As he did so, he untied the yellow scarf at his crotch and revealed a deeply wound copper wire.
Breathing hard, centering his rhythms, Remo concentrated. His face turned red with exertion, his chest heaved as he forced the blood from every extremity to his solar plexus and from there downward.
His manhood quivered and quaked, expanding until the gleam of copper fell into shadow.
And the copper wire slowly, agonizingly, reluctantly parted, falling away under the inexorable flow of blood.
It was then that Remo looked more closely at the moist red blot he thought was a drop of blood. He saw that it was unmistakably in the shape of a woman's lip print. Lipstick.
And then he remembered how it had been ....
Remo jumped from the bed, calling her.
"Kimberly! Kimberly!"
No answer.
Then, louder, anguished, "Kimberly!"
He plunged into the bathroom, flung open the closet door. The hallway was empty as well. He grabbed up the room phone and dialed the other room, the one he had ransacked.
"Come on, come on," Remo said as the ring repeated itself like a mantra of bells. Getting no answer he slammed down the receiver. He scooped it up again and got the front desk.
"The woman in Room 606. Has she checked out yet?"
"Two hours ago," he was told.
Remo resisted an urge to go from room to room in a blind, futile searching for her. She would not be there. Her last words came back to him, echoing in his ears. The words he had heard after sinking helpless and spent into a languorous postcoital slumber.
"We are mated once more, Lord Shiva. You are mine forever. Seek me in the Caldron of Blood, and in blood we shall together revel, dancing the Tandava that crushes the bones and souls of men as one under our remorseless feet. "
Putting his back to the hotel-room door, Remo looked down at himself. He was still erect. And it came to him why.
He wanted Kimberly. Yet he hated her, with her spidery arms that made his skin crawl. But those same hands had given him more pure pleasure in one night than all the women he had ever known combined.
He had been drugged by her sexual odor, manipulated by her cruel ways. And the very thought of her, the sight of her lipstick brand on him, made him harder, even as he felt his gorge rise in disgust.
Remo plunged into the shower and turned the water on full blast. He soaped himself clean, and when the smell seemed to have gone away, he switched to cold water.
When he stepped from the shower, he was nearly back to normal, his male tool swinging in normal repose.
He looked around the room. The bed was a mess. His clothes lay in a pile. He went to them, pulling on his pants, drawing his black T-shirt over his head. It was torn, as if by an animal. Remo remembered how they had fought to remove it in their fury of lovemaking, his hands and hers. All six plunging into passionate, unholy caresses.
When his shoes were back on his feet, Remo Williams started to leave. Something stopped him. He looked back at the bed. The urge to crawl into it, to wait for Kimberly's return, was growing. The urge to smell her horrible sexual scent was irresistible. He shut his eyes, trying to force the kaleidoscopic memories of their perfect orgy from his brain.
"Damn," Remo muttered. "What did she do to me?"
He returned to the bed and snatched up one of the yellow silk scarves. He pushed it under his nose and inhaled greedily.
The smell hit Remo's brain like a drug. He grabbed a wall for support.
And under his black pants, he could feel his erection return.
Remo stuffed his pockets full of yellow silk and stumbled from the room to the elevator. He walked with one hand hovering over his crotch to conceal the bulge.
Down in the lobby, a fortyish woman carrying a Scottish terrier under one arm was getting on as he was stepping off the elevator. She looked to his strategically placed hand and smiled.
"If you still have that problem around lunchtime, drop on by," she breathed. "Room 225."
"Screw you," Remo muttered.
Her laughing "Exactly what I had in mind" came through the closing steel door.
The cabby was very understanding of Remo's predicament. He asked if Remo had a destination in mind, or was he just planning to play with himself in the back seat?
"Because if you are, the fare's triple," he said. "I know this is Washington, but for that kinda consideration I gotta charge more."
"Airport," Remo said, pulling a length of silk from his pocket and holding it up to his nose.
"I know this place where they specialize in bondage," the cabby suggested as he pulled away from the curb, his eye on the rearview mirror and Remo.
Remo dug his fingers into the heavy mesh of the backseat partition. He squeezed all five fingers.
Grunk!
When he took his hand away, the mesh had a in it like a holed cobweb.
"Airport," he repeated.
"Which?"
"The nearest," Remo bit out. "Fast."
"You got it," the cabby promised. "Hope you don't lose your enthusiasm by the time I get you to her."
But Remo Williams wasn't listening. He was inhaling the sweet musky scent that to him meant pure sex, adoring the odor but hating himself with a deepening passion.
Chapter 15
Kimberly Baynes woke up on her own hotel bed on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel with a stiff neck.
Her eyes tried to focus. The events of the day had come back to her. She had awoken late. The previous day's newspaper lay before Kali, as it always did. But instead of a ripped and ragged clipping, one hand clutched a brochure offering limo service to Dulles Airport that had previously rested on the writing desk. Kimberly had gone to the airport, knowing that Kali would provide the victim. And the man in the black T-shirt had accosted her. And just in time, too. Her bra had been digging into her shoulders something fierce.
The last thing she could recall was that the man in the black T-shirt had been about to kill her. She knew intuitively that was his intent. The hand took her. And a silver light exploded within her frightened brain.
She remembered nothing after that. A warm breeze was coming in through the window, disturbing the maroon drapery. That was wrong. She never left the window open.
Kimberly sat up. First she noticed that all four hands were free. She remembered struggling to unleash the hidden pair with their tightly knotted yellow rumal when the silver light exploded.
So how had they gotten loose? And how had she gotten here?
"Kali will know," she whispered, turning to the nearby bureau.
But where her mistress had squatted, there was only emptiness. Only a moist spot on the polished dresser top and a single white elbow. Disconnected.
Kimberly jumped from the bed, her four arms reaching out. She stepped on an already mashed hand, recoiling with a flutter of many hands.
"Oh, no! Mistress Kali! No."
All over the floor, the vessel of Kali lay in segments-maimed, dismembered. conquered.
Had she been conquered too?
No.
The voice came from deep inside her head.
"Hello?" Kimberly said aloud. "Is that you?"
Yes. I live.
"But your vessel-"
My temporary vessel. You are my vessel, Kimberly Baynes, my intended vessel. I have been preparing you just as you have nurtured the clay that housed my spirit. I gave you the body of a woman years before your rightful time, and so you are a woman in fact. You are my avatar. I am your soul.
Kimberly sank to her knees on the rug. Four yellow-nailed hands assumed prayful shapes. Her eyes closed, her face tilted toward the white plaster sky of the ceiling.
"I know, I've known it ever since-"
Ever since your breasts grew and the nub of Kali's nether limbs sprouted from your sides. Clay is only clay. It served its purpose. I blessed you with two of my many arms, the better for you to work my will. You and I are destined to be one.
Kimberl
y frowned. "Where are you, anyway?"
"Inside you. A seed. I am but a seed which germinates in the dark loam of your soul. In time, I will sprout. We will grow together, you and I, Kimberly Baynes. And at the foretold time, we shall flower as one. You must obey me until then."
"What do I do, my mistress?" Kimberly asked.
You must go to the Caldron of Blood.
"Where is that?"
The Caldron of Blood is not a place. It is a hell you and I will create together, in a land far from here. And when it begins to bubble, He shall come.
"He?"
Our enemy, my mate, your murderer and lover in one.
Kimberly's eyes went wide.
"I'm not a virgin anymore!"
He lusts for us both now. He will seek us out. And He will find us-but only after we have stirred the blood in the Caldron and the world careens toward the Red Abyss.
Kimberly Baynes fought back tears of shame. "I obey."
An insistent knocking came from outside the hotel door:
Kimberly climbed to her feet.
"Who is it?" she called, folding two pairs of hands over her exposed breasts.
"Hotel security. Are you all right in there?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Because there's some kinda clay head down on the sidewalk with pieces of your window in it. I'm going to have to come in."
"One minute," Kimberly said. "Let me get my scarf . . . I mean, my robe."
The door opened only long enough for the hotel security man to catch a good look at a pair of naked breasts, and more hands that he expected pulled him into the room and wrapped something tight around his throat.
"She loves it!" Kimberly cried exultantly. "Don't you?"
I love it. Don't forget his wallet.
Chapter 16
Mrs. Eileen Mikulka had been executive secretary to Dr. Harold W. Smith for a nearly a decade.
She had seen a great many unusual sights in that time. One had to expect the unusual when one worked in a private hospital that included warehousing the deranged. She had gotten used to the occasional escapee, the padded rooms, and the straitjacketed patients who sometimes howled their madness in voices so frightful they carried over to the administration wing of Folcroft Sanitarium.
There was nothing unusual about the man who abruptly appeared before her desk asking to see Dr. Smith in an urgent tone.
She looked up, one hand going to her modest decolletage.
"Oh! You surprised me, Mr ...."
"Call me Remo. Tell Smith I'm here."
"Please take a seat," Mrs. Mikulka said crisply, lifting her chain-hung glasses off her chest and placing them on her nose.
"I'll stand."
"Fine," Mrs. Mikulka said as she reached for the intercom. "But you needn't stand so close to the desk." She recognized the man now. He had once worked for Dr. Smith in some menial capacity. He was an infrequent visitor. Mrs. Mikulka was under the impression he had once been a patient. It would explain the urgent look on his face and the unnerving way he stood right up to the edge of the desk. He leaned over, both hands resting on her blotter.
Those eyes made Mrs. Mikulka shiver. They were the deadest, coldest eyes she had ever seen. Even if they did look a little haunted.
"Yes, Mrs. Mikulka?" came the crisp, reassuring voice of Dr. Smith through the tinny out-of-date intercom.
"I have a . . . gentleman named Remo here. He has no appointment. "
"Send him in," Dr. Smith said instantly.
Mrs. Mikulka looked up. "You may go in now."
"Thanks," the man said, edging around the desk to scuttle toward the door.
What on earth is that man's problem? she asked herself as he abruptly spun and sidled through the door with his back to her.
She shrugged, returned her glasses to her chest, and resumed her inventory work. It seemed the commissary was dangerously low on prune-whip yogurt, Dr. Smith's favorite. She would have to order more.
Dr. Smith watched Remo enter the office with owlish interest. The door snapped open. Remo slipped in quickly, dropping to the long leather divan that sat next to the door in a fluid, unbroken motion. He crossed his legs quickly. His face was crimson.
Smith adjusted his rimless glasses curiously. "Remo?"
"Who else?" Remo said, pushing the door closed with his hand from his seated position.
"Is something wrong?"
"We gotta find her!"
"Who?"
"Kimberly."
Smith blinked. "I thought she was . . ."
"She's not. And she got away."
"What happened?"
"I just told you!" Remo said hotly. "I went back. She wasn't dead. She got away from me. End of story. Now we gotta find her. And don't just sit there looking befuddled. Get those computers of yours going. This is an emergency."
"One moment," Smith said firmly, coming from behind his desk. He crossed the Spartan, slightly shabby office in less than a dozen long-legged strides.
Standing over Remo, Smith saw his flushed features, his harried expression, and the way he hugged his folded leg into his lap. The body language was wrong. This was not Remo's body language, he thought. Remo was casual, if not cocky.
"Remo, what you have just told me makes no sense whatsoever," Smith said in a level no-nonsense voice.
"It's what happened," Remo said tightly. "Now, are you going to do your job so I can do mine, or do I have to plant you back in that seat and hold your hands through the early steps?"
Remo's dark eyes locked on Smith's. Dr. Smith's gray orbs met them unflinchingly.
"You told me she was dead," Smith persisted.
"My mistake."
"Everyone makes mistakes," Smith said in a reasonable tone. "So you went back, found her alive, and she eluded you? Is that it?"
"That's as much as you need to know," Remo growled, averting his eyes.
"I need to know her identity. You were going back for her ID. Did you find it?"
"No," Remo said flatly. He adjusted his folded leg. Smith recalled that Remo usually folded his with one ankle resting on the opposite knee, his bent leg forming a triangle with the thigh in repose. An open-legged cross.
Today, however, Remo crossed his right leg over his left one. A more defensive cross. Not Remo's style. Not even in the early days before he had learned Sinanju.
"Remo," he began evenly, "for as long as I have known you, you've never struck a fatal blow that did not turn out to be fatal. As long as I have known you, you have never mistaken a live body for a dead one. What have you to say to that?"
Remo shrugged. "Hey. I was having a bad night, okay?"
"You are a professional," Smith went on with unrelenting logic. "You are the heir to the House of Sinanju. You do not make these kinds of mistakes. Now, tell me, what happened when you went back to Kimberly's hotel room?"
Remo's hard eyes held Smith's as a play of emotions raced across Remo's face-anxiety, anger, impatience, and hovering behind them all, something else. Something Smith had never seen on Remo's face.
When Remo looked down to the floor, Harold Smith realized what it was. Embarrassment.
"We had sex," Remo admitted in a dull voice. "After she died."
Smith swallowed. It was not the answer he had expected. He adjusted his tie.
"Yes?" he prompted.
"Maybe I should back up." Remo sighed. "I went back. She wasn't dead. I know I did her, but she wasn't dead. Not anymore. She attacked me."
"And?"
"She was too much for me."
"Are you serious? A call girl?"
"She wasn't a call girl anymore. She wasn't Kimberly anymore."
"What was she, then?" Smith asked.
'Kali. Or a puppet of Kali's. I know the spirit of Kali had been in the clay statue. I smelled her scent before I destroyed it. Then I smelled it from that . . . thing."
"Thing? What thing?"
"Kimberly," Remo said, still looking at the floor.
"Why do you call her t
hat?"
"She had four . . . arms, Smitty."
"Kimberly?" Smith's voice was thin with uncertainty.
"Just like the statue. Except Kimberly's arms were alive. They tried to strangle me. I fought. Thought I beat her. But she jumped me. Then that smell came again. Just like the last time. I could fight her, but I couldn't fight the smell, Smitty." Remo looked up. His eyes were hurt. "It touched something deep in me. Something that Chiun had always warned me about."
"The Shiva delusion?"
"I don't know what you'd call it," Remo admitted. "But she called me Shiva too. If Kimberly wasn't Kali, how would she know to call me that? And if she was Kali, what does that make me?"
"Kali is a mythical being, as is Shiva. They have no basis in reality, no connection with you."
"Explain the four arms," Remo retorted. "The statue. I heard its voice, saw it move. Explain the best sex I ever had."
"Sex?"
"She had four arms. She was incredible. I never experienced anything like it. You know the curse of Sinanju-mechanical, boring connect-the-dots sex. It was different with Kimberly. I couldn't get enough."
"Remo, there is only one explanation for all this," Smith said flatly.
"Yeah?"
"A hallucinogenic drug."
"I know what I know," Remo growled. Smith put his hands in his trouser pockets.
"Hallucinogens induced in gas form could account for everything you have just described," he went on. "If fact, it is the only possible explanation, which you will see, once you calm down."
"Do hallucinogens cause permanent hard-ons?"
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
"I rather doubt it," Smith said dryly.
"Then why can't I uncross my legs in mixed company?" Remo snapped.
Smith swallowed again. This time he nervously adjusted his rimless glasses instead of his tie. He retreated to his desk. Pressing the concealed stud, he brought his computer terminal up to view, where it offered its keyboard like an unfolding tray of white chocolates.
Smith attacked the keyboard.
"What are you doing?"
"I am beginning a trace of this woman Kimberly. That is what you want, is it not?"
"Yeah," Remo said thickly. He did not sound enthusiastic.
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