She tilted her head to gaze at him, unsmiling. Her eyes were wide. They caught the reflected shimmer of the constellations processing across the dome: Canes Venatici, Coma Berenices, Virgo. He could see her small front teeth, a spark of saliva glinting upon her lower lip. Her chest moved in time with his and her hands pressed against his belly; but her expression was coldly, almost malevolently, ferine. It should have frightened him. Instead he was getting hard again.
“… most famous are those of the sixteen th-cen tury French medical doctor known to us as Nostradamus. His prediction that ‘in the New City the sky burns at forty-five degrees’ has been interpreted by many as a warning of the destruction of the ozone layer here above Manhattan and of the atmospheric disturbances that followed…”
Trip scanned the rows in front of them. They seemed to be empty, as were the two rows behind them. On the other side of the circular room, he could barely make out the shapes of schoolchildren staring raptly at the dome.
“… also spoke of plagues that would devour man and animals alike. Millennial cultists such as the Wheel of Light and the New Puseyites believe that Nostradamus’s references to ‘The Last Conflagration’ dovetail neatly with the famous apocalyptic visions of Saint John the Divine, and that these in turn point indisputably to the celestial special effects dubbed ‘the glimmering’ by Stanford astrophysicist Francis Partridge. Scientists, of course…”
“Come here,” Trip whispered. He slid from his chair to the floor, crouching. The blond girl sank deeper into her chair, so that her disembodied head seemed to rest upon the points of her skinny knees. “Come here,” he repeated more urgently.
She went to him. Without a word, seemingly without even moving. One moment she was there above him. The next he was staring into her huge eyes, and her hands were upon his knees.
“Hey,” he whispered, startled. “I—”
She shook her head, raised her hand, and brushed it across his lips. Her fingers smelled of earth, her touch was oddly damp. But her mouth was hot as before, and tasted like buttermilk. He put his arms around her and drew her to him, clumsily. She was so frail, he could feel her bones like the spars of a kite. If he handled her roughly her skin might tear.
“Marz.” He kissed her cheeks, her eyes, the wisps of hair at her temples. “Marz—”
“Shhh,” she said, then murmured, “I love you.”
She tilted her head, staring at him. Her hair held the restless sheen of leaves in moonlight. Her pale eyes gleamed as she drew away, and he could see her pupils, not swollen and black as they should be in this darkness but mere specks, like the dark pistils at the heart of a myrtle blossom. Her gaze unnerved him, it was so detached, but before he could say anything or even look away she smiled, her little white teeth glinting.
“Come here,” she whispered.
Trip’s breath caught in his throat. He started to back away, but her hand closed upon his wrist, surprisingly strong. “No. Wait,” she commanded, and dipped her head and in one smooth motion pulled off her sweater. Then she leaned forward and took his hands in hers.
“Like this,” she murmured.
He shook his head, glancing up at the rows of seats, the spinning stars overhead. “Hey—n-no, we can’t, I’m—”
“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. He wanted to pull away but she was too close, she was everywhere, it was too late. He was lying upon her, and she was unbuttoning his shirt, so that he could feel her flesh against his, so warm and yielding it was like floating in a tepid pool. Her hands tugged at his pants, unzipped them, and pulled them down until his cock sprang out, nestling between her thighs. He groaned and pressed his face against her throat, tasting her skin, the soft prickle of her hair across his mouth. He moved his hands slowly, as though trailing his fingers through still water, until he found her breasts. Their nipples hardened, and he thought of plucking flowers from the water, hyacinths and wild iris. A sweet musky scent filled his nostrils; he moaned, and seemed to hear from very far away a childish voice saying They called me the hyacinth girl.
The musky fragrance grew stronger, choking him. He tried to raise his head but could not. The girl’s hands had tightened around his back and she was pulling him close, her legs coiling around his, the heat of her groin pushing against his cock. She was making mewling sounds, unh unh unh, her eyes shut tight as she buried her face against his breast. Her scent was everywhere, his legs were trapped by hers but it didn’t matter, she had found him somehow, her cunt another greedy mouth upon his cock as she swallowed him, and he could feel the sharp jolt of her hipbones as she thrust against him, again and again and again, until with a hoarse cry he came inside her.
“What is that noise?” From across the room, a child’s whisper. “What is that noise?”
Trip gasped, in a panic yanked at his trousers, shoving the girl aside and fumbling for his shirt, his fly, buttons, and zipper. He crouched in the narrow space between rows, holding his breath and waiting for some terrible rector to descend and make public his disgrace.
But no one appeared. The planetarium show continued without interruption. Someone on the other side of the room loudly blew his nose, and children giggled. He heard the muted hum of a child monitor, the clash of cymbals accompanying a nova bursting overhead. Finally he started to grope his way back into his seat, but stopped when he saw the girl already there, gazing at him.
“Oh man,” he said, and sank back down. She looked so tiny, sitting there. So goddamn young.
She’s just a kid, you know.
Shame like a fever surged through him; he thought he might pass out, as his stomach churned with guilt and fear. Had he gone insane? John Drinkwater’s face loomed in the darkness before him, and Peter Paul Joseph’s plump pale hands, holding Trip’s morality contract and the results of a lab test.
For the lips of a strange woman drip as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oiclass="underline" but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.
Trip ground his knuckles against the rough carpet. He knew nothing about her, but Nellie Candry had the scars from petra virus, and the girl had come from some foreign place… He could die now, as surely as if he had walked into a radiation chamber; bones and blood poisoned, and all his magic gone, that clear white veil he had carried about himself for twenty-two years torn beyond hope of repair.
Woe is me! For I am undone: because I am a man of unclean lips…
Yet as he groaned he could feel once more the girl’s moist warm skin, the lilac musk of her hair seeping into his nostrils, and her small mouth pressed against his. The stars shifted in the sky above him, the astronomer’s voice purred on.
“… along with the glimmering an increase in the sightings of other previously rare phenomena, parhelia or sun dogs and the refracted moonlight called paraselenae which sometimes appears in the darkness…”
He forced himself to look at the girl. Her sweater had slipped from one thin shoulder, and he could see a small bruise there, like a dark thumbprint. Otherwise, she seemed utterly composed. He had expected her to be angry, or scared. Instead she hunched down into her seat. Her eyes opened wider than he would have thought possible, and it seemed they held neither iris nor pupil, only an awful empty whiteness.