The Chosen

Vera’s in there. Somewhere.

Vera…

I still love her, he realized.

And then, with no hesitation whatsoever, Paul Foster did the least logical thing he could do under the circumstances:

He entered the great pipe’s entry and began to follow its dark, damp course up into the ridge, toward The Inn.

Instantly he felt drowning in moist darkness; the concourse of the sewer pipe seemed like a spectral esophagus into which he was being swallowed. Just as he thought he could walk no more, due to the cloying dark, gobbets of light rasped his eye. He knew he was walking upward into the ridge. Eventually he detected the most diminutive illumination. Light, he thought. Yes, it was definitely light…

Paul followed the light.

After what seemed a hundred yards through the bowels of the ridge, the round, cement concourse left him standing in a warm, wanly lit corridor. He heard the faintest humming, like machines far away.

He walked on, eyes flicking back and forth. What if I get caught in here? he wondered. What will they do? Process trespassing charges? He didn’t much care, though. Some unbidden curiosity urged him on. Some query, some dementia.

He wasn’t sure what it could be.

The corridor turned. Doors lined it, on either side. He peeked into one and saw something that looked almost like a cave: rough rock walls lit only by sputtering torches set into sconces. A large bed of pillows lay in the center of the cave-room.

But the room, other than that, was empty.

A dream, he thought when he looked into the next room.

Not men but things fornicating frenetically with two listless women tied down to a similar bed of pillows. Others stood round watching, an eager glint in impossibly huge eyes. A few of these watchers masturbated erections the size of rolling pins…

Yes. It must be a dream.

It had to be.

In the next room a similar scene ensued, only some of the queer-looking spectators seemed to be engrossed with plates of food. Women, however, moaned in unison as still more figures with strangely warped heads steadily performed cunnilingus. Inordinately large tongues, like pink snakes, delved without reluctance into the spread, moist fissures. One figure admitted an entire hand, while its glaze-eyed recipient tossed and turned in heady bliss…

A dream, he thought a second time.

In the next room, a bald woman seemed to be cleaning up, placing large, smudged platters into a plastic bustray. Her pubis was as bald as her head, and large, pert breasts seemed erected on her chest.

There was something—

Something, he slowly thought.

—that seemed uneasily familiar.

Then she turned and looked at him. Recognition widened her eyes.

“Paul!” she acknowledged.

Paul’s sight seemed to droop like warm putty.