No, Martin couldn’t help the unconscionable musings. He could only look on as Melanie continued to tend to herself, oblivious to the voyeur’s eye on the other side of the wall.
Oblivious? came the strange question.
Melanie stood with her front toward the wall. She was looking down, drying the muff of hair and the insides of her thighs. Then, very slowly, she looked up, right at the wall. She grinned directly into Martin’s gaze.
Martin felt locked in rigor. The grin struck him like a fisticuff. He nearly shrieked. The tiny pendant lay between her breasts, and in her eyes—her stark beautiful chocolate-colored eyes—he saw madness, ataxia. He saw death.
“You are wreccan now, Martin,” she said through her grin.
«« — »»
Erik could smell it even before he entered. He could feel it. Hustig, he thought automatically. Hüslfek.
The door to the church basement was unlocked. He stepped into blackness and waited, listening. No one was here, he felt sure of that. He felt sure of something else: people had been murdered in this place very recently.
The hustigs always ended at the high moon. There were no windows, so he felt safe turning on the lights.
Here was the brygorwreccan’s chamber. This was where Erik used to live. He wondered about who had replaced him. There was the bed, the old dresser, the same bare, whitewashed cement walls. In the back was a large stereo system, but that was all.
The trunk.
The trunk had been moved to the side. He opened it and was not surprised to find several shovels and a box of heavy-duty plastic garbage bags, an ax, and a few knives. Erik had kept his money hidden in the trunk’s vinyl lining, but it wasn’t there. There were also a few flashlights and a few pairs of work gloves. Tools of the trade, he thought.
He went to the back of the chamber. The large wooden door faced him like an old nemesis. From under its crack, he could feel the giveaway draft of warm air. Erik didn’t need to open the massive door for the evidence; he could see it in his mind. He could see the fire pit and stoke rods, the blood-crusted dolmen, the chettles and the iron hooks high on the cement walls.
And he could see the nihtmir propped up in the nave.
But the door was locked.
He set down the shotgun and got the small hand-æsc out of the trunk. He began to dig around the bolt. He actually giggled as he worked. I’m gonna trash the entire cirice. See how they like that. Let the fuckers know that Erik Tharp is back in town.
The hard wood around the bolt plate was tough. The sharp æsc-point dug out a splinter at a time. Soon he exposed the edge of the bolt plate. Once he got that out—
“Brygorwreccan,” announced a voice behind him.
Erik turned. A guy in leather and black hair hanging in his face stood before him. He smiled wanly, holding a double-tipped pickax at port arms.
“Welcome home,” Zack said. He lunged, heaving the pickax. Erik yelled and threw his hands up.
The pickax sank into Erik’s left palm, then slammed into the door, nailing him to the wood. He reached for the shotgun, felt a bone break in his hand. Not gonna make it, he thought, grimly frantic. He stretched, but the shotgun remained inches from his grasp.
Meanwhile, Zack came at him with a knife…
—
Chapter 22
“Dooer, dooer,” oozed the voice in the dream.
Ann strained against the turmoil of sleep. The nightmare replayed through her mind. Melanie’s birth seventeen years ago in the fruit cellar while the storm raged outside. The feminine chorus, firelight dancing on naked flesh. Soft hands caressed her, roving the gravid belly, tracing the sweat-slick thighs. Ann twitched in sleep. The emblem hovered, the queer double circle; it seemed to give off the faintest glow, and she thought she could see something in its shape, but what? Mouths sucked warm milk from her swollen breasts. Tongues licked fervidly up and down over her clitoris. Her sex began to spasm as her womb began to contract…
“Dooer, dooer.”
The nightmare’s eye showed it all, never faces, just the naked figures bowed in attendance. A cup was being passed around, engraved with the same emblem on the wall. Then came more words, issuing in liquid softness:
“Dother fo Dother, Dother fo Dother.”
And the final vertiginous image: the bright-bladed knife plunging down—
slup-slup-slup
—time after time to the hilt, into soft flesh…
Ann’s eyes snapped open in the dark. A slice of faint pink light canted in through the window. The clock glowed 4:12 a.m.
She lay on her side in a fetal shape. She watched several minutes pass on the clock, and soon the nightmare began to fade from her mind. She began to feel better. She could hear Martin breathing lightly behind her, and then she felt his hand slide over her breasts. At first she wanted to rebel, slap the hand away. She was still mad at him, she remembered, but his hand on her breasts felt so good, so soothing. The sensation pushed the dream out of her head completely, leaving desire in its place. She moaned as the fingers tended the nipple, gorging it. Next, his hands were pushing her nightgown up over her rump. Ann kept her eyes closed. Suddenly, she felt…lewd. She opened her legs at once, inviting him. His hands lay her out on her back; his penis nudged her once as he moved down in the dark. The glans felt hard as a knob of polished wood. He pushed her knees up to her chin and began to go down on her.
She whined at the initial contact of his tongue, then moaned steadily. Gently, and slowly at first, his tongue traced up and down the groove of her sex. Ann felt a flood of moisture and desire collide; she hugged her knees to her chest as the tongue delved harder and more precisely. Martin was going down on her more deftly than she could remember. He made her feel so good so fast that she forgave him instantly of his drunkenness and his coming home so late. The synchronicity of his mouth and tongue against the rhythmic tremors of her hips drew her horniness out like a tension rod being twisted and twisted. Soon it would have to snap…
She was going to come, but she didn’t want to, not yet. She wanted to come with him inside of her. “Fuck me now,” she panted. She never talked dirty in bed, but tonight she couldn’t restrain herself. She’d never felt like this, so wound up, so primitively horny. “Put your cock in me.”
Martin’s soft poet’s hands turned her over on her belly, then hauled her hips up. The roughness with which he positioned her was almost brutal, but she liked it—the promptness, the immediacy of his desire. He knelt behind her splayed rump; she felt like a bitch in heat waiting to be mounted. One hand came around her hip, the fingers opening her. Ann tensed as the gorged glans nudged into her sex. All she could feel right now was her need, like electricity humming from the swollen points of her nipples to the warm pocket of her sex. It made his penis feel huge and surreally hard. She almost shrieked when he thrust it all into her at once.
He was so deep in her. One hand braced her thigh, the other came around and plied her clitoris as his thrusts drew in and out. The pleasure was excruciating. The potentiality of her orgasm ticked in her loins like a bomb about to go off. She buried her face in the pillow, to increase the angle and depth of the penetration. It was too much, too many sensations waiting to break at once. Her hands twisted the sheets into knots, her teeth bit into the pillow.
“I love you, Martin,” she panted. She couldn’t believe what she said next. “You fuck me so good, I love it when you fuck me like this. Do it harder, honey. Fuck me harder.”