There was a chandelier of cut quartz with dull yellow sockets forcandles. The light in the room, however, came from a number of table and floorlamps. Thecorners of the room were in shadow.
Childe waited for a while and sweated. It was hot in the corridor, and thevarious odors, of wood; plaster, and long-dead mice, became strongerinstead of dying on a dulling nose. The teaser of perfume was entirely gone. Finally, justas he decided that he should be moving on--and why was he standinghere in the first place--the woman came through the door. She was naked; hertitian-red hair hung loosely around her shoulders and down her back. She held a long- necked bottle to her lips as she walked toward the dresser. She pausedbefore it and continued to drink until only about two inches of the liquid wasleft. Then she put the bottle on the dresser and leaned forward to look into themirror.
She had taken her makeup off. She peered into the mirror as ifshe were searching for defects. Childe stepped back, because it seemedimpossible thatshe would not see him. Then he stepped forward again. If she knewthat this was a one-way mirror, she did not care if another was on the other side. Or supposedthat no hostile person would be there. Perhaps only the baron knew ofthis passageway.
She seemed to find her inspection of her face satisfactory, andshe mighthave found it very pleasing, to judge from her smile. Shestraightened up andlooked at her body and also seemed pleased at this. Childe feltuncomfortable, as if he were doing something perverted by spying on her, but he alsobegan toget excited.
She wriggled a little, swayed her hips from side to side, and ranher hands up and down her ribs and hips and then cupped them over her breastsand rubbed the nipples with the ends of her thumbs. The nipples swelled. Childe's penis swelled, also.
Keeping her left hand busy with her breast, she put her righthand on her pubes, and opened the top of the slit with one finger and began torub her clitoris. She worked swiftly at, it, rubbing vigorously, and suddenlyshe threw her head back, her mouth open, ecstasy on her face.
Childe felt both excited and repulsed. Part of the repulsion wasbecause he was no voyeur; he felt that it was indecent to watch anyone underthese circumstances. It was true that he did not have to stay, but he washere to investigate kidnapping and murder, and this certainly looked worthinvestigating.
She continued to rub her clitoris and the hairy lips. And then-here Childe was startled and shaken but also knew that he had somehow expectedit--a tinything, like a slender white tongue, spurted from the slit.
It was not a tongue. It was more like a snake or an eel.
It was as small in diameter as a garter snake but much longer. How long itwas he could not determine yet, because its body kept sliding out andout. It kept coming, and its skin was smooth and hairless, as smooth as thewoman's belly and as white, and the skin glistened with the fluid releasedfrom her cunt.
It shot out in a downward arc, like a half-erect penis, and thenit turned and flopped over against her belly and began to zigzag upwards. Itcontinued to slide out from the slit as if yards of it were still coiled insideher womb, andit oozed up until its snaky length was coiled once around her leftbreast.
Childe could see the details of the thing's head, which was thesize of a golf ball. It turned twice to look directly at him. Into the mirror, rather.
Its head was bald except for a fringe of oil-plastered black hairaround the tiny ears. It had two thin but wet black eyebrows and a wet blackMephistophelean moustache and beard. The nose was relatively largeand meat cleaver shaped. The eyes were dark, but they were so small and set sofar back that they would have seemed dark to Childe even if they had beenpalest blue. The mouth was as much a slit as the vagina from which the creaturehad issued, but it briefly opened it and Childe could see two rows of littleyellow teethand a pink-red tongue.
The face was tiny, but there was nothing feeble about itsmalignancy.
The woman's lips moved. Childe could not hear her, but he thoughtthat she was crooning.
The snaky body resumed its climbing while more of its body slidout of the pink fissure and the dark-red bush. It rounded her breast and went upher shoulder and around her neck and came around the right side andextended a loopoutwards and then in so that the Lilliputian head faced her. Thewoman turned a little then, thus permitting Childe a quarter-view of her profile.
Her hands moved along the ophidian shaft as if she were feelingan unnaturally long penis--hers. Her slim fingers--beautiful fingers-traced the length and then, while one hand curled gently back of the head tosupport thebody, the other slid back and forth behind the head as if she weremasturbatingthe snake-penis.
The thing quivered. Then the head moved forward, and its minutelips touchedher lower lip. It bit down, or seemed to, because she jerked her headback a little as if stung. Her head moved forward again, however; and hermouth wide open. The head was engulfed in her mouth; she began to suck.
Childe had been too shocked to do anything but react emotionally. Now he began to think. He wondered how the thing could breathe with its headin her mouth. Then it occurred to him that it would be even more difficult for it to breathe when it was coiled in her womb or whatever recess of her bodyit lived in. So, though it had a nose, it perhaps did not need it. Its oxygencould be supplied by the woman's circulatory system, which surely must beconnected through some umbilical device to the other end of the thing.
That head. It had belonged at one time to a full-grown man. Childe, with norational reason, knew this. The head had belonged to the body of anadult male. Now, through some unbelievable science, the head had been reduced tothe size of a golf ball, and it had been attached to this uterine snake, or theoriginalhuman body had been altered, or...
He shook his head. How could this be? Had he been drugged? Thatmirror and now this.
The body bent, and the head withdrew from the woman's mouth. Itswayed backand forth like a cobra to a flute, while the woman put her hands toher mouth and then removed a pair of false teeth. Her lips fell in; she was anold woman--from the neck up. But the thing thrust forward before she hadput theteeth on the dresser, and the tiny head and part of the bodydisappeared intothe toothless cavity. The body bent and unbent, slid back and forthbetween her lips.
At first, the movements were slow. Then her body trembled, andher skin became paler, except around the mouth and the pubes, where the intense darkeningspoke of the concentration of blood. She shook; her great eyesfluttered open; she stared as if she were half-stunned. The thrustings of the bodybecame swifter, and more of the body appeared and disappeared. She staggeredbackwards until she fell back upon the bed with her legs hanging over the edgeand one foot resting on the floor, the other lifted up.
For perhaps ninety seconds, she jerked. Then, she was quiet. Thesnaky bodylifted; the head came out of the lips and turned with the turning ofthe upperquarter of body. A thick whitish fluid was dribbling out of the openmouth.
The shaft rose up and up until all but the last six inches werelifted from the woman's body. It teetered like a sunflower in a flood and thencollapsed. The tiny mouth chewed on a nipple for a while. The woman's handsmoved like sleeping birds half-roused by a noise, then they became quiet again.
The mouth quit chewing. The body began a slow zigzag, retreatinto the dark-red bush and the fissure, trailing the head behind it. Presently, the bodywas gone and the head was swallowed up, bulging open the labia as itsank out of sight.
Childe thought, Werewolf? Vampire? Lamia? Vodyanoi? What? He hadnever read of anything like this woman and the thing in her womb. Where did theyfit in with the theories of Le Garrault as expounded by Igescu?