Necroscope IV Deadspeak - By Brian Lumley Page 0,52

paused just out of sight in darkness.

Harry wanted to call out: 'Who's there?' but his paralysis wouldn't let him. Perhaps he gurgled a little. A shape emerged partly from the shadows. Through the submarine haze he saw a navel, the lower part of a belly with its dark bush of pubic hair, the curve of soft feminine hips and the tops of thighs where they might show above dark stockings. She stood (whoever she was) just beyond the door, her flesh soft in the filtered light. As he watched she transferred her weight from one unseen foot to the other, her thighs moving, her hip jutting. Above the belly, soft in the shadows, there would be breasts large and ripe. Sandra had large breasts.

It was Sandra, of course.

Harry's voice still refused to work, but he could now move the fingers of his left hand. Sandra must be able to see him, see how she was affecting him. His dream was about to become reality. The blood coursed in his veins and began to pound once more. In the back of his mind, faintly, he asked himself questions. And answered them:

Why had she come?

Obviously for sex.

How had she got in?

He must have given her a key. He didn't remember doing so.

Why didn't she come forward more clearly into view?

Because she wanted to see him fully aroused first. Perhaps she had not wished to wake him until she was in bed with him.

Why had she waited so long to show him that she could be sexually aggressive? She'd taken the initiative before, certainly, but never to this extent.

Maybe because she sensed his uncertainty - feared that he might be having second thoughts - or perhaps because she suspected he had never fully enjoyed her.

Well, and maybe she was right.

Staring was causing his right eye to jump, both eyes to water. It was the poor light. Harry willed his left hand to move, stretched it out, pulled the cord that closed the window shutters - to shut out a little more of the faint, greeny-grey light. That left the room in near-darkness -thin dim green stripes on a black velvet background. And that was what she'd been waiting for.

Now she moved forward, olive-fleshed. She must be wearing stockings; a T-shirt, too, rolled up to show her navel. Sexy, dismembered by darkness, her thighs, belly and navel floated towards him, hips moving languidly, green-striped. She got onto the bed, kneeling, her thighs opening, and inched forward. The dark cleft was visible in her bush of pubic hair. She was so silent. And so light. The bed did not sink in where she crept towards him. Harry wondered: how does she do that?

She began to lower herself onto him - slowly, so slowly - the dark cleft widening as her body settled to its target. He arched his back, straining up towards her... but why couldn't he feel her knees gripping his hips? Why was she so weightless?

Then, suddenly and without warning, his flesh was crawling. Lust fled him in a moment. For somehow -instinctively, intuitively - he knew that this was not Sandra. And worse, he knew that he couldn't rightly say what it was!

His left hand fumblingly found the light cord, pulled it.

Light flooded the room blindingly.

At the same time the cleft in her bush of pubic hair sprang open like a mechanical thing. White-gleaming, yawning jaws of salivating needle teeth set in bulging, obscenely glistening pink gums shot down from the gaping lips to snap shut on him in a vice of shearing agony!

Harry screamed, rammed himself backwards in his bed, banged his head savagely on the headboard. Galvanized, his hands stabbed out, striking murderously for a face, a throat - striking instinctively at features... which weren't there!

Above the navel, nothing! And below the upper thighs, nothing!

She - it - was a lower abdomen, a disembodied vagina with cannibal teeth which were chomping on him! And his blood hot and red and spurting as the thing feasted on his genitals and munched them up like so much slop. And a crimson eye that snapped suddenly open, glaring at Harry from the orbit which he had mistaken for a navel!

'And that's it, Harry?' Dr David Bettley, an E-Branch empath retired early for the sake of his shaky heart, gazed at his visitor from beneath half-lowered, bushy eyebrows.

'Isn't it enough?' the other answered, with some animation. 'Christ, it was enough for me! It scared the living daylights out of me. Yes, even out of