There were two buttons remaining. Two buttons, and her blouse would fall open, and he'd have a feast of her, hanging in front of his eyes. She stopped unbuttoning. He made a little growl in his throat. The smile suddenly went from his face. Perhaps she was imagining it, but there seemed to be a flicker of fire in his eyes.
She stopped her teasing and put her hands back up to the first of the remaining buttons. He rewarded her with a little smile, which showed her a detail she'd missed until now. His teeth, though small, were all sharpened to a fine point. He had the smile of a piranha. She literally felt the flesh around her nipple tighten up at the prospect of those needles coming anywhere near her.
She chanced a quick look in the direction of the horsemen, but they had disappeared from sight for a time. The road that was bringing them here had wound into an expanse of pine forest. She looked back at the goat-boy. He was tapping his left foot, which appendage boasted a nail that would not have shamed a raptor. Plainly he was just a little anxious about the proximity of the Duke and his men: he did not wish to be caught. But just as plainly he was not going to leave. Not yet; not until he'd seen what Tammy had to offer.
He pointed at her. Made a little waggling motion with his forefinger. "Show me," he said.
She smiled at him, but she didn't move to oblige.
"Show," he said again.
She continued to smile at him, all the while assessing how many strides of his flat little feet it would take for him to reach her, should he take it into his head to run. He could be on her in five strides, she guessed. Four if he pushed it.
She slipped one of the two buttons out of its hole. The blouse fell open a little, giving him a peek at her left nipple. She flashed, suddenly, on some hot summer's day in her fourteenth year, when she'd crept into her parents' room in the middle of the afternoon, and played striptease in the mirror. She had more to boast about than any of the other girls in her class. Bigger breasts, and hair down between her legs. Her life would have been a lot happier if her breasts had stopped growing that day. But they'd had a long way to go. By the time she was fifteen she was like a young Shelley Winters; and it just got worse from there.
Strange how things came round. How something that had become a source of shame for her was now, out of nowhere, redeemed. She let her fingers slip down to the last button, knowing that the goat-boy's gaze would go with them, and she would have a chance, however slim, to look up past him and see whether the horsemen had emerged from the forest.
The news was bad. There was no sign of the Duke and his men. Had they perhaps taken a wrong turning in the forest? Surely not. Surely they knew this entire territory, after so many years of riding it.
"Show me your tits," the goat-boy demanded.
As he spoke he lifted his left leg and struck a stone with his raptor claw.
A bright spark leapt from the place and landed on a tuft of gray grass, where it erupted into a little fire. It had too little fuel to keep it sustained for long, but in the five or six seconds that it took for the cycle of spark, fire and extinction to play out Tammy heard the sound of the Duke's horses, and from the corner of her eye saw them emerging from between the trees.
The goat-boy narrowed his eyes to golden slits. The corners of his mouth turned down, showing the lower row of monstrous teeth.
"Show me," he said again.
Plainly he wasn't going to be toyed with any longer. He wanted to see what she had, and he wanted to see them now.
She didn't pretend that the horsemen's proximity was not of interest to her. What was the use? Everybody was in on this ridiculous game, the goat-boy included. He dropped his head a little, which should have been a sign for Tammy as to what he would do next, but she was too busy thinking about how long the Duke would take to get off his horse to realize that the goat-boy was making a run at her. And by the time she did realize, he was already halfway there, and there was nothing between her bare breasts and his hands, his mouth, his teeth, but a prayer.
EIGHT
Fearing the worst, Todd let out a yell, and started racing across the muddy, bloody ground to do whatever he could to stop the goat-boy attacking Tammy. But before he could get there she had taken matters into her own hands. She let the last of the six buttons slip, and her blouse fell open, unveiling her breasts. The sight of them literally stopped the Devil's child in his tracks. He opened his mouth and drool ran from it.
Tammy was smart enough not to reject this sign of adoration, however crude. Instead, she opened her arms, inviting him into her embrace. Todd would have betted against the wisdom of this. The goat-boy was no sentimentalist. He wanted to play rough. But had he made that bet, he would have lost it.
The Devil's child fell to his knees, laughing. Then he crawled—yes, crawled—into Tammy's arms. His hands went greedily up to one of her breasts, and he held the unwieldy bubble of flesh before his eyes for a moment of devotion. His mouth was slick and wet; the saliva glinted off his terrible teeth.
"Please God . . ." Todd murmured.
It was very possibly the strangest sensation of Tammy's thirty-four years, the feeling of the Devil's child's mouth around her left nipple. There had been a moment—as he closed his mouth around her—when it had crossed her mind that she should be afraid; that with one chomp he could give her an instant mastectomy if he so chose. But somehow she knew he would not. He was in love with her breasts. Instead he worshiped them, in his way. Though his mouth was tight around her flesh, she felt not so much as the lightest of scratches from those shark-like teeth. In fact she suspected he'd somehow sheathed them, the way a snake sheathed its fangs, because as he sucked and sucked all she felt was a slightly guilty rush of pleasure as his suction drew the blood to the nipple, and the flesh surrounding the nipple, sensitizing the entire area.
Then, as though all this weren't peaceful and domestic enough, the Devil's child closed his eyes, his fat little hands holding the source of his bliss, and Tammy gently rocked him in her arms.
Goga had been searching for Lilith's child for many centuries now, under a sky that—though it was sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear—always showed the sun eclipsed. He had no real idea of how long his imprisonment in the Devil's Country had lasted; his mind had long ago lost any grasp on the passage of time. He and his men had passed the centuries in a kind of fugue state. Sometimes, when they rested and ate what they'd hunted—rabbit on occasion, or venison, or wild pig—they would talk about what had happened to them that day on the hunt, and where they now were. It was the Duke's opinion that this was not a real place at all, but a kind of dream that the Devil was dreaming, and they were trapped in it. How else to explain the curious limitations of their condition? The same ships forever heading toward the horizon; the same roads haunted by the same beasts; the same sun in the same heaven, half-blinded by the same black moon?
But in the last few days—if days and nights could truthfully be said to pass here—there had been signs that things were changing in what had been hitherto a virtually changeless place. There had always been strangers coming and going (trapped, the philosophizing Duke surmised, in the same infernal dream where they found themselves). But whereas in the past visitors had little or no effect upon the world they were wandering through, the trespassers of recent times had not been quite so guileless or so lucky. Several had perished in the region around the forest.
And now—as if all this were not strange enough—a new spectacle, stranger by some measure than all that had preceded it:
Sitting beside the road—nursing the object of their long search as though he were a commonplace baby—was a bare-breasted woman.