Untitled.FR11

by Unknown Author

  “Hey, not so loud,” Katt said. “This isn’t Boulder.”

  “ You’re the one with the loud voice,” Sherry said, “a voice that so far hasn’t said a whole heck of a lot.”

  Katt smiled, finding a forkful of trail mix. “Lyra’s cabin.” Looking superior, she closed her mouth around the tines. Behind Sherry, the guy had unfolded paper from his shirt pocket, uncapped a pen, hunched to sip coffee.

  “Crazy Lyra’s place?”

  “Be nice.”

  “She having a party?”

  “Nope. Just the two of us.”

  Sherry smirked. “How cozy.” Then she softened, took Katt’s hand momentarily. “Really, that sounds wonderful.”

  “There’s a skylight,” Katt said. “Full moon. Raging fire in the fireplace. Turns toasty warm real quick.”

  “So I get to sample the amazing energy vortex?” “Oh ye of litde faith.” Katt laughed. “I haven’t a clue, really. But it’s there. Or something’s there. You tell me—when we get there and settle in—whether you feel anything or not.”

  Sherry looked at Katt. “I’m feeling something pretty intense right now, to tell the truth.”

  “Time enough for truth later.”

  “And I intend to give you plenty of it.” “Likewise,” Katt said. “Hours on end.”

  Over by the silverware, a young family rose and left, a slumbering moist-haired infant Snuggli’d on its father’s chest. The salad was good, every bite, and that much more delicious for Sherry’s company.

  “So how,” her friend asked, “do I find this place?”

  “Just follow my car.”

  “I can handle that. But what if we’re separated?” “It’s easy to find,” Katt said. “You have a piece of paper? I’ll draw you a map.”

  Sherry rummaged in her purse, found a wrinkled scrap, a Razor Point pen. “This do?”

  “Yep. We’re gonna continue west on Horsetooth toward the reservoir.” She talked it out as she drew, left here, right here, so many traffic lights. Wasn’t very involved. For the remoteness of Lyra’s cabin, getting there was easy and the route pretty straightforward. As she drew the box that represented the cabin, she imagined being able to see down into it, to see herself and Sherry caught in coziness and love, there on the sheepskin rug by the fire. She put a finger on it, brushed it lighdy, so lighdy that no one but herself noticed.

  Thank God for glass. He’d had a clear smoky shot at both of them, a slight twist of the head, made it seem as if he were gazing out into the dimly lit parking lot, but there they were, etched in onyx, all the details dark and shiny, their movements maddeningly suggestive. The glass also slighdy amplified their voices, especially the less appealing one—not that he needed the boost, she spoke so clearly. Gave superb direcuons too.

  He’d had his eye on the flower girl, past the recipe board by the entrance—cool spiritual type, long yankable brown hair down past the shoulderblades. She’d be savage when aerated. Spiritual meant spirited, a sweadng filly all steamed up, tugging at her reins, trying to rouse him by the natural movements of her flesh. Then the once-sad breeder had come in, looking tighter than he’d remembered her. Prettier, bouncier. He’d idled along, checking her out. When the redhead with the devastating curves joined her, a drillable splash of dream-flesh swooping below her neck, his heart leapt up. Her glance had skewered him in the Student Center, highly observant; here he didn’t want her noticing him. And fortunately, unnatural sex acts on her mind, her eyes and ears were fixed on her short-haired friend. A cabin, up yonder in the foothills. Isolation. He wouldn’t have to coax anybody. Just surprise the shit out of them, clonk ’em, fasten their fascinating slicked-with-sin bodies to a tree, and wait for them to revive.

  He paused. He pondered. This situation could use a little thinking about: These two were lezzies, that much was clear. They weren’t about to drop any babies, and if he killed them, maybe the papers would get it wrong, warp his message maybe. Ah, but it wasn’t the newspapers that mattered; what mattered were the antennas he drilled into the be-hind-handers; what mattered were the backstage ties they had to one another worldwide. And as for being safe if sorry little lezzies, these days even dykes went ahead and puffed up—artificial insemination had done its worst with them or they let some gay buddy poke his seeder into their parts and shoot his shit-laden seed up inside them. Besides, maybe they were bi. That was all the rage these days and they didn’t seem like manhaters. Not these two.

  No, they’d be prime victims, of that he was sure.

  His coffee grew cold. He pretended to sip it, paper before him, doodling air-spirals along the edges.

  In the center, the map was taking form. He’d driven up that way before, knew vaguely the locale, blessed Katt—the sexier one had dropped her name—for being so helpful. At their rising, he turned inward to the window, propping his face on his left palm, concealing it, watching walking shadows, clear the eadng area, then glide past the chocolates and onward through an empty checkout line. He folded the map and jammed it into a jeans pocket, leaving the coffee cup where it was.

  Sherry’d been expecting something rustic, tiny little back-to-the-earth place, a wood-burning stove, an unevenly carpented oak floor that caught at stool legs. The cabin, brighdy bathed in moonlight, asserted itself smardy when Katt’s assured driving at last brought it into view. None of that rustic crap for me, it proclaimed.

  “I like it,” Sherry said into the warmth of the night air, twin pings echoing in her head from their doorslams.

  “It’s likable,” Katt joked, key in hand.

  The inside was spodess, a clever blend of rich woods in the cabinetry and furniture, with the steel and tile of modern fixtures. A single room, but what a room! It felt spacious yet cozy, uncluttered but with the correct number of chairs and couches casually contrivedly scattered about here and there. Chopped cords of wood were stacked by the fireplace. As Katt tended to them, Sherry walked about in awe of the place, trying to sense the fabled energy vortex but just feeling good about the quiet and the solitude and being here with Katt. The cabin air,

  starting to glow now with the first feeble flames, was lightly redolent with an ineffable hint of woodbased incense. Katt snapped out the light by the door and Sherry focused for the first time on the skylight, a tepee of moonshine aslant upon the flocked off-white carpet. “Someone lucked out,” she said.

  “Lyra and Joseph are pretty special.”

  “Must be. I’m impressed.”

  Crackles from the fire and a reaching out of heat and light. Katt approached her, merged with her. Her embrace was so gentle, so firm, so right.

  Sherry asked, “So is this place supercharging

  you?”

  “Something is,” Katt joked. Then more seriously: “I think so. But there’s only one way to find out. You need to take off your clothes and lie down over here.”

  “So serious,” she said. “And in such a hurry. Like most of the men I’ve met and bedded.”

  “No hurry. It’s just that being naked here feels so good, and I think it’ll feel even better tonight.” There was more to it than that, Sherry sensed, but let it go.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “There’s one small problem.”

  “What problem?” asked Katt.

  “I seem to have forgotten how to take my clothes off. I’m afraid you’re going to have to do it for me.”

  Katt smiled. “With pleasure,” she said.

  There’d been no need, really, to keep them in view.

  In fact, he’d lost them at once, traffic on 229

  r

  Horsetooth being what it was outside of Alfalfa’s. Anxiety tightened his stomach. Absurd. The map lay beside him in the truck, and Katt’s words had burned the route into memory. Female guidance, in a voice he’d later drill up to the top of its scale, coated the night highway. A mommy’s coaxings. The easy byplay of their conversation had been mere prelude to the duet they’d weave under his blandishments, taut, thick with agony, skirling up into
the moonlit sky. Surely, the race of tempters would hear the message in their bones and end, as one, the hipsnakings, the coy flashings of exposed flesh, the endless upthrusting and implanting and adorning of eye-achers, all intended to lure out seed and baby-make unendingly. True shame would hold sway at last. Cosmetic lies gone, they’d show their ugliness. Pussycravers would droop their seeders down. No more brats, ever. Clear the pipeline. Watch the last brood of kickers and pourers age and die. Give the planet a big long rest.

  Three miles on, with the traffic thinning, he saw two cars he guessed were theirs—like a tailgated slowpoke but without the anxiety and rage he usually felt from watching such a duo form. He held back, pleased to see them follow the directions in his brain. Cars were few enough and the nightroad unlit so that he could track them about the dips and curves by mere residues of backlight. When, up ahead, they turned off onto a dirt road, his anxiety revived. He drove past the dirt road, glimpsing receding pairs of red glowlights dancing on the road’s uneven surface. Then he swung out and U-turned, taking his time. She’d said the cabin was exactly a mile off the highway. He’d need to stop a quarter mile in; kill his engine before they killed theirs, so they wouldn’t hear anything behind them; grab a wrench, the drill, his bag of tricks, and set out on foot.

  He eased onto the dirt road, the slow crush of gravel tight and grunting beneath his tire wheels. Switching off his headlights, he trusted the moon to light his way.

  Katt felt the power as soon as she and Sherry crossed the threshold. The place welled with assurance, rising up through the floorboards. She walked in its embrace, a dim cool calm about her as she built and lit the fire. People would call her crazy— Katt herself would have thought so a few weeks ago—if she spoke of the energies she felt here. Let them. Or rather, let the power’s intensity, at least, be a secret. Even from Sherry.

  Anyway, the energy vortex, the influence of the moon, all of it could be seen in two ways: as real, which still struck her as flaky; or as an externaliza-tion of the state of her being in this place, her body, her mind, her spirit focused for some reason as sharp and blazing as the flames in the fireplace. She could relate to it as goddess power or whatever and yet think of it as psychological shorthand for her inner truth. No problem, no contradiction, and no craziness, not really; just a wisdom that defied logic.

  About the rising blaze, Katt tepee’d thick branches.

  Tonight she didn’t need to be under the skylight. It felt right to move the sheepskin rug before the hearth and lead her lover there where the quick heat of the fire made her clothing cling like hot wool. Sherry’s dark tinsel of red hair caught the fire’s antics, her pupils dancing with the flicker and crackle of it. Katt embraced her. In her ear she whispered, “I love you,” and heard its echo return in low tones, Sherry’s soft lips at her lobe. Their hands roved, unbuttoning, sighing down zippers, pausing to thumb up tight nipples under bras and then nipples without bras.

  Must keep my mind on the task at hand, she thought, a temptation just to surrender to the pleasure. But Sherry, all unawares, needed healing; and Katt needed to heal her. Although the vortex made no accusation against her—indeed it asserted the rightness of her actions—she felt as if a measure of atonement would be hers if she healed her lover first thing. It would convey closure. A renewed sense of integrity almost. Then, that done, she could revel in her friend’s flesh, as her friend reveled in Katt’s.

  Shuddering with delight, she broke from Sherry’s lips and knelt to unbutton and wiggle down and remove her jeans and her lace briefs, burying a kiss into the smooth pillow of pubic hair, sniffing the glistening nub and lips. “Lie down,” she said, doffing the remainder of her own clothing as Sherry did so—took an instant, tossing backward behind her. Then she knelt to share with her sweet friend a kiss and the heady aroma of her juices. Sherry’s hands rose to caress her. Katt gently removed them. “Lie back for now. Just let me touch you.” And she turned her attention then to Sherry’s mound, her fingers again easing their slow way inside her, deep as they could go, her left hand resdng a moment on her tummy, then moving into her private hair and beginning to scan inward toward the uterus.

  Katt’s back, though not uncomfortable, felt less warm than her toasty front. This place spoke of security. The power held her in its warm palm, the rich air buoyant as a soft blanket and replete with what felt, since Lyra’s talk a few weeks before, like the assurance of a goddess. What name had Lyra used? Artemis. Felt right. Felt like just thinking that name summoned out of the firelapped darkness an approval lying almost within hearing. And mingled with that approval was a stern, if muted, reproach about Conner and what she’d nearly done to him; her attack upon her son had been a wrongful act, prompted by the needs of ego, not by spiritual necessity. But in that upbraiding, there lay a sooth of forgiveness.

  Sherry moaned, a pattern of brief delighted surprise. It was her learned way to signal approaching orgasm, mouth teased open, eyes closed, back arched, breasts thrust like mounded heaven wantonly upward. The saddle of Katt’s palm rhythmed against her lover’s moist nub. She slowed it, an effort to focus away from sex and toward the troubled area within. She closed her own eyes. She found it, a wayward expansion of cells, and bathed it in twin flows of energy, one from the hand that lay above, one from the tips of her inthrust fingers that nearly touched the place. Her lover squirmed beneath her attentions, and Katt rode the motions like flotsam over rolling ocean. Awareness and trust were all she needed. Her hands held assurance, became conduits for the chthonic power that taught her body as it streamed through to its cure. Love. This, too, the healing she put forth, was love. It and the silent rhythm of palm against moistened pearl were but two facets of the same generosity of spirit.

  The badness dwindled, increasingly banished as Sherry gave in to her rising abandon. Katt midwifed the birth of inner harmony, the coming into correct focus of previously troubled flesh and the unstoppable release of deep orgasm. They melded, the two healings. And they held there, clung tight together, the air filled with joy and the sweet high terror of Sherry’s voice pushing beyond the power of lungs to express. Katt wept with happiness. For one insane and certain moment, she knew she would tell her. Here in this cabin, here where the goddess enfolded them, what Katt had done to Marcus—even what she’d nearly done to their son—would make perfect sense. Sherry would understand. She’d commiserate and forgive. They would share the pain, share the grief, their common womanhood speaking below the level of everyday law and logic, conspiring over deeper truths.

  Katt withdrew her fingers and Sherry fumbling brought them to her lips, kissing the moistness. Then, still weak from lost breath, she gasped, “Come here,” drawing Katt to her, downward, torso to torso, the hot sweat, the touch of mouth to mouth, Katt’s arms resting upon fleece (hot here, cool there), the grapple at comfort, animation below where skin glowed, new arousal eager for its twin.

  Gunshot! She let out an unformed sound. Scatters of impression. The thoughts wouldn’t cohere, not fast enough for her fear. Not a gunshot. Even as she turned her head and saw the door jittering from the crash, the shape moved like a wraith through the room, the night coolness touched her calves, upraised arm on the thing hurtling toward her, silver gleam, a held silver bone that arced down like dull pewter sweeping through burnished air.

  Sherry deafened her right ear with a scream.

  A No! almost made it to Katt’s lips.

  Then the world thundered out.

  Well-behaved earth. No twigs snapped underfoot, moon giving sufficient outline to things, the three steps up to the door by the canted flagpole nice and firm, no telltale creak to betray his coming. So when he took a deep breath and burst in, charging at the flames and trusting that his victims would be there, surprise was on his side. Seconds of surprise would be crucial. Two combatants were one too many. He had a clear shot across the carpet, lumpy shapes he processed as clothing only later, chairs and couches at the periphery—and, good fortune, resolving like photos in a tray, thei
r clasped unclothed bodies, helpless, stunned, ready for capture.

  His rush was seamless. Get one! was his only thought and all else was acUon. He clonked the top one, a brutal stroke to the skull. She went out, falling on the redhead where notions of rising had be-pm, falling so heavily that he heard a quiver in the redhead’s scream. She flailed at the body above her, t tying to escape. Inert buttocky mass blocked his way loo. He shoved at it with his wrench hand and grabbed a fist of red hair, wanting too many things at once, opening himself up. In the next instant, as the old one rolled off, he was tensed to yank the other’s skull to the floor, hard and fast enough to stun her at least, then follow through with the wrench. But her knee she abruptly wedged in his belly, air gone. She was water. He toppled beside the liquid squirm that was the redhead getting away and grabbed her ankle, his remaining strength concentrated in his grab, so that she fell forward. Breath returned in sufficient quantity to leap at her, cover her kicking legs with his body, his wrench hand at her right thigh as if to measure a new silver thighbone. Cold metal on flesh. She struggled to rise, her bare back a curved porcelain ripple below a fury of red hair.

  Absurd word above, like odd tan lines: MINE.

  He grabbed upward at her left shoulder, felt tension, felt her try to shake him off. But he had her pinned, and he was stronger, and his breath was back in full. Sped-up turde-tug forward. He’d gained a foot upward, leg flails now from chest to thigh. The first blow of his wrench had little power. The second one fell solid and her struggles abruptly ceased.

  Out.

  His face was burning up. Chest heaving at the exertion but soon okay. He had the urge to pulp her head with blow after blow, silken red hair flying up amid the bloodspray, matted then in stickiness. But there were drillings to be attended to, a pump-priming on the body of this temptress, followed by a weave of screams that would get through loud and clear to their accursed sex across the globe.

  He whipped two lengths of rope from his jeans pocket, binding the plain one’s hands behind her with one of them. Enough. Weren’t going anywhere, that one. She’d probably be lying here on the rug, still out, when he came back.