Masques IV

by J N Williamson

  “I—I wish I could have spared you all of this pain,” I whispered as I lowered my face and kissed her lightly on the cheek. The briny taste of her tears exploded in my mouth. The effect was overpowering; I could no longer hold myself back. Like a snake, my tongue darted between my lips and, flickering, trembling, caressed her skin. I grew dizzy, intoxicated by the hot, sweet taste of her.

  She moaned softly, barely at the edge of hearing. My arm went around her, pulling her closer—comforting, reassuring, like a good friend.

  “Go on,” I whispered. “If you have to cry, let it out. Let it all out.”

  I could barely hear my own voice above the roaring rush in my ears as my face brushed against hers. Ever so lightly, my tongue worked its way up from her chin, over the soft contours of her cheek until—at last—I reached her eyes. My hand grasped the back of her head, turned her gently to face me, and pulled her tightly against my greedy, eager mouth. Moving my head from side to side, I kissed and lapped her lower eyelids, savoring the salty explosion of taste on my tongue. With slow, sensuous flicks, I licked the bulging circles of her closed eyes.

  “No—please!” she whispered, squirming on the seat. “Not now . . . not here!” But I knew she didn’t mean it. Her body was molded against me like a tight-fitting glove. The passion consuming me filled her, too. I could feel it thrumming through her body like an electric current. Her hands worked around behind my back, clutching, clinging desperately to my coat. She shook with repressed sobs as I moved back and forth, kissing the corners of each eye. While I was busy drinking the flood of tears from one eye, my hand wiped the other until it was slick with moisture. Then I slipped my fingers into my mouth and sucked them clean, not wanting to miss a single delicious drop.

  “Please . . .” she moaned, and I knew what she was asking for. This wasn’t denial; it was passion, raw and desperate. Puckering my lips, I feverishly kissed first one eye, then the other. She gasped for breath, the tears streamed down her face, but my lips were there—eager to savor every pearly drop. Oceans of passions raged in my head, my heart pounded heavily in my chest as I pressed myself against her, crushing her back against the seat of my car. The world outside disappeared in swirling passion. For a flashing instant, I knew she sensed danger, but it was already too late. I possessed the source of her tears, the twin rivers that fed the raging of my desire.

  “White Nile”—I said before kissing her left eye, “—and Blue Nile,” before I kissed the other. Then I clamped my mouth over her right eye and, pressing my tongue hard against her eyelid, began to suck—at first gently, then more insistently. I’m sure she thought I was lost in sexual desire but I knew she would never truly understand. None of them ever did. I applied more pressure, suctioning hard until her eyeball bulged against her closed lid.

  She began to struggle, making soft, whimpering sounds; but here in the shadowed corner of the parking lot, I knew no one was going to notice us. As my sucking grew stronger, more insistent, she screamed, sharp and shrill. I covered her mouth with one hand, pulled back, and stared at her eyes, glistening and round with fear.

  “Please—don’t,” she said, her voice a wet rasp. Her throat was raw with tortured emotions and the tears she had already shed. Her fists beat helplessly against my back as I leaned forward and sucked all the harder. Her resistance was futile. She was mine now. I had her!

  Her low, bubbling scream continued to rise, stifled by my hand. I was afraid I’d have to kill her before I could finish. It usually happens that way no matter how hard I try to keep them quiet. Marianne thrashed with frantic resistance, but I wouldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop. I had to have her—I had to lay claim to the source of my passion! I was only dimly aware of her long, agonized screech as my cheeks, working like strong bellows, sucked harder and harder until—at last—something warm, round, and jellied popped into my mouth. I nibbled on it until I felt the resilient tube of her optic nerve between my teeth, then bit down hard, severing it. A warm, salty gush of tears and blood—an exquisite combination—flooded my throat. I was dizzy with ecstasy as I reached down to the car floor, found the jar I kept under the seat for nights such as this, spun open the top—and spat her eyeball into it.

  Then I went back to draining the empty socket dry of tears and blood. Precious drops dribbled from the corners of my mouth, but I eagerly wiped them up with my fingertips.

  “I . . . love . . . you,” I gasped. With one hand still covering her mouth, I sat back to wipe my chin with the back of my wrist. Then, moaning softly, I shifted over to her left eye and clamped the suction of my mouth over it. She struggled again, harder now, writhing and screaming in pain and terror; but my weight held her fast while I dragged the tip of my tongue hard against her eye, lapping up more tears. Then, unable to hold back any longer, I sucked her other eyeball out of its socket and spat it, too, into the jar.

  For long, dizzying minutes, I pressed her down against the seat while my tongue tenderly probed both empty holes for the last traces of tears. After a while, her body shivered; then she lay still as her heart quietly slowed and stopped. My rapid-fire pulse eventually lessened as well—but all of this happened nearly four weeks ago, and I feel it coming on me again. I have to go out tonight. That urge, that demanding, thirsty need is strong inside me . . . like the irresistible pull of the ocean’s salty tide.

  Collaborationists

  J.N. Williamson

  Highlights in the professional life of this writer include coaxing four of these anthologies into existence, plus the non-fictional How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and working with the contributors to them . . . writing the novels The Ritual (my first, in ’79), Playmates, Ghost, Wards of Armageddon (with John Maclay), The Black School and its Jacob Wier continuation, Hell Storm . . . following Bob Knight’s I.U. basketball and Bob’s coaching techniques . . . realizing that Robert Bloch’s and Rick McCammon’s story acceptances for (respectively) the two Psycho Paths anthos and Horror Writers of America’s first, Under the Fang, put my published story total safely over 100 . . . and writing my most mature novels, The Night Seasons and Monastery, for upcoming publications. (So what if following basketball isn’t a professional endeavor; in Indiana, it amounts to that!) My work in progress is a psychological horror novel. It’s also approximately 70% autobiographical.

  Here’s one of my rare humorous horror stories. Even if the qualifier places me at risk, “humorous” was certainly my intention. Its influences aren’t my usual ones; they’re authors such as P. G. Wodehouse, Dotty Parker, Ray Russell, and the lighter-than-air Jim Thurber. It probably won’t scare you, unless you’re a male writer too!

  As if it had been ordained by Someone on High, Mel always came to the convention with Valerie, his wife. I’m certain he knew we would expect to see that old horror writer’s most supportive fan but there was no decent opportunity to ask Mel why she wasn’t present this year until the final day of the convention, Sunday, and he hadn’t uttered a word about her absence. I was, frankly, mildly hurt.

  Until this convention, Valerie and Mel, Carol and I had made it a matter of course to attend the awards banquet and for the four of us to sit together. But Carol and I had suffered a bad year financially, hadn’t bought banquet tickets, and our plane for home would leave in a couple of hours. Carol left the hotel to look around town and, I supposed, to avoid any risk of embarrassment. I waited in the lobby and was startled when Mel dropped heavily into the leather chair beside me.

  I said, “Aren’t you going to the banquet either?”

  “No,” he said. “It won’t really be any fun without Valerie.” He crossed his long legs, busied himself lighting a cigarette. That surprised me too because Mel had quit smoking two years back. “Go ahead and ask,” he told me. “I won’t like it, but you might as well get the question off your chest.”

  I took that for one of his customary sardonic replies. “All right.” Casually, I sipped at a coke—this was Sunday, remember—I’d brought out to the lobby wi
th me. “Why isn’t Valerie with you at this convention?”

  Mel swiveled his oblong head around to peer directly at me and I was reminded of some aging horse that had learned even his stud services were no longer required. He took a moment. “On Thursday, a week ago,” he said, “Valerie woke up and found that she was an entirely happy woman.”

  “Why,” I breathed, “that’s wonderful.” Now came Mel’s famous punch line.

  “No. It is not.” He took his time about getting a long drag into his lungs and tried not to cough when it came back out. “I’m afraid you aren’t understanding me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My fault. I’m not getting it right.”

  “Why don’t you try again?”

  “All right,” Mel said. His eyes burned into mine. “Val said she was in a condition of absolute ecstasy.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Had been, she said, for at least twenty-four hours.”

  “My God,” I said. “How? Not to be overly inquisitive, but why?”

  “That’s what I asked her. I mean . . . I’m a writer.”

  I said, “My point exactly.” I shifted nervously in my leather chair. “How could a thing like that happen to a writer’s wife?” I found the concept wholly confounding. “Was she drinking?”

  “Not a drop. Remember; she never cared for the stuff.” Mel gazed thoughtfully at the burning end of his Winston but it had no answers for him. “Well, I tried not to make too much of it; played it down. Not time yet for hysterics, I thought. Then I poked around in her things.” A deepening frown. “I was looking for it, you know. Dope.”

  “Why, certainly.” I tried to be as reassuring as humanly possible. Drugs was as good a guess at explaining Valerie’s condition as anything, I thought. I added to Mel, manfully, “You had no other choice.”

  “But there was nothing narcotic anywhere I looked,” he said. “Except for a fantasy novel—leprechauns and unicorns, you know—and one of those exquisitely subtle horror anthologies.” His shoulders moved. “Nothing, however, she could possibly put into her nose or arm or could conceivably swallow.”

  Wonderingly, I slowly shook my head. I yearned to help, but I could not bear imagining what I might do if Carol was ever—

  “My Val has been a genuinely decent woman, a devoted wife, always,” Mel choked. I tried not to see his eyes at that instant. “Truly devoted. Understand, I don’t want to make Valerie out to be some kind of angel—”

  “But she was,” I said. I changed it hastily. “Is. Listened to every word you got down on paper, I know. Typed your manuscripts. Put off having more children, even held down the basest, most menial jobs just so you could—”

  “It was together” Mel interposed a trifle sharply. “For both of us. The long climb up, grubbing for a dollar, an agent; prostituting oneself. You know how it goes.”

  “How true,” I said and chuckled. Mel and I had often laughed together about the deceit, the lies, the royalty departments, computer downtime, though I didn’t know why. “Mel, I know. I remember when—”

  “You can’t know,” my friend argued. “You can not know what passes through one’s mind when your wife, out of the blue, announces that she is one hundred percent content.”

  “You’re right,” I nodded, “I can’t.”

  “Well, try” he urged me.

  “I cannot. I wouldn’t know where to start,” I admitted. “Mel, surely she didn’t mean what she said. Not literally.”

  “One hundred percent,” he answered with a stricken, stately nod. “I sought immediate clarification, suggested eighty-nine, proposed ninety-four. She swore that she meant every percentage point. Just sat there, grinning. Smirking like a devil.”

  “No one has ever heard of such a thing.” Then the idea hit me. “A possibility comes to mind, one only—a single, nebulous, wholly absurd, exceedingly remote possibility.”

  “Thought of it in the wee hours.” He had stopped with his cigarette an inch or two from his lips. “You’re wondering if she’s having an affair. Has taken a lover.”

  “No!” I shouted. One of the people moving around behind the check-in desk almost lifted his head to look at me. “Well, yes.” I felt my cheeks color. “But only because it can happen to the best of us. Remember Allen? And Wally?”

  Mel looked me in the eye. “I demanded the truth of Valerie and she swore that there has never been a man in her life since we married.” I used the occasion of my friend’s growing ash drawing within inches of my nose to raise a hand and conceal my errant smile. Mel, meanwhile, tapped hell out of the cigarette in a tray.

  And then—to my astonishment—he was beaming the broadest of smiles at me. “Put two and two together and you can imagine what I did next.” He made his face go blank, glanced carefully around and then back at me. “I took advantage of the situation.”

  “You mean, you and Valerie . . .?”

  Light reflected off his high forehead as his head bobbed. “Took Val straight to bed. We had at it. We had at it.” He went on nodding. “And?”

  “It was as good for me as ever.” His expression remained blank. “But,” I prodded.

  His chin lowered. “She said it was fine.”

  “Lord,” I sighed, “that bad?”

  He spoke into the collarless neck of his sweater but I heard him. “It was as good as it had ever been for her, too—and she was still perfectly happy. ‘Ecstatic’ remained her exact term.” The mumbling got worse. “She said she had no complaints about either that particular sex or our sex life in general. Absolutely none.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” I remarked. “She’s in even worse shape than I’d thought.”

  He didn’t hear me. “She strongly implied that that aspect of our marriage should in no way be held responsible either for how awful she used to feel or how ecstatic she felt after we’d just had ‘our little romp.’ It was . . . fiiiiine”

  This was intolerable! “My poor, old friend. What happened next?”

  “What else could I do but accept it? I was neither responsible for making my wife miserable nor for making her content.” Mel’s face was a mask of horror. “A husband can occasionally strike out; we all know that. But I was no longer even a member of our marital team! It wasn’t as if I couldn’t get the bat on the ball, it was as if—”

  “I understand,” I told him, and edged slightly away.

  “Well, the kids came over. Not because I phoned them; they’d already been invited to dinner.”

  In mind’s eye I saw my friend’s grown children and their mates. Mel, Junior, had a wife I’d had to use—on paper, that is. The daughter was as lacking in talent as Junior. “How awful was it?”

  “Awful enough.” His shudder started out life as a sigh. Perhaps everything did, I thought, and tried to remember the insight till I got to make note of it. “Before they were through the door, I had to tell them about Valerie. ‘Your mother is happy,’ I said. ‘She has just informed me that she’s never before felt so fulfilled.’”

  “That was her choice of words, ‘fulfilled?’” I stammered. “That?” Nothing had prepared me for such a disclosure. I doubt anything could.

  “Do you know what Junior asked me?” His baseball mitt of a hand squeezed my knee. “Do you know?” His face was red so I winked back tears of pain and he continued. “He asked if his mother—my wife—had asked for a divorce!”

  “He wasn’t expecting such news, Mel,” I reasoned. “He’s a man, too.”

  Mel’s fingertips dug in. “That little son of a bitch!”

  “Easy, buddy.” Prying his fingers out of my knee was like extracting steel pins. Mel has written several million words. “It’s a dreadful thing to ask his father, but he’s your own flesh and blood. You must try to forgive him.” We were sitting side by side and I began to wonder what was detaining Carol, my wife. Into my friend’s sudden, growing silence, I whispered: “Did Valerie go to an attorney?”

  Mel snatched the can of coke from my hand. For a momen
t, I swear, I think he wanted to dash it into my face. Then, emitting a moan unlike any I’d heard from an unfettered man, he crushed the can between his typewriter-trained fingers and paid no heed to the drops raining on our knees. “She did not. I thought about it, but the only one I know is a man who was always out of town when I wanted him to read a multi-book contract. Besides, if I did seek a divorce, I’m reasonably sure . . .”

  I was staring at him when his words began to trail away. “Go on,” I said.

  Mel turned to peer at the check-in desk. The people behind it were obviously trying not to look at us. “I’m sure that if I got a divorce, it would mean no more to Valerie than if I didn’t. It’s—all the same to her, now. She’s happy!”

  I let seconds tick away, to think. What I needed to say to Mel then was hard, very hard, and Mel’s face looked as if a powerful storm was building, broodingly, behind it. “Mel . . . old friend . . . there’s a possibility”—I broke off in order to furnish suspense—“that Val has . . . gone.”

  “Gone?” he repeated. “How do you mean, ‘gone’?” One eyebrow lifted. “Do you mean her soul may have been replaced by that of some demonic entity—that sort of ‘gone’?”

  I considered the idea for an instant, then shook my head. Valerie wasn’t Catholic. “No, I meant that writers’ wives are often under great pressure. Since they lack the creative outlets we possess, at least when the child-bearing years have passed, a few of them have been known to—become neurotic. Flip out, as it were.”

  “Not Valerie.” Rather wearisomely, Mel again shook his head. “Carrie, our daughter, ruled that out. She had a little heart-to-heart with Val and said she’s perfectly sound mentally. Or did I tell you Carrie graduated from that psych course she took? ‘Everything You Needed to Know about Your Woman’s Mind but He Wouldn’t Let You.” My girl is Doctor Carrie now.”

  “Then I’m at a complete loss to understand Val’s problem,” I confessed. A surreptitious glance at my watch told me the plane home would leave in an hour and Carol was still window-shopping in town. Several ideas played torturously at the fringes of my mind, one of them worth writing down, but I remembered my friend still had not said why his wife had not come to the convention. I approached the matter with delicacy.