At first she had managed to hold gagging revulsion at bay by disengaging from her physicality, distancing herself first from what she was expected to do and then, as things progressed, from what was being done to her. From this point of view the cavernous purple bedroom with its drifting layers of scented smoke, the picture of the powerful and rapacious dog-headed creature crouched over the prone white body, positioning and repositioning it as it gasped and groaned beneath him, had a certain Pre-Raphaelite pornographic charm. Her undoing came when, in that state of detachment, she had perversely started to enjoy herself. The moment she gave in, she was reminded what a sick piece of slime Anubis really was; repulsion had elbowed its way in, detachment had taken a cab.
But then, just as she started to reached the limits of her tolerance, something new began to happen.
***
Something new began to happen. Jim’s senses were already in serious disarray. Epiphany was somehow simultaneously all around him, under him, above him, and front of him, a Mobius continuation, the galaxy made rhythmic flesh. The blue ovoid room came and went. Forward and back, the two of them in sync to the erotic pulse-of-the-spheres. One moment the room, the next a state of free fall above the methane and ammonia atmosphere of Saturn. The rings arched over them and left them gasping in the vacuum, reality capriciously disengaged. The only constants were that Devora, still in her midnight-blue space suit, was always behind him, at the periphery of his distorted vision, and that some foreign object had penetrated his body. And yet, the intrusion in no way bothered him. Quite the contrary, it only added to the mind-thrashing fun he was already having with Epiphany. If his unexpected paramour’s companion wanted to bugger him with the lubricated chrome of her ray gun, who was he to complain?
When the flash came from out of nowhere and almost blinded him, Jim was concerned that Devora, in some moment of cold alien excitation, had inadvertently-or maybe even deliberately (a little mantis in everyone)-pulled the trigger on the ray gun. He was still conscious enough to know that could mean trouble. Jim felt as if his spine were going to snap, his brain boil out through his eyes. He was hard-pressed to tell agony from ecstasy. Then, suddenly, he was in another place.
***
Semple felt as though her spine were going to snap, her brain boil out through her eyes. She was hard-pressed to tell agony from ecstasy. Then, suddenly, she was in another place, with another person, a man, indistinct but definitely a man. His hair was shoulder-length and dark, but his features kept shifting, like the indefinable face in an elusive dream. And they were together, with a power passing between them though neither of them knew why.
***
Jim was in the arms of the Queen of the Nile, black ringleted hair billowing around him, kohl-rimmed eyes gazed into his. She gripped him with a terrible urgency, as though she knew they had encountered each other in a transitory place that could only be the result of a glitch in the cosmic flow; in a nanosecond, he knew they would be parted. She pressed her mouth against his in simultaneous welcome and farewell. Then Jim was falling. Multiple orgasms of a kind that he had never experienced before were ripping through him. And he was once again falling.
***
Semple was screaming. Multiple orgasms were ripping through her. And he was screaming. And she was screaming.
The question of human edibility is a tricky one.
A is Jim hit slimy water with a splash and sank, he had a fleeting glimpse of the UFO above him. It was already nothing more than a tight cluster of colored lights in the sky, zigzagging away on an erratic and illogical course and vanishing into a gray overcast, just like they did in all the sighting stories and blurry handheld camcorder tapes. For an instant, he was filled with a burning if illogical outrage. He’d been used like the proverbial one-night stand, the universal tramp. He didn’t even qualify as an intergalactic whore: to the best of his knowledge, he’d received absolutely nothing in return for the bodily invasion except a residual burning in his rectum and the feeling that he had been victimized. As far as could tell, he’d been dropped from a chute in the underside of the saucer, dumped out like garbage, without so much as even the parting acknowledgment of metaphoric cab fare.
As he sank, his mouth, nose, and ears filled with slime, duckweed, and swamp water, and resentment gave way to the urgent necessities of survival. Jim hit bottom, or at least hit mud. He floundered up again, stumbling, splashing, drenched, with his previous fury returning. Not only had he been discarded and disrespected by the fucking aliens, but something magical had been interrupted by his fall. He didn’t even have a clear memory of what had happened. All he knew was that it had been important and now it was gone. A new and mysterious cake, not simply left out in the rain, but hit by a monsoon, the recipe irretrievable. A woman with dark Cleopatra hair hovered at the core of the fragmenting memory, but already he could no longer picture her. The drapes of perception were rapidly closing, like the falling curtains of dreamwaking.
Gasping, treading water, getting himself covered in mud, he discovered that the water in which he was struggling was actually only chest deep. At the same time he also heard a voice. “Over here, pal. There’s a few square yards of dry land where I am. I don’t know what good it’ll do you, but you’re welcome to join me.”
The voice was not unlike that of a frog in an animated cartoon. A cockney frog, to boot, with vowels decidedly British, and the kind of epicene vocal droop affected by Mick Jagger in his speaking voice. The frog, if indeed it was a frog, sounded dense but trustworthy, and for want of a better offer, Jim waded laboriously in the direction of the voice.
“Say something else, will you? So I can get my bearings?”
“Tossed from a flying saucer, were you? Give you the treatment and then heave-ho you into the swamp, did they? Those fucking aliens have a lot of fucking nerve, I’m telling you.”
Jim was now only up to his waist in water, pushing through the thick reed beds that flourished in the shallows. It was hard to see. The swamp was heavily shrouded in a gray drifting mist. The Anglo-frog seemed be leading him in the right direction, but he needed to keep it talking. “You get a lot of folks ejected from UFOs around here?”
The frog voice was blase. “Happens all the time.”
“All the time?”
“Maybe not all the time, but often enough to be noticeable. Local speculation has it that the aliens have this thing about the Jurassic. Maybe something to do with the Nemesis Asteroid.”
Now Jim was totally confused. “The Jurassic?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re saying this is the Jurassic?”
The frog voice croaked, perhaps to clear its throat. “Or a loving reconstruction of same.”
Jim halted in his squelching tracks. “Get the fuck outta here.”
“Surprised? Most folks are when they first fall out of the UFO.”
“I’m in the Jurassic era?”
“You’re in the Jurassic.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to, my old son. Plus there’s not very much you can do about it apart from trying to avoid being eaten. Bit of a difference in the old food chain back here. I can understand your confusion, though; it must be hard to go from Master of the Universe to a snack on legs.”
As if in confirmation of the point, the mist temporarily parted and a huge form became visible in the distance. It stood well over fifty feet tall, with a long serpentine neck and tail, a hunched body like a small hill, and a mud-caked hide wrinkled green and brown, with markings not unlike jungle camouflage. It stood grazing on the top foliage of a medium-sized tree, and even its slightest movement caused twenty inches of oily swell to roll across the swamp, threatening Jim with inundation. Jim Morrison stood frozen by the sight of his first live dinosaur. Suddenly he wished he’d never been so rash as to call himself the Lizard King. In terms of monarchy, this beast had him. Jim wasn’t sure if it was a brontosaurus or a diplodocus. He had always confused the two. The frog voice piped up helpfully. “I wouldn’t worry about her too much, pal. Strictly herbivorous.”