by Edward Lee
The horror was in her complexion.
Any impeccability of Miss Aheb’s physique was howlingly counter-weighed by what I could only conceive of as some ghastly epidermal defect or pitiable disease. Every square inch of her exposed skin was made appalling by a condition far worse than the pallor, say, of the conductor’s face but instead by a skin-tone that was absolutely revolting. It was not the strange un-light that held dominion in the room: of this I was sure. It was a physical fact of the woman’s heredity.
Her skin looked like the unpleasant white of a bullfrog’s belly marbled by swaths of a mucoid green.
The image nearly overpowered me; I nearly voided my stomach’s contents. It occurred to me now that what the servile conductor had been wiping off was no doubt some mode of cosmetic make-up to conceal the madam’s true appearance to this evening’s guests; what’s more (and I don’t know how I knew this) I felt all-too-certain that this aberrancy of Miss Aheb’s skin was her natural condition!
Between her protuberant yet malignantly toned breasts hung a modest pendant whose elongated stone reminded me of a common stalactite of chalcedony, nearly colorless and rather lackluster. Yet from the thin, two-inch-long stone, after I stared a moment, I took note of the pendant’s only uncommon characteristic…
It seemed to, however irreducibly, generate some aspect of the room’s overall anti-light. And as this registered, my eyes slowly roved upward to the most macabre chandelier I’ve ever beheld. Uneven elongated crystals hung from each setting in the same stalactite fashion (hundreds of them, each quite similar to the pendant) inexplicably giving off the light that was not light.
Miss Aheb grinned to her servant in an almost vulturine way. “I simply adore you so much,” came a wanton whisper and with it her gracile hand to the conductor’s crotch. “Kiss me now…”
The conductor’s gloved hand came to his chin—
“No, no,” the appalling-skinned madam interjected. “Keep the mask on—”
So I was right! I thought. It was a mask the conductor wore!
“—I want you hideous at first,” she continued. “I want you repulsive! It makes my juices flow all the more hotly…”
I forced my thoughts to still, and merely watched—
—as the conductor’s waxen face lowered to Miss Aheb’s, and their mouths joined.
Minutes passed; the oral contact roused Miss Aheb noticeably. She stood in a slowly rising craze as the mouth-hole of the conductor’s abhorrent mask ranged from her lips and down the slope of her scum-hued throat, then lower to suck into its lurid parchment aperture each gorged nipple.
“Yes, yes,” panted the raven-haired madam. “Harder… That’s just… so… lovely…”
The conductor continued his ministration until a veritable gloss of excitement effused from Miss Aheb’s vulval groove and shined down the insides of her thighs. Eventually, rapid-breath’d, she pushed her servant’s counterfeit mouth away and ordered, “Get the thogg. I’m ready now…”
There’s that strange word again, I mused. Thogg…
While the conductor parted, Madam Aheb lay back on the high, plush bed and crudely brought her knees to her face, whereupon her mal-coloured hand began to titillate the furred pubis. Again, I was in paresis from the dichotomy of her unflawed curves made monstrous by the mysterious skin disease.
When the conductor returned he brought with him the equally masked motorman…
No words were spoken then as the demented procedure began. My stomach quivered, for when the bulky motorman displayed his hand, I recalled my impressions when I’d glimpsed it getting off the trolley, dismissing a trick of moonlight as the cause for my initial alarm.
I now saw the fact of the matter.
It was no real hand that existed at the end of the motorman’s arm but instead a hideous facsimile: a cluster of elongations of boneless, jointless flesh. Just as harrowing, though, was the hue of the boneless flesh: the same grub-white spotted by pond-scum green.
First, these fingers, if one could call them that, extended, then wriggled; and then they curled inward to form a parody of a fist which then incredibly swelled in size, then shrank, swelled, then shrank, as if throbbing with some unearthly pulse. Miss Aheb seemed delighted by the demonstration, her splayed legs tensing and buttocks writhing at the sight. Next, her fingers parted the shining lips of her vulva within the nest of hair—a lewd invitation.
Without abatement, the motorman contorted the boneless digits forward and inserted his “hand” into the teeming, pink purse of Miss Aheb’s vaginal vault…
In and out, then, the monstrous hand delved, begetting a regular slick, wet sound that reminded me of one trudging through mud, the digits obscenely undulating and obviously heightening the pleasure of his (or I should say its) mastress. Soon the derrick-like penetrations probed deeper, to the extent that Miss Aheb’s reproductive orifice had swallowed the motorman’s hand nearly to the point of mid-forearm…
“Now,” the abyssally-skinned woman panted. Her pleasures mounted to tighten every muscle and tendon in her body.
It was to the stoic conductor that the order was directed, for first he removed his gloves, then woolen regulation-blue jacket, then the white shirt beneath…
Expression gaping, I now beheld the length of this evil ruse: when the conductor’s clothes were tossed aside, his nudity revealed him to be no “he” at all, but a woman, and one with a physique nearly as comely as Madam Aheb’s.
My shock racked me at my peeper’s post.
But the conductor (or I should say now the conductress) even in her stunning beauty, shared some of the same hideous dichotomy as the madam and this “thogg”: that nauseous sickly white skin-tone blended with the mucous-green splotches.
The carnal aberration I bore witness too now was surely a scene forged in hell…
Butternut hair fell when the regulation cap was undonned, and then the conductress removed the parchment mask…
Simultaneously I felt on the precipice of cardiac failure and a fit of madhouse screaming. How I was able to stave off both, I know not. But this was the coup de grace of all I’d visually attested to thus far: the revelation of the conductress’s face, which I suspect the perseverant reader has already deduced.
It was my sister Selina’s face that had been until now secreted beneath the gruesome mask.
What has that hideous BITCH done to my sister! my thoughts railed. Dangling between Selina’s ample yet similarly discolored breasts was a pendant like that of Miss Aheb; this I could glimpse as my either brainwashed or subjugated sibling turned for a moment, knelt up on the bed, and then lowered her mouth to her superior’s clitoral nub. All the while the motorman’s unearthly hand plungered wickedly in and out…
“Yes, yes,” issued the accented hiss. “Lick it faster, dear, faster.” Dung-brown nipples erected to inflamed teepees as the order was complied with. Meanwhile, as if by psychic cue, the dead-faced motorman finally withdrew the marauding forearm while the madam’s bare foot caressed the thing’s trousered crotch. A lump hardened there and with the attendant stimulation, this less-than-human being lowered said trousers—
I nearly fell into a swoon!
—to reveal genitals as monstrous as its facsimile for a hand.
Indeed, less-than-human was no exaggeration; I could only thank Selina and Erwin’s God that it retained the parchment mask, for by now I could not, would not contemplate what its true face must be.
“What a beautiful cock,” the madam profaned, eyes enkindled by the throbbing sight.
From the wax-white and utterly hairless groinal region, an identically waxen prong of queer white flesh stuck out. I estimated the erect pudenda’s length at roughly eight inches, with perhaps two inches’ girth at the base. It seemed to lack the sheathing skin as one would typically expect, and tapered queerly to a fleshy point rather than sporting an also-expected dome of glans; I could only think absurdly of a paste-white carrot. Blue traceries of veins ghosted beneath its dread whitenes
s as it throbbed; likewise, it shined as if effusing its own preludial lubrication. The only aspect that made this vision more hideous was the curious absence of scrotum and, hence, testes.
Selina’s next instruction didn’t have to be voiced; she held back her madam’s legs to more effectively part the groove of the shapely buttocks.
“Now, now,” Miss Aheb seethed—
—and it was into her nethermost aperture that the motorman—this thogg—inserted the macabre phallus and began to pelvically thrust; all the while, Selina re-tended her superior’s swollen clitoral metus. The sought-after effect took little time; soon Miss Aheb’s hideously skinned yet voluptuously curved body began to buck madly on the bed as the obvious crisis of her climax was at hand. She shrieked, then whinnied as the spasms of release began to pulse—a sound barely human, while in concurrence the motorman’s frame stiffened, then began to quiver.
“I can feel it!” Miss Aheb lewdly rejoiced. “Pouring into me! Filling me!”
The denouement wound down; then, the motorman withdrew its carrot-like “cock” from the woman’s bowel. My sister turned away, appalled.
“That was lovely, dear,” Miss Aheb commended. She lay slit-eyed and grinning, the quaking orgasms leaving her limp on the plush bed. “But now that I’ve had my moment… You know what to do…”
The thogg stepped away, stuffing his sullied organ back into his trousers; yet my sister, in motions that were clearly gruelling, came round to kneel at the edge of the bed between the madam’s upthrust thighs.
“I just can’t abide the idea of the thogg’s jism being in me for long,” Miss Aheb remarked as Selina pressed her lips to the plumbed sphincter and began to suck.
“There, good, good, dear. Suck it all out…”
Numbed to stupefaction, all I could do was watch as poor Selina engaged in the revolting process of evacuating Miss Aheb’s rectal vault of the thogg’s semen. When her face came away from the cleft, she wobbled on her knees.
“Swallow now, dear,” the madam dictated, “and then you’d both best be on your way.”
Selina stared in the chandelier’s sinister unlight, lips pursed as her mouth obviously remained full of the creature’s spermatic void. She steeled herself, went tense, then audibly swallowed.
I watched then as my sister rose to listlessly redress herself and re-don the grim parchment mask.
Miss Aheb indicated the strange poles standing to either side of the bed. “The carriers are full as you can see. Take them now—the back stairs as usual, and be on your way through the ingression brink.”
At this incomprehensible command, Selina lifted up one of the poles while the motorman hoisted up the other. These poles or rods or whatever they were continued to mystify me. What exactly was the mass of shriveled, semi-lucent things adhered to them? Again, I thought of wizened grapes…
Miss Aheb stood up, her nude body stunning in its curvatures yet appalling in its discolor. “Go in glory,” she oddly bid my sister, “and sing praise to our benefactors.”
Here was the only occasion for a vocal utterance on Selina’s part. “Yes, Madam Aheb.”
“And have the trolley back by bell-time. Soon our very generous guests will have had their fill of the evening’s delights.” She grinned wickedly in the shimmering light that was not light. “As we so have our fill of them…”
Selina and the motorman departed through an adjoining door and disappeared. I was able to detect the sound of descending footfalls…
They’re going down a set of ancillary stairs, I realized, to the trolley.
My own footfalls took me in haste, down the sweeping main stairs to the atrium; I realized the import of moving faster than my sister and the cumbersome motorman, and was confident of this goal’s achievability. From each stair-hall I detected the sounds of sexual traffic (moans, murmurs, squeals of lascivious release) and was relieved to find the atrium devoid of prostitutes and male suitors alike. At once I passed through the large outer door to the decrepit courtyard, and in the moon’s bedimmed light, I boarded the vacant trolley and piloted myself to the rearmost seats of the second car, to hide myself. Before I’d stowed my person behind the wood-slat seat, however, I paused to take further note of that great archway of lichen-stained blocks embrasuring the mammoth door of rusted iron beams studded with rivets. Again I was perplexed by the almost mirage-like image: a sickly colored mist that seemed impossibly oily, sifting beneath the great door’s gap; and with it, evidence of some weird half-light that I was now able to correspond to the indefinable shimmer of Miss Aheb’s bed-chamber.
What could possibly be behind the door that would possess such strange traits? This was New York City, for goodness sake…
I ducked back down, as the footsteps I knew would come had arrived. I heard my sister and her monstrous companion clatter aboard the trolley. Exposing myself to an obvious risk, I dared to steal a split-second peek above the seat-back’s edge…
Selina and the motorman—that thing—had planted the pair of mass-cloaked rods in mounts of some sort or other, where they now stood upright as they had upstairs. Selina tended to some flicking of switches on a control board, but it was the motorman who dismounted and plodded toward the massive arched door.
A loud metallic clang! reverberated as a bolt was thrown, then came the keening grind of old hinges as the thing secreted beneath the garb of a transit motorman pulled open the doors.
With half an eye over the seat-back, I stared in utter befuddlement…
More stone blocks filled the archway, rendering passage impossible! What on earth? I thought. Yet the negating blocks were not of normal stone, as were those of the arch and the courtyard’s walls…
They were of the same cryptic material that comprised the stalactitical crystals of Miss Aheb’s chandelier, and her and Selina’s pendants!
The trolley jerked; metal abraded as the vehicle’s wheels squealed over the ancient rails, and it was then…
Impossible!
Trolley No. 1852 rumbled forward toward the solid wall within the arch and—
Ineptly, I covered my head with my arms, awaiting what… I could never estimate.
The trolley, without so much as a hitch, passed through the wall of outerworldly blocks.
There came a noisome sucking sound, then one of soft grinding; I myself felt as though I were being pulled through a range of sand, yet no physical substance was observed; barely visible mist, however, was observed, akin to the seeming mist I’d thought I noticed in the madam’s chamber. I received the notion that the mist (warm and somehow oily) existed in some direct or indirect relativity to that inexplicable counter-luminescence, for that same trait now—that light which was not light—held dominion over the queer space in which the trolley now ranged.
And a queer space it was, indeed.
I sensed barrenness even before I opened my eyes, and felt inordinate pressure as well as a peculiar absence of air temperature; it was neither hot nor cold, just simply nothing. I thought of vacuities and voids, of inhuman realms and lost worlds. It was then that I actually looked out of the trolley-car’s vestibule…
Should this manuscript ever be found, I suspect that by this point, the reader will have no choice but to dismiss me as one fit for some refuge for the deranged. Translating what I then witnessed into communicable lexicon would overbound the skill of even the most preeminent writer. Sufficient words, you see, simply do not exist. I will endeavor, though, toward a feeble attempt…
I saw a sky hazy with the anti-light, whose source could not be perceived as there was no object of provenance, such as a sun or a moon. Yet beyond the spectral shimmer, the nature of this phenomenon I can only think of as a sky existed in layers, or stratum, the darkest being the most elevated, the lightest being in the closest proximal relation to the land, if indeed it could be called as such. Yet each strata bore colours defying category; instead, they seemed gradient shades of tone, bereft of what we’re taught to be primary and/or secondary colouring wh
ich, when amalgamated, result in the visual character of what our eyes perceive. Forgive my convolutedness, and I apologize for any ensuant frustration. Alas, this is the only description my anaemic grey-matter can generate.
Even more spectral, though, than this “sky” was the terrain itself over which the clattering trolley now traversed. The physical realm I now beheld (what I mean is the solid ground) existed not as earth nor desert, not as hillock nor woodland. It was merely flat, barren space, flat to exactitude and extending as far as the eye could register retinal images. I knew then that I must be on another planet, or (recalling the forbidden mythologies of the ancient Ahebites) within some other dimensional plane that existed in contestation with the three aspects of dimensionality we are comfortable with; for the Ahebites, led by the dread witch-priestess Isimah el-Aheb, were worshipers and human physical agents for the drab, featureless beings known as the Pyramidiles who did indeed inhabit a realm that was not planetary and thereby could only be para-dimensional.
This, I knew, was but grim fable; or at least I’d always thought it to be…
How, though, could I deny it now?
More surveillance was necessary for me to make a proper assessment of this phantasmata I was now sitting in the middle of. I required a forward view, which would no doubt expose me to the greatest risk yet. Nevertheless, I took my chance, realising no other subsidiary manoeuvre.
I stood upright at the back of the trolley.
What faced me were the backs of my sister and the aberrant motorman; nothing could be more imperative, I knew, than to prevent them from seeing me. Yet I was the one who needed to see. And see I did…
To my unabating horror.
Past the shoulders of Selina and the thogg there stretched a vista so strange, so unutterably alien, that the very glimpsing of it fleeced the breath from my lungs and instigated a slugging of my heart. It was a horizon of sorts, extending to sheer endlessness, a screaming, demented infinity that transcended all manner of measure. Sounds like wicked wind blended with some human aspect seemed to shriek from all directions; and dust (though dust that glittered) flitted through the ultra-terrestrial haze, filtering a purview of impossibility. The only apparent “natural” objects in view were the two track-rails extending in perfect linearity for incalculable miles ahead. Who could possibly have lain them? I wondered in fascinated terror. And just how long do they extend?