Gog walks down the tunnel between the oaks towards the humps of red at its end, where it narrows into a cranny of dark boughs above dead stumps of elm trees, the colour of gore. Over one of these stumps, the girl is bent, naked and still. Her arms and head flop over the far edge of the timber. Her chest and belly is laid on top of the rotting stump. Her right breast is squeezed into a split in the wood, its nipple askew and pointing towards Gog. Her ribs crush small toadstools that sprout from the decay. Her near buttock swells upwards like a vast white fungus from the back of the stump. Below it, her thigh and leg trail down the bark near Gog, so that her toes just touch the dank earth.
Behind her, Crook stands, his two hands on her hip bones, working and pulling his screwing belly deeper between the tops of her thighs. As Gog watches, he shudders, clawing at the haunches of the girl, scoring blood from her flanks. Then he bends, his chest against her back, and bites her in the nape of the neck. Her head twists, then lolls again. And Crook draws back, his cock still erect and dripping, and he turns towards Gog.
Gog strikes at Crook’s face with his fists, but Crook ducks and lunges at Gog’s gut, hitting him in the lower belly, so that Gog grunts and jerks downwards. By chance, his plunging elbow chops with force on the back of Crook’s neck, sending him sprawling. Gog drops his great weight on Crook’s body. He hears his foe grunt beneath him, then draw in a rattle of breath through his downturned mouth. As Gog puts his hand round Crook’s neck, Crook goes limp. Gog tightens his grip on Crook’s windpipe, but his foe stays motionless. Still straddling Crook’s shoulderblades, Gog continues to throttle, suspecting a ruse. Still, no movement. So Gog rises, one leg on each side of Crook’s back and looks down at his fallen enemy.
Behind him, he hears a moaning. As he raises his left foot to turn towards the girl bent over the stump, Crook twists over onto his back, rears upwards, and butts Gog in the balls with his skull. Gog yells and falls, rolling over, his hands between his legs. He hears the snap of wood as his temple explodes from a heavy blow. Then darkness.
Cold.
Gog wakes to the cold. Cold belly, cold face, cold left arm. Only his right side is warm. He feels a ticklish pain at his crotch. He puts down his left hand to find his cock erect and swollen and hurting. A piece of bracken is flicking at it, stroking it. Gog hears Crook laugh and opens his eyes to see his enemy hunched between his legs. At his right side, the naked girl lies on her back, her eyes turned towards him, looking at him with terror. And yet, she lies there, as if staked down by invisible thongs. Gog sees that her plump breasts are gridded with welts and scratches; bruises make patches of indigo on her white flesh.
“ ’Er’s yers,” Crook says. “I’ve ’ad ’er every way there is. An’ some there isn’t. So ’ave ’er ’ow yer fancy.” He looks down at the girl and flicks the bracken between her thighs, so that she trembles. Then he fixes her with his hard yellow stare, still bright in the twilight under the trees. “Yer’s willin’, if I say?”
The girl nods dumbly. She shivers, but draws her knees up, opening her thighs.
“Git up on ’er,” Crook says to Gog. “Try it out. Or did I geld yer fer good?”
Gog sits upright, meaning to defy Crook. But as he sits, he sees the white belly of the girl, the hairy triangle arrowing the red sore between her legs, the spread and fallen pillars of her thighs. The sick agony of his cock swells and thrusts outwards. Gog looks at the girl’s puffed red face, as if beseeching forgiveness. But she has closed her eyes, her top teeth tight on her fat lower lip.
“Go on,” Crook says. “Or I’ll crush yer balls proper. What’s them fer?” And he grabs Gog by the waist, lifts him half-way onto his feet, turns him in mid-air and drops him between the girl’s knees onto her body. “I hope yer know what ter do now,” he says. “I don’t ’ave ter teach yer that.”
Gog closes his eyes, all thought, all feeling, all himself concentrated on the erect pain between his legs. He fumbles with his hands to guide his prod of lust into its sheath. The soft point of his being scratches on hair rough as bracken, then suddenly plunges deep into a warm stickiness, slippery, gripping. And Gog can feel the body under him shudder and the girl gasps under his chest and Gog shifts his weight forward to dig deeper into her. But he is so tall that he crushes her face beneath him, so that he must squirm sideways a little, allowing her mouth and nose to get air under his armpit, while he lies with his face downwards on the dampness of the earth, one eye buried, the other looking at the red and rotting stumps of elm.
Gog hears the girl sob again and squints back to see Crook standing, one of her ankles in each hand, forcing her legs apart, for her pain or Gog’s pleasure. As Gog watches, he sees Crook bend the girl’s legs back again at the knee, so that each of her soles rests on Gog’s pumping buttocks, making a white M of thighs and shins above Gog’s rump. Then Gog buries his face in the soil, projecting images of naked breast and belly and buttock on the screen of his closed lids to hurry on his desire. To perform rape, he has to act out rape in his mind; not the real rape of a red cold bruised plump girl, but the mock rape of the remote tall sneering Maire, stripped of her black coat, her body of cream spilt before him, screaming halt. So Gog has a quick coming, so that he may have a quick going away from his fall and degradation.
When the spurt of Gog’s release is over, he rises and buttons himself up and turns to the watching Crook, without daring to look down at the lying girl.
“We’d better get away,” he says. “Fast.”
Crook shrugs. “Slow, if we want ter. ’Er won’t tell.” He bends over the girl, his knife in his hand. “Will yer say owt?” The girl shakes her head against the ground, her eyes trembling wide.
“I were good ter yer,” Crook goes on saying. “I didn’t carve yer. So yer can ’ave more. I should ’ave left yer so other men would be sick ter see yer. So forgit us, see. If yer don’t, an’ a copper come after me, I’ll be back ter carve yer.”
He stoops, plucks at one of the girl’s nipples, and swings down the knife he holds in his other hand to slash off the nipple. But he swings the arc of the blade short, so that the point of the knife merely scratches the skin of the girl’s breast.
“Next time, I won’t miss,” Crook says.
He stands up and turns towards the recesses of the wood. As Gog looks back at the girl and opens his mouth to ask if they can help her, somehow help, Crook catches Gog by the elbows and pushes him beyond the stumps of elm into the thickets ahead. Twigs and branches jab at Gog’s eyes, so that he has to push his hands in front of him to make his way. Lunging forwards, he bursts through the thickets and he turns to find Crook on his heels and the girl cut off from sight.
“On,” Crook says, and pushes him stumbling forward between the trees.
The forest begins to change its nature. A blight has struck the trees. Their boughs are covered with a white webbing, a cocoon over whole branches that swathes them in moist gauze. Bulbous growths, the colour of curds, split the bark of trees. Mistletoe festoons the oaks, its sticky pearls of berries sweating on its green and mucous leaves. A curious albino lichen spatters the surface of the detritus of wood, which makes a verminous barricade feet high between many of the trunks. A kick clears a way through; but the kick also raises up a stink of maggoty wood, an odour of wet rot, a scurrying of lice and spiders and earwigs that briefly scatters the forest floor with a confetti of orange and yellow and grey movement.
“Let’s turn back,” Gog says. “This is foul. I’m not going on.”
But Crook clouts Gog against the earhole, forcing him onto one knee. He picks up a splintered branch and prods Gog in the thigh, compelling him onwards through the litter of decay.
The trees begin to thin at a clearing. The twilight brightens to a grey clouded day. Through the trees, Gog can see a white summerhouse, curiously carved. As he reaches the edge of the clearing, he discovers that a Gothic fretwork encloses the summerhouse in whorls and curlicues and gargoyles of fantasy. The snake-haired heads and vast breast
s of four Medusas support the roof at each corner of the building; the wings that sprout from their shoulders hold up the gutters; their waists are as scaly as mermaids; but a horn projects from where their legs divide into haunches of wooden fur, ending in wooden hooves. The walls of the house are a saturnalia of still coils and immobile writhing. Satyrs enwrap whales, goats leap upon the backs of serpents, eagles alight on sleeping nymphs, bees pollinate sea-anemones, sailors impregnate giant worms. There is no permutation of copulation between fish, fur, flesh and fowl, between insect and plant and mammal, that is not carved grotesquely upon the walls of the summerhouse in a carnival of coupling, peeling all over with scabs of flaking paint.
Between the orgies of the fretwork are windows, opaque with grime. Crook shoves past Gog and sidles up to a pane and draws back his fist to smash it. At that moment, there is a murmur of voices from within the summerhouse. Crook pauses, then moves on cat’s feet past the twisting length of a naiad embracing a buffalo, to where a broken pane rises above the nipple of a griffon rearing upon the rump of an elephant. Crook begins to smile at what he sees, and he motions Gog to join him at his peephole.
The broken pane makes a sooty frame for Gog the voyeur. Through the hole in the glass, he can see a brass four-poster bed set in the middle of the boards of a bare enormous room. On the black coverlet of the four-poster, her right arm holding the yellow metal bars of the bed head, Maire is lying naked, facing them. One leg rests on the bed, the other is bent at the knee so that its sole is upon the floor. The chauffeur with the narrow shoulders kneels at Maire’s feet, wearing his green uniform but without his cap, so that Gog can see the back of his bobbed, slicked, black hair. As the chauffeur licks the lying Maire, he runs his fingers up her thighs and over her belly to scratch at her nipples, then down again. From the glint on his fingernails, Gog can see that they are varnished.
Maire arches her back against the coverlet, her breasts swelling and her nipples opening like spread lips. She moans four times, luxuriously, pulling at the short hair of the chauffeur until a tuft comes away in her fingers. He remains, kneeling on the boards in the dust, until she relaxes again. Then she commands sharply, “Get up, Jules. And take off your clothes.” He obediently rises and begins to undress, facing her with his back towards Gog the voyeur.
Gog is sick with a compound of jealousy and curiosity. He wants to crash through the window, yet he has not seen enough. And Crook, for once, shows no sign of violence nor aggression. His pointed tongue runs rapidly along his lips, sucked in round his teeth.
The chauffeur takes off his shirt and drops his trousers to show himself bare-backed, but wearing a black garter belt above his rounded white buttocks and black stockings held up by the shiny metal grips of the belt. He walks forward towards Maire, and she pulls down the garter belt and unrolls the stockings off his hairless legs delicately and slowly. Then she kisses him on the belly and pulls him onto the four-poster beside her. And Gog sees that the chauffeur is another woman. “Julia,” Maire says. “my only one.” The two women entwine their bodies until they join in a mesh of limb.
Rage wells up in Gog’s windpipe, so that he chokes. He raises his fist and crashes it through the pane. “You Sapphic bitch,” he shouts, while Maire and Jules start up.
“Gog,” Maire cries, “you dare?”
Jules leaps off the four-poster, her small breasts swaying, and rummages in her clothes. She comes up with a small automatic pistol in her hand. She squats, crouching, resting her elbow on her thigh to steady her aim, and fires at Gog. The pane near him smashes.
“Scarper,” Crook says.
He and Gog run as another two bullets are gnats by their ears. They are as fearful as beasts at the noise of any gun. They do not pause until they are safely within the coverts of the wood on the far side of the clearing.
Again the wood changes its nature. It becomes spare and barren, with pine trees standing upright in kempt rows like soldiers in the ranks. There are also firs, stretching out their straight branches with horizontal precision. The ground is dry and crisp underfoot with brown pins, while the olive needles on the trees sting and prick and stimulate Gog’s skin as he passes by. The air is sharp now, so that he breathes deeply to fill his lungs with piercing oxygen, and he straightens his back to approximate to the stiff spines of the trees.
The sun comes out from between the clouds and catches Gog in a grid of blaze and shade. The horizontal bars of the straight branches, the vertical trunks of the trees, make a cage of shadow about Gog. He stops and turns back to see Crook stop behind him, covered with black lines as if he were scored with pokerwork. In this definition of dark and light, Crook takes on even more the look of the beast, on whose head and ribs and haunches nature has laid the stripes of camouflage.
And Crook comes forward, his yellow eyes staring at Gog, his broken iris compelling fascinated stillness, and he puts his forearm behind Gog’s neck, and he kisses Gog full on the mouth.
Gog does not recoil at the hair rasping on his three days’ beard, nor at the tongue that thrusts between his slack lips and open teeth. He stands as if playing statues, while Crook rubs up against him, belly to belly, a little shorter than Gog, but equal in height on tiptoe. Only when Gog feels Crook’s free hand fondling his buttock does he step back, breaking from the forearm round his neck.
“What?” Crook says. “Don’t yer fancy me? Ingratitude.”
Gog shakes his head, dropping his eyes to avoid the hypnosis of the black blob of broken iris. “I’m not that way,” he mumbles.
“What d’yer mean?” Crook jeers. “We’re all all ways. Bent sometime, straight sometime. As long as we git it.”
He sidles forward through the grid of light and dark, the many stripes of shadow making him tyger, tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night. But no mortal hand nor eye could frame his fearful symmetry. That comes from the force of the inner cock-screws of desire, of the nervescrews of instinct, of the gutscrews of perversity that knows it must succeed. Crook’s left hand plunges for Gog’s crotch, grasps, loosens and strokes, while his right hand is raised, ready to chop or claw or strike.
Gog stands, looking willy-nilly into the yolk-bright eyes in the striped hairy face. A great weariness comes over him, a resignation in the face of power. He feels his muscles drain into syrup and lust begin to rise in his belly. But when he sees Crook begin his thin grin, he suddenly jerks forward with his shoulder, catching Crook on the side of the head.
This time Crook is not caught unawares. He chops terribly with the side of his hand into Gog’s neck, and as Gog sags, he brings up his knee onto Gog’s chin, knocking him unconscious. Again Gog slides into the black recesses of his hidden mind, the winding crannies among the roots of his brain cells. There he sees myriads of red maggots twisting desperately to get into a mesh of tiny slits and holes, their red tails squirming and thrusting as their heads burrow and search and enter. His inward eye cuts to an image of himself standing by the rollers at the back of a police launch on Thames river. The naked drowned corpse of a girl suicide is bent over the rollers, her head and arms flopping forwards, her belly flat on the wooden spokes, one breast squeezed through them, her buttocks high, her legs trailing down until her toes just touch the water. In every orifice, the tails of eels jerk and heave, blue-black as the vomiting policeman by the rollers. And then, Gog is the corpse, and the eels writhe within him, and he screams dumbly in his dream.
Gog wakes in a wash of relief, to find himself safe in his own skin, alive, dry pine needles under his face, belly down flat on the earth, relaxed and still, his bare legs apart. He feels a pain between his buttocks, but his body responds when he moves its parts slowly, fingers first, followed by arms and legs. He turns himself over to lie chest up in a shaft of sun. His aching head gradually feels only an occasional throb rather than a continual hammering and the sun puts its warm balm on the knots in his muscles. After a while, Gog sits up, wipes himself below the waist with abrasive handfuls of pine needles t
o cauterize his flesh, finds his trousers and puts them on. Then he begins limping on slowly through the wood, hoping that the animal Crook will finally leave him alone.
Again the light and the forest change. Black clouds sweep angrily over the grey. The trees are low and gnarled; the soggy soil cannot support the weight of height. Gog’s boots begin to sink into the swamp at his feet. Onyx pools exuding vapours make hollows of polished jet among the roots, which creep into them as entrails into the stomach. Twining buckbean bares the pink lumps of its fruit from the white beard of its corolla. The hairy stems of hemp agrimony matt the reddish flowers into lung linings. The fleshy leaves of brooklime curl from stems crawling intestinal. There is a brackish sweet smell as if syrup were mixed with slime. Gog squelches on, sometimes sinking in mud or stagnant water up to his knee.
Plump drops of rain begin to fall one by one. Gog hears thunder clap its hands many miles away. He hurries forwards to where the dark curve of a hillside shows above the swamp. As the rain turns from a spatter into a torrent, he reaches a driveway of sodden timber sleepers, raised above the surface of the marsh. A ruined oaken gateway is set on each side of the drive. Its uprights are two rounded poles fifteen feet tall; at each of their tips, the wood has been carved into the shape of a swollen cloche hat. The crossbar between the uprights is cracked in the middle so that it is half-fallen in the centre. Gog can just walk straight under the splinters in the middle of the collapsing bar.
In the side of the hill ahead, the façade of a pagan temple has been built, a northern Baalbek, some aristocrat’s folly. Massive fluted square pillars supporting a broken pediment stand in front of the hill like the bars in front of a cage in a natural zoo. As Gog approaches, he sees that black doors three times his height make an entrance into the granite hillside within the pillars. One door is a little open. Gog walks through it out of the thunderstorm, past the black bolts that stud its surface. As he enters the hill, the door closes behind him.
Gog Page 13
