Multi-level floor. Fact established. Perspective reUltra-modern collapsible retractable mutable furniture. On the black slopes the distorted mushrooms were human bodies some clothed and some not, some moving some not and some halfway between involved in incredibly slow lovemaking with limbs entwined and all else forgotten except the touch of skin to skin. So too in front of her not a megalithic circle but eight men wearing only boots and scrawled across the chest of each-or the upper arm if the chest was too hairy for writing on-a crayoned name gene putzi vernon hughie phil slob charlie pat. Arms on each other’s shoulders they formed a horseshoe around a very tall young woman with small breasts and a premature pot-belly also naked except for a belt and sandals with interlaced thongs rising to above the knee, holding a whip and crowned with a fantastical red-blue-green wig. There was intolernoise, not deafening but coming from all sides and overhead, as though in every adjacent room there was music and dancers’ feet stamping and people arguing among themselves at the tops of their voices. Her eyes were maniacally wide and she was running with so much sweat her inscriptions were dissolving.
“She’s awake!” A shout. A spray of fine spittle-drops, touch-touch on Lyla’s skin. Also reported from the skin: the abrasive clutch of ropes at her elbows, on her back the sweat-slippery contact of moving muscles across hard shoulder-blades, under her buttocks wet furriness, at the nape of her neck the wiry roughness of kneehair, like a terrier’s coat. She gasped and drove her perception into a normal mode by sheer willShe was sitting tied back-to-back with Harry Madison and she had been stripped.
“So what did you do with those Nix she was wearing?” roared the tall girl with the whip, and Gene on the end of the line of men broke loose eagerly, went to retrieve them, offered them with a cringing bow. Whip draped over shoulder the girl felt for the pocket and took out what there was: Punch key (let fall), some money (let fall), ID card (retained) and a phial.
“That something good, Mikki?” whined Gene. “That a good trip in that bottle?”
“How the hell should I know?” the girl bellowed, scrutinizing the ID.
Mikki? Lyla thought. Oh God. No. Let it not be Michaela Baxendale.
Booming words barely perceived through a fog of shock and terror and the aftermath of whatever drug had been used for the kidnapping: “A good trip baby, yes, a good trip, hey! Know who you collected for me, darl?”
Gene shook his head and the others craned close to hear.
“Why, it’s the pythoness that son and daughter of a motherfucker Dan Kazer macks for now!” Mikki screamed, dissolving in a paroxysm of laughter. “The shitty bugger dropped me cold in the street and now here’s deliverance into my hands-hey, darl?” She glowat Lyla venomously, shaking the little phial close to her ear, and then turned to inspect it critically by the light of the red-green sun which was a dial on the wall with one pointer tilted into the green.
“Ah-hah! Enough here to go clear around if it is a good trip in this bottle!” She unscrewed the cap briskly. “But let’s just be sure, huh? Let’s try it on them and find out how it makes them fly!”
Giggling, the ring of men broke up, dropped on knees, grabbed-clutch at ankles, then thighs, reaching up higher greedily to crotch, also breasts: all too rapid to separate into individual events, a totality of clawing and fondling. Meanwhile behind Lyla others doing the same for (must be) Madison. She was too weak to fight them off so tried duplicity, waiting until a hand came close to her mouth with one of the sibyl-pills, prompting comfrom the one branded slob: “Hey, Mikki, this must be a good trip! Look, she’s opening up for it!”
And bit. Hard.
“The bitch! She bit me!” Leaping back, pill dropped, looking in horror at finger gashed across nail’s base, blood pulsing out drip-drip on Lyla’s leg. But in the moof delusive relaxation to celebrate successful couna bang on the back of the head, Madison’s hard skull. A whisper: “Hold his nose.” The sound of a punch in the belly. Loudly: “He swallowed that okay! Try the girl again. Give us another pill, Mikki. No, don’t bother!” Scrabbling on the black carpet. “I found the one she spat out-here it is.”