The Haunter of the Threshold (31 page)

Hazel was about to say yes, was about to tell him that she’d found it and locked it in the car, but then retracted the affirmation without knowing why. Instead, she credulized the lie with an incomplete truth. “Oh, that red gemstone on Henry’s computer. File Number 1. I saw the picture of it. What the hell is it?”

“What the hell is it?” he murmured. He wore khaki pants, loafers, and a short sleeve shirt with the tails out. His hair look disheveled, and overall he appeared tired and dirty. “You don’t need to know because you would never understand. You’re a lit-head and a sex-maniac.”

“Thanks...”

“Henry chickened out, just like my father. So he threw it away, the asshole. The system works in sequences of 33, but without that crystal we only have 32. It reduces the power-quotient by ten to the 32nd power.”

Hazel smirked her confusion.
What’s he talking about?

“Don’t you see? Henry
knew
he was screwing us over. That’s why he got rid of it.”

Hazel sighed nervously. “Frank, this doesn’t feel like a dream. It feels real.”

“Three cheers to God, then, hmm? For creating the human mind and all its ten trillion synaptic connections. Quite a piece of work, to be able to do all those things and
still
produce dreams with such clarity, such accuracy, and such sheer authenticity that we don’t even believe they
are
dreams.” His hand slid up the inside of her thigh, played through her abundant pubic hair, then gave her crotch a squeeze. “Did that feel real?”

“Yes!” she yelled.

“But how can that be? If this were real, Sonia would’ve woken up. You have a very loud voice sometimes, you know that?” He sputtered. “It reminds me of my mother, which I guess is one of many reasons I’ve never liked you.”

“Oh, that’s just great, Frank!”

“This one, on the other hand...” He wandered over to Sonia who remained asleep on her side. He pushed her over on her back, then kneed onto the bed. His fingers slipped the straps of her nightgown down, then he lifted out the large, bulbous breasts. “God, those are great tits, aren’t they? Shit.” He played with them, infatuated. “I
love
these tits, Hazel, but the problem is...I fucking
hate
everything else that’s attached to them.”

“You really are a shitty person, Frank.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “I am. But I’m a sucker for big tits, I guess. Drop a couple loads, then next thing I know she’s got me believing I’m in love with her and we should have a kid.” He pushed the nightgown up over Sonia’s swollen belly, then grimaced in disgust. “I should’ve made big-bellied whine-machine get an abortion.”

“Frank! That’s awful!”

His brows raised over the sunglass rims. “Think about what you just said. It’s
awful
for me to say that?”

“Yes!”

“But it’s
your
dream, Hazel, just like the fat guy told you in the other dream. It’s
your mind
that put those words in my mouth, so what does that really mean? Does it mean that
I’m
awful?” He thumbed open Sonia’s labia, then smirked. “No. It means that
you’re
awful.”

Hazel exhaled a long breath in frustration. “This dream sucks, Frank. I just want it to end.”

“Of course you do.” He walked back over to Hazel. “But between looking at your body and my fat, knocked-up manatee of a fiance’s tits, I’ve all of a sudden got some lead in the pencil, if ya know what I mean.” He stood at Hazel’s side of the bed now, closer. It was then that Hazel noticed the oddity: his
breath.

Whenever Frank spoke, his mouth seemed to expel breath-fog, like when one talks in cold weather.

Only
this
breath-fog was black, like sooty smoke.

“Why is your breath—” she began.

“Just more conduction flux.” He smiled more sharply behind the black oral mist. “The spells reverse the valance of proximal molecule chains—it’s all geometry, Hazel—and one of many results is a
directional
yield. Fictility. It involves an inversive model of a quadric surface within angular hyperbolean variants. For instance, right now you probably feel like an invisible water bed is lying on top of you, right?”

“Yes!”

“Ah, well, consider, this”—he leaned over—“if I put my finger, just
one finger,
behind your head, and lift—”

He did this, and Hazel’s head raised off the bed as though it was instantly weightless.

“See? My brain waves—my
thoughts
—manipulated the desired valance.”

His finger continued to lift her head up, then her back, until she was fully sitting up, and then—

He continued to direct his finger, forward now, and down. Moments later, she was bending forward as her back bowed...

“What are you doing?”

“Sonia said you’re double-jointed or some shit, used to be a gymnast.”

“So?”

“I want to see you go down on yourself.” A smoky chuckle. “Don’t know why, really. It’s just the idea of you sucking yourself off really rings my bells...”

The bizarre task, impossible to most, was easily achievable for one as nimble as Hazel, though it had been awhile since she’d bothered. She gave into the perverse request, however, relaxing her hip joints and spreading her legs to an extreme.
Concentrate,
she thought, Frank’s finger still pushing. She imagined her spine going rubbery, then it bowed further until her pubic hair tickled her lips. She extended her tongue, ran the tip between the folds, and felt the forbidden thrill.

“No, no, not just the tongue,” he ordered. “Get your
whole mouth
down there on your pussy and suck.”

She relaxed more, folded over now in a human convolution. She smelled her own musk as each tiny increment of effort brought her closer and closer until—

“There,” Frank said, satisfied. “You did it. Now suck it.”

Her labia still ached from the various tortures the day had brought, but once the outer vulva was drawn into her mouth, she enjoyed the intense yet soothing sensation. She sucked her own folds, played with them between her lips. She heard Frank’s zipper come down.

“Suck your whole clit into your mouth,” he panted, leaning over close to watch. The meaty smell of his black breath gusted into her crotch. “Suck it like it’s a little cock and get yourself off...”

Hazel did so, coaxing the clitoris, hood, and immediate flesh upward via suction. Her saliva clicked as the suction grew systematic.

“Good, good, yeah,” Frank gusted, and with his approval came the sound of his own masturbation. “Suck it off. Make yourself come...”

Hazel filled her head with many of the day’s debauches; nauseating to typical women, these images had her whining in only another minute, summoning waves of imminence that made her groin throb. She let it all replay in her mind: being mauled, man-handled, tit-fucked, and fisted; being slapped, choked, and bilge-pumped; being forced to swallow a shot glass full of sperm and then letting not one but two male bladders be emptied into her stomach. All these repugnant images left her enfrenzied as her mouth desperately plied her own sex.

“Think about Sonia,” was what Frank’s black voice whispered next. “Pretend that’s
her
pussy you’re sucking...”

The mere words set her off; her pelvis bucked up against her mouth as the potent spasms broke.

“Good, good...Suck, suck...”

She came till she thought she’d collapse into herself. She was actually crying it had been so good...

When she wanted to teeter over, Frank jerked her face up. Thumb and index finger of his left hand dimpled her cheeks to give her fish-lips, while his right hand pressed his glans right to the hole and–

“There...”

Globs of sperm flowed between her lips onto her tongue, eddies of it. When he’d finished he kept her cheeks pinched together and pushed her head all the way back.

“Swallow now.”

Hazel nearly vomited when she did so.
Oh, gross...
The sperm tasted unlike any she’d experienced—it tasted
wretched
. It tasted the way old sperm smelled on a dried up wet spot three days old.

The room’s occult gravity slammed her shoulder blades back down on the bed.

“You’re something, you know that?” Frank’s words misted. He pulled his zipper back up. “You’re every perverted male fantasy in the flesh, Hazel. You are the personification of Woman As Object, a sexual spittoon, a
thing,
Hazel, that exists solely as a receptacle for every twisted desire to ever comprise a man’s most carnal obsessions.” He smiled below the foolish sunglasses. “You’re
meat,
and what’s worse is that you’re content with that role. You walk the earth with only one true purpose: to be fucked. You’re a human condom, Hazel—a
fuck-
dump—and that’s all you’ll ever be.”

“Fuck you,” she drooled.

Frank’s black voice puffed as he spoke. “Find the Shining Trapezohedron and you’ll be rewarded,” and then he turned and walked out of the cabin, counting each step.

“One, two, three...”

When he was gone, Hazel’s awareness was hauled down into utter, ghastly
black.

“It’s almost noon!” the voice pried into her sleep. “Don’t you want to get up?”

Hazel’s eyes clicked open. When she tried to speak, her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth.
What?
she thought, then,
Oh,
God...
Blocks of sunlight came one by one into the room as Sonia opened the shades.

“Here’s some coffee.” Sonia smiled down at her, setting a cup on the nightstand. She wore another bright, flowery sundress.

“Is it really noon?” Hazel groaned. A headache twinged at the back of her skull.

“Almost.” Sonia seemed perky, energized, as she busied about the room.

At least she’s not still down in the dumps,
Hazel considered. She sat up naked in bed, rubbing her eyes.
Damn.
“Sorry I slept so late. That’s not like me.”

“No problem.”

Hazel was going to mention her nightmares but then thought better of it when she recalled the slowly reforming details.

“I was doing work anyway.”

“What work? Summer session’s over. You’re on vacation.”

Sonia sighed. “This morning I checked my email and found a note from Administration. They lost all my student evaluations—the entire student roster—for all my classes in the session. So now I have to re-collate the
whole friggin’ thing,
and send it back to them. They have to have it for the quarterly stats.”

“Bummer,” Hazel said. “I’ll be happy to help.”

“Thanks, but it’s really something I have to do. It’ll probably take a couple more hours.” Her smile beamed. “At least it’ll give me something to do while Frank’s on his way.”

Frank...
Hazel tried to blink away the remnants of the nightmare: Frank’s black sunglasses, his black breath, ugly comments, and rotten sperm...

Sonia sat next to her. “And I’m sorry about yesterday.”

Hazel could’ve groaned. “You don’t have to ap—”

“You’re right, I did overreact.” Sonia laughed and rubbed her baby-bump. “Knocked up, you know? Crazy hormones. I don’t know how Frank’s been putting up with me the last eight months.”

Well, that’s a change,
Hazel thought.
He’s not the Big Bad Wolf
anymore.
“He said he’ll be back this afternoon,” she tried to sound confident, “and I’m sure he will be.”

“I know. I keep forgetting. Frank’s not just a self-absorbed
guy,
he’s a self-absorbed
college professor.
And by now his phone battery
is
dead, it’s got to be. Like you said, once he gets all this Henry stuff out of his system, he’ll be fine.”

Hazel nodded through a distraction. Of course she
knew
that last night was indeed a dream...her mouth was lined with the most awful taste. She hopped off the bed. “Well, you get back to work. I’ve got to take a shower and decide what I’m going to do today,” but as she moved away, Sonia’s hand caught her wrist.

“Wait!”

“What?”

Sonia kissed her lightly on the lips. “Thanks for being such a good friend. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”