Prayer for the Dead by David Wiltse Page B

fluke or experiment, but after that, you start to want it—if you’re that kind of person. After awhile you need it, you need the rush of adrenaline or the sexual thrill or whatever it happens to be in your case. Like any addiction, you need more and more. The more you get, the more you need, until eventually, like any addiction, you overdose … Killing grows on you.”
    Tee noted the intensity with which Becker spoke and looked away from it. There were some things he didn’t want to witness and some he didn’t want to know.
    “Well, so. Insurance salesmen. How much time do you think we have until his ‘appetite’ makes him take somebody else?” asked Tee.
    “Mick disappeared fourteen days ago. I’d guess we have a month, maybe less.”
    “Unless he stops.”
    “Stops?” Becker laughed. “He’s in too far to stop. It’s in his blood, in his gut, it makes him dizzy with desire. He can hear it like a howling in his ears.”
    Tee watched Becker with growing unease. He did not want to know how his friend knew such things.

Chapter 6
    D yce made his way through the pillows as he maneuvered across the bedroom, taking care not to step on them, even though they were everywhere underfoot. Helen filled her bed with pillows when she was not in it, at least ten of them arranged together like children propped against the headboard. Two of them were for sleeping, but the others—a motley group of calico-patterned cats, gingham dogs, hand-stitched samplers with pictures of cottages and comforting proverbs, and compact, satin-covered cushions suited for a doll—were lined up for decoration or solace, Dyce did not know which. When they got into the bed, usually with much display of sexual urgency, Dyce would sweep as many of them to the floor as he could take with his arm. Helen would remove those from her side of the bed rapidly, but with care. He knew she did not approve of his style of inconsiderate dumping, but she never mentioned it. Later, if they were out of the bed, even for a few minutes, she would line up all the pillows again. It made no sense to him, but he had decided it was a female crotchet, one he couldn’t expect to understand but must learn to tolerate if he was to exist in her world.
    “It’s all right,” Helen said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
    Dyce pushed a red and white checked cat out of the way with his foot. Someone had sewn plastic whiskers onto the pillow’s face and they pricked his foot as he brushed against them while digging with his toes for his underpants that were buried under the cushions.
    “I love it just having you hold me. We don’t have to do anything,” she said. She always said the same thing, and it sounded more accusatory to him every time.
    “Don’t be upset. I don’t mind, really I don’t.”
    “I’m not upset,” he said. He found the underpants and lifted them with his toes, keeping his back to her. Dyce was shy about letting her see him naked as long as he was flaccid. A natural modesty was compounded by his impotence. Helen, on the other hand, seemed to have no modesty at all. She paraded nude with as much indifference as if she were clothed. In his opinion, she didn’t look that good, either. Her breasts were full, he liked that, but so was the rest of her. Dyce had expected filmy peignoirs and full slips of the type he saw on television. He had not been prepared for this all-out assault of flesh and naturalness; it was not femininity as he thought of it. It was woman, but it was not feminine. Dyce would have preferred something with the lights out, something with soft music and gentle touches, perhaps some coy resistance on her part, a sense of conquest on his.
    Instead, he was assailed by a woman who seemed to want to consume him, smothering him with her body and her mouth and her desire. Dyce felt overpowered by it all but did not know how to tell her so. His impotence was her fault, he knew it. He had done fine that first night when she burst into his