Found in Amber

The watchman pulled the latch with trepidation. One hand gripped the
cold pull-lever, the other his gun. The door clicked and creaked heavily
open. There was darkness within.

He peeked behind him. He would have some time before he had to get
back, as he had skipped most of his rounds to get straight here. The coast
was clear. He flicked on his flashlight and peeked inside, then left the
door slightly ajar. The room was cold.

There it was, in the middle of the room. He gave the room the once-
over with the beam, and his breath poured out in billows of steam. A few
gizmos, a few blinking lights, but it looked safe. He flicked on one bank
of lights, and holstered his gun.

A tarp draped over the large, rectangular block. Being over seven
feet tall, its appearance was imposing, suddenly illuminated just a few
feet away. He couldn’t fathom why they would keep the thing carefully
wrapped and refrigerated now, after it had weathered eons of harsh
treatment by the elements on its own.

He drew nearer. On inspection, he found with relief that the specimen
was not that carefully wrapped. He placed his hat on some shelving. Then,
he bent and grasped the heavy cloth with both hands, and snapped the tarp
sharply upwards. The covering was surprisingly heavy. Not only did the
tarp fail to clear the top, but the watchman felt the painful, familiar
pinch of his ailing back.

Cursing, he stamped his feet in the freezer, psyching himself up. He
seized the tarp again and pulled at it, grunting ferociously. He stopped
after making little headway. Determined that his curiosity would not be
denied, he ran to the opposite side, shorter and dangling from the top.
He stood on his tiptoes, and with all his might threw the end over.
Breathless, he fell back and sat. Staring up through the clouds of his
exhalations, he beheld her.

She was crouched in that same position that he had seen in the
newspaper photos, except now that he stood beneath her she was so much more
imposing. Actually, she wasn’t crouched down so much as curled
aggressively forward, as if jumping down to pounce upon him, her prey. Her
long hair was suspended up behind her. Her knees were bent and splayed
apart. Her rigid torso leaned forward above her hips, and her arms raised
menacingly before her and above her head, hands and fingers clawed out and
hooked. Frozen at the moment of kill–long, sleek and angry.

Strictly speaking, her face wasn’t beautiful, but it was sexy in its
attitude and frame of mind. It was unmistakable what had been on her mind.
Her lips were full, and ominously raised in a sultry, arrogant snarl. Blue
eyes glared large and hard down at him.

The frozen position was awkward and tense, demanding a coda, a next
and final moment. She sought a murderous rest she would never feel. He
recalled discovering a praying mantis as a boy, a wiry, evil-looking
creature unlike anything he had seen before. It sat large and dangerously
still forever before him, like it could explode at any moment. He had that
same feeling now, so long forgotten. But this time he had already
resolved, he would draw near and touch.

She was covered from head to toe in a glorious, tight leather, slick
and tight beneath the heavy translucent amber. The leather seamlessly
conformed to her muscular thighs and the curve of her hips. The supple
stomach and her breasts, conical and jutting proudly out, were outlined
perfectly. He could distinctly see the indentations beneath her biceps,
smoothing to her armpits, and strong calves sloping dramatically into the
tops of pointed stiletto boots.

He unzipped his slacks, and walked slowly around the slab, surveying
her body from all angles. The sleek catsuit revealed more about the body
by its wrinkles than it did in the areas where it was stretched tight. The
long creases that ran down the front of the suit between her meaty breasts,
which had been frozen at the moment of weightlessness, and inflated against
the inside of the suit. Those folds behind her bent knees, illuminating in
relief the powerful muscles of her shapely legs, the vertical lines of
strong calves and hamstrings, that could crush a man’s neck.

And that complex of folds and creases in the cleft between her legs,
reaching from the rounded bottom of perfectly toned buttocks into that
mysterious area, where bumps and pinches and a definite protruding bulge
promised at what lay beneath. He had never had a chance to really stare at
a woman’s genitals enough to comprehend them.

Certainly Trudy would never allow him to, nor would he ever ask, or
want to. He had only extracted what he needed from them, the hole
somewhere within. The rest was pure awkwardness. They sure didn’t look
like those neat diagrams in books, where everything was very distinct and
labeled with a name and an arrow. In real life, there were no separate
colors and shapes. It just melted together in a mishmash of skin, too
intricate and embarrassing to be of interest. Just so the glorious hole
could be found.

But this woman, he wanted to see this one. They were so intricate and
strange that he would never know them. He could stare at hers forever,
just inches but eons away, trying to touch it with his mind. He exhaled
and grunted deeply, grinding his hips forward.

Ah, but he knew she would never let him gawk at her this long were she
alive. She was suspended above the ground, and due to her posture, it was
impossible to tell how tall she was, but he could see she was a tall lady.
Maybe 5-9, 5-10. Not a short, stubby kielbasa woman. No, she was tall,
lean, powerful, unforgiving. She wouldn’t let him roll atop of her and let
him do his business in her on the dark bed before sleep.

She would not allow him to lasciviously stare at her womanhood while
he rubbed on his dick. She would spit angry words on him while he played
with himself. She would cuff the side of his head while he turned his gaze
down in humiliation.

“Don’t look down now! Go on, look at my beautiful body,” she taunted,
and his groin wrenched at the sound of her catty growl. “Look at me!”

His head trembled as his gaze lifted slowly from her pointed toe up
her shin and knee, along the mighty thighs, to her pussy. “Look at me
while you finish your dirty business, you little shit! Now!”

At her forceful command, his shaking hands once more sprung to life,
doing her bidding, pulling on his swollen penis with urgency and fear. She
growled to the rhythm of his strokes, louder and faster, to intimidate him,
until he felt her hot breath and saliva beating on his crown.

“No. No,” he fearfully wailed. She was hissing and cackling obscenely
under her breath. In her guttural animal gurgling he could a barely
intelligible mantra of threats and curses and hatred. Her pussy was so
near, he needed to see it, to throw himself on it, to please her. Please,
please, if it could only be. His face, chest, thighs and penis ground
desperately against the block, and finally, he grunted, and shouted, and
light erupted all around him.

“Gierzyck, what the fuck are you doing?”

The soundstage bulbs blare heat and light down upon the platform,
glistening on the edges of the translucent obelisk below.

An irritable voice barks orders over the public address system.
“Jesus! Pull those lights downstage! You’re burning my monitors up.”

“Can we get this damned thing over with?” yells the kinky-haired
talent standing beside the pale yellow block. “This whole scene really
blows. Right, Georgio?”

“Yes, babe,” again from the loudspeaker. “Let’s look alive. Are we go
on the effects shot?”

“Check, G!” calls an engineer.

“Come on!” The talent snaps her dark plastic eyeframes on.

“Audio!” An aggressive hip-hop beat begins to pound. The roomful of
young dancers springs to life. The music cuts, interrupted briefly.
“We’re patching in from L.A. Everybody’s watching the red clock, got it?
Watch it!”

The music resumes, with a voice-over. “Five, four, three, two, one,
we’re active!”

The talent barks into her mike, “Yeah, Pauly, we’re here at Club Dom
on the Lower East Side. Are we partying our asses off, people?”

The dull red lights turned to blue, and the dancing crowd screams
above the music. “Whoo!”

“Yeah, and we have to be very good tonight, as you know, because
tonight we are entertaining The Lady.” The talent walks to her left on the
platform, until she is standing next to the tall translucent block
containing the suspended form of a savage woman bedecked in a catsuit. A
manic strobe flashes through the block from behind her.

The talent coyly raps the slab with a riding crop. “That’s right,
history’s very own mistress, and we’ve got her right here. She’s making
her list, checking it twice, so you’d better be good, heh-heh. . . .
What’s your name?”

“Lisa,” the blond red-leather dancer yells through the music.

“Well, Lisa, have you been a good girl this year?”

“No way!” she screams, leaning close to hear.

“What do you think of our mistress of ceremonies, Lisa?”

“Oh, I think she’s very liberating and inspiring to me as a woman. To
think that back then in prehistoric times, women were choosing their own
roles as individuals.”

“Oh, really? And what are you going to do then to appease the
goddess,” she taps the amber expectantly, “and to help her ring in the new
year?”

The blond drops to her knees and presses her face to the clear stone,
at the spot closest to the toe of the catwoman’s stiletto boot, and licks
as if at a bowl of milk. The cameraman zooms in.

“Whoa, what is this? The things they show on TV these days, huh!
Lisa? Lisa? Well, you just have a good old time, girl, and we’ll just go
to Bill down on the floor. Bill! Bill, are you there?”

“We’re here, baby, we’re here. Your homeboy’s here on the dance floor,
where things are pretty hot and slick, I’m saying. As you can see, all the
right kinda wildlife is out and playing tonight. It’s going to be a bad,
bad New Year. See?”

The lights pulse yellow-over-red to the beat, and the cameras pan
around the dungeon. The cameraman is jostled by bumping and grinding
leathermen, whip-women, chained people, ladies dancing in bras and
hotpants.

“What’s your New Years resolution, little boy?”

The dancer wears black Dockers, a black leather cap and two nipple
clamps. “Whoo!” he answers.

“OK,” the male talent replies facetiously, and moves to the man’s
partner, a no-nonsense brunette with tasteful make-up and a leather collar
set with sparkling gems. “And what’s your New Years resolution?”

She waves toward the platform, her eyelids heavy. “If I could be like
her.”

“Oh yeah, I know what you mean. By the way, it looks like you’re line
dancing.”

“Huh?” she draws closer.

“I say, it looks a lot like you are line dancing.”

She dances away.

The male talent laughs. “Tell you what, let’s go to our sizzling
cyber-corner, where hundreds of people nationwide are joining our party,
doing a little of the cerebral tango, shall we say. Oh yeah!”

The dancers part before the approaching camera, revealing carrels
scattered about the far end of the dance floor, each with a flashing
computer terminal, and one or several people hunched before them.

“Yes, these people are practicing cyber- bondage with real, hot-
blooded kinksters all across the country on one of America’s biggest online
services, which shall remain nameless!” The host leans down to a skinny
gent. “How’s it going?”

“OK,” he states in a monotone.

“You two better hurry,” the host shouts. “Midnight’s coming!”

“Yeah, OK.” He sits motionless but for his hands, which fluidly clack
keys.

“Right.” The host rolls his eyes for the camera and moves to the next
table. “Here’s the organizer of Cyber-And-Gomorrah ’95, Dr. Che Liebowitz,
professor of psychology at New York University. Doctor, how’s things
going?”

“Bill, we’re very pleased with the participation and enthusiasm here.
We’re very convinced that the virtual community is the next realm of human
interaction. Cases of people falling in love in cyberspace are now
commonplace. Why, then, can’t society embrace this tool as one of
liberation and experimentation in sexuality? We’re saying, there’s nothing
wrong here. It frees us from the constraints of our bodies and our day-to-
day responsibilities, into the realm pure ideas. Hence, this vivacious,
exciting woman I perceive on my screen right now, is probably in fact a
fat, boring housewife in Iowa, for all one knows.”

Bill leans to read from the screen and pats the doctor on the back.
“I see! Safe sex, right?”

“Right. For instance, right now, I’ve got this woman . . .”

The host yanks the mike away. “Ho! Watch that! We gonna have New
York’s finest throwing down on us.” He thinks a moment. “Man, tell her
to. . . .” He whispers in the doctor’s ear. They both chortle.

“I don’t think she’ll go for it,” the doctor replies as he types. The
host peers to the screen.

They both laugh after a moment. “I told you! I told you!” bellows the
host. They slap a high five. “I gotta be going, but I’ll be back! I’ll
be back here.” The host walks away.

Bill’s voice is now heard loudly over the sound system, the hip-hop
now in the background. “We got business, crew. Listen up. The moment has
arrived. It’s time to ring in the New Year. Give it up for our ladies of
the night.” The people look up to the platform and cheer. A spotlight
shines on the hostess standing beside the block of amber.

“Ready to count in the New Year, devils? Fine, together: ten, nine,
eight . . .”

At the stroke of twelve, a huge bank of strobelights fire off from
behind the amber block, lights aimed at the slab from different angles.
The catwoman suspended within appears to dance, as lusty bodies crowd and
writhe, making love to the obelisk.

“Come, my pet, awake. Rouse thyself. I have your treats.” A thin
man of effeminate features and sickeningly pale skin, clad in black, called
in a reedy voice into the huge open-air observation tank below. The tank
comprised most of the cavernous room, and consisted of a circular ten foot
wall, paneled within by white easy-wash vinyl. The solid white walls of
the arena were interrupted only by a huge ground-level plexiglass
observation window, and a small hole of two-to-three feet in diameter
opposite the observation window. The hole was used for access in and out
of the open-air terrarium, and the gaunt man was particularly proud of it,
as this was his idea. As he predicted, his subject could no longer escape
through the hole.

The huge tank contained only a few objects. A jungle mat, a beanbag
chair, rubber playballs of various sizes and colors, building blocks and a
wide-screen TV.

The tank was also ringed at its top by black steel scaffolding, which
allowed onlookers to walk around and observe from any angle. The waiflike
black figure stood upon the scaffolding, as he reached into a greasy brown
grocery bag.

“Up, my friend. It’s time to eat!” He pulled his hand from the bag,
and tossed packages wrapped in white paper to the floor of the tank. He
grabbed another handful and tossed them. Some remained wrapped until they
hit the ground. Others fell from their wrapping, and hit the floor as
scattered buns and ketchup-laden patties and pickles. “Come on, it’s the
fun time!”

On the far side below, a makeshift wall of building blocks tumbled
down, and an animal- like grumbling emanated from beyond. When the next
volley of burgers splatted upon the floor, a large creature charged out
from behind the rubble of blocks, across the tank toward the debris.

The creature charged huffing to the culinary litter scattered about
the tank floor, scooping up and devouring the scraps as it moved along.
The brute was obese, his body clad only in a large diaper. Food bits
sprayed to the ground as it hunched and ravaged its food. The subject wore
meaty sideburns down its cheeks, and a long, silvered pompadour, which it
repeatedly tossed away from its face as it fed. As it ate the smaller
bits, the brute scooped and gathered larger burger chunks in its cradled
arm. Still chewing, it stood, still holding its armful of booty.

It crammed a whole burger into its mouth, then shook a fist up at its
captor. “Ah’monna get you, Michael.” It choked, and then stuffed another
patty in, with some effort.

The observer giggled like a child from the scaffold. “Be happy, my
friend,” he reassured in his thin voice, “I have a surprise for you. We
have a new friend to play with.”

The wraithlike man-boy snapped into motion and nimbly danced down the
stairs. He reappeared at ground-level, at the plexiglass viewing window,
and knocked on it. He called the brute over with his finger. The diapered
hulk moved closer, then looked perplexed as it took in the sight.

“Say hello to our new friend.” The gaunt man stroked lovingly at the
yellow encasing surrounding the leatherclad catwoman. “I don’t have a name
for her yet. Can you think of a name for her? She’s very pretty, isn’t
she?”

The amber block had fresh cuts on four of its sides–above the woman’s
head, below her feet, and at both of her sides–as large sections of the
slab had been sawn away. Parts of the woman were now only millimeters
beneath the surface.

“Soon she will be free,” the thin man said dreamily, “and then, the
fun we will have. . . .”

“Do you like her?” the thin man asked. The brute only stared and
chewed from the other side of the window.

“Well, Mr. Merrick likes her,” he continued, and turned to address the
human skeleton hanging from a nearby pole. “You like her, don’t you, Mr.
Merrick? Yes, Mr. Merrick likes her. Yes he does.”

“Yes, soon she will be free.” He flipped some switches on the side of
an oblong coffin-like machine, which began to hum and whir, and fog rose
out, illuminated from within. “And then we can all play together, here in
our secret world.” He climbed over the side and into the open chamber of
the machine. He sat up inside of it, with the fog rising all around him.
“I just have to think of her name,” and he laid down into the haze to
sleep.