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  Paula shuddered, her legs and arms flung out with the gesture of a wounded deer. The boy pulled out of her at that instant, and with a drunken laugh, freed his sperm in a curved fountain onto her quivering stomach.

  "No babies today," he roared. "Just some old-fashioned sanitary fucking."

  The girl was still on the sand. Her husband studied her with contempt. She dragged herself quietly to a darkened area. Far from the fire, they heard her whimpering.

  Jenkins couldn't get up to be blindfolded. He stretched out, not fully conscious. But according to the rules, the high priest bandaged him and demanded that he choose a victim. The boy tried to stagger to his feet, and they all laughed watching him. A few of the viewers ran about him. Gloria sat motionless on the sand, hugging her knees and exposing the ridges of her wet flesh. Jenkins tripped over the blond girl who had stared at Gloria when Gloria had removed her clothes.

  "He has a victim," they all shouted, eager to see how he would rise to the demands of carnality. But Jenkins, sprawled across the girl's slim figure, was motionless. He was now completely unconscious.

  The leader stood up. "The victim, in this case, will have to become the blind man."

  "Yes!" there was immediate agreement and relief that the game would continue unabated. The blond girl was quickly blindfolded. She waved her arms before her, chanting, "Who will be my victim?"

  Gloria studied the sand; it was running with her streamed passion. Her head fell to her cushioning arm and at that moment, she felt hands lightly tapping her shoulder.

  "You are my victim," the girl cried.

  When her blindfold was removed, she looked at Gloria and smiled into her eyes. It was obviously not by chance that the victim had been found.

  "Come to the center of the ring," the girl insisted.

  Gloria stood up and was surprised at her own trembling. "What do I do with you?" she implored. "I don't know what to do with a woman."

  "Just do as I tell you," the girl calmed her. "I have no parts you don't have … no secrets. There's nothing to be afraid of."

  They stood exposed in the light of the fire. The audience was delighted that the two girls would be the next lovers.

  The blond girl stared at Gloria and addressed her. "Reach out and touch my breasts."

  Gloria was standing directly facing her lover. They were about a foot apart. She cautiously put her hands before her, and closing her eyes, she cupped the girl's full globes. Her body heated with alarm. The breasts were soft … soft but firm in their shape.

  The girl reached over and put her hands on Gloria's firm mounds. The hands were gentle ... a woman's hands. It was if Gloria were performing before an enchanted mirror.

  "Now do whatever I do," the girl commanded. She freed three of her fingers from the round, throbbing flesh and delicately pinched the hard nipples. Gloria looked down at her body, watching the tits in erected obedience. The warmth was radiating to her vagina. She timidly, then hungrily, fingered her double's rosy resistant tips, realizing that she controlled her own experience. As hard as she pinched and pressed, the pressure on her own singing breasts responded. It was magic and she kneaded the girl with liberty, forgetting the staring fire-lit faces.

  The blond girl clasped Gloria's head and pulled it toward her. She pressed soft lips against parched lips. The woman's mouth was softer and more insinuating than any man's had been. She bit her lips and struggled with tenderness to the dark blood-tasting tissues within. For a long moment, the girl chewed her mouth, fingering her nipples, till Gloria lost cognizance of which was her lover and which herself. They lowered themselves to the sand.

  The girl's head was at Gloria's thighs and Gloria balanced the position. They formed a white oval on the sand. The girl scissored her head between Gloria's loins and Gloria did the same. Then she felt a tongue, maybe her own, pierce her clotted passion. The tongue and mouth and teeth gnawed at her core. With fear, Gloria darted her tongue into the girl's offered opening. Her mouth found the hard button of sensation. So this was her taste. So this was the musk and dampness that she thought she could never know, as mysterious to her as it was revealed to the men who possessed her. She dug eagerly into the soaking membranes and heard herself groan.

  She adored her reflection. Then she felt the tension mounting like one brick pressed on top of another in her now familiar vault. Her own tongue urged and nuzzled her completion. Her body writhed with the first mighty contraction. The orgasm waved out of her and the cunt around her tongue expired like a bleeding artery. Then the girls fell apart.

  They lay obscenely splayed in the sand. Gloria felt the blond girl rise and walk back into the dark. Alone, she was offered to the stranger's eyes.

  The high priest approached her exhausted form and helped her to stand. "Now you must find your victim," he told her.

  She stood subservient before him. He tied the bandage over her eyes. It was stranger than she had anticipated to be blind with the fire first warm on her back and then on her trembling breasts.

  She reached her arms into the unseen and heard the taunting of near voices. She circled in the hot dark, sometimes tripping to her knees as she searched for a victim.

  CHAPTER XII

  It was three o'clock in the afternoon when she opened her eyes in the small cottage bedroom. Once awake, she knew that she would catch the five o'clock boat to New York. She wished herself in the city now, searching the streets for him. The evening's bacchanal made his death urgent. She would turn into a twisting animal if the poison he had deposited in her could not seep out with his spattered blood.

  She slipped into her bathing suit. There would be time for a fast swim, then she'd pack and shower, and by nine she would be home. She hurried out to the beach and found Laura sitting on a blanket with three other bridge players. They were waiting for a bid and had been silent for the past five minutes. Gloria's presence changed the electricity in the patient air, and they all looked at her with annoyance. Laura smiled and said accusingly, "I hear there was quite a party on the beach last night."

  "Yes," one of the players said as she pulled her eyes from the cards, "tales of nudity and strange religious rites."

  "I wouldn't know," Gloria lied. "I just woke up."

  Laura regarded her strangely. "You look like the unkissed sleeping beauty."

  "I'm going back to the city today," Gloria announced.

  "Must you?"

  "Yes, there's something I forgot to attend to."

  Laura remembered her breeding and did not press. "Come out again if you can. I'll probably be here all of next week."

  "Thank you," Gloria said. "I had a good rest."

  "You look like hell." Laura suppressed a laugh. "If you see Christopher and his concubine, don't give him my regards. Tell him I never mention his name."

  "All right."

  "Say it in such a way that he comes running out here to get me. Hint that big things are happening and that if he doesn't hurry, he'll be too late."

  "All right," Gloria repeated, and looked away from Laura's painful of-course-I'm-not-being-serious face.

  "I've been pretty good about Christopher, haven't I? I mean, I've been living in spite of all kinds of preferences."

  "You've been splendid," Gloria told her. "I hope you get what you want from him." Her tone gave it importance. Laura looked away with embarrassment and quickly bid.

  "You're all right, Gloria, aren't you?"

  Gloria felt a burst of pain in her brutally used cunt.

  "I'll be all right," she promised Laura.

  She walked to the sea and stood at the edge of the water. She muttered a pagan incantation to the sea. "Lead me to him tonight. I can go no further. Help me, I pray you." Then she plunged into the divinity's breast and floated far out.

  The boat left sharply at five and it chugged across the inlet, managing to take one-and-a-half tense hours before it docked at Amityville. The slow, painful voyage induced a stupor in Gloria and she sat on the top deck with an unseen book in her lap.
She caught the seven o'clock train at Amityville and reached Pennsylvania Station at a quarter past eight.

  Gloria unlocked the door of her apartment and entered the silent rooms. The night pressed black through the transparent curtains. There was a sterile order in the flat, except for a lipstick-rimmed coffee cup left on the kitchen table. The order oppressed Gloria and she opened the cupboard and took out a bottle of scotch. She poured some generously into a glass and took a deep drink of the burning liquid. Her mouth stung and she held the scotch in her puffed cheeks until it was warm enough to slide down her throat. She walked to the water tap and diluted the liquor with a third of water. Then she sat down on the couch, smoking and drinking slowly, inspecting her latest painting. The canvas was a streaking of blues and dull grays. The colors moved in and out with a futile energy. She stared at the painting with distaste, wondering if it was better to do nothing than to do something unimportant.

  She hadn't realized, during her hours at the easel, how trivial the final product would be. All her life Gloria had had a faith in her world, in her ideas, in her talent. When she was five years old, she had taken a black crayon in her hand and drawn a black sun that shone on a black farmhouse hidden in a field of black corn. Her mother had shown the picture to Gloria's father, and that moment her parents had concurred that she was an artist. It was comfortable to have an identity. The rapist had crushed that identity. She would have it back. She would have him back. One hour was all she needed – one hour.

  She left the house and walked lonely in the summer night streets. It had to be that evening. Time denied an egress. She could not contain or stay her desperation with another impersonal nameless fuck. She had to find him to return his hate. She was a vessel in which he had carelessly deposited his soul, and it choked hers. She was a frozen star circling his mysterious orbit, and something profound and undeniable in nature would take her back to him.

  Third Street was filled with pushing tourists. The men balanced wide-brimmed hats that would have been suicide on Madison Avenue. The women wore flower print silk dresses, all the same cut and pattern. They must all have been seduced by the same "what to wear in New York" ad.

  Some soldiers jostled her and a southern corporal drawled, "Baby ahm just a lonely boy lost in the big city." His buddies laughed uproariously at his witty courage and Gloria knew with nausea that she had to get off the streets.

  She went into the dark club where dedicated jazz musicians went to play after hours. Climbing down the steep narrow steps, she could hear a trumpet playing "Melancholy Baby." She sat down at a round table for two and asked the waiter to bring her bottled beer. He brought it to her and took the opener out of his dirty apron, snapped the top of the bottle and pocketed the little cap. Dancers were clinging to each other on the tiny floor, guided away from the bordering tables.

  She lifted the beer to her lips and the trumpet wailed for her attention. She looked over the rim of the glass at the slightly elevated bandstand. He was there, whispering into the trumpet. She finished a long, cool, thirst-quenching drink.

  She recognized him in a distracted casual glance. The same white eyes flickered expressionlessly over the dancers.

  His shoulders, clothed in the dark jacket, hovered over the brass trumpet, protecting it from the smoke-packed room.

  Sitting alone at a small table placed at the foot of the platform was a pale young girl. She had long fair hair and the detached melancholy stare of an addict. She moved imperceptibly to the music and smiled secret smiles as if she were receiving coy messages in the melody. Messages reserved for opiate ears. The rapist nodded curtly to the remote girl, and the girl made a responsive motion toward him that was not physical. Her spirit leapt in a movement to return his nod. So he had a woman who waited for him. He took her home after the last set, and if they weren't too high, they fucked.

  You're going to die tonight

  , Gloria messaged to him. Blow a dirge. Blow taps for yourself. She didn't know how she would get to him, but he would die tonight. A boy with a busy tweed jacket pulled at the rapist's sleeve and the musician lowered his ear to the customer. A request for "The Lady is a Tramp." The rapist motioned to the piano player and they decided on a key.

  She tried to fully feel his presence, the long hunt rewarded. When the band finished playing "The Lady is a Tramp," they scraped back their chairs and took cigarettes out of their pockets. Time for a break. A few young boys in the club dashed up to the platform to play the idle instruments. The rapist walked toward the fair girl. Gloria got up from her table and discreetly blocked his way.

  "Don't musicians dance, too?" she smiled. The invitation was exposed with her teeth.

  "Yeah, kid, musicians dance." The customer was always right. He put his arms around her and led her onto the small dance floor. The pale girl looked at them casually. She was accustomed to the rapist not reaching the table.

  Gloria felt a great rest, leaning against his chest. She had never really been anywhere else. The rapist looked over his shoulder and directed her effortlessly. She could tell by the uninspired movements that he was annoyed. Sometimes she thought he would not take the next step, just let his arms drop wearily to his side and walk off the floor.

  "Not bad," he commented, and she turned around to see that he was staring at the flared hips of a neighboring redhead. The redhead was clinging to her partner. Gloria tightened her grip on the rapist.

  "What time do you finish work?"

  He remembered she was there. "Two o'clock."

  "What do you do when you leave?"

  "I go home, baby."

  "Do you live in New York?" She was asking all the insipid questions that eager-to-be-friends ask.

  "No," he had answered that too often. "I make it in Chicago."

  "How long will you be in New York?"

  "The band cuts to Ohio tomorrow," he volunteered.

  Without you, she thought. You're going to be stuck in New York.

  "Ever been to New York before?" she questioned.

  "About a month ago," he supplied.

  "Been here before that?"

  "About thirty-six times."

  He hates me

  , she thought. "I live around the corner," she said.

  "Great."

  They were both silent after that. The dance would end and he would disappear. She moved closer to him, rubbing against his flat stomach.

  "Not bad," he sighed. He was looking at the redhead.

  "What do you do when you come to New York?" She wanted him to remember, for an instant, for a realized flash, that he had held her in his arms once before."

  "I flip," he laughed. "I pick up, prowl and flip."

  "Anything interesting happen to you last trip?"

  "Nothing interesting ever happens to me, baby. I'm a very uneventful guy."

  He loved himself; she could tell that. She remembered that this was a man who got his kick, even if he couldn't recall it, when he violated a woman. He despised her eager rubbing against his body. He had to initiate the attack and then take the woman before she was ready. If there was time, she would have played the game, created the illusion that he was chasing her. But there was no time for games. The game was up. She touched his pants. He was flat.

  He glanced down at her. "What do you do?" He was waiting for the dance to be over, but the unprofessional musicians didn't know how to end a number. They were afraid that if they stopped they'd never start again.

  "I'm a painter," she replied.

  "A painter." He was like lead in her arms. "What do you paint – walls?"

  She detested his banal humor. It would be too ignominious to kill him if he were a fool.

  "Don't say stupidities," she warned him.

  He looked down at her with curiosity. "You take yourself pretty seriously."

  "I'm a very serious woman."

  He scoffed. "You all are. Women are too much."

  "Do you have much trouble with women?" Her hand was on his groin and the bump was shapi
ng.

  "I make out." He looked at the clinging redhead. "I make out."

  The music rose to a finish. Now, now, now.

  "Look," she suggested, "I live right around the corner. Why don't you come over now for a cup of coffee?"

  She wasn't his type. "I only get a fifteen minute break," he told her. What he meant was, no dice, not interested.

  "I've got some new jazz records," she was desperate. "They're terrific." He didn't answer and she added, "You can have them if you like."

  He stopped on the dance floor and watched her. He found it interesting for a woman to be that much out of her mind. It didn't excite him, but it was interesting. Too bad it wasn't the redhead.

  "Great," he said. "Let's go listen to your records."

  Her heart suffused her throat. For a minute, she couldn't reply. They were standing in the middle of the floor and the music had stopped. Other dancers were quietly waiting for the next number. They weren't conspicuous. "I'll get my bag," she told him. She walked to the table and looked into her purse. The knife was there. He was waiting at the entrance and they walked up the stairs to the street.

  When they got to the door of her house, she turned to him and said, "Ever been here before?"

  "I don't know, baby," he responded. "I never know where I am in New York."

  She wanted him to remember. "You must know people in the neighborhood. A lot of musicians live around here. A lot of kids from Chicago, too." He turned the knob and let her into the hall.

  "It looks familiar," he helped her. "But all the apartments in New York look the same to me."

  Nothing, nothing

  . "What floor do you live on?"

  "The fourth."

  Walking up the steps, she knew that she was not going to let him into her apartment. That wasn't the plan. The plan had been carefully made. She stood before her door and dug into her pocketbook for the key.

  "Christ," she complained, "I've lost the key."

  He wanted to go through with it now. "Let me look for it," he offered. He reached for her purse.