Deaths Excellent Vacation

what, exactly, was happening? This did not sound like sex anymore, not like ecstasy. And now that he thought about it, some of the groans the previous night had sounded full of pain to him as well. What the hell was the woman doing to this guy?
    He picked up the phone and reached out to punch the button for the front desk, but hesitated. What the hell would he say? Instead, he put the phone back in its cradle and climbed from the bed. Tugging on the pants he had worn that day, he ran the whole thing over in his mind. He could bang on the wall or go out into the hall and knock on the door, but if he was wrong . . . if this was just extraordinary sex or some S&M thing he was too naïve to understand, he would feel foolish. And to Diana he would appear jealous and full of regret, and he did not want to give her that satisfaction.
    Diana’s muffled moaning grew louder. The headboard kept banging, although if he was correct the rhythm seemed to have slowed. But in the midst of the man’s groaning, Tim felt certain now that he heard sobs and weeping.
    That’s not pleasure.
    Fully awake now, he went to the slider, unlocked it, and drew it open as quietly as possible. Hesitating only a moment, he went to the railing that separated his balcony from Diana’s and carefully threw his leg over, settling his weight on the railing a moment in order to shift his weight from one balcony to the next.
    You’ll be arrested, he thought. Peeping Tom. Pervert. She’ll think you just wanted to see.
    But such reservations did not stop him. Something was wrong. He could feel it in the rising of the small hairs on the back of his neck and the icy dread that raced through him as he crept across Diana’s balcony.
    Her slider was open halfway. The crash of the surf on Santa Monica Beach, just behind him, covered any noise his bare feet might have made. He paused just outside the slider, hidden from within by the curtain hanging on the other side of the glass. But where the slider was open, the curtain had been drawn back to let moonlight into the room. Tim took a deep breath and held it, then carefully leaned in so that he could get a glimpse into the room.
    Diana knelt astride an olive-skinned man, rocking herself back and forth on him, riding him hard enough to keep the headboard slamming the wall. The sensual curves of her body in the interplay between moonlight and shadows made Tim catch his breath. But then he noticed the way the man’s body bucked beneath her, the way his hips seemed to come up off the bed with her, not as if he were thrusting into her but as though with each motion she dragged him up with her, as though her sex had clamped onto him and tugged again and again, milking him, attached in some unfathomable way.
    So entranced was he by the strangeness of that, and by the swaying of breasts, that at first he did not notice the strange wrongness of the shadows around her face. The man continued to cry out, his eyes rolled back to the whites, his cheeks looking sunken—Jesus, he looked sickly, how old was this guy? Diana had her mouth against his chest and at first Tim thought she must be licking his nipples or his skin, but then Diana shifted in the moonlight, drew her head back a bit, and Tim’s heart seized in his chest.
    His mind tried to make sense of what he saw. He stared, breathless, as denial tried to fight back the horror and disgust and fear that filled him. Chills rippled across his body and his stomach churned. Bile roared up the back of his throat, and he had to force himself not to vomit.
    Diana’s mouth was distended, stretched into a pale, blue-veined funnel attached to the man’s chest, right above his heart. Her lips trembled with a quiet suction, the skin around them glistening wetly, but he could hardly tear his eyes away from the disgusting proboscis that her face had become.
    The man’s cheeks were streaked with tears.
    As Tim watched in mounting horror, the other man’s face seemed to become thinner. His entire body had begun to wrinkle, even to wither, and Tim wondered what he had looked like before he had crawled into that bed. Kirk’s no longer with me, Diana had said of her previous night’s lover. So where the hell was Kirk now?
    The room service guy’s head tossed to one side, and for just a second, his eyes were on Tim. That was enough.
    He swept the screen open and burst into the room. Diana glanced up but did not slow the thrust of her hips, the slam of the headboard, the suction of