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about him. His muzzle was
long and matted with dirt. His teeth were crowding his jaw, his pink lips
drooling a bath of foam.
He patted each of us down in the small hallway. Finding nothing on Mandy and
Twink, finding the gun on me. He took the gun away in his clumsy paws and hung
it on a coat hook and then shooed us up the dark stairway, after the Karli.
Top floor," he growled.
I took one step forward, and felt the soft squelch as I brought my foot down.
Oh yuk!
The stairs were covered in dogshit.
So were my shoes.
So I followed Twinkle like a mad dancer, one foot here, one there, between the
dungheaps, moving up to the dim landing.
The top step led straight into the kitchen. Along one wall were nailed the
carcasses of dozens of dreamsnakes, shimmers of green and violet. Three dogmen
were eating there, out of bowls at the table. The room was in darkness, but
you could smell the meat they were eating, and lumps of it were falling to the
floor as they slobbered at it. The smell was sweet to my nostrils, but I
couldn't work out why. It was certainly having an effect on them; the more
they ate, the more they howled. One of them fell on the floor, landing in some
of his own shit. It didn't bother him, just kept on rolling around, like he
was having some kind of trance.
I don't think they even knew we were there.
Karli took one sniff into the kitchen and then raced out of the room,
following some more succulent dog scent, along a corridor, and then up the
next flight of steps, Twinkle pulled along by the tight lead.
I hung back for a moment, Mandy just behind. There was a closed door to my
left. The door ahead of me was slightly ajar, so I pushed it open. The room
was bathed in darkness, with a smell like dog sex coming in waves. One whiff
of it and I was back in the pink Vurt, Bitch on
Heat, Cinders urging me on. And when she looked back at me, it wasn't Cinders,
or Desdemona;
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it was the Game Cat there, smiling in the dog's eyes.
No.
Not now. Do this alone. No feathers.
I brought myself down.
A lone dog girl was lying on a black carpet, her long tongue licking down
between her split legs.
The room smelt like porn. Dogporn. Porn for the nose.
The bitchgirl looked up at me.
She had eyes of the brightest human blue, set amidst a face of fur.
I couldn't look into those eyes.
I closed the door gently, and then turned to the door on the left. Mandy was
no longer with me.
Where was that girl?
No matter. Do it alone. Check every room. Keep looking --
A tiny noise. There! Listen! A tiny noise just coming in, almost lost in the
howling from the kitchen. I pressed my ear against the left side door. There
it was. The sound of alien flesh rubbing up the wrong way against planet
Earth.
I pushed the door open.
Slowly.
Do this slowly, holding the breath, keeping cool.
I went into the room.
There was a smell of bad meat, a rancid haze that clogged at the senses,
bringing thoughts of death.
The Thing was in the room.
I could hear him calling me, in that strange tongue.
The room was dark, dark as all the rest, but I could just make him out there,
his fat bulk.
The curtains were closed, just a glimmer of a streetlamp filtering in. In the
shadows I saw a thin shape moving. It was bent over near the Thing. A dull
glint came from its fingers. The shape moved slightly as I stepped inside,
lifting its head up towards me, and I saw the snout dribbling, a slow turn of
its thin long face.
The shape howled, high pitched.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was a young dogboy and he was crouched
over a bed.
The Thing was tied down to the bed with old dogleads. Dogboy had a breadknife
in his paws, and he was cutting chunks from the Thing's stomach. Beside the
bed lay a bowl. Some meat was in there already. My mind jumped back to the
kitchen, what I saw there as we passed -- the dogs eating and the sweet aroma
of the meat.
Sudden flash of me arriving back down in the real, the Thing pressed up on top
of me, that sweet aroma rising from his skin.
Those dogs were eating the Thing! Bit by bit. Letting him regenerate between
meals. And then cutting some more muscle off, taking that featherless flight
into Vurt, direct to the flesh.
Something snapped just then. Something happened. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]