She was h.o.r.n.y. Inexplicably and irrepressibly h.o.r.n.y.

She kneaded her own breast, feeling the swollen nipple. Next her fingers walked down and rubbed the little b.u.t.ton of her s.e.x, then plucked it, twirled it, as though it too were a nipple. The sensation was delicious. Suddenly her mind filled with the most lewd imagery, a recollection from that video of her father's, Little Oral Annie, but at once it shifted slightly, to Little Oral Penelope. In her mind she saw her mouth stuffed with erections, one after another, b.a.l.l.s slapping her chin. She sucked and sucked, and one after another, each p.e.n.i.s slid out of her mouth at the crisis-point, emptying lines of sperm into her face. She let the bitter sauce run warmly down her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as her hand raced at her s.e.x. An inexplicable feeling was mounting in her-more images a.s.saulted her: ma.s.sive, veined p.e.n.i.ses whacking in and out of her v.a.g.i.n.a like mindless pistons of meat, then tremoring, then filling her to overflowing with more delicious, wet heat...

Something clicked.

The images abandoned her, replacing the unbidden l.u.s.t with an edgy curiosity. What had that sound been? And, more importantly...

Where am I? she thought. A house? A bas.e.m.e.nt? Where exactly had Professor Besser taken her?

She seemed to be lying in a narrow, dark room whose confines were etched very dimly in orange and silver light. And what were those things above her? She turned her head, looking up. Shelves? she thought. They looked like b.u.t.ts of bottles in a wine rack, so maybe she was in someone's bas.e.m.e.nt. The things in the rack glinted like gla.s.s in the dim, orange light.

Voices suddenly rang in her head like bells.

-Penelope!

-Penelope! We promised you a great destiny.

-Oh, you're so lucky! We wish we could be you!

-We love you, Penelope!

The voices were a madness in her ears. They blurred from side to side like stereo. They were the woman's voice, the woman who'd been in her car, the woman in black.

-We have a great silver lord, and you've made him very happy!

-Yes!

-And now it's time for us to fulfill our promise.

The slush voices blanked, replaced by a vast, amplified silence. Penelope could hear her heart, her eyes blinking, her blood as it pulsed through her veins. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and s.e.x throbbed in the remnants of her s.e.xual fantasizing.

Distantly a door opened. A bent block of light lolled across the floor. The orangish hue disappeared altogether, leaving only what she guessed must be moonlight. A figure came into the room, tiny in the distance and crisply black. It cast no shadow.

More and more Penelope felt pleasantly drugged. There was only lethargy and the intense, primitive horniness that made no sense. The figure stood at her feet now. Penelope recognized it at once as the woman in the black cape and hood, yet now she seemed younger and thin, like a girl in p.u.b.erty. The white, smiling face gazed down through onyx black sungla.s.ses.

-We wish we could be you.

But why should she wear sungla.s.ses indoors? And, yes, she was very young, for her cape fell open and revealed small, predeveloped b.r.e.a.s.t.s and a hairless pubis.

Suddenly the girl seemed very sad.

Penelope was not herself and never would be. Images of s.e.x remained stuffed into her head, stupefyingly precise. How could such thoughts, once terrifying, once her worst fears, now delight her to madness? Penelope, a virgin, cringed to be f.u.c.ked.

-I have what you want right here. Our master's gift.

"What?" Penelope was finally able to speak.

-YES, came the voice. But this voice was ragged and black. The single word concussed in her head.

It was a man's voice.

Penelope moaned. She quivered in heat. The dim, silverish light seemed to smother her in l.u.s.t.

The girl set something down and backed away. -We wish we could be you, she said sadly. Then she left.

Was someone breathing? Penelope heard a noise.

Grunting, she propped herself on her elbows. She looked past her bare feet at what the girl had left.

It was a bucket. It was just a bucket.

She fixed her eyes on it. The sound grew louder. It reminded her of gurgling, of respiration. Then- Did something bulge over the bucket's rim?

The gurgling quickly rose to an excited, wet sputtering. The bucket began to rock back and forth, over and over- -until it tipped over.

A large puddle of dark slop poured out of the pail. It seemed brown, shining; it shifted slightly. Clumps of gurgling bubbles escaped its amorphous center. The ma.s.s floundered; it seemed to be straining upward...

Within the ma.s.s, a pair of lopsided white lumps emerged.

They were eyes.

It's seeing me, Penelope slowly realized. Though merely blobs bereft of pupil and iris, these floating white lumps were seeing her.

The thing was staring at her. Did it desire her? Did her raw, sweating nakedness excite this...this thing? She thought so, for next it strained upward again, with much more force. Streams of bubbles spurtled out below the two white lumps.

Penelope giggled. She wished she could touch the atrocious ma.s.s. She wanted to put her feet in it and draw the bubbling slop between her legs, coddle the lumpy gelatin. The woman in black must be a witch, she thought, and giggled again, Witches. Devils. What else could explain the percolating thing before her? The woman in black must be a witch, and she'd conjured up this devil from h.e.l.l.

But why?

Now Penelope realized what the ma.s.s of glop was straining to do. It surged upward again. It held there, shaking. Then, something gave- -and it stood up.

It stood before her like a man. In relief, it shivered. It had a lumplike head, stringy brown legs, and arms that sagged nearly to the floor.

-YES, she heard.

And the woman: -Yes!

The thing's erection stood out like a knotted post.

Penelope sighed.

The thing chuckled.

In hitching, dripping slowness, it knelt sloppily between her legs and lay on her in a delicious, warm weight. Penelope cooed, already beginning to tremor in o.r.g.a.s.m. Pa.s.sions merged like intent plumes of flame; beauty and revulsion coalesced.

Then the face of held together muck lowered, dripping, and gave Penelope a big wet hot lumpy kiss...

CHAPTER 10.

At the precise moment that a grossly maladjusted redhead named Penelope was, with much delight, losing her virginity to a man shaped cohesion of slop, an old joke p.r.o.ne conservative business major named Tom stepped into his dormitory room on the eighth floor of Clark Hall and witnessed what, within minutes, would describe the end of his life. What he saw, exactly, was an attractive woman sitting on his desk, wearing only a white blouse and high heeled shoes. That's right-no skirt, no panties. And what this woman was doing, exactly, was masturbating. To say the least, this struck Tom as an oddity. When you walked into your dorm room well past 2 A.M., the very last thing you expected to see was an attractive woman sitting on your desk masturbating. No, you did not expect that at all. Especially when the woman was Winnifred Saltenstall, the wife of the dean of Exham College.

Earlier Tom had stopped at the campus police station to see if his friend Jervis Phillips had involuntarily checked in for the night. The night cop, a rather bulbous young man known as Porker, was applying Giant brand peanut b.u.t.ter to a row of English m.u.f.fins. He was using an ice cream scoop instead of a spoon.

"Excuse me, Officer Porker," Tom said. "Anyone booked tonight?"

"No," Officer Porker replied. He seemed addled by this intrusion. "You want to be the first?"

"Not really. Say, I saw in the Sears ad that they're having a sale this week on backyard sheds."

"So?"

"Thought you might want to know, in case you're in the market for a new lunch box."

Porker stopped clicking the scoop. "My patience is getting thin."

"Yeah, but the rest of you sure isn't."

"You've got about a second to get out of here, McGuire."

"A second? It'd take you that long just to get out of the chair."

"That's it." Porker began to get up.

"All right, I'm leaving." But Tom paused at the door. He could not resist. "Hey, Porker, here's an old one. How do you get your mother into an industrial freight elevator?"

"How?" Porker asked.

"You grease the doorway and throw in a Twinkie!"

Tom roared laughter. Porker grabbed his nightstick, yelling, "McGuire, I'm gonna kick your motherf.u.c.king-"

Tom boogied, revved the Camaro, and split. What else am I going to do with all these jokes? he rationalized.

But cruising down Campus Drive, his levity waned. The night seemed creepily dry of life. Hollowness followed him back to the dorm like a tailgater, and soon odd thoughts probed his mind, thoughts that seemed like someone else's, a mad person's, perhaps. Rhythms of words whose meanings made no sense creaked back and forth in his brain. He heard colors and saw screams. Then he saw something else, much more clearly: a murky shape in spattered moonlight-a man. The man's face was blacked out. He held a shovel in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.

Tom's stomach shimmied. He cringed at the image, almost veered off Pickman Way. One too many Spatens, he dismissed.

This, of course, all tracked spoor back to the last significant event of Tom's evening. He rode the elevator up to 8. When he walked into his dorm room, what he heard was: -He's here.

What he saw was: Winnifred Saltenstall masturbating on his desk.

And what he said, after an appreciable pause, was: "What the h.e.l.l are you doing!"

Mrs. Saltenstall's face was flushed and lightly asweat. She'd been caught, not with her pants down, as the saying goes, but with them off. Her pose lost its tension, and she sat upright. "What's it look like I'm doing?" she answered huffily. "I'm masturbating."

Tom could only stare in disbelief. This situation required some consideration. When he finally spoke, the strain of forethought made the next sentence seem guillotined. "Why-is Dean Saltenstall's wife-masturbating-uh-on my-desk?"

"I hate just sitting around, Tom." She tossed her head, brushed back her hair. "I had to find something to do while we were waiting."

"Waiting for what!"

"For you," she said, and grinned.

Tom's head seemed to tick. He stalled again. Waiting?

"We knew you'd get here eventually. So we waited."

Waited. Get here. Waiting. "Then it was you in town. In Besser's De Ville."

"Uh huh," she admitted. "We were driving around-scouting, you might say. We were looking for a suitable enlistee."

"Why do you keep saying we? You mean you and Besser?"

"No, Dudley's busy right now." Winnifred's grin spread as wide as her legs had been. "He's helping our master."

Madness, Tom thought.

"We," she went on, "as in myself, and...her," Winnifred Saltenstall pointed into the dark. "Your new sister, Tom."

A shadow stood in the corner. Tom turned on the overhead. What stood there looking at him was a freakish hooded woman in a long black cloak and sungla.s.ses. She grinned...hideously.

Fluid giggles floated up, like kindergarten kids laughing.

Madness, Tom thought again.

"We need you, Tom," Winnifred said.

-You'll be happy with us. Our master will be very happy.

Both women stepped forward. Winnifred continued, "We're inviting you to take part in a miracle, Tom. We need you."

The woman in black kept giggling in abrupt, wet bursts. On and off, on and off, the giggling went, like the sped up cackle of a band of witches. The sound made Tom want to puke.

Winnifred was giggling too. Her spa.r.s.e trim of pubic hair showed unabashed, glistening from self excitation. A black pendant lay between her big, bloused b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It looked like an upside down cross. On her left hand was a square black ring. In her right hand she held-Tom's eyes bulged-a hammer.

The woman in black was holding something too. It looked small, slender, sharp. It looked like a nail.

A nail? A hammer?