After that protracted descent, Herbert’s eyes had adjusted to dim
light; even so, it took him some time to acclimate to the large, dark
cavern. Beyond the rigidly symmetrical working of the fire door jamb,
the floor was a smooth, slightly uneven plane of rock. All around the
room were small stalactites and mineral deposits bulging on the walls in
places. The ceiling was too high and too dark to readily perceive,
beyond the reach of the colored lamps that stood on thin brass stilts at
intervals about the area. He heard the trickle of running water but
couldn’t pick out its source. As he stepped into the room, shapes
coalesced and defined themselves: stuffed Victorian chairs here, a
bookcase and circular walnut end table there, and a broad, heavy Persian
rug commanding most of the floor, larger than he’d ever seen before.
Come to that, upon this rug reclined a vast and mighty woman, as long
as the rug and nearly filling the room. She was draped in yards and
yards of satin, as elegant as finest brocade and voluminous as a surplus
parachute. It only partially covered a woman who resembled Rodin’s
masterwork, the result of a three-year sabbatical fueled by unlimited
patronage and untrammeled arousal. Curves no mind could frame, milky
hues and porcelain textures that defied perception and
invited—demanded!—caressing, exploring, tasting. Beneath her dress, the
titaness’s skin glowed in answer to all the colored lamps, casting a dim
light of their own. Her long, long legs stretched on forever, potent
muscle caked in delicate flesh, ineffably demure in their subtle pose.
Subtle! What about this colossus could be subtle? She was gigantic, she
was immense; she filled the room with her mass and commanded attention
with her… her… je ne sais quoi, animal chemistry, the imperceptible and unmeasurable charm that gave people irresistible command over legions.
Her eyes glowed in the darkness, it seemed to Herbert, and when they
slowly rolled toward him, his body shocked with the urge to scramble
away and hide behind a loveseat. This figure spoke to his basal self as a
large predator, overwhelming, against which he had no defense. To be in
the same room with her, to stand this far away and witness her potence,
that was more than enough. It was too much! Her chest swelled with her
breath, and he believed he could feel the entire room drawing in toward
her, and himself with it. He glanced at his feet, checking his
unsteadiness against what his body was actually doing. And she looked at
him, and he wanted to flee, and all this fought with the screaming,
searing urge that she was everything he had ever dreamed of.
Herbert craved her; he feared her. He wanted to throw himself into
her arms and sob unrestrainedly; he wanted to knock the steward on his
ass and charge up the stairs, maybe burn the house, no, the whole
neighborhood down. None of this made sense, none of it: not the fact of
her dimensions, not the scope of his yearning, his starvation for her.
How could he want something that existed beyond his comprehension? His
legs were weak, alarm prickled in his armpits, and his chest frosted
over in panic. What should he do? What was he supposed to do? She was
looking right at him! What was he supposed to do?!
He wheeled to face the steward. That was a composed man, a man’s man,
someone who stared bravely into every inky unknown and acted with
conviction. He’d know what to do.
What he was doing was hauling the fire door closed again. Herbert
only barely contained the temerity to remain standing: charging after
this old traitor was well beyond his capability. He could not even croak
out a cry as the heavy steel door fitted with incontrovertible solidity
into place; distantly, heavy pistons and bolts rolled into position,
placing punctuation after punctuation at the end of Herbert’s sentence.
“Good evening, Herbert.” Her voice resounded throughout the cavern, knocking him to his knees. She said his name Air-Bear,
in a halting French accent. French; a French titaness, lounging on a
priceless Persian rug in a louche cavern under the most expensive,
private section of his city. He wanted to laugh at the extravagance of
it, every aspect of it, until his throat bled from hilarity. Yet there
he knelt, clutching his thinning hair, shamed in the light of his
eternal goddess now manifest, only now remembering to breathe.
He tried to turn but collapsed upon the damp rock, gasping without a
shred of elegance or composure. “Herbert? Can you hear me?” Oh God, oh
God, his goddess was calling to him, she knew his name, how could she
know his name except everyone in this opulent bloc seemed to know his
name. What should he do? What should he do?
Slowly he pushed himself up to lean upon one hip; in ungainly fashion
he twisted himself around to try to face the living goddess once more,
but the simple physics of his body resisted him. The dim pang of
impatience was his salvation, then, as he kicked his legs out straight,
bent them to heave his body upright, and finally stood shakily before
the immense creature of incalculable sensual depth.
“It is pleasant to meet you at last, Herbert,” the monstress said.
For all her charms, Herbert’s basal self knew that she was an aberration
of nature, most likely an apex predator, and that charming man’s man
just sealed him up with this gorgeous, horrifying beast. “You are, erm,
smaller than I anticipated, but you are much more silent as well.” She
arched an eyebrow the size of his arm. “Is it that you have nothing to
say to me?”
He wanted to laugh at her, brayingly, mockingly. What place did a
wretched little mortal like himself have to utter anything in the
presence of this awful divinity? Should she not smite him at the
sounding of his first miserable syllable? Ah, but was he not already
smitten…
In for a penny, he thought with characteristic understatement. “The
pleasure is all mine, goddess,” he said, and his voice was even thinner
and weaker as it bounced off the glossy mineral walls. Should he bow? He
tried bowing, one foot crossed before the other; one arm folding his
abdomen in half, the other flung away aping élan. And why not? If he was
going to die here, now, with her, at her hands, then why not just
fucking go balls out and play the game as well as he could.
Breath roared in her chest. The titaness closed her eyes slowly,
opened them, like an affectionate cat does. Not a finger twitched
unduly: in this realm, everything belonged to the giantess and nothing
occurred without her approval. She had all the time in the world, and
everything Herbert thought was his, was in fact… “You are a nice little
gentleman, aren’t you.” Her voice was loud yet soft, resonant and
musical without being overbearing. When she spoke, it was an orchestra
that came at him from all sides. He could feel her voice tingling in his
pubic hairs; promptly he chastened himself for such a filthy, demeaning
thought, then realized his cock was aggressively hard. He folded his
hands before his crotch and nodded. “Step forward, then,” she said, and
there was not a fiber in his body that could resist this command.
He heard his pathetic shoes shuffling over the rocky floor, then
muted as they crossed the hem of the ungodly expensive rug. He watched
his unfaithful legs drag him from the place of modesty and respect to a
brazen proximity without shame. The giantess lay placid, stretched
without a consideration for how she must appear, arrayed like the
foothills of a legendary mountain range. What should she care, when the
only witness to her bearing was a wretch like him?
And what was up with that, his wretchedness, his pathetic quality?
They came up again and again without apprehension in his thoughts, as
neutral as the fact of his existence. Was he comfortable with these
descriptors? Was he proud of them? That is to say, what mortal
could not but feel wretched in contrast to this vast, voluptuous spread
of femininity? And if he was wretched already, was he not therefore
especially suited for this situation? Yes, any other man, any hale,
tall, robust figure of quintessential masculinity would have so much
farther to fall, confronted with this casual giantess of overt, abundant
sexuality; Herbert was already most of the way down, so while the
red-blooded American hero had shattered his bones in his descent,
Herbert merely picked himself up, dusted himself off, and moved to the
next scene. This was the gift of being naturally low; this was Herbert’s
Christmas.
“I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be here,” he said cautiously.
It was sincere, but in no way was it the uncoordinated tumble his
emotions wanted to make it. It was good enough, but he dared not follow
it up with anything.
Which… seemed to disappoint the giantess. Could he do anything right?
Her unperturbed expression glowed against his skin. Thick lips, heavy
with raw sex, parted and formed shapes: “I wonder if you can tell me why
you are here, petit Herbert.”
Again, he was seized with the urge to throw himself at her, weeping,
and beg her to roll just enough to crush him beneath her sternum, crush
him to a paste. End me, his entire body sang, finish me beneath any
section of your blessed divinity. To shove my head up your asshole is
more than I deserve, and there he cut off his rampant, unpolished
thoughts from speaking another sound. “I got this card,” he started,
“from the Madame.” There. Perfect. All the facts, not a shred of which
made any sense out of context. He sounded like a particularly dim child.
Nicely done, Mr. Barton.
“Is that so?” As she spoke, one massive thigh shifted ponderously
upon another truly colossal thigh. Herbert quickly ran out of
adjectives, staring at the large mass drift over the other large mass,
between which he craved to be obliterated. “Who is this Madame, and why
did she lead you to me?” She said ’oo instead of who, zees instead of this, and he wanted to crawl into her mouth and live until he died in the place that made such sounds.
He drew a breath, and his ribs ached with disuse. “I’m sorry, do you
mind if I sit? I’m kind of overwhelmed.” Herbert was stunned at his
glibness, his casual tone. And yet, rather than backhand him to an early
and unsatisfying death, the titaness simply reached out and picked up a
chair like he would pick up, say, a magical, life-changing,
reality-altering business card. She placed it beside him and his
automatic reflexes guided him into it, when his more candid reaction
would have been to collapse to the floor and urinate with abandon.
“I think you know the Madame,” he said with astonishing frankness. “I
have been frequenting her business—heh, her whorehouse—for half a year
at least. I’ve spent quite a lot of money going through all of her
staff, asking them for one thing after another, pursing something I
didn’t really understand myself.” He smiled, despite his urge to vomit
with intense tension. “Big women, tall women, women with exaggerated
features who could sit on me, stand on me, crush me in various ways. I
didn’t understand what it was I wanted, and every woman was a near
miss.” He laughed, when his body wanted to wail and tear down the steel
fire door with his flimsy nails. “So, after banging my head against this
particular wall for months and months, I finally received this little
card from the Madame, which led me here. And honestly, I had no concept,
no notion of what I was getting into.” Again, he laughed, when he was
ready to tear open his rib cage and surrender his ghost to the
hereafter.
The giantess moved. How she moved, what part of her moved, was
impossible to estimate. “That is a tidy little answer, for such a tidy
little man,” she purred, like a Harley-Davidson purrs. “I commend you
for not wasting my time.”
“Wasting..?” Something compelled him to lean forward slightly, arching his brows in concern.
“The other men”—zee uzzer men—“they gabble and they plead
and they fall on the ground. They roll around, begging and demanding,
like a…” The giantess’s eyes squinted, and for once they trained upon
somewhere other than Herbert (he felt a weight lift; he felt an
indescribable robbery). “Like a, you know, a puppy. The puppy likes to
play, it bites you, and then it rolls to its back and shows you its, how
you say, its tummy? And you rub its tummy, but no, it wants you to
masturbate it.”
Herbert’s barking laughter surprised even himself. He knew exactly
what she was expressing, the sickening cross-species warmth of the
emerging red shaft against the side of his hand; the all-consuming
longing for this gigantic mother of humanity to suck his cock and balls
right out of his body. He found himself on both sides of this fence,
abruptly, and he refused to say another word until he knew where to
step.
“You are not like these men, Herbert.” Once again, her fearsome,
luminous green eyes rolled to consume him. “You ask for the chair. I ask
you a question, and you answer me without a wait. There is something
about you, Herbert. Do you know this? You must. Vraiment,” she said, and
her massy head dipped twice with profundity, “tu es un petit homme spécial.
With you, I am looking forward to play.” One huge arm bent and reached
back, threading thick fingers through thick hair, tossing her raven
tresses behind the peak of her shoulder.
Herbert couldn’t breathe, and that was the level best he could manage.