DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

her hand as he talked. He continued stroking her hand even after he had run out of things to say.

He thought of all the times that hand had stroked him.

He smiled. They had not done it all that much the last few years. They’d still loved each other, perhaps more than they ever had, but the sex thing seemed to have died down for both of them. They’d done it only infrequently in the past decade, and even then it had not always worked.

But he’d discovered recently how much he missed that part of their relationship. In bed alone, he remembered their early years together, when they had done it almost every night—and when she had continued to please him even when it was her time of the month.

He’d masturbated a lot lately.

He held Barbara’s hand and looked at her face. Her slightly parted lips looked wet, full. Inviting.

He closed his eyes. What was he thinking? What the hell was wrong with him? He let go of her hand. It was the wine. He’d had too much of it today. It was starting to get to him.

He opened his eyes, looked again at Barbara’s moist lips, and felt a stirring in his groin.

He stood up and, as if underwater, walked across the room and closed the door. He turned back toward the bed. The tubes were in her nostrils, he thought. She would still be able to breathe.

And of course she would want him to be happy.

No. This was crazy.

He stood for a moment next to the bed, staring at her familiar face. He could feel his erection growing. He was hard, painfully so.

He pulled down his pants, crawled on top of her.

He heard the door to the room open behind him. He heard the nurse’s gasp. “Mr. Scott!” she yelled.

But his penis was already in her mouth, and he was thrusting.

28

Penelope was standing alone in the main hallway of the school. Only the school was empty, abandoned, the bare floor covered with the dust of age. It was night, and only a thin sliver of moonlight shone through the boarded windows, but it was enough to show Dion that Penelope was naked.

And that she was robbing herself.

As he watched from the shadows, there came a growing, insistent flapping, like the sound of birds taking off or a helicopter landing.

The sound grew, intensified, and from the blackness behind Penelope he saw a shifting shape emerge, descending downward through the color spectrum, growing lighter, grayer, white, a huge fluttering, whirlingly ill-defined creature that he identified to his horror as a monstrous swan. Even in the dark he could see pliant lips on an orange, ungiving bill, calculating human eyes within the tangle of feathers above. As if on cue, Penelope stopped fingering herself and dropped to her hands and knees, waiting on all fours.

Behind her, Dion could see the swan’s massive penis.

Penelope arched her back, baring her buttocks for the swan, which mounted her from behind. She screamed once, loudly, a horrible cry of agonized pain, and then the feathers were flying, the swan disintegrating in a rain of white which floated down on Penelope as a baby gruesomely pushed its way out of her exposed forehead, the skin below her hairline ripping, breaking open in a wash of blood that rolled cleanly off the emerging infant.

The baby smiled at him, pulling the remainder of its body from Penelope’s head as she fell onto her side. “Father,” the baby said in a voice like thunder. “Son.”

Dion awoke feeling strange. He sat up. The bottom half of his body seemed different, unfamiliar, as though it belonged to someone else. He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again. He found that he was afraid to move his legs, afraid they might not work, afraid they might work in ways to which he was not accustomed.

He turned his head to look out the window. Outside it was still dark.

From this vantage point he could see the rounded silhouette of the hill, backlit by the moon.

He looked immediately away, frightened.

What the hell was happening to him?

He didn’t know, and it was a long time before he fell back asleep.

29

Kevin and Dion walked past the school bus on their way to the parking lot. It had rained earlier in the day and the ground was wet, the sidewalk’s ostensible flatness belied by a series of off-center puddles.

“You know,” Kevin said, “ever since you two got together, you don’t do shit with me anymore. Not that I miss having to drag your sorry ass around, but—”

A paper cup filled with ice was thrown from one of the bus windows and landed on the sidewalk to Kevin’s right. “Pussy!” a boy’s voice called out.

“Don’t tell me your problems!” Kevin shot back. He reached down, picked up the smashed cup, and threw it at the side of the bus. It hit with a wet splat.

Dion laughed.

“So what are you plans for tonight?”

Dion shrugged. “I don’t have any.”

“You’re not doing anything with Penelope?”

“I don’t know.”

“So take a night off. We’re going to pay a visit to Father Ralph again. Paul’s been grounded for the past week, so this time he’s really going to get back at his old man. It should be great.”

“I’m not—”

“Come on, don’t be a flit.”

Dion grinned. “Flit?”

Kevin nodded. “Flit.”

“Okay.” Dion laughed. “You talked me into it.”

They met again at Burgertime. A guy Dion didn’t know had brought his van, so all six of them could fit into it. This time there was a bottle in the car, and Paul lit up a joint. Dion frowned. Was it his imagination or did all of them seem a little wilder than usual, a little more on edge? The joint was offered to him, and he shook his head firmly.

“Candy ass,” Paul sneered.

Dion ignored him.

As before, they parked a little way up from Father Ralph’s house and crept through the bushes and the mud until they reached the backyard.

This time all of