The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (8 page)

Her mouth lolled open. Her eyes rolled back in ecstasis. Her hair lay in a fan about her head. Her features were transfigured . . . No, not transfigured,
transforming!
They were changing, being replaced by other, stronger, more brutish features. Ursula's forehead was bulging, growing whiter, she was being instantly encephalicised. And the arms that held Richard, they

too were changing, becoming thicker, more muscular, hairier. He tried to pull away, but the legs that grasped him above the hips were thicker now as well. Horribly thick and imprisoning. As Richard watched in awed fascination, the beautiful breasts he had been licking and sucking withered, expanded into hard dinner plates of pectoral, each pap sporting a twistle of black, black hair.

Richard's cock died. It didn't slither out of its soft confinement – it was spat out. It wasn't Ursula's voice that was urging Richard on any more, it was a deeper, throatier voice, a voice not of abandonment – but of damnation.

Bell hugged Richard to his great chest. He stroked Richard's blond curls and cupped his cheek with a blunt hand. Richard couldn't understand why it was that he could hear what Bell was saying, because his own screams bounced and whined around the room. ‘It's good to have you on board,’ said the big man; ‘I thought you were never really going to join – become one of us.’

And as he pulled Richard down on top of him, the scent of Jicki came into the back of Richard's throat. But it was no longer sweet, it was bitter, bitter as cocaine.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR

Will Self is the author of
The Quantity Theory of Insanity,
winner of the 1993 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize,
Cock & Bull, My Idea of Fun, Grey Area
and
Junk Mail.

Martin Rowson is one of Britain's leading political cartoonists and has produced comic book versions of T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
and Lawrence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy.