No woman had become pregnant, in the time since New Eden had been transported. No one had died, not human nor pet. Marianne Dawson’s cervical cancer had simply vanished, and Glenn O’Hara’s emphysema had gone away. Though eighty-four-year-old Will Donneridge still walked with a cane due to his hip implant, he was doing fine and walked the streets almost every day.
Many people walked the streets, almost every day.
And some, sleepless, also walked at night. Sometimes the dogs howled at night too, but it was a noise one had to get used to.
Our ant farm, Jefferson thought as he looked upon the creature in her elegant gown of black and gold, with her long black hair and her pale blue eyes that, unblinking, saw and knew everything. Here is our creator.
Whether she was one entity or many in one flesh, he did not know. Whether she was truly female or not, he dared not guess. And what she really looked like, without the disguise…he dreaded the thought and had to banish it as best he could.
Because here she was, his harlot starlet from the stars, and as she stroked his cheeks and played with the heroic-looking cleft in his strong and noble chin, she also began to feed him the mind-pictures that were his undoing. She knew all of his past deeds and misdeeds; she knew the face, aroma, and touch of every MILF and every drug- or pain-addled teenaged girl in every motel room he had ever paid for with his hidden account Visa card. She now offered them up to him, the ferrago of fleshly feasts that had over time become the central obsession of his life, and so potent were these pictures of his passionate past that—alien creature or not, female or not—Jefferson Jericho was responding to these mental images, and this was the true power he had come to know because it was not so much about the sinning as it was about the winning.
You know I compel to disrobe you.
Had she spoken with words, or with her mind? Her mouth had not moved; her understanding of the human language was still fractured, but her understanding of her toy was perfection itself.
Her fingers were working at his tie. He knew she enjoyed undressing him; it seemed almost an ecstatic ritual to her, for as she let his Ben Silver tie drop, took off his coat, and began to unbutton his Brooks Brothers shirt, her eyes were aflame like meteors in the night. As she unbuckled his belt and unzipped his trousers, her face in her ecstasy seemed to suddenly become like soft wax and shift on its bones, and Jefferson had to quickly look away lest he lose his hard-on…but she sensed this in an instant, and flooded his mind so thoroughly with memories of past conquests, moans, and orgasmic shivers from a legion of females who had fallen under his spell, that he quite simply was himself spellbound.
My Jefferson. Take my hand.
He held up his trousers with one hand and with the other took hers. It was, as always, almost the feel of human flesh but not quite. She led him to the bed, where he sat down to allow her to remove his polished shoes and his socks, which she did slowly…again, almost as an ecstatic ritual. Then she—slowly, slowly—pulled off his trousers and his blue-checked boxers, and she commanded him mentally to lie on his back upon the bed while she slid down beside him. Once in position, she began to play with that large part of him that she seemed to find as fascinating as any female who had never flown between the stars.
When Jefferson’s mind began to betray him, the Gorgon mistress injected him with fresh memories. She made the dalliances of twenty years ago as real as the moment, and all he could do was drift in a territory of heated sexual dreams while she pulled and stretched and twisted him between her hands as if testing the strength of the material he was made of. Then suddenly the frames skipped once more and she was undressed, and her not-quite-human-flesh was pressed hard against him. When he dared to look into her face in the yellow candlelight he saw unwanted shadows there and he quickly looked away, but all the time she was feeding him his own past, the parade of images from a life of lustful debauchery, scenes contained within the walls of countless motels and apartments and the occasional back room of a strip club. She gave him back the world he had made for himself, and he was proud of his accomplishments, proud of his power to move at his whim any female object, proud of his abilities and attributes and gifts from God, proud of his silver tongue and golden persona, proud proud proud until he was nearly bursting aflame with pride.
The flame lit him up. She was trying to kiss him but she didn’t know how to kiss, it was all open mouth that belonged to a hollow mask but he couldn’t think that, couldn’t go there that this creature mounting him was not human and oh oh back to a steamy shower in a Motel Six with a German exchange student named Jana who had come in wanting a good deal on a used Jeep Wrangler, and the wetness and softness and murmuring enveloped him and stole him away.
He was inside her now, pounding her as he would have any human female, a mindless rhythm that built to an explosive release. She was damp within, and it passed through his feverish mind that this was false too, part of the disguise, some kind of artificial lubricant developed in an alien lab…and then he was plunged back into a memory, examining a birthmark in the shape of a cat’s paw on the left breast of a blonde woman named Georgia May who used to work at his bank in Little Rock.
As he turned her over on the bed or she turned him over, which was difficult to say who did what because the frames were skipping, Jefferson plunged deeply inside her and heard her give a soft hissing noise. He kept driving into her with all his strength and with all his past amours tumbling through his mind. He had endurance, he could keep this up until he decided they both had had enough; it had never been love, with anyone, it had always been the winning of something or someone, the praise, the attention, the admiration that had kept him going from one to the next to the next. And so too, did he perversely enjoy this admiration from his starlet harlot.
Then, as sometimes happened, as Jefferson plunged into his Gorgon mistress, a hot fleshy thing clamped upon him, there in her wet depths, and held him fast. He felt a shiver of panic, of terror, that passed away in the wiry embrace of a small-boned Asian stripper named Kitten who always smelled to him of burning leaves. And then, as sometimes happened in the heat of their encounters, small tentacle-like things began to slide around the backs of his thighs to hold him more firmly still, and here he squeezed his eyes shut and gave himself up fully to the memories she offered, for even in the bedrooms of the past, Jefferson Jericho could feel her coming apart at her seams, and things slithering out of her false body to snake-grip his own.
No memory she offered up, however lush, was enough to overcome this part of it. But she tried, and as she pumped his mind full of decadent opiates of his own making, a tentacle wound around the base of his balls and tightened there while another flicked and played with them, and deep inside her the fleshy thing clamped hard once…twice…a third time and he came to the tune of a blonde vagabond named Marigold sitting on a bed naked playing “Greensleeves” on a beat-up acoustic guitar.
The thing inside his Gorgon mistress—as strong as another hand—milked him. The tentacles writhed and whipped. He had never seen these things, but he knew what they must be. She was gracious enough to put them away when she was done with him. When she had wrung him out the fleshy clamp released him, and in a dazed and drifting dream-state he wondered if they were using his seed to make hybrids of human and…what? But it was no matter to him now, for though he feared this creature, and when she called him by that device planted in the back of his neck, he had to go into the bathroom and throw up, he was so afraid…he had to admit in the long-lingering afterglow that she was one great lay.