They walked past Kensington Round Pond, and the twilight deepened. It was indeed a long time since Gabriel had strolled in the park, because he was pleasantly surprised by the lack of people.
It was not until they had reached the statue of Peter Pan that he remembered why lovers did not linger in the tree-enchanted, grass-held twilight. And by then it was too late.
The prepubes must have been stalking them for several minutes. Gabriel had been aware of odd little noises, but had idiotically dismissed them merely as twilight sounds. When the rush came, he and Camilla were taken completely by surprise.
The prepubes closed in on them like a human noose, tightening round them then dragging them to the ground. Gabriel could not see Camilla, though he could hear her muffled cries.
Prepubes of both sexes were sitting on his legs, his arms, his chest, his head. Busy little fingers were going through his pockets.
“No jackpot,” piped a thin and possibly female voice. “Only about thirty in paper money, a clip of cab tokens, and a little box with pills in it. The box might bring a piece of the old folding.”
“What are the pissing pills?”
“Dunno.”
“Hi, buster.” A prepube removed her bottom from Gabriel’s face. “What are the pissing pills?”
Gabriel raised his head with an effort. He could see parts of Camilla. She, too, was held down expertly by several prepubes. A very small child sat carelessly on her head. A boy of perhaps twelve was tearing at her dress and pinching her breasts.
“Hi, buster!” The foot connected heavily and painfully with Gabriel’s ribs. “About the pissing pills.”
“Aspirin,” he said cautiously. He was rewarded with another kick.
“That so? Then suck some and get cool.”
Gabriel struggled, but cruel little fingers pinched is nostrils, forced his mouth open and popped some InSex tablets in. He did not know how many. He stopped struggling. He began to breathe very heavily. He shivered. He wanted to loosen his clothes. He wanted to die. He felt drunk. His head rattled with terrifyingly erotic images. He felt explosive with desire. He knew he was developing the greatest, the most insatiable, the most implacable erection in the world. He was lost in a red, red mist.
“Holy Beatles!” exclaimed a joyous and childish voice from far, far away. “It’s InSex. Give me one!”
“And me!”
“I want it too!”
“Don’t drop the pissing box or we lose the pissing InSex!”
“Give a shot each to the titters!”
“Let’s feed this joker’s dolly.”
Briefly the mist cleared for Gabriel. Something demonstrably and violently female lay beneath him. It moved, it writhed, it moaned. It blew desire to a white heat. Gabriel strained and jerked and groaned. The body beneath him was pulled away. Then it writhed and clawed its way back. Or was it another body? He did not know. He did not care. He was surrounded by writhing, gasping, straining bodies. And he did not know and he did not care. The terrible compulsion was all that mattered — all that was real at the centre of a hot dark moist erectile universe.
Mercifully, the overload of InSex did not allow him to remain even semi-conscious for long. He slipped down into a pulsing limbo, his body jerking mechanically long after his mind had surrendered to oblivion.
When at last he returned to reality, he was stiff and cold and filled with a thousand aches and all the horror of returning fragments of memory.
The air was still and cold. There was a high, full moon. And nearby, there were two bodies lying familiarly close to each other on the grass. One was Camilla, the other a prepube — a boy of perhaps eleven or twelve. They had their hand tightly round each other’s throat. They felt very cold.
Camilla’s clothing had been torn to shreds. There were scratches and bruises all over her body, blood on her abdomen. Her mouth was wide open, her tongue protruded, and she stared in sightless wonder at the moon.
Numbly, Gabriel removed the prepube’s hands from her throat. Numbly he raised her haid, pressing it to his breast, kissing the damp hair, stroking the cold forehead, rocking back and forth as one long cry of anguish exploded from the depths of his being.
He sat there, cold, mindless and tormented, nursing Camilla, weeping and mumbling incomprehensible endearments to her while the moon passed slowly across the sky. He sat ther nursing his dead love until the noise of a low, patrolling proc chopper jerked him back into the world of reality. He saw the proc chopper’s searchlight sweeping sysematically across the park.
Then he had the good sense to kiss Camilla for the last time very gently, gently lay her down — then run.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Utterly traumatized, and without knowing how he accomplished it, Gabriel managed to make his way back to the apartment in Shepherd’s Bush. Eustace was dead, and Camilla was dead, but P 939 went marching gaily on. It was all a joke. Dead funny. A monstrous joke conceived perhaps by some perverted supergitt upstairs to provide a few moments of divinely infernal amusement.
Gabriel wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to want to bang his head on the wall, cut this throat, destroy hordes of nameless prepubes. He could do nothing — because he was traumatized and insanely tranquil and horribly alone.
He began to drink. He did not eat, but he began to drink. Daylight came, then darkness, then more daylight, then more darkness. He went to sleep on the floor only when he was too drunk to stay conscious. He went to the bathroom only to pee or be sick. He went out of the apartment only to buy more vodka, gin, brandy or whatever.
He looked like a zombie. People avoided him in the street. The charlie at the wine shop wondered whether to call the procs, but Gabriel, a bleary-eyed automaton, dropped enough folding money to pay for the booze ten times over. The wine charlie did not call the procs but merely prayed for another visit soon.
Returning from one of his whisky forays, Gabriel literally bumped into Dr. Slink, returning bright-eyed, uplifted, renewed, purged and dedicated from a P.U.L. service personally conducted by Brother Peter who had emerged like a butterfly from the Karamazov caterpillar she had formerly known to become the Son of Man. The butterfly no longer seemed to have any connection at all with the caterpillar. Brother Peter was no more, no less than Brother Peter — the way to Perfect Universal Love.
Horrified by Gabriel’s appearance, Dr. Slink managed to steer him into her apartment. She decided that he, too, could use a shot of Perfect Universal Love. At first Gabriel would not talk, or perhaps he had been struck dumb. Dr. Slink tried to get his wife, but there was no answer. So, intending to call the meds, she put Gabriel to bed after a fashion and tried to clean him up.
He was dirty and hairy and he smelled of sweat and urine, and he would not be separated from the whisky bottle clutched tightly in his hand. But Perfect Universal Love gave Dr. Slink the strength to cope.
She nursed him against her ample breast like a baby, while the whisky slopped over them both. Presently, miraculously, Gabriel began to speak. It was an act of confession — a drunken addendum to Supergitt’s monstrous joke.
In slurred, barely comprehensible words, Gabriel told all. He told her about Eustace and the animals, and about P 939, and St. Paul’s and Epping Forest and InSex and the great crusade.
He told Dr. Slink how he had deliberately infected her, and how the disease of non-aggression was spreading across the world. He told her how he and Camilla had gone for a walk in Kensington Gardens and how it had ended in the dirtiest most perverted joke Supergitt could devise.