Decay Inevitable

“I can’t,” he said. “The beer. The coke. I’m done in.”

She forced his cock against her and pressed with her fingers, trying to nudge the flaccid tip between her lips. Again, she locked her heels at the small of his back and dug down. “Come on,” she said. “Come on.”

“Susannah, you’re hurting me. What’s the rush? Susannah?” He grunted and his eyes bulged. He lifted his chin off her chest and tried to speak but only tiny noises were bursting from the back of his throat.

She felt his pelvis pulverise under the persistent crush of her feet. “You fucker,” she said. “You miserable fucker.”

She let herself come through.

Cheke watched Derek’s eyes, hazy with pain, as her body changed beneath him. The puckered mouths emerged through the taut flesh of Susannah’s torso and gulped at him. Her own cunt grew and broadened until it trembled beneath Derek’s shattered groin.

“Give me what I need,” she said, and sank him into her. Before too long, Derek was unable to say anything, even if his mouth had been able to form the words. The blood, so much of it, could only get out of him that way.

HER INDUSTRY WAS not to be questioned, surely, and she had done well so far, or so she thought. Gleave came to her at the house, stepping through the drying waste of the hallway with the look of a man who had just found a hank of hair in his soup. She had been warned of his arrival; her inner eye, recalling the previous night’s excesses, had been interrupted. She envisioned Gleave’s car sweeping into the street, saw his grey face press up against the window pane as the neighbouring houses rushed by. There had been enough time to change: another of Susannah’s black dresses, sleeveless, short, generous around the bust. In the mirror she checked her colouring and sucked out a deep, plummy colour from the palette of mouths in her memory, dusted her cheekbones with the hint of blush Jonathan had sported when she took off her robe in front of them, before he understood what was happening to him.

“What are you doing?” Gleave asked when they were seated in the living room. Cheke had left one of Jonathan’s magazines open on the coffee table in the hope that Gleave would see. She wanted him to do to her what the men in the pictures were doing. She wanted to do to him what the women were doing. The more she did it, the closer she would come to knowing the secrets. Maybe in this way she would understand what normal was. What it meant to be human, to be a woman.

“I thought you’d like to see me being less unusual.”

Gleave took something from his pocket and sat down on the sofa next to her. He trawled the fingers of his other hand through his soft, white hair.

“Do you like me like this?” she asked. She said: “Can I call you Daniel?”

Gleave turned and smiled savagely at her. “No, you cannot call me fucking Daniel,” he snarled. He showed her what was in his hand: a canister that fit snugly in his palm. He flipped off the lid and sprayed the contents full in her face. He calmly replaced the lid and slid the canister back into his pocket. Then he stood up and clasped his large, soft hands in front of his greatcoat, watching her all the while.

“I think,” he said, “that it’s time you understood what pain is.”

Cheke blinked at him. She brushed away the spray from her eyes and waited for him to go on. She was not yet aware that half of her face had come away with her fingers.

“Pain is master, anywhere you look in the animal kingdom,” Gleave said. “So it is with us.” He spotted an errant hair on his cuff and tweezered it off with his elegant fingers. He removed his lenses and polished them on a white handkerchief which he then folded precisely and kept in his palm. “I thought you were aware of the job you had to do for us,” he said at last.

“I am,” Cheke wanted to say, but the words would not form, in the same way they had failed in the seconds after she was withdrawn from her resting place. The word am didn’t have any closure about it. It drifted on instead: ahhh. Drool glazed her chin. She felt for her mouth and there was no bottom lip for the top one to shut against. As if triggered by this ghastly discovery, a flood of heat wound tightly around her lower jaw. She made a gagging sound and dropped to her knees.

“You will know pain,” Gleave said. “Maybe that’s where we went wrong at the start. We should have tied you to your job with the threat of pain. You must not underestimate us, Cheke. We need you, but there are others. Do as you are told and then we can discuss your rehabilitation.”

He stepped towards her suddenly and she flinched. Gleave smiled. “It’s good that you are afraid of me. Good that there is something to scare you. Fear is an ally. It will help you to stay alive.

“Now... open wide. Godspeed, my angel.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: A THIEF IN THE NIGHT