The goat-boy narrowed his eyes to golden slits. The corners of his mouth turned down, showing the lower row of monstrous teeth.
"Show me," he said again.
Plainly he wasn't going to be toyed with any longer. He wanted to see what she had, and he wanted to see them now.
She didn't pretend that the horsemen's proximity was not of interest to her. What was the use? Everybody was in on this ridiculous game, the goat-boy included. He dropped his head a little, which should have been a sign for Tammy as to what he would do next, but she was too busy thinking about how long the Duke would take to get off his horse to realize that the goat-boy was making make a run at her. And by the time she did realize, he was already halfway there, and there was nothing between her bare breasts and his hands, his mouth, his teeth, but a prayer.
EIGHT
Fearing the worst, Todd let out a yell, and started racing across the muddy, bloody ground to do whatever he could to stop the goat-boy attacking Tammy. But before he could get there she had taken matters into her own hands. She let the last of the six buttons slip, and her blouse fell open, unveiling her breasts. The sight of them literally stopped the Devil's child in his tracks. He opened his mouth and drool ran from it.
Tammy was smart enough not to reject this sign of adoration, however crude. Instead, she opened her arms, inviting him into her embrace. Todd would have betted against the wisdom of this. The goat-boy was no sentimentalist. He wanted to play rough. But had he made that bet, he would have lost it.
The Devil's child fell to his knees, laughing. Then he crawled -- yes, crawled -- into Tammy's arms. His hands went greedily up to one of her breasts, and he held the unwieldy bubble of flesh before his eyes for a moment of devotion. His mouth was slick and wet; the saliva glinted off his terrible teeth.
"Please God ... " Todd murmured.
It was very possibly the strangest sensation of Tammy's thirty-four years, the feeling of the Devil's child's mouth around her left nipple. There had been a moment -- as he closed his mouth around her -- when it had crossed her mind that she should be afraid; that with one chomp he could give her an instant mastectomy if he so chose. But somehow she knew he would not. He was in love with her breasts. Instead he worshipped them, in his way. Though his mouth was tight around her flesh, she felt not so much as the lightest of scratches from those shark-like teeth. In fact she suspected he'd somehow sheathed them, the way a snake sheathed its fangs, because as he sucked and sucked all she felt was a slightly guilty rush of pleasure as his suction drew the blood to the nipple, and the flesh surrounding the nipple, sensitizing the entire area.
Then, as though all this weren't peaceful and domestic enough, the Devil's child closed his eyes, his fat little hands holding the source of his bliss, and Tammy gently rocked him in her arms.
Goga had been searching for Lilith's child for many centuries now, under a sky that -- though it was sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear -- always showed the sun eclipsed. He had no real idea of how long his imprisonment in the Devil's Country had lasted; his mind had long ago lost any grasp on the passage of time. He and his men had passed the centuries in a kind of fugue state. Sometimes, when they rested and ate what they'd hunted-rabbit on occasion, or venison, or wild pig-they would talk about what had happened to them that day on the hunt, and where they now were. It was the Duke's opinion that this was not a real place at all, but a kind of dream that the Devil was dreaming, and they were trapped in it. How else to explain the curious limitations of their condition? The same ships forever heading towards the horizon, the same roads haunted by the same beasts; the same sun in the same heaven, half-blinded by the same black moon?
But in the last few days -- if days and nights could truthfully be said to pass here -- there had been signs that things were changing in what had been hitherto a virtually changeless place. There had always been strangers coming and going (trapped, the philosophizing Duke surmised, in the same infernal dream they found themselves in). But whereas in the past visitors had little or no effect upon the world they were wandering through, the trespassers of recent times had not been quite so guileless or so lucky. Several had perished in the region around the forest.
And now -- as if all this were not strange enough -- a new spectacle, stranger by some measure than all that had preceded it:
Sitting beside the road -- nursing the object of their long search as though he were a commonplace baby -- was a bare-breasted woman.
The Duke dismounted a few yards from where Tammy sat in the dirt, rocking the goat-boy in her arms. His lieutenants had dismounted several horse-lengths away, and were now creeping around the nursing woman, swords drawn.
Tammy saw all of this, but she registered nothing -- not a word, not the raising of a finger -- for fear of alerting the contented child to the fact that his time in this idyllic state was about to end.
Very cautiously, the Duke approached the woman and child, beckoning to his men to take their final positions. One of the men had brought a wooden box; clearly his own crude handiwork which he now opened and positioned behind the pair.
The goat-boy didn't open his eyes, but he pulled his mouth away from Tammy's breast long enough to say: "You don't all have to creep around like that. I know what you're up to." He'd no sooner spoken than his interest in the Duke's men was forgotten again and he was back to stroking the ample flesh in front of him. "Beautiful," he said to Tammy. "Do you have names for your tits?"
"Names?" Tammy said. "Actually, no."
"Oh you should. They're amazing." He kissed them, first left, then right, then left again, tender, affectionate kisses: "May I name them myself?" He asked this question with the greatest delicacy, stumbling over the words. Plainly the last thing he would have wished to do is cause offense.
"Of course." she said.
"I may? Oh thank you. Then this must be Helena, who I sucked on, and this one I'll call Beatrice." He looked at Tammy, framed by her breasts. "And you? Who are you?"
"Tammy."
"Just Tammy?"
"Tammy Jayne Lauper."
"I'm Qwaftzefoni," the goat-boy said. "Are you on the run from somebody, Tammy?"
"I was, I suppose, in a way."
"Who?"
"My husband Arnie."
"He doesn't appreciate you?"
"No."
The goat-boy began to lick Helena and Beatrice, again big sloppy tounguings that made Tammy shudder with pleasure.
"No children?" he said in the middle of a stroke.
"No. Arnie can't ... "
"But you could, Tammy." He lay his head against her pillows. "Believe me, I know about these things. You're fertile as the Nile. As soon as you get pregnant these beautiful mammaries will become milk-machines. And your children will be strong and healthy, with strong, healthy hearts, like you." Finally, he opened his eyes just a slit, his gaze first settling on her face then slipping sideways, to get a glimpse of the cage. "So what's your opinion?" he said to her.
"About what?"
"Should I give myself up, or let the chase go on?"
"What happens if you give yourself up?"
"I go home. With my mother, Lilith. Back to Hell."
"Isn't that where you should be?"
"Yes, I suppose so. But how would you feel if I said you should be back with Arnie?"
"Oh no ... "
"So, you understand," he said, running an appreciative palm over the smooth globes, then putting his head down between them, his chin in the groove. "Sometimes you just have to get away, at least for a while. But you know, now that I lie here, I think, maybe it's time to give up. I've been running for years. Never let anybody lay a finger on me. Until you." His voice, already low, went to a barely audible whisper, almost a hiss. "Are they very close now?" he said.