"And ours! You're balanced giddily on the rim. Shove all these facts in that one-armed bandit in your head, yank, and watch the lemons and ripe cherries spin. Yank!"

Jesus G.o.d. Yes! Bars. Drinks. Late nights. Gyms. Saunas. Ma.s.seurs. Basketball. Tennis. Soccer. Yank. Pull. Spin!

"Well?" My host searched my face, amused. "Three jackpot cherries in a row?"

I shuddered.

"Circ.u.mstance. No court would convict me."

"This court elects you. We tell palms to read ravenous groins. Yes?"

Gas steamed up from one shriveled aperture in the restless mound. Yessss.

They say that men in the grip of pa.s.sion, blind to their own darkness, make love and run mad. Stunned by guilt, they find themselves beasts, having done the very thing they were warned not to do by church, town, parents, life. In explosive outrage they turn to the sinful lure. Seeing her as unholy provocateur, they kill. Women, in similar rages and guilts, overdose. Eve lies self-slain in the Garden. Adam hangs himself with the Snake as noose.

But here was no pa.s.sionate crime, no woman, no provocateur, only the great mound of siphoning breath and my blond host. And only words which riddled me with fusillades of arrows. Like an Oriental hedgehog, bristled with shafts, my body exploded with No, No, No. Echoed and then real: "No!"

Yessss, whispered the vapor from the mounded tissue, the skeleton buried in ancient soups.

Yessss.

I gasped to see my games, steams, midnight bars, late-dawn beds: a maniac sum.

I rounded dark corridors to confront a stranger so pockmarked, creased, and oiled by pa.s.sion, so cobwebbed and smashed by drink, that I tried to avert my gaze. The terror gaped his mouth and reached for my hand. Stupidly, I reached to shake his and-rapped gla.s.s! A mirror. I stared deep into my own life. I had seen myself in shop windows, dim undersea men running in creeks. Mornings, shaving, I saw my mirrored health. But this! This troglodyte trapped in amber. Myself, snapshotted like ten dozen s.e.xual acrobats! And who jammed this mirror at me? My beautiful host, and that corrupt flatulence beyond.

"You are selected," they whispered.

"I refuse!" I shrieked.

And whether I shrieked aloud or merely thought, a great furnace gaped. The oceanic mound erupted thunders of gaseous streams. My beautiful host fell back, stunned that their search beneath my skin, behind my mask, had brought revulsion. Always when Dorian cried, "Friend," raw gymnast teams had mobbed to catapult that armless, legless, featureless Sarga.s.so Sea. Before they had smothered to drown in his miasma, to arise, embrace, and wrestle in the dark gymnasium, then run forth young to a.s.sault a world.

And I? What had I dared to do, that quaked that membranous sac into regurgitated whistling and broken winds?

"Idiot!" cried my host, all teeth and fists. "Out! Out!"

"Out," I cried, spun to obey, and tripped.

I do not clearly know what happened as I fell. And if it was a swift reaction to the holocaust erupted like vile spit and vomit from that putrescent mound, I cannot say. I knew no lightning shock of murder, yet knew perhaps some summer heat flash of revenge. For what? I thought. What are you to Dorian or he to you that frees the hydra behind your face, or causes the slightest twitch of leg, arm, hand, or fingernail, as the last fetid air from Dorian burned my hair and stuffed my nostrils.

It was over in a second.

Something shoved me. Did my secret self, insulted, give that push? I was flung as if on wires, knocked to sprawl at Dorian.

He gave two terrible cries, one of warning, one of despair.

I was recovered so in landing, I did not sink my hands deep in that poisonous yeast, into that multiflorid Man of War jelly. I swear that I touched, raked, scarified him with only one thing: the smallest fingernail of my right hand.

My fingernail!

And so this Dorian was shot and foundered. And so the mammoth with screams collapsed. And so the nauseous balloon sank, fold on midnight fold, upon its own boneless sell, fissuring volcanic sulfurs, immense rectal airs, outga.s.sed whistles, and whimpers of self-pitying despair.

"Christ! What have you done!? Murderer! d.a.m.n you!" cried my host, riven to stare at Dorian's exhaustions unto death.

He whirled to strike, but ran to reach the door and cry, "Lock this! Lock! Whatever happens, for G.o.d's sake, don't open! Now!" The door slammed. I ran to lock it and turn.

Quietly, Dorian was falling away.

He sank down and down, out of sight. Like a great membranous tent with its poles removed, he vanished into the floor, down flues and vents on all sides of his great platform nest. Vents obviously created for such a ma.s.sive disease-sac melting into viral fluid and sewer gas. Even as I watched, the last of the noxious clot was sucked into the vents, and I stood abandoned in a room where but a few minutes before an unspeakable strata of discards and half-born fetuses had lain sucking at sins, spoiled bones, and souls to send forth beasts in semblance of beauty. That perverse royalty, that lunatic monarch, gone, all gone. A last choke and throttle from the sewer vent underlined its death.

My G.o.d, I thought, even now, that, all that, that terrible miasma, that stuff is on its way to the sea to wash in with bland tides to lie on clean sh.o.r.es where bathers come at dawn ...

Even now ...

I stood, eyes shut, waiting.

For what? There had to be a next thing, yes? It came.

There was a trembling, shivering, and then a quaking of the wall, but especially the golden door behind me.

I spun to see as well as hear.

I saw the door shaken, and then bombarded from the other side. Fists pummeled, struck, hammered. Voices cried out and screamed and then shrieked.

I felt a great ma.s.s ram the door to shiver, to slam it on its hinges.

I stared, fearful that the door might explode and let in the flood tide of nightmare-ravening, terrified beasts, the kennel of dying things. For now their shrieks as they mauled and rattled to escape, to beg for mercy, were so terrible that I clamped my fists to my ears.

Dorian was gone, but they remained. Shrieks. Screams. Screams. Shrieks. An avalanche of limbs beyond the door struck and fell, yammering.

What must they look like now? I thought. All those bouquets. All those beauties.

The police will come, I thought, soon. But .

No matter what ...

I would not unlock that door.

NO NEWS, OR WHAT KILLED THE DOG?.

It was a day of holocausts, cataclysms, tornadoes, earth-quakes, blackouts, ma.s.s murders, eruptions, and miscellaneous dooms, at the peak of which the sun swallowed the earth and the stars vanished.

But to put it simply, the most respected member of the Bentley family up and died.

Dog was his name, and dog he was.

The Bentleys, arising late Sat.u.r.day morning, found Dog stretched on the kitchen floor, his head toward Mecca, his paws neatly folded, his tail not a-thump but silent for the first time in twenty years.

Twenty years! My G.o.d, everyone thought, could it really have been that long? And now, without permission, Dog was cold and gone.

Susan, the younger daughter, woke everyone yelling: "Something's wrong with Dog. Quick!"

Without bothering to don his bathrobe, Roger Bentley, in his underwear, hurried out to look at that quiet beast on the kitchen tiles. His wife, Ruth, followed, and then their son Skip, twelve. The rest of the family, married and flown, Rodney and Sal, would arrive later. Each in turn would say the same thing: "No! Dog was forever."

Dog said nothing, but lay there like World War II, freshly finished, and a devastation.

Tears poured down Susan's cheeks, then down Ruth Bentley's, followed in good order by tears from Father and, at last, when it had sunk in, Skip.

Instinctively, they made a ring around Dog, kneeling to the floor to touch him, as if this might suddenly make him sit up, smile as he always did at his food, bark, and beat them to the door. But their touching did nothing but increase their tears.

But at last they rose, hugged each other, and went blindly in search of breakfast, in the midst of which Ruth Bentley said, stunned, "We can't just leave him there."

Roger Bentley picked Dog up, gently, and moved him out on the patio, in the shade, by the pool.

"What do we do next?"

"I don't know," said Roger Bentley. "This is the first death in the family in years and-" He stopped, snorted, and shook his head. "I mean-"

"You meant exactly what you said," said Ruth Bentley. "If Dog wasn't family, he was nothing. G.o.d, I loved him."

A fresh burst of tears ensued, during which Roger Bentley brought a blanket to put over Dog, but Susan stopped him.

"No, no.1 want to see him. I won't be able to see him ever again. He's so beautiful. He's so - old."

They all carried their breakfasts out on the patio to sit around Dog, somehow feeling they couldn't ignore him by eating inside.

Roger Bentley telephoned his other children, whose response, after the first tears, was the same: they'd be right over. Wait.

When the other children arrived, first Rodney, twenty-one, and then the older daughter, Sal, twenty-four, a fresh storm of grief shook everyone and then they sat silently for a moment, watching Dog for a miracle.

"What are your plans?" asked Rodney at last.

"I know this is silly," said Roger Bentley after an embarra.s.sed pause. "After all, he's only a dog-"

"Only!?" cried everyone instantly.

Roger had to back off. "Look, he deserves the Taj Mahal. What he'll get is the Orion Pet Cemetery over in Burbank."

"Pet Cemetery!?" cried everyone, but each in a different way.

"My G.o.d," said Rodney, "that's silly!"

"What's so silly about it?" Skip's face reddened and his lip trembled. "Dog, why, Dog was a pearl of... rare price.

"Yeah!" added Susan.

"Well, pardon me." Roger Bentley turned away to look at the pool, the bushes, the sky. "I suppose I could call those trash people who pick up dead bodies-"

"Trash people?" exclaimed Ruth Bentley.

"Dead bodies?" said Susan. "Dog isn't a dead body!"

"What is he, then?" asked Skip bleakly.

They all stared at Dog lying quietly there by the pool. "He's," blurted Susan at last, "he's ... he's my love!" Before the crying could start again, Roger Bentley picked up the patio telephone, dialed the Pet Cemetery, talked, and put the phone down.

"Two hundred dollars," he informed everyone. "Not bad."

"For Dog?" said Skip. "Not enough!"

"Are you really serious about this?" asked Ruth Bentley.

"Yeah," said Roger. "I've made fun of those places all my life. But, now, seeing as how we'll never be able to visit Dog again-" He let a moment pa.s.s. "They'll come take Dog at noon. Services tomorrow."

"Services!" Snorting, Rodney stalked to the rim of the pool and waved his arms. "You won't get me to that!"

Everyone stared. Rodney turned at last and let his shoulders slump. "h.e.l.l, I'll be there."

"Dog would never forgive you if you didn't." Susan snuffed and wiped her nose.

But Roger Bentley had heard none of this. Staring at Dog, then his family, and up to the sky, he shut his eyes and exhaled a great whisper: "Oh, my G.o.d!" he said, eyes shut. "Do you realize that this is the first terrible thing that's happened to our family? Have we ever been sick, gone to the hospital? Been in an accident?"

He waited.

"No," said everyone.

"Gosh," said Skip.

"Gosh, indeed! You sure as h.e.l.l notice accidents, sickness, hospitals."

"Maybe," said Susan, and had to stop and wait because her voice broke. "Maybe Dog died just to make us notice how lucky we are."

"Lucky?!" Roger Bentley opened his eyes and turned. "Yes! You know what we are-"

"The science fiction generation," offered Rodney, lighting a cigarette casually.

"What?"

"You rave on about that, your school lectures, or during dinner. Can openers? Science fiction. Automobiles. Radio, TV, films. Everything! So science fiction!"

"Well, dammit, they are!" cried Roger Bentley and went to stare at Dog, as if the answers were there amongst the last departing fleas. "h.e.l.l, not so long ago there were no cars, can openers, TV. Someone had to dream them. Start of lecture. Someone had to build them. Mid-lecture. So science fiction dreams became finished science fact. Lecture finis!"

"I bet!" Rodney applauded politely.

Roger Bentley could only sink under the weight of his son's irony to stroke the dear dead beast.