a floor lamp and i tie her to that like it's a tree
mommy has a real deep place like between her booboos and i can look down into it when i'm behind her tying her up and she looks at me and says what are you looking at and i say nothin'
i start building the fire
did you see my cooty before
i start giggling and so does she and we giggle so hard we can't stop but finally we do and then she says boy that's a nice fire it's getting me nice and warm
she puts her legs open kind of and her slip is all wrinkled way up on her legs so if i look i can see the black hair on her cooty because i'm sitting on the other side of the fire but i try not to
she can't pull it down because her hands are tied up
i cook some meat over the fire play like
she says what are you gonna do now
i'm gonna give ya some food 'cause i'm a nice indian
oh goody i'm hungry
i give her some meat but she can't take it because she's tied up so she says come and sit on my lap and feed it to me so i do i hold a bone up to her mouth and she bites the meat off of it play like and chews it up
mm that's good
she's real soft like pillows under my rear end sometimes her lap goes up and down sort of while she's
eating so i ask her if she has to go to the bathroom and she
starts laughing again and shaking her head no
i laugh too
the laughing makes her booboos jump up and down and i point at them and it makes me laugh harder and she looks down at them and starts laughing harder too and then her booboos really start jumping and bouncing and all
her other strap falls down and it looks like her slip's gonna fall off her booboos
they're so big and round and nice they're brownish pink where they stick out in the middle
oh ha ha ha oh you naughty thing ha ha pull up mommy's slip before she gets embarrassed ha ha ha ha
so i pull the straps back up on her shoulders but one falls off again and she keeps chewing up the meat but pretty soon she starts breathing hard like she's tired and whenever she breathes in her booboos get real big
i ask her if she wants a drink of water and she says yes but then she says no
whiskey
ok me get whiskey
oh ha ha ha whew oh my ha ha it's on top of the kitchen cabinet
i get on my horse and ride to the kitchen
can you reach it
uh huh but i have to get up on a chair
i ride back with the bottle of whiskey and sit on her lap again
open it
i open it
now hold it up to my mouth
i hold it up to her mouth and she drinks some but i pour too much and some of it spills down between her bubbies that's what a boy i know calls them he lives next door and sometimes i play cowboys with him but it's more fun to play it with mommy he has a sister with bubbies and he says one time he saw some big boy sucking on them but i don't believe it mommy says that boy's not nice and i shouldn't play with him because he's a jew a jew is something like an indian i think they do bad things maybe he was telling the truth about his sister i don't play with him much
oh that's cold oo ooo get a towel
i go get a towel
when i come back her slip looks farther up her legs and then she lifts one knee up and i can see her whole cooty
ladies don't have a doohicky like boys
i wonder how they peepee
they have to sit down because sometimes mommy comes and sits on the toilet when i'm in the bathtub and you can hear the peepee going in the toilet
there must be a hole
boy is it hairy
she says dry me
i dry her off above the slip
that feels good
she pulls the straps down so i can do all the way across it's not wet there just in the middle but she says it feels good anyway
oh i'm wet all the way down to my bellybutton i'm going to have to take this thing off so she takes her arms out of the straps and lets it down to her tummy
hey how'd you get outa the ropes
she giggles they weren't too tight there i'm tied again finish drying me
i dry off the deep place between her booboos they're so white and naked now
it makes me feel funny
you wanta drink some of that she asks me
what
that whiskey oh can i
see if you like it
i try and it tastes awful but i tell her i like it because indians like whiskey a lot and jews too i guess it burns your throat
then she drinks more and i dry her more and she says do them too
she means her booboos so i rub them some with the towel but they're not wet and she says oh that's nice and drinks some more from the bottle
do you think mommy has nice booboos
uh huh
give them a kiss then
so i kiss them both on those pinkish brown circles and she makes a funny noise and drinks more whiskey and then i drink some too but it still burns my throat awful and she says whatever you do don't tell anybody at church about this and i promise not to
it's a sin to drink whiskey even if you're just playing cowboys and indians but it seems like god wouldn't care if your mother let you and all but i don't say any of that i just dry her some more with the towel because she spilled some on herself accidentally and then she says oh i'm wet all the way down to my cooty and i start giggling again and so does she
i dry her some down below her bellybutton but i don't get down to her cooty because she might get mad
her tummy is real soft and white
i guess i'd better take this thing off before i catch cold
and so she does and then she's all naked and it's sundown and the coyotes start howling out in the dark where you can't see them and mommy turns off the floor lamp but the little light by the sofa's still on and i pretend that's the moon and mommy stretches out on the rug in the moonlight and says pretend you were carrying me across a river to your camp and dropped me in the water and i'm all wet all over and you have to dry me off but she talks kinda funny and i get a little scared but she hugs me and kisses me and then i feel ok
i dry her bubbies again and her tummy and bellybutton and she puts her legs way out and says i should dry her cooty because it's all wet and i look at it and it's wet all right so i rub it with the towel
it sticks up high like a hill sort of and down below the hill in between her legs there's a deep place like between her booboos only deeper sort of and it's all sticky there and doesn't smell like whiskey
i wipe it off good
she lifts her head and drinks more from the bottle and watches me rubbing her cooty and calls me a big bad indian
once that boy that jew he called me a mama's boy i hate him and i'm not going to play with him anymore mommy said he was just trying to humiliate me i don't know what that means but it's bad something jews do and i start thinking about what he said about his sister and i rub mommy's bubbjes some more and i wonder if i could suck them one time i saw a little baby on a bus sucking one his mother had it right out of her dress and the baby was getting milk i wonder if i did that when i was a baby it's different though when you're grown up but i don't know if it's a sin or not you wouldn't dare ask anybody they'd call you a name
remember what you were going to do when you got me to your camp
what
you were going to make me your squaw
oh
she's moving her cooty real funny against my hand and it keeps getting wet so i keep drying it i don't think it's peepee i don't know what she means about making her my squaw
don't you know what the indians do to a white woman when they capture one
no what
they stake her out on the ground like this and tear off
her clothes
they do
yes and then they put their hands all over her body
oh
well aren't you going to do it
without the towel you mean
of course without the towel
so i giggle and put down the towel and start rubbing her with my hands and boy her skin feels hot she closes her eyes sort of and says rub my tits
what
my booboos these things
i start doing it quick because it sounds like maybe she's going to get mad if i don't
i pull one of the brown bumps and let it go like a rubber band and that makes me giggle but mommy doesn't giggle she just makes a funny noise and i think maybe i hurt her but she says do it again so i do and then she says to rub her booboos she called them tits with one hand and her cunt with the other one and i say huh and she says my cooty my cooty so i start doing that
oh oh oh johnny
huh
keep doing it
i get the sticky stuff all over my hand but i don't mind i feel kinda dizzy and funny and the moon looks green sort of and she says put your finger in it only she says it so low i can't hardly hear and out in the dark the horses are stomping their feet and snorting maybe there's a mountain lion out there
that's what the indians do she says
what
they stick their fingers in it go ahead are you afraid
i say i'm not but i am but i do it
it's not a little hole like I thought it's a big one and easy to get your finger in but i'm scared because i don't want to touch any guts so i don't stick it in very deep
then it starts opening and closing like a mouth and i stare at it and she starts moving all over like when you try to hold somebody down when you're wrestling and all of a sudden a man without a face comes in the door he's wearing a soldier suit
he says hey what the hell's going on and some other bad words and he has a big long doohicky sticking out between his legs and the horses all start rearing up on their hind legs and i start crying and he knocks me in the head with his big long thing and i fall in the fire and get all burnt and the moon goes around and
around
then mommy picks up my gun and shoots the man and there's blood all over his soldier suit
he laughs and drinks some whiskey and takes a long time to die
then i'm older and in another place running around to all the doors and windows trying to get out but they're all locked
i am crying and there are bugs crawling on the walls
i get on my bicycle and ride from room to room for a long time and every time i come to a door i try to open it but then i have to laugh at myself because I don't really want to get out i'm only pretending to
i forgot it's only a game
still i have to follow the rules
when you're grown and don't follow the rules you are punished so as soon as the man dies and goes away i take the gun and shoot my mother
bang bang you're dead but she just laughs i laugh; too
i say to myself there's plenty of time to do what you have to do and all the time i know i am only dreaming and that makes it even better
i go into another room and get into bed with my mother
do you know what they do then
what
they rape her
what's that
they stick their doohickies in her cooty
gosh
we laugh about that and have some more whiskey
she puts her hand on my leg and then she pulls on the hanky i got on for an indian outfit and the back of it comes out from the belt
it feels funny sliding in my rear end
why don't you take that off
so i unbuckle the belt and the hanky falls and then i'm naked too and you can't hear the horses or the coyotes or the mountain lions or anything
it's very nice and warm and sleepy between her legs
she starts fiddling with my doohicky and that makes me giggle and she giggles too and keeps doing it
i look down at it and it's sticking out like when you take a hot bath sometimes and it sticks up through the suds
she squeezes it too hard one time and i say ouch and she says aw did mommy hurt the big indjan let mommy kiss it so i get up on her chest with my rear end on her bubbies and she kisses my doohicky and i giggle and she licks it sort of and puts it in her mouth and tickles it with her tongue while it's inside her mouth and
it feels funny
i get kinda dizzy again
after while she stops and says go back down and I'll show you how
ok
get between my legs now get up on your knees that's right
her fuzzy cooty tickles my thing
now get real close
down lower
closer
closer
mm
i thought it would be easy like with my finger but it starts smacking sort of and i get scared and i start thinking about aunt fran's gums the way they looked when her teeth fell out that night at supper and then i hear a voice calling out in the dark where nobody can hear and then the bed hits something solid and i wake up
CHAPTER NINE
--coming!
The boy rubbed his eyes and saw the big gray house where the party was held. He stepped out of the black bowl onto the shore, not far from the dock with the two skiffs. People were still milling about the slope in front of the house, but the boy didn't recognize any of them. Drake, Cory, Flemming, Uncle Farley... He had the feeling they had gone home a long time ago. The people walked in strange, unrelated patterns, entirely separate from one another, and he remembers that their skin had a certain grayness in the early dawn light. The black bowl dissolved into a cloud of something like squid's ink, and the boy walked up the shore toward the dock. The island, of course, was still out there in the middle of the lake, but he didn't look at it. He knew what he had to do.
Standing beside the skiff with the body in it, he gave a
shout, and the old lady who owned the place came tottering down the close-clipped lawn to the shore. The boy pointed at the curled-up form in the bottom of the boat, and the old lady adjusted her spectacles on her nose. A light chop ruffled the surface of the lake, though there wasn't a breath of wind.
"Oh, my goodness!" she said. "It's.....!" (The boy
has forgotten the name.)
She put her hand over her mouth, and immediately a crowd gathered around the boat. Soon the police were on the scene. Many of the women in the crowd were in advanced stages of undress, and a few were stark naked, but no one seemed to notice this except the boy. He moved slowly through the crowd, letting his hands wander over their bare breasts and buttocks, grabbing a fuzzy cunt from time to time, always making it look like an accident. Once he lifted the skirt of a girl who was bending over the boat to pay her respects to the deceased, and stuck his cock surreptitiously into her asshole, thinking, "I wonder if I hid the fishing rod well enough."
He became increasingly anxious as the cops started snooping around, and after a while, concealing his erection as best he could, he slipped out of the crowd and ducked into the shrubbery.
Soon he had reached a dirt road which stretched away across the countryside. He swung into an easy stride, and by noon he was a good ten miles away--safe, at least for the present. He remembered breaking the fishing rod in half and stuffing it into the garbage can at the pool hall, but he couldn't remember whether any of it stuck out. The chrome on the reel would of course be visible from a great distance. In any case, it was only a matter of time until they found it. He pushed on.
Presently he decided to leave the road. Bearing off to the east, he soon found himself strolling along between two turquoise hills all speckled with black stones. Off to the southwest, behind him, lay a broad rolling valley, checker boarded with lush grain fields and divided up by wooden fences painted bright yellow. The fences shone brightly in the sunlight, and the breeze made the grain flow in gentle, sensual waves from south to north. Ahead, however, the boy's view was blocked by a great, hump-backed ridge that ran laterally across his path. It was sea-blue in color, and rose sharply against the luminous umber of the sky.
Once he thought he heard dogs barking in the distance, and stopped to scrape the dried blood, from beneath his fingernails with a splinter of wood, but it wouldn't come
out. "It's only my imagination," he thought, continuing on toward the ridge.
It was a mild, placid scene. The birds were even singing. Nevertheless, the boy had a sick, empty feeling in his stomach. "Am I really safe here?" Apparently so, and yet he couldn't help but feel they were closing in on him. If he pushed on, mounted the ridge, attained the summit, what would await him beyond? And if he lingered... What then? What if they had already found the broken surf rod? Going over the whole affair in his mind, it became all too clear that the clues would lead straight to him; there was no way to avoid it. "I am the guilty one," he said aloud. They would never catch him, he was sure of that, and yet he knew he would never escape.
With the greatest stealth, and with a deftness born of resolve, the boy opened a door, just slightly, and peered into the room beyond.
Sure enough, there was that hairy crack in the mirror, just as before. There could be no turning back now.
Hey, look! I think he's coming out of it.
Oh, poor baby! Claude, are you sure he won't... ?
The boy cocked his gun, and stepped into the room.
