‘that I should intrude what you have chosen to call my penis into the person of my wife and that this intrusion should take place through the orifice between her legs?’
Dr Mannet nodded. ‘More or less,’ he muttered, ‘though I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’
‘Which orifice,’ continued Lockhart more ferociously than ever, ‘being too small, will then split and cause her pain and suffering and …’
‘Only temporarily,’ said Dr Mannet, ‘and if you object I can always make a slight incision myself.’
‘Object?’ snarled Lockhart and grabbed the doctor by the tie. ‘If you think for one moment I’m going to let you touch my wife with your foul John Willie—’
‘Not my John Willie, Mr Flawse,’ gurgled the strangulated doctor, ‘with a scalpel.’
It was an unwise suggestion. As Lockhart’s grip tightened Dr Mannet turned from puce to purple and was passing to black when Lockhart released his grip and hurled him back into his chair.
‘You come near my wife with a scalpel,’ he said, ‘andI’ll gut you like a dead rabbit and have your balls for breakfast.’
Dr Mannet tried to get his voice back while considering this awful end. ‘Mr Flawse,’ he whispered finally, ‘if you will just bear with me a moment. The purpose of what I call your penis and what you prefer to regard as your John Willie is not solely to pass water. I hope I make myself plain.’
‘You do,’ said Lockhart. ‘Very plain, not to say downright ugly.’
‘That’s as may be,’ continued the doctor. ‘Now in the course of your adolescence you must at one time or another have noticed that your pen— John Willie gave you pleasurable sensations.’
‘I suppose you could say that,’ said Lockhart grudgingly. ‘At night.’
‘Precisely,’ said the doctor. ‘At night you had wet dreams.’
Lockhart admitted that he had had dreams and that the results had sometimes been wet.
‘Good,’ said the doctor, ‘now we’re getting somewhere. And in those dreams were you not conscious of an overwhelming desire for women?’
‘No,’ said Lockhart, ‘I most certainly wasn’t.’
Dr Mannet shook his head carefully to rid himself of the feeling that he was dealing with some violent and wholly unconscious homosexual who having turned nasty once might turn murderous a second time. He trod warily.
‘Would you mind telling me what you did dream about?’
Lockhart consulted his memory for a moment. ‘Sheep,’ he said finally.
‘Sheep?’ said Dr Mannet faintly. ‘You had wet dreams about sheep?’
‘Well, I don’t know about the wet part,’ said Lockhart, ‘but I certainly dreamt about sheep a lot.’
‘And did you do anything to these sheep you dreamt about?’
‘Shot them,’ said Lockhart bluntly.
Dr Mannet’s sense of unreality grew alarmingly. ‘You shot sheep in your sleep,’ he said with involuntary alliteration. ‘Is that what you’re slaying … saying?’
‘I shot them anyway,’ said Lockhart. ‘Wasn’t anything much else to shoot so I took to potting them at fifteen hundred yards.’
‘Potting them?’ said the doctor, slipping paediatrically. ‘You potted sheep at fifteen hundred yards? Isn’t that a bit difficult?’
‘Well, you’ve got to aim up and off a bit, but at that range they’ve got a running chance.’
‘Yes, I suppose they do,’ said the doctor, who wished he had. ‘And having potted them you then had spontaneous emissions about them?’
Lockhart studied him with concern now mixed with his disgust. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘First you fiddle with my wife and then you ask me here and start talking about fucking sheep …’
Dr Mannet seized on the expression. ‘Ah,’ he said, heading for bestiality, ‘so having shot sheep you fucked them?’
‘Did I?’ said Lockhart, who had picked up the six-letter word from Mr Treyer, who used it frequently in its seven-letter variety when speaking to or about
Mark Russinovich, Howard Schmidt