Chapter 15

Catharine heard her daughter's call, but she could not reach back. The thin little voice was soon drowned out in the shattering sounds around her, and the tiny oval porthole through which she had come was covered now with a silvery-hard haze. It was miles and miles and miles away. She would never know how to get there, over all the writhing bodies. Catharine could not bear to touch them. They were filthy. Most of them had little or no hair, but pasty scalps showing a revolting pinkish cast as if the hair had been pulled out at the roots. Automatically, her hand went up to her own head. Her fingers stiffened and froze. Her shriek was lost in the horrible cacophony of moans and screams from the others.

A large clump of her own golden fine silk hair had been yanked out. Her hand touched scalp. Her fingers recoiled and she almost lost consciousness, but such relief was no longer available to her and her kind.

She was in Hell.

If I explain to the right people who I am, she thought, standing very still while everyone around her seemed to leap and squirm and dance in some grotesque imitation of a nightmare ballet, if I tell them there's been a mistake, that I am Catharine Johnston Burgess ... oh, God, what is he doingl

The green-skinned demon held a blood-soaked bone in his claws and was tearing meat from it with his sharp teeth. His dick was still erect, she noticed, and despite his disgusting eating habits and the dank sticky liquid that oozed from the corner of his mouth, there was still something about him that made her want it again. This time she would stay conscious, she wanted to experience every second of it, that strange combination of horror and ecstasy ... but she must get out of here. The green cocksman was dancing a little jig as he tore into the bone. His legs were spindly and hairless, and the skin glistened with slime.

Catharine started toward him, pretending to ignore the monstrous cock that pointed up at her, tempting beyond belief.

"Can you help me," she began, using all her knowledge of feminine wile. After all, this ... creature was a man, the proof poked up at her in a most disconcerting way, a man who had taken advantage of her. Surely he understood that he owed her something. "I don't belong here, you see," she said in her prettiest wheedle.

The hideous fellow roared with laughter, choking on the raw meat in his mouth. It came spewing out in a mess all over himself and some got on Catharine, too. She brushed at herself. Oh, God, she was nakedl She tried to cover herself with her hands.

"I don't see what's so funny. I wish you'd help me. After all, you got me into this, didn't you?" she said, a little tartly, but not really bitchy. She knew exactly how to get what she wanted from men, of course, always had. Show a little spirit, but always with the tacit understanding that you are pliant and vulnerable underneath. Throw yourself on his mercy, but let him know he's going to have a lively time of it.

"Cunt," the demon said. "Made me drop my meat."

He began to dance again, and spun away from her as if he owed her nothing.

Still not aware of her true circumstances, Catharine began to look around her for the first time. The landscape was a vast horizonless rubble heap, with all color gone from it. No trees, no grass, no sky or water anywhere, no big comforting house to run to. Only a reddish-brown darkness, with a terrible stench, as if someone had been burning flesh and hair. Here and there, small fires did indeed send up wisps of black smoke, and the air was overcast with heavy fumes. In the distance, naked figures ran in circles, as if constantly being bitten by insects.

And all around where she stood were other naked people, most horribly misshapen and deformed, with scaling skin and running open sores. They were all doing vile things to themselves and to each other. She wanted to look away, but every time she turned from one monstrosity, there was another. There was no place to look that was not sordid, vile, sexually degenerate, and mad.

Am I mad, she thought, is that what has happened to me?

The thought comforted her. Then I shall wake up soon, in a clean white bed with fresh lovely flowers on a little table, and doctors and nurses looking after me. It will be all right. I've had a nervous breakdown, that's what it's called. It's all a bad dream, a nightmare. It's not real. Help me, everyone. Give me a pill, a capsule, a drink, an injection, a little tender loving care, and fuck me, fuck me, fuck me hard and slow and long and never stop...

But she had come this way to leave that awful itching need behind her forever. If she had truly gone with the devil, why then he would have kept his part of the bargain and she would be free of sexual need now . , . this was proof, wasn't it, that it was a dream, only in her mind ... because her body still yearned and ached and hungered, worse than ever before.

Who are these people, those creatures around me, then? Are they inmates of the mental hospital ... figments of my sick imagination ... could even I imagine such ugliness, such debased and anguished orgiastic antics ... what happened to the orgy they promised me, the feast where I was the pretty centerpiece and everyone sucked and kissed and licked and caressed and fed and fucked me with their fingers and their toes and their tongues and their cocks...

She hoped she wasn't speaking out loud, if the doctors were listening, if she were unconscious and lying in a hospital and talking out loud that way she would die of shame when she woke up. What if Richard heard-if. he knew what bad thoughts churned all the time in her head ... what if Jennifer heard, with her innocent little cherry-if Richard gets that he will have gotten both of us, and he doesn't deserve it. Oh, Daddy, why didn't you fuck me, why don't you come and help me now ... I only came this way because they promised me you would be here. I want your thing inside my thing, Daddy. That's all I ever wanted. You know. Do it. Do it, please, come to my room again, at night or in the morning, or in the high afternoon when Mommy is having her nap, and put it in me. Yes, I'm big enough to take it. I'm a big girl now, Daddy. Fuck me in my white satin wedding dress, with the veil over my face. Don't let him have me. He's ordinary.

"Want some, honey?" cried a bulbously fat woman as Catharine wandered past her. "Come and have a little suckle, my, you're a pretty one, so you think! Give us a suck here, see how big and squeezy they are, you like tits, everybody-likes tits, mine are prettier than yours. Want some, honey?"

The woman had no teeth in her mouth. It was red-brown inside when she laughed, blood-red and shit-brown, like everything in this place. Her nipple was as big across as her fat hand that held it up for Catharine to see. The other breast hung hugely down to rest on the scarred rolls of belly. Catharine felt a moistness in her throat as the gross flesh heaved and bounced with the woman's shrill laughter. Her involuntary salivary glands told her that it would be good, good to suck on that enveloping warm flesh, delicious to be held and fondled and sucked in turn by that toothless mouth...

She ran from the fat woman and almost tripped over the long red hose that another woman was busily stuffing up her cunt. It took more and more and more. Catharine watched in fascination until the rubber hose began to emerge from the woman's gaping mouth. More and more she pushed it in and little by little it came out the other end. Catharine gagged.

"I have to get out. I have to get well," she told herself out loud. That brought a croaking laugh from someone so close behind her that she jumped in surprise. Whirling around, she saw a giant female creature, hard and muscled and tattooed around the tits and gut in a wreath that curled right down into her slit. The creature held a white-hot branding iron. With a steely bear-trap grip, she grabbed Catharine and threw her down onto the ground. She pressed the steaming iron into the delicate white skin. It seared and smoke poured from the wound as an acrid smell clotted in Catharine's nostrils. The pain was so horrible that she thought surely she must faint again, but such relief is not possible in Hell. Pain invaded her body, her mind and her universe, blotting out all other sensation and thought. Pain and the equally devastating knowledge that her flawless flesh was being desecrated.

The huge, naked, sweat-gleaming giantess threw down the branding iron and shook with mirth as she watched Catharine's agonized belly crawl along the garbage-littered ground.

"That's the only thing that stops the hots, honey," someone tittered, and then roared with his own joke. "It's sort of a counter-irritant, you'll get used to it. You'll beg for pain, to stop the hots. Just be thankful you didn't get it up the ass. My God, you should see mine. Want to see, please, hon, take a look, do!" The tall bony fellow turned and squatted so that Catharine's eye was pushed against his red-brown ass-hole. There was a scar there, but no telling what had made it.

"Help me, help me," she moaned to him. He seemed friendly. When he turned around, he had smears of garish makeup all over his face, and false eyelashes, but she knew he was a man because his long thin penis was standing right up under her nose like a chicken bone, pale and bare and rigid.

"Sweetie, I can't help you, I mean, that's not what does it for me. I'm just as horny as you are-see?but you couldn't come near cooling me out, so why bother!" With that, he moved away from her toward a group of muscular young men who were hitting each other with wet towels.

"Why, if it isn't the jerk-off lady herself! Hey, come and see who's here, everybody!"

A hulking man came toward her, gesturing excitedly over his shoulder to the others to follow him. He was wearing a torn and filthy garment that had once been an elegant red silk Oriental robe. Catharine could see the faint traces of an embroidered dragon and lotus blossom pattern under the festoons of caked dirt and spittle and dried semen. He had a shaggy unkempt beard with flies buzzing frantically around in it. He didn't seem to mind them, but as he bent his head close to her, Catharine had to keep fanning the insects away with her hand. A huge rent in the hem of his robe showed glitter boots underneath, still with traces of dull gold sequins poking through the dung that clung in clotted turds high up around the ankles. He stopped directly in front of her, blocking her way (but where was she going?) and the others came hurrying up tosee.

There was a woman in a torn tee-shirt and nothing else, a fat man with his scalp showing scabs where the hair had been pulled out, an ancient hag wearing the tattered remains of a satin slip through which her wrinkled folds of withered skin barely covered protruding ribs and pelvic bones. They gathered around Catharine, touching her and turning her this way and that. Their hands were dirty and without gentleness. They clucked and spit and muttered excitedly as they probed and poked at her.

Catharine tried to pull away, but they ignored her pleas and found her struggle amusing.

"She's not so much," the snarling woman in the tee-shirt said, spitting on Catharine's smooth white breast. The woman's cunt was thick with matted hair. Catharine had a crazy impulse to touch it, just to see what she would do.

"Turn her around, I want to stick it to her in the ass," the bearded transvestite said. He opened his tattered robe to reveal a small penis standing erect, peering from the tangled masses of its own beard. It was very small, Catharine thought, sniffing.

All the men were erect here. All the females were wet and ready, it seemed.

The foursome spun Catharine around and spread her buttocks rudely. The bearded man inserted himself and began to pump away. She hardly felt the little thing, although the in-and-out sensation made her want more. They held her bent almost double, with her long hair sweeping the ground, and in a moment it was over. I have to wash my hair, she thought, there's dirt in it now.

"Hardly worth bothering about, a teeny little orgasm, and she didn't come at all," the man in the robe sneered, withdrawing his dick. When she stood up again, she saw that it was still hard. He didn't bother to pull the raggedy robe together.

"You're thinking it's too small," he leered at her. "I used to worry about that, too. That's why I'm here. What are you here for, jerk-off lady?"

The fat man peered around at her and grinned. He offered his hand for her to shake, quite formally. He had tufts of hair all over his body, covering the rolls and folds of pulchritude. His stomach was so enormous that he couldn't see his own cock, although he could reach it well enough. He held it firmly with his left hand while he shook hers with his right.

"How do you do," he said. "I'm so glad you're here. It's queer, isn't it ... I used to watch you sitting before the mirror there. We all did. And now you're one of us."

"No!" Catharine exclaimed. "I'm not, I'm really not. I'm only ... I'm only..."

"Shut up! Shut up!" the old hag crackled furiously. "I'll cream the bitch!"

Catharine shrank from her, but the fat man brought up his wide knee in a gesture surprisingly agile for such a heavy person, and hit Catharine in the groin, knocking her air out. She fell to the ground in pain. The others descended on her as if she were carrion and they a pack of rabid rats.

They held her to the ground, three of them, with hard bruising grips and playful slaps that hurt, while the old hag began to root around in a pile of garbage a few feet away. With stiletto nails the cackling crone picked through the rancid heap until she uncovered a rather large mirror. Her huge red-rimmed eyes glistened as she, dragged it nearer. The fat man and the woman in the ragged tee-shirt pulled at Catharine's legs, and the transvestite grabbed a handful of her hair. It seemed to Catharine that they were pulling in opposite directions, but they yanked and hoisted and wrenched at her until they dropped her with a hard thump onto the top of the greasy glass surface of the mirror.

The old hag moved in, and all four began to examine Catharine with minute attention, probing and poking, as if looking for lice. She turned her head wretchedly this way and that, searching for a friendly face, a sign that some one of these creatures still had some humanity left. She knew how to deal with people, but these ... I She wept helplessly as they flipped her over onto her belly, then on her back, and touched every part of her until she felt that she had never been clean in her life.

The fat man seemed the least hostile of all of them. He had shaken her hand, sort of welcomed her to this place. She might be able to get him to respond to what was left of her charms ... hadn't he fucked her-or had he? She couldn't remember. But men always liked to do things for Catharine, whether they felt they owed her something, or thought they might be able to get somewhere with her ... she knew how to handle men...

Why didn't the doctors give her something to wake her out of this horror? How long would it take before she was back in the real world again ... but even as she thought about it, the real world seemed dimmer and harder to remember.

The fat man was peering intently up her nose. "Please," she breathed into his hairy ear. His finger, inside her mouth, was bigger around than his dick. "Will you help me?"

Someone was licking her toes, a most uncomfortable feeling, halfway between a tickle and a turn on. She felt herself swelling and becoming wet again. She couldn't help raising her hips for more as the examination went on.

"I'll help you, I'll help you," the fat man was blubbering deep into her ear. His moisture dropped deep inside the little opening there. "I come from wealth, too, you see. I've been buttered up, stuffed with glut, bathed in milky baths-like you," he panted, spittle dripping from his tongue into her ear. "I'd like to be your beau, Loo-Loo. That's your name, Loo-Loo."

She realized that he was getting off on his mumbling. His breath came hotter and faster and she had a violent urge to turn her face and meet his slavering mouth with her own. But he was repulsive, horrid. She would never have had anything to do with him if they had met in Placid. The transvestite plucked a few hairs from Catharine's snatch and tickled her belly with them.

"My credentials are impressive," the fat man was saying. His voice was actually rather cultured, although his rising passion was making him drool heavily. She lay as quietly as she could, trying to ignore her own agonized thrusts and squirms. "We had a burnished banister in our chateau. It smelled of Mother's pussy." He giggled, and panted into her ear. "Charming ... charming ... charming ... just a minute ... wait just a minute..."

He spewed his come all over her arm. It was warm and sticky. The old hag grabbed Catharine's hand and held up the arm for the others to see. She nearly yanked it from its socket in her fury.

Suddenly, they all lost interest in Catharine. The hag and the bottomless waitress and the transvestite all began licking the fat man's bulbous belly. Muttering absent-mindedly to herself, the old crone grabbed Catharine's hair as she slid down to her knees. The hair pulled out painfully, leaving another hideous, bleeding patch of bald scalp.

Left alone, Catharine sat up, touching her pitiful head and staring at the red ooze that came away from it on her fingers. She crawled away, across garbage and twisted piles of molten metal shapes and rusted chains. She sat in a daze for a moment, too desperate to cry or to think. Then she saw her green demon off in the distance. He was sitting cross-legged in front of an oval frame that looked like her own dear familiar loving mirror.

She crawled painfully toward him. As she came closer, she saw that the frame of her mirror had come alive. The smooth carved wood had given way to real slithering snakes and crawly scorpions, wreathing in grotesquely moving patterns. She heard the high-pitched cackle of the demon's laughter as he rocked on his heels and watched something inside the oval frame.

There was an amber glow inside the oval, warm and soft in contrast to the stark red-brown of everything else around it. It was candlelight, on the other side, inside. It was her attic, just beyond her reach.

Catharine rose to her feet and tried to run. She didn't see the pit that loomed ahead of her. The fall was a nasty one, but she stumbled to her feet again.

"Help me out! I must get out!" she screamed.

There was one other occupant of the deep hole. She looked vaguely familiar to Catharine. Matronly, plump, she sat as if holding court in the dung-filled pit. She wore elaborate jewels around her arms, a gleaming diamond necklace hung from her neck, and a sparkling tiara was placed carefully atop her well-coifed hair. The woman's primping reminded Catharine of someone-the gestures were those of a grand lady before her mirror, but the woman was utterly naked.

"Help me, please. I must get out," she explained as calmly as she could to the disturbingly familiar eyes. They were violet, like her own, and like her mother's had been ... but heavily overlaid with blue liner and purple eye shadow and almost obscured by thick black gluey false lashes.

"Why should I?" the woman screamed at her. "What'd you ever do for me?"

Just then a young pretty boy, about thirteen, came sliding down into the pit head first. He came to a stop with his head in the woman's lap, and instantly began sucking hungrily at her flesh.

"That's better," the motherly looking woman sighed, leaning back against the stained dirt wall of the pit, and directing the towheaded child's mouth deeper into her cunt.

He looked like an angel. Children, especially boys, had always liked Catharine. She wondered what it would be like to take his little hairless baby prick into her mouth, she could yummy up the whole thing, his sweet little balls too, and then he would help her, she knew it.

"Little boy," she called in her softest voice, "come and let me see how pretty you are."

The boy's beautiful head turned toward her. He had a cherubic smile, and fine golden hair like her own had been. It was dirty, though. How she longed to wash him, to soap his whole sweet little body and rinse him and gobble him up ... he turned from the matron and buried his face in Catharine's lap.

"Nol Mel Me!" the woman shrieked, throwing stones and garbage and whatever she could reach from her sitting position only a few feet away. "Get back here, Pretty Boy! Suck on these, look how juicy, I'm swollen ... suck me here and here ... please, Pretty Boy, pretty please ... suck me, suck me, suck me. ... " She went on and on, like a lullaby, to herself now. Catharine looked up from the boy's pale little buttocks curled under her hand, and saw that the naked matron was being quieted by someone new. A scrawny man, his skin encrusted with rat bites, had slid into the pit with them and was jacking himself off against the woman's breasts. Pretty Boy looked up, too, and laughing, he rolled away from Catharine to take the man's stiff grimy cock in his rosy little mouth.

Catharine, with a moment's regret for the loss of Pretty Boy's attentions, climbed painfully up over the side of the hole. Her body, oiled and perfumed, was now so sweaty and covered with caked filth that she experienced, for the first time since her birth, the distinct feeling of being unattractive. I'll think about that later, she thought as she ran and stumbled and ran again to the place where she had seen the demon laughing into the oval mirror.

She passed a huge muscled female in a wrestler's kimono, opened to show a foot-long red rubber dildo strapped to her, whipping a runny-nosed little child who was whimpering but making no effort to run away.

She passed a yellow-haired young girl with a blue satin sash that said "BEAUTY QUEEN" across it. The girl was sitting in a bathtub, admiring herself in a tortoise-shell hand-mirror. I'd never have a tortoise-shell hand-mirror, Catharine thought haughtily as she stumbled to go around the tub. Tortoises are an endangered species.

A hand reached out and grabbed her painfully by the left tit. It squeezed and twisted until Catharine came to a halt. The hand belonged to a small thin dark-haired girl wearing a tiny apron. Her hand was slimy and filled with some of the black mud she had been pouring over the beauty queen's back.

"Look at this ... she's the best they have in Placid, Massachusetts!" the little maid sneered.

"How disgusting. She's really so plain," said the blonde beauty queen. Her hair is not nearly so fine as mine was, Catharine thought to herself. She stood still while they considered her loudly.

"She's really repulsive," the maid commented.

"Foul. Nauseating," the beauty queen agreed. She slathered some more mud on her shoulders. Catharine saw that it was crawling with little worms.

"Ludicrous. Revolting," said the maid.

"Odious. Sickening," said the dirty blonde.

"Offensive."

"Putrid."

"Repellent."

"Vulgar."

"Loathsome."

"Old."

They don't mean me, she thought, as she finally managed to slip around the tub to the other side. Anyway, they're jealous, everyone is jealous of me.

But her hand strayed to her head, and she felt the horror of the bald patched scalp, and then the only thing that would enable her to go on was her hand deep in her crotch. Her hand was filthy, but so was her cunt, now. It was difficult to run this way, and her steps slowed as she comforted herself. Her whole hand had to be thrust inside there ... my God, he must have stretched me, will anything ever fill me again ... except him...

The little green demon still sat before the mirror, for all the world as though it were a television set playing a particularly lurid episode of "Doctors Hospital." He cackled and rocked back and forth, chewing all the while on the raw meat from the bone he held.

For a moment, her eyes played a cruel trick.

"Daddy?" she cried to the vision she saw.

But the monster cackled again, and she saw that it was the demon after all. She was still too far away to make out what he was looking at inside the warmly glowing oval. The frame writhed and hissed. Running hunched over with her legs spread wide, both hands now frantically inside her cunt, not caring how she looked, Catharine tried to keep her eyes on the amber light of home.

She had to stop. On the verge of her orgasm, a spasm seized her and she squatted close to the dirt ground, pummeling and manipulating herself furiously. Suddenly, a head popped up from behind a mound of rotten eggs. Bulging eyes stared right up inside her cunt. A snake-like tongue began to lick at her. Her revulsion was so great that her orgasm never crested. She stood up and wearily began plodding toward the distant mirror again.

The demon looked up and grinned as she approached. "Why, you're beautiful, Catharine ... you're exceptional, aren't you now? Come look in the mirror, that's what you love ... come, everlastingly ... everlastingly horny, that's your fate ... do you love it, you're just like all the others here ... horny forever, never satisfied ... welcome to Hell, Catharine!"

He grabbed his toes in glee and rolled all the way over onto his back, laughing hideously in the throes of ecstatic pleasure. His slimy green balls rolled out from under his up-thrust ass, and she reached out her hand to caress them. Immediately, he sat upright. He pointed his hard, thick, stiff, green glistening prick at her, but waved it out of reach when she grabbed for it.

"Look in the mirror, Catharine. See how exceptional you are!" He laughed again and rolled away from her.

The snakes and scorpions hissed at her as she approached, but the lovely calm amber light gave her hope, and she was drawn to the mirror despite her fears and premonitions.

It reflected not her attic haven, but herself as she was now. As she really was.

Her hair was mostly gone, except for gummy matted strands and grizzly clumps sprouting from her bony scalp. Her lips were caked and split and blistered out of shape, encrusted with scabs. Her eyes were red, swollen, deeply shadowed, and sunken in pain. Her skin was greenish under the mud and slime, and bits of garbage stuck to her. Her pussy was dank and matted. She smelled as foul as any of them.

She lifted a hand to her head, then touched her stranger's mouth with one coarse fingernail. She closed her purple-green eyes, but when she reopened them she was the same. Behind her, the mirror reflected all the other victims of vanity, eternally in heat, desperately trying to appease their terrible hungers.

Her hand went to her crotch. Then both hands, tearing at herself. Understanding at last the depths of her fate-to-be, she withdrew her fists to beat against the traitorous mirror. Behind her, the bitter wind sighed in the wilderness, and the howls of orgasms, never enough, rose around her ears.