First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (27 page)

Then I felt her hands stroking my right foot, felt her lift it and place it between her thighs, felt her fingers grasp my toes and gently begin to insert them into herself. Immediately I was all attention; attentive to her soft wet warmth, attentive to her gasps as she spread herself, gradually, gradually, till each of my toes was inside.

She paused a moment, then her hands went to work again, drawing in my oily forefoot, then the bony arch, then the rough heel. Till, miraculously, even my ankle was inside her, my entire right foot, and she gasping and grunting with the effort, the pain of it.

I forced myself to be silent (I had been whimpering with excitement), and she was silent now for a moment, too.

Then I felt her hands again, this time on my left foot; and she began the process again. As before, she tucked my toes into herself first, one at a time. Her breath rasped. Slowly and surely, she went about her work. She inserted the forefoot, the bridge, the heel, the ankle, till the whole of my left foot was in, oil sliding against oil, snugly alongside the right.

I was afraid some involuntary spasm of mine might injure her, so I lay there, quite still, my feet bound together in the wet, warm, flexible tube. It was so long since I had felt such excitement, yet I could not stop myself from sobbing quietly.

“Hush,” she said. “Hush, my dearest.”

I knew I must stop this sobbing, and I did, and lay quiet, expectant. This was, after all, only a lull. Soon, the muscles of her abdomen took up the work. They began sucking my
legs in, impossibly sucking my legs into her. Inch by inch, I felt my calves, then my knees, slowly being drawn in.

I twisted my head around to look at her. But from over my shoulder I could see only her distended genitalia, a fringe of hair, and otherwise nothing but my own thighs, my plump thighs, gradually disappearing into her. I turned my head back and lay still. When she reached the oily bulge of my buttocks, her panting and gasping increased, punctuated now with howls of pain as she stretched to enclose me.

If she felt pain, I myself was in no pain whatever. All of my flesh had taken on a purplish hue; my whole body was engorged, it longed to slide into her.

She gave a loud cry as she enveloped my buttocks, but still her muscles did not rest. They kept sucking till I was in her past my waist and still sliding. Some instinct urged me to press my arms to my sides to facilitate entry, and so I did, for I was sliding faster now. I could have believed a rope was attached to me, I was being pulled inside so inexorably, an ecstatic spelunker in this smooth, timeless tunnel. Even my well-oiled chest and shoulders somehow contracted themselves enough to accommodate passage.

I wondered now, I wondered for the first time, might I die? Might a man die of so much pleasure? Might this be how a rabbit feels, caught in the slim, loving jaws of a python?

Such thoughts were in my mind when the sucking, all at once, stopped.

I listened, alert as never before. I noticed that the quality of her groans had changed: despair was now mixed with pain. And I knew what was wrong. My head, my balding, plump, oily head, was too massive for her.

As her will slackened, the grip of her muscles eased, and I felt myself sliding back out of her—so many hard-won
inches surrendered. I howled with frustration. To be thwarted, with the prize so near. I knew I would be unable to bear it.

Then she spoke. Her voice was so urgent, so kind.

“Help me, my honey. Please help me, my sweet darling.”

Yes, yes, I tried to tell her. She must believe, yes, she must believe how much I wanted to help.

I tensed my body and I wished and wished and wished. She shuddered, and miraculously, her muscles took hold again, the sucking resumed. My shoulders re-entered her, then my neck. I tucked in my chin and took a last breath. A wall of slow, sweet flesh covered my lips, flattened my nose. As I closed my eyes, I heard her utter one last great shriek of effort, or triumph, or love.

Then, darkness.

I felt myself shoot along a brief tunnel and spill out into a balloon of pink light and opaque waters. A great throbbing surrounded me, my body vibrated with the beat of it. I tried to say the word for this, my rapture. But no word came, only a gurgle, and I cast myself off from all words.…

 … W
ORDS … WORDS … WORDS
reached me from a distance, rousing me from sleep.

My nose and mouth were covered but I was breathing the purest of air. I opened my eyes. I was lying on a bed in
a white room full of sunlight. My whole body felt stiff and sore. I could see tubes coming from a gallows, leading towards my left arm. At the side of the bed was a machine with a pulsing graph.

A man in a white coat, with a long face, was at the foot of the bed, talking. His voice sounded like a tire on gravel. He had a stethoscope round his neck. With him was a woman in a nurse’s uniform.

I tried to speak.

The nurse came forward and unfastened the oxygen mask.

“So you’re awake,” she said.

I tried to move, but my left arm was heavily bandaged and fixed to the bed by a strap.

“Where am I?”

“Invertay Hospital,” she said.

A familiar name, though I didn’t know why.

The man came over.

“I’m Doctor Burns,” he said. “You’ve been in an accident. I’ll just check a few things, then the nurse can take over.”

He examined my eyes with a little flashlight, and as he did so, I remembered the mote. I looked around for it, but could see no sign of it lurking in corners, waiting to attack.

The Doctor probed around my chest.

“Interesting birthmark,” he said, running his fingers over the purple stain. He went to the bottom of the bed and scribbled on the clipboard for a while. Then he put it away. “I’ll call in tomorrow,” he said, more to the nurse than to me, and he left.

She’d been businesslike while the Doctor was in the room, but now she smiled and relaxed. She was a solidly built woman with short grey hair and glasses. “You’ve been
here for two days,” she said, and told me what she knew. Apparently I’d been discovered by the driver of a snow-plough clearing the mountain roads twenty miles from Invertay. My car had gone off the road into a tree. I was suffering from hypothermia and had severed tendons in my right arm. I was lucky not to have lost it.

“You talked a lot before you came to,” she said. “We lifted the mask a couple of times to listen. But you weren’t making any sense.”

Now she asked some questions: who was I? where did I live? and so on. She especially wanted to know about the accident, but I could remember nothing, no matter how hard I tried. As she asked her questions, I became more and more aware of the pain in my arm. She noticed, gave me a shot of morphine, and left me alone.

The next day I felt better, though my arm still throbbed. It was unstrapped and I was able to get up and walk around. A policeman came to ask for some details about the accident—but I still couldn’t help. I could only wonder how it might have happened, the way Uncle Norman must have wondered, long ago on St Jude.

After my morning dose of morphine, I was feeling quite genial. That was when another visitor arrived. He was a big man shaped like a barrel: a barrel in an expensive suit.

“Mr Halfnight. Good morning. Cacktail’s my name—Doctor Gordon Cacktail. Please call me Gordon. I’m a psychologist,” he said, smiling. We sat on two chairs by the window of my room. It had snowed the day before, and now the sun shone brilliantly on the hills around.

“Burns thought it might be a good idea if I saw you,” my visitor said. “In cases like yours we often find there’s a lingering trauma. It’s good for the patient to talk.”

He was big, but not in any way threatening. As though all his physical strength was used in concentrating his mind on helping me. He gave the impression of being someone to be trusted.

“You don’t seem to have any head injuries,” he said. “But I gather you can’t remember anything at all about your accident. That may be a sign there are other things at the root.”

I felt very comfortable with him, but I didn’t say anything yet. He clasped his big hands together.

“I understand,” he said gently, “that you talked quite a bit before you recovered consciousness. Burns thinks you may have been under some kind of severe stress before you got in the car. This is a good opportunity to talk about your earlier state of mind. That may make you remember what happened in the car.”

The morphine made me feel so good, and Gordon Cacktail was so kind, and it was so long since I’d talked to anyone, I just opened up. The words were like hot coals I couldn’t spit out fast enough. I just talked and talked. I went right back to the beginning and talked about my birth and the death of my sister; my father’s death, my mother’s final illness; I told him about my voyage on the
Cumnock
and my friendship with Harry Greene; I told him about St Jude and Aunt Lizzie’s murder of Uncle Norman; I told him about my stay at the House of Mercy and how I came to live in Canada; I told him about my years of tranquillity, then the nightmares that led to my trips to the turreted mansion, and my affair with Amber Tristesse; I told him about my struggle with the mote, and about my journey to the motel in the hills; I told him about my experience with the woman there: I said that was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me.

But when it came to the circumstances of the accident, I said I just couldn’t remember anything. But I did tell him I thought it was curious I should be lying here, in a place called Invertay, the same name as the place where my parents conceived me. And I told him I remembered something else—a dream I’d had my first night in the hospital: how I was at an upstairs window in a house among hills, watching a procession of women dressed in black. How they were paused in mid-stride, like a movie stopped at a single frame. How the leaves falling from nearby trees were suspended in mid-air, as though time and the wind had ceased. How a tall woman, poised for her next step, was carrying a banner. How the banner itself was stretched out rigid, and the words on it were quite legible:
THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN
. How I looked across at the house opposite and saw, standing at the upstairs window, another watcher all dressed in black, and he was watching me with cold, fearful eyes.

Gordon Cacktail was a good listener. He nodded frequently while I talked, encouraging me. When I was finished, he said he had a few things to ask me.

The funny thing was, as soon as I’d stopped talking, I suddenly began to regret that I’d talked at all. I suppose the euphoria of the morphine had worn off while I’d been telling him my life story and I’d been too interested in talking to be aware of what I was saying. Now, I just couldn’t believe I’d done it. I couldn’t believe I’d betrayed myself. Resentment filled me. How could this man have taken advantage of me when my will was so weakened? I was angry. I completely lost control of myself.

“You should be ashamed,” I shouted at him even though he was only a yard away, “prying into a man’s private life when he’s full of dope. It’s psychological rape. You’re nothing better than a rapist!” The fact I was capable of that
outburst showed there was still some of the morphine left in me.

Gordon Cacktail smiled and was as pleasant as ever.

“Good, good. It’s quite normal to have these feelings,” he said, “after what you’ve been through. All I want to do is ask you a few simple questions. If you help me, I’ll be able to help you.”

My eyes blurred, and when I rubbed them, I discovered I was weeping. I felt utterly humiliated.

“You quack, you parasite! Leave me alone!” I shouted. “Leave me alone!”

“Good,” he said, getting out of his chair without any hurry. “Don’t hold it in. I’ll come back again some time when you feel better.”

The next afternoon, a grey-haired police officer drove me to the scene of the accident. We travelled in silence along monotonous, snow-covered roads.

“The snow’s come so early this year,” he said after a while. “Is this area at all familiar?”

These roads all looked the same to me, like bookshelves in a massive library. How was anyone to tell the difference between one and another?

“We’re almost there,” he said.

The road divided just ahead, and he took the left fork. It was actually a short driveway through the evergreens, and ended in an open area the size of a football field. The policeman parked and pointed towards the trees.

“That’s where they found the car,” he said. “You must have thought you were still driving on the highway. When you came to the end of this clearing, you braked and slid over the embankment into a tree.”

Through the windshield, we could see a tree with broken branches and a fresh gash on its trunk.

“Does any of this ring a bell?” he asked.

I said no, I couldn’t remember anything. At least, that’s what I told him. But there was something familiar about the place, even though I could have sworn I’d never been there in my life.

“I used to patrol this area years ago,” he said. “A motel was located here. It was demolished a long time ago.”

I wouldn’t even have thought of asking him the name of the motel. But he told me anyway.

“It was called The Highlander,” he said.

S
ATURDAY WAS MY
last day at the hospital. I was completely rested, and felt physically well, except for my arm. Doctor Burns said with any luck I might regain the use of it in due course.

I had an hour to wait for the taxi that was to take me back to Camberloo. I was standing behind some potted ferns at Reception when Gordon Cacktail and Doctor Burns came by. They were carrying cups of coffee and stopped to chat only a few yards away, quite unaware of me. I suspected they might be talking about me, and I was right.

“… a classic case,” Gordon Cacktail was saying. “A pity he’s leaving. He has all the signs of a chronic oedipal condition: in fact, he believes he made a journey back into the womb. And he has massive survivor guilt. He says his twin sister was killed as a baby, and since then he’s lived in places where large numbers of the population have been wiped out. He went through a broken romance, and a few years
of heavy substance abuse that brought on various delusions. He has a definite touch of paranoid schizophrenia, too: he believes that not long ago he was possessed by an alien being.” He shook his head. “Really, Burns. It’s the kind of case I don’t often come across.”