Read Flesh for Free Online Page B

pleaded. “Anyway, I was only half-conscious most of the time. I tried to resist when they put me on a table and then placed a little white lamb on top of me. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what they intended—until they cut its throat. I was drenched in the blood from head to foot.
    “Then it was taken away, and I was being forced through a narrow triangular opening. The opening must have had a skeleton of metal, but it was surrounded by some pinkish spongy stuff. Two priestesses had me by the shoulders and were pulling me through the opening. The others were caterwauling like banshees. Dopey as I was, my blood was chilled. You never heard such God-awful shrieks in your life!”
    “Yes, I did,” Calthorp said. “All Washington heard them. The entire adult population was standing right outside the White House gates.”
    “I was stuck in the opening, and the priestesses were pulling violently at me. My shoulders were jammed. Suddenly, I felt water squirting on my back; somebody must have turned a hose on me. I remember thinking that they must have some sort of pump in the house, for the water had terrific pressure behind it.
    “Then, I had slipped through the opening—but I didn’t fall to the floor. Two priestesses grabbed my legs. I was lifted into the air and held upside down. And I was spanked, spanked hard. I was so surprised I yelled.”
    “Which was what they wanted you to do.”
    “Then I was placed on another table. My nose and mouth and eyes were cleaned out. It’s funny, but up to then I hadn’t noticed that I had a thick mucus-like stuff in my mouth and up my nostrils. I must have had some trouble breathing, but I wasn’t aware of it. Then... then...”
    “Then?”
    Stagg turned red.
    “Then they carried me to this enormously fat priestess, lying propped up on pillows on my bed. I’d never seen her before.”
    “Maybe she came down from Manhattan,” Calthorp said. “Barleycorn told me the Chief Priestess there is enormously fat.”
    “Enormous is the word for her,” Stagg continued. “That woman was the biggest I’ve ever seen. I’ll bet that if she’d stood up, she’d have been as tall as I am. And she must have weighed over three hundred and fifty pounds. She was powdered all over her body—it must have taken a barrel of powder to cover her. She was huge and round and white. A human Queen Bee, born to do nothing but lay millions of eggs and...”
    “And what?” Calthorp asked after Stagg had been silent for at least a minute.
    “They placed me so my head was on one of her breasts. It’s the hugest in the world, I’ll swear it. It seemed like the curve of Earth itself. Then she took my head and turned it. I tried to fight, but I was so weak, I could not resist. I could do nothing.
    “Suddenly, I did feel like a little baby. I wasn’t a full grown man; I was Peter Stagg, just born. It must have been the effect of that drug. It’s a hypnotic agent, I’ll swear. Anyway, I was... I was...”
    “Hungry?” Calthorp said quietly.
    Stagg nodded his head.
    Then, in an obvious desire to get away from the subject, he put his hand on one of the antlers and said, “Hmmm. The horns are rooted solidly.”
    “Antlers,” Calthorp said. “But you may as well continue misusing the term. I notice the Deecee use the inexact word too. Well, even if they don’t distinguish between antlers and horns in common speech, their scientists are wonderful biologists. Maybe not so hot in physics and electronics, but superb artists in flesh. By the way, those antlers are more than symbolical and ornamental. They function. A thousand to one that they contain glands that are pumping all sorts of hormones into your bloodstream.”
    Stagg winced. “What makes you think that?”
    “For one thing, Barleycorn dropped a few hints that they would. For another, there’s your phenomenally rapid recovery from a major operation. After all, it was necessary to cut two holes in your skull, plant the antlers,