The Pulp Fiction Megapack. John Wallace
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to a corner of the room.
The thing dangling from the chains was no longer a woman. Its skin had been replaced by a mantle of smoldering scar tissue. The head hung forward with long hair cascading over fattened chest where breasts had been. Nausea churned in all of us.
I glanced across at Helen and saw that she had mercifully fainted. So had two of the other women, but they were not permitted that method of escape. One of the servants threw water on them, reviving them.
What now? What new hellishness would the degenerate mind of that she-fiend conceive? Would she serve Helen and the other women the same way as she had Portia Teele? God!
There was a sudden silence as Tala Mag started to speak. Even the women ceased moaning, for it was plain that she was to announce the fate of the rest of us. She stood next to that dangling horror, and she was tall and beautiful in that blue. evening gown that revealed more of her golden-skinned body than no clothes at all would have.
“You have seen how this foolish woman suffered,” she said. “You realize that at a word from me each of the other five women will share her experience and worse.” A cry went up from our wives. Tala Mag lifted a hand and continued: “But I am magnanimous. I shall spare you on one condition—that you follow to the letter every command I utter. If you refuse—” She waved significantly to the dangling corpse.
We all held our breaths, knowing that whatever she would propose would be more fiendish than what had been done to Portia Teele, yet daring to hope that somehow what passed for her heart had been softened.
“Clara Cuyler, come to the center of the room,” Tala Mag ordered.
As if in a dream, Clara rose and moved away from the group of women. Her face was ugly with fear.
“Remove your clothing.”
“No!” Clara screeched. “Please!”
“You will follow my order without protest.” Clara glanced at the hideous corpse and began frantically to undress. Clara had been selected first because she had been longest under the domination of Tala Mag and feared her most. Her husband sobbed like a child. When she was utterly nude, she was allowed to return to the other women. I saw now the cruel whip marks which crisscrossed her white skin.
“Helen Marlin,” Tala Mag called. “Come here and strip.”
I ground my teeth with helplessness. One by one she would make each woman undress before her four servants and four other strangers while the woman’s husband was forced to look on. And that would be only the beginning.
* * * *
The modesty in Helen’s nature dominated the fear which must have gibbered within her. She stood up, straight and proud and defiant, but did not come forward.
“I refuse,” my wife declared firmly.
Tala laughed with glee. “The same stubborn streak as your husband, I see. Well, it will be all the more fun breaking you. You realize that you will be stripped anyway—not only of your clothing but of your skin as well.… Clops, the brazier. Emil, put her in the chains.”
Helen chewed on her knuckles as she saw Clops start wheeling the brazier from its corner and Emil advancing toward her. A whimper trickled from her throat, rising higher and higher. As for me, I was shouting something, but I cannot remember what it was. Perhaps I was cursing Tala Mag; perhaps urging Helen to give in rather than suffer the inevitable torment of fire.
When Emil actually had his hands on her and was dragging her forward, Helen cracked. The memory of what Portia Teele had endured was still too vivid in her mind to make resistance possible.
“I’ll do it!” she cried. “Please tell him to let me go.”
God, if I could have strangled Tala Mag then and there for the smug smile on her lips as she told Emil to release my wife! The giant stepped away and Helen was left alone on the floor with all eyes in the room on her.
Slowly, as if her hands were obeying a will divorced from her own, Helen pulled down the zipper in the side of her dress and drew the dress over her head. It fluttered to the floor. Momentarily she hesitated as she stood clad only in strips of silk about hips and breasts; then her hands went behind her back to the snaps of her brassiere. She removed it and it followed her dress to the floor and, her entire body suffused with pink, she cupped her palms over her splendid bared breasts.
“Continue,” Tala Mag said.
Helen tugged at the elastic of her step-ins, changed her mind and kicked off her shoes instead. Bending over, she rolled down her stockings and straightened up again, her arms once more coming up to cover her breasts. Choking whimpers of shame came from her lips.
The four mighty servants of Tala Mag had carnal eyes fixed on my wife and their ugly features were slack with degenerate lust. And even the husbands of the four other women became suddenly quiet as they stared avidly at her.
“I said strip completely,” Tala Mag rasped. And so Helen had to remove the last wisp of silk from her hips, and that too joined the rest of her garments. Completely naked she stood there, while four sub-human creatures and four other men feasted their eyes on her loveliness which had never before been exposed to any man’s gaze but mine. She was truly magnificent as she stood there, with pride returning to her; and she faced Tala Mag defiantly, knowing that however beautiful Tala Mag might be, it faded before the beauty of her own body. And Tala Mag knew that also and venom twisted her face.
“You may return,” Tala Mag ordered savagely. “Next, Lillian Bord.”
One by one the three remaining women came to the center of the room and, thoroughly cowered, removed their clothing. When they were all naked, Tala Mag looked the crouching women over coldly and said:
“Before the night is over, one of you five will endure the same fate as Portia Teele. Which one that will be depends on your husbands.”
* * * *
The women were wailing again, their eyes drawn against their wills to where the thing that had been Portia Teele still hung from the chains. Which one was it to be? She had said that it depended on us men. Would she make us draw lots? No, her diabolical brain would think of something infinitely more horrible.
Tala Mag turned to us. “We shall have a hunt,” she said with that completely dissolute smile of hers. “It will be great fun, I promise you. You men will be the hunters, your wives the hunted. The women will be let loose in the grounds, and then you men will be given guns. Not real guns, of course, shooting lead bullets; they will contain tiny pellets which will dissolve when striking the naked skin, leaving a blue mark. The game will last for two hours. At the end of that time you will all be rounded up and the blue marks on the bodies of the women will be counted, and she who has been hit the most times will be handed over to Clops for the caress of his hot irons.”
We gaped at her, finding it hard to understand that even this woman could have conceived of anything so diabolical.
“It will be a fascinating game,” she went on. “Those of you who win, and there will be only one loser, will be permitted to depart unharmed.”
“We won’t do it!” Victor Rooney shouted. “You can’t make us!”
Tala Mag shrugged. “That is entirely up to you. You are all completely in my power, yet I am making a magnanimous gesture by promising freedom to all five of you men and four of the women. If all of you prefer to die unpleasantly instead, very well. But I think that you will all play the game with no further protest.”
What could we do? It was all our lives or the life of only one. We had no choice.
“As in all games, there are rules in this one,” Tala Mag said. “You women, you hunted, will use all your skill, all your ingenuity, out there in the grounds to avoid being shot by the hunters. Not for a moment will you forget the terrible price you will have to pay if you are shot more times than the others. And you men, you will do your best to shoot and hit any woman but your wife, because the more times the others are hit, the