The great door creaked slowly shut behind him as Loofah stepped out into an ocean of white brilliance. The sun enfolded him in her warm caress and he breathed the fresh, clean air, flushing the putrescence from his polluted lungs. Slowly, shapes began to crystallise out of the homogenous dazzle: white stone columns, a gravel driveway, a line of gleaming motor vehicles.
And, in front of the cars, a pacing figure: a man in a crumpled dark suit with mirrored sunglasses that shielded a care-ravaged face from the harsh glare.
Loofah shrank quickly back behind one of the pillars. The Frenchman stopped, dropped the butt of his Gitane onto the gravel, then reached into his jacket to take another from its elegant blue packet. His lighter clicked and he inhaled with the desperation of a drowning man before spinning on his heel to continue his anxious patrol.
Sheltering behind the pillar, Loofah peered out at his pacing enemy; he needed a plan of action, but his brain—still numbed by shock and confusion—was refusing to co-operate. Suddenly he was aware of a sensation, of something unpleasant sliding over his buttocks, and with a little scream he spun round. The little fat man, his doughy flesh still draped in a heavily stained gown, leered oleaginously as his slimy eyes slithered down over the front of Loofah's body.
'Hello, my dear,' he purred, 'Remember me, do you? You were very nice to me last time we met, very nice indeed. Are you going to be nice to me again?'
A five-fingered mollusc closed over Loofah's left breast and with an instinctive squeal of revulsion he lashed out. Glaring like an enraged bullfrog, the fat man clutched his slapped cheek.
'You little vixen!' he hissed viciously, 'I'll teach you to—.'
'Qu'est-ce que tu fais, imbécile?'
The bullfrog's eyes widened with sudden fear. He backed away as the furious Frenchman stormed round the pillar.
'Have you caught him yet? Non? Then leave la fille alone!' With a whimper, the little man cowered away from the advancing velociraptor. 'I am warning you, boule de suif, if again you are failing, I will be eating your fattened liver for the petit déjeuner. Now—get back inside!'
As the Frenchman continued his tirade, violently shoving his cowering creature in the direction of the Temple door, Loofah slipped quietly away into the warm dazzle of the afternoon.
At the brick pillared gateway, he paused. The road back to the village was straight ahead, and leading off at either side were a pair of yellow-arrowed footpaths. A tiny pilot-flame of anxiety flickered, but before the main burners had had chance to catch she had started towards the path on the left—it seemed that she knew the way. For, although the nymph had loaned him her body in return for his, she did seem to have retained a degree of control, presumably for purposes of guidance—and possibly also because she didn't entirely trust a mere man with the delicate female mechanisms of her petite and lissom form. And so, while she skipped lightly over an amazingly well-behaved stile into a high meadow of gentle emerald waves and yellow foam buttercups, Loofah shrugged to himself and relaxed.
Once in the field, she floated over the crests of the slowly rolling waves, like gossamer on a gentle breeze. Though her slim legs moved, swinging languidly to and fro in the warm air, her bare feet touched nothing. The path ran beside a bank of fine trees—sturdy chestnut and noble ash—which drifted respectfully past with whorled patterns playing quietly in the molten plastic of their trunks. From the trees, the green sea swept out in a rolling plateau before falling away into the valley below. Beyond this, distant hills shimmered blue in the haze, so close that she could have caressed their sunlit flanks and plucked the tiny trees from their dark wooded crowns. The breeze caught her hair and it tumbled softly against his cheek. He brushed it away lightly, then let her hand float down over the front of her gown. Warm liquid trickled down his spine and the white satin of her gown flowed over his skin like the lapping waves of a tropical sea.
They were now in sloping, dense beech woods. The smooth trunked young trees crowded the path, as if trying to get close to her, and between the packed trunks flowed a green oil-slick of dog's mercury, with tiny whirlpools and rainbow eddies swirling languidly across the glossy surface of the plants. A thousand trilling fibrils of birdsong echoed and re-echoed through the aquarium air, weaving themselves into a gorgeous fabric of tonal celebration, a rejoicing of her coming.
The path became steeper still, until it fell away from under her naked feet. As he looked to the left and to the right, the whole of the glittering, swirling wood pulsed and sang, resonating languorously with the electric giddiness in her skull. With an upsurge of strange euphoria, she swept her arms back and leaned forward into the flow, gliding gently down through the trees like a manta ray through the warm waters of a Caribbean kelp forest. A million, zillion jewels of light cascaded over her body and fused with her skin and hair, turning her into a creature of light, a golden sunbeam in an emerald forest.
The slope was now beginning to bottom out. A stile slid past far below them, then suddenly she was enveloped in hot brilliance as she left the cool waters of the wood. The dazzling earth was coming up to meet her and so, with unhurried grace, she folded her arms over her breasts and stepped down out of the liquid air onto a welcoming ribbon of velvet grass. As she walked, the satin of gown flowed over her skin like molten pearl and her thighs caressed against each other, as if to remind him of their existence.
A car of pastel violet throbbed languidly past, then she skipped across the thick river of the road. On the far shore, she paused. A vast curve of field swept away from her feet, climbing gently into the far distance. The path—as straight as an arrow's flight—cut diagonally across endless lines of foetal bean plants that marched with military precision across the field, to a gap in a distant hedge; behind this crouched a low ridge, with meadow skirts and a blue wooded crown. As she reached out to cup the hill in her upturned palm, he felt a strange thrill tingling up her arm, spurring her forward. A little worm of fear wriggled through the tide of warm honey—she had sensed something, but he didn't know what.
Column after column of embryo plants slid by under her bare feet in a dizzying, infinite parade, like the green spokes of a vast wheel turning on the hub of a far hill. She was crossing the bottom of a shallow dish, a dish with a scalloped rim of distant hills and a cover of ceramic azure. The sun beat down like a velvet hammer pulsing hot dazzle onto the spinning stripes of dry earth, and the satin of her gown blazed like liquid fire.
The hedge was closer now, the cool meadow on the far side beckoning like a friend. For a moment, he thought he saw a single tree standing alone in the lake of grass, but when she looked again it was gone, vanished like a mirage.
As she glided onwards through the blurred haze of pulsing brightness and spinning green spokes, the massive sky and distant hills pulled away, sucking her out into the vastness of their space—and yet never got further than the ends of her fingertips. Her liquid skin blended smoothly into the molten gown and then poured out into the hot air, flooding over the thirsty field in a gentle rolling wave. Soon she filled the dish, lapping up to its distant rim; her hair was the sun and her skin was the sky, her breasts were twin wooded hills from which the grassy slopes of her belly swept down to the smooth ridges of her thighs. The tree was there again, shimmering at the edge of her vision, and again when she looked it was gone, slipping mischievously into non-existence.
The hedge was a sheer bank of ash and elder and young oak that towered over her like the walls of an ancient castle. The defences, however, were already breached; she did not even bother with the pretence of climbing the stile but flowed through it in a golden stream of liquid honey. On the other side, in the sanctum of the meadow, the sun's warmth had none of its harsh edge and the long grass lapped over her bare feet in cool, languid waves. The path lead up the slope to the woods beyond, bypassing a solitary oak—but yet again as she turned towards the tree it eluded her, passing neatly into a parallel dimension; it was still there—she could sense its presence—but at the same time it was not. With a secret smile she left the path and cut a route of her own through the uncharted waters of virgin grass.
When she reached the place where the tree might or might not have been, she lay back in the grass, letting the green waves flow over her legs and arms, and caress her body in swirling, gentle eddies. When she stared up into the sky there was nothing but unbroken ceramic blue; when she let her eyes slide slowly closed, however, the orange light across her eyelids was cut into a thousand pieces by the overhanging mesh of branches, and the tree's shade wrapped her in its cool embrace, soothing away the hot dazzle of the day. She reached over her head and touched solid bark which dissolved into nothingness under her fingers. Then her fingers too dissolved, then her arm and then her whole body, melting and evaporating into the warm night.
Soon there was nothing, just the chocolate orange sky draped languorously over the darkened landscape. She breathed out and a warm breeze brushed softly over gentle hills, sending a sweet electric thrill through the honeyed night. Birds sang at the edge of time, trickling their song through the velvet darkness, dribbling it over her like maple syrup.
Somewhere in the night a strange pulse began. She was now the breeze that flowed over the twin hills and caressed their softness with ethereal fingers. The pulse came harder and faster; she sighed into the darkness and the breeze slid down over the rolling plateau to the long smooth ridges beyond. She paused for a moment to relish the sweet throbbing that thundered through the black liquid air, and then seeped through the dense little copse where the ridges joined and on down into the warm, enticing crevasse below. The slow breeze shuddered quietly and moaned—but at that moment of delectable anticipation a shadow loomed into the orange darkness and something touched her hand, something that wasn't her.
The young man was kneeling beside her, his massive torso filling half the universe. His hand was covering hers, pressing it between her opened thighs. He was as naked as when she had first seen him long ago, as a human phoenix being reborn from his own senile decay in the old people's home.
She squirmed under the strange heat from his deep set eyes, black as jet, and tried to pull her hand away. But with a smile, he held her tightly against herself until the squirm became a shudder of sudden embarrassment and she wrenched her hand free, snapping her legs tight closed. He laughed. Her cheeks flushed hotly and she tried to roll away, but he laughed again and held her still. Then he stopped laughing and reached down to part the molten satin of her gown. She started to wriggle away, but as she moved a spasm of tiny wavelets scudded away over her electrified skin that paralysed her to stillness; his hands slid down over her belly and glided up her thighs to the clamped vice of her knees.
Though she clamped tighter still as he pulled apart, the inexorable force of his will melted her strength and slowly, ever so slowly, her knees began to open.
He was staring now with a new intensity, not into her face but between her spreading thighs, watching, rapt, as the gates of her citadel swung slowly open. She squirmed again, though not this time from embarrassment, when suddenly, with her gates at near their full spread, he gasped in boyish wonder as his face and torso were bathed in an spectral white light. For a moment she thought this was sunlight shining off the molten pearl of her gown, but then she realised—the light was coming from her.
A vague worry began to form, about intimate infections with phosphorescent microbes previously unknown to gynaecological science, but before it could come to full fruition it was subsumed by a more pressing concern—she felt something move inside her. A second later it came again, a vigorous wriggling, and the light over her companion's face and chest flickered. The realisation of what was happening sluiced through her overheated veins like super-cooled anti-freeze—there was something inside her, something alive—and it was coming out.
She dug her fingers into the damp grass and pushed herself up, staring down between her open legs in blank horror. The movement was stronger now, she could feel the thing worming forward like some nightmare uterine parasite. Then something appeared between her thighs, a silvery, mucous-slippery head, pushing out into the sun dappled light. They gasped in unison, she with disgust though he with reverent awe, and when it was nearly all out—a gigantic fat maggot the size of a baby's forearm, cocooned in slug-slime—his face lit up with genuine joy and he cupped his hands under her in welcome for the new arrival.
It fell with a liquid plop into his palms, where it lay still, exhausted by its parturition, glowing palely like a fat cigar of radium. The assiduous midwife brushed away the silvery foetal membranes and rubbed life into the rubbery body, and then he lifted it up to her, presenting her with the triumphant fruit of her womanhood.
The traumatised mother, however, recoiled with a shudder of post-natal disgust. The young man laughed quietly and, cooing encouragement, held the infant closer. She saw then that it wasn't a maggot, but a huge white caterpillar. Its tight skin bulged with new life and its eerie light, which had turned her gown into spun silver and her naked flesh into bone china, seemed to shine right through her like gamma radiation, illuminating her soul and gently dispelling the dark shadows of revulsion, allowing her maternal love to flourish and grow. Was it hungry? she wondered, as the fingers of her left hand trailed absently over a porcelain breast.
The babe began to twitch, a series tiny convulsions. The fat body seemed to bulge more tightly and then it twisted suddenly, as if in pain. With a flicker of maternal panic, she looked to her companion who smiled in calm reassurance. The caterpillar was soon in some sort of tetanic fit and its swelling body seemed ready to burst like an over-ripe fruit. Then, as the twitching became suddenly urgent, the silvery cuticle wrinkled like drying parchment and spilt open to reveal, not a bubbling mass of insect gore, but a white carapace of polished alabaster.
The handsome midwife pulled away the shrivelled caterpillar skin and for a while the chrysalis lay still, glowing quietly and hardening in the warm air. Then it too began to move, wagging its segmented tail like a happy dog, and moments later it split along the back as what looked like a giant cockroach, wet and bedraggled, pushed itself out and clambered unsteadily onto his palm.
The great white wings, once unfurled and dried, were each the size of a dinner plate. They opened and closed twice, catching the light of the sun and blending it with their own luminous brilliance, and then the wings were no longer wings, but twin sheets of pure light, weightless and ethereal, transcendent of matter. She had never seen anything quite as beautiful as the butterfly, ever before in her entire life—and this exquisite creation had come from her, it was of her flesh.
Sensing his charge's readiness, the midwife lifted his cupped hands and the great butterfly rose gently into the air to become a lepidopteran sunbeam, dancing on its own brilliance through the half-existent branches of the overhanging tree. She thought it would fly away, but it stayed, hovering over her head, where each beat of the sunshine wings showered her with cascades of a pure light that poured over her and through her. Something pulsed deep in her soul, a thrill of deep pride and celestial joy; she raised her arms into the cleansing rain of light, letting it wash away the mire of her sins and then fill her, like a silver chalice, with the wine of its purity, while her spirit—a fluttering lacewing of diaphanous gossamer—floated up into air to dance with the butterfly in the golden brilliance of the sun.
She became aware of strong fingers brushing her cheek. The young man was kneeling beside her in the cascade of light, his olive skin turned to luminous gold, his raven hair shining like a black halo around his handsome head. She saw then that he too was a child of the sun, a mortal Apollo, that they were brother and sister, born together of the butterfly's womb of light.
He smiled with a strange intensity, then trailed his fingers down the exquisite skin of her neck, each touch sending a thousand caterpillars of light wriggling through her flesh. She watched with child-like fascination as his hand slid down over her shoulder and onto the sloping curves of her breast. The butterfly's light was now sacred fire, an icy blaze that flamed across her whole body, turning every pulsing cell, every liquid drop of blood, every spicule of ceramic bone into a burning icicle of spiritual longing. She saw that he too was on fire, for his skin shimmered with it and his eyes blazed with it as he kneaded the flesh of her thigh with his other hand. The burning cold was too much and she began to melt into warm nectar, sliding down over the sculptured ridges of his chest and the marble slab of his belly.
The whole universe was now liquefying, flowing into a turgid whirlpool of primal matter. And, as her body blended with the whirlpool, the slow waters filled with her own flaming desire and then swirled around the centre of his might, an electric pain of yearning blending into the cold heat.
White light, like the epicentre of an atomic explosion, blazed into his skull and he quickly shut his eyes again.
The first thing he was aware of, sheltering in the orange darkness, was a soft warmth under his left hand and arm, and against his face and neck. Then, like scattered chickens returning to the coop, tiny scraps of memory came scuttling back: of a sunny field and a non-existent tree, of white satin on the soft nakedness of a girl's body, and of an electric icy heat flooding over his flesh. A warm tingle of niceness slithered over him and he snuggled against her, running his hand over the muscular curve of her buttock, feeling the rugged ridges of her strong back against his cheek.
The warm tingle chilled quickly and Loofah snapped open his eyes, ignoring their protests. As the nuclear blast faded, and shape and form emerged from the homogenous dazzle, the chilled tingle became a cold sluice. He pulled his hand back, touched his own bare flesh and squealed like a scared girl.
Loofah scrambled to his feet and for nearly a minute ran around on the grass like a decapitated hen, trying in vain to escape the squirmings of his own mortification. Then he stopped, hoping against hope that it was all a dream. But the young man was still there, fast asleep on the grass under the uncertain shade of the tree, as naked as the day he was reborn. And perched on the his thigh was a huge butterfly, which was opening and closing its dazzle-white wings and showering the scene with the light of the sun, as if to bless the unholy union.
Doubling over and covering his groin with his hands, Loofah jumped behind the tree trunk—which promptly disappeared. Peering out from his non-existent hiding place, it was then that he noticed the clothes, discarded over the grass in the abandonment of unbridled passion: jeans, underpants and socks, a lime green tee-shirt and a leather jacket with shiny sleeves, like a pair of crumpled and over-sized black slugs.
The butterfly took to the liquid air and flitted to and fro, playing languidly with the half-dappled sunbeams while Loofah hauled on his clothes. When he was nearly done, the young man shifted in his sleep, half turning and reaching out for his absent lover. Although the afternoon was still warm, Loofah pulled the jacket tight over his chest and zipped it up to his chin.
As he stepped out into the unbroken sunshine, he hesitated. At the top of the meadow a stile beckoned, straddling the entrance into the dark beech wood that cloaked the upper slopes and crown of the hill in a glossy green mantle. A strange shiver tingled through Loofah's flesh and a tiny grub seemed to reawaken somewhere deep within his bowels. The butterfly was already fluttering up the slope, presumably on important business of its own, but Loofah turned and headed down towards the gap in the castle-wall hedge that lead into the bean-spoked field beyond.
No sooner had he set off, however, than the great insect came after him, flying around him in agitated circles.
'You don't think I should go this way?' Loofah asked, a little crossly.
It fluttered in affirmation.
'Well I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this the way I want to go, and that's all there is to it. Goodbye.'
He hadn't gone three paces, however, before the butterfly started dive bombing him like an angry seagull, flying down out of the sky, dazzling the sun off its wings and into his eyes.
'Look, this is silly! I'm a grown man, aren't I? Surely I can be allowed to decide which way I walk!'
It hovered before him in the sunlight, inscrutable, impervious. Loofah felt his resistance begin to weaken.
'And so which way would you prefer me to go?'
In reply the butterfly swept down over his left shoulder, fluttered a few yards up the hill then hovered in the sunshine, waiting to lead him into the dark womb of the wood. Again Loofah shivered, as if a wet cob-web were being draped across his soul—but his destiny lay with the iron-willed arthropod and he knew it.
'Lead on, MacDuff,' he said with a resigned shrug, and set off after his lepidopteran guide.
The stile at the top of the meadow seemed to sense the portentous nature of the moment and didn't even try to cause trouble. On the far side he turned for one last look. The tree slipped quickly into non-existence, leaving the young man to the full embrace of the sun.
'Nothing happened, you know,' he said to the butterfly, 'I'm not that way inclined, really I'm not.'
The great insect hovered over the path. Although it made no comment, Loofah sensed an edge of scepticism in the flutter of its wings.
'You won't say anything, will you?' he went on, with a sheepish grin, 'Not that I'm embarrassed or anything—I just wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea, that's all.'
With this he turned his back on the brilliant dazzle of the open meadow and followed the butterfly into the ominous shadows of the wood.