“I tell you, it’s leering at us!”
“Your mind is distorting the image. It’s probably all the way on the other side of the maze. Your imagination is playing tricks. It’s not real!”
The hell he said! Threats to one’s identity must be dealt with firmly. I tweaked his nose—firmly!
The blond hooker giggled behind me as I left them. Moving on, once again I spotted the black girl in a mirror. She was a small, shiny, ebony beetle backing into a corner of reflecting glass. A turtle-necked spider with a strangler’s web taut between two tentacles was moving in on her.
From out of nowhere, a tiny white ant stepped between them. It took me a few seconds to realize it was the little girl, Giselle. She blinked at the garrote. “Make a cat’s cradle,” she demanded.
“Get away, kid! I’m busy!” The spider tried to step around her to get at the beetle, but the insistent white ant sidestepped with him.
“You don’t know how!” Giselle taunted him.
“Beat it!”
“Give it to me! I can do it!” The white ant grabbed the cord with both antennae. She must have taken him by surprise, because he let go. “Nyah! Nyah! I got it!” The white ant scampered away.
Cursing, the spider chased after her. It was a reprieve for the black beetle. She hurried off in the opposite direction.
A moment later the black girl collided with me, the two of us now transformed into jagged, elongated light streaks. Nevertheless, I could feel her body hot with panic under the still-soaking sweater and skirt. “Hold still!” I told her. “I want to help you.”
The zigzag flash of her knee caught me in my crackling groin. Short-circuited, I doubled over. She vanished in black-tinted glass, running through a fat round blob which rolled through her and on up to me.
“Why are you holding yourself there?” Giselle asked, pointing. When I didn’t answer, she spoke again. “My mommy says it’s nasty to play with yourself.”
“Giselle! You stay away from that fag!” her father’s voice commanded.
“Your brain will turn to oatmeal and they’ll have to put you away,” she assured me.
“Giselle!”
“Your father wants you.” I managed to straighten up.
“And you were carrying a lady’s pocka’book,” Giselle remembered, spying the redhead’s handbag lying on the ramp where I’d dropped it when the black girl kicked me. “Maybe your brain has already turned to oatmeal,” she decided. She picked up the pocket-book and rolled away, swinging it from one hand, and the garrote from the other.
“Hey! Come back with that!”
But she was gone. Her father replaced her, an enormous sphere breathing fire. “Keep your paws off my kid, you queer!”
“She took my pocketbook.”
“Your pocketbook?” He snorted contempt.
“My pocketbook!” A redheaded ball bounced angrily up to us. “Thief!” She shook a fist under my nose. “Give it back to me!”
“I don’t have it.” I tried to explain. “The kid took-—”
“Look at that!” Daddykins interrupted me. “Do you see what I see?”
The redhead and I both looked at the mirror he was pointing at. The glass was the size of a Cinerama movie screen. It was filled by two magnified, gigantic figures —the blond joy girl and her client. Her blouse was pulled down from her forty-foot breasts, and his huge face was buried between them. The lower half of his body was grinding against her—-a dinosaur’s trousered backside—boxing her into a corner.
The blond’s fingers, a swarm of giant, red-nosed, wriggling eels, managed to squeeze between their lower bodies to open a zipper with teeth like a whale’s. Jonah, tremendous, sprang free. The eels surrounded him.
“Ooh! Look at that!” Miss Hot Pants was impressed.
“It’s not so much.” Old Baldy was modest.
“It could choke a horse!”
“I had something like that in mind.”
Giselle, three heads bobbing, hopped into the scene. “Can I play, too?”
“Giselle! Don’t you dare look!” She already had, but that didn’t stop her father from taking off like a super-jet to rescue her.
“That kid’s got my bag!” The redhead was right behind him.
“Go away, little girl,” the blond told Giselle. “We’re busy.”
The kid skipped out of the frame just as her father entered. He caught sight of the last of her three heads and hurried after her.
“Stop! Thief!” The redhead was right behind them. But the sight of the entwined behemoths in the quivering flesh brought her up short. “Is this man bothering you, miss?” she asked the bimbo.
No answer. The blond was otherwise occupied. “Because if he is,” the redhead added, “I just want you to know that I’m not one of those people who’s afraid to get involved.”
“Please, lady,” the mammoth man panted, “I’ve got all I can handle now.”
“Mmmm! So has she!” The redhead peered over her bifocals.
“Listen, you!” The blond took time out. “Stay on your own side of the street!”
“Well, I never!” The redhead departed in a huff.
“I can believe that!” The giant hooker slid to her knees.
Titillating as it was, I wrenched my eyes away from the couple. I had to find the black girl. I wended my way through the mirrors, looking for her.
I spotted her reflection-—short, squat, pinheaded. She was frantically trying to find her way out of the maze. One dead-end mirror after another frustrated her. When she finally started down a path that didn’t, she was brought up short by the sight of the would-be strangler waiting at the end of it.
The black girl reversed herself. Too late! He’d seen her! Transformed into a skeleton on the hoof, he clacked after her fat, fleeing figure.
Several things happened at once then, and the action kaleidoscoped. Giselle, a multicolored ball of fur, collided with the skeleton. The black girl puffed up to a glasslike blob, shattered into beads, and scattered in twenty different directions. The turtle-necked bonehead snatched his garrote back from Giselle. The black girl materialized right in front of me, running fast.
“Give it back!” Giselle wailed.
I grabbed for the black girl.
“I’ll tell my daddy!” Giselle chased the skeleton.
I came up with two hands full of two breasts— neither belonging to the black girl.
“Giselle! You come here, or Daddy’s going to spank you!” Her father-—-his nose ten feet long and bright red—ran after his furry daughter.
“Rape! Help! Rape!” The redhead yanked her bruised mammaries from my grip. “Rape!” she yelled again.
First Randy Beaver, and now this schoolteacherish redhead! It makes a man think. I was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t a rapist myself!
I ran. A moment later I met myself coming-—-a stalk of green celery. The redhead was a purple carrot on my heels. A polka-dotted onion tried to tackle me.
Swerving through another mirror, I avoided the tackle. The onion and the carrot collided. “Sonofabitch!” Behind me, the onion, Giselle’s father, picked himself up.
“You said a nasty word, Daddy!” Giselle, a blue turnip, danced around them. “Shame-shame! I heard you. Shame-shame on Daddy!”
I rounded another corner and braked to a halt in front of a two-hundred-pound breast with a bright orange nipple the size of a flagpole. A fang-filled, giant green fish mouth was assaulting it. The revolving mirrors were playing weird tricks with the hooker and her client.
The parts of their bodies that moved became magnified and distorted and changed color rapidly. The blond had raised herself up to give the mouth access to her breast. Now she settled to her knees again.
Her own huge lips parted to reveal a mammoth, curled tongue. The flagpole of his throbbing manhood bucked and grew impossibly larger as the tremendous snake-tongue grazed it. Then it struck, bypassing the flagpole, darting inside the opening of his pants, flicking tensed thigh muscles. It moved from side to side, from the sensitive flesh of one leg to the hidden crease where the other joined his torso. Sawteeth nibbled around the forest of his groin. His throbbing penis enlarged once again and blurred.