"Yes, but Doc told Trish that she was a freak. Anyway, Doc tried not to respond but he failed hopelessly, abysmally. He found out what he was missing. The discovery did not delight him, it enraged him. He broke his bonds and killed the woman and escaped."

"He had to kill her?" I said.

"No. That was what sent Doc into the first sickness of his life. He almost went insane after that; his conscience almost killed him. He had lost self-control, and committed two evil acts, for the first time and in rapid succession. First, the woman had made him lose his self-control by f.u.c.king him and then sucking him off. Second, his reaction to this resulted in another loss of self-control, and he had killed the woman as you would kill a chicken, by wringing the neck until the head came off. He confessed to Trish, a few years later when he met her, that he had an o.r.g.a.s.m when the blood jetted out of her neck. It splashed all over him and the room.

"He became very depressed and even suicidal for a year. He told no one what had happened. As far as his buddies were concerned, he had retired from society for a year to meditate and experiment. He went up to the Arctic Circle, somewhere in Canada, where he has a hideaway and stayed there for a long time. Then he came back with the intention of throwing himself into the battle against evil with a terrible fury. He would try to make up for what he had done by ridding the world of more evil.

"It was then that he met his cousin. Apparently, their fathers had not seen each other since they were teenagers. Trish's father had migrated from England to Canada and lost contact with the family. Doc's father also came from England but much later. It was only by accident that they met and then found out they were related.

"Doc and Trish fell in love. Doc told her all. Despite his moral prohibitions, he went to bed with her. She could take him, but it hurt her. She's a big girl with a small c.u.n.t, or so she said. Then Doc did a strange thing . . ."

"I saw that little Oriental greet him when he went into his house," I said. "She was very little."

I had not paid too much attention to her last few sentences. I had been thinking about his cousin and his accusations that I had murdered her. No wonder he hated me. But why did he think I had killed her?

"That's Patani. I hate her! She's so exquisite, so tiny and dainty. Don't worry. She won't try to take him into her c.u.n.t. She's a compulsive c.o.c.ksucker. That's why she and Doc always get together when they're here."

She played with my p.e.n.i.s for a while and then sucked on it a while. Again, it failed to respond. She said, "Have you really become impotent? No, that can't be so. You were crossing c.o.c.ks with Doc, like Robin Hood and Little John with their quarter-staffs on the bridge. Say! You haven't gone fairy, have you?"

I said, "No."

There was no use trying to explain something I did not understand myself. If I told her I could get an enormous erection and jet all over her if I killed her, I would have frightened her. Or at least made her uneasy. Few of those admitted to the caves frighten without great cause.

She asked me if I would at least take the edge off of her, and I said I would. There were plenty of other men who would have done more for her, and so I felt complimented that she would prefer less with me than more with others. I used two fingers on her until she had a number of o.r.g.a.s.ms, and I also rammed her with my tongue until she had a dozen more o.r.g.a.s.ms. Aside from my wife, Clara had the sweetest v.a.g.i.n.a I've ever tasted.

I felt excited but it was a numb excitement.

Clara kissed me-she seemed to enjoy the taste of her own c.u.n.t-and left me.

24.

I know that many of the aficionados of the romances about me will be shocked by what Clara and I did. Even outraged. My "biographer" has depicted me as a man of absolutely unyielding morality. According to him, I remained unswervingly chaste and faithful to my wife when being tempted by very beautiful and pa.s.sionate young women after I'd gone through long periods of continence. Many aficionados of these romances firmly believe the accounts of my superhuman-or neurotic-moral behavior. Perhaps they like to believe in a man who has the strength they lack.

On the other hand, many readers scoff at this att.i.tude. They deny that any well-s.e.xed man could resist such beauty under such conditions. Even the Victorians were not that Victorian.

The strange thing about this is that my biographer did not exaggerate or lie. When I got married (I knew little as yet of human customs), I gave my word I would be faithful to my wife. She elaborated on this after the ceremony and made me swear again that I would bed no other woman as long as we lived.

We did not know then, of course, about the Nine or the elixir. I understood her att.i.tude and what she required because The Folk have a similar att.i.tude. However, among The Folk, a male can have more than one wife at a time. And divorce is easy for both male and female.

There have been long periods when I was roaming the jungle or off on some expedition or other or on some mission for the Nine, and I did not see my wife. At these times, I have m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed. Or, for several years, in the jungle, I took along a pet, a beautiful female leopard. This was never written into his romances by my biographer. In fact, he never heard of it because I never told him. I liked him very much and did not want to offend him or to shatter his image of me any more than it had been by previous disclosures. He was one of the few really likeable humans I have known.

I fell in love with Kuta in an unconventional manner. Some day, I'll write about this peculiar man-feline relationship. The third year, she ran off with a male leopard, I suppose because I couldn't give her cubs. Or perhaps she could no longer endure her jealousy of my wife and was afraid that she would attack her. Up to the time that I first loved Kuta, in a glade on a mountainside shortly before dusk, she had been very fond of my wife.

I did not feel that I was breaking my vow by masturbating or by mounting Kuta. That vow only included human females. And certainly Clio would not be jealous of a leopardess. Or she shouldn't be. I did not, however, say anything about Kuta until after she deserted me. Clio and I were in our London house celebrating our 7th wedding anniversary and my birthday when I said something about it. It was November 21, 1920. We had been drinking champagne, and that was a mistake because I drink so seldom that a little, alcohol quickly uninhibits me. I told her about Kuta and so had to endure several hours of tears and verbal abuse. I finally managed to convince her that I had not been really unfaithful or committed a terrible crime against Nature. As far as I was concerned, the only crime against Nature was against my nature, which suffers when I don't have a frequent discharge of s.e.xual energy. In other words, if I don't come at least six times a week, I get nervous and mean.

She forgave me, or said she did, and she is very open and truthful, within limits. She forgave me because I had been raised by The Folk and so was not fully responsible for my "uncivilized" behavior. I said I took full responsibility, and my behavior could be justified far more by logic than hers could be. She ignored this and said that I must promise not to do any such thing again. Not only were humans off-limits, so were animals, no matter how beautiful and cooperative.

I asked her if that included "jacking off." She was startled and, also, red-faced. I told her about my masturbations. I was so "natural" about it, I suppose, that she overcame her inhibitions about it. After a few more gla.s.ses of bubbly, she confessed that she m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed, too, when I had been away for a long time. It took much courage for her to tell me this. She came from an upper middle-cla.s.s Southern family with a puritanical Protestant background. In addition, her black "mammy," who had raised her since she was six, was a very strict Southern Baptist. Despite which, Clio managed to grow into a pa.s.sionate not-particularly-prudish young woman with a tendency for what humans call "s.e.xual experimentation." And she was able to free herself of those crippling conditioned reflexes that humans call racial prejudices. At least, as much as any North American white is able.

(I digress. But I tell my story as I wish. Moreover, the reader won't understand me or those I love if he doesn't see us three-dimensionally.) Clio and I freely discussed our masturbations and the accompanying fantasies. She even made a joke about the size of the banana she needed to satisfy herself with after having had me for 7 years.

This vow of fidelity did not hold during a part of the year. It was suspended for whoever was attending the ceremonies in the caverns of the Nine. When we accepted the elixir of prolonged youth, we also had to accept certain conditions laid down by the Nine. We spoke once about it and after that ignored the subject. We had agreed that the elixir could not be purchased without a very high price. Nothing comes free. The price was worth it, or so we thought at the time. I had my doubts now and then, but they were not powerful.

Clara interrupted my thoughts by returning. She said, "I just ran into the little Thai. She was very upset. She said she felt repulsed by Doc. He looked so absolutely evil to her. Something has happened to him. He is not the same Doc she has known for so many years. So she just walked out on him."

I said, "Did he have a hard-on?"

"No, he never does unless you suck on him a while."

I thought of our meeting on the bridge.

Clara looked hard at me for a moment and then said, "I had an uneasy feeling when we started to make love, John. Or I should say when I started to make love. You had changed, too. It wasn't just the soft-on. Do you know, you're evil, too!"

This was a peculiar thing for her to say. I wanted to ask her more about her feelings but she left quickly.

The silence had to be filled with my thoughts. They buzzed like flies in a dead mouth.

It seemed to me that anybody who accepted the gift of the Nine, and so accepted their terms, was, in some measure, evil. It was true that the Nine had never required me to do anything which I thought of as evil. As yet. They had the power, by the terms, to ask me to do anything they wished.

I thought of the inevitable parallel, the story of Faust and the devil. Faust, however, made a sorry bargain, a short-termed one, and regretted it. We, however, if we were lucky, would live for at least 30,000 years, and, once dead, that was the end of it. Also, some of us would probably become members of the Nine, because even they died now and then. The last one had died 2000 years ago, and one of the servants of the Nine had taken his place. The next vacancy might not be for another 2000 years or it might be today.

I would say that to be offered a multimilleniaed youth is to be tempted irresistibly. I can picture a mentally sick person, a depressed person, or a very old person, rejecting the offer. But not anyone who loves life.

Why should the Nine share this prolonged life with others? I suppose because the elixir is far more binding than money. And also because the Nine believe in tradition, in the continuity of their secret body of people, the oldest by far of any bodies.

The intercom buzzed nine times, and the Speaker's voice began to call our names. Mine was fifth. Caliban's was eighth. By this alone, I knew something unusual was happening. In the 48 years I had been attending, no more than one pilgrim at a time went into the ceremony cave.

25.

The entrance was carved out of rock, delta-shaped, and only large enough to admit one at a time. It was a tight squeeze for me.

The cave was well-lit only in the center. Elsewhere, it was dim dusk for the s.p.a.ce of a few yards and then blackness. The rough granite floor sloped downwards from all sides to the center. At the bottom was a tiny lake of black water, and in its center was a truncated cone of large rough-hewn oaken blocks and beams. On top of the island, which was about twelve feet high, was a circular oaken table, a ring. Inside the ring were nine high-backed intricately carved oak and ash chairs. The Nine entered through a trapdoor in the middle of the wooden cone.

The ceiling was covered with darkness except in the center, where nine ma.s.sive crystaline stalact.i.tes hung down, like glowing hanged men, from the night of the ceiling. The light came from nine giant torches of wood and pitch projecting from moveable stone pillars set around the edges of the platform top.

We lesser beings stood on the slope-there were no chairs for us-throughout the ceremony. There was silence except for the inevitable coughing, occasioned by nervousness, not colds, since those who drink the elixir have no physical diseases. We were not allowed to speak except in reply to the Nine.

After a long time, the Speaker came up through the hole in the island and stood to one side of the chairs, leaning his staff with its ankh and hannunvaakuna outwards from him.

Slowly, one by one, the Nine appeared from the hole and took their a.s.signed chairs. The last to appear was the most important, the old woman Anana.

Only eight of the Nine were here. The chair just to the right of Anana's was empty. It belonged to the giant white-bearded old man who wore a double-headed raven headpiece and a black patch over a good eye. We knew him only as XauXaz.

The eight were dressed in their monkish robes, but the hoods were hanging behind their necks, and they wore their headpieces. Anana's was the head of a wild sow, and the others wore the heads of a bear, a wolf, a hyena, a ram, a jaguar, a badger, and an elk.

The woman Anana looked us over for a long time. I have been close to her many times, so I knew that she looked as if she were 125 and kept Death away only by scaring him. I had reason to believe that she was 30,000 years.

Finally, she gestured at the Speaker. He walked to the empty chair beside her and lifted from its seat what the shadows had hidden. It was the two-headed raven headpiece of XauXaz. He placed it on the table before the chair and stamped the end of his staff against the oaken floor so that it boomed nine times.

He cried out in English in a loud voice that echoed back from the murkiness, "XauXaz has gone to his ancestors, as all must, even the Nine!"

The others picked up small stone cups and drank from them and set them down. There was another silence. Apparently, this was to be all that would be said about XauXaz, who had sat in that chair, or one like it elsewhere, for at least 5000 years and perhaps for three times that long. The Nine may have had a previous ceremony during which they genuinely mourned him. I do not know. But when with us, they acted as if they believed in ceremony, but in a short one, only.

Anana seemed to shrink within herself, physically, though the force of her personality did not diminish. I was not joking when I said she was holding Death off by scaring him. I do not frighten easily, but I am very uneasy when in her presence.

After another painfully long pause, she stirred. She looked to her right at Ing, the old man who wore a bear's head, and to her left at Iwaldi, the gnomish old man who wore a badger's head. These two, with XauXaz, were, I believe, the oldest after Anana. I do not know what their age is, but I have been close enough more than once to hear the language which the three men spoke only among themselves. And I know enough of Indo-European linguistics to recognize several of the words. I have read them, in their hypothetical and reconstructed forms, though I had not, of course, heard them spoken by a native speaker. Until then, that is.

One word was "weraz," and the other was "taknwaz." I believe that these meant, respectively, "man" and "precious object." Ing, Iwaldi, and XauXaz were speaking a dialect of Primitive Germanic. This is the tongue from which is descended the modern Norse, English, High and Low German languages, and, earlier, Old English, Old Norse, Prankish, Gothic, Old Saxon, and so on.

The others ranged from seeming octogenarians to those who looked no more than 50. I knew something of each, since I had had contact daily for several weeks when I had been Speaker. One was a Hebrew born shortly before 1 A.D. Two were Mongolian but spoke a language between themselves I could not identify. One was a very old, very huge Negro, and he sometimes talked to himself in a language that I am sure is the ancestor of all the Bantu tongues of modern Africa. The seventh looked as if he were a North American Indian. He also looked so Mongolian, however, that he could be an Olmec of ancient Mexico. Ing looked Nordic. Iwaldi was a dark-skinned dwarf with very broad shoulders, a huge head, slight epicanthic folds, long thick gnarled arms, great hands like the roots of an oak tree, and very short thick bowed legs. His white hair fell to his b.u.t.tocks, and his white beard to his knees. He looked as if he belonged to a very different stock of Caucasian. Yet he spoke Primitive Germanic with Ing and XauXaz and seemed very close to them, as if they had known each other for a long time and had unusually common interests.

Anana said, "The mourning is over for us. And the chair is still empty. Who shall sit in the High's seat?"

The torches flickered on the naked men and women standing on the downslope. The light was dim, yet I could see that skin of the woman near me was goose-pimpled. It may have been the cold dampness of the cavern or the antic.i.p.ation-apprehensive-of the ceremony, or it may have been the suddenly increased tension from Anana's words. We knew, without having been told, that one of us was going to be nominated for a seat with the Nine.

I had counted 49 people, including myself. There were, I knew, many more than that in the organization. These people must be those whom the Nine considered their best candidates. Doctor Caliban stood on my left about 20 feet away. There was nothing between us to block the view. I studied him during the silence. He was indeed a magnificent man. By the peculiar light of the torches, he looked more than ever like a bronze statue. He was not, however, h.e.l.lenic. No Athenian sculptor would have created a male figure so divinely proportioned except for the genitals. They were gargantuan, and, for some reason, the p.e.n.i.s was half-erect. It was of a far darker bronze than the surrounding skin, being engorged with blood.

At that moment, the statue came to life. Caliban shifted his weight to his left leg, and a second later he turned his head slightly and looked out of the corners of his eyes at me. His gaze was downward; a slight smile-not amused-made fluid the corners of the lips and the eyes seemed to light up from an inner explosion. This was, of course, an illusion of the flickering torchlight.

I looked down. Not until that moment had I realized that my hatred and my desire to kill him had erected my p.e.n.i.s. I also realized that my own skin was almost as bronzish as Caliban's, even to the darker bronze of the p.e.n.i.s.

The Danish countess, Clara, was staring at my erection. She was undoubtedly wondering why she had failed and what there was in this situation to arouse me.

The Speaker thumped his staff on the oaken floor again. It was as if a stalact.i.te had fallen. Almost everybody jumped. I did; I react swiftly to stimuli unless I have some reason to control myself. Caliban did not jump. He merely smiled on seeing my response, and he looked utterly savage as he did so, and then he turned his head to look back at the Nine.

The Speaker told us, briefly, what we would do. Because of the death of XauXaz, we would go through the ceremony in the presence of the other servants. All except two would experience the same ceremony as before. These two were the final candidates, chosen from the group in this cavern. If the two candidates did not meet the requirements of the Nine, if both failed, then other candidates would be chosen from the rest of the group. That, however, would be at a later time, since the test would occupy the two for a while.

Silence fell again like a piece of darkness from the ceiling. The Nine seemed to be thinking of other things. Perhaps they were remembering the last time a new man had taken a seat.

The cry of the Speaker cracked the darkness.

"Lord Grandrith! Doctor Caliban! Approach! Wade through the waters! Climb the Tree to the Table of the G.o.ds!"

We walked down the slope and into the lake. The waters were cold. The blood in my legs jelled, quivered, and was dead. This deadness went up my legs, up my thighs, and then the waters covered my t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and my p.e.n.i.s, which had lost its swelling as soon as it hit the water. The t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es tried to retreat into the cavity of my belly, and then they froze. My bowels became ice. The lower part of my spine was a tree with roots exposed to the Arctic sea.

Climbing up the oak logs to the top of the structure did not thaw me much. The ascent was not easy because of the partial paralysis and because the logs were slimy. I don't know what was the ultimate fate of anyone who slipped back into the water and then could not make the climb.

Caliban and I got to the top at the same time. At the low-voiced direction of the Speaker, we stood side by side and faced Anana across the table. She looked even more wrinkled than I remembered her, as if Time had folded up her face like a bag and then, changing his mind, had unfolded it to give her a chance to live longer. The dark blue eyes in that face like a fist were bright, however. And deep. The many thousands of years had drilled far into the region behind the eyes. There was something ineffably sphinx-like about her, and, at the same time, something unidentifiable. That nameless quality was frightening. She, and three others of the Nine, are the only human beings that ever made me feel touched with fear. These four may not be human. When a man lives past a thousand years, he may become more-or less-than human.

Anana's voice was a whisper. She spoke in English with echoes of a tongue that perished long before bronze was invented.

"What is your quarrel with him, Grandrith?"

I believed that she knew very well what my quarrel was. She probably knew far more than I, since she would also have the facts about Caliban. Also, I was beginning to wonder if she was not, in part at least, responsible for the state in which Caliban and I were enmeshed.

The Speaker bellowed out her question. The words flew back from the distant walls like invisible bats.

I said, "Caliban attacked me without provocation."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bronze figure shudder a little.

"Did you, Caliban?"

The Speaker shouted her words.

"No. He lies."

The Speaker repeated in a voice like a bull's, "No. He lies!"

I was beginning to get irritated by the thunderish repet.i.tions and the bat-like echoes, which seemed to jeer. Ordinarily, such things do not bother me. The unusualness of the ceremony, its unknown and possibly sinister development, the irrational motives for Caliban's hatred, my desire to kill him and get him out of the way, and my nervousness to get to England to protect Clio combined to make me abnormally sensitive.

Anana said, "Why did you attack Grandrith?"

"He raped and murdered my cousin, Trish Wilde."

"You know this to be a fact?"

"She was with a botanical expedition near the Uganda-Kenya border. A naked man ran into the camp at night, knocked Trish out, and carried her off. Some of the natives identified the man as Grandrith. They tried to follow but lost the trail. They did run across two natives who had seen Grandrith raping my cousin."

He paused, and a sound like a suppressed sob came from him.

"They interrupted him; he took off with Trish over his shoulder, running like an antelope. She's a big woman, weighs 150 pounds. Who else could carry her off like that? And then Trish's colleagues found her two days later . . . what was left . . . the hyenas and the vultures . . ."

He drew in a deep breath, but his face was expressionless.

"There must have been enough to identify her."

"Only bones. Her skull was missing. But the bones were those of a Caucasian female of her age, that is, twenty-five, in appearance. Actually, she's sixty."

"The skull was never found?"

"No. It's presumed a hyena or perhaps a leopard carried it off."

"Do you know anything of Grandrith?" Anana said.