Chapter 13: "The Locket"

"Mr Pendrill. I want to play a game."

"A game?"

"That's right. A game. If you succeed, everything you desire will be yours. If you fail, you return to your early morning duties and you lose out on the fantastic opportunity that I've been offering you. It's that simple. This is the big one and it's for SJ6: the department, the whole caboodle. It's all or nothing. Do you understand, Mr. Pendrill?"

Howard swallowed hard, and he straightened and stiffened his back. "Yes," he asserted cautiously, confused: still studying Cecily's nipples and wondering how they could have swollen to such an enormous size. They were turgid and bulbous and still growing.

Was it because they'd been transplanted from that Egyptian woman - an incompatibility, perhaps, in the DNA - or was it for an entirely separate reason?

Howard braced himself for this new game that Cecily was proposing, without knowing what it was about or what he was anticipating.

"Do you see the locket around my neck?" Cecily asked him.

Howard did, and it was nothing special. It was a locket, and it lay static and stationary, a long gold chain weaving its limp, circuitous path from Cecily's throat to her chest and thence into the deep cleft between her breasts. It lay ordinary, oval shaped, with a filigree motif attached to the front and a tiny clasp to the side - a common type of ornament worn by a great many women.

Howard nodded tentatively, content to admire Cecily's chest and those black, swollen teats as he looked at the locket.

"Inside is a picture of a young woman," Cecily told him. "But who is it, I wonder? Is she my sister, or perhaps my mother when young. That's the question I need you to answer, Mr. Pendrill. You have thirty minutes to discover the truth and to give me a name. That's all that I need from you: a name. It's straightforward, uncomplicated and the clock is now ticking. Unless you give me the young lady's name, I must drop you from the program and you will kiss goodbye to a life in the Special Forces. You won't be my conjugal, and you won't be allowed to summon me to one of our country's most elaborate torture chambers. In fact, you won't even see me again. Everything will be gone, vaporized in a puff of black smoke. On the other hand, Mr. Pendrill, if you succeed, I promise to choose you as my partner and you, Lucy and I will be happy in our various ways. Mr. Pendrill? Do you understand me?"

Howard nodded cautiously, for he could hear Lucy's pitiful screams from somewhere in the courtyard outside, and his head was running with imponderable questions - big ones, little ones, old and new ones, known and unanswerable - every conceivable type.

Was Lucy really being stripped out there? Were her clothes really being systematically removed by soldiers intent on enjoying her body? Or did her screams have another unidentified cause? Howard wanted to check, but Cecily's black teats were like a curse that he couldn't escape from, and they were drawing him closer.

Closer.

In his head he imagined himself, and Cecily, and Lucy living together in a plush, third floor apartment near the centre of town. He would fraternize with Cecily in the bedroom, and Lucy would be his Cinderella. She'd be naked apart from a pink, PVC apron that she'd fasten about her waist. She'd be wearing her hair tied in pig tails and she'd care for the house while Howard was out on assignment. She'd dust, Hoover, and make beds, and when visitors came calling, she'd open the door to them, her breasts exposed, and she'd offer them the hospitality of her pussy.

"Thirty minutes," Cecily said, nodding towards a pocket watch that she'd set on the table. "Thirty minutes. Not a minute more. Do you understand, Mr. Pendrill."

She stood calmly with the locket hanging around her neck, the ropes pinching her skin and numbing her circulation. And from outside, Howard's ears became full of another woman's screams.