Jack Ketchum - Sleep Disorder

He smiled.

"There are no parameters," he said.

"You're saying we did that? Tapped into…"

"Something we don't understand. And why? Because the parameters don't belong to us. So much is scattered. So many cultures, so many different visions… There's so much to dissimulate, you know?" His bare shoulders shrugged. “What do you think?"

He lifted a finger, traced the claw marks on her breasts, then down her belly, then across her soft white thighs.

She shuddered, then laughed.

"I think it bears…further investigation," she said.

"So do I."

They arrived in a Rolls Royce White Shadow. Date of manufacture: 1916. Original owner: Nicholas Romanov.

The crowd at the door parted for them immediately.

The Rolls matched their own plumage. The white owl was Athena's bird.

Athena. Wisdom. War.

The feathers of her mask were real, luxuriantly arranged over a light wire frame with a soft satin lining, which was then affixed to the lined insert. The beak was a carven???(carved or craven?) horn.

Stephen's was a faceplate of pressed gold — the image, perhaps, of the sun god Apollo. Athena's brother.

They wore white satin floor-length cloaks and when they handed them to the woman at the club entry they were naked but for the masks, and wholly anonymous. She stood silent while patrons stared. To the pressure rings on her nipples he attached two long silver chains, trailing them down across her belly and reattaching them to two more rings on each of the lips of her labia.

They moved slowly side by side down the long dark hall and the crowd parted for them a second time.

Heavy chains and black leather manacles hung from walls and ceiling. A fat man tied by ropes to the steps of a wooden ladder was being whipped with a riding crop by his mistress. Few bothered watching.

Another man hung suspended from the roof of an iron cage. A crowd had gathered inside to watch two women insert needles through the flesh of his thighs and arms, swabbing at the specks of blood with balls of cotton. Further on, a rail-thin, multi-tattooed young woman was being racked by two hooded men in black leather pants and naked to the waist. They too had attracted their admirers. But Christine felt all those eyes shift to her as they passed in a tide of speculation.

Many had begun to follow.

He led her to a low dais inside another cage. She raised her arms to the manacles above her head and spread her legs wide to the shackles on the floor. The crowd gathered, grew, jockeyed for position. Captive bird. He gently removed the first chains and then the rings from her nipples and labia and then turned and spoke to the crowd.

Behind them, music blared. Slayer. Danzig. Killing Joke .

They heard him in spite of it. Not quite believing at first — not quite having heard or seen exactly this before. There were sidelong glances and nervous laughter. They hadn't seen this coming.

Nor, for that matter, had she.

"My sister," he said. "I give her to you. To touch, to know. To love as you see fit. One caveat. No pain."

Nods from the crowd, eagerly submitting.

The hunger in their eyes, and the smell of oil and leather.

He stepped aside. The sun god offering up his bounty.

She felt the touch of a dozen hands — male and female — all at once, stroking, squeezing her breasts and thighs, her ass, a finger probing delicately inside her ass, another in her sex, flicking, rolling the aching clitoris, moving slowly in and out, moving wetly across her belly, replaced inside by two more fingers, then three, then four, male and female both, stretching her wide into a pink fleur-de-lis, the tongue of a tall black woman moving deep inside her mouth, hands and heat and lips and teeth gently biting, gently pulling at her swollen nipples tender from the pressure rings and the long, deep scent of human breath and human flesh.

She felt serene. Soaring. Stroked by a dozen hot winds.

The white bird sailing through the night.

And came and came again.

In the dream she stared, amazed. Beyond the dusk she saw cities, or things like cities. Cities so old they were black. Odd architectures which extended along a vanishing line of horrid lightlessness. A raging terra incognito. Horizons crammed with stars sparkled close against cubist chasms. She saw buildings and roads, or things like roads, tunnels and pyramids and strange flattened edifices whose chimneys gushed oily smoke. It was a necropolis, systematized and endless, endless as eons. Squat, stygian churches sang praise to mindless gods. Ataxia the only order. Darkness the only light.

She lay paralyzed in the black, muttering dream. Small, soft nubs prodded her. Hands, or things like hands, reached out to touch her rice-paper flesh.

She saw it all. She saw time tick backward, death bloom into life, whole futures swallowed deep into the belly of history.

In the night she awoke to the sound of him crying.

He no longer lay in bed with her. He sat naked in the dark at an Edgewood secretary, its mahogany writing lid opened.

A hand-dipped candle flickered.

"What? What's the matter?" she said.

Sleep had refreshed her. Even the dream, so oddly terrifying, seemed to rekindle her. His crying had thrust her into consciousness. Into strangeness. Not the dream.

"Stephen?"

"I'll lose you," he said.

"No you won't."

"Of course I will."

"Come to bed. You're not going to lose me."

A pause in the fluttering light. "You'll be the first then," he said. "Yes. I'll be the first. Now come to bed."

The Windsor chair creaked when he rose. The candlelight licked his skin. She stopped him as he crossed the room.

"And bring the masks," she said.

Then later, lamb and wolf.

He was the wolf.

Nanticoke, she guessed. Or Wicomico or Conoye. Tribes which had thrived along the Chesapeake from 10,000 B.C. until the 1600s, when England had christened the New World with metallurgy, gunpowder, and smallpox. These masks were possibly all that remained of them.

She was the lamb — in rut, squirming beneath the cunning predator. The masks clicked when their faces touched. They were wood, hand-carved a thousand years ago by shark-tooth awls gingerly tapped with hammers of flat slate. Both, again, had been laced to the linen-covered insert plates, the eyeholes of which matched exactly those of the masks.

The wolf's eyes hovered over her. They seemed strangely murky-blue, not like his eyes at all, nor a wolf's. For a moment they stopped her. She looked at the eyes behind the mask as if studying something acrostic. Sumerian cuneiform. Druidic glyphs. The Runes of the ancient Norse.

Mindless now. Something as dead as all those languages.

She sensed sapor and heat. She felt the flavor of his sweat and tasted the sound of his panting breath. She lay impaled, pinned to the bed, writhing beneath him, staring up into the otherness of his eyes. And then suddenly he reached up, tore the wolf-mask from his head and his mouth was at her breast — suckling her, suckling at the lamb and pulling hard and long, drawing the breastflesh deep and then deeper into his mouth and raking her nipple with his teeth, squeezing the breast with his hand, milking her, so that she felt something give and rise inside her, a small thick pulsing flow. Her eyes rolled upward, her teeth crimped her lower lip.

Then the lamb was felled.

Sated, the wolf rolled off her, slaked. The veneer of sweat cooled her skin as it dried. She continued to orgasm briefly, little pelvic stutterings, long after he'd withdrawn. Her breast ached. The tracery of scratches on her body felt luminous, sensorial glitter running along her nerves.

Jesus , she thought, her breath husky beneath the mask. She glanced over and saw a thick drool across his lips. Her own milk like semen on his face. Blood of the Lamb.