CALLING THE MAN FROM O.R.G.Y.
What did Randy Beaver, the red-headed “Blue Movie” star, Liberty Dix, the “Black is beautiful” sex bomb and Phoebe Phreeby, the luscious, lustful librarian, all have in common?
They all wanted Steve Victor to ring their bell – and it was the job of the Man from O.R.G.Y. to satisfy the amorous appetites of this trio of tempting tigresses.
But Steve had another task as well.
The fate of the entire world was in his busy hands – as the Man from O.R.G.Y. swung into a do-or-die battle with a perverse computer programmed either to kill him with kindness or finish him with fiendish fun …
DIAL “O” FOR O.R.G.Y.
Ted Mark
1973
CHAPTER ONE
“Boy Meets Ghoul”
(A Romantic Dialogue in Four Lines)
He: What are you doing after the burial?
She: I don’t know. It’s pretty dead around here.
He (boldly): Your grave, or mine?
She: I have a tomb-mate, better make it yours. . . .
That’s the sort of thing that goes through your mind when you’re lolling around a cemetery in the dead of night. Well, maybe not your mind. Still, it really did cross mine as I tiptoed through the tombstones.
In a funny sort of way, it was prophetic. At the time, though, it merely seemed the kind of sex-oriented wool-gathering I’d come to expect from myself. You might expect it too, if you were me, Steve Victor, also known as “The Man from O.R.G.Y.”
“O.R.G.Y.”? The initials stand for “Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth.” Which is another way of saying O.R.G.Y. is dedicated to removing warts from the palms of the sexually guilt-ridden. The means are surveys conducted by yours truly, Steve Victor, O.R.G.Y. being a strictly one-man operation.
I believe in the personal touch. I leave the door-to-door delving to yentas like Kinsey. As for libidos turned loose in the lab, all wired up to a voyeur computer programmed to measure the unmeasurable orgasm of fornicating humanoid robots -- hell! — that’s for mechanics like Masters and Johnson.
Oh, the yentas and the mechanics make their contribution. I don’t deny it. But I’ll take the one-to-one grass-roots technique. It’s more humanistic.
Besides, it gets results. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to get funds from the various foundations which finance my sex investigations. That’s another reason for O.R.G.Y. It pays!
It also lands me in some pretty unusual places, and some downright bizarre situations. Like a cannibal soup pot with a passionate pygmy princess. Or an igloo melting with Eskimo passion. Or a Middle East harem ruled by a violently jealous sultan. Or—
A cemetery in the dead of night!
Now, some people are dying to get into cemeteries. However, I’m not one of them. Like the lady said, there’s not much life in the place. And the business of O.R.G.Y.—my business—-is erotica, not epitaphs; sex, not stiffs; girls, not ghouls!
Besides, tombs do not turn me on. I don’t dig graves. Shrouds are not my bag. I never met a corpus I thought was delecti. For me, cemeteries are definitely not where it’s at!
So what was I doing in this graveyard?
A distant church bell shattered the stillness. It struck twelve times, a dozen deep, dire bongs. Dracula music!
At midnight yet?
The echo died away. It was quiet as a you-know-what. The only sound was the whisper of the wind among the tombstones. The faint breeze was perfumed by the oversweet, dank aroma of fresh-turned earth. A werewolf halo circled the full moon. Suddenly an owl began to hoot, an eerie redundancy, rhythmic and ominous as a Poe poem. Hair crawled—a scurry of spiders—up the back of my neck!
Was I dreaming?
I pinched myself. Hard. It was a pinch worthy of a subway masher testing the resiliency of a teeny-bop-per’s succulently filled hot pants during rush hour.
It hurt. I wasn’t asleep. I wasn’t dreaming. I was awake. It was all real—-the cemetery; the tombstones; the graves; the dim, flickering, hellish glow in the distance, piercing the mist, the glow of Inferno. . . .
Inferno?
Yeah. Inferno, Iowa (Pop. 2,372)—the glow of its night-shift-operated small foundry was also part of the graveyard reality. As much a part of it as the shrouded, ghost-white figure floating into view.
Eyes playing tricks?
I peered again through the wisps of fog rising up from the graves. That’s what it was, all right! A shrouded, ghost-white figure . . . floating into view!
Crouching behind a tombstone, I watched it approach, gliding through the haze. It took on form, but that didn’t make it any less scary. As it came closer, I saw that it was female, that the shroud was of some gauzy white material, which accounted for the ghostly aura.
The face above it was cruelly beautiful, the features distinctly etched, as if carved from white marble. The mouth—compressed lips—was a blood-red down-line. The eyes were jet-black mysteries submerged in the milk of she-devils. There was a purplish cast to the lids, and the brows above them were wide-arched, Lucifer-style, almost coming together in a peak over the bridge of the nose. Long, black vampire hair framed the picture. More ghoulish than girlish, maybe, but still she was a knockout!
“Ghoul of my dreams, I love yew-ew-ew . . .”
She moved as if floating through a nightmare. Her long-fingered hands--sharp, tapered nails tinted a ghastly green—were graceful, but . . . One of them curled like a claw around the shovel she was carrying! Finally she glided to a halt in front of a freshly covered grave. She studied the tombstone. For the first time her face changed expression.
Dis muz be der blace!
The change of expression was only the slightest of alterations, but crucial-—and revealing. Her lips parted and curled at either side of her mouth. Two small fangs appeared, sharp sword tips, dead-white and deadly! I stared at her, fascinated and repelled at the same time.
“Didja ever have the feeling thatcha wanned ta go, an’ yetcha have the feeling thatcha wanned ta stay . . . ?” .
Ambivalent, I kept watching. She produced a candle from the folds of the shroud, lit it, and set it on the tombstone. The light it provided rendered the shroud semitransparent.
There was more than ectoplasm behind it! In this new light, she was turning out to be quite a bosomy apparition indeed. I caught a glimpse of the sharply pointed outline of her nipples as she strained to dig the shovel into the mound covering the grave.
There was anticipation on her face as she dug. The grave was indecently shallow; in no time at all the shovel thudded against the top of a coffin. Breasts bobbling eerily behind the shroud, she bent to clear the loose dirt away. There was a spine-chilling creak as she opened the lid of the casket. A moment later she dragged the body out, over the edge of the open grave, and laid it out on the grass.