She stripped the burial clothes from it. When the cadaver was completely naked, she retrieved the flickering candle and stood over it. She stayed that way a long time, staring down at the naked male corpse. I’m neither gay nor a necrophile, but I had to admit that the stiff was really something to see. He covered over six feet of turf, and his musculature was really impressive. He was supermasculine; even in death the arms folded over his broad chest bulged with biceps. And besides being built like a brick caca-house, he had a face like a young Adonis. Not to mention that the stiffness of the stiff’s stiff was a perpendicular testimonial to whatever brand of embalming fluid the mortician had used.
“It’s cost me a lot, but there's one thing that I’ve got — it’s My Ma-a-an!”
The girlish ghoul— or ghoulish girl, if you prefer-— set the candle back on the tombstone. She shrugged her shoulders strategically. The shroud slithered down her body and settled in a heap at her feet.
Her face may have been vampirish, but the body was pure vamp. Sans shroud, there was nothing ethereal about it. Round hips, shapely legs, and a bosom that more than fulfilled its shrouded promise—it all added up to one solid, curvy, luscious pile of pulchritude. She was a veritable Miss America of Necrophiliacs!
That’s what she was, all right. A necrophile! A corpse-cuddler! A kanoodler of cadavers! And now she proved it by ravishing the body in dead earnest!
“When a body meets a body . . .”
Yeah, I know. It sounds about as appetizing as a hunchbacked leper with a raw-fish fetish. Still, it didn’t come off quite that repulsively. I mean, she had a lot of enthusiasm. For a chick who was making it with a corpse, she was really living it up!
She covered all the ghoulish bases! She utilized every part of that dead body. And her own body responded from head to green-painted toe. Finally she straddled him, managing the appropriate impalement, and moved with a rhythmic violence that said she was in pure ecstasy. A moment later she froze and bayed at the moon. It was ghastly, but it was damn sexy too!
When her last howl had died away, she relinquished her perch. She stood up and put on her shroud. She crossed over to the open grave and stepped down into it. Then she lay down in the open casket, crossed her arms over her breasts, and closed her eyes!
Everything was still for a long moment. The only sound was my teeth chattering. They were castanets playing a dirge. I didn’t know it, but the dirge was in anticipation of the horror of horrors to come.
Now it came!
Eyes bugging out of their sockets, I watched the naked male corpse slowly sit up! Monsterlike, he got to his feet. He went to the grave and closed the lid of the coffin containing the girl. Then he picked up the shovel and started shoveling the dirt back into the grave!
Like I said, that necrophile chick had really been something else! She had the kind of sex drive that could really kill a guy. Or bring him back to life! Still, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The dead don’t come back! No, not even for a quickie! The dead don’t come back!
Or do they?
CHAPTER TWO
Turnabout is gander sauce. So I supposed, hunching up behind that tombstone, the graveyard chill numbing my never-mind, watching the corpse bury the necrophile. Inferno! It was a scene to make a dude take a second look at what he’s smoking.
Except that I’d given up smoking. I’d quit about a month ago, during my stay on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Paradise! That’s where it all started, Paradise, just a jet-age sinner’s stone-throw from Inferno—Paradise!
The sky pilots say we’ll get our reward in Paradise. A willing angel named Leila was my reward. She was a passion-packed bonus payment for professional services rendered an Arab sheikh who owned a sumptuous villa. I was his guest for six weeks—six weeks of Leila!
She was an Arabian nymph, as sensual as a sex-starved satyr’s hashish dream. Sleek, but voluptuous, full, tawny breasts, Persian melons tipped with ripe, pointy wild strawberries; plump hips, rippling in motion; a velvet-cushiony derriere, springy as a Pogo stick; feverish thighs with strong, hot sinews hidden beneath the smooth surfaces; lips like feather-lined suction valves; soft, green eyes and softer blue-black hair which tingled when it grazed my flesh; an angelically sweet disposition, and a devilishly energetic lust-— that was Leila!
“ ‘Around the World’ is not a trip!” she explained to me that first night. For the next six weeks she proved it. By the end of which time I was one decidedly vanquished Victor!
Halfway through, my wind began to go. That’s when I gave up smoking. That’s the trouble with vices: to keep up with one, too often you have to sacrifice another.
Finally, late one afternoon, I admitted to myself that I was worn down to the nub -- the nub being a basket case hiding out in the disaster area of my groin. So, padding my Jockey shorts to keep from groaning every time I took a step, I tiptoed from the snoozing Leila’s bedroom of a thousand-and-one-too-many delights, and headed into the Paradise Island sunset. A half-hour or so later, I limped into the Casino.
The Paradise Island Casino is the Las Vegas of the Islands. You name it, and if it can be bet on, they’ve got it. Craps, roulette, faro, blackjack, slot machines —-the Compleat Catastrophe! A fancy-shmancy road to ruin featuring snotty deadpan croupiers with clipped British and fuck-you French accents, high-pile carpeting you could sink up to your moneybelt in, lavish tapestries reminiscent of some of the higher-class brothels I’ve known, sound-deadening acoustics—lush, plush, hushed -- the Casino is vulgar as hell!
If sex could cure me of smoking, maybe gambling could replace lechery. Reasoning thusly, it took me less than an hour to go broke. I mean broke! I was down to my groin-padding, which was nonnegotiable, and one last silver dollar.
I dropped the cartwheel into a one-armed bandit and twisted its arm. It whirred dyspeptically and came up citrus. One. Two. Three. Three lemons. I’d drawn a blank!
And then I drew another blank. Charles Putnam! His vacant blob of a face was hanging right over the triple disaster. Charles Putnam!
Take a child’s crayon, preferably gray, and draw a large circle. Square off the bottom. Square off the top. Now, very lightly, fill in the outline. Look at it. That’s the face of Charles Putnam.
It sits on top of a square, powerfully built frame in neutral clothes selected to make the wearer fade into the woodwork. The total impression adds up to those six-point-three Americans in the survey polls who have no opinion; that’s their answer—“No opinion”-- whether the question concerns bombing Hanoi or which brand of kitty litter is most scrumptious. In other words, Charles Putnam looks like a nonentity, which is exactly how a man in his position should look.
His position? Something in government. Something unoffficial, but very high up. Something that transcends administrations. Something more secret than Top Secret.
Indeed, only a very few people in the highest echelons of government are aware of Charles Putnam’s existence. Even those privileged few are hazy as to his function. Which isn’t surprising, since the function itself is purposefully blurry.
His role takes in that area where ends and means meet. He moves freely back and forth between the State Department, where policy is determined-—in part by Putnain’s advice—and the areas where the most secret policies are implemented by such outfits as the CIA, the Secret Service, Army Intelligence, et cetera. Where Mata Hari shacks up with Machiavelli—that’s the bed under which Charles Putnam parks his work shoes.