Creed (28 page)

The fat woman resumed the journey without so much as a glance his way, leading him
down
a short flight of stairs and along yet another corridor. This one was much narrower and would not have allowed Blythe to walk alongside the woman even if he had wanted to. He imagined that vast bottom ahead of him bouncing from side to side like a giant fleshy pinball and the thought filled him with loathing rather than humour.

Another staircase (up, this time) which wound round and round as if it were in some kind of turret (Blythe had noticed two from the outside) until it reached a small dingy landing. Only one door led off from there.

The receptionist stood to one side. ‘Grace Buchanan,’ she announced as if that were the name of the door itself.

He stood on the landing and raised his eyebrows at the fat woman.

‘You can go right in,’ she said, and smiled.

And right then he didn’t want to go in. Suddenly he wanted to climb back down those stairs, find his way along the confusing corridors, get to the main hall, run through the large doors there, jump into his Rover, and drive back immediately to the warm world of scandal and calumny that he knew and loved so well.

Unfortunately for him, it was but a fleeting and indeterminate moment, a swiftly suppressed intuition that had no real influence over the opportunity for a good and meaty story. He was about to catch sight of a famous star’s crazy daughter, someone who had been locked away for the past thirty-odd years, a prisoner of her own mother’s shame. The princess in the tower, the loon in the attic! It was irresistible.

He gripped the doorhandle, looked once at the fat woman (was there just a glint of mockery behind those beady little eyes?) and opened the door.

Again he was revolted by the stench that greeted him, although this was slightly different – perhaps more sour – than that of the corridors below.

He stepped inside the darkened room and faced the most peculiar individual he had ever seen in his life (alas, a life that was to be all too short).

Breathe him she did.

Creed was perplexed. What the hell was she playing at?

The woman called Laura nuzzled his neck, taking in short sharp breaths, first through her nose, then her mouth, capturing the air around him –
capturing his smell!
– drawing it into herself. She moved over his chest, pushing his coat aside, her nose and lips almost touching his sweatshirt. Up again, under his chin, now lightly brushing his mouth.

He couldn’t help but
breathe
her,
taste
her redolence, that bitter muskiness that was so much stronger now she was so close. Her thick black hair tickled his nose and he angled his head away, looking up at the ceiling as if appealing to the Almighty beyond.

‘Uh, listen . . .’ he began to say, but she was descending once more, past his chest to his stomach. Her hands tugged at his sweatshirt so that his flesh was bare. She breathed it.

‘Oh no . . .’ he muttered as the animal at his groin stirred again. He put a hand on her shoulder, but his pressure was not insistent. Without raising her head, she lifted the hand away.

She went down to his thighs, moved to and lingered over his crotch, inhaling all the time, those breaths becoming stronger, a little more urgent.

He moaned inwardly as he felt himself swell.

With some effort, he said, ‘I’m here for Sammy, not . . . not this . . .’

She paused only to look up at him, ducking her head once more almost immediately to resume her curious exercise. Her shoulders rose and fell in quickening shudders.

Creed squirmed in the seat.

Her hands touched the buttons at the neck of her dress and so deft was the movement they seemed to open of their own accord. Her fingers travelled down them and still she did not stop inhaling him, her lips parted, their redness moistened.

Oh shit
, he said to himself,
oh shit oh . . . not this. Christ, not now . . .

She pulled at her dress and it slipped from her shoulders.

Her skin was white, so very white. Even in the gloom he could tell it was as white and pure as ivory; but soft, so soft, demanding to be touched . . .

We know Creed wasn’t the strongest of men when it came to morals – in fact, he wouldn’t even have regarded sex with a proper stranger
as
immoral – but the thought of the danger his son might be in did put something of a downer on the situation. He struggled to sit upright (for he had sunk low into the couch, the nape of his neck almost on the headrest).

‘Quit it!’ he said, and there was an element of desperation in his voice. ‘I’m here to get my boy, that’s all, that’s it, that’s what I’m here for. Let’s cut this crap and get down to business. Who the fuck are you, anyway?’

She paused to smile at him.

‘I told you, you can call me Laura.’

‘Laura who, Laura what? What have you got to do with all this? I came here to see the pervert who kidnapped my son, not some fucking nympho who gets her rocks off snorting body odour. You better start talking before I get
really
mad.’

Her broader smile barely showed her teeth. Her dark-rimmed eyes watched him intently, yet there was a vacuity there, a kind of distant emptiness, that was disconcerting, not to say downright eerie.

He felt that probing again, gentle exploring fingers inside his mind, sensuous as they touched certain nerves, certain thoughts. And those thoughts were suddenly
bad
. They were of her. They were of her and
him
. No, no, not
now
! He thought he heard her laugh, but her lips had not moved, they still smiled, and the sound was too far away, too hollow, as if coming from a locked attic. She hadn’t laughed; but the laughter had come from her.

She touched her dress again and it opened further, almost to the waist. The material appeared to be sheer, as if having metamorphosed into gossamer, and he could see the curves of her breasts against the hardened dark tinges of her nipples. She drew the dress to one side and he groaned at the pleasure of her body’s full, soft whiteness.

He attempted to speak again, tried to resist, but he was only human and what’s more, he was only Creed. He had to caress that exposed flesh.

She stayed his hand.

Then reached into him with her other hand. The zip of his jeans opened in the same magical way as her dress buttons, almost without being touched (or, more realistically, her touch was so expertly light it seemed as if the undoing was of its own accord). Her fingers were cool and soft as they delved further. She brought him out into the open.

Creed shifted, unsure if he should join her on the floor, or if she should join him on the couch. Laura placed her hands on his thighs to still him.

Creed glimpsed himself and marvelled at his own erection; it had been quite a while since he’d been aroused to such eminence. It was worthy of a snap.

He wanted this strange woman very badly. So badly that Sammy had become no more than a shadowy thought somewhere at the back of his mind, there, not forgotten, but not in the reckoning at that precise moment. If Creed felt guilt, it was easily overwhelmed by lust.

‘Come on . . .’ he urged her dryly, but she smiled and kept him there, the pressure on his legs firm and uncompromising. She released him only so that she could feel her own naked breast. Her eyes half closed as she fondled the nipple, and her smile became more inward. She freed her other breast, cupping both in her hands, stroking them, arousing herself and arousing Creed even more. He tried to reach for her again, but she warded him off, swaying back on her haunches, not allowing him to touch.

She remained leaning back, her legs apart, and slid the skirt up to uncover stretched, milky thighs, the most erotic thighs Creed had ever looked upon, thighs so beautifully rounded, so wonderfully taut in their posture of openness, the dark valley between so enticing . . .

He moaned aloud when she drew the hem higher and he saw the deeper darkness there, the unclothed hair like some large jet arrowhead pointing in the direction he wished to travel.

Too much. It was too much for Creed. He sank to the floor so that he was kneeling before her, his knees outside hers and touching, his back against the edge of the couch. She had not tried to stop him.

She dipped her hand into herself and shuddered, her eyes closing completely for a moment. Her fingers came away and she smeared his lips with her own wetness. A tiny stab of repulsion jarred him, but it was soon overcome. Creed licked his lips.

Laura dipped again, and this time his hugely erect penis took the wetness and it mingled with his own seeping juices. She spread the mixture down his full length.

Her moistened hand left him and she ran her fingers along her own thighs, teasing herself, up and down, reaching higher with each stroke until finally she plunged into the shadowy recess with both hands, arching her body backwards so that her vulva was thrust at his face. She gasped repeatedly and Creed, goggle-eyed and slack-jawed, panted in time with her gasping.

Around them, the room darkened.

He could bear no more. He flung himself at her, springing the top button of his jeans and jerking them down as he did so.

She let out a cry as they fell together, her legs straightening, one kicking the couch so that it banged against the wall and released a shower of dust.

His right of passage was hindered by her hands, for she still covered herself, she still caressed herself, her movement at once hard, and then soft, hard and then soft, the tips of her fingers more and more lost from view. Creed grabbed her wrists to pull her hands away and briefly she allowed him access. He was in – fast, forever the opportunist – and the exquisiteness of sinking deep into the damp yielding opening made him yell and slaver and grip her waist beneath the flimsy dress so that he could be inside her to the very limits and he thrust and thrust until the fluids roiled and began to erupt . . .

But Laura spasmed her body and tossed him from her as his liquid gushed; it spilt itself over her thighs, over her dress, sputtering more as he fell away, to plop in milky drops across the carpetless floor.

The room sank darker still.

Her breasts rising and falling in heavy shudders, she rested on one elbow and watched him.

For his part, Creed was confused. Discharged, but confused. And disappointed. But intoxicated, too. And not entirely satiated.

She began to laugh, a giggle at first, proceeding to a chuckle. He grinned inanely back at her, the grin wavering when she let loose a graceless snort, followed by an inelegant bellow of laughter.

It ceased abruptly and her gaze left his to wander down his body, stopping only to rest upon his nakedness. She studied his dripping penis and Creed felt its ugly head rear again in a small flicker of excitement. He moaned yet again, thinking this was not possible, not so soon after, that although not fully satisfied, he was certainly fully spent. But no, his wayward member twitched once more, started to stiffen with free-willed resolve.

Laura smiled and a shadow, like a veil, shifted over her face.

In a languid movement, she dipped her fingers into one of the white pools left by him on her thigh and touched the moisture first to her lips and then – the movement tantalising in its slowness – to her vagina.

Something rose from that second orifice, curling in the air, something nebulous, ill-defined, but nevertheless a shape; it ascended to the darkness above her, more than just a wispy vapour, for something moved within it, a form inside a formless sac.

More protoplasmic tendrils began to rise from other semen pools on her legs and the cloth of her dress. A minute shape floated like steam from a mother-of-pearl speckle on the floor between Creed and the woman.

She watched them climb into the air with a rapturous expression, as a child might gaze at a release of bright balloons.

Creed felt cold, a sensation so immediate and acute that he shivered violently. ‘What are they?’ he asked in a slow, quavery voice.

She didn’t answer right away, but continued to watch as the cloud-forms smoothed out against the ceiling, spreading so that their ragged edges began to join.

‘Phantoms,’ she answered after a while, still without looking at him. ‘The phantoms of emissions.’