Aaaiiieee (21 page)

Walt then turned the woman around to face him, impulsively, passionately. He embraced her from the front, but a bit to one side, the twin between them as if to keep them apart. Still, he got his arms around her. Locked his mouth to hers. They exchanged tongues, and still swayed to the music.

After several minutes of this, Walt kneading her left breast through her clothing as they kissed, he stepped back from her and began to bunch up her dress. But Betty Ann took his hands gently. Her face looked pained.

“I’ve seen it,” Walt reassured her. “Remember? I’m not afraid. I’m not disgusted.”

“It’s all people ever see,” she whispered, her voice husky with emotion. “It’s like I’m the one who never got to live…”

“I’ve seen her already,” Walt repeated. “Now I want to see the rest of
you
…”

Slowly, Betty Ann’s hands slipped away from his. Slowly, he raised her dress up over her head. It caught a moment, snagged on one of Sally’s legs. Betty Ann quickly reached to untangle it.

Again, the white bathing suit-like outfit, as startling against her skin as her teeth when she smiled. She wasn’t smiling now—still looked timid, afraid—but he could feel the heat uncoiling off her skin, coming in slow panting waves from her slightly open mouth.

He removed her top. His lips and tongue brought her nipples, almost black against her dark skin, to a hardness so exciting he had all he could do not to bite down on them. His hands ran across her smooth shoulders, and then drifted down to find the edge of her outfit’s bottom portion. He began to skin it from her. His forearm nudged against the swell of Sally’s body. They both ignored it. They backed as one toward the sofa in her tiny living room.

Atop Betty Ann on the sofa now, Walt hastily unbuttoned his shirt and unzipped his trousers with one hand. She helped him by pulling off his white shirt and pushing his trousers down his legs with her toes. She helped him further by taking his engorged cock in hand and nuzzling its head against her lower lips, which parted to admit it. He fed himself long and deep into her, inside her where it was moist already and so wonderfully, tropically hot in contrast to the cold awaiting them outside her little apartment.

Sally brushed against his side as he moved rhythmically inside Betty Ann, his body at a slight angle atop her. They both disregarded the intrusive contact as best they could.

*     *     *

Walt came to see her nearly every day, as his work permitted. He did not pay her, as Ed/Edna’s lovers did; he offered to help Betty Ann, but learned she made a whole lot more money than he did, and had bought her parents a nice home and sent her brothers and a cousin to college.

Every time he visited her, they had a drink or two. Most times they danced. And always, they ended up in her bed.

After the first several awkward times, in which he had done all he could to minimize contact with Sally, Walt began to be less concerned about it. He would lie more directly across Betty Ann, Sally pressed up fully against his side as if growing out of him instead, and he would even rest his hand on the parasitic twin’s rounded ball of a body—as smooth as Betty Ann’s own curved flesh—while pumping in and out of his lover. On the fourth time they made love, things became so impassioned—both of them sheened in sweat, Betty Ann’s legs hooked over his calves, her soles pale and toes clenched—that Walt took hold of one of one of Sally’s legs at the knee where the limb began its tapering and held onto it as he cried out in climax.

Ever the love-making, but marriage never came up. Marriage would be unthinkable to the world outside these close walls. Not so much because of the half-dead, half-buried sister depending from Betty Ann’s body, but because of her color. One time only she mentioned it. With her head resting on his bare arm, she mused quietly, “I can never be married like my parents. Like my brother Sam. I can’t live like they do. Sally won’t let me. We’re stuck together in every way, Sally and me.” And she had laughed sadly. Walt had, too. But he hadn’t contradicted her.

One night when he stayed over, as he increasingly did, they listened to the ocean’s wintry ghosts wail through the chasms and ravines of the city beyond these windows. Sheets pooled sweaty around them, a bottle glowing ambery on the floor. Walt was kissing the soft swell of Betty Ann’s belly, pressing his lips into her navel where the mysterious link to another human being had been long ago severed. She ran her fingers absent-mindedly through his bristling short hair.

His lips moved from her belly to the greater swell of Sally. “Hi, Sally,” he purred playfully, to attract Betty Ann’s distracted eyes. He smiled, and ran his tongue up the swollen hump. He began to stroke one thigh, which if his eyes were closed would have been indistinguishable in itself from Betty Ann’s. A bit more curiosity took hold of him, and he moved the heavy thigh aside. Nestled between the parasite’s legs, which were always cocked to one side in such a way that the public was protected from the view, was a small patch of knotty black hair.

“Hmm, what do you have here?” he teased quietly, and traced the tip of his forefinger along the folded crease at the center of that kinky hair. He smiled again at Betty Ann, who smiled back at him shyly, and he returned his attention to the slit he caressed. He wet the tip of his finger in his mouth, then rubbed the seam some more.

After a minute or so of this, he was surprised to find his fingertip could slip between the secret lips, to a warm and moistening interior. He pressed his finger in deeper, worked it until he could insert two fingers. Shifting his position, growing hard, he inserted two fingers of his other hand inside Betty Ann herself.

He couldn’t take this very long. With his fingers still inside Sally, his cock so hard that its solidity ached, he penetrated Betty Ann and began to rock his hips madly.

And after a minute or so of this, Walt slipped out of Betty Ann, took his cock in hand, and rubbed its end against Sally’s dampened slit. With just a little resistance from tighter muscles, a more restricted channel, he was inside, snugly sheathed. Propping himself up over the twin so as not to lie directly atop its bony limbs, he resumed his passionate thrusting. The slick sloshing noise of his movements within the underdeveloped body excited him to further heights, and he cried out loudly as he burst fiery inside it, holding tightly onto one leg at the joint of its knee.

Afterwards, they lay heavy and hot, again listening to the ocean wind. Walt was running his hand over Betty Ann’s belly, but she had stopped running her hand over his short bristling hair.

*     *     *

Walt was going down on Betty Ann. It was something men didn’t boast about to each other, for fear of coming across as sick, dirty, perverted. Years ago, an older female cousin had introduced Walt to the forbidden pleasure.

After pressing his nose and lips against Betty Ann’s dark mound, Walt slipped sideways to Sally. Spread her legs that never moved on their own, the hand that never moved on its own jutting in the air like the insensate claw of a gargoyle grown from the body of a cathedral. Walt pressed his nose and his lips to the dark mound of the headless sister that dangled from the belly of his lover, hooking each of her thighs around his ears. He moaned softly against the slick flesh, his penis hard between his belly and the mattress, which was as damp as the floor of a jungle.

Betty Ann’s hands did not touch him, her fists coiled around the bars of her metal headboard. Christmas music crooned half-heard from the radio, crackling as if the falling snow interfered with its reception. And Walt thought he heard one soft, whispery sob…but when he lifted his slippery, hungry face to look, Betty Ann’s face was turned to the gloomy shadows of her little apartment.

*     *     *

On Christmas eve, Walt arrived at the Five-In-One with bundles in his arms, snow on his fedora’s brim. He even had presents for the fat lady, the dwarf, the sword swallower and Ed/Edna (a bottle of women’s perfume and a bottle of men’s cologne lashed together with a thick rubber band).

But when he got there, the police had arrived ahead of him. Real police, not private dicks like himself.

Leaving his bundles in the hall, Walt charged up the stairs. Her door was open. He shoved half way in past a cop before the man got a hold of him and stopped him. But he could see enough from where he stood.

Betty Ann’s body lay on the worn carpet, in front of the sofa where he had first made love to her. He didn’t know where she had acquired the shotgun that lay beside her like a spent lover. Betty Ann’s body was unmarked. Soft. Lovely. But the thing that had been Sally was burst like a strange fruit from the blast, rent horribly down the middle and its limbs even more askew.

Betty Ann’s eyes and mouth were half open. Her surgery had been unsuccessful. And she had bled. Bled so badly…her lustrous chestnut skin now grayish.

Walt sagged against the cop, no longer fought him. A sob was wrenched painfully up from his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I’m sorry…”

And a window rattled with a sharp, harsh gust of winter wind, like an agonized ghost aching to break through the pane—but trapped outside of it.

Hapi Birthday

Vultures wheeled in the sky, high and distant, an unsettling sight for an Easterner like myself. I don’t know why it should have bothered me, though. I’d been to many stranger places on the globe than Southern California…had just returned from such a place, in fact. But there was nevertheless an alien feeling to this day. The seemingly endless orange groves we had navigated to reach my friend’s remote house had seemed a great bleak expanse to me, despite their fecundity. And the house, when at last we arrived, was modern and odd-angled.

It had been built to the tastes of my friend, Ronald Montgomery, who had the wealth to indulge in all his tastes, and the imagination for those tastes to be unique. Perhaps it was the availability of everything money could buy that had turned his tastes more…unorthodox…over the years. That money makes us jaded, makes us lose our perspectives, is no new observation.

We had gone to school together; it was there, in fact, that I came under the thrall of his undeniable charisma. When I married, my wife gradually helped me break that hold. She had never liked Monty. I felt glad actually, relieved, when I began to assert my independence from him. He had moved to the west coast. But then came his visit, a brief stay. Now here I was…returning from a long trip to the Egypt I had always ached to visit. A trip sponsored by my friend, Ronald Montgomery.

Four strong men lowered the crate down from the truck and struggled it inside as Monty came out to embrace me. His arm around my shoulders, he gestured at the sweaty workers. “Like slaves moving one of the blocks at Giza, huh? Your timing couldn’t be better, Tim…did you remember that tomorrow is my birthday?”

Monty walked behind the men, craning his neck to observe their passage. He turned to me again and grinned. “Who would have thought the Valley of the Kings had any surprises left, huh, Tim?”

I nodded. “Who’d have thought that there was a tunnel so deep under Thebes? The deepest chamber recorded in the valley…”

“No one would have thought to look for it before, in the monkey cemetery of all places. But you see, Tim? You got me my treasure and I got you in the history books. Hey, I think you still owe me.”

I must confess I winced inside. I wanted to meet my obligation and escape back to my own life. “Well, they weren’t that happy to have the mummy taken. And
National Geographic
 wanted to be there when it was unwrapped.”

“The authorities weren’t too unhappy to take my money, and I have more of that than
National Geographic
 does! They know it’s in good hands here in my esteemed collection. And I did sponsor the excavation, after all. If people are nice I’ll let them borrow it for study. Besides, there were other baboon mummies in the chamber.”

“But this one was so…big. For a baboon. And its coffin.” I wagged my head.

“I don’t suppose any amount of money could have made them part with that, hm? Solid gold, like Tut-ankh-Amen’s inner coffin…”

“For a baboon! I know they were sacred, and high-ranking baboons received better burials than lower grade baboons, but Christ, you’ve seen the pictures! All they can say is that this monkey must have been a symbolic representation of the god Hapi.”

“Selected, no doubt, for its unusual size, as you’ve pointed out. Hey, gentlemen, easy there!”

*     *     *

Monty had been walking fine when I arrived, but by the time we had the mummy unpacked and on the table he had prepared for it, he was using his cane to support himself. When he was excited or upset, I knew, his equilibrium seemed to falter. It was his worsening MS that had kept him from joining me at the excavation; in the past, we had been a team on some of his expeditions, his adventures. And on many he had gone without me. The relics—no, the
trophies
—of these adventures decorated the lab around us, and abounded even more in the study just beyond.

“Hey,” I said half-jokingly, “I’m a little jet-lagged, Monty. You’re not really going to start unwrapping your birthday present now, are you?”

“You can go nap or freshen up if you’d like, Tim, but I’ve been waiting months for this, and everything’s set to begin. I don’t
need
 your help, but…”

I sighed, shrugged. I didn’t contest him…just like the old me.

And so we began undoing the careful and reverent work that had been done atop another laboratory table, fifteen-hundred years before the birth of Christ. That was not only the time when conspicuous pyramids were passed up in favor of the hidden tombs in the Valley of the Kings (to protect the interred from grave robbers such as ourselves), but it was when the Egyptians further perfected the art of preservation. These advances were increasingly reflected in the body we now labored over. The remains were fully swathed in linen, this covered in a glassy-black, hardened gum. The resin was so hard in places that Monty had to chisel at it, but he had anticipated this. In other places he was able to simply unwind the wrappings as I gently elevated the dry form.