Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Edogawa Rampo [27]
Lieutenant Sunaga was all the more pitiful in that, although he was a fourfold amputee, his torso was extremely well developed. Possibly because of his keen appetite—eating was his only diversion—Sunaga's belly was glossy and bulging. In fact, the man was just like a large yellow caterpillar.
His arms and legs had been amputated so closely that not even stumps remained, but only four lumps of flesh to mark where his limbs had been. Often he would lie on his great belly and, using these lumps to propel himself, manage to spin round and round—a top made of living flesh.
After a time Tokiko began to strip him naked. He offered no resistance, but just lay looking expectantly into those strangely narrowed eyes of hers, like the eyes with which an animal watches its prey.
Tokiko well understood what her crippled husband wanted to say with his amorous eyes. Lieutenant Sunaga had lost every sensory organ except those of sight, feeling, and taste. He had never had much liking for books, and furthermore, his wits had been dulled by the shock of the explosion to which he had fallen victim. So now even the pastime of reading had been given up, and physical pleasures were his only diversion.
As for Tokiko, although hers was a timid heart, she had always entertained a strange liking for bullying the weak. Moreover, watching the agony of this poor cripple aroused many of her hidden impulses.
Still leaning over him, she continued her aberrant caresses, stirring the crippled man's feeling to ever higher frenzies of passion. . . .
Tokiko shrieked and woke up. She had had a terrible nightmare, and now she found herself sitting up in a cold sweat. The lamp at her bedside was blackened with smoke, the wick burned down to its base.
The interior of the room, the ceilings, the walls. . . all seemed to be stretching like rubber, and then contracting into strange shapes. The face of her husband beside her was of a glossy orange hue.
She reminded herself that he positively could not have heard her shriek, but she noticed with uneasiness that he was gazing at the ceiling, his bright eyes wide open. She looked at the clock on the desk and noted that it was a little past one.
Now that she was wide awake she tried to erase all thoughts of the horrors of the nightmare that had assailed her mind, but the more she tried to forget, the more persistent became the images. First a mist seemed to rise before her eyes, and when this cleared, she could distinctly see a large lump of flesh, floating in mid-air, spinning and spinning like a top. Suddenly a stout, ugly woman's body seemed to appear from nowhere, and the two figures became interlocked in a mad embrace. The weirdly erotic scene reminded Tokiko of a picture postcard portraying a section of Dante's Inferno; and yet, as her mind drifted, the very disgust and ugliness of the embracing pair seemed to excite all her pent-up passions and to paralyze her nerves. With a shudder she asked herself if she were sexually perverted.
Holding her breasts, she suddenly uttered a piercing cry. Then she looked at her husband intently, like a child gazing at a broken doll. He was still looking at the same spot on the ceiling, taking absolutely no notice of her.
"He is thinking again," she told herself.
Even at the best of times it was an eerie thing to see a man whose only organ of communication was his eyes lie there with those eyes fixed forever on just one spot, and now how much more so in the middle of the night. Of course his mind has become dull, she thought, but for a man so completely crippled as he, there undoubtedly exists a world completely different from any I can ever know. Is it a pleasant world, she wondered. Or is it a hell. . . .
For a while she closed