Cloris had been wading along for a long time. She
wasn’t sure how long, but her legs were shaking from fatigue. Her calves were
cramping. The extra weight on her head, so light and lovely before, now felt
heavier.
But it still felt beautiful. The man with the tattoos on his face, blue and green images of soft clutching things, had said that the drug would take her into another world, and it had. It had gone down, then up, like a flower blossoming seen in fast action, all sped up, from the seed in her belly, sprouting, coming up in her throat—she had choked at first but the feelings were so beautiful she didn’t care—and then it came up out of her mouth. She felt it sliding from her mouth up her face, toward her eyes, crawling damply, luxuriantly but forcefully up and up, and then the blossom—a thing of flesh as much as plant—poised over her eyes. It had split in two—then its two dart-shaped flowers had driven straight at her eyes. A double piercing pain, as it slithered into her eyes, as it burst them… Destroyed her eyes entirely.
She didn’t mind. The pain was part of the
glorious, ever-changing painting in her mind. The bursting of her eyes was
part of the painting too. It was the most beautiful image she’d ever seen. Pain
and pleasure were all intertwined in it. It pulsed with life and awareness. It
looked at her as she looked at it. The pleasure the slithering plant was giving
her was sexual and far beyond sexual; it was so profound, so all consuming,
that the pain was like a tartness added to a sweet drink, a perfect counterbalancing.
The pain was exquisitely integrated into the pleasure; into the beautiful
living, transforming painting her mind had become…
She was a painter, was Cloris, and now she
thought, Could I ever paint this, in my dank little studio, could I evoke a
tenth of this alien glory?
No. Cloris was the work of art now. She was living it, instead of painting it. She was sightless, in some ways—her eyes were gone; her eye sockets full of something else; her heart thudding in tandem with another heart, with the thing that had enveloped her entire head. Sightless she saw all, an infinity of gold and scarlet, liquid emerald and melting diamond, constantly shifting, yet always asserting patterns, slithering away from the center and returning…
Blind but all-seeing! Her nervous system charged
with pleasure but crackling with agony. That’s how she’d felt for hours, and
even after she felt herself stripping off her clothes, walking blindly but with
surety out the door into the swamp behind the house where the tattoo man had
his special sessions. She had felt the warm, close air sliding over her skin;
she felt the mud enveloping her feet, the water about her ankles, as she walked
in the shallow water, slipping a little but somehow always recovering. Her body
knew just where to go. She wasn’t afraid of the gators. She sensed them gliding
along the surface of the swamp water nearby. But she knew they wouldn’t come
close to her. She could even get glimpses of their small, reptilian thoughts.
They saw the glorious Other wrapped around her head and they were afraid of it.
The Other spoke to something else, something
bigger, something waiting up ahead.
The mud got deeper, creeping up to her calves; the
water deeper now, up around her thighs, lapping at her hips. It was amazing she
could walk along blindly and not fall, though her vision was transfixed by the
glorious vision, the slithering mass of beauty, like thousands of baby snakes
intertwining with infinity…
The Other was guiding her. She heard its heart,
and began to hear some of its thoughts.
“This one is
almost exhausted. It was the only rapid way to reach you…. He planted me deep
within her…he serves us well…”
Now the colors swarming Cloris’s vision were
dimming, going dark; the sinuous shapes taking on browns and grays, becoming
sluggish in their movements. Pain began to overbalance pleasure. It spread out
like cracks in an old, dried up painting. A painting of her, Cloris, in some
forgotten basement, covered in mildew, flaking away…
She felt a plunge in her heart, an engulfing
darkness. She wanted to cry out, to beg for a return to the boiling infinite beauty,
the painting engorging her mind, but she could make no sound. The Other had enwrapped
her head; filled her mouth as well as her eyes.
Cloris staggered…and exhaustion took her, like a
giant cold hand, and pressed her down to her knees. She was up to her breasts
in water now, shaking…
“I see you.
Come, and take me back to the Always Womb of our underland, and take what
remains of her as my gift to you…”
Cloris was gagging, trying to vomit, as the thing withdrew from her—the thing that had given her oxygen and waves of pleasure and a beautiful image drawn from the deeps of her own mind. The thing that had guided her body and brought her here, someplace in the swamp…
Now it slithered from her mouth and eye sockets and away from her—leaving her in utter darkness. She could smell the swamp; could feel the warm muck, the glutinous water. She could hear the gators coughing. And she could scream now.
She let out a single long, long shriek that echoed
between the cypresses that she could not see…
Perhaps, she thought, the gators will get me now.
But they were still afraid. They swam hastily away
as another, the parent of the Other, arose and arched over her. Cloris could
smell it, an alien smell; she felt its otherworldly thoughts raining upon her…
...Little
remains of her. But. I. Shall. Feed.
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