“No more. That’s probably why more people don’t follow our beliefs – there’s just so little known about the Shadow Gods, even what they looked like, even their names, so there’s not a lot to get a handle on. But they beat the devils, and that’s good enough for me.”
“Do you yourself actually follow this religion? Do you pray?”
“Yeah, I believe in it. But we don’t pray to them...we don’t ask them for help and guidance. They’re gone, they have no more influence here like Ugghiutu has. We just give our thanks to their memory, more than anything else. If they hear us somehow, great. If Ugghiutu were ever to break free of his chains and awaken someday, we want them to come back. We want to stay on their good side.”
I turn to Saleet. “I think you should convert to Zoksa’s religion, Sally.”
“I told you, Chris, I’m an agnostic.”
The Shadow Gods are the Elder Gods of the Necronomicon, there is no doubt. And the Elders worshiped by that obscure Tikkihotto cult, the Church of the Burning Eye. But those deities are gone. Are they, Gods forbid, dead?
I continue to tease Saleet. “My girlfriend, the devil worshiper.”
“Girlfriend, huh?” Zoksa says, wiggling her long single brow.
“Your girlfriend, the forcer, who’s going to hit you with her nightstick,” Saleet says.
“Will you handcuff me first?”
Zoksa promptly rises from her chair. “Oh-kay...I’d better clear the table and get going soon.”
Saleet and I smile across at each other again. I flush a little bit, that bashful streak rising, and avert my eyes to sip my coffee.
We help Zoksa clear the rest of the table, then move ourselves to the sofa while we wait for her to be off with her friends. As is becoming a fond habit of ours, Saleet and I watch VT. Girlfriend, I think. I can’t believe I came right out and referred to her as my girlfriend. She doesn’t appear to mind; her hip and outer leg are pressed almost too hard against mine, she sits so close to me. I ache to put my hand on her thigh under its blue-black membrane of silk, taut across its firmness like the skin of a fruit. I can’t bring myself to do that, but I do something more significant. I reach over and take her hand, weaving my fingers through hers. It’s warm. She squeezes back and I see her look over at me but I swallow and keep my eyes on the VT. Yes, there’s an unspoken agreement which, in my heightened sensitivity of late, I feel profoundly in my molecules and in my chakras and whatever else is crammed inside me. Tonight is our communing.
Dropping my eyes idly from the vidtank to the carpet which takes up nearly all of the livingroom’s floor, I admire the intricate embroidery in colorful and metallic threads. The carpet is shaped like a large cross with four equal arms. Thus, I realize, eight corners. In the central area of the rug, beautifully rendered hunters armed with something like spear guns, some riding large glebbis, chase after fearsome animals that look like manta rays with four lithe legs under their broad mantles. One of these animals, rearing up, is tearing a hunter’s arm off with the mouth on the underside of its flat body. Huddled protectively in one of the four arms of the cross shape is a cluster of finely-garbed women, wives or admirers of the heroic males, watching the action. Another arm of the cross contains a miniature rendering of some spired city. A third arm contains an image of one of the manta-panthers roasting on a spit. And in the fourth arm is a black structure with eight tapered minarets or towers. Men are carrying one of the manta-things, trussed up but apparently still alive, to its yawning front door...obviously as an offering. Sacrifice.
“Can we eat one of those the next time I visit?” I ask, pointing to the carpet.
“A goloth? They’re extinct now. Too much hunting, maybe.”
I look directly at Saleet. “When will I meet your family?”
Now it’s Saleet who avoids my eyes, turning back to the VT. “I don’t know...”
“They won’t ever accept me, will they?”
“They’ve been very tolerant of me. They’re more modern than...”
“I don’t expect you to have to make a choice between us.”
“Shh, Christopher. Not now. We’ll take it as it comes.”
Zoksa returns brightly to say her goodbyes; I release Saleet’s hand to rise and thank her. She unabashedly gives me a hug. I don’t want Saleet to be anyone other than Saleet, but it would be so much easier if she were one of these Sarkinians. I suspect her family would accept me more readily. Especially since I’m sympathetic to their religious beliefs.
Now we’re alone. We sit back on the sofa. I hope I haven’t ruined the tone of the evening with my difficult question. I try to get us off into another direction. “How’s your case with that...broom...thing?”
“Going nowhere yet. But my partner and I have been asked to lend some help on the case we talked about, with the prostitute...”
“Jelena Darloom?” I practically blurt. I think I even sat up straighter on the couch, just now.
She raises her brow at me. “You’re really following this, aren’t you?”
“Well...it’s an unusual case. I read about it a little bit on the net...”
“Well, unfortunately, murdered and mutilated prostitutes isn’t an unusual occurrence.”
“So they must feel it was a sex crime, to bring you into it...”
“They found semen inside the body, as it turns out.”
“Human? Choom?”
A hesitation. Then, “Kalian.” Another beat. “That’s another reason they want me on this.”
“Semen from one person, or were there more?”
“Chris, I really can’t talk...”
“Well, what about the parts being spread across town? Any ideas on that? What’s with her finger, stuck on that spike on that cemetery fence?”
“Only the delusional fuck who did that to her could explain it, Chris.”
Mm...this isn’t a good line of conversation. I don’t like to hear Saleet swear, and she’s getting too intense, somewhat hostile. I’ve stained the mood a bit, maybe. I hope to learn more about the Jelena Darloom case from her, but I can’t push it further right now.
“I’m proud of you,” I tell her. “What you do. You’re so strong. I worry about you, though.”
“I’m pretty tough.”
“And you’re pretty, too.” I take her hand again, bend toward her for a kiss. For a beat or two her lips feel hard, a bit resistant, but they soften pliantly under mine. She leans into me. Her body is very warm, seems warmer to the touch than an Earth person’s; an inner steam rises through the tightly-knitted material of her skin and of her clothing.
I move my lips to her throat, just under her jaw, and she tips her head back to arch her neck invitingly. I move along its length, to where it sweeps into her shoulder. The scent of her hair is heavy in my nose, fills my head like a dark cloud. Her hand rests with feminine lightness on the back of my own neck. I take it, turn its palm up, and press my lips into its damp hot center where the lines cross and intersect in mysterious patterns some feel they can decipher. Rising, still holding her hand, I draw her to her feet. We drift lightly toward her bedroom together.
The door shuts with a secretive but decisive click.
Saleet turns to me, and we’re embracing again, kissing deeply. I’m kissing her throat again. Whether it is her natural scent, or an oil rubbed into her skin, she has an earth-toned spicy smell that reminds me of sandalwood or patchouli. There’s a faint, not unpleasant musk of perspiration. I’m rubbing her lower back, gliding my hands up under the abbreviated hem of her shirt. Then sliding them down to cup her full bottom. She copies me, squeezing mine in turn.
I disengage from her enough to take the edge of her shirt and begin to pull it up away from the flesh beneath, as if peeling a ripe fruit. She assists me, and skins the black membrane over her head. Glimpses of the intimate shaved bareness of her underarms. Her bra is dark purple. I cup her breasts and lift each of them slightly to plant a gentle kiss on the nipples that press at the restraining fabric
.
Reaching around behind her, I unclasp the bra, and free her breasts. They are soft but hold much of their bound shape, in that gravity-defying trick of the young. Their aureoles and nipples are the same dark gray of her lips. Again I cradle them, again distribute slow, gentle kisses upon them, deeply inhaling their flesh. I take a nipple between my lips, and no suckling child was ever more contented than me. I could lay my head on her chest like this for eternity.
But following our telepathic program, we step away from each other so we can finish undressing. I remove my shirt, watching as she unfastens and works down her satiny black pants. Her briefs are of dark purple cotton. We embrace to kiss again and I feel and squeeze her full shapely cheeks through her soft panties...but I can only take so much of that before my hands are sliding beneath their elastic. I work her panties off her hips, down her legs, and she steps out of them.
Now reclining on her bed, her arms flung back behind her head, she watches as I finish my own undressing. Then I position myself over her lower body, begin exploring her almost daunting number of wondrous curves and planes. I stroke and massage her feet, the soles of which are tough and even calloused. She murmurs something self-consciously about not rubbing lotion into them often enough, but I kiss them to reassure her and work my way up. I kiss her shins, her calves with their faint rasp of stubble, her thighs as soft as flesh could ever aspire to be. Sliding my shoulders under them, curling my arms around them, I lower my face to a thick, glossy black patch of secret shadow, from which the strengthened musk in the air emanates deliriously like a smoky incense. It almost has the quality of smoldering autumn leaves.
Above me, my eyes closed, I hear her sleep-heavy breathing, little jags whistling through her nostrils. Maybe the faintest exhalation of a sigh. Lifting my head to pinch a wiry hair off my tongue, I see that these lips are as dark a gray as those of her mouth, both sets enlarged with blood flow. I again press my mouth and tongue into service, my nose pressed into that fragrant lush thatch. But she isn’t as moist as Gaby would have been at this point, and I wonder if I’m really exciting her. Perhaps this is very alien to her – I can’t imagine that the misogynistic Kalian males administer to their women in this manner.
Her hands find my head, and she draws me further up her body, which again makes me wonder if she’s self-conscious or uncomfortable about my technique. I see she has a plastic tube in her hand now. She whispers, “Rub some of this into me, Chris. We don’t naturally lubricate like your women do...it’s the men who lubricate.”
“Easier for them to masturbate, huh?” I joke nervously. I squeeze some of the jelly onto my fingers, and ease one of them in and out of her as sensuously as I can make it seem. She’s small in that way; I’ve heard that Kalian men have long but very slender members. I’m hoping we can go through with this after all. I glance up at her face shyly as I stretch her enough to work a second finger inside her. I feel her arch her back a bit, hopefully from pleasure. Her eyes are closed, maybe in enjoyment, though from her compressed mouth I think she’s too shy to look at me right now, herself.
“All right?” I whisper.
She nods.
I position myself above her. Lower my full length upon her. I start guiding myself into her opening, and she winces a little, takes hold of me herself and modifies the angle. I press deeper in increments, sliding in and out, but this works in my favor, teasing out my pleasure until at last – thank God – I finally enter her to the hilt, gripped entirely inside the seeming molten heat of her interior. I almost come at once and have to wrestle for control of the urge.
I get it harnessed nicely, though, because it’s a good hour straight that we fuck. Me on top, her legs hiking up around me like the hungry jaws of a giant insect. Her sitting atop me, her gray-fleshed bosom hanging into my receiving hands, churning her hips, the sound of it a slickness in the air. Then me behind her, holding onto her waist tightly, her hips flaring out and ass bunched up hard against my belly, cheeks parted. Sweat shines in the groove of the small of her back and our skin is sticky. The atmosphere is dense with earthy aroma, seems fogged. She’s giving little husky sobs now, self-conscious little half-stifled moans. For all her shocking modern rebellion, it’s as if she can’t give herself totally to her pleasure, strains to just barely contain it.
But I cry out loudly, several times, as I speed up and then let myself go inside her with such a burst that I think I might be hitting her in the heart with the ejaculation. I hope I’m not gripping her waist too hard, grinding too deeply in her, but the intensity jolts through me like a current.
We subside to a more relaxed position, me on top again, and I pump very languidly while I wonder if I’m going to die of a heart attack. I reach my right hand between us while I fuck her and rub her clitoris with my fingers. Before today I wasn’t sure if Kalian women possessed those fleshy buttons, and if they did, whether they were allowed to keep them.
My wrist is getting cramped but I can feel Saleet building toward a climax at last. She rides the wave just to the crest and then breaks off with a grimace as if in child-birth, pushing my hand away almost frantically.
“No,” I whisper, urgent, trying to calm her, “let me finish it for you, baby...”
She won’t let go of my wrist. “That’s enough,” she gasps, “I did...I came...”
“Are you sure? It looked like you could have gone that one more step...”
“It’s scary. I’m afraid I’ll fall off the other side.”
“Saleet, no...let me finish it for you.”
But she won’t let go of my hand. “Someday. Not now, Chris. It was great...I came. I did. I came enough for now.”
“You risk your life in the streets, and you’re scared to let...”
“Shh,” she pleads, and it looks as though a moistness films her obsidian eyes. I realize I’ve never seen her cry before. “This is harder for me than you might think, Chris. It’s hard for me being in love with a man from outside my culture. It’s hard for me to fight who I’m expected to be.”
I embrace her. Hold her. I push her hair away to nuzzle her ear. “I know,” I reassure her. “Please don’t be scared. Please don’t leave me.”
She holds me in return; tightly. But she doesn’t say anything.
***
I DON’T KNOW if I should follow a sequence. I don’t know which part of Jelena Darloom was deposited first. I can only trust in my intuition, and it has led me to a stone bench in the middle of cobblestoned Salem Street, where vehicles aren’t allowed to pass, in the heart of the old Choom town at the center of Punktown. I sit on the bench where they found the headless, limbless, heartless torso of Jelena. There is no stain, but I can see the ghastly sundered body here in my mind’s eye. It helps that I have photos with me, printed out from my computer and folded in my generous coat pocket for reference.
For comforting warmth I have a hot mustard drink I bought from a street vendor. A Choom beverage; not as popular as was the fad a few years ago, but I still like one occasionally. The air is getting a bite to it now that autumn deepens (its progression is a minor shock to me after staying in the moderate climate of the underground for such stretches). The sky is like the inside of a sea shell. I have bought a new coat today, a respectable businessman’s overcoat, down to my knees and black with a suede-like feel. It will conceal my shotgun if need be. My money is getting very thin now. I just simply cannot go find some prosaic job at this point. I wonder if Saleet can lend me money and I dismiss the thought with a blast of self-directed anger. Bad enough I don’t have a job; I want her to respect me. How soon before she starts thinking of me as lazy, unmotivated, a slack-off? As I’ve considered before (with dread), if worst comes to worst, I’ll seek out my father (near here), or my mother in Miniosis. I could take a bus or tube to that nearby city.
I have printed out other sheets as well. They are diagrams, symbols, from The Veins of the Old Ones. With a stick of lip balm, I am copying the symbol from the print-out spread in my lap, a gust
of wind rustling its edge. I am drawing that symbol on the rough stone surface where Jelena lay disfigured, unrecognizable, just meat. I am counteracting whatever spell was imprinted here by her sacrifice. I am closing one of the windows that my enemies are opening. I don’t know who my enemies are. I don’t think my enemies even know each other, in some cases. All I know is that there are those whose aims are opposed to my own. Kalian sperm inside Jelena’s ruined shell. Hence, some of my enemies are Kalian.
The drawing is just barely visible as a waxy residue. It doesn’t matter, apparently, whether it now gets smudged, obliterated, washed away. It isn’t the artistic medium that counts, but the form it gives existence to. Apparently that can’t be so readily obliterated. It sinks into the very atoms of the stone.
Before I even drew my picture, I laid my hand flat on the spot as if it were a gravestone. Oh Jelena, I thought. I hope it wasn’t me who attracted all this to you.
Finished, I cap my makeshift pen. I rise, finish off my welcome hot drink, dispose of its cup. Hands in my new pockets, I walk to the tube station. I have seven more stops to make today.
In the vestibule of a shabby tenement house, where a pretty, slender and disembodied right leg with orange-painted toenails was discovered, I trace a pattern in lip balm on the wall near the floor. I finish and straighten up just as a black woman comes down the stairs, giving me a suspicious look. I smile and apply some balm to my lips because it’s in my hands and is an innocuous substance (to the layman, at least – unaware of its more impressive uses). When she heads out onto the street I wipe my sleeve across my lips with a grimace. I never use lip balm.
I render waxen graffiti on the window of a bank. On the window’s sill was found a woman’s left leg. I wonder how many people passed by it and only gave it a quick glance, like they’re giving my act of vandalism now.
A symbol takes form on the shell of a mail box inside which a mail carrier was no doubt incensed to discover a left arm with insufficient postage attached.
A lot of traveling to reach these far points. I’ve never covered so much of this vast city in one day. It was morning when I started out and it’s noon already. Though the smells outside are enticing, I don’t venture inside the bakery on whose window box I draw a symbol to exorcize the ghost of a dismembered right arm.
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