Splunk!
—she dropped into a surprise gully deeper than she was tall. She sprang back to the surface, laughing, then began to dog-paddle around. Where the night’s heat had felt heavy on her skin, the cool water felt absolutely luxurious. A sudden liberty swept her as she let the water devour her:
No one knows I’m here; I’m totally alone.
She liked that feeling, a forbidden independence—being naked and by herself, as though the world existed solely for her, and she were its only inhabitant. The moon looked down, a luminous voyeur. Her flesh felt buoyant; cool water rushed between her legs and over her stomach and breasts. She smiled to herself, kicking out farther, totally tranquil in the water.
Patricia was at peace. . . .
It was some sort of a sack, canvas, or maybe several layers of burlap; she’d never figured out what it was exactly. And she never saw it coming.
He must’ve been in the water the whole time. Waiting? But that was impossible, because no one knew she was out here. She’d told no one she’d be skinny-dipping tonight; in fact, she hadn’t even made the decision until after leaving the theater. Nevertheless, as she’d turned to come back closer to the pond’s edge, a heavy, wet sack was pulled over her head from behind and tightened immediately by a drawstring. It couldn’t have been more effective. . . .
It smothered her scream.
A strong arm girded her neck. Her attacker was breaststroking back to shore, Patricia in tow, but as he did so his hand plowed into her most private area as though it were a squeeze ball. Fingers tried to wriggle in. Each time she attempted to suck in a breath and bolt out a scream, the wet sack sucked against her lips, and all she could do was wheeze. And when they reached the edge and her ankles began to kick through mud—
Thwack!
—a fist hard as a stone knocked her unconscious. Deathlike blackness filled her mind. Was she dead? No, but as her consciousness began to trickle back, her previous terror had been supplanted by an all-encompassing nausea. She opened her eyes but couldn’t see. It wasn’t the sack; instead, the only thing she could figure was that a wide strip of tape had been pasted over her eyes. When she tried to move, her wrists and ankles rose . . . but only an inch.
She’d been tied down.
More of her senses began to fall back into place. Her eyes had been taped but her mouth hadn’t, and just as she sucked in a deep, deep breath to try another scream, a palm slapped across her lips.
Then something very sharp and very pointed pricked the side of her neck.
“Feel this?”
A coarse whisper.
“It’s a knife. If you make any noise at all, I’ll cut your throat. Understand?”
She felt burning hot yet immobile, as if frozen solid. At first the terrified paralysis wouldn’t even allow her neck muscles to work.
The knife point pricked a little harder.
Patricia nodded.
Next: “If ya bite, I’ll cut‘cher tongue out ‘n’ slice yer big tits off and leave ’em on yer mama’s doorstep. Understand?”
Patricia nodded.
The clammy palm left her mouth, only to be replaced by a slavering mouth. At least her rapist was passionate—he wanted to kiss first. The dirty mouth sucked her lips, a tongue pushing through. Reflex caused Patricia to squeeze her eyes shut in spite of the blindfold, and from there . . .
Her mind went blank.
More reflex, more defensive instinct. Earlier it was the moon, but now, blinded and lashed to the ground, she became her
own
voyeur, sight replaced by sense. It was as though she were watching herself with her mind. Her mouth fell open and she simply let him do it—
Don’t fight your rapist
, she’d read in a women’s column once—so she admitted his tongue, tasting liquor and bad breath. The tongue continued to slaver, his drool falling into her mouth. Then the strange mouth sucked her own tongue out, sucked it hard, and that was when she noticed the gap.
His two front teeth were missing.
Eventually the abominable kiss ended; the mouth lifted, then fell right back to her breasts. Wet, ugly suction drew each nipple between the gap in his teeth, and the tongue began to whirl furiously. She could feel that he was naked himself—that hot, hard weight pressing down. All the sensations and mental images collided with revulsion, but Patricia now was disengaged, her own self not part of what was happening.
He never said another word.
She simply lay there and let him molest her, her belly sucked in, her arms and legs pinned out straight as steel rods. Her nipples buzzed now from the furious tendings of his tongue and the way the gap in his teeth isolated the dark areolae. A moment later he sat upright as though her stomach were a seat. His scrotum lay like a hot bag of pudding on her belly, his manhood no doubt inflamed by his own demented desires. His hands opened and closed over her breasts, intent, as if he expected to wring out milk. The sensations hurt; she imagined handprints bruised into her flesh. Next, his fingertips closed on her nipples, tweaking at first, then grinding. Patricia’s hips squirmed beneath his weight as he twisted her nipples as if turning screws into a wall.
The weight began to shift. He kneed himself backward, off of her. Was he done? A foolish question. Of course he wasn’t done—he was just beginning. Only now did she realize how widely her legs had been parted. Hands gripped her upper thighs, and then the mouth lowered.
Oh, God . . .
Her revulsion collapsed on her like a brick wall against the fiercest wind. The most secret and personal part of her body was brazenly invaded by the detestable tongue. First the tip traced around the opening of her vagina, stimulating the outer ridges, then delving up and down the groove. It was a long tongue, too, evidenced by how deeply it delved inside after each revolution. These ministrations lasted for a long time, until she thought the body she was perceiving so distantly would go nuts and simultaneously choke on vomit.
Could she actually feel the moonlight on her skin even with taped-shut eyes? Patricia could almost see herself writhing, half in arousal and half in utter repugnance.
The mouth rose and its new target was no surprise. . . .
Now the wicked suction drew over the assailant’s true target in a variety of movements: back and forth, up and down, then hard circles. And all the while it continued to suck, drawing the nugget of her sex through the gap in the front teeth—a macabre inversion of fellatio.
The sensations rose and rose. Loops of rope abraded her ankles and wrists, and every muscle in her body began to clench up; a feeling she’d never experienced seemed to sear into her, something scalding hot but delicious. Then that detached kernel of her consciousness—that seemed to be spectating the crime from afar—snapped back into her brain like something yanked inward off a cord, and at last the thing that all those sensations had been building up to . . .
. . . broke.
Patricia went out of her mind, and that was all she remembered.
Some early risers found her at sunup. When the duct tape was peeled off her eyes—taking quite a bit off her brows—she dizzily saw that she’d been staked to the ground. She felt humiliated and insensible, naked and laid out for all to see. A man who’d been walking his dog gave her a light jacket to wear until the police came.
Of course her assailant had raped her after his oral invasion, yet she remembered none of it. She could feel her virginity ruptured between her legs, but at least there was little blood, and she recalled no pain. But she could feel the sperm deep in her like some devilish slime. Her mind spun in rings of disgust; she couldn’t have felt dirtier than if she’d been defecated on. Worse were the pitying looks in the eyes of the people who’d found her, as though she were crippled, an elderly invalid who could no longer control her bowels. “Poor girl,” a woman said. “Like to kill the sick animal that did this,” said a man. But Patricia could barely even cogitate. Eventually a much younger Chief Sutter arrived to take her home. Her mother and Judy were aghast, Judy breaking into tears when she’d heard what happened. Chief Sutter couldn’t have been more considerate in dealing with the sensitive aftermath of physical examinations and questioning. There’d been no DNA profiling back in those days, no way to type her assailant with technology, just a vaginal smear for rudimentary disease screening. And Patricia supposed—even now, after the passage of over two decades—that if anything could be worse for her than the rape itself, it was her father’s reaction when he’d learned of the details.
“Skinny-dipping!” he bellowed, red in the face when he’d gotten home from the crabbing docks. “Runnin’ around with no clothes on like a common tramp! Life’s hard enough, and now I got a daughter shitting on our good family’s name, makin’ us look like trash!” He slapped her in the face with a sound like wet leather snapping. “How could you let something like that happen?”
The words were worse even than the blow; Patricia felt as though she’d been shot with a gun. Tears flooded her eyes, and when she looked to her mother for support . . . her mother just looked back with a face set in stone.
So long ago,
she thought now, looking at the poster on the wall.
I’d forgotten all about it, until I came back here.
Enough of this . . .
She shook off the flash of despair, focusing instead on the bag that Chief Sutter had given her.
I guess the desk is as good as anyplace,
she thought, and tucked it back in the bottom drawer. The recollection of her father—and Bowen’s Field—seemed to hasten her out of the cramped room, but before she would leave, she made an abrupt decision.
She tore the poster down and crunched it up in her hands. The gesture provided little satisfaction, but that was better than nothing. She was about to drop it in the small wastebasket by the desk when something caught her eye.
Something inside.
An envelope and a crumpled letter.
Perhaps the only reason she’d noticed them at all was because the items were the only things in the basket.
She picked them out, focusing. . . .
The envelope was addressed to Dwayne, handwritten, not typed. There was no return address; the local postmark was dated one day before Dwayne’s death. Junk mail wouldn’t be handwritten, but it was obviously something Dwayne had opened, looked at, and immediately discarded.
Her curiosity pecked at her, though she couldn’t imagine why; Patricia wasn’t ordinarily nosy.
The bastard’s dead, so it’s not like I’m invading his privacy,
she reasoned.
Paper crinkled as she uncrumpled what she could only guess was a letter, but she saw in a moment that it was not really a letter at all.
Just a sheet of paper with one word inscribed neatly at the top.
Wenden
.
(III)
It’s heavenly
, he thought. He stared up in wonder, drinking up the sight of the stars.
My whole life is heavenly. . . .
The night couldn’t have been more beautiful, nor could his love. The God that he believed in was much more nebulous than the God of most people, but just as real. Wilfrud knew, in fact, that they were all essentially the same, and it was to that great ethereal and omnipresent being that he now offered his unbounded thanks.
Ethel, his wife, puttered in the woods, focused on their task. It was Wilfrud who was the dreamer of the pair, the introspective one, which she often, in her loving way, dismissed as laziness.
But it’s only my love that makes me a dreamer,
he thought, and she knew that, of course.
Besides, she was the better diviner.
Divination could be very effective in obtaining knowledge of that which one desired, so long as the practitioners were faithful people. Faith was in the heart, in the soul. Wilfrud and Ethel had been the clan’s diviners for decades, since their late teens. They solicited the spirits of nature tonight for nothing more complex than finding honey morels for the weekend’s clan banquet. Ethel made a delectable mushroom roux that specifically depended on this rare edible fungus, but they were very difficult to find.
Diviners, however, could find them a little easier than others.
Earlier they’d both prayed over the boiled pig knuckle, and now Ethel meandered about the woods, holding the clean bone in a cupped hand. It was not with anything like tactility by which she read the telltale signal—it would be more like a vibration in her head. She was naked, of course, to further appease the spirits, and Wilfrud’s eyes couldn’t resist that raw beauty of hers as she stepped through the brambles, sensing the air. Her bare skin shone so white in the moonlight; it looked so perfect. No, neither of them was young anymore, but looking at her now, in the quiet night’s glow, Wilfrud got short of breath. He couldn’t be more grateful to God for giving him so beautiful a wife.
The decades had blessed her body; she didn’t look at all like a woman in her mid-fifties, and the gray had barely touched her long, raven-black hair. Even her bosom barely sagged; her breasts glowed like lambent orbs in the moon’s light, centered with large, dark nipples. About her neck hung the pendant he’d made for her when they’d gotten married, a deep blue-and-scarlet pontica stone that diviners and mediums often wore, to maximize their visions. The stone hung between her breasts and seemed to change color when her own passions inflamed. Wilfrud himself wore the cross she’d given him just as long ago: two meticulously carved shavings from an eddo root.