He must be crazy, he told himself with a quiet certainty that didn't
hurt for the moment, perhaps because he sat so very still. Everything
he'd felt this afternoon had been out of character, including his
ridiculous overvaluation of that dream cat.
Yes, he must be crazy.
At that moment the dim circle of the window was intersected by a
smaller and much brighter circle. He automatically stood up and stepped
forward.
The girl in the room across the bay had switched on her light. Now
she threw down a cloak and walked around the room as if searching for
something, the horsetail of black hair flirting from side to side
as she turned her head this way and that. She was less than twenty
feet away and he could see her clearly. She was wearing a gray suit
fashionably pied with great splotches of black. Her face was compact,
nose small, mouth broad, eyes very wide set, and, as Phil now noticed
definitely for the first time, her ears were lobeless and curved up to
an almost faun-like tip. As on those rare occasions when he'd glimpsed
her before, he felt a quiver of uneasiness.
She shrugged her shoulders, as if giving up her hunt, and walked over
to the window, looking straight at Phil. He shrank back a bit, though
he knew he was invisible. She grasped a knob on the rim and swung her
hand in a quarter-circle, the window gradually blacking out as she did
so.
Then, just as Phil started to turn away, the window began to brighten
again until it was almost as transparent as before. He realized what
must have happened. The inner pane of polarizing glass had missed its
catch and revolved silently onward a few extra inches. He'd known it to
happen to his own.
The girl across the way thought she was hidden. She wasn't.
She stretched and took off her coat. Phil gnawed his lip. He didn't
quite want to watch her. But anything was welcome that would distract
him from the thought with which his last reverie had ended, and, Phil
knew very well, this window could provide most gripping, if barren,
distractions.
She slowly parted the magnetic clasps on her blouse, then slipped out
of it with a lithe twist of her shoulders. Phil forgot his fears,
enthralled by the beauty of her dark-nippled breasts. Below them,
almost cupping them, she seemed to be wearing some sort of close
fitting, velvet black undergarment.
She stepped out of her skirt. The undergarment ended raggedly at her
thighs. It puzzled him, perhaps because of the faint smokiness of the
window. It looked almost as if it were made of some sort of fur.
Balancing expertly on one leg, she drew the stocking from the other,
and along with the stocking one of those grotesque ten-inch platform
shoes.
Only--and here Phil's heart jumped--she seemed to have stripped off
much more than that. To be precise, her foot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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