With the weird logic of dreams she had very reasonably told Qwaftzefoni that she felt feverish and he would have to stop. She had pulled him off her breast with some difficulty, only to discover that he had hold of her hand, the sharp nail of his thumb pressed hard against the pulsing vein in her wrist as though threatening to pop it at a moment's notice. Then he had guided her palm down to the clammy place beneath the curve of his stomach, where his prodigiously veined prick stuck out from folds of infant fat. She felt a row of tiny objects down the underside of his shaft.
"They're black pearls," he said, before she asked the question. "They'll increase your pleasure."
In her fever-dream, she barely had time to register what the little bastard was proposing before he was climbing up onto her, her tit spurting in his fist as he milked her, her screams going for nothing. In the hellish heat of the room the spilled milk went bad in a heartbeat, souring on the sheets. It stank as if they'd been soaked in vomit, the stench rising around her with physical weight, as though it might smother her.
She had begged for the goat-boy to leave her alone, but he clutched her hand so tightly she was afraid he'd break the bones if she didn't obey him. So she had taken hold of his pearl-lined ding-a-ling and proceeded to jerk it.
"You want it over with quickly?" he had said to her.
"Yes . . ." she had sobbed, hoping he'd let her go. Men knew how to do it better than women anyway. Arnie had always turned up his nose at the offer of a hand-job. "You never do it right. I'd prefer to do it myself." But there were no easy get-outs here.
"Then stay still!" the goat-boy had said, flipping over backward, still keeping his grip on her fountaining breast, but relinquishing the enforced masturbation for a grosser game. He was straddling her head now, his thick little legs just long enough to raise the cushy divide of his ass six or seven inches above her nose. The coarse hair on his goaty legs pricked her face. It thickened around his buttocks, and he'd long since given up trying to clean it. The stench made her gag.
"Open your mouth. Put out your tongue."
She could bear it no longer. She reached up and grabbed his balls hard, throwing the little fuck forward, so that he was sprawled on the milk-soaked bed. Then she lifted his tail and started to beat his ass with her palm, for all the world like a mother chiding a monstrous child. He started to sob, and shit, the groove of his buttocks filling up with the turd he would have dumped on her face if he'd had the chance. She was past caring about how dirty her hands were. She just kept beating the little fucker, until he had no more tears left, and he was reduced to hiccups.
No, the hiccups weren't his, they were hers.
Her eyes fluttered open. The fever had broken, and she was alone in a bed that was damp with all the sweat she'd shed, but otherwise sweet-smelling. The cretinous horror she'd brought from the Devil's Country was gone; shit, hair and all.
She got up out of bed and flushed all the medicines down the toilet, determined to let the flu pass from her system of its own accord. She was crazy enough, without the aid of medication.
THREE
"Jerry."
"Tammy. My dear. Whatever happened to you? I wondered when you were going to call."
"You could have called me."
"Well, to be perfectly honest," he said, "I didn't want to trouble you. Unlike me, you've got a life to live."
"Well, actually, Arnie left me."
"Oh, I am sorry."
"Don't be. It's for the best."
"You mean it?"
"I mean it. We weren't meant for one another. It just took us a long time to find out. What about you?"
"Well, since we made the news I've been invited out to a few more fancy dinners than I used to be. People are curious. So they wine me and dine me and then they casually interrogate me. I don't mind, really. I've met a lot of people, mostly young men, who have a faintly morbid interest in what went on up in the Canyon, which they pass off as an interest in me. I play along. I mean, why not? At my age, you don't argue. Interest is interest."
"And what do you tell them?"
"Oh, bits and pieces. I've got quite adept at figuring out who can take what. You know, the ones who say tell me everything are the ones who go clammy when they're told—"
"Everything?"
"No. Never everything. I don't think anybody I've met is ready for everything."
"So how do people respond?"
"Well, they're usually ready for something fairly wild. If they sought me out in the first place it's because they know something. They've heard some rumor. Some little piece of gossip. So it keeps the conversation interesting. Now: you. What about you? Have you been sharing our adventures with anybody?"
"No."
"Nobody?"
"No. Not really."
"You should, you know. You can't keep it all bottled up. It's not healthy."
"Jerry, I live in Rio Linda, Sacramento, not Hollywood. If I started spouting off about going to the Devil's Country my neighbors would probably never talk to me again."
"Would you care? Be honest."
"Probably not."
"What about Rooney?"
"Who?" Tammy frowned.
"Rooney. The detective who interviewed us, remember? Over and over."
"His name was Rooney? I thought it was Peltzer."
"No, that's one of Maxine's lawyers, Lester Peltzer."
"Okay. So Peltzer's a lawyer, and Rooney's who?"
"You haven't heard from him? He's the Detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department who first talked to us. Have you been checking your messages?"
She hadn't but she said she had.
"Strange," Jerry said. "Because he's called me six or seven times, pressing me for details. Then I called the Department, replying to one of his calls, and you know what? He was fired two weeks ago."
"So why's he calling you?"
"I think the sonofabitch is writing a book."
"About what happened to us?"
"I guess we'll find that out when it's published."
"He can do that?"
"Maybe he'll change the names. I don't know."
"But it's our story. He can't go round telling our story."
"Maybe we should all talk to Peltzer and see if we can stop him."
"Oh God," Tammy said softly. "Life used to be so simple."
"Are you having a hard time?" Jerry said.
"Yeah. I guess. No, what am I saying? I'm having a horrible time. Really bad dreams."
"Is that it? Dreams? Or is there more?"
She thought about her reply for a moment, wondering if she should share the problems she'd been having with him. But what was the point? Though they'd been through hell together she didn't really know him all that well. How did she know he wasn't planning to write a book too? So she said: "You know all things considered, I'm doing just fine."
"Well that's good," Jerry said, sounding genuinely pleased. "Have the reporters stopped bothering you?"
"Oh I still get the occasional journalist on the doorstep, but I had one of those little spy-hole things put in the door, and if I think he looks like a reporter then I just don't open the door."
"Just as long as you're not a prisoner in your own house."
"Oh Lord, no," she lied.
"Good."
"Well... I should let you go. I've got a thousand—"
"One other thing."
"Yes."
"This is going to sound a little wacko."
"Oh. Okay."
"But I wanted to tell you about it. Just... for old times' sake, I suppose."
"I'm listening."
"You know we never really discussed what happened to us in the house."
"No. Well I figured we all knew—"
"I didn't really mean what happened to everybody. I meant you and me, down in that room. You know that there was a lot of power in those tiles. Visiting the Devil's Country kept Katya looking perfect all those years . . ."