Chapter 12

Ken walked down a long corridor and through the empty reception room of Creighton and Fulham, Architects. He went to the door of his private office and opened it. The room was a shambles. The desk was overturned, the drapes torn from the windows. Someone had destroyed his rendering and written across it: "The dog is no good. I must be let in by my sister on May Eve."

A woman with black hair that hung below her waist approached him with a swaying, seductive walk. Her smile frightened him. Her incisors were like the fangs of a dog.

"I'm Marcia Wilson, your new secretary," she breathed in a voice that oozed sexuality.

She came close, intolerably close. He tried to step back, but he was powerless to move a muscle as she draped her hands on his shoulders and smiled up at him.

"What do you want?"

"You must marry me. You will be my child's father."

"Father," another voice echoed.

He found that he could turn his head. Another woman, scarcely more than a girl, stood there. Her slanted blue eyes burned with a hellish glow.

"Father," she repeated.

The women looked at each other and cackled with obscene glee.

The girl came closer, unbearably close. She leaned toward him as if to offer her mouth in a kiss. She opened her mouth. She had the jaws of an animal. She no longer smiled. She snarled.

"No!" he screamed.

Tangled in bedclothes, streaming with sweat, he sat upright in darkness. His heart pounded. He was awake, but he was scared, more scared than he had ever been. He fought the impulse to turn to the door, where he imagined that Melody actually stood, grinning fiendishly. That was foolish. He turned. No one stood at the door.

He fumbled for a cigarette and made out the mound of Marcia's hip, the pool of her hair on the pillow, by the flare of the match. The flame shook. He inhaled and suppressed a fit of coughing, not wanting to wake her.

He peered at the clock. It was one. It had been a quarter after twelve when he'd last looked, despairing of ever being able to get to sleep. Now he had slept and it had been far worse than lying awake and thinking of-here he made a supreme effort to blot out the subject that had obsessed him, tortured him, kept him from sleep, but it was no use-thinking of Nora Curtis.

He groaned aloud. Just by letting her name form in his mind, he had opened the door for the twisted, cloying images of sexuality that had been prancing and slithering through his mind all night. His fantasies had acquired the force of hallucinations. She was in the bedroom, as real as the dresser or the night stand, but she was no longer the Nora Curtis he knew. Her hair was disordered, her bare body glowed with sweat, her eyes were hungry. She postured lewdly, caressing her sex, twisting to offer her lithe buttocks, urging him with her puckered lips. He felt a resurgence of the excitement that had passed beyond desire to become an excruciating pain.

He hadn't been able to purge Nora from his mind since he'd kissed her, but at first he hadn't thought that unusual. After all, he was bored. His wife was barely speaking to him. He was enduring a movie that interested him not at all. Why not occupy his mind with Nora and the exciting new possibilities she had brought into his life?

That was when the strangeness had begun: during the movie.

He had nudged Marcia. "Looks like Nora, doesn't it?" he had said.

Marcia had feigned irritation, as if the preposterous film were too gripping to admit interruptions. "What?"

"That actress. Looks like Nora Curtis, doesn't she?"

Marcia had studied him for a moment. "You have a vivid imagination," she'd said, turning back to the screen.

Stupid bitch. It was Nora Curtis, down to the tips of her fingers. He was tempted to enlist the support of his children in asserting the likeness, the identity of the actress with their neighbor, but they were sitting beyond Marcia. He didn't want to create a disturbance over an unimportant point. Surely Marcia saw the resemblance as clearly as he did. She was just being difficult.

He hadn't been paying much attention to the movie. The actress who looked like Nora didn't have a major role, but she made an appearance in almost every scene. She never said anything. Often she would gaze right at the camera-right at Ken-for no understandable reason. The director of the film was known for his offbeat, obscure touches. This must be one of them.

Two of the principal characters were chatting at the side of a pool. In the background, the trim little woman with tawny hair swam, then emerged to preen herself at pool side. She began to peel off her bathing suit. The movie was rated "R." Perhaps this was why.

The actors in the foreground went out of focus as the camera concentrated on the blonde actress. Her breasts were bare, beaded with diamonds of water. They swayed as she rolled her bikini down from her hips to reveal a sparse patch of pubic hair that didn't hide the plump lips of her sex.

"I'll give you the kind of fucking you never even dreamed of," she said.

Appalled, Ken turned to Marcia. She watched the movie, her face impassive. The kids were absorbed in the screen. No one in the audience had giggled, no rowdies had hooted at the blatant invitation. No one seemed to have noticed it. He turned back to the screen. The girl was gone.

He had drunk a lot before coming to the movie. Could it be that he'd dropped off to sleep momentarily and dreamed that sequence? It seemed the only plausible explanation, even though he felt sober and alert.

The movie continued. He could make little sense out of it, even when he tried to concentrate. A man from outer space was visiting the earth incognito, doing enigmatic things for obscure reasons. Marcia and the kids followed it all with apparent interest.

The hero was climbing a fire escape. The camera followed, then lingered on a lighted window and entered through the billowing curtains. The blonde woman lay nude on a bed. She gazed at Ken with sex-dragged eyes. Her glistening fingers toyed unashamed with the exposed flesh between her legs.

"I want you" she said. "Now. Please. Come to me. I'll do anything for you, anything at all."

Ken looked around him. He was touched by panic. No one else in the audience was reacting to the scene. No one else seemed able to see it. He gripped Marcia's arm.

"What is it?" she demanded.

"What the hell kind of movie is this? Are you just going to sit there and let the kids watch this filth?"

"For God's sake, Ken," she sighed. "Why don't you go next door and have a drink?"

He was scared. She hadn't seen it. No one had. It was a product of his imagination. Overwork? Hardly. The D.T.'s? That only happened to Skid Row bums. He'd had four or five drinks, that was all, and their effect was wearing off.

He forced himself to concentrate on the screen, on what was really there. But Nora Curtis was really there. Head bowed, she was caressing a man's phallus with her moist tongue.

"I'd prefer to have you, Ken. It's you I really want."

He stumbled out of his seat and fled the theater with Nora's amplified voice booming lascivious suggestions in his ears.

In the bar next to the movie house, after two gins on the rocks, he had been able to chuckle at his overwrought imagination. The chrome and glass gleamed with unquestionable reality. The bartender, ruddy and solid, was undeniably himself. Men talked of bets and politics and women. Warily, he studied the murky mirror behind the bar, but no trim little woman with a leonine mane appeared in it.

Marcia, wearily patient, collected him when the movie was over.

Now he sat awake in bed and wondered if he were going mad. If so, he was mad on only one subject, the victim of only one obsession. Lust. What a silly, old-fashioned word! Perhaps it still appeared in children's catechisms, perhaps writers of pornography still squeezed some mileage out of it, but the word was unknown to common speech, the concept was alien to the modern consciousness. Yet that was what he felt for Nora Curtis: he lusted for her. His body ached for her, his brain seethed with visions of her.

Marcia turned in her sleep and rolled against him. He looked down at her. Only the basic elements of her pallid face showed in the darkness, giving it the stylized appearance of a primitive mask. He couldn't tell if her eyes were closed or open, or if her lips were parted in a wolfish grin-he wrenched his mind away from that fantasy. She could be anyone. She could be Nora.

She was Nora.

He snuffed his cigarette and quietly put the ashtray back on the bedside stand. He hadn't touched his wife in-he couldn't remember how long. It seemed that they always arranged to go to bed at different hours. Only habit, and the reluctance to make a symbolically significant change, kept them together in the same bedroom.

He lifted strands of her hair from the pillow. They were light in color. Her face was Nora's face. Her eyes were open.

"Yes, Ken," she whispered.

He slipped his hand under her nightdress, up the cool column of her thigh to hair that was much finer and fluffier than Marcia's. Petals opened to his probing fingers, moisture trickled as he rolled above her, guiding himself eagerly and clumsily with his free hand.

An elbow banged his chest, a knee speared his thigh as she shoved him and twisted away.

"God damn it, Ken!" It was Marcia's sleep-scratchy voice. "Go away."

"Frigid cunt!" he snarled, heaving himself out of bed.

He looked down. Beyond question, the hair on the pillow was black. It was Marcia. She was already asleep again. He heard the soft, familiar purr of her snore. He wished he hadn't touched her. His hand felt dirty. He wiped it on his robe as he belted it about his body. Touching any woman but Nora was wrong.

On his way downstairs, where he planned to drink himself into insensibility, he paused at Melody's door. It had never before occurred to him how much he disliked his stepdaughter, but his strange dream had somehow focused his emotions. Perhaps it was the fact that the dream had emphasized the conspiratorial relationship that existed between the mother and daughter, a conspiracy directed against him.

Melody had never been able to conceal her contempt for him, and her mother had never done anything to discourage it. Melody often amused herself by playing a cheap little trick: answering a question before he asked it, or finishing a sentence he had only started. Then she would permit a hint of a smirk to touch her inscrutable mask. She was observant, that was all, and she'd been around him a long time. She couldn't read his thoughts, even though she tried to give that impression in order to disconcert him. And that telephone trick-maybe she always answered the phone when he was out by saying "Hello, Ken," hoping to catch him with that exasperating prank.

But his dislike-no, why mince words, his loathing-for his stepdaughter had a deeper source than the long accumulation of practical jokes and sneers and slights. Sometimes-and it was now happening more frequently-his flesh crawled when they chanced to touch, as if he had accidentally brushed against a snake. He sensed something inhuman about her. The texture of her skin, the look in her eyes, the way she walked-everything about her was subtly, indefinably wrong. It was as if a clever, but not quite perfect, counterfeit of a human being had been palmed off on her gullible mother. The dream, in which he had pictured Melody with the muzzle of a beast, had underlined that impression and made it clear to him.

He sighed, turning from her door. Perhaps he really was cracking up, and this was further proof of the fact. He had reason enough to crack up. He was intelligent, talented, and personable. He had worked hard all his life. He had achieved material success, he was married to a beautiful and intelligent woman, he had a young and attractive mistress-and yet none of his trophies was worth anything, none of them meant what he had thought it would mean. His wife was cold and hostile, his success was the result of compromise and concession. His stepdaughter was insane. His mistress was crude and stupid. He drank too much, and he was getting older by the minute.

Nora was the answer. Nora would set everything right for him. He had married the wrong woman, that was the source of all his problems. Not only would she be able to satisfy the hunger that gripped him now, she would also tell him what to do to satisfy all his other unfulfilled needs. He remembered now that he had once thought her scatterbrained. He was forced to laugh at himself. How could he have been so wrong about someone? Nora was the missing half of his mangled soul.

He passed through the living room without looking at the bar. The wet pebbles of the Japanese garden gouged his bare feet. Only then did he realize that he had left the house, that he was striding purposefully toward Nora's. He paused for a moment, wondering what he would say and do when he arrived on her doorstep in his bathrobe at this ungodly hour. It didn't matter. He would go to her, that was all that mattered, and the details would sort themselves out.

He could have walked more easily by way of the road, but he was impelled to march on a straight line through the patch of woods that separated their properties. No lights showed ahead of him. He couldn't see where he was going. But he knew that he couldn't go wrong. An invisible thread tied him to his goal. His desire grew with each step, for he knew that each step took him closer to Nora.

He found himself repeating her name aloud as he went forward. He stumbled over logs, collided with trees, tangled with bushes. Having fallen for the third time, he no longer troubled to get up. He went forward on hands and knees, speaking her name with each ragged exhalation of breath. The wheezing of his abused lungs sounded abnormally loud in his ears.

His robe snagged on a thorny bush. He fumbled to free it, but he saw that he was wasting precious time. He wrenched it from his body and continued to scramble forward.

The rough ground beneath him gave way to a smooth lawn. He crawled on for awhile before looking up. The tall chimney at the end of Nora's darkened house towered above him, blotting out the stars. He got to his feet and ran to the front of the house. He scanned the upstairs windows, wondering which ones gave onto her bedroom. They were all dark.

"Nora," he called. "Nora!"

He rang the doorbell, holding it down under the steady pressure of his thumb for a full minute while he rattled the knob. He stepped back. The upstairs windows were still dark. He rang the bell again, then plunged into the plantings at the front of the house, trying each of the windows. They were all locked.

He worked his way around to the back of the house, tugging at locked windows. Some shred of sense remained, holding him from smashing his fist through a window to gain entry. He knew that what he was doing was irrational, that he ought to return home; but he couldn't.

He pounded on the back door, loud enough to drown the thunder of his heartbeat and the rasp of his breath. The door was locked. He looked around for a tool to force it. He saw that the garage door was open. Her car was missing. He sank to his knees, striking the earth with his fist, screwing his face against the tears that still managed to seep out.

"Nora!" he roared. "Nora!"

He lay on the wet grass for a long time, gasping and sobbing. He had made her wait too long. She had gone off with someone else, perhaps with her lover from the movie. He no longer thought of that as a movie, nor as a hallucination, but as an event he had witnessed. She had offered herself. She had begged him to come to her. He had failed. He ripped at the grass and earth under his fingers.

He would break into the house. He would go to her bedroom. He would lie between the same sheets that touched her. He would clutch the pillow, inhaling her scent, and pretend that he held her naked body. The fantasy excited him. He writhed against the ground, rubbing his erection on the grass. He rolled over on his back and began to stroke it with his hand.

Light dazzled him. He lay still, unable to interpret the burst of light. Gravel crunched under tires. Sanity crashed back, filling him with shame and horror. He saw himself as anyone else would see him: a wretched degenerate, exposing himself and masturbating on a suburban lawn.

He got to his feet and started to run. He staggered. For the first time he felt the pain that his progress through the woods had cost him. His legs had been scraped, his feet cut and bruised.

"Ken!"

He stopped cold, He forgot the pain. He turned. It was her voice, Nora's voice. He stumbled toward the glare of the headlights, no more able to resist than the phototropic bugs that were flitting in the same direction.

Nora got out of the car. She wore a plain white gown, a startling contrast to her normally flashy outfits. Her tiny feet were bare. She held one of her earthenware bowls, a large one, in her hand. She was obviously returning from dinner, for which she had brought one of the courses, with perfectly normal friends; and she had come home to find a naked man masturbating on her lawn. The incongruity shamed him, but it didn't, deter him. He felt a hollow longing for her in the pit of his stomach that almost transcended the burning urgency in hi? out-thrust prick. Now he knew that he had been hallucinating earlier, because none of his visions could match the impact of her reality.

"I thought you'd be here," she said.

He was unable to speak. He reached out to her. She threw back her head and laughed at him. Her laughter held a bold challenge, and it seemed to unlock a whole new cage full of insane desires. He wanted to bite the white throat exposed to him. He wanted to rip off her breasts with his teeth. He wanted to drive her to her knees with his fists and kick her to death. Sex alone couldn't calm the frenzy within him, or the passion she provoked.

He grabbed her and wrenched her forward to a bone-jarring collision with his body. He clutched a handful of her thick hair to tilt her face up while his free hand tore her gown from her body. Laughing, she trapped his thigh between her legs and rubbed her cunt against it in a lewd, humping motion. Then she sliced his face with her nails, hurting him with cool deliberation, exulting in her absolute power. He hated her for making him want her so much. She offered her lips. She squirmed and writhed, rubbing her firm little tits against his chest, massaging his thigh with her moist cunt. She kissed him as if trying to suck out his soul. Then her teeth pierced his lip.

He flung her down on the grass. She smiled up at him, slowly licking his blood from her lip as she let her thighs drift wide apart. Her cunt was just as he had seen it in that insane movie: the hair too sparse-the lips so plump and perfect-that it was like a child's. He even remembered a mole high on her inner thigh. Her green eyes glinted with desire and malice.

"Can't you wait till we get to the bedroom?" she asked, her tone a ghastly parody of girlish coyness.

He shook his head. She laughed again as she sprawled back on the grass in the stark illumination of her headlights.

"Eat my cunt, you worthless piece of shit," she said. "I'll bet that's all you're good for. If you do it nicely, maybe I'll let you stop before sunrise."

He dropped to his knees in the angle of her white thighs. She corresponded in every particular to the Nora Curtis of his feverish visions. Her pubic hair was only slightly darker than the hair on her head. Her cunt was long and leaf-shaped, her anus a prim, red berry. Her belly was concave, her navel a depressed slit. Her nipples were large and dark, the aureoles the size of half dollars. Under his stroking hands, her skin felt as he'd known it would-soft as a baby's, but overlaying firm muscularity.

He wiped the blood from his lip and snuggled his face between her legs. Her hands tangled in his hair and pulled his head forward and down, hard. He pressed his mouth against the nearly hairless lips, prodding and probing with his tongue until they opened like the red wings of a butterfly.

He slipped his hands beneath her sleek rump and lifted her as a thirsty man might lift a brimming bowl. Her thighs locked his head in place. She clawed his shoulders, laughing wildly. She scrubbed his lips, his nose, his eyes with her sopping cunt. He loved it. All thoughts of violence had vanished. He breathed the fishy odor deep into his lungs, he drank the sticky ooze as it seeped out under his eager tonguing. He couldn't breathe. He didn't care. He was lost, wandering eternally in a hot cavern whose red walls sweated and clutched.

"Lower," she ordered. "Put your tongue in my asshole."

He did what she told him. He forgot about hating her. He forgot his name, his status, his pride. He became a simple organism, a lamprey or a leech, joyously fulfilling its sole function in the universal system. He made a stiff rapier of his tongue and thrust it deep into the hot, dry hole, vibrating it inside the squirmy tightness while she spread her legs wider. He clutched her buttocks with clawed fingers, dreading separation from her crotch.

The hand clutching his hair jerked him upward. He caught a ragged breath and pressed his mouth again to her cunt. It was a soft, slushy pudding now, all except for the hard little button that made her squirm whenever his tongue flicked it. He drew it lightly between his lips and began lashing it with his flickering tongue. His heart leaped as she began to moan. He couldn't believe that he was actually pleasing her, that he could exert a kind of power over her.

He pulled his hands out from under her wiggling ass and slid them up on her sweat-slick flesh until they were cupping her tits. He felt a fresh thrill of excitement, a new surge in his aching cock as he kneaded the firm globes with his hands. He pinched the hard, darkened cones of her nipples between thumbs and forefingers, rolling them lightly, making them even harder, and an electrified quiver ran through her body. She stiffened suddenly, then went limp, then began twisting her hips to mash her cunt against his sucking mouth even more violently than before.

Spitting inarticulate, feline noises, she dragged him higher. He needed to draw breath. Even more than that, he needed to kiss her belly and lick her breasts. She shivered. She battered her jutting pelvis against his chest and belly in repeated hammer blows.

"Now," she ordered. "Now!"

His rigid cock sank like a stone into a viscous sea. Her cunt sheathed it to the hilt in a second skin made of fire and mercury and oil. She writhed like a captive serpent as she threw herself into the rhythm he set-her hips twisting, her belly strumming, her spine arching. He clutched her harder, trying to break the cages of their bones and flesh in order to blend their souls.

She whimpered with impatience, urging him to move faster, but he took his own time. As she shifted and squirmed and squeezed, he felt that he had somehow gained control, that he was now in charge. She was at last reacting to what he did. He was touching her, controlling her pleasure.

She twined her legs around his back, shifting her ass to take as much of his thrusting prick as she possibly could, and he pulled her buttocks up in his cupped hands to jam the last inch of the tingling meat into her. He fucked her in hard, staccato bursts, his prick shuttling in and out of her like a red-hot piston, making the juice fly and spatter against his legs from the churning cauldron of her molten cunt.

She stretched her legs up higher, until her knees were pressing up into his armpits and her cunt was wide open to his hammering thrusts. He couldn't remember when he'd been in so deep, when every last inch of his prick had been bathed so thoroughly in scalding juice.

Nothing in his life, nothing he had experienced or imagined, had prepared him for Nora Curtis's cunt. He had thought of them as conveniently placed holes, uniquely wet and warm, but essentially primitive and uncomplicated in nature. He was shocked to find his prick sliding inside an organ that seemed as complex and sophisticated as his eye or his heart or his hand, but totally unfamiliar and defying comparison with anything else.

It could squeeze-as a unit or in sections-the pressure starting at one end and rippling to the other like falling dominoes. It could slither around him like a wet tentacle. It could disappear altogether, ballooning away from his buried pillar of flesh to become an echoing, empty vault

It was as if fucking had been invented for this woman alone, and all the others who tried it were only giving a pale imitation. He wanted to slow down and savor this fuck, to relish every inch of the slide into the fleshy flower between her squirming legs, but she wouldn't let him. She battered her hipbones against him and clawed his back to urge him in and out, even faster and harder.

Clutching and groping, they wrestled against each other through a jungle of wet grass and gravel. He clawed at her sweat-slimed body; she raked him with her nails; her teeth clamped his shoulder; she pounded his kidneys with her dainty heels. He was both rider and mount, spurred and spurring, as they galloped ever faster toward an overwhelmingly important goal: heaven or hell (he couldn't say which, nor did he care).

Then he discovered that the goal was within himself. It was an inward glimmer, something similar to the soul he had pictured as a child; but he wasn't merely picturing it, he was feeling it. It expanded to fill the universe he had become-tingling at the edges like a billion stars, like a billion tiny needles pricking his skin from the outside-and he felt earthquakes shake the world of her body beneath him.

Dimly, he heard a high-pitched noise like the whine of a mosquito, even louder, diving closer. He realized that she was making the noise, way back in her throat, and then it burst from her mouth as a yell that he instantly stifled with a bruising kiss as the pump of his cock dragged fire up from his balls and showered it into her. He groaned like a wretch on the rack; but it wasn't pain or death that gripped him, it was ecstasy that fragmented like a flock of glass butterflies, fluttering and clattering, fading and blending to a dull glow.

"Now that we've broken the ice," she murmured, "let's go upstairs and do some serious fucking."

He braced himself on locked elbows and smiled down at her. In the ghastly radiance of the headlights he experienced one last hallucination as she smiled back. For an instant it seemed that he gazed down into gelatinous eyes bulging from the sockets of a grinning skull-a skull only partly covered by rotting, yellow skin-and that bare bone gleamed through its patchy growth of dead-white hair.

But this last hallucination was gone in the blinking of an eye, and he looked down into the smooth, white face of Nora Curtis, who smiled with temporary satisfaction.