Nightmare in New York

four.'

Bolan distantly heard Evie sigh and leave the bed. Then the sheet was drawn back and something soft and warm moved in beside him, pressing close with sweet scents and cushiony resilience. Satiny arms worked him into a tender embrace and the smooth flesh of softly powerful legs intertwined his in full command. A fragment of something someone had said, '… body therapy…' drifted through his closing consciousness and he said, 'Yeah, I'll buy that,' but he did not know if the words left his throat or not.

'Take my strength,' whispered a soft voice. 'Body to body, lover, take it and build upon it.'

Yeah, yeah, here came the bottomless pit and Bolan was slipping into it, but it really didn't matter. It was all a mad dream in a madhouse, and the Executioner had freaked out for sure. Face to face, body to body, it was a total freakout.

Chapter Three Corpses

Bolan's recovery was dramatically quick under the constant ministrations of his three nurses. He was fed every time his eyes flickered open, and the bizarre 'body therapy' continued around the clock. On Monday he was up and prowling about under his own steam, getting the lie of the luxury apartment shared by the girls. It appeared that they had no money problems. The building was located in the high rise and high rent district of Manhattan's fashionable East Side. The apartment was one of those garden terrace setups with the ultra-modern decor which is usually associated with modest wealth. There were but two bedrooms, one of which was shared by the moppet and the Yogi. Paula had the other one to herself, but Bolan considered it quite a sacrifice for personal privacy — very small, windowless, with hardly space enough to walk around the bed.

Most of the apartment was given over to a split-level and luxuriously appointed living area, quite spacious and supplying just about every conceivable animal comfort — from a glassed-in massage and sun lamp den to a swinging bar with built-in enter-tainment center. The kitchen wasn't overly much, but fully gadgeted and probably adequate for a trio of working girls who perhaps confined their food preparation to dry salads and black coffee. The refrigerator now was amply stocked with gobs of red beef, brought in especially for consignment to Bolan's blood- building chemistry.

Thanks to the compulsive talker, Bolan had learned that Paula's age was twenty-six, making her the eldest of the three and obviously a sort of den mother. Rachel was twenty-two, Evie twenty. The girls shared an equal interest in Paula's Fashions. The fashion design know-how belonged to Paula, Rachel had brought local fame and following as a model, Evie the cash. They had a going enterprise, concentrating on the far- out learnings of the freaky set and, according to Evie, outshining all the competition in that field.

Bolan had been informed, that morning, that the 'body therapy' routine was finis. As he understood it, the idea was a pet theory of Paula's which she had picked up from some Eastern mystic, having something to do with the flow of life energies from body to body. She explained to Bolan,

'The basis of all universal laws is the principle of balance. Our universe is balanced, the planets and the stars all giving off and receiving energies from one another, and our bodies do the same thing. A body with an ebbing life force will naturally induct the stronger energies emanating from a proximate body. This practice of isolating the sick with the sick is primitive hogwasfa and it's self-defeating. Every sick person should go to bed with a strong, healthy partner — someone who can spare a slight diminishing of their own vital energies. The value gained by the vital forces of the patient could easily mean the difference between life and death.'

Bolan could understand why she had not completed her nurse's training. 'Yeah, but something else gets vitalized in the process,' he pointed out, 'and a guy could end up losing a lot more energy than he gained.'

'That's why we are discontinuing your body therapy,' Paula explained. Her eyes flashed mischievously. 'Anyway, libidinal energies are the strongest force the body has going for it. Yours seem to be fully restored, so you've disqualified yourself from further body therapy.'

It was the nuttiest quackery Bolan had ever heard, but he kept a straight face and let the matter drop. They had saved his life; he would not openly question their methods. Something had worked, certainly.

Paula and Evie had gone off to keep the goldmine in operation, leaving Rachel to babysit the mending houseguest. Bolan had been trying, without apparent success, to penetrate the aloof coolness of the beauteous nursemaid and to repair the lines of communication he had so thoughtlessly ripped asunder on that first encounter. He had not seen the girl without clothing since that awful moment, or at least without what would pass for clothing in any nudist camp. At the moment she wore buckskin hotpants which hugged the hips, deeply plunging at front and rear, and with cutouts that revealed a goodly area of shiny buttock to each side. A fringed leather thingamajig hung from some hidden suspension point across the bountiful chest — like a Kit Carson fringed jacket without the jacket. A narrow headband with a tiny oriental symbol of some sort traversed the forehead just above the eyes to complete the ensemble.

Bolan asked her, 'Is that one of Paula's designs?'

She shook her head in that feline way and replied, 'No, I conceived this myself.'

Bolan grinned. 'Your concession to prudery,' he suggested quietly.

Her eyes flashed to his, then skittered away. 'There is nothing vulgar about the human body. I simply want to get that into the record. Vulgarity is a mental creation.'

Bolan asked her, 'Did you pull that discovery out of The One!

'Don't joke about that,' she warned him. 'There are many names for God.'

Hell, Bolan thought, a nudist holy roller. Aloud, he replied, 'Sorry, I didn't realize you took it so seriously.'

'I take it very seriously,' she assured him.

'Why don't you just call him God?'

'The word is too fraught with superstitious ignorance. Words are very important, don't you think? They are symbols of our mental content.'

He told her, 'I guess you're right. So what sort of symbol pops out when I'm thinking about sex?'

She watched himwarily for a moment, then replied, 'I don't know about you. For me, the word is purity.'

'Purity,' he echoed, sliding the word through his mind for size. 'Sorry, the ideas seem to clash.'

'In your mind, yes, because you think in vulgar terms. You kill, and you terrorize, and you thump your chest like a jungle ape, and of course you take your sex in the same frame of mind.'

She was striking back, and Bolan was finding it uncomfortable. He told her, 'My killing and my sexing have no connection at all. I don't want a fight with you, RacheL But I'm curious. In what frame of mind do you take your sex?'

'I do not take sex,' she replied coolly.

'All right,' he said, thoroughly subdued.

'It takes me,' she explained.

'Oh.'

'This is the only purity, you see. A man and a woman meet, something sparks between them, and sex immediately takes them if they are wise.'

Chuckling, he asked, 'You mean they just flop down immediately and let sex take it, wherever they may be when the sparks fly, on the sidewalk at Times Square or on the floor of the Brooklyn subway.'

She smiled and told him, 'You're thumping your chest again. It's not necessary to 'flop down' anywhere. For the wise, it is enough to merely let sex take you, and lead you to the proper time and place.'

He did not even wish to mull that one over. 'And if you're not wise?' he prompted her.

'Then you fall into impurity, into vulgarity, seductive maneuvers, thinly covered repressions, with nothing left of the pure impulse but lecherous thoughts and dishonest actions. It is the birth of pornography. We sparked, Mack Bolan, you and I, yesterday. And you flung my spark back into my face.'

That was not, Bolan was thinking, where he had flung it — and indeed he had not known even what he had