pressed against him, and he lacked the will, or the
strength, to try to push her away. He was still trembling.
The woman muttered something in Spanish. He did not
understand the words, but her tone was intended to be
soothing. She backed away and began to undress swiftly.
The dress slid off, and the three petticoats, and then the
knee length underwear and the long black stockings and
corset. Dolores, in the nude, was a magnificent woman.
The breasts were full and the nipples, almost as large as
the ends of his thumbs, pointed upwards slightly. The
pubic hair was thick and black and a line extended from
it upward, like the smoke from a distant fire, to her navel.
The fluid beginning to soak her hair and run down her
leg showed how deeply impatient she was.
Childe, seeing these, felt less afraid. She looked too
much of the protoplasm, too little of the ectoplasm, for
him to believe to the core of his mind that she was truly a
ghost.
He was far from being at ease, however. And when he
tried his little Spanish to ask her if she could release him,
he realized that she had no intention of letting him loose.
Or else she was not able to do so.
He repeated his request that she get the key from
Magda. She shook her head, indicating that she would not
do so or she did not understand him. Perhaps—he hoped
—she meant to release him but only after she had gotten
what she wanted. What she wanted, for some reason or
other, was Childe.
Not that it was any mystery about what she wanted.
The reason why he was her choice was the mystery. At
present, he could do nothing to find out.
She kissed him again and again and finally she began to
play with his penis while she kissed him. He could not get
an erection; the touch of her ringers turned his flesh cold
as a dying man's, and he shrank from her. He was, liter-
ally, spooked.
Finally, she quit kissing him. She backed away again
and inspected him with stabs of her black eyes and then
frowned. But she approached again, speaking in soothing
but incomprehensible Spanish, and got down on her knees
in the straw. She took his limp penis into her warm
mouth. She began to suck slowly, while the tips of her fin-
gers touched the insides of his thighs where the thigh and
belly met. His flesh began to warm, and the penis, as if the
blood, once frozen, had suddenly become fluid, began to
fill out. The old familiar but never boring sensations be-
gan to come back. He put his hands on her hair and
pulled the high comb out and let it flood loose around her
shoulders. He moved his hips back and forth.
Suddenly, she had unmouthed his penis and was kissing
him again, running her tongue around his mouth. Then
she took his penis and, rising to her toes, let herself down
upon it. It slid up into her cunt; she moved back and forth
a few times, and he came.
There are orgasms and there are orgasms.
This was so exquisite that he passed out, very briefly,
during the ejaculations.
It was as if she had sparked within the chamber of her
cunt, as if a century and a half of chastity were loosed
along the shaft of his cock. Or as if she had generated a
current that shot lightning down his nerves. So intense
was the sensation, he was not sure that he was not burned
out—literally. Perhaps something electrical had been dis-
charged.
Childe was restricted to an upright position because of
the chain. He told the woman, the ghost, or whatever she
was, to get the key from Magda, but she paid him no at-
tention except to look at him when he was talking. He
could not understand why she did not get the key, since it
was to her advantage to do so. And then it occurred to
him that she was probably afraid that he would take off
and leave her. And she did not want that, because she
had too much to unloose. Or so it seemed to him.
He was limited in his area of activity and angle of po-
sition, but Dolores was ingenious. After she had sucked
his penis into a full rigidity again, drawing in on it with
just the reverse action of blowing up a balloon but with
lowed the spermatic fluid and cleaned off his penis in the
process, she released it. She got down on her hands and
knees and turned away from him and then stood up on
her hands, her legs spread wide. She let herself fall
frontward, toward him, and her feet struck the wall on
each side of him. After working her way forward on her
hands a little, she was in the position she wanted. He
thought at first of refusing her, but after considering that
she might leave him locked up if he did, he grabbed her
hips. His penis went past and under the anus and into the
slit and she rocked back and forth.
Like Magda, she could squeeze upon his dong with the
muscles of the vaginal sheath. He moved only a little,
pulling her hips in to him with short savage jerks. Within
a few seconds, she was shuddering and sobbing, appar-
ently having one orgasm on the heels of the next. Her
cries were in Spanish. He knew little of that, but he could
catch, "Oh, holy fucking virgin mother Maria! Oh, father
of the big cock! Fuck! Fuck! Shit! Shit! Oh, Christ,
blessed Jesus, ah, sweet Jesus, he's fucking me! Fuck
me, blessed flesh! Sweet flesh, fuck me!"
At that time he did not think about her words; he was
just reacting. But he would remember and wonder. If she
were the daughter of old Don del Osorojo, the sheltered
daughter of the weird old grandee, she had a surprising
vocabulary. But then, during a century and a half of
hanging around live people, she could be expected to pick
up words she might not have heard before death. But why
hadn't she learned English in that time?
Now, he did not think of what she was saying. He was
taking a long time coming, so long that he was able to
turn her over, or around. Her arms were then braced be-
low her, her feet against the wall, her cunt rammed
against him, and she pushed back and forth while he
reached down and rubbed her breasts and nipples with
his hands. She had strong muscles; she could remain in
that human-arch position, her head hanging down, and
rock back and forth and occasionally stab her ass forward
with no support of his hands under her hips.
After what seemed a long time, he jetted. Dolores
screamed with the crescendo of climaxes. Then she let
her feet slide down the wall while he helped ease her
weight with his hands on her buttocks and then clamped
her legs between his arms and let her slide on down. On
the floor, she lay on her back, panting and looking up
while spermatic fluid fell drop by drop into her open
mouth. Then she scooted a little to one side to let the
&nb
sp; drops fall on her breasts and rubbed the sticky stuff over
them. The chlorox odor of the fluid and the odor of sweat
were strong in the chamber.
When her breathing became normal, Dolores rose and
gave him a long tonguey spermaticky kiss. Her hand
fondled his testicles.
He turned his head away and said, "No more, Dolores.
Or whoever or whatever you are."
His legs trembled. Fucking in bed was demanding
enough, but fucking standing up took twice as much out
of him. And it seemed to him that Dolores had means
for draining him of more than the normal quota of energy.
For a few seconds, she had given him energy—he would
swear that she had discharged a current down his penis—
but then the orgasms had been so exquisite that they had
opened gates to drain the reservoir.
He had no objective reason for thinking so, but he felt
that she had robbed him of a certain amount of vital en-
ergy and strengthened and solidified herself. Certainly,
she had seemed flesh enough when he had felt her. But
now, she seemed to have somehow become even more
solid.
Dolores, seeing him shake so, said something, smiled,
and held her finger up as if to tell him to wait there.
(What the hell else could he do?) And she left the room.
In a few seconds, she was back with a bottle of red wine
and a big chunk of filet mignon. (Did she have secret ac-
cess to the kitchen?) He said no to the wine but eagerly
ate the meat. Although he had finished supper only
a half-hour ago, or so it seemed, he was very hungry.
Dolores tilted the bottle to her lips and drank. Almost,
he expected to see a dark column going down the throat
and into the stomach, as if she were a transparent figure
in a stomach-acid commercial. But he could see only the
Adam's apple moving.
If he was hungry, she was thirsty. She kept the bottle to
her lips until it was half empty. She may have intended to
fully empty it, but a noise came through the door, which
she had left ajar. Dolores jerked and dropped the bottle.
It fell on its side and spurted red wine on the straw.
She bent down and scooped up all her clothes, rolled
them into a bundle, which she placed under her right arm,
and then kissed him swiftly, breathing wine and sperm.
She ran to the wall on his right; her left hand pushed
along the juncture of two gray blocks. With a groan and a
squeak, a section of wall, consisting of blocks six high
and four wide, swung inward on the left side. The interior
was dark. Dolores turned and smiled and threw some-
thing that glittered. He lunged for it, but the chain jerked
him back, cutting off his breath, and the object bounced
off his fingertips and fell on the straw.
It was the key to the lock on the metal collar.
The darkness swallowed Dolores. The section, squeak-
ing and groaning again, swung shut.
A huge head with huge jowls, large purplish eyes, and
a high-piled blue-black hairdo, came around the corner
of the doorway. Mrs. Grasatchow.
From behind her came excited voices. The fat
woman's eyes widened. She pushed the door open and
waddled across the straw to Childe. He slowly drew back
the foot he had extended to try to move the key toward
him.
Mrs. Grasatchow sniffed loudly and then screamed,
"Jism!" She grunted like a sow about to give birth. "Who's
been here? Who? Tell me! Who?"
"Didn't you see her?" Childe said. "She went down
the hall!"
"Who?"
"Dolores del Osorojo!"
Mrs. Grasatchow's skin was naturally pale and made
even whiter by her powder. But she managed to turn
more white.
The baron, a long cigar in one hand, entered the
room. He said, "I thought it would be Dolores. Only
she …"
The fat woman whirled swiftly, as graceful as a rhi-
noceros, which is huge but can be very graceful in certain
movements.
"You said … you pooh-poohed Dolores! You said she
couldn't be any danger to us!"
The baron looked shrewdly at Childe before answering.
He puffed on his cigar and said, "It didn't seem likely
that she would ever get enough plasm long enough to
harden it. But I was wrong."
"What did she do to Magda?" Mrs. Grasatchow said.
The baron shrugged. "We'll have to ask Magda that
when she comes to. If she does."
The doorway was filled with the body of Glam. He
carried Magda, still naked, in his arms. Her head lolled,
her long blonde hair hung down, her arms and legs were
limp.
Glam said, "What do I do with her?"
"Take her upstairs to her room. Put her to bed.
Tell Vivienne to look at her."
Glam's expression flickered from stone-mask to some-
thing unreadable and back to stone-mask. The baron said,
"She's defenseless now, true. But if I were you, I wouldn't
try anything."
Glam said nothing. He turned and carried the woman
off. The two blond youths, Chornkin and Krautschner,
looked in, each from a side of the doorway.
"Did you see Dolores?" the baron said.
They shook their heads. The baron glanced at the sec-
tion of wall which had opened for Dolores. He opened his
mouth as if he were going to tell the youths where she
had gone and to send them after her. But he closed his
lips.
Childe thought that perhaps the baron preferred to
keep certain secrets. Didn't he trust the two? Or did he
think it would be futile to chase after her? In any event,
he must think that Childe had seen the exit.
"She has to be flesh enough to fuck," Mrs. Grasatchow
said. "Look at the redness of his cock and the jisrn."
"I can see," the baron said dryly. "Magda's key was
gone. Childe, do you have it?"
Childe shook his head. Igescu went to the two youths
and they whispered for a moment. Then the youths
turned their backs to each other and went off down the
hall, bent over, searching. The baron came back in and
said, "Take your eyes off his cock, and help me look for
that key."
"Here it is!" Mrs. Grasatchow said.
She stooped, picked it up, and straightened, groaning.
The baron took it and put it in his jacket pocket.
Childe tightened his lips. He had no chance now, unless
Dolores came back to help him. He doubted that she
would. Although she had thrown the key to him, she had
not made sure he had had it, and she had had time to do
so. The gesture had seemed to say that he could escape if
he were agile enough and clever enough. Perhaps, she was
resentful of her long, long frustrating imprisonment in in-
corporeality. She might have wanted him to suffer, too.
After all, she had taken him, not because of affection or
love but because she needed an object to relieve herself
on.
But she was partly on his side. That w
as his only
hope, at present.
The baron left the room, and, in a few seconds, the two
youths entered. The boy had the key. He unlocked the
collar, and he and the girl, each holding Childe by
an arm, hustled him out of the room. They passed
two doors and entered the third, which was already open.
This was a room the size of the one he had just left, but its
walls were oak-paneled, the ceiling was painted light
blue, and the floor was covered with a thick Persian rug
profuse with swastikas inside circles. There were a num-
ber of collars hanging from chains attached to bolts sunk
into the wall, however. Childe was again held by a metal
collar.
This room must have no secret entrances.
The baron looked at his wristwatch and said, "We have
to do something about her. She wasn't dangerous until she
got enfleshed. But everything has its disadvantage. Now
she's dangerous, she's also vulnerable. We can do some-
thing about her, and we will. I'm going to call a confer-
ence."
Mrs. Grasatchow pouted. She said, "Now Magda's out
of the way, I'd thought …"
"Half an hour. No more," Igescu said. "I'll send some-
body down to escort you. You wouldn't want to be alone
on the way up."
The fat woman started. It was as if a tidal wave were
racing through her flesh.
"You mean I ... I ... have to worry? That I'm in
danger?"
She bellowed with laughter.
"We all are," the baron said. "All of a sudden, our se-
curity is gone. This," he stabbed a thumb at Childe, "has
something to do with it but I don't know what. He's a
focus of some sort. Maybe Dolores has been waiting for
someone like him all these years.
"Half an hour," he said. "I mean it. And don't use him
up. I still want a piece of him."
The baron left, closing the door behind him. Mrs.
Grasatchow started to take her clothes off. Childe's legs
began to shake again.
16
He told her that she was wasting her time. He did not tell
her that, even if he had not been drained and weakened,
he would have been unable to respond positively to her.
The enormous hanging breasts, the tremendous belly,