Image of the Beast and Blown (22 page)

into the wall, however. Childe was again held by a metal
collar.

This room must have no secret entrances.

The baron looked at his wristwatch and said, "We have
to do something about her. She wasn't dangerous until she
got enfleshed. But everything has its disadvantage. Now
she's dangerous, she's also vulnerable. We can do some-
thing about her, and we will. I'm going to call a confer-
ence."

Mrs. Grasatchow pouted. She said, "Now Magda's out
of the way, I'd thought …"

"Half an hour. No more," Igescu said. "I'll send some-
body down to escort you. You wouldn't want to be alone
on the way up."

The fat woman started. It was as if a tidal wave were
racing through her flesh.

"You mean
I
...
I
... have to worry? That
I'm
in
danger?"

She bellowed with laughter.

"We all are," the baron said. "All of a sudden, our se-
curity is gone. This," he stabbed a thumb at Childe, "has
something to do with it but I don't know what. He's a
focus of some sort. Maybe Dolores has been waiting for
someone like him all these years.

"Half an hour," he said. "I mean it. And don't use him
up. I still want a piece of him."

The baron left, closing the door behind him. Mrs.
Grasatchow started to take her clothes off. Childe's legs
began to shake again.

16

He told her that she was wasting her time. He did not tell
her that, even if he had not been drained and weakened,
he would have been unable to respond positively to her.
The enormous hanging breasts, the tremendous belly,
which curved out and overhung the genitals so far that
they could not be seen in the shadows and folds, the hips,
sackish with fat, the tree-trunk legs, repulsed him. He
doubted that he could have gotten a hard-on even if he
were in full strength and had not had an emission for a
month.

Mrs. Grasatchow said, "That spook-bitch sucked you
dry, heh?" And then she laughed. She was close to him;
the blast of alcohol made him feel like vomiting. There
must be almost two gallons in that pony-sized gut.

She had brought into the room a large bear-skin-purse
and a bottle of wine and a bottle of Scotch. She poured the
wine over his belly and genitals and then got on her knees
and licked them off. He did not respond.

She came up off her knees like a boulder tossed up by a
volcanic explosion. Her hand struck him on the side of his
jaw. He saw comets and fell back, half-unconscious,
against the wall.

"You little asshole!" she screamed. "You may look like
George, but you sure aren't the man he was!"

She waddled to her purse and took out a silvery cone
about two inches long. "This will put some life into you!
Once it's in you!"

Grinning, she approached him. He shrank back against
the wall and then leaped out at her, striking at her.
Laughing, she caught his wrist and turned it until he cried
out in agony and sank to his knees as far as the chain
would allow. Choking, he tried to stand up again, but she
forced him down until he was almost unconscious again.

He regained his senses to find himself turned around, his
face to the wall. Something—he knew it was the cone—
was being shoved up his anus.

"You've never had anything like this, little man!" she
crooned. "Never! You'll not forget this night, as long as

you live! Oh, little man, I wish I were you just now, so I
could fuck me!"

The cone burned at first and made him feel as if he had
to shit. After about half a minute, it seemed to turn icy
and to become heavy, as if it were a lead sinker just re-
moved from a freezer. The coldness and heaviness spread
out, up his intestines, coil after coil, like a snake racing
ahead of the Ice Age but too slow, into his testicles, which
became bells ringing with chilliness, into his solar
plexus, and, at the other terminus, into his penis. Liquid
nitrogen pumping into every tube of his body.

He squirmed as the stuff fell down the shafts of his
legs and flapped slowly spiraling up the shaft of his trunk.
The powerful hands of the fat woman tightened, and she
said, "Quiet, little lover. This won't hurt you, and you'll
be a man such as you never were!"

The icy weight lapped at the base of his brain. His
neckbones and hindbrain felt crystallized. He could dis-
tinguish each vertebra and each cell of the cerebellum as
a frozen entity. He could also feel the individual vessels
of his penis slowly filling with half-frozen blood. By then,
Mrs. Grasatchow had turned him around again and was
down on her elephantine knees and sucking on his penis.
She grunted as if she were a sow tearing into a corncob,
but, as far as he could detect, he was being treated gently
enough. Her jaws did not move, only her lips, shaped
around the glans, moved. He could feel nothing. He might
as well have had a hundred local shots of morphine over
his body and one massive shot in his penis. But if his
brain was receiving no tactile message, part of his body
was. The penis, like an independent creature, a leech
stuck in her mouth and drawing blood from her tongue,
was gradually filling up.

When she felt that it was as swollen and rigid as it could
be, she stood up. She said, "You're not going any place,
not now!" She unlocked the collar and put the key in her
purse. He tried to run from her to the door, but his legs
would not move.

She lay down on the floor and spread her thighs open
—it was like the Red Sea splitting to make passage for
the horde of Moses—and she said, "Eat me!"

Obediently, although his frozen brain tried to push out
a message of resistance to his nerves, he got down and

spread the slit open and prepared to tongue the clitoris
first, as was his habit.

She said, "No, idiot! The other way! Sixty-nine!"

He crawled up onto her and swiveled around. She took
in his penis until his hairs pressed against her lips. He
could not feel this, but he looked through the space that
existed briefly between their bodies and saw the hairs and
the narrow band of the root. He flicked the tip of his
tongue over the "little penis." A "little penis" this clitoris
was. He had never seen such an enormous one. He did
have some difficulty getting to it, however, because her
belly was so huge. It was like having to curve over a hill,
hanging upside down, to lick at a spring in a crevasse at
the bottom of the hill.

The worst of it was, he felt no sexual stimulation, only
disgust. But he had to do exactly as she said, and his or-
gans, outside of the brain, must be responding to some
sensory input.

At another order, he withdrew his penis from her
mouth and turned around and inserted it into her vagina.
He began pumping slowly but soon speeded up in re-
sponse to her command. She began groaning and moan-
ing, turning her head from side to side, crying out in
a foreign language, rolling the great hips sideways and
then thrusting and now and then lifting herself up from
the waist and grabbing his buttocks and pulling and push-
ing him.

He did not know how long they were in this position
nor whether or not he had an orgasm. But the time came
when she rolled him off her, the uncoupling wetly an-
nouncing itself, and got above him and eased herself down
upon his penis and moved the great body as lightly and
swiftly as a toy balloon on the end of a string. After what
seemed to be a hundred orgasms, judging by her number
of frenzies, she got off him and went to the corner after
her bottle of whiskey. He seemed able to move a little of
his own volition, so he turned to watch her. She sat on
the rug, leaning against the wall, looking like an over-
yeasted mass of dough.

Childe became aware that he was gasping. He could
hear his breath rattling in and out, but he could not feel
the thudding of heart nor the moving of his ribs.

Mrs. Grasatchow downed at least a fourth of the quart
and then looked at her wristwatch.

"Forty-five minutes," she said. "Igescu will be furious."

She heaved herself up and said, "Hmm! What's wrong?
He said he'd send somebody after me."

She opened the door and looked down the hallway.
Childe tried to run toward her then, hoping to knock her
down with his momentum and get away down the hall.
He only managed, after a seemingly long time, to get to
his feet. If he had exerted himself prodigiously, he did not
know it. Reception from his muscles was still cut off.

On seeing him move, the woman's eyebrows went up,
and she said, "Do you feel that suppository burning
now?"

"No," he said. "It's still cold and heavy."

"You'll feel it in a moment. You'll think a hot-air bal-
loon is going up your ass!"

A laughquake shook her. Afterward, she said, "That
stuff has a very peculiar effect. You didn't feel anything
while you were fucking me, but wait. I wish I could take
advantage of you then, but you'll have to enjoy yourself
with yourself."

She looked at her wristwatch again. "Maybe I won't
go. I think Igescu has forgotten me. Or he knows I'll be
very angry indeed if I don't get all of you. Now, you just
stand right there, little Georgey Porgey Pudding Pie. I'll
fix you up again, and double the effect. I don't want you
acting up on me."

As if a bore tide had reversed and was running back to
sea, the coldness and heaviness became warmth and
lightness. The second effect started where the first had
ended, in the brain and the tip of his glans. The warmth
and lightness raced inward from all borders and met in
the region of the cone, in his anus, where, for a second, it
burned as if a meteorite had just ended its fiery curve
there.

He cried out with the pain.

The fat woman said, "Oh, oh! It's happened!" and she
charged, one hand open to grab him and another cone in
the other hand. She seemed to grow as large as the wall.
Her flesh shook like a loose robe in a stiff wind. Childe
launched himself at her, his hands out to grab her ears,
because he meant to tear them off. He would have to fight

savagely to get past her to the door. Even when he had
his full strength, he would have been outmuscled by her,
not to mention outweighed.

His hands caught her ears, and his face thrust into one
breast as violently as if he had been dropped from the
ceiling onto her. She screamed, because he had bitten
down on the excrescence suddenly appearing between
his teeth. It was her nipple, as he found out when he
got up from the floor where she had thrown him. He spat
out the piece of flesh—the nipple and some white skin
around it—and rose shakily. She was still screaming and
rolling back and forth and clutching her mutilated
breast.

Childe did not wait to completely recover from the
impact of the floor. Fighting dizziness and a pain in his
shoulder, he kicked her between her legs as she started to
roll toward him. His big toe disappeared momentarily
in her slit. She screamed again. A flailing arm knocked
his leg out from under him. He fell crosswise on top of her
belly. She clamped her arms down on his buttocks and
then one hand slid down to grab his testicles. With a des-
perate jerk, he turned over to face her, still crosswise,
seized a breast, and twisted.

Her arms came up; she screamed again. Childe rolled
away across her belly and down her legs. It was like roll-
ing down a small hill. He got out of the way of her
kicking legs and leaped up and came down with both
bare feet on her face. Her head was driven back against
the floor; her nose was smashed; blood burst; her eyes
crossed.

Again, he leaped and came down with both feet on her
belly. He sank deep. Her wind whooshed out, as if some-
body had opened a big door to a distillery with a strong
cross-draft. He almost gagged. But he jumped a third
time, once more on her face. Her nose became even flat-
ter. Her eyes rolled up until only the whites showed. Her
mouth was wide open, braced like a sail against the
wind of her agony to get her breath back.

And, at that moment, the cone reversed its effect. It
was as if the entire coition with her had been recorded
with a glass window between himself and his nerve end-
ings. He could see but could not hear. Now, the glass was
gone, and he could hear the rerun. With this difference,

He was no longer frozen. He now felt everything exqui-
sitely; he could feel his cock in her mouth and between
her breasts and in her cunt, even though they were no
longer there.

During the fight, though he had not been aware of it,
he had had an erection. Now, he jetted, and the delayed-
reaction orgasm stormed his body. He fell to the floor
and writhed helplessly, if ecstatically, in its lightnings.
There was nothing else, for the moment, he could do.

17

When he could regain control, he got up and staggered
toward the door. Although his penis no longer spouted,
it remained as hard as before and did not have the
delicious emptied-to-good-purpose feeling of an after-
orgasm. It did feel pleasurable, increasingly pleasurable,
as if he were again working up to coition. He could,
however, ignore it for the present.