And the shadows were pulled, I was pulled, toward that vast glass eye, that immense window behind which a shapeless Something stared to dine on gymnasium airs.
«Dorian?» I guessed.
«Come meet him.»
«Yes, but . . .» I watched the wild, convulsive shadows. «What are they doing?»
«Go find out. Afraid? Cowards never live. So!»
He swung wide a third door and whether it was golden hot and alive, I could not feel, for suddenly I lurched into a hothouse as the door slammed and was locked by my blond young friend. «Ready?»
«Lord, I must go home!»
«Not until you meet,» said my host, «him.»
He pointed. At first I could see nothing. The lights were dim and the place, like the gymnasium, was mostly shadow. I smelled jungle greens. The air stirred on my face with sensuous strokes. I smelled papaya and mango and the wilted odor of orchids mixed with the salt smells of an unseen tide. But the tide was there with that immense inhaled breathing that rose and was quiet and began again.
«I see no one,» I said.
«Let your eyes adjust. Wait.»
I waited. I watched.
There were no chairs in the room, for there was no need of chairs.
He did not sit, he did not recline, he «prolonged» himself on the largest bed in history. The dimensions might easily have been fifteen feet by twenty. It reminded me of the apartment of a writer I once knew who had completely covered his room with mattresses so that women stumbled on the sill and fell flat out on the springs.
So it was with this nest, with Dorian, immense, a gelatinous skin, a vitreous shape, undulant within that nest.
And if Dorian was male or female, I could not guess. This was a great pudding, an emperor jellyfish, a monstrous heap of sexual gelatin from the exterior of which, on occasion, noxious gases escaped with rubbery sounds; great lips sibilating. That and the sough of that labored pump, that constant inhalation, were the only sounds within the chamber as I stood, anxious, alarmed, but at last impressed by this beached creature, cast up from a dark landfall. The thing was a gelatinous cripple, an octopus without limbs, an amphibian stranded, unable to undulate and seep back to an ocean sewer from which it had inched itself in monstrous waves and gusts of lungs and eruptions of corrupt gas until now it lay, featureless, with a mere x-ray ghost of legs, arms, wrists, and hands with skeletal fingers. At last I could discern, at the far end of this flesh peninsula, what seemed a half-flat face with a frail phantom of skull beneath, an open fissure for an eye, a ravenous nostril, and a red wound which ripped wide to surprise me as a mouth.
And at last this thing, this Dorian, spoke.
Or whispered, or lisped.
And with each lisp, each sibilance, an odor of decay was expelled as if from a vast night-swamp balloon, sunk on its side, lost in fetid water as its unsavory breath rinsed my cheeks. It expelled but one lingering syllable:
Yessss.
Yes what?
And then it added:
Soooo…
«How long . . . how long,» I murmured, «has it . . . has he been here?»
«No one knows. When Victoria was Queen? When Booth emptied his makeup kit to load his pistol? When Napoleon yellow-stained the Moscow snows? Forever's not bad .
What else?»
I swallowed hard. «Is . . . is he?»
«Dorian? Dorian of the attic? He of the Portrait? And somewhere along the line found portraits not enough? Oil, canvas, no depth. The world needed something that could soak in, sponge the midnight rains, breakfast and lunch on loss, depravity's guilt. Something to truly take in, drink, digest; a pustule, imperial intestine. A rheum oesophagus for sin. A laboratory plate to take bacterial snows. Dorian.»
The long archipelago of membranous skin flushed some buried tubes and valves, and a semblance of laughter was throttled and drowned in the aqueous gels.
A slit widened to emit gas and again the single word:
Yessss .
«He's welcoming you!» My host smiled.
«I know, I know,» I said impatiently. «But why? I don't even want to be here. I'm ill. Why can't we go?»
«Because»-my host laughed-«you were selected.
«Selected?»
«We've had our eye on you.»
«You mean you've watched, followed, spied on me? Christ, who gave you permission?»
«Temper, temper. Not everyone is picked.»
«Who said I wanted to be picked!?»
I turned to stare at the vast mound of priapic gelatin in which faint creeks gleamed as the creature wept its lids wide in holes to let it stare. Then all its apertures sealed: the saber-cut mouth, the slitted nostrils, the cold eyes gummed shut so that its skin was faceless. The sibilance pumped with gaseous suctions.
Yessss, it whispered.
Lisssst, it murmured.
«And list it is!» My host pulled forth a small computer pad which he tapped to screen my name, address, and phone.
He glanced from the pad to reel off such items as wilted me.
«Single,» he said.
«Married and divorced.»
«Now single! No women in your life?»
«I'm walking wounded.»
He tapped his pad. «Visiting strange bars.»
«I hadn't noticed.»
«Creative blindness. Getting to bed late. Sleeping all day. Drinking heavily three nights a week.»
«Twice!»
''My business!»
«And ours! You're balanced giddily on the rim. Shove all these facts in that one-armed bandit in your head, yank, and watch the lemons and ripe cherries spin. Yank!»
Jesus God. Yes! Bars. Drinks. Late nights. Gyms. Saunas. Masseurs. Basketball. Tennis. Soccer. Yank. Pull. Spin!
«Well?» My host searched my face, amused. «Three jackpot cherries in a row?»
I shuddered.
«Circumstance. No court would convict me.»
elects you. We tell palms to read ravenous groins. Yes?»
Gas steamed up from one shriveled aperture in the restless mound. Yessss.
They say that men in the grip of passion, blind to their own darkness, make love and run mad. Stunned by guilt, they find themselves beasts, having done the very thing they were warned not to do by church, town, parents, life. In explosive outrage they turn to the sinful lure. Seeing her as unholy provocateur, they kill. Women, in similar rages and guilts, overdose. Eve lies self-slain in the Garden. Adam hangs himself with the Snake as noose.
But here was no passionate crime, no woman, no provocateur, only the great mound of siphoning breath and my blond host. And only words which riddled me with fusillades of arrows. Like an Oriental hedgehog, bristled with shafts, my body exploded with No, No, No. Echoed and then real:
«No!»
Yessss, whispered the vapor from the mounded tissue, the skeleton buried in ancient soups.
Yessss.
I gasped to see my games, steams, midnight bars, late-dawn beds: a maniac sum.
I rounded dark corridors to confront a stranger so pockmarked, creased, and oiled by passion, so cobwebbed and smashed by drink, that I tried to avert my gaze. The terror gaped his mouth and reached for my hand. Stupidly, I reached to shake his and-rapped glass! A mirror. I stared deep into my own life. I had seen myself in shop windows, dim undersea men running in creeks. Mornings, shaving, I saw my mirrored health. But this! This troglodyte trapped in amber. Myself, snapshotted like ten dozen sexual acrobats! And who jammed this mirror at me? My beautiful host, and that corrupt flatulence beyond.
«You are selected,» they whispered.
«I refuse!» I shrieked.
And whether I shrieked aloud or merely thought, a great furnace gaped. The oceanic mound erupted thunders of gaseous streams. My beautiful host fell back, stunned that their search beneath my skin, behind my mask, had brought revulsion. Always when Dorian cried, «Friend,» raw gymnast teams had mobbed to catapult that armless, legless, featureless Sargasso Sea. Before they had smothered to drown in his miasma, to arise, embrace, and wrestle in the dark gymnasium, then run forth young to assault a world.