It was about six and a half inches long, uncircumcised, with long black pubic hair. With a shudder it flipped itself onto its shiny heavy testicles and waddled toward her, now unmistakably erect. Dorothy shrieked, leaped out of bed, and onto a chair. The penis—moving like something between a rabbit and a small dog—also leaped off the bed and onto the carpet where it waited hopefully at the foot of the chair. They had reached an impasse: Dorothy, too terrified to move, and the penis, standing pert before her, a little too eager to please. They stayed like that for a good ten minutes. Until the phone rang.
“Don’t you dare move!” Dorothy yelled. With a timid shudder the organ waddled a few inches back on its balls. She tentatively climbed off the chair then bolted down the narrow wooden stairs and grabbed the phone. It was her employer, Mr. Carrington, concerned that she hadn’t arrived at work yet.
“I’m having some difficulty with a small animal…a rodent—no, not a rat exactly…. I’ll be in late.”
Dorothy put the phone down, her heart still thumping in her throat. Behind her she heard a gentle thudding. She swung around; the penis was hopping down the stairs toward her. There was something pathetically vulnerable about the way it launched itself blindly off the last step, flying through the air to land with a painful bounce on the Persian rug she’d inherited from her aunt. Her aunt! So this was what had been twitching in the knitting bag. Now she understood why Winifred was known as the Merry Spinster.
The penis inched forward and rubbed itself against Dorothy’s bare foot. She pulled back immediately, but then a perverse curiosity made her stretch her foot back toward the expectant organ again. It felt silky, the touch of that velvet skin deliciously familiar. She was reminded of those stolen afternoons, lying back in the motel bed, stroking her lover into submission. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be caressed.
It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. The penis rubbed itself backward and forward like a cat; Dorothy could practically hear it purring. The clock in the hallway chimed ten. She’d promised to be at work in half an hour. The organ flopped itself seductively over her foot and appeared to look up at her. What was she going to do? She couldn’t leave it alone in the house.
She reached down but the penis slipped out of her hand and darted behind the sofa. Dorothy spent a good fifteen minutes catching it. She wrapped the wriggling member up in a sock and hid it in her underwear drawer. As she drove off she prayed that it wouldn’t leap out and give the cleaner a heart attack.
Walking along the High Street, Dorothy got wolf-whistled at fourteen times. Astonished, she gazed at herself in the reflection of a shop window. She was wearing jeans and a threadbare sweater with holes in it. She looked like she always did; what had changed that was causing this sudden male attention?
Even her boss, Mr. Carrington, who must have been at least seventy-five, commented on how good she was looking. Another colleague dropped two Georgian swords onto his toes when Dorothy bent down to do up her shoelaces. At lunchtime, when she walked into the bank, every male set of eyes swung around and stared.
Dorothy was bewildered. For a woman who was used to being invisible to the male sex, it was incredibly disorienting to be suddenly not just visible but apparently extremely desirable. Then a frightening thought occurred to her. Maybe, in some perverse way, this male attention was connected to the penis. As if its manifestation had suddenly imbued her with a powerful pheromone.
That afternoon, convinced she was being betrayed by some terrible scent, Dorothy spent forty minutes scrubbing her armpits in the women’s toilets. When she finally emerged, flushed and stinking of tar soap, water still staining her armpits, Mr. Carrington, worried about her mental state, sent her home early.
On the way back she was followed by a police car. The inanely grinning policeman pulled up beside her and complimented her on the originality of her car. Dorothy gazed at him in disbelief; she drove a blue Honda sedan. A moment later a cyclist fell off his bike because he was staring so hard at her. Then, at the petrol station, the attendant lost concentration and dribbled petrol all down the side of his trousers.
For the first time in her life Dorothy began to consider the advantages of being plain. Relieved to reach the sanctuary of the cottage, where a solitary cow grazed in the field next door, she checked the horizon for any visible male, then bolted to the front door. Inside, she exhaled. At last she was alone—well, almost.
The only way Dorothy could describe how she lived with the penis for the next couple of weeks was…well, like dog and mistress. It followed her everywhere like a love-struck puppy, hopping up beside her on the couch to watch television, getting tangled in the wool when she was knitting, perched precariously on the soap dish while she bathed.
At first Dorothy barely tolerated the intrusion, then, slowly, she started to appreciate its steady vigil. She even found herself listening out for the pitter-patter of those heavy balls thudding gently on the carpet.
“You’ve always wanted a pet,” she said to herself, in a futile attempt to banish the thought of any possible sexual exploitation on her behalf. Not to mention the idea of her aunt ever having used the poor creature in that manner.
Poor creature? She peered across the room. The penis was lying on its side in front of the fire, trying to look as innocent as a sex organ could. What kind of sorcery had conjured such an organism? Dorothy was fairly well read on such matters: investigating myth and legend had been part of her training as a historian. She knew of the Golem of Prague, but never had she come across anything like this. For one hideous moment
she entertained the thought that perhaps it had been cut off a dead man. She kneeled on the carpet and took a good long look. The penis didn’t display any scars. She sat back in relief. She dreaded to think what other skeletons lay in her great-aunt’s cupboard.
The next day at work she consulted an archaic dictionary of definitions entitled, Esau’s Book of Devilry, Everything the Mere Mortal Should Know About Magick. She looked up mandrake root.
The mandrake root is a curious plant that is found growing at the foot of the gallows. It is said to spring from the seed of the ejaculation of the condemned man at the moment of death. It hath been harvested bounteously by both witches and sorcerers in their spells….
The alchemist Esau went on to describe the bulbous and forked appearance of the mandrake and to summarize the inherent evil the root personified. There was even an illustration beside the floral calligraphy: it showed a curious twisted bulb that resembled a crucified figure.
“Not a bit like my mandrake root,” Dorothy concluded. “I mean, how can a thing imbued with that kind of self-parody be evil?” She closed the book angrily. “Witches be damned.”
Perhaps Great-Aunt Winifred the sorceress had got it wrong. Maybe Dorothy’s penis hadn’t sprung from a mandrake root at all, but was a twisted manifestation of her own sexual frustration. Or even an extreme form of penis envy. Dorothy sank into a deep reverie, depressed by the possibility of looming psychosis.
“Ms. Owen?”
Dorothy found herself gazing into the remarkably handsome face of a tall blond man. His eyes were green and blue, seeming to change with the light like those of a knowing cat. He had strong eyebrows and straw-colored hair that framed a long face cut diagonally by curiously strong cheekbones, as if an exotic gene had found its way into what was otherwise a classically Anglo-Saxon countenance. The nose was diminutive and neat, almost feminine, while the mouth spoke of obstinacy (a thin upper lip) offset by the sensuality of a ridiculously full lower lip.
Each stared at the other for an interminable time, both sensing a kindred attraction.
“I…I…er hope I’m not disturbing you,” he finally stammered, awestruck by the sexual luminosity that surrounded this rather plain woman.
“No, not at all. I was just researching a family heirloom.” Before Dorothy had a chance to cover the book he glanced down. “Damned strange heirloom,” he said, reading the title upside down.
She pulled the book away from him and drew herself up to her full height. “You are?” she asked formally.
He extended a deliciously delicate hand; both smooth and strong and promising in its size. “Stanley Huntington. I’m here to research my ancestor Lord Cedric Huntington.” Stanley, allowing his fingers to linger a little longer than was necessary, was pleasantly surprised by the ripple of electricity that ran between them.