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eBook Category: Erotica/Erotic Science Fiction/Science Fiction
eBook Description: She was the first woman he had ever been--in this SF transgender classic! Andre Fuller had been convicted of the brutal rape-murder of a young woman and was awaiting the sentence of death. But, this was tomorrow and concepts had changed. A human life was too valuable to throw away in a futile gesture of revenge. Rather, Andre learned he must replace the life he had taken. He had to become the woman he killed in a bizarre totally terrifying new approach to capital punishment. First published in 1968, this science fiction classic was later reprinted by Masquerade and most recently made into a major motion picture. Renaissance E Books is proud to be the publisher of the first electronic edition of Season of the Witch, complete with a brand new Afterword!

eBook Publisher: Renaissance E Books/Sizzler, Published: 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2004

11 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [177 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [175 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [150 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [803 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [173 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [177 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [211 KB] , hiebook (KML) [403 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [210 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [141 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [176 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [232 KB]
Words: 80000
Reading time: 228-320 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
ISBN: classic erotica

"Passion, pain, real pluck ... a good eye for physical detail and a strong feeling for the human predicament."--Fritz Leiber, Fantastic

"A perceptive science fiction novel ... razor-blade fiction."--Richard Delap, Magazine of F&SF

"Lip-smackingly good ... a good SF book and a rather better novel qua novel. Stine never offers an explicit sexual scene in standard cliche terms--each one of her descriptions brings a personal and original observation into play. Many of these observations are not erotic--they may even strike some readers as anti-erotic--but they ring with truth. A genuine work of erotic realism, written far above the standards of pornography."--Ted White, Amazing Stories

PROLOGUE

Crime

There was nothing on the Formica-surfaced table top except coffee steaming from an earthenware mug and the illusion-thin reflection of a smile. The flesh smiled, the mouth and muscles and dimples at the cheeks smiled, stretching the skin tight into an open, masculine, confident, caring smile; but the eyes in the flesh were like dull onyx, hot and staring into the reflection trying to find an answer and finding only a freshly polished Formica table top with one steaming cup of coffee left by a forgotten waitress and a tissue-thin reflection of a face born with, cursed with, stamped with, but never, never blessed with a smile it had never felt, nor understood, nor earned, nor found a way of earning. It was not his, not real, but indelibly fused into sinew and flesh, so no waking moment could escape from it and no private, secret thought could exist apart from it. It was a smile given him unasked, and somehow accepted by all the chicks and broads and cunts as a real smile, a genuine smile, a part of him, because his smile and his face haunted some private dream of theirs, and they accepted it at face value as an answer to an ancient prayer, too exhausted by searching to question any farther, glorying in the smile and presence they had known would be there someday, since their hearts and souls were forged. His face, smiling, damning smiling, with eyes flawed and hot, stared back at him from its dream-thin reflection in the Formica tabletop, and he found the center of the trip engulfing him in acid-washed barriers of nonreality.

His hands were on his face, fingers moving with a serpentine sentience beyond his capacity to control, searching, feeling, touching, feather light and hard, aching to know why this doughy flesh had been cursed with a smile that every girl loved and every girl gave to, gave herself and her love, trusting it to be something he could not even conceive or see or sense. But they believed in it with blood and heart until it was everything that had ever and could ever mean anything to them, and he gave to them, whatever it was they thought they wanted, receiving in return shelter and money but no comfort and no caring because they weren't reaching anything; there had never been anything to reach--only a tumescence too easily satisfied, so easily satisfied it had never had to develop into anything else, and so was nothing. But now he had to believe that whatever they wanted and whatever they were seeking was more than just his prick sliding into folds of flesh, even if their flesh--sliding in and out while they made something, some dream of their own out of his face and his smile and came to that, but never knew there wasn't any him there, and all their coming and their tearful, joyful orgasms that always seemed so profound and so much better than his paltry explosions of semen into protected wombs where the entire act was reduced to a sanitary moment of pleasure where he could find no further meaning--seemed now to be something more than he had ever seen before. And he had to believe, in the next-moment breathing-level, where even a reason for the rush of air to the lungs is inconceivable and imperative that they, fucking some dream myth of their own, compounded from his smile and his face and their excrement, believing him some heaven-sent, love-sent come, were reaching ... reaching for something that was only an empty question he had never seen before now, in this Formica table-topped restaurant, trying to remember what he had done and why his face smiled while there was blood caked under his fingernails and a stark cold fear in his gut more real than any empty diner with its early-morning shiny polished reflections of despair, a reaching out to comprehend what that cursed smile had done earlier in the evening when some profound act of ?

He flashed, white and cold and real, the acid beginnings of memory opening up his head and the Formica table top became a surface tilting ... the floor opening under his feet, spilling him down through a sightless, soundless corridor where the gray blur of motion dazed his eyes. And he came to, steady and cold, the memory working its way up from the penis, seeking its womb, to his mind, and the whole celluloid tape of the trip emptied into his mind like a left over movie from an eighty-cent-theater, open-all-night, three-big-features. Three, seen over the loud snores of futility ground out by homeless men when he wasn't being kept and hadn't found a shack-up for the night yet. Only here it was and he watched it being replayed as the cops came for him through the Formica-polished sanctity of the restaurant.

And it all happened again?

again?

again?

again?

again?

again?

"Here," the girl said (echoing in his mind).

"Here," the girl said, her coral-lipsticked lips cemented together by exhaustion and sweat, the flesh pulling apart slowly so you could see the sticky skin curving away from the small opening until it reached the corner of her mouth and could go no farther. Last night those lips had closed over his prick, tongue sliding across his member with a motion so frantic it was almost an act of worship until he had come, white semen spurting into her throat, and she pulled away, spittle and sperm running down her cheeks, burying her face against his balls and chanting over and over in some convoluted mantra, "You're beautiful, you're beautiful. "

But now her hand, instead of clenching like a fist on his foreskin, offered him a tiny pink pellet and he wondered why, for just a moment, in the California-matchwood cluttered interior of her apartment, he caught the odor of bitter almonds. But his hand closed around her smaller one and took the pill, holding it up to the light so it seemed to glow a pale rose from within, asking, "What is it?"

"MST, like acid and STP with a hypo of smack to juice it up."

His fingers held the capsule rock steady while she poured a glass of pre-canned, pre-digested orange juice from a yellow plastic pitcher and took the cap, breaking it in half so the sand-fine pink granules fell floating on the liquid, inserting a finger slowly into the juice, careful not to break the surface tension, then swirling it about, sucking the powder into the orange undertow until it was gone.

She handed him the glass first and he drank, tasting curiously to see if there were any immediate difference, even flavor, but it was only the sweet-sour tang of concentrated juice on his tongue. So he took it in two swift swallows, the cold biting his throat and stomach instantly, settling into an uneasy mixture in his gut.

He sank down on the couch which they had never really made up from the frantic fuckings of the night before when the sheets on the foldout mattress were tangled and wet with a rich and heavy scent, handing her the glass with his prints oily and sharp on it, raised with the sweat of his fingers. Her hand wrapped around it with a strobe-light motion, a segmented folding that grasped the glass tightly, fingers slightly spread, and the other hand closing over it, interlocking, bringing the rim slowly to her parted lips where her tongue moved thirstily behind white teeth. She put it down on the dirt-ringed telephone stand next to the receiver, taken off its hook and buzzing but not insistently enough to interrupt her lovemaking, and her eyes lifted to his, lonely, seeking eyes, lost in wonder at his face, her hand beginning to move over his body, through the tangled hair and along the lines of the musculature, coming slowly up to his face, to pull his head down so she could stare into his eyes and find--something; and he resisted, hiding the emptiness of his eyes, bending forward too smoothly and too abruptly for her to stop, putting his dry lips on her nipple, eyes hot and open, staring at the shadowed railing of her rib cage.

His breath whistled in and out, a loud throaty sound filling the silence of the plaster-walled apartment, her nipple hardening under the wet lash of his tongue playing across the roughly surfaced tip, the fuzzy feel of downlike hair tickling his nose with each loud rushing breath sucked into and forced out of his body. Her hands groped over him, heavy and urgent, her eyes widening and widening until there was only an immense pupil inlaid in a milk-white and slimy stone, staring beyond him while the deft, impelling motion of her fingers kneaded and caressed and coaxed, arousing a hard, cold need in his genitals that rose up, inching over her thigh, growing, swelling, climbing tree-tall, hard and steady. But his mouth still clung to her nipple, tongue flicking across the tip, eyes on her rib cage, watching, passive, as her flesh sank away, hidden beyond a vast kaleidoscope of color, the images wheeling and dissolving into patterns more stately than any human dance, fragmenting and breaking and re-emerging into twin colors that complemented and eternally fell through each other in a webbery macabre.

His prick rose up blindly, twitching, moving, finding its way down her body while his hands prepared the way, spreading her legs, spreading the wet, willing walls of her vagina, opening them wide, making them receptive as he slid the shaft of his flesh down, down, down endlessly into her, past every barrier, past every obstruction, seeking the core of her being he had never touched because she had never really looked at him, only at what she wanted to see, never touching him. He went in, slowly, slowly in, each single discreet movement an eternity, feeling the warm, wet smoothness of her cunt enfolding him, receiving him, taking his flesh into her flesh; and he pressed on, his hands clenched whitely on her shoulders, then working up to hold her face still, its wide, unseeing eyes looking into his while he pushed in and in, his body a knotted force, an agony yearning cruelly against her passive cunt.

Then her eyes came back to his face, while her flesh transmuted again into a sea of pale hued color washing into and over him, twin colors falling endlessly through each other, and her eyes looked into his hot, real ones; and he groaned over and over again, his breath a half moan whistling through his words, "Look at me, fuck you, damn you, look at me while you're fucking me. Fuck me, fuck me, not this stupid death's head smile that splits us apart no matter how tightly, fuckingly joined our guts are. Look at me, look at me, look at me ?" repeated a thousand times in a pattern that tried to reach out beyond all their fuckings and make this one here, now, mean something to her, something to do with him, the him of the onyx hot eyes and not the unreal him of the foolish, cursed smile. And compelled by the power of his voice, her eyes came back to his, summoned out of her private dream to meet his, and suddenly, bolt uprightly terrified, seeing, her body twisted away, her cunt recoiling from the crying honesty of his prick trying to reach her through this fuck and make it mean something real to both of them. She screamed, her body revolting, and his hands clenched in the white sponge-rubber of her throat, cutting off the spewing forth of black fear that came multi-tentacled, writhing from her mouth, and went on, her face growing purple, twisted, eyes glassy, body limp, his come rising and rising, demanding to be free from his balls, blood spurting under the knife-edged sharpness of his nails, until his semen burst into her body, stuffing it, preserving it, filling it, finally, ultimately reaching her, leaving her quiet and satisfied in the aftermath of a gut-real fuck of honesty between them--between them between them sprokata--sprokata--sprokata. The last flickerings of memory tape ran through the projector, its frayed end hitting sprokata, sprokata against the gears of his mind, and around him, the black reflections of their helmets and uniforms filling the Formica-surfaced restaurant, were the man, the fuzz, the frigging cops, hauling him out from behind the table, spilling it and an earthenware mug of steaming coffee to the floor long before he could rise to surrender himself to their justice, twisting his arms up behind his back, the muscles wrenching across his shoulders while they crowded in from every side, pinning him in the closed walls of their hatred, hustling him from the building before the startled waitresses could put down their newspapers for a quick look.

He went passively, exhausted, empty, his semen gone, irrevocably committed to her body, his life gone, empty of all except an eternal smile and a death's head rictus settling in his veins where the blood of his body had tried to find a way to merge with hers and had found only death. A cold metallic surface touched his shoulder, stinging slightly, the abrasive roughness of the analyzer probing his chemistry, seeking the mechanics of madness as they emerged into the isolation of smog and street, its faint hum reducing his physical condition to a few symbols punched on a green tape.

They lifted his feet from the pavement, the night sky swinging into view as his head tilted back and his feet became horizon-level, and thrust him into the rear of their beetle-black, beetle-shaped van as other hands reached out and drew him in while still other hands moved around him, probing with sharp needles, and one of them, white cloaked, looked up into the goggles of the other, staring in at the reflection of his own goggles, and said, "MST, it looks like," while bringing a round nozzle up to his arm, "this will bring him down," and triggered some remote and unseen switch, his arm stinging for a moment as they brought up still another nozzle saying, "and this one will immobilize him." Then they triggered the second drug and his body convulsed into a pain clenched nausea, throat opening in a silent gag that ended almost as it started, tongue and epiglottis a dead weight in his mouth, his whole body limp, the nausea still a fierce blade in his stomach but his muscles responding to no command, even the unvoiced, instinctive one of retching, toes and fingers, legs and arms, all motionless, and he cried for motion, no sound emerging, his mind frantic with strength and torn with fear.

But no movement came, only the van making its silent journey through the city while they computed and analyzed and decided, his fate fed out on unseen carrier waves to the computer beyond, running the maze of his life through on key-punched cards; one of the two men handling the print out, its long white tongue feeding through his hands and past his eyes, while the other brought out more instruments from the packed, neat, closed tomb-like interior of the truck, scraping the encrusted blood from beneath caked fingernails and dropping it bit by bit into liquid-filled beakers, watching the color changes and placing the final end product under a microscope, their images bent in the curving overhead mirror running the length of the van where his paralyzed eyes could see them and they could watch him from any angle.

"It's her blood. No doubt about it," the white-smocked doctor said, straightening up from the instruments, his face half-turning to the programmer before the computer board who fed the information into the satellite unit where it whirled a moment on the magnetic tracks of his tape and then flashed out to the central complex at police headquarters and back in an instant with the verdict. The programmer tore the final result from the outlet and nodded to the doctor. Light smeared across the black shield of the goggles, and they swung a metallic helmet from one wall and fitted it over his head until it covered all but the eyes and he could only stare up helplessly at the mirror, trying to guess what hid behind the dead professional mask of their faces, and a new machine lit up, a wide sheet of graph paper rolling through it beneath the black line of an inky indicator. "You are Andre Monkton Fuller?" the programmer asked, reading his sheet, eyes shifting to the graph across from him, working the paper forward mechanically a line at a time as he spoke, and the indicator swinging up and back as he paused, a spark of response to his own name running from Fuller through the headset, down yards of circuitry to the detector. "Good. This truth detector having confirmed your identity, this is your trial."

Fuller tried to answer, tried to speak, tried to move tongue and lips and throat, but only his thorax retained any life at all, his lungs still functioning shallowly, only enough oxygen to sustain consciousness reaching his blood stream, so he remained silent before their accusation, the tell-tale unrolling of the graph speaking for him. "Josette Kovacks, tonight at eleven o'clock, was found dead in her apartment on Alvarado Street by two interns sent when the Medicare-Life-Indicator at the base of her throat ceased functioning as her heart stopped beating and her name flashed on the emergency board at County General. According to testimony given by her neighbors, you had been staying with her for the last week--is this true?" The indicator swung up and back, leaving a heavy black curve instead of the even progression of its line. "I see it is. Very well, fingerprints found on a glass by the side of her sofa-bed proved, on comparison with those at the local Selective Service Registration Office, to be yours. Further, the glass contained orange juice into which MST, a drug which it is illegal to manufacture, possess or take, had been mixed. The girl had been strangled and her throat lacerated in the process, the marks of fingernails in her flesh. Her blood type was found under your nails, and close analysis revealed it to have antibodies peculiar only to her chemical makeup. Did you strangle her?" A churning black fear, blacker than the sounds of hate from her throat or the purple-red of her blood, boiled in his chest, restrained only by the limp stillness of his body, and illuminated by multiple-screen, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree slow motion images of his prick and her cunt merging. His hand ached to reach down and unroot it, tear it out, rip it from his body and cast it away, never to be used again, to hurt him or anyone else, and in the overhead mirror his face smiled that open, confident, caring, masculine smile they all loved so much.

"Good. Having been tried and found guilty by the Division of Homicide of the Los Angeles City Department of Justice of the crime of murder, you are ordered to appear five days from today, on August twenty-third, before Judge Richard Goldstein of the Superior Court of the State of California, Division Eighteen. To that end I am empowered by the state to make certain you appear and hereby give authorization that a goad be implanted in your brain as provided for in the California Criminal Code, section eight hundred seventy-three, paragraph fourteen." He paused, licking his lips, the wet protuberance of his tongue distorting the narrow shape of his mouth and leaving the stubble of his beard glistening with saliva. "This judgment having been read to you, on this day of August eighteenth, you will be required to voluntarily sign a copy for the records stating that you have heard and understood it, in order to gain your release on recognizance."

The programmer raised his hand and the doctor lifted the helmet away, the graph stopping, its black line ending abruptly, the indicator leaving a Rorschach blot where the last of the ink fed from the tubing; and his scalp, damp with sweat, prickled, itching at the root of every hair, a maddening, constant, fierce and agonizing itch that he could not relieve or complain of, but only lie motionless and fearful, waiting, as they came back again, with other instruments, sharp and glittering instruments that descended, spinning, against his head, slicing through the thin layer of scalp to grind, ratcheting at his skull, pain and blood blossoming, the pain sinking, needle-sharp, into his brain, the blood dripping like spring sap through his hair, and unconsciousness enveloping him, pain, itching, fear and all, only a sliver of his mind retaining awareness as they drilled through the skull and invaded his brain, raping deep into the gray, quivering jelly, leaving behind a tiny metallic flake that gleamed for a moment before the slow ooze of blood covered it.

The paralyzed shutter of his eye lay open, the green-flecked iris a narrow band circling the pupil, and the images sank in through aqueous and vitreous humors in the retina, trapped, held, and sorted, then fired with electron speed down the optic nerve to the brain, where, in a dim, half-recognized twilight, he watched them replace the top of his skull, cementing the bone into place and sewing his scalp together, leaving only a dark mat of blood in his hair to betray their entry.

His head ached and his arm stung and he reached over to rub the shoulder, his hand pausing in the air, the sweat-slick palm quivering faintly, a pulse beating across the ball of the thumb and the fingers moving slightly, trying to embrace the wonder of freedom as he lifted his head to see if it were really true, his body able to move, muscles able to expand and contract at will, sliding over the blood lubricated bones in a coordinated effort, and fell back, bright pain screaming in his skull. Their hands closed over his arms and legs, lifting him from the table, his agony-weakened head flopping back on his neck, beating and beating and beating with a stomach-souring venom that shattered thought and resistance as the doors opened and a cool draft of air blew in, a metallic, drying chill on his damp flesh.

They set him down gently, one of the black uniformed officers coming out of the cab, helmet flashing, reflecting the brilliance of the street lamps, nightstick hanging by his wrist, putting an arm under him to steady his spinning balance, while the doctor stood before them, lifting his goggles and peering at him through narrowed lids. "I've planted a small metal goad consisting of two terminals and a receiver, in your brain. One is in the hate center, the other in the pain center. The one in the pain center is operated by a unit at headquarters and will activate at ten a.m. on the twenty-third if you are not in court. The other will activate it too if you become violent enough to attack another person. Any rise in activity in the hate center changes the electrochemical balance of the brain, triggering the goad, and will send you into great pain, a pain much worse than the pain you feel now. It will be a pain so severe you will have to reach the courthouse or die."

The tight ache pressed against his eyes, and he tried to blink away a mucous haze, the doctor a blurred image who thrust a pen in one hand and a paper before his face. "Sign this, it's your release." His fingers took the pen and his name seemed to boil out across the bottom of the paper in a chaotic black line while the doctor's words still echoed, ungrasped, in the night. "Good." The doctor raised his hand in a peculiar signal and said, "Here. This will convince you."

The agony came from everywhere, blazing in every cell, catching fire and consuming him in a nightmare torment that dissolved his very soul and threw him to his knees, puking the acid content of his stomach on the pavement. "That ought to do it," the programmer called from inside, and the doctor climbed back into the truck, the doors swinging shut and the light dying, leaving him alone on the street in front of his apartment, his mouth filled with the bitter taste of bile.