The Hellfire Club (24 page)

He took his fingers from her chin and moved behind her. The bed sank under his weight. “Hands,” he said. She put her hands behind her back, and he grasped her wrists and lashed them together. “This is a disgrace. You need a manicure more than anyone I’ve ever met. Pedicure, too. And you have to start using some really good nail polish, I don’t care what kind. We’re going to have to shop for some essentials, and after we get toothpaste and stuff like that, I’ll get you some female equipment. It’ll help our project.”

She heard him rip off a length of tape and felt him coil it around her joined wrists. “Why are you doing this? Are you going somewhere?”

“Don’t want you to run away while I wash the Westerholm slammer off me. Want to come in with me?”

“No, thanks.”

He cackled. “You can have one after.”

“After what?”

He patted her shoulder and hitched himself off the bed to carry the tape and the knife to the table, where he placed them in their old positions and made sure they were properly aligned.

“Are the two of us going to sleep in this bed?”

He looked over his shoulder in mock surprise. Slowly, as if pondering the question, he revolved to face her. “Since there’s only one bed, I suppose I presumed . . . And twin beds are so Ozzie and Harriet . . . But if you have strong objections, I guess I could sleep on the floor.” His drawl ridiculed his own words. “All right?”

She nodded.

“All right, then.” Dick Dart stripped off his shirt, dropped it on the floor, and undid the top of his trousers. His tasseled black loafers came off, and he bent down and skipped out of his trousers. His arms and shoulders were flabby, and a crust of black hair covered his chest. The shapeless slab of his stomach pushed out the waistband of boxer shorts decorated with a fly-fishing pattern. “But I don’t expect to have that problem.” He pushed down the shorts, exposing a nest of brown curly hair and a long, thick cucumber penis ridged with prominent veins. He tossed the shorts onto the chair and unselfconsciously walked to the table to pick up the roll of tape. His buttocks were flat, almost absent, and his heavy thighs and calves ended in wide, oddly primitive-looking feet, like those of dinosaurs. Tufts of black hair grew alongside his spine at the small of his back.

He ripped a four-inch section off the tape and came toward Nora, penis swinging before him like a pendulum. “We’ll work things out.” Then he was standing in front of her, the ridged gray cucumber at the level of her eyes radiating stinks like a swamp. She began to shake. Tears slipped from her eyes. He pushed up her chin, smiled down over the bulge of his belly, and flattened the tape over her mouth. “Breathe through your nose. Don’t panic.”

He pushed her shoulders and sent her flopping backwards onto the bed. Dart disappeared. She tried to gasp, and coarse tape clamped against her lips. Her body demanded oxygen, immediately. Pain blazed in her shoulders, and the rope chewed her wrists and ankles. She rolled from side to side, choking on tape, and finally remembered to breathe through her nose. Dimly she heard a chuckle, then the closing of the bathroom door. The shower hissed and rattled against the tub. Dart’s unmelodious voice began singing “Them There Eyes.” Nora rotated her hands and wrists the quarter inch permitted by the rope handcuffs. She lay collapsed against the bedspread, too terrified to cry.

Nora had a sudden vision of herself as seen from above: naked, bent across the bed, trussed like a roaster for the oven. She looked like a corpse in a crime-scene photograph. The woman in the photograph was nothing, an emptiness, less than pathetic. Some deaths might be preferable to the madness waiting within her, but not that one.

Dart came out of the bathroom, hair plastered to his head, water shaping the hairs on his legs into vertical lines. “What a picture you make.” He unfurled a towel and systematically began rubbing it over his arms, chest, gut, genitals, legs.

“Back in a second.” He vanished into the bathroom and reappeared with a fresh towel. Instead of returning to the bedside, he closed the bathroom door and stepped back toward the closet. Nora watched his reflection in the mirror on the bathroom door. He scrubbed his hair until it floated about his head, and then lightly ran the towel over his neck, his chest, his penis. He clutched himself with the towel, pulled himself roughly several times, and manipulated his testicles. After reaching a satisfactory stage of self-arousal, he stood sideways, held in his belly, gave himself an encouraging pat, as much a slap as a caress, and twitched upward another half inch. Dart had forgotten all about her. His beloved, the cucumber, jutted out before him. Dart clutched it in his fist and jerked up and down, causing the entire structure to darken to purple, bloat out another half inch, and raise itself in an upward curve. This accomplished, Dart turned to face himself head-on. Excited by the sight of itself, the thing in front of him stiffened into a curved rigidity ending in a red-blue knob the size of a small apple. Dart’s eyes were glazed, and his mouth was open. Nora thought he was about to ejaculate. He hefted his tes-ticles and groaned.
Go on,
she said to herself,
spurt all over the mirror.

The eyes in the mirror met hers.

47

DART STRODE BACK
into the room. “Hope you appreciate my consideration in showering. Did it for me more than for you, but wouldn’t want any unseemly body odors distracting you from what most women find a deeply enjoyable experience.” He straddled her legs, bent over her, pushed the head of his penis into her stomach, and rubbed it back and forth across her stomach. “Like that?” He stroked one of her breasts with his free hand. Nora closed her eyes, and he pinched her nipple. She uttered a sharp sound of protest into the tape over her mouth. “Pay at
-ten-
tion,” he sang, twirling the nipple painfully between his thumb and index finger. “We are going to perform an introduction, and it isn’t polite to close your eyes.” Smiling, he hitched himself up onto the bed and settled his knees on either side of her rib cage. “Nora’s titties, meet the Big Guy.” He leaned forward and ran the Big Guy along first one nipple, then the other. He lowered himself between her breasts, squeezed them around himself, and pumped back and forth. Dart released her breasts and hitched himself forward to thrust his beloved before her eyes. “Don’t call me Dick for nothing, right? Never saw one like that before, did you?”

The object four inches from Nora’s eyes looked like something pried out of calcified mud at an archaeological dig, something offered for half price at an Arabian bazaar, something carved from an enormous root. Granddad had brought it home from his travels and shown it to Grandma, and after she stopped shouting at him he had taken it upstairs to the attic and buried it in a steamer trunk. Varied in texture from corrugation to a dangerous, slick smoothness, lumpy with veins, a goiter stuffed with rocks—was this what most men wanted to have? Would Davey wish to swap his nice, willing member for this? She knew the answer. He would, absolutely.

She shook her head,
No.

“Going to go places hubby could never take you, Nora-pie.”

He moved off the bed, went to the table, and picked up the largest knife. Then he knelt in front of Nora and peeled the tape off her legs. Instead of cutting the rope, he laboriously untied the knot. Her legs loosened and sagged. Nora instantly closed them, and Dart chuckled and stood up. “Move up on the bed,” he said.

She hesitated, and Dart brought the point of the knife into contact with her left thigh.

She got her feet on the bed and levered herself up to the pillows. Her arms and shoulders ached, and her wrists burned. Dart walked up beside her on his knees. When he reached her groin, he slapped the knife on the pillow, thrust his hand between her legs, and rummaged around until he inserted a blunt fingertip. Nora’s body shuddered and went cold.

Humming to himself, Dart withdrew his finger and slid on top of her. He pushed her legs apart, planted his knees between them, and moved down to take aim. Nora made a high-pitched sound muffled by the tape. Her face was covered with tears.

Dart maneuvered a portion of himself into her and grunted. He shoved forward. Nora felt as though she were being torn apart. She screamed and heard only a thin, weightless wail. Smiling, Dick Dart propped himself on his elbows and held the knife to her throat. “What we have here is a reality lesson. All sex is rape, pure and simple. I am going to put my cock into your pussy. This act has been known to send women out of their minds, even then it was rape . . .” He pushed himself another quarter inch forward.

“. . . and do you know why? Because when it was all over, I owned them. That’s the secret.” He hoisted himself up, withdrew a tiny bit, and then rammed himself into her. Nora screamed again and rolled to one side.

Dart shoved her back down.

“Better relax, or there’s going to be a lot of blood. Have to stretch you out, and you’ll get there as long as you loosen up.” He withdrew and plunged ahead again, invading her. “Do you know the secret?” Nora had been hiding within herself with her eyes closed, her body clamped in revulsion, and when Dart slapped her cheek she realized that he was talking to her. “Didn’t think so.” He shoved forward again. “Women, who run rings around men all the time, who can outthink any man ever born, have one weakness. They love being fucked more than anything else on earth.” His voice seemed to come from a distant professorial source completely unrelated to what he was doing.

“Money, cars, fur coats, jewelry, houses, they’re smart enough to know those things are just toys. Give them all away for a guy with a johnson big enough to turn them inside out. Trouble is, most women never find that guy. But if they do, they’re
his.
Every guy is trying to do this, because deep down every guy knows how it’s supposed to be, and every woman is secretly hoping he’ll turn her inside out, because deep down she knows that’s the way it’s supposed to be. So it’s always a rape.”

Nora opened her eyes to a curious sight. Dick Dart’s upper portion hung over her. His mottled face had hardened around his concentration, and another face, a secret face, seemed to surface beneath the public one. His lips had drawn back from his yellow teeth. His nose had sharpened, and a suggestion of hair darkened his cheeks. She closed her eyes and heard distant artillery fire.

Eternities later, a quickening in her torture returned Nora to the world. Dick Dart’s sweat plopped on her in great tears. He groaned” his hands locked on her shoulders. His body froze, his legs turned to iron bars. Her mind seemed to burst into flame. He arched his back and slammed into her twice, three times, four, five, so forcefully her head banged the headboard.

Dart collapsed on top of her. She felt extraordinarily defiled, so dirty that she could never again be clean. When he rolled off, she felt as though he had broken each of her bones systematically. She would never open her eyes, never again. A hand crawled over her thigh.

“Was it good for you, darling?”

He left the bed and padded into the bathroom. Everything hurt everywhere. She was afraid to open her eyes.

Little voices hissed and chattered. Her demons had found her again. The demons were fond of room 326, and presently they were fond of Nora also, because once more she had been pushed through the bottom of the world into the devastation where they flourished. Nora hated and feared the demons, but she was much more fearful of what she would see if she opened her eyes” therefore she had to endure them. She remembered from her last exposure that although demons did not wish to be seen, you occasionally caught sight of those who crept up to impart a morsel of demon knowledge. Some of them were tiny red devils with toothpick pitchforks, some looked like animals created by mad scientists: long-toothed badgers with rat’s tails, hairy balls with darting eyes and heavy claws. Some demons looked like moving smudges.

An indistinct, winged thing flapped past her head whispering,
“He isn’t a wolf.”

Nora wondered if she would have the demons if she had been raised in some sensible religion, like Buddhism.

The thing circled around and flew past again.
“He’s a hyena.”

“You belong to a hyena,”
giggled something invisible but near. A tinny ripple of demon laughter greeted this remark.

“Wasn’t it fun, wasn’t it fun?”
sang another.
“And now you’re back with us again!”

Most of the information imparted by demons was true, for if they told lies they would be lunatic annoyances, not demons.

She heard them rattling up to her, whispering to each other in their rapid-fire voices, and drew into herself as tightly as possible, though she knew that the elated demons would never touch her. If they touched her, her mind would shatter, and then she would be too crazy to be interesting.

A demon who looked like a rat with small blue wings and granny glasses whispered,
You can’t get out of this one, is that clear? You passed through and now you’re on the other side, is that clear?

When she nodded, the ratlike demon said,
Welcome to the Hellfire Club.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Dick Dart. Nora opened her eyes, and the demons scattered under the bed, behind chairs, into drawers. Her pain bounded back into her body and stretched like a big cat. Naked, smiling, his hair combed, Dart stood beside the bed, idly tugging at himself. His free hand held a damp white towel. The secret face moved toward the surface of his public face. Nora saw that it was true” he was a hyena. “Take a gander. You have to sit up anyhow, so I can get the rope off your wrists.”

She shook her head.

Dart told her in an equable, good-humored fashion that like it or not she was going to sit up, grasped an upper arm, and jerked her forward. The room swung before and beneath her. Grimacing, she looked down and nearly fainted.

“Okay, let’s get this off.” Dart reached across the pillow for the knife and expertly nicked the tape around her wrists. He ripped off the tape and worked on the knot until the rope released her wrists. “Now the gag. I’m going to do this fast. Make any noise louder than a peep, I’ll ram this knife in you, understand?” She closed her eyes. The chattering demons crowded around. Her lips and a good deal of skin seemed to rip away with the tape, but she managed not to whimper.

He tossed the damp towel onto her legs. “Wipe yourself off. Have to strip the bed. I don’t want to sleep in this mess.”

Nora obediently passed the towel down the tops of her thighs and realized that if he was going to strip the bed, she would have to get off. She moved her right leg half an inch to the side, and her various pains held steady. Gritting her teeth, Nora swung both legs off the bed and forced herself to stand up. Her head swayed, and a bolt of pain shot upward in her groin.

“Girl’s a trouper,” said Dart, reclaiming the knife. “To prove I’m not completely evil, I did you a favor. Try to guess what it is.”

“Can’t,” she muttered.

He smiled at her and tugged out the bedclothes. “Ran you a bath, Nora-pie. Aren’t you grateful?”

“Yes.” At that moment she wanted a bath more than she wanted freedom.

“Pop yourself in that tub.” In a single gesture, he jerked the bloody cover and sheets off the bed, balled them up, and threw them into the corner.

She walked, knees trembling, to the bathroom. The casket-sized tub was three-fourths filled with water. The soap dish held a tiny plastic bottle of shampoo and a cake of soap the size of a commemorative stamp. Two curling black hairs adhered to the soap.

Nora’s stomach contracted, and she turned to the toilet in time to vomit pinkish drool into the bowl. She wrenched a tissue out of the dispenser, tottered over to the tub, picked up the soap as she would have a dead spider, then dropped the wrapped obscenity in the toilet and flushed it away. From a shell-shaped dish beside the sink she took another minuscule bar of soap and, stepping as gingerly as a stork, at last got into the tub.

Ah, yes. She never wanted to be anywhere at all except the inside of the tub. A pink cloud swam into the water from the center of her body. Delicately Nora explored herself. She was still bleeding, not seriously, and she had a lot of sore tissue. Various little fires continued to burn along the path of Dart’s invasion. She soaped her arms and legs and realized that she would have to wash again under the shower to remove the film of blood deposited by the water in the tub. She was bending forward to open the drain when Dick Dart sauntered into the bathroom. She leaned back and sank up to her neck in the cloudy water, and her knees rose like islands.

“Comfy?” Dart grinned down at her, then inspected his face in the mirror. “I hate the way your teeth feel when you haven’t brushed. Being unshaven doesn’t exactly fill me with joy, either. On our way to lunch, we can see if this place has a gift shop.”

Dart moved forward and peered into his eyes in the mirror, twirled around, and sat on the toilet, regarding her almost paternally. “Couldn’t help but notice you experienced some discomfort during our encounter.” He put a sarcastic stress on the last word. “To facilitate matters I’m going to do what I do with my old dears and buy some K-Y. Lubrication will eliminate about half of your problem, but if you don’t relax, you’re going to keep on getting hurt.”

Nora closed her eyes. A demon flapped up and hissed,
“You’re going to get hurt!”

She opened her eyes.

“Embarking on the great adventure of menopause, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” she said, startled.

“Irregular periods, vaginal dryness?”

“Yes.”

“Irritability?”

“I suppose.”

“Hot flashes?”

“Just started.”

“Formication?”

“What’s that?”

“Sensation of an insect crawling on your skin.”

She astounded herself by smiling.

“Doing any hormone replacement therapy? You should, but you have to experiment with the dosage levels before you get it right.”

She closed her eyes.

“I suggest a shower and a shampoo before we visit Home Cooking. Time for the next step in your education.”

He bestowed another hyena smile upon her and walked out. Moving as if in a trance, Nora dialed a disk at the end of the tub, and the bathwater gurgled into the drain. She pulled herself to her feet, waded through the froth, and twisted both dials at once. Water shot from the faucet. She flipped the lever directing the water to the showerhead, and freezing water shattered against her body.