“Excellent. So just be a good little boy now. And suck.”
Paul sucked. What else could he do? He’d already experienced the woman’s extraordinary strength, and her thumb against his eye remained a convincing reminder of what would happen to him if he resisted. Paul’s unwilling tongue roved; she tasted like sharp brine, she tasted like a real woman, and this he could see too, with his other eye: the sleek, curvaceous shape, the hourglass middle, the large high-riding breasts centered with big dark distended nipples. Yes, she was all woman…
But—
Paul remembered something else, vaguely in the most distant recess of his brain, from that night…
“Oh, Paul, that’s so good,” she slurred. “I-I-I think I’m gonna have to…”
She slid her sex off his lips. Her right thumb stayed pressed against his eye, while she rubbed the large pink bud of her clitoris with her left index finger. Her body tremored in waves.
“Do you remember, Paul?” she whispered. “Sure you do. I’m the Zyramon, I’m one of his most special concubines…I’m synoecious, Paul. Do you know what that means?’’
Paul gasped in a musky breath.
“I’m an hermaphrodite, and I have a big surprise for you…”
Paul watched in his daze, her soft milk-white thighs still clamping his cheeks. Her finger continued to tend to her clitoris, and soon she herself began to gasp. And then—
You’ve gotta be shitting me…
Something began to emerge from the fissure of her vagina. Very slowly yet very clearly, he realized what was coming out of the place of her womanhood:
An erect penis.
And a very large one at that.
“Okay, Paul. You’ve already sucked my pussy, now you’re going to suck my cock.” She added a bit of pressure to her thumb over his eye. Then she inserted the tumescent penis into his mouth.
Paul began to fellate her. I’m sucking a woman’s dick, came the insane awareness. He tried to do the best he could but…he couldn’t help but shudder…
“Goddamn it!” she yelled above him. “You’re not doing it right! Do it right!”
Paul gave it the All-American try but this was no easy thing, since he’d never sucked cock before, much less a woman’s. He gagged repeatedly as the swollen glans slid against the back of his throat. One thing he noticed, though, with his free eye, was the sharp purple glint…
What is that?
A well-cut purple stone had been sunk into her navel.
An amethyst, he realized.
And then he remembered the much larger amethyst he’d seen mounted in the transom of The Inn’s front door…
“You little peon piece of shit!” she yelled. “Can’t even suck cock, I should’ve known.” She withdrew her penis, then pinched his lips together hard. “What’s the matter, is little Paulie nervous, hmm?” she suggested in a chastising tone. “Little Paulie too scared to suck a good dick like a good little boy?”
Paul exhaled long and hard when she got off him. Into the dim candlelight, she was walking away. Keep walking, he thought, traumatized, exhausted. But he wouldn’t be so lucky. Before he could even try to muster the energy to rise, the bald woman returned, bearing a bottle of wine. “Remember that blow, Paulie?” she said, standing with one beautiful hip cocked. Of course, the image of that hip lost some of its beauty considering the nearly foot-long erect penis that bobbed betwixt her legs. “You know, the blow? Shit, you probably snorted a pound of it that night—”
The cocaine, he remembered. Or whatever it was…
“Well, let’s just say that it comes from a very special place, and we use it a lot around here. We spike all our booze with it. It makes people a little more willing to—you know—do things.”
That shit I was snorting, he remembered, the strange brownish-white powder that made him crazy. The stuff she’d no doubt also put in his beer.
“You’re gonna drink this, Paulie,” she told him. “It’ll make you lighten up. Then you’ll give me a good blow job before I fuck you in the ass.”
This was not good news. Paul moaned as she approached the bed and uncorked the bottle. Her erection bobbed along with her breasts. Then she leaned over and prepared to dump the wine into his mouth.
Paul lurched forward, more unconsciously than anything else. He didn’t even know what he was going to do, but one thing he knew he wasn’t going to do was give this woman any more head.
He collided into her abdomen, surprising her enough to actually jar the bottle from her hand, which hit the earthen floor and broke. Paul’s face bulled into her belly, his mouth opened, and he bit down hard on whatever was there—
The woman screamed.
When she fell away, Paul discovered that he’d bitten out the oval of soft flesh around her navel. And with it…the amethyst.
Paul spat the stone, and the little ring of flesh, out onto the floor.
Then the woman did the strangest thing.
Instead of coming for Paul, she dove howling for the amethyst. This Paul didn’t know what to make of. She’d already easily demonstrated her superior strength, yet without the amethyst in her navel, she seemed desperate with fear. She began to crawl across the floor, toward the lightless corner where he’d spit the stone. And as she did so…
What the fuck is happening now? he thought in dismay.
She began to change…
As she crawled forward, her sleek body darkened, shuddering. Her joints seemed to expand, and so did her head and hands and feet. Hip bones and shoulder blades protruded, the skin between her ribs turned gray and sucked in. Her terrified howls turned inhuman, and Paul could see why.
Because she wasn’t human, not anymore.
Taloned, long-fingered hands padded at the dark corner, searching hungrily for the amethyst that Paul’s teeth had divorced her from. By now her skull looked warped, with a long fissured forehead. And horns.
Strike when the iron’s hot, he reasoned.
Beside the bed lay a tray of sadomasochistic instruments: knives, thumbscrews and nipple-clamps, and long, long needles. Paul stuck one of the needles into the thing’s back, about where the kidneys might be. She screamed like a machine, faltering. Then he inserted several more needles in a random pattern about her back. She convulsed, wailing like an animal on fire, and collapsed onto her belly.
Hmmm, Paul thought. This looks like it has some possibilities.
Then he picked up the heavy stone tray on which the torture instruments had been lain. He hefted it in his hand, raised it up—
“Here’s some head for ya,” he remarked.
—and brought it down on top of her head. The head burst, splattering a plume of black brain mush across the earthen floor.
“There. Blow yourself.”
The corpse began to fizz, as if effervescent. In only moments it seemed to dissolve to a crackling discolored fluid which, in turn, was then absorbed into the floor.
And in one more moment:
Gone, he observed.
Nothing at all remained of her. Nothing.
He was not sorry to see her go. So much amassed in his mind, however, that he couldn’t even contemplate what he was in the midst of. I’m crazy, that’s all, he thought. I’ve gone insane. That was some consolation, at least.
At the far end of the hallway, he found an elevator which took him up to a normal, paneled hallway. Around the corner, he found himself standing in a spectacular hotel atrium. This is it. This is The Inn. But where was Vera? He didn’t even know where to begin looking, but given the hour, he suspected she’d be asleep. A banistered staircase swept up to the next floor; Paul noted a tiny plaque: employee suites. If she’s here, this is where she must be. But a glance down the wing showed him a dozen doors. Which one was hers? He couldn’t very well just barge into each room and wake people up, could he? Then he laughed at the absurd reservation.