Gibson was a little surprised when she closed the door; he couldn't really believe that she intended to remain through the night with him on so brief an acquaintance. He picked up the book and leafed through it, doing his best to look casual. "I'm sure I will. I could sleep on a cement floor if I had to."
Christobelle dimmed the bedside light and turned back the covers; then she started unbuttoning her shirt. Gibson glanced up and raised a questioning eyebrow. "You look as though you're planning to stay?"
She grinned at him, "Unless you have an objection."
Gibson sat down on the bed."No objection at all. I just didn't expect it."
Christobelle wasn't wearing a bra.
"Didn't you think that well-brought-up English girls did this sort of thing? "
Gibson chuckled.
"Hell, no, I've met a few well-brought-up English women in my time. They didn't act any different to anyone else."
"So why the look of amazement? You must have had girls throwing themselves at you all the time."
"Windemere isn't going to be put out by us being here like this?"
"Why should he?"
"I was wondering how he might feel about a total stranger debauching with his secretary."
"Listen, Gibson, Gideon Windemere's secretary debauches with whom the hell she wants. Don't you forget that."
She was sliding the leather miniskirt over her hips. Her panties were plain black cotton. She sat down beside him and put her lips close to his ear. "If you want to, you can look at it as just a little more dreamstate reinforcement. Or put it down to the tact that, when I was little, I always wanted to be a groupie."
Gibson could reel the warmth of her breath, and he needed no further urging.
After all that he'd been through, making love to Christobelle Lacey was close to a hallucinatory experience. He was beyond exhaustion and far from certain that he'd be able to respond at all. Fortunately, Christobelle seemed to have no reservations about taking control, and Gibson was more than happy to relax and leave himself in her capable hands, lips, arms, mouth, and all the other parts of her body that continuously drifted in and out of his soft-focus opium half-dream. She moved against him sinuously. She stretched and writhed. There was muscular, feline joy in each slow variation of her movement. She was a jaguar crouching over him, purring and sighing, hot breath on his face. Momentarily, her teeth clamped into the flesh of his shoulder, and he later tasted blood on her lips. As if from a great distance, he could hear his own gasps of pleasure, and despite all that he'd been through, he found himself rising with her, coming up for annihilation, drawing a strange new strength from somewhere in the depths of complete unreality. The only disturbing part was that each time he opened his eyes he found that he was looking at the Warhol Electric Chair on the wall that faced the end of the bed. Who was it who said that there was only a fine line between orgasm and death? You said a mouthful there, Jack.
When they were both finished, Gibson lay on his back, panting, watching red explosions beneath his eyelids. Christobelle rested her arms on his chest and looked down at him in the gloom with a wicked but contented grin on her race,
"Did you like that, Joe Gibson?" He noticed that she had very sharp little incisors. He opened his eyes and smiled.
"That would be an understatement. I feel like a violin that's been played by a master."
"Or maybe a mistress?"
Gibson laughed. "Top-of-the-line, five-thousand-dollar hooker couldn't have done better."
Her teeth were very white in the darkness.
"You really know how to sweet-talk a girl."
"Were you ever a top-of-the-line, five-thousand-dollar hooker? Maybe in another life?"
Although Gibson knew that it was probably the gentlemanly thing to stay awake and talk, he couldn't fight his sinking mind and wilting intelligence. Within minutes, he was fast asleep. His dreams were a procession of ragged fragmented images, weird but not terrifying and certainly not imposed from outside. At one point, he floated on his back in a warm, buoyant sea while an entire armada of stately UFOs, rainbow-colored and in an infinity of configurations, slowly crossed the jet-black sky in multiple formations. Christobelle or someone very like her swam beside him, occasionally reaching out a soft hand to touch his body. There was nothing in this part of his dreamstate to warrant any complaint.
Waking was a whole different matter. Christobelle was gone, replaced by O'Neal and a headache of Godzilla proportions. O'Neal was standing at the end of the bed. He was wearing a zipped-up nylon windbreaker that made him look like a narc.
"You'd best be getting up."
His voice had the harsh rasp of Catholic Belfast. Gibson sat up. For a few moments, he had no idea where he was. Then it all came back to him. It was hardly a pleasant sensation. Even less pleasant was the taste in his mouth. He reached for one of the Cokes on the bedside table. The ice had melted, but it was still cold.
"What's going on?"
"Windemere will fill you in. You'd best get some clothes on. Everyone else is waiting for you in the drawing room."
The White Room
IT WAS THE shrink hour at the small but very exclusive clinic. That is to say, it was shrink hour for Joe Gibson. It was plainly a very self-centered attitude to think that the clinic revolved around him, but there was nothing to give him any greater perspective. They had him completely isolated, and he had absolutely no idea what went on in the rest of the place. Monday through Friday, he spent one hour a day with Dr. Kooning. Indeed, the only way that he could recognize a weekend was by the lack of Dr. Kooning's hour and the change in the TV schedules. Monday through Friday, they came for him in his white cubicle with the ceaseless TV set, put him in a wheelchair, and wheeled him through the bright, sterile corridors of the clinic to the equally white interview room with the garish, orange-and-yellow floral curtains. Gibson couldn't figure the logic of transporting physically healthy mental patients from one part of the clinic to another by wheelchair. Why in hell couldn't he be allowed to walk and maintain some shreds of his dignity? Did the patients being in wheelchairs make them easier to subdue? Gibson had learned more than he really cared to know about subduing procedures at the clinic when he'd made that first futile attempt at a breakout.
Dr. Kooning was a small woman with scraped-back, graying hair, rather prominent teeth, and very thick, circular glasses that she wore balanced on the bridge of her nose. Her face was locked into a permanent expression of distaste. Gibson wasn't sure exactly what she found so distastefuclass="underline" humanity at large, the nature of her job, or maybe just him. He didn't believe that it was him alone. She'd appeared to have been wearing the expression so long that almost all the lines of her face conformed to it. Dr. Kooning had been viewing the world with distaste long before he'd shown up. That was, however, no reason for her not to make him the focus of it during their sessions. They had clashed immediately. One of Gibson's first ploys was to refuse to lie down on the couch. Another token maintenance of dignity. He would sit on the couch, he'd lean on the couch, he'd sit on the couch hunched in a corner with his legs curled up under him, or in a full lotus position. The one thing that he wouldn't do was lie flat on his back on the couch.
"What frightens you about the couch, Joe?"
"I'd get too anxious and I wouldn't be able to concentrate. I'd be too worried that someone would suddenly jump on my stomach with both feet."
The thing that annoyed him the most about Dr. Kooning was that she always tried to insinuate herself into the picture.
"Do you fear that I'd jump on you?"
"No, but one can't be too careful."
After about a week of sparring, Dr. Kooning had accepted Gibson's attitude regarding the couch. She still brought the matter up at roughly weekly intervals, but the initial fight seemed to have gone out of her. Instead, she had recently taken to challenging his fundamental belief in himself.