Bell and Karen had dinner at a small restaurant that served excellent fresh seafood. They talked and laughed like old friends and held hands across the table over after-dinner drinks. The suggestion that they go to Bell's place was greeted with a sly enthusiasm, and he couldn't help but think that she both suspected and desired his intended ending to the evening.
He held bis breath as he opened his apartment door, expecting the sweet blood smell. But the fans and the night air had removed all but a trace of the odor, and it seemed now only as if a rare steak had been grilled there recently. It was not offensive, Bell thought. Not offensive at all. On the contrary.
They sat on the couch, sipping sherry and talking softly, Karen's eyes becoming liquid, melting under his gaze. Then he was holding her, they were kissing, and his hands were sliding over her back, up to the nape of her neck where the soft hair grew in wispy curls, then over her shoulder, cupping her breast, while her tongue pressed against his, and little grunting sounds came from somewhere inside her.
He whispered something about being more comfortable in the bedroom, and they stood up, holding the embrace as tightly as possible, and moved down the short hall. She made a comment about breaking in a new mattress, and he laughed, heartily enough to be appreciative, but not enough to break the mood.
Despite the buildup, despite her readiness, despite his all-consuming desire, it was terrible. When they drew together naked for the first time, the only thing Bell could think of was a dream, was Don Juan and how he could compare to him; Casanova and his phallic power next to Richard Bell's. Foreplay was interminable, and Karen moaned with the need of him long after he could have entered.
But he could not get hard, no matter what Karen did, and the more impassioned her efforts grew, the more flaccid he became, until, in desperation, he entered her roughly with his hand, kneading and prodding until at last she suffered a small, quivering climax.
Bell rolled off of her and switched off the dim bedside light so that he wouldn't have to see her face, unsatisfied and accusing. He felt her hand on his shoulder, but was too full of despair to pull away. Her voice muttered softly, sympathetically, "S'okay. It happens."
Not to me! Never to me, bitch! The thoughts burst out wildly, uncontrolled, and their strength frightened him. He made a noncommittal noise translatable as agreement, chagrin, despondence, whatever she wanted to hear.
She spoke again. "Sleepy?" She was rubbing his chest now, making unseen whorls in the dark hair around his nipples.
"Mmm." He turned on his side, his back to her. She ran her finger down his spine, sighed, and lay still, her hand resting in the saddle of his waist. In less than two minutes she was asleep.
Blood was in his face; he could feel it. The red warmth of shame coated his body as he lay there, his penis a dead lump between his thighs. Bitch, he thought, and the word repeated in his mind like a litany. Bitch Bitch Bitch Bitch Bitch — a mantra of rage that dragged him down into sleep with claws that shredded sanity.
And in his dreams that spongy slab of flesh that had betrayed him (No — that had been betrayed!) grew firm at last, its ovoid head flaring upward like an uncaged beast's, the tumescent rondure of it shrieking with the demand to once more pierce the world. But instead of that universal vagina, it saw Karen bound, legs spread, on an altar of marble. The head of the phallus tensed, then drew back, paused, and shot forward like a battering ram as Bell, strangely detached from the penis-thing that grew out of him, screamed BITCH at a volume whose intensity masked all other sound. And as the thick cord of tissue tore into her with shattering force, he started to laugh, and laugh, and laugh again as the blood spouted, until the dream and the world itself were nothing but a red joke in the darkness.
Sunday
She was dead when he awoke. What was left reminded him not so much of a human being as a watermelon he had blown up with a cherry bomb when he was a boy. The sight sickened him, but did not surprise him. The knowledge that he had caused her death, had taken the final step, was strangely comforting, like a cool hand on his brow, and a voice that whispered soothingly, "It's over now. It's all right. The worst is over." He remembered his mother, gently talking him out of a bad dream.
It was over. Only one thing remained. Payment. Retribution, fitting and just. And he knew how he could receive it. It was so simple.
He found the book quickly, as if it had been waiting for him. He looked up the name in the index, turned to the listed pages, and started to read. When the chapter was over, he turned off the light and lay beside the dead woman there in the darkness, letting no alien thought impinge upon his meditation on what he had read.
Sleep pressed down upon him, and he slipped into the dream like a fish into water. He first became aware of the shape above him, moving rhythmically over his body. Then came the pain down below, in the unfamiliar cave of dry tissue between his legs. When he bent his neck and looked down at his body, he saw the man's hands, coarse and grimy, rubbing the small breasts that protruded from the gap in the rough woolen sweater Bell wore. The man's upper garments were on, but his trousers were down around his ankles as he plunged grunting into Bell's body, into the leathery vagina that refused to moisten. Finally the man collapsed on top of Bell's body, lay still for a moment, then pushed upward and drew himself out with an abruptness that brought a sharp whine from the lips of the dream-woman Bell had become.
The man pulled up his trousers and took a coin from his pocket. With a cross between a laugh and a snarl, he threw it onto the bed, aiming at the recess he had just vacated.
Bell giggled, half in delight at payment, half in fear, and sat up, wiping the coin on the hem of his dirty gray skirt until it was free of spilled semen and sweat. Then he put it into a small purse that hung on a drawstring from a waist button, and called a thank you after the man, who had just shut the door behind him.
The red soreness diminished to a dull ache, and Bell held himself, used long, light strokes to try and dispel the last of the pain. He rose from the bed and hobbled to a worn and rickety nightstand, where he dipped a yellowed handkerchief in cold, filmy water and pressed it between his thighs. Soon the coolness relaxed and strengthened him. He sighed heavily and adjusted his sweater and long skirts. A look in the dulled and hazy mirror told him that he was ready to go out once again, and he crossed to the door.
He was about to open it when he hesitated, as if a voice had called to him from far away in warning. But it lasted only a second, and was easily dismissed. The woman's head shook in both negation and acceptance, the hand turned the knob and opened the door, and Richard Bell walked down the weathered steps and into the dark streets of Whitechapel to meet his destiny.
When the manager of the apartment complex unlocked Bell's door a few days later, he immediately noticed the smell the neighbors had complained of. He expected to find something dreadful as he came nearer the closed bedroom door from behind which the odor was emanating. He was not disappointed. The woman's body was barely recognizable as human.
But what gave the manager bad dreams for a year afterward was the man who lay beside her, ears and nose cut away, but his peacefully smiling mouth untouched. His lower torso had been slashed open, the organs methodically removed and lined up on the bloody sheets. It was the same way that Mary Kelly, a penniless prostitute, had been dissected by Jack the Ripper a century before.