Chapter 1

He picked the girl up on a small feeder road leading to a main highway-he didn't know which one-and he regretted his generosity even as she was climbing into the Thunderbird.

Not that she was ugly or undesirable. Quite the opposite. Her legs below the white but dusty slacks were long, slim and alluring. Her slim waist sloped enticingly up to a pair of breasts with sharp nipples that appeared to be boring their way through her white cotton shirt.

Nothing wrong with the girl either physically or personality-wise. Her smile was certainly a promise of full payment for a lift, whether she meant to keep that promise or not.

Therefore, something must have been wrong with Mark. He thought about this in the back of his mind as the girl plopped down in the bucket seat next to him and expelled a big sigh of relief.

"Golly, mister. You're a life-saver!"

"Glad to be of service." Something wrong because this girl did not stir him in the least? Perhaps. Maybe permanent damage to his-to his what? His zest for life? That was as good a phrase as any.

With a quick flicker of memory he went back to the wild, insane Greenwich Village life from which he was fleeing. There was a mental flash of Candy posed obscenely on the bed that last time he'd seen her. His own strange reaction of sudden entrapment; the need to get away quickly as though the very air in the room were poison. His flight.

And the odd vacuum that left where the world once had been.

Love? God no! Of this he was sure. Not love of Candy. That was gone if it had never really been. Self-preservation, rather. A sudden fear and revulsion of the Greenwich Village world of sick sex that had come close to rotting away his soul and spirit...." I said my name is Carol Rice. I-"

"Oh, I'm sorry. Day dreaming, I guess. I'm Mark Hanes." In sudden irritation, he revolted even against the courtesies of normal human contact. Why did he have to give this girl his name? What difference did it make to her? And for his part, he didn't car whether she was Carol Rice or Suzy Schmaltz.

"I'm glad to know you, Mark."

Of course she was. She would have been glad to meet any jerk who came along, got her off her feet and onto her can. "Where are you headed?"

Carol stretched her long sleek legs forward, raised her arms, thrust her breasts forward like like a peddler offering a pair of melons to a customer. "Oh, pretty much anywhere. I lost a job in a restaurant back in a tanktown called Janesville because the owner's wife thought I was too much of a hazard."

"Were you?"

"Maybe."

"Is that your line? Restaurant work?"

"One of my lines."

"Boston. Not Back Bay, ordinary Boston. I'm on my

"Where are you from originally?" way to California-"

"-To get into the movies."

"Not me, mister, I'm not kidding myself." Mark thought that a touch of bitterness came into her voice at this point. "I know my good points and my shortcomings. I've got talent, sure, but men only want private showings-in bedrooms, not on public screens."

"Well, don't look at me," Mark snapped. "I haven't made a pass and I don't intend to."

Maybe he had misjudged the bitterness, Mark thought, because she gave him an impish side glance. "A woman hater, huh?"

"Not at all. I just wanted you to understand that you're under no obligation for this ride, so sit back, relax and enjoy it."

"Well, thanks. That's certainly a novelty in this day and age." Again the side glance. "What's your line?"

"I'm a painter."

"Houses? Barns? People?"

"I've done portrait work. Right now I'm interested in landscapes."

Her defensive hardness melted a little. "No fooling. You really an artist?"

"What's so fantastic about that?"

"Nothing I guess, but I didn't think they existed. I thought a man calling himself an artist was just a gimmick to get a girl in a room with her clothes off."

"That may be another definition of an artist." It was Mark's turn to glance over at her. "I assume the gimmick worked in your case."

"I guess it kind of did," Carol admitted ruefully.

Mark half-smiled in spite of himself. "Did the picture turn out well?"

"That all depends on your point of view. The quote artist unquote was pretty happy. Me-" She made a casually suggestive gesture toward her hip. "-I came out of it pretty sore."

Frankness, or plain vulgarity. It was really no problem to Mark because he didn't care one way or another. The girl's troubles and tribulations were her own. He said nothing and she continued on a different tack.

"If it's scenery you're looking for, you ought to head for some country I passed through about a month ago."

"Where was that?"

"Oh, about two hundred miles south of here and maybe a hundred miles east."

"That's pretty vague."

"I guess it is. I don't keep track of where I happen to be at any given time. But you could find this place all right. It's called Devil's Bend. That's the name of the town, and all around it are valleys and creeks and hills they refer to as the Devil's Bend country."

"There's something special about it?"

"There must be if I'd notice it, and I did. Me-I don't usually pay attention to such things. Desert or tropics, they're all the same to me. But I do remember the Devil's Bend country."

"It might be worth looking into. I'll think about it."

"There's something else there that made me remember it, I guess."

"What's that?"

"Some kind of a cult. Religious I think. When I hit Devil's Bend-the town-their sheriff or constable or whatever he was, accused me of being a member of the cult. He wanted to know if I'd escaped."

"Escaped? Good lord! What is it? A prison colony?"

"I can't say. I worked in a restaurant in Devil's Bend for three days to get money to move on and I heard a little about it but I didn't ask questions."

This last seemed curious to Mark. "Why didn't you ask questions if it interested you?"

"I've found from experience that it's best to keep your mouth shut in any strange place. Less chance of getting into trouble that way."

"But you did hear a few things about the cult?"

Mark wondered why he was asking all these questions. He really could not have cared less about this silly cult.

"Everybody in town took it as a joke," Carol said. "Those who weren't plain hostile and contemptuous of it. There was some talk about Purity Day-a kind of highlight with the cult, I guess-and some talk about people called the Kelps."

"Who were the Kelps?"

"I didn't find out much about them except they look like the Martins and the Coys out of the old song."

"Hillbillies? Mountaineers?"

"That was for sure. A couple of them came to town while I was there. They had long dirty beards and wore clothes right out of a Hollywood moonshine movie. They even carried long, funny-looking rifles."

"Maybe they'd make better material for me than the hills and valleys you tell about."

Carol shuddered. "Maybe. Everybody to his own taste. Me-I began to itch when they passed within twenty feet of me...."

The Thunderbird had long since climbed onto the paved highway and miles were spinning away under the tires. "What are your immediate plans?" Mark asked.

Carol shrugged. Then she turned her head and looked him straight in the eye. "One of two things. You can drop me in the next town and I'll scout the restaurants for a job."

"And the other?"

"I'll ride along with you until nightfall and go to a motel with you and pay you off for the lift."

The touch of wistfulness in her voice would have been a compliment to Mark if it had penetrated his preoccupation with his own problems. "Thanks, but I think I'll pass."

"You weren't kidding then?"

"No."

"And you're not going to California?"

"No. Not now at least." He straightened and took a less casual grip on the wheel. "As a matter-of-fact, I think I'll veer off-after I find a town for you-and take a look at that Devil's Bend country. If it's the way you say, I've got a hunch I might find some old mill wheels."

Carol laughed ruefully. "Okay. But it's the first time I've ever been turned down for a mill wheel."

Mark laughed with her. "Maybe there's something Freudian in that."

"Maybe." She ran an unconscious hand down her thigh. "But you certainly would be nice to travel to Los Angeles with."

"You're wrong," Mark said glumly. "I'm afraid I'd be pretty poor company...."

Half an hour later, Mark pulled up at the curb in a clean looking town that appeared-from its activity-that it might be a small city before long.

"How's this?"

"Fine. I'll have a job in an hour. Sure you won't change your mind!"

"Thanks. For a while at least, I'll stick to mill wheels."

They shook hands, Carol got out and waved to him as he pulled away.

Long legged dreamboats who pass in the daytime, he thought, as he headed for a station to gas up....

It was in a strangely empty mood that Mark Hanes reversed direction and drove back out of the town where he'd left Carol Rice. At the gas station, not as definite about looking for mill wheels as he'd sounded, he'd gotten a road map. He went over the map very carefully and sure enough there it was, an area by the name of Devil's Bend. No town marked, but this did not bother him. He was looking for country, not for settlements.

And now, on his way, the past from which he was fleeing suddenly caught up with him in a strangely objective way. New York City, The Village. The preceding six months no doubt had been the most crucial of his life. He'd come from moneyed parents and thus never worried about the key problem ordinary people face-that involved in making a living. His early routine had been a good prep school, four years at Harvard, and after that a year of European travel.

A shakedown cruise, his father had called it. "To get the wildness out of your blood." He'd meant women of course-Mark's fill of women before he came home, settled down and married decently and properly.

But it didn't work that way. Mark found no women who interested him. But in Paris he found what he hoped would be a new career. He gave the idea careful, methodical thought, quietly decided that he wanted to become an artist.

Thus, a law education would go by the boards and his father and mother would be terribly disappointed. They were disappointed. There were some pretty bitter words between father and son, but Mark was as stubborn as his sire and finally his parents threw up their hands.

Mark went into a Greenwich Village studio and immersed himself completely into his new career. To everyone's surprise, he did quite well at it. He had never been self supporting, but this was not necessary because over and above the money his parents gave him he had a sizable inheritance of his own from his grandfather.

He had a vogue among the North Shore set his family belonged to, did several portraits. Also he learned how glamorous his new career made him. One smart young matron asked him to do her in the unde. He learned shortly that this was merely a way to get her clothes off and climb into bed with him.

He accommodated her, but he could have done without it.

As he did others on canvas, he got mild pleasure out of feeling them quiver in his arms, hearing their cries at the climax, feeling their nails claw at his buttocks as it approached and sometimes listening to their spew of filthy words as they searched for release. Their choked: " ... Oh, deeper, darling! Deeper! Harder! Harder! Harder!"

But no woman ever really captured him until Candy came along.

Mark met Candy in a small Village club. She was standing beside a piano singing throatily. He bought her a drink and was excited by the way the candle light made the copper of her hair glitter. She wore a low-cut gown that came just to the upper edge of the nipples on her lush breasts.

He had seen beautiful women before, without becoming greatly excited. Normally he would have walked away from Candy and forgotten her. But somehow they came, after a walk in Washington Square, to his apartment and he asked her in for a drink. Dawn was just breaking over the city, coming in the window; and what happened also was a dawning to Mark.

Just how they reached the bedroom he never knew. But he was keenly aware of what Candy's hot tongue was doing to his ear as he laid her across the bed and kissed her. She had a magic tongue indeed and it was the first time in his life that Mark was not the aggressor in a battle of love. A not-too-greatly enthusiastic aggressor, true. But now he did nothing, Candy did it all.

She removed his tie, her tongue moving down over his cheek to find his mouth. Then, magically, his shirt and undershirt were gone and he was stripped to the waist. Candy's mouth never tired, seeking eagerly the taste of his skin as it ran over, his body.

Candy somehow managed also to undress herself while stripping him naked. Then her sleek head lay on his belly and from that moment on his body recorded new sensations. Candy didn't miss a single square inch of its surface. While her tongue explored him intimately he quivered from head to foot, every muscle responding to this new, shameless method of love making with which he'd heretofore been completely unfamiliar. He was glad Candy could not see his face as her tireless mouth caressed his body.

Little cat-mews of eagerness burst from her throat as she feasted on his body. At last, when she finally reached the ultimate goal he became aware of her body in close proximity to his own. She had gradually positioned herself so that the hot richness of her could not be avoided.

Fire stirred in his loins, a reckless excitment took command. He put his hand against her inner thighs, pressed outward, and her legs gave willingly.

She stopped what she was doing for a moment to whisper, '"Uh, darling! You're wonderful! Your body! Your lovely, lovely man-body! It makes me hungrier by the minute."

Then she went back to thrilling him, tearing at his every nerve, and the reckless feeling took complete command as, with a choked cry, he sought the nameless ecstasy that the pure woman-smell of her had promised.

And it became a magic world for both of them, the intoxicating promise of man and woman turning liquid and flowing into each other to become a part of both of them.

In a frenzy he entered her, his passion a clawing demand of his hand and heart until she writhed and cried, "Oh, harder, love! Hurt me!"

She screamed piercingly, and then it was over....

They lay in each other's arms. Candy's face against his, and her tongue came out to gently lave his cheek. Then she found his mouth and they lay joined thus, neither moving, for an eternity. Until Candy said:

"I love your wonderful body."

"I love yours."

"May I come again tomorrow?"

"Why leave? Why not stay?"

"Is it evil to admit to you that your body is what I want? Does that make me a tramp?"

"I'm glad you did admit it. I think your body is wonderful."

"But you've had lots of women. There are always women ready to love a body like yours."

He'd never before realized sex was so wonderful. It had served him adequately, but no woman before had ever taught him the delights possible from the physical act.

"No woman ever did to me what you do."

"I couldn't do otherwise. When I saw you in the club-when I was singing, I wanted to change my lyrics and sing just to you. I wanted to sing a love song like this:

I want to undress you beautiful man arid take you in my arms. I want to put my tongue on your body and lick the salt of your manhood and make it a part of me. I want to put my tongue to you and taste all of you. I want you. Please take me with you and we will give each other our bodies. "Was that a terrible song to want to sing to you?"

"I think it was a wonderful song." The morning was bright now and Candy shivered. "I don't want to go home, darling. I want to stay here in your arms. I want to sleep for a little while and then wake up and make love to you again."

"I never want you to leave." They slept and he was awakened by her mouth on his body again. Then, in sudden need, viciously and cruelly, he hurled her over on her back, separated her thighs and took her in a frenzy. She whimpered and cried as she clung to him, clawing at his body, her breath hot on his face.

He rose to a new heights of passion and a scream welled out of her throat. Because the room was not sound-proof he snatched a pillow, put it over her face and continued his frenzied attack while she struggled and writhed and her muffled screams came up to him through the pillow. Their bodies pressed together like two taut steel rods, they reached the climax together.

"My God!" he moaned, as he took the pillow off her face and kissed her.

She cried in his arms and went to sleep again. When she awoke it was dark out over Washington Square, But when the club closed he was waiting to bring she had to go back and stand by the piano and sing, her back and they actually ran down the street, so great was their compulsion to be alone together.

He undressed her in his apartment, carried her to bed and put his lips to her breast. She quivered and her back arched as she pressed the nipple into his mouth.

Oh, darling. It was hell being away from you. Take me! Eat me. Hold me! Never let me go!"

As his tongue teased the erect nipple, and the fire arose within her, she turned so that she could apply her own mouth to his body. And again she stoked the hot fire of desire into a dazzling flame, as though it would be the last taste of love they would ever have.

Then they lay in each other's arms and marveled silently at what they alone had found-this magic of man and woman in the heart of Manhattan's uncaring jungle.

They slept and awoke to make love again while life went on around them out in Washington Square....

"We'll be married as soon as your engagement is over," Mark said.

They were having breakfast in Mark's apartment. It was the third week of their acquaintance, most of which had been spent in bed.

"Married?" Candy looked up quickly as though the idea hadn't occurred to her.

"Of course."

"I didn't ask for it."

"Don't you love me?"

"I love you as much as I can love anybody, but-"

"You're saying that you don't, then?"

"I'm not saying that at all, darling. But let me ask you the same question. Do you love me?"

"I think of you night and day. I'm unhappy when you're not around. Isn't that love?"

"Not necessarily. Exactly what do you think of? Be honest now."

"I'll be perfectly honest. I think of having you in bed."

"Couldn't you think that way of any woman?"

"No. It's you I want in bed, not any woman."

"I'm flattered and I'd rather hear you say that than anything in the world. But there's more to marriage than going to bed. Suppose you grow tired of me?"

"I'll chance that."

"But I can't, Mark."

"I don't understand."

"Darling, you must have guessed it by now. I'm a nymphomaniac. Love is my life. Physical love. I can't get enough of it, I'm never filled."

"I think I'm capable of filling your needs."

"If one man only could!" There were tears in her eyes, he got up and took her in his arms. He kissed her and when her hungry mouth found his-when their tongues met and battled in frank, reaching intimacy, it was the same as always.

He carried her off to the bed, stripped her gown off and, as a new variation, she resisted ftim. "No, Mark, no!"

"Yes!"

He threw her savagely on her back and forced her Kicking struggling legs apart. He lowered his body to hers, held her with the sneer weight of him, lunging brutally to gain entrance while she twisted and writhed to prevent him. He succeeded finally, and her eyes bulged from the force of it. She cried once in pain and then the game was over, she clung feverishly to him as he charged her Ike a mad bull, grunting at each prodigious effort to reach further than ever before.

"On, yes!" she cried suddenly. "I'll marry you! I'll marry you! I never want to lose you! Oh, Mark my darling! I love you."

"You're damn right," he said savagely, his passion at its height. "You'll marry me or I'll follow you everywhere you go and rape you whenever I find you. I'll throw you down in the street and rape you in front of everybody."

She was in the rapture of climax. "Yes! Yes!" she panted. "Rape me in front of people. I'll yell and scream but no one will help me.. They'll only watch and let you tear me to pieces...."

A strange romance indeed but the marriage was even stranger. They went to Nassau for a honeymoon and came close to what Candy had asked for in that he took her one afternoon on the white beach with people in sight although probably two far away to realize a man and a woman were making love in public.

Then they returned and Candy finished her engagement at the club because she still wanted a career. Mark went back to his painting, working during the day while she slept, exhausted by his almost superhuman love making. He picked her up at the club each night, brought her home and they went right to bed.

It seemed they could not get enough of each other. When he put his lips to the rearing nipples she held toward him it was always as though for the first time, each coupling seemed a thrilling new adventure....

But then he began to falter. He noticed first that he was always tired-too tired to concentrate on his work. He discarded several half-finished canvases, one after the other.

His hunger was still there, though, and he made every effort to keep on satisfying her. But he began drifting off to sleep, even with her nipples in his mouth or her mouth on his body.

Then, gradually, the sex lure seemed to diminish. Candy sensed it and tried desperately to stir him just as he tried desperately to respond.

Then one night, in the midst of a great effort at love making, he suddenly got up from the bed. "I'm sorry. I can't. I just can't. I have to have a rest." She looked up at him in silence. He dressed, left the apartment, took a long walk and came back two hours later to find her asleep. But the position in which she had dropped off, the placing of her hands, told him that she had found a relief of her own-the only kind a lone woman can find. He picked it up, put it back on the dresser and went to bed.

The next night he did not pick her up at the club. He stayed uptown, came home late and found her asleep again.

But the third night was different. As he entered the apartment-silently so as not to disturb her, he heard sounds of passion from the bedroom. Breath taken in and exhaled in great panting gasps. There were sounds of male grunts punctuating extreme effort, and rhythmic squeakings of the bed.

Then Candy's voice. "Oh, my darling! Love me! Rip me! Tear me! I'm yours! I'm yours!"

Mark walked into the bedroom. They had not turned out the light. He saw the man in the classic love position and it looked ridiculous to him. A naked man lying on a naked woman, humping his body insanely up and down while she went mad under him.

The man was hardly that, a dark-haired youth, the kind he'd often seen hanging around the club. The youth saw him and panicked. He rolled off Candy to the far side of the bed, he stared at Mark with fear in his eyes.

This left Candy in the completely ridiculous position of having violent love made to her by nobody-her legs open, her arms around thin air, eyes shut tight and her head thrown back in an ecstasy of passion.

Suddenly Mark felt like an intruder. He had no right to do this to Candy. So he acted even more ridiculously. He turned toward the door saying, "I'm sorry I intruded. Go on with what you're doing."

As he closed the door after him he heard Candy's cry. "Mark! Mark! Oh, my God!"

He stayed uptown that night, at a strange hotel so she couldn't get in touch with him. He stayed away all the next day, returning to the apartment while-he hoped-Candy was at the club. His hope was justified. He put a check for ten thousand dollars on the table with a note:

Baby:

It's all right, I understand. You were not dishonest, you warned me. I guess a divorce is best. Go to Reno and get it. Settle the details with Sam Archer, my lawyer. He'll be fair. Again, baby, I'm so very, very sorry. I'll be going west immediately, but I'll be back some day. I'll see you around.

Mark.

He'd left New York City the next day, driving west at random; moving as the wind blew, as whim and the highways led him. The one clear thought in his mind was that he suddenly loathed and feared sex as something that had turned to a sickness inside him; a rottenness that might permanently scar him.

Candy? Their love? This did not bother him. What they'd had he remembered as a fever that he must eliminate from his system before his spirit was burned to a crips.

So there he was-seeking a country mentioned casually by a girl he'd picked up on the road. Devil's Bend. The name certainly did not indicate a place of any great beauty. But Mark shrugged inwardly. If it proved a disappointment, he could always move on.

The road spun under his wheels, the going got rougher. Night overtook him and there was no place to sleep except by the roadside. This did not bother him. He pulled over, inflated his rubber mattress and slept. The next morning he bathed in an ice-cold creek, shaved in the hard water, ate two chocolate bars and moved on.

Two hours later he came upon a weary, weather-beaten sign pointed left at an intersection. It read Devil's Bend-20 Mi....