The stairwell opened out into a red-carpeted hallway, indirectly lit by no source Anthony could see, a diffusion of pale light that mottled the carpet. As he and Brigitte followed Cynthia and Cassia down the corridor, he imagined that the dark splotches on the rug were actually puddles and, when he touched one with his shoe’s toe, the leather dripped sticky scarlet.

Brigitte reached for his hand, and he took comfort from her touch and hoped he gave it in return.

The hall ended in a single door of polished wood, midcentury modern with a knob that sparkled in Lucite splendor. Strange, percussive music pulsed beyond the portal.
“Here we are,” Cassia said, trying to push past Cynthia.

“No, no,” Cynthia answered, blocking the Goth, boldly taking hold of the handle and turning it, not bothering to knock. The light beyond the door spilled out, more garish than the lurid passageway, a mirror ball scatter of colors and shining shapes.

“Come on in,” someone called from inside. “We can’t start the party without you.” Anthony recognized the voice, and Brigitte’s splitting smile indicated she did too.

“Rascal!” she cried, lunging past him, shoving Cassia and Cynthia aside to grab her brother in a desperate hug as he stepped back to welcome them in.

Rascal wore a pair of skintight golden trunks, nipple clamps, and nothing else. His heavy body had been oiled, but none of this deterred Brigitte from clinging to him.

Rascal kissed her in an unbrotherly way and ushered her into the rainbow chaos behind him, waving for the others to follow.

Confetti hung in the air, some of it colorful, other pieces like floating ash. Anthony saw that the crazy light bled into the room through crystalline windows along one entire wall. He remembered the view from Cassia’s penthouse and he understood the colors, their liquid nature as dazzling as explosions. He realized with a sort of dread that what he saw now beyond the window was most likely sunset or sunrise on some unimaginably alien world.

A Balinese gamelan played loudly, unseen, the sound vitally real, percussion vibrating the air and his skin. A live band, invisible as it was. No recording ever sounded so good.
A milling crowd of people stood around the spacious room – none of them gamelan players as far as Anthony could see. He recognized some of them though. Professor Wentworth and the naked barbarian librarian from the fallen city, dressed now in a schoolgirl outfit.

“Derrick,” Cynthia said, smiling – calm, as if she expected him to be here too.  Cassia also seemed to know some of the other guests. The gamelan played something peppier. Anthony shook his head. The party was amped up already and well on its way to becoming an orgy, the people around him chattering, though he could not quite hear their words. Some of the guests were making out, more than a few were naked and aroused. He saw lots of hair and tanned skin. A big African man in a dashiki and a woman who might have been eighty began to fuck on one of the sofas.

I’ve gone to hell, Anthony thought.  And it’s the Playboy Mansion.

“Hey, hey, boyo!” Charlie, his voice preceding him like a clash of discordant cymbals, ambled out of the throng. As always, he looked like a rodent with outsized cheek pouches, stubbly jowls permanently pooched, his long, sharp nose emerging from between them like a spindly cock between enormous balls. His eyes glittered unnaturally.

At first Anthony thought the book dealer had dressed in an 80s pimp suit, snow-white fabric with wide lapels, a hint of flare at every cuff, but he realized Charlie was actually naked, that his skin had grown silky folds, like a big orchid. The fleshy satin of his plumage glistened with sweat and his cufflinks were wide, living green eyes. Beneath the white coat, Charlie’s torso appeared as bare skin, rolls of pasty fat, but when Anthony looked closer, he saw that every fold was actually a toothless, hungry mouth.

Charlie laughed – probably at the mask of horror Anthony felt on his face – and leered at Cassia.

“Baby!” the Procurer exclaimed, then leaned over to cough wetly. Something gelatinous and fast hit the tile floor with a splat, then rolled toward Cassia.  It flowed up her left leg and disappeared under her tiny dress.

She screamed an alto scale, then quivered in apparent orgasm.

“Who loves you?” Charlie asked her, winking, his image momentarily shifting to something out of the 70’s - he looked like Johnny Wadd, but sequin-garish, bombastically sexy and ridiculous.  Clydesdale stallions didn’t have cocks that produced bulges that large. He shifted again, passing through a female form. My god, Anthony thought. Charro.

The tendril emerged from the wound in his side, the pain as odd as the wave of strange arousal that had struck him once before,  in the stairwell. Whatever sensations were associated with this new appendage, they were not recognizably lust, but they did seem to be some disturbing second-cousin to it. A vague craving for something very sweet filled his mouth as he fought back a wave of memories that were not his own, a rush of broken words, like dyslexic poetry in his brain.

He had no control over the snaky member either – the thing truly seemed to have a mind of its own. Charlie caught him in a bear hug, the dewy petals of his clothing caressing Anthony like Brooks Brothers on Spanish Fly. Anthony’s tendril disappeared into one of Charlie’s stomach mouths and the suction of the blowjob pulled at Anthony’s internal organs.  His cock, vaguely involved in the weird sensations, hardened, but not from the lush sensation of brushed emotion and inspiration, not from the sensory stimulation of tendril and stomach-mouth.

He remembered in a rush the smell of a failing gas jet in a London boarding house, the horror of finding his lover gutted like a perch, traffic jams and rainstorms, an unraveled button thread, all the ragged ends of feeling that made uncounted lives.

Charlie’s gut mouth sucked off Anthony’s tendril, and Anthony’s head and senses spiraled upward with the torrent of words and images inside him, each turn erupting into feelings without names.

When the tentacle orgasmed, the goo flowed out of Charlie’s pouch-mouth to pool on the floor, and Anthony welcomed the climax that wrapped his cock and squeezed his spend to join the pools beneath him. His spine tightened with ecstasy, then released more emotional jiz as it relaxed, opened, smothering him in a feeling like nostalgia tinged with regret, but for no acts he could remember clearly.

“Oh yeah,” Charlie said, watching Anthony’s tentacle droop back into its slit as if Anthony shook off his cock before tucking it back in his fly.  Charlie only grinned, Picasso-Cheshire, sharp, distorted and pale.  “Definitely, it’s party time.” The Procurer turned his gaze on Cynthia and Anthony realized Charlie was trying to decide exactly how to fuck her.

Cynthia held up the ankh and Charlie winced.

“You don’t really think that will stop me?”

She didn’t say a word but held tightly to the stone haft. Anthony took a step back and looped his arm through hers.

“Fine,” Charlie conceded, grumbling as he waved his hands. The eyeballs on his wrists blinked, disappointed. “We need to talk, I guess.”

“You think?”  Cynthia responded.

Charlie huffed, then led Cynthia and Anthony out of the party, the jangly gamelan fading into a sound of falling water, as they passed into a room that appeared to have walls woven of living nerve tissue pulsing with complex rhythms.

“Give me the book,” he commanded Anthony.

“Go ahead,” Cynthia told him. “We don’t need it now.”

Anthony looked at Cynthia, but she never met his gaze, just kept her eyes falcon sharp on Charlie.  A bloom of trust pushed against his fragile hold on existence as he surrendered it to Charlie.

The greasy disco king turned the volume over, looking at both covers. He opened it randomly and began to read aloud:

“The stairwell opened out into a red-carpeted hallway, indirectly lit by no source Anthony could see, a diffusion of pale light that mottled the carpet. As he followed Cynthia and Cassia down the corridor...”

“For on that day, the pen passed out of Charlie’s hands. There was a new author, a new director. She looked at Anthony with eyes that shone lovingly, and he whispered ‘Cynthia,’ still entitled to call her that, but for everyone else, she had a new name.”

“She was the Procuress now, revered, and full of stories yet to be.”