The Dunwich Romance (11 page)

I was boiling up with angur when she got done sayin these things, but what I felt worse than angur was a deep down sadness like I never know before, not just from WHAT she said but HOW she said it, like it didnt bother her at all which I can only figure is cuz shes just so durn used to being treated awful by her father and other folks, that she think being treated awful be just another part of reguler life.

But it AINT just another part of reguler life!

So I decide rite then n there that for all Im worth I gonna prove to her that theers better things in livin than bein treated shitty by folks and being beat and hurt and what not. No sir. What else could she do, bein’ a young girl and all? Wasn’t nothing SHE could do bout it.

But there sure as SHIT be sumpthin I can do about it.

Im still sitting here at the big desk with the oil lamp turned low, as I’m writin watchin her sleep with the moonlite on her face from the high little window. Every time I look at her, she just seem more beautiful then before, and—

Had ta stop with my pen for a sec cos while I was watchin her she start to turn an toss a bit on the cot, and git ta moanin more then a tad. First I thought it must be a bad dream she be having but then I notice shes kinda smiling and then she gets to rubbin her hands up and down her bodie through my ma’s old black dress, and she moan some more louder, then she starts rubbin her bosom with one hand and rubbin her privit place with the other, but I can see she still be asleep. One of her tits fall out the toppa the dress and then she gets to playin with it, and I see the nipple on it grow biggur right before my eyes. So it become pretty clear to me it aint no bad dream she s havin, it’s a good one. Wish I cud believe it was me she was dreemin about but, well, itd be plumb stoopid to think sech a thing.

Now shes rockin’ back and fourth on the cot and really gettin worked up, so mutch that I wudn’t be surprised if she wake herself rite up. I will stop writing now, turn the lamp down some more, and watch, an if she wake up I’ll act like I fall asleep in my chair—

Nine

It was a rich mixture of feelings with which Sary awakened so abruptly in the middle of the night, and still more such feelings had dominated her cerebrations before she recalled falling asleep.
Them men at Osborn’s,
the memory suffused, and then with it the inexplicable delight that she bubbled with upon knowing that her assailants had been forced, by an operandi she failed to understand, to consume horrific substances. She also remained aware of the unusual peaceablility from that point on, since walking back to the tool-house with Wilbur and sharing the rock candy with him. They’d conversed for some time after that, which had pacified her further, but she’d felt slightly uncomfortable when he’d given her the gold piece. Soon, though, Sary’s eyelids drooped; she took Wilbur’s suggestion to heart, and agreed to stay with him, at least for the night. As awkward as the lengthened cot appeared, she found it comfortable to a luxurious degree; sleep whelmed her in only moments.

She recalled her melange of dreams, then—dreams whose tranquil essentia seemed so inconsonant to her: somnolent images of vast, beauteous pastures whose verdancies filled her spirit with an immeasurable delight; of resplendent and celestial dawns; of grand forests unspoilt by the encroachment of man and his ax for time immemorial, and of the silence of such forests which could only be described as deific. Moreover, partnered with all this, was an all-pervading sense of inner-equitableness the likes of which her heart had never experienced.

What she could not grasp, of course, was the seeming instantaneous
reversal
of the dream’s overall mien...

Those beauteous visions of pasture, sky, and wood—quite verily—transposed themselves into a shocking and inscrutable opposite: Osborn’s General Store and the trio of nefarious debauchers who’d accosted Sary only hours ago; and it was with her dreaming mind’s eye that she gazed at the appalling event. However, as the scene replayed, she found a thoroughly different perspective presented to her: not witnessing the assault as a victim but, this time, as an omnipresent spectator; likewise, it was not via her objective
vision
with which she made her observations but via what one might think of as some manner of hideous
camera dementata...

Sary saw the perpetrators—and their respective acts of self-degradation—from various flexures and multiple ranges of proximity. One after another, each of them cranked opened their mouth to unwillingly consume the material of their punition. If anything, this ocular recrudescence seemed to take place in a most unnatural
slowness.
Initially, Sary’s component of dream-awareness recoiled at the repugnance of this perspective, as would anyone’s, yet...

She continued to watch with an undeniable
acceleration
of attentiveness. And what she saw next struck her even more inexplicably:

She saw
herself,
escorted by Wilbur Whateley, leave the derelict general store.

Yet the dream’s visuality remained, which enabled her to continue watching, and what she watched would be deemed, by any general canon, as unwatchable.

For a time, the three men had lain shuddering once their stomachs had been filled with unmentionable effluences, and Sary had assumed that the self-inflicted atrocities were at an end.

She was incorrect, however, in this assumption.

It was the age-and wretchedness-wizened Tobias who first came to his feet, doing so in a straining, wincing protestation, as if being puppeteered by a force of will more malignant even than his own; and in jerking motions he picked up the spit-can and began to vomit into it. While this rather noisily ensued, under similar locomotions, Luke Lang and Henry Wheeler each staggered behind the old wood counter, rummaged falteringly amongst the aisles of shelving, and then returned, Lang bearing a half-gallon glass bottle and Wheeler holding a large bowl. Lang at once girdled the bottle’s opening with his lips and began to vomit Wheeler’s urine (along with other digestive debris). Into the bowl, of course, Wheeler regurgitated his feces.

Even in the dream-conscience, Sary found no need to ponder over what might next take place...

Tobias passed the spit-can to Lang, Lang passed the urine bottle to Wheeler, and Wheeler passed his heaping bowl to Tobias Whateley, and they all began to consume the contents of these receptacles. Then the process of regurgitation/consumption was repeated, until each man had had the opportunity to sample
all
the offerings of the day.

Sary started awake as if a scream had issued directly into her ear, and with parallel rapidity the dream’s constituents appeared in her wakened awareness.

If one could gasp
mentally,
Sary did so, and it was a gasp of fitful wantonness. Her body churned on the mattress, buttocks clenching, toes flexing, sex palpitating. Her fingers were twisting a delicious ache into a gorged nipple, while her other hand seemed determined to admit itself entirely into her womanhood’s tender threshold. Her sexual fluids ran rampant; her abdomen sucked in and out as her back stressed like an archer’s bow pulled to maximum arciform. In her mind, she knew she was awake, yet that simple acknowledgment is all she seemed able to command. What remained was only a fervent—no—an
inexorable
sexual ravenousness, a yearning for orgasm comparable to the hunger of a donjon convict left unfed for a fortnight. The capability of coherent thought was impossible, overtaken as she was with this raw and primitivistic need to be
penetrated,
to be
cored,
to be drubbed by
immediate
and
interminable
intercourse. In fact, if any analytical thoughts did indeed exist in her head, they were merely recollective images of her dream...

Not the glorious pastures and atavistic sunrises, but her three antagonists cabalistically forced to consume various bodily waste.

She felt aflame, bolting up in the cot. She could hear the thuds of her heart as her hand bedeviled her sex and her breasts buzzed.

Her eyes snapped wide.

Aw, my GAWD...

The logical queries that such a predicament might bid never arrived, queries that considered her sudden, unquenchable, and very uncharacteristic lust, or, in her own backland dialect,
Haow can dreamin’ baout men etting shit’n drinking pee’n spit make me so dag blasted horny?
It was a pertinent question, and had Sary been a schooled alienist of, say, the Freudian Doctrine, she might devise that such an excitement came as the result of multiple retrograde symptoms of erotic-reversal revenge totems.

But, lo, Sary was not a schooled alienist.

At any rate, the recollection of nauseating imagery blotted out all else in her mind, leaving only the verisimilitude of sexual appetency and the unheeding drive to slake it.

In labored breaths, she scanned the shed’s interior. Only a sliver of light leaked from the oil lamp on the desk, and in this inappreciable illumination, her eyes deciphered the lanky, awkward form of Wilbur, slumped asleep in his chair.

Sary rose as if instigated by Vodou. She walked dizzily to where Wilbur slumbered; then, with no abashment whatever, she skimmed the diaphanous gown over her head and straddled Wilbur bare-groined in the chair. Whether he came awake instantly or not, she had no idea; her focus, instead, had her hands frantic at the man’s belt. Several eye-blinks later, his belt was untied, his trousers were opened, and Sary was grunting in an absolutely adamantine effort to haul his trousers down. Wilbur did indeed come awake at this point, and in such a manner as could be likened to outright alarm.

“Suh-Sary! What it be yew’re doin’, gull?” he exclaimed, and then his hands came to her bare waist, to intercept her efforts.

The words of her reply seemed hewn by the heat of her angst. “Wilbur, I carn’t ‘splain it at all but I feel jess plumb
out’a my mind
with a hanker ta fuck yew! Got ta thinkin’ ‘baout all ya done fer me, and ‘specially makin’ them men do them things at the store and—
jiminee!
—it’s got me hornier than a mare in heat!” and with this declaration she was able to jack Wilbur’s pants down several inches.

Wilbur hitched them back up. “Aw, no, Sary...”

“Wilbur, please! I dun’t know what come over me, but I jess, I juss, I juss GOTTA have yew in me!”

“But-but,” and then his large hands finally snapped to her wrists and arrested all movement of her hands. “Thar’s suthin’ ye dun’t understand! See, I’se
different,
is what I’m a-sayin’!”

“
Different?
” she wailed.

“Different from fellas hereabouts!” He broke into an ungovernable stammer. “Different, I mean, duh-duh-duh...
daown thar...
” and then he tremulously gestured his groin.

Utter bafflement contorted Sary’s face in the barely visible lamp-light. “Ya mean...yew’re
dick?
”

Wilbur froze with the question. “Wal...ee-yuh—”

Sary’s tautened wits and sexual delirium had no time for this; her hands shot back to his trouser rivet. Yet his hesitance made fuel for thought: the presumption that he was merely bashful was the first possibility to come to mind (though why should a man as large, physically intimidating, and fearless be bashful?); she also considered that perhaps his genital endowment was less than substantial, an instance which was known to infuse in men no small quantum of insecurity. Either way, though, Sary cared not in the least. She was insatiable—she would have her way, and she would see to it that he did not bemoan the result. “Dun’t yew worry abaout nuthin’,” shot her scorched-whisper response. “Jess yew
relax
naow an’ let me do this!”

At long last, Wilbur resigned to her insistences, but not before turning the lamp all the way down. This Sary took to indicate an embarrassment on his part—again, the Small-Genitals Possibility seemed most probable. Or did he possess some genital
deformity
that he expressly wished her
not
to see? The potential amused her. In the time of her professional calling—and the benefit of knowledge
a posteriori,
one could say—she’d witnessed bifurcated coronae, dual urethras, a trine of testicles, penile shafts bent akin to horseshoes, endomorphic foreskins, and even less cogitable aspects of malconformation. As far as penises were concerned:
I’ve seen ‘em all...

No, she cared not of Wilbur’s unaccountable reservations—
I’m a whore,
she didn’t have to remind herself,
and it’s a whore’s job to make fellas feel good...
Sary determined to do exactly that, but not before making herself feel good as well.