Death's Excellent Vacation

Thin Walls CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

Christopher Golden is the author of such novels as The Myth Hunters, The Boys Are Back in Town, Of Saints and Shadows, and (with Tim Lebbon) The Map of Moments. He has also written books for teens and young adults, including Poison Ink, Soulless, and the thriller series Body of Evidence. He cowrote the lavishly illustrated novel Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire with Mike Mignola. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.

TIM Graham woke slowly, the sounds of raucous sex drawing him up into the waking world. He frowned sleepily and looked around in the darkness of his hotel room, as though he expected to find the perpetrators of the disturbance screwing acrobatically on one of the floral-patterned chairs near the balcony slider. He liked to keep a room as dark as possible for sleeping—something he’d picked up from Jenny—so the heavy curtains were drawn and the only light came from the ghostly glow of numbers on the alarm clock. If someone had been screwing in his room, he would barely have been able to see them.

But the sounds, he quickly realized, came from the room next door. The bed in there must have been head to head with his own, for he heard the lovers far too well, their grunts and moans and exhortations, the slap of flesh on flesh, the rhythmic tap of the headboard against the wall. Most hotel chains had long since learned to attach the headboards to the wall so they wouldn’t knock against it when guests got busy, but apparently that bit of logic had been overlooked here.

At first, Tim smiled. Half asleep, he felt a mixture of envy and arousal.

“Yes, like that!” the woman sighed, repeating it several times, making it her mantra. Then she started to plead, almost whining, urging him on.

After several minutes of this, Tim’s erection brought him fully awake. He closed his eyes and put a pillow over his head, trying to force himself back to sleep, but he could not drown out the sounds. His pulse quickened. He wondered how long they could go on. Unless the guy was young—or old and using Viagra to regain his youth—it shouldn’t take that long.

He had heard people having sex in hotel rooms before. More than once, he and Jenny had been the people making too much noise. One time an angry old woman had banged on the wall and shouted at them to keep it down, and they had laughed and made love even more vocally. Tim had never banged on the wall himself. He didn’t like the idea of interrupting, and he had always felt a little thrill at overhearing.

So he listened, his erection painfully in need of attention. Jenny had been gone for just over a year. He was tempted to masturbate, but the image of a sad little pervert jerking off on the other side of the wall disturbed him, so instead he got up and went to the bathroom. With the light on, the bathroom fan drowned out most of the noise from next door. He splashed water on his face and looked in the mirror at the dark circles under his eyes. He had to wait for his erection to subside before he could aim for the toilet, but at last he managed to piss, then washed his hands and returned to bed.

The fucking continued.

“Christ,” he muttered.

He wanted sleep more than cheap thrills. The voyeur inside him seemed to have given up and gone to sleep, because though his cock stirred and rose once more, it only achieved half mast, apparently tempered by his growing irritation.

He laid his head back on the pillow and stared up at the darkness of the ceiling. Had they heard him go to the bathroom? The sound of the fan and the flush of the toilet? If so, it had not troubled them at all. If anything, the lovers had gotten louder. The man started to call her filthy names, making her his slut, his whore, his bitch, and she rose to what she seemed to consider a challenge, agreeing with him at every turn. If he’d ever tried that with Jenny, he would never have had sex again, but for these two it seemed a huge turn-on.

Long minutes passed. Tim’s throat was dry, his breath coming a little quicker as his erection returned, more painful than ever. He could not help but start to imagine the scene taking place next door, picturing positions and stiletto heels. In his mind the guy was a blur, but the woman had a body sculpted by desire, with round, heavy, real breasts and hip bones perfect for gripping.

He rolled his eyes and shook his head, not daring to look at the clock, though he felt sure he had been awake at least half an hour by now, and had no idea how long they had been going at it before they had woken him.

And still they went on.

Tim lay on his side, listening closely. There was no alternative except leaving the room or hiding in the bathroom, and so he surrendered to eavesdropping, trying to pick out each word. Mostly it was repetition, dirty talk, and baby-oh-baby-come-on from him and give-it-to-me from her. The classics, he thought, chuckling tiredly. Unoriginal but much beloved the world over.

And then a break in the rhythm, a pause.

“Can I?” the man asked.

The answer, when it came, sounded clear and intimate and close, as if she had whispered the words into Tim’s ear.

“You can put it anywhere you want.”

Jesus, he thought, breath catching in his throat. It really had sounded like she was there in bed next to him. He listened as the sounds started up again, but soon the man lapsed into silence broken only by wordless grunts. His lover continued to urge him on—demanding, pleading for him not to stop.

Then the man let out an almost sorrowful groan and the woman cried out in triumphant pleasure and, at last, the thumping of the headboard subsided.

Tim’s heart was still thudding in his chest and his face felt flushed, but he figured if he just lay there in bed, he would calm down enough to go back to sleep. He closed his eyes and took a breath.

And she spoke again, there on the other side of the wall.

“Thank you, baby,” she said, and he heard it as though she were whispering it right into his ear. “That was exactly what I needed.”

The hunger and the pleasure in her voice did him in. He threw back the sheets and went back into the bathroom, where it took only seconds for him to get himself off.

Afterward he lay in bed, ashamed and frustrated and missing Jenny so hard he felt ripped open inside.

Eventually, he slept.

ROOM service brought his breakfast at nine o’clock on the dot. Tim figured that most people who had their morning meal brought to their rooms were up and out of the hotel for meetings by nine A.M., which explained their being so timely. He signed for his breakfast, giving the thin Mexican guy who’d delivered it a decent tip. In his visits to Los Angeles over the past few years, he had been consistently amazed by how much more effort Mexican immigrants seemed to put into their jobs than native-born Los Angelenos. And not just more effort, but more hustle and greater civility. There was a lesson to be learned in the great immigration battle, but he had lost too much sleep last night to give it very much thought.

Sunlight splashed into the room through the sliding glass door that led out onto the balcony. He liked to sleep in the dark, but during the day he wanted as much sunshine as he could get, and if there was any place in the world to find it, it was right here.

In light cotton shorts and a blue T-shirt Jenny had bought him two years back in Kennebunkport, Maine, he carried the tray out onto the balcony and set it on a little round table. First order of business, he poured himself a cup of coffee—cream, no sugar—and sipped it as he looked down at the beach below, the waves crashing on the sand. The surf made a gentle shushing noise that comforted him.

The hotel backed right up to the ocean. From the balcony he could see the Santa Monica Pier. At night, the lights from the pier provided their own kind of beauty, but during the day the view was truly spectacular. Tim breathed in the salty ocean air and felt cleansed, refreshed. The coffee relit the pilot light in his brain, and he started to feel awake for the first time this morning.

Jenny had loved the view. They had stayed here during both of their visits to L.A. together, the first time only months after they had started dating—it had been that weekend, Tim believed, that they had fallen in love—and the second as a special getaway for their fifth wedding anniversary. Not in the same room each time, of course. Jenny might have remembered the room numbers—he had never asked her—but guys just didn’t pay attention to that sort of thing.

And, anyway, it was the view that she had loved, not the room.

With another deep breath, he sipped at his coffee and then set it down, settling into a chair beside the small table. He removed the metal cover over his breakfast plate to reveal a western omelet accompanied by a small portion of breakfast potatoes and half a dozen slices of fresh melon. Sliding the table over in front of him, he tucked into his breakfast. The omelet was delicious, but halfway through, his appetite failed him and he wondered why he hadn’t just ordered juice and toast. He ate the melon because it was sweet and good for him, and drank the small glass of OJ that had come alongside the coffeepot, and then he settled back to digest.

Already the day had grown warmer. The weatherman had said it would reach the mideighties by noon, and Tim had no trouble believing that. He planned to go to Universal Studios in the afternoon, just for a few hours—it was what he and Jenny had done the last time they were here together—but this morning he intended to take it easy. He got up and went into his room, fetching the James Lee Burke novel he’d bought to read on the plane. Then he shifted the chair to keep the sun out of his eyes, poured himself another cup of java, and sat reading and enjoying his coffee with the sound of the ocean enveloping him.

Twenty or so pages later, he was pulled from the book by the sound of a slider rattling open. He looked up to see a woman stepping out onto the balcony of the room next door. Instantly his mind went back to the night before and the sounds that had come from that room, and he felt both embarrassed and aroused at the same time. This had to be the same woman whose voice he had heard so clearly. It was too early for her to have checked out and a new guest to have arrived.

“Good morning,” she said, raising a coffee mug in a toast to him.

Her smile was brilliant. His throat went dry just looking at her—five feet nine or ten, lean and limber like those Olympic volleyball girls, long blond hair back in a ponytail, bright blue eyes—and the pictures he had painted in his mind of last night’s acrobatics became that much more vivid. She wore a black and gold bikini that nearly gave him a heart attack.

“Morning,” he said, wondering if she would notice the flush in his cheeks—was he actually blushing? God, he felt awkward.

He forced himself back to his book, desperate to look at anything but her. The words blurred on the page. The balconies were open-post style, and he had gotten a fantastic look at her stunning legs.

Just read, he thought, trying to focus. Should he get up and go into his room, or would that be even more awkward?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Am I disturbing you?”

God, he thought, you have no idea.

“Not at all. Just enjoying the morning.”

“I know what you mean,” she replied, sinking into a chair and stretching her legs out, propping her feet up on the railing of her balcony. “I don’t have to be anywhere until after lunch and wanted to get a little sun while I have some downtime. It’s quiet out here this morning.”

She stretched out to maximize her body’s exposure to the sun and, consequently, to Tim as well. He held his place in the book with one finger and turned to smile politely at her.

“It’s a weekday. People are off at business meetings, I guess.”

She shielded her eyes from the sun to look at him. Her lips were full and red and perfect. “No meetings for you?”

“Fortunately not.”

He shifted uneasily, not sure he wanted to have this conversation but also not wanting to be rude. And God, she was beautiful. The sounds from the previous night returned as he stared at her, and he could not help imagining those lips saying those things, pleading, moaning, and then . . . You can put it anywhere you want. Shit, he’d almost forgotten about that, and now that he’d remembered he could barely even pay attention to what she was saying.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What was that?”

She smiled, a sparkle of mischief in her eyes, as if she knew exactly what had distracted him.

“I asked what brought you to Santa Monica, if not business.”

Tim ran though possible answers in his mind, but they all came down to a choice between lying and telling the truth, and he had given up lying years before. He and Jenny had been going through a rough patch, distance growing between them because he had been traveling for work so often, and he had been unfaithful. It had nearly ruined his life, nearly destroyed their life together when he confessed to her, but they had gotten through it. He had vowed that he would never stray again, but it had taken years before she actually seemed to believe him. Forgiving him, though, was something else. She had said she did, but he had always wondered, and wondered even still.

“Honestly, it’s sort of a sad story for such a beautiful morning,” he said. “What about you?”

She cocked her head curiously, maybe intrigued by the tragic air about him. Tim had seen it before. Maybe someday he would take advantage of the way some women reacted to sad stories, but he had not yet reached a place where he could do that.

“Just sightseeing. A little California dreaming, you know? Started in Napa and made my way down with . . . Well, Kirk’s no longer with me.”

So his name had been Kirk.

“Kirk?”

She arched her eyebrow suggestively. “I guess I was a little too much for him.”

Tim could have taken that any number of ways, but the eyebrow made it clear what she meant. In his mind he could practically hear Kirk’s voice even now, calling her every filthy thing he could think of. When he had imagined the woman on the receiving end of those words, she had been nothing like this lovely creature on the balcony. As beautiful as she was, she seemed sweet, even charming.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tim said.

“It’s a morning for sad stories, I guess,” she said. “My name is Diana, by the way.”

“Tim,” he said.

“Sorry if we kept you up last night, Tim.”

He grinned, feeling himself flush even more deeply, and glanced away. If he had seen the comment coming, he could have prepared, pretended to have slept through it all, but her directness had sneaked up on him.

“Nah, it’s fine. I mean, not for long—”

Diana pouted. “I think I might be insulted.”

“—no, no, that came out wrong,” he stammered. Then he laughed at his own embarrassment. “I’m a pretty sound sleeper. And who hasn’t been on the other side of thin walls at least once, right?”

Her eyes seemed to dance with merriment. “Exactly. That’s so true.”

She sat up to take a sip of her coffee, her breasts straining against the thin fabric of her bikini top, a single strand of her blond hair—loose from the ponytail—hanging across her face.

“So, are you going to tell me why you’re in Santa Monica?”

Her boldness impressed and entranced him. As he thought about it, he could see this woman being the honest, passionate, carnal lover whose voice he had heard through the wall the night before. Yet Diana had many facets, and he saw one of them now, as a kind of sorrow filled her eyes.

“I don’t mind sad stories. I’ve got a whole catalog of them myself. Go ahead. I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

Something in that last line made him wonder if she had said it to tease him, but he might have imagined it, added a pouty, sexy insouciance to it that was really only an echo of the night before.

“You might think it’s a little strange,” he ventured.

Diana turned her chair slightly, basking in the sun even as she transformed their two balconies into a strangely intimate confessional.

“I like strange.”

Tim thought about Kirk, the idiot who had apparently left this woman after a night like they’d shared last night. What kind of fool must he be?

“All right,” Tim said. He turned down the page in his book and laid it across his chest, staring out at the ocean for a moment before returning his focus to Diana’s curious gaze. “I’m on a kind of tour, I guess. I’ve been to New Orleans and Montreal and to Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod. I even went down to this little village on the Gulf of Mexico. They’re all places that were important to my wife, Jenny, and me during the years we had together.”

The kindness in Diana’s eyes broke his heart all over again. “She’s gone?”

“Just over a year ago. Pancreatic cancer. It was agony for her, so it was probably good that she went quickly, but I didn’t have time, you know? No time to get used to the idea of life without her. It’s taken me this long to accept that I’ve got to live my life. I know she’d have wanted that for me. I’m only thirty-seven. There are a lot of days ahead, if I’m lucky. So I’m on vacation, but it’s also kind of our farewell tour.”

“Wow,” Diana whispered, almost wistful. “That may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. You’re, like, the perfect husband.”

A familiar guilt filled him. It had grown like rust on his heart over the years. After he had betrayed Jenny, he had spent every day trying to make it up to her. He doubted he would ever have been able to, really, no matter how much time they had been given together. But he had wanted more time to try.

“Far from perfect,” Tim said, staring out at the Pacific.

“No, you’re a good guy. I can sense those things,” Diana said. “And you’re lucky, too.”

He frowned. “Lucky?”

The mischief returned to her eyes, and she stood, adjusting the strap of her bikini top.

“You said you were a sound sleeper,” she reminded him. With one hand on the handle of the slider, ready to go inside, she glanced over her shoulder at him in a pose so sexy it was painful to behold. “I always have trouble falling asleep. I need someone to tire me out. The only way I can really sleep well is if I’m so exhausted that I’m a quivering mass of jelly. And with Kirk gone . . .”

Diana glanced away, almost shyly, before looking back at him with renewed boldness. “I don’t know what I’ll do tonight.”

Tim could not speak. He dared not move for fear that she would notice the effect she had had on him, if she hadn’t already.

Obviously pleased by his speechlessness, Diana opened the sliding door into her room. “Enjoy your day, Timothy.”

He managed to croak, “You, too,” before her door slid shut.

Shaking his head in amazement, he went back to his book, the erection Diana had caused—the second in a very short time—slowly subsiding. After a few minutes he realized that his thoughts were straying and he had not understood a word he’d read, and he laughed softly at himself. Had that really been an invitation? Did she mean it?

Not that it mattered. As arousing as it was just being in the presence of this woman, Tim knew that any sexual trysts were still in the future for him. In another life he would have climbed mountains for an opportunity to sleep with a woman like Diana, and he knew that he would remember what he had overheard last night for years, maybe forever. Maybe someday he would even regret being faithful to a woman who was now only a memory, but this trip was about him and Jenny, and he would honor that, no matter what. He wanted to start a new life, but not quite yet.

He laughed again, thinking of Jenny. If she were alive for him to tell her the tale, she would have mocked him with love but without mercy. Men, she had often said, were pitifully simple and predictable creatures. Pavlov had used dogs to test his theories about programmed responses, but all he would have had to do was put a man in a room with Diana, and there would have been no need to experiment further.

This final stop on his farewell tour was by far the strangest.

How Jenny would have teased him. God, he missed her.

THE phone woke him. In the darkness he searched for it, fingers scrabbling on the nightstand, and only managed to find it when it rang a second time. As he pressed the receiver to his ear, he saw the faint glow of the alarm clock.

Twelve seventeen A.M. After midnight. Who the hell . . .

“Hello?” he said, voice full of gravel.

“I can’t sleep,” she whispered.

It took him a moment, and when the pieces clicked together, his breath caught in his throat.

“Diana?”

“Hey,” she said in a sleepy voice.

Tim had come back to the hotel around eight P.M. and eaten a late dinner alone in the restaurant downstairs. Afterward he had held his breath walking past her room, heart racing. Their conversation on the balcony that morning had stayed with him all day, and he had caught himself fantasizing about her, wondering if her thinly veiled invitation for tonight had been more than just flirting.

It hurt his heart. This whole strange vacation had been meant to be about Jenny, and his not being able to get Diana out of his mind seemed a dark stain on pure intentions. But, Christ, he was only human.

“Did you have a nice day?” she asked, when he didn’t reply.

“Yeah. I guess. Do you . . . do you know what time it is?”

Even her laugh had that soft, sleepy intimacy about it.

“I do. I’m sorry. I told you I have trouble falling asleep.”

They both let that hang in the air for a bit. Lying in bed in the dark, hearing her voice in his ear, Tim found his memory of the previous night returning with perfect clarity. He could practically hear the thump of the headboard against the wall behind his head, and now that he knew what she looked like, the images in his mind were more than imagination.

“Listen, Diana, I enjoyed talking to you this morning—”

“Can I come over there?”

Tim squeezed his eyes shut. How come this couldn’t have happened to him before he met Jenny, or sometime in the future? Six months—hell, one month—from now, maybe his mind would have been in a different place.

“I’m sorry, I just . . .”

You can put it anywhere you want.

Holy God, how was he supposed to handle this? His heart slammed in his chest. His face felt flushed, and once again this woman had given him a painful erection, this time with nothing but a whisper. He felt like a fool for having so little control of his body.

“Tim, hush,” she said. “Think about this. You’re trying to forget, right? I can give you that. We can help each other. I can make you forget, and you can help me get to sleep.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“But it is.” She laughed that sweet, soft laugh again. “Honey, trust me, I’ll make you forget your own name.”

There in the dark, he felt himself grin. “I have no doubt you would. And you have no idea how tempting it is—or, actually, you probably do. But this isn’t about forgetting Jenny . . . I never want to forget her. It’s about making peace with the fact that she’s gone, and . . .”

He trailed off. The rest was too personal. He didn’t know Diana.

“And?” she whispered.

Tim took a breath and turned onto his side, phone pressed between his cheek and the pillow.

“I betrayed her once. This would feel too much like doing that again.”

“She’s been dead over a year, you said.”

“Not to me. I need to finish saying good-bye. Whatever life has in store for me after, I’ll embrace it, but not here. This place was part of us.”

“Please?” she said in a little-girl sort of voice. “I can’t sleep.”

His words dried up in his throat as the reality of the conversation struck him hard. Please, she’d said, and now that he reminded himself what she was pleading for, what she wanted from him, he could barely think. It could be the night of his life.

But he would never be able to enjoy the memory of it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Good night, Diana.”

As he reached out to return the phone to its cradle, his hand hesitated involuntarily for just a moment. But if she said anything more, he did not hear it. He hung up and laid his head back down with a mixture of relief and regret.

His arousal subsided and a peaceful sort of contentment filled him. Though he half expected the phone to ring, it did not. He closed his eyes and burrowed down into the bed. Sleep had fled, but only for a while, and soon enough it began to envelop him again.

“Tim.”

He came half awake, lost somewhere in a dream.

“Tim.”

Now he blinked and opened his eyes. In the darkness he reached out to search the rest of the huge hotel bed to make absolutely certain he was alone there. She sounded so close.

“Are you awake?”

She wasn’t in the room; her voice came through the thin wall, a lover’s whisper, though she must have been speaking up in order for him to hear her.

He considered replying but then thought better of it.

“Think of something you’ve always wanted to do but never dared to ask of a woman,” she said. “You don’t have to ask me. You could do whatever you want, and I won’t stop you. I won’t say no. Better than that, I’ll ask for more.”

Scenarios played out in his mind instantly, and once again she had him captivated.

“Please,” she said. “I need you.”

She began to tell him in great detail every little thing she would be willing to do, and have done to her, and how much she would enjoy it. How she would moan, even scream.

Then, at last, when he did not reply, she sighed.

“All right. I’ll just have to call room service. But you’re to blame for what happens.”

You’re to blame? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Tim pulled a pillow over his head to block out her voice, but it seemed she had surrendered at last. Yet still her promises echoed inside his head. He lay curled on his side, unable to make his erection go away, unable to deny his arousal, and yet filled with more sorrow and missing Jenny more than he had since the day he had lost her.

At some point he drifted off, temptation still burning in him.

A sharp rap at the door snapped him awake. His eyes burned and his head felt full of cotton. What little sleep he’d had tonight had been shallow and restless. In the blackness of the room he threw back the covers and started to climb out of bed.

Gotta be her. Crazy woman, Tim thought. I’ve got myself a stalker.

“Who is it?” Diana called.

Tim froze, brow furrowed. Had the knock been at his door or at hers? With the walls so thin, it was difficult to know.

A muffled voice replied. He heard Diana unlocking her door and, out of curiosity, pressed his ear to the wall again. The rattle of a room service cart was followed by a murmur of voices. Tim fancied he could smell food—a burger, maybe?

He glanced at the nightstand. In the pitch dark of his room he could barely make out the glow of the alarm clock, which he’d turned away from him. Now he felt his way onto the bed and crawled over to it, turning the clock around to read the time.

Room service at two thirteen A.M.? Did this hotel even have twenty-four-hour room service? Or had Diana persuaded someone to break the rules for her? Tim had a feeling Diana had spent her entire life tempting and cajoling and getting exactly the result she desired.

A spark of irritation ignited within him. Though he felt a now-familiar stirring at the thought of her, his frustration at this long night of broken sleep trumped any lingering arousal.

From next door he heard the sound of a door closing, and he assumed the room service guy had left. But a moment later the murmur of voices began again, both hers and a man’s, and then they moved nearer and he heard the creak of weight upon the bed.

“Trust me,” he heard Diana say, “this is going to be the best tip you’ve ever gotten.”

Tim couldn’t help himself. He laughed softly, falling back onto the bed. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

But he should not have been surprised. Diana had told him that if he wouldn’t come over and have sex with her, she would call room service. He supposed things like this must happen fairly often in the real world, but to him it seemed like something out of the Penthouse letters page or some porn film.

Already the noises had begun. How fast had she stripped the guy? Tim lay there staring at the ceiling in the dark and listened to the grunts and moans quickening. Diana urged the room service delivery guy in words almost identical to those she had used with her lover of the previous night. Tim began to get an erection, and he felt a ripple of anger at himself. Tired and frayed and amused, he should not find any of this arousing, but he could not help himself. Men were pitifully predictable creatures.

Not so predictable, he thought. You didn’t go over there.

But he knew that meant little. Under other circumstances, he would have jumped at the chance to be with a woman like Diana and been just as grateful as, no doubt, the room service guy felt at that very moment.

The noises in the next room reached an initial crescendo, with Diana crying out in a throaty, shuddery orgasm followed almost immediately by the groan of a man stunned by his own good fortune. If last night was any indication, though, Diana would not let it go at that. As soon as the guy had a few minutes’ rest . . .

The groan had not stopped. The man’s voice began to rise and fall, perhaps with each spasm of his own orgasm. It sounded like he was still coming, like she had brought him to the height of ecstasy and somehow managed to keep him there. The guy cried out to God, but even those words were barely more than grunts.

The headboard slammed the wall in quick rhythm, punctuating each spasm. Diana talked to him, urged him on, and Tim wondered what kind of woman this was, what tantric magic she had that could keep a man locked in ecstasy, and suddenly he knew that although he would always know he had done the right thing, he would also forever regret not having felt what the lucky son of a bitch next door was feeling in that moment.

And then the room service guy began to cry.

In the midst of his climactic groaning, he sobbed and began to say “please” every few seconds. The tone alone told Tim that the man wanted it to end. That he had had enough.

Diana laughed.

“Come on, baby,” she said. “Fuck me harder.”

Then it was her turn to moan, sounding the way some lovers did when they were locked in a deep kiss, or during oral sex. Tim’s erection had returned full force even as he listened with growing unease. The room service guy’s cries sounded full of pain now, even fear.

Tim reached out and turned on the light. Sitting up in bed, he stared at the wall, trying to decide what exactly he was hearing.

You’re to blame for what happens, Diana had said.

But what, exactly, was happening? This did not sound like sex anymore, not like ecstasy. And now that he thought about it, some of the groans the previous night had sounded full of pain to him as well. What the hell was the woman doing to this guy?

He picked up the phone and reached out to punch the button for the front desk, but hesitated. What the hell would he say? Instead, he put the phone back in its cradle and climbed from the bed. Tugging on the pants he had worn that day, he ran the whole thing over in his mind. He could bang on the wall or go out into the hall and knock on the door, but if he was wrong . . . if this was just extraordinary sex or some S&M thing he was too naïve to understand, he would feel foolish. And to Diana he would appear jealous and full of regret, and he did not want to give her that satisfaction.

Diana’s muffled moaning grew louder. The headboard kept banging, although if he was correct the rhythm seemed to have slowed. But in the midst of the man’s groaning, Tim felt certain now that he heard sobs and weeping.

That’s not pleasure.

Fully awake now, he went to the slider, unlocked it, and drew it open as quietly as possible. Hesitating only a moment, he went to the railing that separated his balcony from Diana’s and carefully threw his leg over, settling his weight on the railing a moment in order to shift his weight from one balcony to the next.

You’ll be arrested, he thought. Peeping Tom. Pervert. She’ll think you just wanted to see.

But such reservations did not stop him. Something was wrong. He could feel it in the rising of the small hairs on the back of his neck and the icy dread that raced through him as he crept across Diana’s balcony.

Her slider was open halfway. The crash of the surf on Santa Monica Beach, just behind him, covered any noise his bare feet might have made. He paused just outside the slider, hidden from within by the curtain hanging on the other side of the glass. But where the slider was open, the curtain had been drawn back to let moonlight into the room. Tim took a deep breath and held it, then carefully leaned in so that he could get a glimpse into the room.

Diana knelt astride an olive-skinned man, rocking herself back and forth on him, riding him hard enough to keep the headboard slamming the wall. The sensual curves of her body in the interplay between moonlight and shadows made Tim catch his breath. But then he noticed the way the man’s body bucked beneath her, the way his hips seemed to come up off the bed with her, not as if he were thrusting into her but as though with each motion she dragged him up with her, as though her sex had clamped onto him and tugged again and again, milking him, attached in some unfathomable way.

So entranced was he by the strangeness of that, and by the swaying of breasts, that at first he did not notice the strange wrongness of the shadows around her face. The man continued to cry out, his eyes rolled back to the whites, his cheeks looking sunken—Jesus, he looked sickly, how old was this guy? Diana had her mouth against his chest and at first Tim thought she must be licking his nipples or his skin, but then Diana shifted in the moonlight, drew her head back a bit, and Tim’s heart seized in his chest.

His mind tried to make sense of what he saw. He stared, breathless, as denial tried to fight back the horror and disgust and fear that filled him. Chills rippled across his body and his stomach churned. Bile roared up the back of his throat, and he had to force himself not to vomit.

Diana’s mouth was distended, stretched into a pale, blue-veined funnel attached to the man’s chest, right above his heart. Her lips trembled with a quiet suction, the skin around them glistening wetly, but he could hardly tear his eyes away from the disgusting proboscis that her face had become.

The man’s cheeks were streaked with tears.

As Tim watched in mounting horror, the other man’s face seemed to become thinner. His entire body had begun to wrinkle, even to wither, and Tim wondered what he had looked like before he had crawled into that bed. Kirk’s no longer with me, Diana had said of her previous night’s lover. So where the hell was Kirk now?

The room service guy’s head tossed to one side, and for just a second, his eyes were on Tim. That was enough.

He swept the screen open and burst into the room. Diana glanced up but did not slow the thrust of her hips, the slam of the headboard, the suction of her hideous mouth.

“Get off him!” Tim shouted.

He grabbed her with both hands, gripped her upper arms from behind, and used his momentum to drag her off the bed, straining with the effort. Too heavy. What the . . .

As Diana flopped to the carpet, Tim watched the room service guy dragged along with her, her pussy and that grotesque, distended mouth suctioned to his flesh. Her hips continued to piston onto him and he kept groaning, but his voice had become weaker now and his skin had begun to turn a hideous coal gray. Smoke rose from his open mouth, as if he were on fire inside.

“Jesus!” Tim cried. He wanted to bolt from the room, to pretend he’d never seen this thing, but he knew he would never erase it from his mind.

He reached down and tried to separate them, but Diana flailed at him, fingernails dragging furrows in his neck. She and her prey were on their sides on the carpet. The stretched funnel of her mouth still adhered to his chest, but now Tim saw the lips crawling caterpillar-like, trying to keep hold of the flesh.

“No. No way,” he said.

Clutching at his bleeding neck, he stomped a bare foot onto that thin, pale flesh. Her mouth came free with a pop and he saw a black tongue, needle-thin and long—so long—slip from the man’s chest before she sucked it back between her lips and spun on Tim.

“What the hell are you?” Tim rasped.

Diana hissed, tore herself from the man, and leaped up at Tim. She attacked with her fingers hooked into claws, and now panic raced like poison through his veins. What the hell had he done? Why had he intervened? He grabbed her by the wrists, but she was strong. She spun him around and slammed him into the wall, and that long mouth thrust at him, long black tongue darting out, and now Tim saw that it had a glistening stinger on the tip. He shoved her backward, clenched his fist, and struck her in the temple. He punched her again and again, drove her against the mirrored closet door, which shattered into hundreds of shards that cut their feet as they grappled.

Tim caught only a glimpse of the room service guy out of the corner of his eye before the guy smashed him in the head with the telephone. He spun backward and crashed into the wall, sliding to the carpet even as blood trickled down into his right eye and pain clutched viselike at his skull. Darkness danced around the edges of his vision, and for several seconds he blacked out.

He opened his eyes again to the room service guy’s voice. Full of desperation, pitiful and withered, half the life already leeched from him, the poor bastard’s cock was still hard.

“Please. Finish,” he pleaded.

The hideously disfigured mouth on the creature Tim knew as Diana twitched, then smiled. She reached out and took the lost soul’s hand and led him back to bed, mounting him again, reattaching her lamprey mouth to his heart and her sex to his.

Amid the tortured music of the headboard and their moans, Tim managed to stagger to his bloodied feet. He nearly tripped over the guy’s uniform as he shoved the room service cart out of the way. Through the wreckage of the closet door he saw a body laid out on the floor inside. The shriveled thing between its legs had once been a penis. The skin was like shrunken leather, split in several places to reveal dry pink meat inside, and the cheeks had torn badly enough to show bone. It looked as though all of the moisture had been sucked out of him, along with all of his youth and vigor, and his life.

Kirk. And now this guy.

Tim had tried. Whatever Diana had done to Kirk, and who knew how many guys before him, she was now doing to the room service guy, and like some kind of junkie, he needed it now, needed her to finish the job. The hook was in deep. The things that made him him had already been taken away.

Kirk’s no longer with me.

I guess I was a little too much for him.

Tim opened the door and staggered out of the room and down the corridor on bloodied feet. He banged the elevator call button and then ran on to the stairwell door and slammed it open. Ever since Jenny’s death, the people who loved him had told him that she would be watching over him. He had never quite believed it—she had gone from this world, a wall thrown up between them—but after this night he was not so sure. It seemed that even those walls could be thin at times.

As he raced down the steps to the lobby, he wondered again if Jenny had ever forgiven him for what he had done. Yet for the first time, it was an idle curiosity. He had loved her as well as he was able and knew she had loved him in return, but she was gone now and would never be able to give him the forgiveness he sought. He would have to claim it for himself. And he would. Tim had done his penance.

Tonight most of all.