'Better relax, or there's going to be a lot of blood. Have to stretch you out, and you'll get there as long as you loosen up.' He withdrew and plunged ahead again, invading her. 'Do you know the secret?' Nora had been hiding within herself with her eyes closed, her body clamped in revulsion, and when Dart slapped her cheek she realized that he was talking to her. 'Didn't think so.' He shoved forward again. 'Women, who run rings around men all the time, who can outthink any man ever born, have one weakness. They love being fucked more than anything else on earth.' His voice seemed to come from a distant professorial source completely unrelated to what he was doing.
'Money, cars, fur coats, jewelry, houses, they're smart enough to know those things are just toys. Give them all away for a guy with a Johnson big enough to turn them inside out. Trouble is, most women never find that guy. But if they do, they're
Nora opened her eyes to a curious sight. Dick Dart's upper portion hung over her. His mottled face had hardened around his concentration, and another face, a secret face, seemed to surface beneath the public one. His lips had drawn back from his yellow teeth. His nose had sharpened, and a suggestion of hair darkened his cheeks. She closed her eyes and heard distant artillery fire.
Eternities later, a quickening in her torture returned Nora to the world. Dick Dart's sweat plopped on her in great tears. He groaned; his hands locked on her shoulders. His body froze, his legs turned to iron bars. Her mind seemed to burst into flame. He arched his back and slammed into her twice, three times, four, five, so forcefully her head banged the headboard.
Dart collapsed on top of her. She felt extraordinarily denied, so dirty that she could never again be clean. When he rolled off, she felt as though he had broken each of her bones systematically. She would never open her eyes, never again. A hand crawled over her thigh.
'Was it good for you, darling?'
He left the bed and padded into the bathroom. Everything hurt everywhere. She was afraid to open her eyes.
Little voices hissed and chattered. Her demons had found her again. The demons were fond of room 326, and presently they were fond of Nora also, because once more she had been pushed through the bottom of the world into the devastation where they flourished. Nora hated and feared the demons, but she was much more fearful of what she would see if she opened her eyes; therefore she had to endure them. She remembered from her last exposure that although demons did not wish to be seen, you occasionally caught sight of those who crept up to impart a morsel of demon knowledge. Some of them were tiny red devils with toothpick pitchforks, some looked like animals created by mad scientists: long-toothed badgers with rat's tails, hairy balls with darting eyes and heavy claws. Some demons looked like moving smudges.
An indistinct, winged thing flapped past her head whispering, '
Nora wondered if she would have the demons if she had been raised in some sensible religion, like Buddhism.
The thing circled around and flew past again. '
'
'
Most of the information imparted by demons was true, for if they told lies they would be lunatic annoyances, not demons.
She heard them rattling up to her, whispering to each other in their rapid-fire voices, and drew into herself as tightly as possible, though she knew that the elated demons would never touch her. If they touched her, her mind would shatter, and then she would be too crazy to be interesting.
A demon who looked like a rat with small blue wings and granny glasses whispered,
When she nodded, the ratlike demon said,
'It's not as bad as it looks,' said Dick Dart. Nora opened her eyes, and the demons scattered under the bed, behind chairs, into drawers. Her pain bounded back into her body and stretched like a big cat. Naked, smiling, his hair combed. Dart stood beside the bed, idly tugging at himself. His free hand held a damp white towel. The secret face moved toward the surface of his public face. Nora saw that it was true; he was a hyena. 'Take a gander. You have to sit up anyhow, so I can get the rope off your wrists.'
She shook her head.
Dart told her in an equable, good-humored fashion that like it or not she was going to sit up, grasped an upper arm, and jerked her forward. The room swung before and beneath her. Grimacing, she looked down and nearly fainted.
'Okay, let's get this off.' Dart reached across the pillow for the knife and expertly nicked the tape around her wrists. He ripped off the tape and worked on the knot until the rope released her wrists. 'Now the gag. I'm going to do this fast. Make any noise louder than a peep, I'll ram this knife in you, understand?' She closed her eyes. The chattering demons crowded around. Her lips and a good deal of skin seemed to rip away with the tape, but she managed not to whimper.
He tossed the damp towel onto her legs. 'Wipe yourself off. Have to strip the bed. I don't want to sleep in this mess.'
Nora obediently passed the towel down the tops of her thighs and realized that if he was going to strip the bed, she would have to get off. She moved her right leg half an inch to the side, and her various pains held steady. Gritting her teeth, Nora swung both legs off the side and forced herself to stand up. Her head swayed, and a bolt of pain shot upward in her groin.
'Girl's a trouper,' said Dart, reclaiming the knife. 'To prove I'm not completely evil, I did you a favor. Try to guess what it is.'
'Can't,' she muttered.
He smiled at her and tugged out the bedclothes. 'Ran you a bath, Nora-pie. Aren't you grateful?'
'Yes.' At that moment she wanted a bath more than she wanted freedom.
'Pop yourself in that tub.' In a single gesture, he jerked the bloody cover and sheets off the bed, balled them up, and threw them into the corner.
She walked, knees trembling, to the bathroom. The casket-sized tub was three-fourths filled with water. The soap dish held a tiny plastic bottle of shampoo and a cake of soap the size of a commemorative stamp. Two curling black hairs adhered to the soap.
Nora's stomach contracted, and she turned to the toilet in time to vomit pinkish drool into the bowl. She wrenched a tissue out of the dispenser, tottered over to the tub, picked up the soap as she would have a dead spider, then dropped the wrapped obscenity in the toilet and flushed it away. From a shell-shaped dish beside the sink she took another minuscule bar of soap and, stepping as gingerly as a stork, at last got into the tub.
Ah, yes. She never wanted to be anywhere at all except the inside of the tub. A pink cloud swam into the water from the center of her body. Delicately Nora explored herself. She was still bleeding, not seriously, and she had a lot of sore tissue. Various little fires continued to burn along the path of Dart's invasion. She soaped her arms and legs and realized that she would have to wash again under the shower to remove the film of blood deposited by the water in the tub. She was bending forward to open the drain when Dick Dart sauntered into the bathroom. She leaned back and sank up to her neck in the cloudy water, and her knees rose like islands.
'Comfy?' Dart grinned down at her, then inspected his face in the mirror. 'I hate the way your teeth feel when you haven't brushed. Being unshaven doesn't exactly fill me with joy, either. On our way to lunch, we can see if this place has a gift shop.'
Dart moved forward and peered into his eyes in the mirror, twirled around, and sat on the toilet, regarding her almost paternally. 'Couldn't help but notice you experienced some discomfort during our encounter.' He put a sarcastic stress on the last word. 'To facilitate matters I'm going to do what I do with my old dears and buy some K-Y. Lubrication will eliminate about half of your problem, but: if you don't relax, you're going to keep on getting hurt.'
