"Actually he doesn't have to watch. He could just listen, in the bathroom. People hear you anyway. In the next room."
"That's true. What the heck."
She could tell he was thinking that he'd have a good story to tell his friends, about the kinky old dude and his weird little mistress.
Darryl glanced at Ephram, who was standing a few paces away. Not looking at them, but staring up at a clutch of stars glimmering in a cloudbreak. Ephram stared at stars a lot and seemed to see things in them. Sometimes he talked to them.
"Uh…" Darryl said. "Your place, or…?"
"Yours," Ephram said, not taking his eyes from the shining stars.
Darryl led the way. Opened the door for both of them. Hemmed and hawed a bit more. Constance scarcely noticed, as Ephram was lacing up her brain with soft snakes of pleasure, making the feelings slither down her spine and through her groin and up again to nest thickly over the empty place that she used to call her Heart… so she couldn't feel the emptiness… and she simply took off her clothes and drank some of Darryl's Blue Nun and then let him play with her body for awhile and then she rolled over on top of him…
"Oh yeah," he said, "I like it when a girl's on top."
Constance not thinking, just doing, with Ephram's star-glimmery fingers inside her brain like a hand fitting perfectly into a glove; Constance slipping Darryl's penis inside her (rewarded with a blaze of pleasure that made her arch her back, which Darryl mistakenly took for something she got from him) and reached behind her to Ephram as he stepped from the bathroom to give her the knife…
The room was dark except for the pushy crowding motion of the TV light and a deader shine that came in through the white-curtained window. Not far away, outside, the freeway made noises. Different cars and trucks had their different pitches. Sometimes a big semi sent a faint shake through the building. The light from a Pizza Hut sign – one of the really amazingly high signs towering to be seen from the freeway – shone through the curtains in one corner of the window, and you could see wavery red outlines of some of the letters on the motel room wall. She could make out a P and a Z and an H and a T. Darryl had the wall-mounted colour TV on near the foot of the bed, MTV with the sound turned off, one of those fast-edited designer jeans commercials came on, and then Downtown Julie Brown with her hand on her hip, mincing and prancing, wubba-wubba, and then a Sting video (she wished she could watch it, she always thought Sting was cute… a flash of punishment for that… then a rewarding flush of pleasure as she thought: No, I'd rather fuck this guy and use the knife). And the noise of a crying baby and angry voices and slamming car doors from the parking lot and a thin honking from the freeway; a splinter of light from a truck flashing its highbeams, caught and spun through the Blue Nun bottle…
She cut off his nipples first. The knife was so sharp, they came off easily. The Niagara of pleasure that Ephram sent through him meshed with horror right in the middle of his face and the confusion was kind of funny (wasn't it?), a logjam of expressions and the blood welling prettily in the bluish TV light. Darryl, of course, briefly tried to escape but that was cut short by Ephram's ghost-hands working in the boy's brain, paralyzing him, then giving him a jolt of pleasure, making him giggle and making his face like The Joker, a horrible smile up to his ears almost, pasted there even when she starts to saw up the middle of his stomach with the knife, opening it up like with a can-opener (Next time, Ephram said, we will use a can-opener. and all the time her hips pumping on his cock which stayed hard because Ephram had control of that too, her vagina sucking, milking the semen out of him as the knife pulled the other lifebloods out of the belly and isn't it pretty inside, really, when you look at it just right and feel the molten wax of pleasure up your spine smothering your heart, and Just get into it, Constance told herself, it was the only way to get away from what you were doing, just nestle deep inside the pleasure that Ephram gave you…
Perhaps, Ephram thought, I'm going too far with her too soon… This is the third stupid young man in as many nights and Constance will be losing her brain's capacity for pleasure soon (remarkable how the brain never really lost the capacity for suffering: your delicious irony, my Lord) if he didn't ease up and give her time to restore herself… perhaps put her on some sort of tranquilizer for a few days… Ephram himself feeling the strain of controlling her and the men. Perhaps that strain making him careless, that and his greed for sensation. Three murders in three days along the same route. He really should get rid of the Porsche; he'd found himself putting it off, one gets attached to a fine car. Soon… With luck, the other two bodies hadn't been found yet. Yes, that's it girl, now put the knife in his hands and I'll make him suck on its wet blade so that the blade makes ribbons of his tongue…
Ephram, meanwhile, slipping up behind the girl and sliding his mercifully small member up into her anus.
Ha ha, if her father could see her now!
Ephram wondered briefly if the postcard he'd made her write had convinced the police she was just another runaway. It should have. He shouldn't have sent that one, though he'd made her cross out the signal she'd tried to send – and of course he'd punished her severely for that – but he'd been tired, feeling lazy, and they had no more stamps in the shop and he wanted to get it done so he'd sent it off instead of making another card. She'd scribbled over it well, so it shouldn't be a problem. So, he asked himself, why are you letting it nag at you? Concentrate on the pleasures at hand.
But there was another distraction: Ephram saw something from the corner of his eye, that made him freeze. Was it some errant shadow from the TV set?
He turned and looked, and saw it clearly. His cock shrank inside the girl. No, no shadow, or not a shadow merely: it was the Akishra.
He saw them swarming in through the window, wriggling with hideous purpose, ectoplasmic and urgent with hunger, sending out squirming feelers, scouts trying to locate him. The Astral Protection he'd put on himself was fading or… perhaps the girl had attracted them… perhaps she had some latent Power…
The Protection is not enough, at this close proximity, Ephram thought. They'll sense me. They'll know me.
I won't be enslaved again!
He drew back from the bed, doing up his pants, dragging the girl physically away from the dying man on the bed – and then jolting the man hard with a pleasure impulse, releasing the energy in him that would draw them over…
There. The cloud of wrigglers had drifted through the air, were hovering over the bed, descending to feed. They were a young, blind Mass of Akishra and they hadn't sensed Ephram or the girl yet – or anyway hadn't identified them. They were interested in the transmitter and the boy was transmitting beautifully now, his suffering and pleasure all murkily intermixed. The cloud of Akishra clothing him with their etheric maggotry. Oh Lord, the repulsiveness of their motion, how it ever sickened Ephram.
Now the boy's mind opened. He saw what had happened to him and he perceived the Akishra and his scream made the windows vibrate.
Ephram had got the girl roughly dressed and dragged her out the door. They fled across the parking lot. Behind them someone was shouting. The manager of the motel.
The police would find this particular stupid young man's body. Ephram had to get back to his motel and away before they came out to see who had left this horror… Too bad they couldn't see the Akishra, that'd cloud Ephram's trail, ha ha…
Well, it was not so grave, Ephram decided, when they'd got the car loaded and were away. No one had noticed them running away, evidently, for they were allowed to depart unmolested.
He put the girl to sleep, so that she slumped, snoring, in her seat, and he drove to the next cluster of generic motels and restaurants, for a rest before beginning again…