My name is Saul. There is nothing in my history, nor in my family's history, that would justify the name, which is a significantly biblical one. In all these years I have been able to discover no shred of reason for the appellation. So be it. I am not one to look for reasons. I prefer the lightning thrust of intuition. The name is like any other and it appears on my birth certificate.
From the beginning I was a kind of stranger. What is that? Ha! Baudelaire came near to expressing it:
"Your friends?"
"You use a word that I have never to this day been able to understand."
"Your country?"
"I know not on what latitude it lies."
"Well, then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?"
"I love the clouds ... passing clouds ... over yonder ... the wondrous clouds!"
There is no fact that does not appear to me to be at bottom absurd. My father was drowned at sea. He lived at sea also. My mother died shortly afterwards of some obscure internal complaint. She always complained and she was always obscure about the origin of her complaints. Thus, from my early years, I was an orphan.
Shortly after what the local parson - a man of certainties - called "this double catastrophe," I was sent to America, where I lived until the death of my uncle. Something which my aunts called "grave" happened there. Aunt Jenny, in particular, was of the opinion that I was "marked" for life. I have no personal opinion on the matter. And she, surprisingly, didn't know.
Aunt Jenny was a goldfish.
Aunt Lutetia was a bluebell.
Uncle Harris was over sixty with long hollows in his cheeks and long gray pants and he was always nervous about something.
Aunt Lutetia was a bluebell because her hat was like a bell drawn tightly over the flat yellow shoots of her hair. It was a blue hat she bought at a Christmas sale and she never went without it.
The reason for Aunt Jenny's being a goldfish was less obvious. She smelled of old lavender and always gave the impression of being powdered with gold dust. Then there was her way of saying "oh" as a fish does, her thin lips circular and her blue eyes round and vacuous. And her skirt sloped inwards as far down as her ankles so that she might have been a mermaid if she had been younger and more beautiful. As it was, she was a goldfish.
Uncle Harris was an American and he never tired of telling people, especially other Americans. When Uncle Harris stepped into the buggy, he swung one long, gray, ranging leg after the other in a manner that suggested he was aware of his movements. When Uncle Harris died, it was because he swallowed a dose of rat poison, thinking it was something else.
The trees in the park were elms. They were very green, and so tall and stately that Uncle Harris swore they were planted before white man set foot in America.
They were part of an unspeakable past, prehistoric, because savages, Uncle Harris said, were not in history, and, for the tribes of Indians who roamed there, all time was present. That was the difference between a tribe and a society, he said. A society was change-conscious. Its lifeblood was an ideal. It learned its lessons from the past and looked to the future. A tribe was not like that. It was static, and such progress as there was was unconscious. When Elmer Lewis said one evening that modern Americans were perhaps not quite as conscious as they thought, Uncle Harris was very angry. The elms represented an old order. Uncle Harris owned them.
Elmer Lewis was one of our neighbors. He lived in a fine old house of the colonial style which had belonged to his family since the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was not married and, on his death, the house and the lands would pass into the hands of a cousin in Boston. He was a cripple, and perhaps that was the reason he never married. He spent most of his time in the library, or experimenting with his orchids. He came to visit Uncle Harris twice a week to play chess. During the game, Uncle Harris would allow no one to disturb them. He took his chess almost as seriously as his politics.
I remember the lake and the evergreens, the clear white winters when snow covered everything. And I remember the tiny clearing in the copse where I saw Anna of the white thighs give herself to the man.
Anna was not an American, not yet anyway, and in Uncle Harris' eyes she never would be. She was a Jew. The Jews were not a nation and so there was no question of their changing nationality. They were a race whose racial activism prevented them from being integrated into any nation - a tribe. People knew this, Uncle Harris said knowledgeably, and that was why they called a female Jew a "Jewess." An American woman was an American. Any fool could see the difference.
Aunt Jenny and Aunt Lutetia believed Uncle Harris, although, believing in one God who was a Democrat, they would never have admitted it. The excess of their kindness to Anna was a kind of penance they did for being so comfortably gentile.
Elmer Lewis avoided the subject whenever possible, but it was difficult, for it was one of Uncle Harris' favorite topics of conversation. Together with what was decadent, what was Jewish was un-American.
Anna came to America from Odessa in the Ukraine. Her first memories were of black cargo ships and foreign seamen, Greeks, Turks, Armenians. Her father had been shot by soldiers of the Czar. She herself had escaped from a batch of women seized for a military brothel. That was her mother's fate. She did not know where the rest of her family was.
She learned English quickly and by the time she came to us she was almost fluent. I was ten years old at the time and my aunts, seeing how well-behaved I became in her presence, decided to use her almost as a governess instead of a maid. She was given a room next to mine in the old wing of the house and if Uncle Harris disapproved of her presence there and her influence on me, he kept silent about it. As I was to discover, he had his reasons: she was for him, too, perhaps, Anna of the white thighs.
The goldfish and the bluebell told all the neighbors that Anna's father had been murdered by "the Red devils." My poor aunts were confused about many things.
Anna became very fond of me. When I was not at school, I was with her all the time. She played with me as though she were a child of my own age - I think she was twenty-two or twenty-three then. We pretended we were Apache Indians and we tracked each other all over the grounds. Our favorite hiding place was the little clearing in the middle of the copse. It was utterly secluded and no one from the house ever came there. It belonged to us. If, for one reason or another, one of us were detained in the house, we met there: two Apaches who had escaped from the reservation.
After the first summer, my whole world revolved about Anna. Anna was young and full of life. She laughed at me and kissed me. It was she who awakened me in the morning and put me to bed at night. Throughout the day I held her hand and allowed her to decide what we should do. If she stopped to talk to one of the stablemen, I became badly jealous and pulled at her skirt to drag her away. Then she would laugh and say to whomever it was who was trying to make a date with her, "It's no use, sir! You see, I'm beholden already!"
Anna was not anything. She was not a goldfish and she was not a bluebell. I could not find anything to call her that would have fixed in my mind the smoothness of her olive skin, the way she blinked her dark, heavily-lashed eyes, the tilt of her breasts and her wonderfully soft movements.
I would have died for her.
She was all the more wonderful for me as a child because, at the beginning at least, I could only guess at the limber, supple body that moved, with a suggestion of cloying rhythm, under her dress of washed cotton.
One day towards the end of that first summer, we were alone together in the middle of the copse. I was lying on my back looking at the wide, blue sky and Anna was sitting cross-legged beside me.
"Anna," I said, "do you like America?"
"Yes," she said, "I like it very much."
"Better than Russia?"
"Russia I love, too," she said. "There are things in Russia that I miss."
"And do you like Americans?"
"I like some Americans," she said. "I like you."
I laughed. "Oh, I'm not really an American! And I'm an orphan like you. But do you like Americans better than Russians?"
Anna laughed too, then.
"It is you I like," she said. "It is not Russians or Americans. It is you, you silly boy!"
After that we did not speak for some minutes. I was going east to school in a few days' time, away from her. The thought of leaving her made me more frightened than I had ever been before.
"Anna, what will you do while I'm away?"
"You will soon be back."
"And you'll wait for me?"
"Yes," she said, gazing through the bushes, "I wait for you."
"But I mean longer, Anna!"
"What is it you mean?"
"I mean until I grow up so that we can be married."
She looked at me and laughed merrily. Then, sensing that I was in earnest, she raised her wonderful eyebrows and drew me close to her.
"Yes, my little darling, that is what I mean!" And she kissed me on the mouth with her soft, red, dangerous lips.
But almost immediately she stood up.
"Come, my lad," she said - that was what Uncle Harris always called me - "we carve our initials on a tree. That makes it true, doesn't it?"
We chose the tallest elm halfway up the front driveway. Anna took the penknife, which used to be my father's, and with her thin, strong hand, she cut our initials deeply and indelibly into the bark.
That pledge was the beginning.
By the time I was twelve years old, my infatuation with Anna had reached an intense pitch. I nursed it like a seed in the dark, safely out of other people's sight. Its growth was uncontrollable, but only in the sense that, after a time, I lost the power to make it abate, and not in the sense that I was unable to control it in its overt manifestations.
I learned that craft early.
I learned to indulge myself and derive my satisfactions as needed without either rousing the suspicions of my aunts or causing Anna to turn against me. She was sometimes impatient with me, perhaps bored, for she was already mature and longing, as would any young woman of her age, for the experiences of a man, and that, unfortunately, I was unable to provide for her. But there were other things I could do.
I was quick to note that she liked to be stroked, although the type of caress that I was able to bestow on her was not dangerous enough to be wholly satisfying to her. Obviously, in spite of the fact that I had a strange curiosity to do so, I could not feel her under her skirts without raising all sorts of resistance in her. I tried once, pretending to pinch her knee while we were lying in the copse. Her knee mocked me with its smooth perfection. I would like to have kissed it. When I pinched it, it moved upwards in a kind of reflex movement, revealing a few inches of her dusky white thighs, but as the formless sensation of hunger rose within me, her hand grasped mine and she said, "Don't touch me there! It's not nice!"
I had to be careful.
No. My knowledge that she liked to be caressed was derived from the fact that she always allowed me to brush her hair. She would allow me to do this for hours on end.
I said a moment ago that I had to be careful. I don't mean that I had to be careful to avoid all sex; just that any sexual gesture on my part had to be cloaked; it had to be made under a smoke screen of innocence, or better, under the impenetrable smoke screens of both innocence and utility.
Take the brushing of her hair. No possible guilt there. And also, her hair had to be brushed. I believe I could have put my mouth to her sex if I could have brought to such an act enough innocence, run through by even a vague utility. For my darling Anna was hot and it was my passionate desire to be the priest of her deliverance.
And so I began by brushing her hair.
A barber does not only brush hair. It occurred to me very soon that none of the normal acts of the barber were forbidden to me. I could massage her scalp, or gently behind her ears, my small fingers drooping at her neck, clinging like a little bee to sticky pollen. I could even stroke her cheek, and I was able to put a world of sensuality into that simple action. And when the barber had outrun his limit, I became a masseur.
For that game to begin, I had only to take her gently by the scruff of the neck as I pretended to make the motion of raising her hair. Her head would immediately droop forward and she would usually exclaim, "Oh, my neck muscles are so tired!"
"Yes, Madam," I would say, aping the barber. "If you will just step through into the other room..."
And she would do so, although not literally, by making a motion with her shoulders to signify her consent.
With warm oil I would massage her neck and the gently sloping muscles of her shoulders - this especially when, on warm sunny days, we lay together in the clearing in the copse. She allowed me to push her blouse up as far as her neck, and then I would massage her smooth back, the heels of my thumbs pressing at her spine. It was only when the tips of my fingers slid under the elastic of her knickers and pressed on the heavy muscles of her buttocks that she made a little movement of resistance to signify that I was moving beyond the limits of innocence. And yet she would have liked me to go on. I knew that because of her heavy breathing, because of the relaxed thrust of her thighs under the cotton skirt.
Subtle as a spider, I would reverse motions, alternately teasing and retreating, teasing and retreating, until her breath came urgently and her pores seemed to emanate a growing smell of woman. At such times, I would lean as close as possible to her, with my head a few inches above her back, and breathe in the smell of her fresh sweat. She was a mine of beautiful sensations. I am not sure she realized how entirely such experience of her dominated my horizon.
It was only in the copse that she would ever allow me to touch her leg. Out there, screened from the rest of the world, and in repose under a warm sun, everything was languorous. But even then, I could only touch at the calves, and perhaps two inches above the knees if she pretended to doze. From there on the territory was sacred and I crossed the border at my peril. I think that when I did so, her annoyance stemmed not so much from her moral indignation as from the anger arising from a strongly felt necessity to order me to stop, and even to punish me by prohibiting me to continue with any form of caress.
But I soon learned a trick of getting around this, too. It was difficult to teach her, but, after all, I was simply offering to be the instrument of her own desire.
One day I said to her, "Just to prove I want to be obedient, Anna, I want you to punish me if I'm bad."
"I will. You don't have to tell me that!"
She had missed the point.
"I mean just as Uncle Harris does."
"How?"
"I want you to slap me."
"I don't want to hurt you."
"No," I said hesitantly, "but it doesn't really hurt on the bottom, not for long anyway."
I saw the faint signal of comprehension in her eyes. This was surely very moral: punishment, discipline. It was praiseworthy on my part to demand it of her!
The first time, she did it with my trousers on. That was not really satisfactory. We were both aware of the problem. We had to find some good reason for taking my trousers down, one which would not only agree with the positive aspect of morality, but one which, by overshadowing the sexual implications of slapping another person's bare bottom, would be compatible with its prudent aspect. This was not easy. I pointed out to her many times that it would hurt more if she took my trousers down and that it would therefore be a more effective punishment. She agreed, but hesitated all the same. It was not until I pointed out to her that sometimes she hurt her hands on my trousers buttons that she finally capitulated.
I remember that first time very well. My trousers were pushed down about my ankles, and I leaned over her thighs, feeling their warmth through the faded cotton dress at my crotch, my pink bottom naked to the wide gaze of the sky. She slapped hard; hard enough to convince herself that it was a punishment she was meting out and not in any way pleasurable. But, strangely, the more it was obviously a punishment, the more pleasure my beautiful Anna appeared to reap from the ceremony. Toward the end, she would not stop until she had brought real tears to my eyes. I always took a long time adjusting myself comfortably across her thighs, and when she had struck two or three blows I would ease my legs apart so that the tender insides of my thighs would feel the sharp shock of her fingers. And so, if after having caressed her for some time, I felt her tiring - in the end it is fatiguing to be continually excited without deriving complete satisfaction - I would immediately cross a forbidden border. The more flagrant the offense, the more fierce would be the subsequent punishment. Thus I had to gauge what I wanted to bear. On the first occasion, when my fingers brushed her short hairs, she made a great sexual effort and lost her temper. That was magnificent!
But even while I suffered the most extreme anguish as her hand rose and fell viciously on my tender buttocks, even as I eased open my thighs to the extent of baring my small testicles to possible damage, my mind was working overtime on the problem of how to capitalize on the great sorrow she would experience at having hurt me so badly. At last, I screamed. The pleasure of the scream drowning for an instant the pleasure I took in the beautiful solution I had found to the problem of making this a Pyrrhic victory for her moral fervor. And then, all at once, she was contrite. My face streamed with tears. I threw my head against her breasts, my face pressing hard to the soft pillows of her flesh, and bit down imperceptibly on the button of her blouse. First one, and then another, fell away until the blouse opened, her nakedness nearer to me than ever before. Then, nuzzling my nose to the uppermost edge of her loose brassiere, I forced it down until finally, her bare, warm flesh touched my own. With a cautious, yet willful tongue, I took a nipple into my mouth. How hard, how sweet it was as it rose to the touch of my tongue!
After her first shock, she gave way. Could she punish me again? A moment later, her arms moved round to cradle my head where it lay. "My baby! My baby!" I heard her whisper.
For a while, things progressed by themselves, without further effort on my part. The second time I touched her pubic hairs, which were coarse yet silky at once, my fingers actually brushed against the wet folds of her sex. They seemed, in one fleeting, yet eternal instant, to open themselves to me. But there was no opportunity to languish in their moist suppleness, for just as suddenly as I had perceived the eternal response of her sex, she was pushing me away. Again, her anger caused tears to well in my eyes, and again, I threw myself upon her breast. This time, she was utterly and exquisitely naked beneath her blouse. She had worn no brassiere! My Anna had become my accomplice.
My hands closed around one breast as my mouth came over the other. It was sweet and good in my mouth. I crushed them to me, one in my hand, the other in my mouth. I felt as though I could drown there, infinitely happy enclosed within her soft, full flesh. This time, she allowed herself to fall backwards on the ground, holding my head firmly in place between her hands. I felt myself grow hard and strained to urge my member against her leg. The sun was falling and the copse was partly in shadow and there was the warm buzz of insects; I remember a clump of dandelions not far away.
After a while, one of her hands slipped away from my head. I knew not where it went, but assumed, because her breath was coming in quick, increasingly desperate gasps, and her lower body was rising and falling slightly on the earth beneath her, that she was feeling herself. I imagined her fingers working themselves in small circles around her sex and tried again to reposition myself so that I, too, might feel the same exquisite sensations in which she was indulging at the apex of my being. When I tried to move one of my hands down her body, she stiffened, pushed me away from her and got up. She walked away without saying a word. This time I had really gone too far. She was willing to do anything, but it was my job to find the smoke screens, to find the ethical drugs with which she could put her conscience to sleep. I had not done so. The wall of righteousness was not to be penetrated without strategy.
Still imagining her fingers moving eternally around the circle of her sex, I pressed my hand hard to my own sex. How rushing and warm was the sensation. Alone in the day, I freed it of its constraints. I wrapped my fingers tight around it, and bore down upon the base of it. I closed my eyes and imagined my Anna. It was not my hand that held me, but her's. The pressure which I gave to my desire was the pressure of her desire; her white thighs squeezing me between them; her lithe fingers wrapped tightly around me, squeezing; her red lips kissing me. Yes, it was Anna and my pleasure rose quickly and without ceremony to the surface, warmed not only by my love for Anna, but by the sun overhead. I released my desire into the day and fell back breathless; Anna was desire and she was pleasure.
Chapter 2
It had been Uncle Harris' ambition to be a historian, but for the first thirty-five years of his adult life he had been a lawyer. That was the family business. My grandfather had been a lawyer and my father, before he was drowned, was also a lawyer, although he practiced in England and not in the United States. Uncle Harris had been on the point of retiring for many years, but it was only after my arrival that he finally did so. At that point in his life, he moved from law into history like a tornado.
He spent each morning now in his library, making notes for the first section of his great work.
His progress was slow, but it was the first section, he explained on many occasions to his sisters, which would give the stamp of originality to the whole work. The first section (to be entitled "The Concept of History") was to be a kind of telescope with subtly arranged lenses, which, for the first time, would make it possible for contemporary man to look at the past and see it in its true perspective. That was why he would feel justified in spending even ten years in its preparation. For the rest of the work, he would merely have to train his powerful telescope on the works of his predecessors, an undertaking which would not take more than three years, and would, he believed, rid civilization once and for all of a turgid mass of ancestral delusions. When he spoke, he was very impressive, and my aunts and their friends were duly impressed.
"It's his trained mind," the goldfish said apocalyptically.
The only person in our circle of acquaintances who did not appear the least impressed by my uncle's historical acumen was his crippled friend, Elmer Lewis. This annoyed Uncle Harris because he was well aware that Lewis was no fool. It was all very well to impress the bluebell and the goldfish and the inconsequential ladies and gentlemen who came to take tea with them, but, after all, Uncle Harris was intelligent enough to realize that such praise meant very little. Lewis was different, for he had traveled widely in his youth before his accident and, since then, for over twenty years, he had devoted most of his time to reading. Lewis made no secret that he considered Uncle Harris' theory of history a piece of evangelical nonsense. Therefore, Uncle Harris could not resist periodically attempting to convert his friend to his own opinion.
One summer evening more than two years after Anna had arrived, Uncle Harris and Elmer Lewis joined the rest of us in the sitting room. They had been playing chess, and from the condescending manner in which my uncle ushered his friend into the room, I surmised that Uncle Harris had won. The goldfish and the bluebell greeted Lewis cordially. Whenever he came, they went out of their way to mother him.
Anna, who had been sitting by the window with me, went out of the room after a moment to make some cocoa for us. The rest of the servants had already retired.
"She's such a sweet girl," the bluebell said.
Uncle Harris nodded. "Yes," he said. "It's a pity she's a Jew."
The goldfish and the bluebell looked at the carpet. I said nothing because at twelve years of age I was not expected to say anything, but I thought that if that was so, then I wanted to be a Jew also so that nothing could ever come between us.
As for Lewis, he was looking angrily at my uncle.
"Why?" he said. "What possible difference can it make?"
"Read history," Uncle Harris said.
"I have been reading history for forty years," Lewis said dryly.
Uncle Harris smiled and a faint flush of excitement came to the cheeks of the bluebell and the goldfish. Lewis was only a boy, a dear sweet boy, to be sure, but so innocent and naive beside the man who was still the titular head of the family law business!
"My dear Elmer," Uncle Harris said, "In all honesty, I think you must bow to my judgment in matters of history. Don't take offense if I suggest that there is only one scientific way of looking at history."
"Abracadabra," Lewis said.
Uncle Harris flushed.
"I have told you before," he said, controlling himself with some difficulty, "that the greatest impediment to the true understanding of history is ancestor-worship. It normally takes the form of awe at old things, a sentimental reverence for trinkets..."
"What exactly are you trying to prove, Harris?"
"I don't intend to say any more at the moment than that the Jews are the epitome of what I'm talking about," Uncle Harris said. "They are a decadent race whose whole orientation is unconscious and uncreative."
Lewis shook his head impatiently. "Decadent, uncreative? What on earth do your words mean? My God, look at Anna! Is she decadent or uncreative? You are the ancestor-worshipper, Harris. You've got direct contrary evidence in front of your eyes, but you won't see it! You're not an historian, Harris. You're an evangelist!"
If the goldfish and the bluebell had been birds, they would have twittered.
"Stuff and nonsense!" Uncle Harris exploded. "Take my elms! Take my 'awe-inspiring' elms! Where's my ancestor-worship towards them, eh? No, Elmer. My attitude is scientific. To me, they are timber!"
"Not yet, I hope," Lewis said with a smile.
"As soon as I give the word!" Uncle Harris said.
"Now, now, Harris," the goldfish said. "The poor trees!"
"Yes, Jenny, timber! Timber that will go to create ships, bridges, the structures of civilization. That is progress, a conscious purpose, a movement towards an ideal! I must say I'm surprised and disappointed, Elmer, that you should accuse me of the very attitude I have struggled against all my life!"
"I'm sure Elmer doesn't mean that, Harris!" the goldfish said from her best of all possible worlds.
"The most dangerous attitudes are the unconscious ones," Lewis said quietly.
And there the conversation ended because Anna entered the room carrying a big yellow jug of hot cocoa and the company remembered that she was the person around whom the argument revolved.
We drank our cocoa in silence. I don't know whether Anna sensed she had interrupted something, but as soon as I had finished my cocoa she suggested it was time I went to bed.
"Yes, my lad," Uncle Harris said. "Run along with Anna now. It will be a fine day tomorrow."
I shook hands with Elmer Lewis. I did not need to remember to do it from politeness. It was as though he had fought for me. Then I kissed my aunts and followed Anna from the room.
Before Anna turned the light out, I said, "Anna, could I become a Jew?"
She flushed and looked at me questioningly.
"I suppose you could if you wanted to," she said slowly after a moment's hesitation. "Why?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Can I brush your hair, Anna?"
"Not tonight," she said, and when I was silent, she said, "Go to sleep like a good boy. Good night."
"Good night."
The door closed behind her. I was left alone with my thoughts. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like if Anna one day did not resist, if, as my fingers caressed the creamy inner surface of one thigh, slightly above the knee, she relaxed instead of stiffening, allowing her thighs to fall open like a book - what then? I touched myself, my flesh hot and soft against my fingers. What then? I would, I thought, rest lengthwise along her body, which would unfold to me, and enter her. Oh, the power of such imaginings! Within seconds of thinking it, my member expanded even more in my hand, the underside of it pulsing on the undersides of my fingers, and I shuddered, blinded, able only to mutter "Anna, Anna," over and over again until a curtain of softness descended over my senses, my wet release drying on my belly, my hand limp at my side. My last image was of Anna, her head tilted back, her breasts erect, and, like a vast portal at which I longed to prostrate myself, the soft, yet muscled, forward thrust of her dusky white thighs...
***
Dawn broke early. Uncle Harris was down before me with the rods and the nets.
"Take your breakfast quickly," he said. "There's no time like early morning."
When I had finished eating, the horses were saddled and ready. We rode out along the front driveway as the sun rose over the elms. Uncle Harris did not speak until we had left the park.
"There'll be a dollar for every fish you catch," he said. "If you can land 'em as your father did, you'll be independent!" He smiled at me. "But no minnows," he added.
I caught nothing, though we remained there for three hours. My mind was not on it.
"Might as well get back early," he said.
We rode back in silence.
It was mid-morning when we arrived. The sun was very strong and my aunts were sitting under a large umbrella on the verandah. I went in search of Anna immediately. Uncle Harris seemed preoccupied and did not detain me. She was not at the house.
The bluebell said that she'd seen her go out an hour ago.
I ran all the way to the copse, and then, wanting to surprise her, I crawled silently through the bushes towards the clearing.
A strange sound made me hesitate. It sounded as though Anna had screamed, though it wasn't a scream of fear or pain, but rather, one resulting in the catching of her breath, almost quietly. I crawled forward on my stomach to the rim of the clearing.
And then I saw them together, Anna and the man whom I recognized as the one who worked for Elmer Lewis; a man called Inez. He was doing something strange and terrible to her and she was not resisting, for her smooth, olive-colored legs were stark naked from ankle to thigh, her knees bent in the air nervously at either side of him, and her bare buttocks twitching on a bed of dead leaves. It was as though under the naked front of the man she were dying a strange death; a death to which she gave herself up completely.
I watched in silence, digging my nails into a broken branch which lay before me.
Their breath came hurriedly, in pants and grunts, the man boring into her with his strong, yellow-white shaft and her belly quivering like jelly between his thrusts. I watched and listened bitterly to the muffled thud of her heels on the leaves, and the shifting twitch of her cleanly curved lower torso as it swayed ecstatically beneath him.
I knew that Anna was being unfaithful to me. This was what I should have been able to do to her. It was toward this that I had been unconsciously moving in my daring caresses. And here, insolently, for the man seemed almost detached as he spoiled my beautiful Anna, was this other male, his smooth fount hovering like a falcon about to strike, with Anna, ecstatic, like a dying heron beneath him. It came as a revelation.
This was the thing that I knew existed, but had not been able to imagine; the practical maturity towards which my own longing was directed; the thing to which grownups referred only by innuendo. Anna was doing it! I watched the man, his ragged trousers thrust down about his ankles, embedded in her. At that moment I swore that I would kill Inez.
But I was unable to tear myself away. I watched, my emotions a mixture of fascination and horror.
Every so often, the hot, wet mush of their pubic parts separated a matter of inches, breaking wetly, and exposing for my vision the earth beyond them. And then he would thrust to the hilt in the soft gullet of her sex, and pull out again, dripping with her desire, which should have been mine. Anna's smooth legs were swaying, and each time he drew away from her, her soft buttocks rose from the bed of leaves imprinted with a brown leaf or two, and seemed to follow, his upward movement, as though reluctant to allow him to escape. Her brassiere and blouse lay crushed at her throat and her beautiful breasts, the nipples pointing skyward, were free one moment, then trembling and crushed under his hairy chest the next.
How I hated him!
And then, no doubt feeling her climax draw near, her hands ran electrically down his back toward the tight bunch of his buttocks, encouraging him to complete his violation of her. I was sick with the knowledge of her willing surrender.
Slowly, I turned away from the pale gleam of their wrestling flesh and crept back toward the footpath. How could Anna do that thing about which everyone was ashamed to speak? Was it because she was a Jew? I don't know why I didn't cry or why, when I came to the house, I walked round about it and up the front driveway toward the elms. I looked up out of my own confusion at the sound of rending wood.
One of the elms was tottering. It creaked, lurched and fell in a slow swishing of leaves, raising dust, directly across the driveway. And then I heard the voices of Uncle Harris and two of the stablemen. I ran forward to the tree and, as I came close, Uncle Harris and the two men appeared from behind the foliage and climbed across the felled trunk. The two men were carrying axes and a two-handed saw.
It was our tree, the highest of them, into which Anna had cut our initials two years before.
My uncle laughed at my bewilderment. He put his arm around my shoulders and steered me back toward the house.
"How are the mighty fallen!" he said with a laugh. "You see, my lad," he continued when I did not answer, "that was the highest elm for miles around. There wasn't one person who didn't tell me that. Harris, they said, that tree must be as old as Moses! Well, so it might at that. But what did that prove? To me it proved only that those who said it were a pack of sentimental nincompoops! Because you see, my lad, the old must give place to the new just as the fit must survive. History proves that. That is progress. All in all, that is America, a country of which you'll learn to be proud! I want you to remember. The old is destroyed to create the new. Treat with contempt those jackasses who want you to grovel before what's old, and remember what's old is likely to be decadent and the decadent's no farther from death than a fly's spit!"
"But the tree, Uncle Harris! It was a beautiful tree!"
"It was an old tree, boy. People thought it beautiful. That's as may be. I know now that it's a useful tree." He gripped my shoulder. "Don't let them fool you, lad!"
I did not answer. We walked on in silence.
Suddenly he said, "But where's your pretty Anna? I thought you were going to look for her?"
Impulsively, I twisted away from under his arm.
"Look for her yourself!" I cried. "She's in the copse with a man!"
As I ran from him toward the house, the tears were streaming down my face.
***
That evening I became oppressed by a sense of guilt. Anna's faithlessness, coupled in my mind with what I considered her great daring, was a very grand thing as compared with my mean betrayal of her secret. I felt an overpowering need to confess to her, but when, at last, bedtime came and I was alone with her, I was afraid.
She kissed me goodnight as usual and I listened to her footsteps as they died away along the corridor.
I could not sleep. I felt that my betrayal of her was only a beginning, and that my inability to confess to her, so that she would know her secret had been discovered and could then guard against it, was like diving in water. It was as though I were descending headlong to the dark depths of uncertainty: how could I have betrayed the woman whom I loved? What did it mean?
Uncle Harris had not appeared since I ran away from him. He was absent at lunch and at dinner. My aunts said that he had decided suddenly to go into town. They did not know why. From Anna's face, I learned nothing. She was as calm and lovely as ever, and yet, a few hours before, I had seen her naked and writhing in her sweat below the man. Occasionally, during those two meals, she turned suddenly and saw that I was looking at her. I flushed and turned away.
An hour passed very slowly and I began to know that I would not sleep until I had told Anna what I had done. Perhaps she would forgive me. I would cry and plead with her until she did. All I had to do was to wait until she came upstairs again to go to bed and then I would go to her room.
At eleven o'clock it began to rain heavily.
Sometime afterward, I heard her footsteps pass along the corridor and then the noise of her door opening and closing behind her.
I lay still and waited. The rain beating heavily on the windowpanes filled me with a vague dread of the dark corridor.
When finally I was about to reach forward with my hand and open the door, I became aware that someone was on the other side, with only the thickness of the door between us. I could hear his breathing. I should have screamed if whoever it was had not moved away at that moment. The footsteps went along the corridor and, once again, Anna's door opened and closed.
Who was it? Anna's lover? Inez? A flush of utter hatred passed through me.
Without thinking, I went over to the wardrobe and put on my dressing gown. Then I left my room quietly and crossed the corridor to the little bathroom beside Anna's room. I moved as quietly as a cat. Without putting on the light, I dropped to my knees in front of the keyhole of the communicating door between the bathroom and the room where Anna was.
The sight shocked me. Anna, her flimsy nightdress ripped and exposing her full, lovely breasts, was cowering away from Uncle Harris. He was standing, still wearing his riding breeches, his feet apart, about two yards from her. He threw a bundle to her, which fell to the floor at her feet, and then he stood watching her, his hands hanging down in front of him, flexing a riding crop. On Anna's face was an expression of horror.
He was speaking to her quietly and she seemed to be protesting. The word "harlot" came to me. He listened to her, a small smile playing on his lips, his right hand flicking the riding crop from time to time against his leather riding boot.
As I could scarcely hear what they were saying, it was like a mime show; the man cool and relentless, the woman desperate. The riding crop moved and pointed at the bundle. Anna seemed to catch her breath and she shook her head frantically. Uncle Harris spoke. The riding crop pointed again, moving up and down in a small arc.
And then, lowering her terrified eyes and staring at the bundle, Anna divested herself of her nightdress and stood bare naked in front of him. She was trembling.
It was the first time I had seen her naked.
Her slim olive shoulders, smooth as satin, were slightly hunched, as though she expected to be attacked, and in that posture, her wonderfully young, tawny breasts with nipples darker, more a brick-red than a rose, were partly obscured from my line of vision. I gazed fascinated at the superbly rounded turn of her sleek belly muscles; her buttocks tight but full; her thighs, the dull white inner surface of her soft thighs; and the strong, black-haired mound which I had seen open like red spitting jaws that morning. So beautiful was she, with her black hair falling to her shoulders and her long, slightly yellowish legs spread and run through with the nervous tension of a timid animal, that for the moment I forgot all about Uncle Harris. I was utterly weak and doting at the sight of her.
It was only when he moved, pointing again to the bundle with the riding crop, that the reality of the situation re-impressed itself upon me.
She was stooping now, undoing the bundle. I fixed my eyes on the pale white thighs below the buttocks, catching a glimpse of the soft-haired cleft between her legs.
The first item that came to her hand was a black suspender belt. She looked at Uncle Harris hesitantly.
He nodded grimly.
Slowly, she slung it about her golden belly and hooked it at the soft, left side of her waist. Four black elastic straps, each bearing a silver buckle, flapped at her thighs.
Uncle Harris said something, I think to tell her to be quick.
Sheer, black silk stockings next. She sat on the edge of the bed to put them on.
Uncle Harris leaned over the bundle and extracted a pair of very high-heeled, black patent leather shoes with complicated ankle straps. He threw them in front of her and she put them on.
He must have ordered her to stand up.
The high heels had the effect of giving a forward thrust to her mound and thighs, like a hungry, seductive gesture, and the two tightened straps in front framed her sex, which was black as seal-skin with a thin, coral-red slit.
The next thing he threw to her was a mask, a simple mask of black velvet, as jet-black as her pubic hairs.
He flicked the cloth, which had contained these things, aside with his riding crop.
He spoke again.
Hesitantly, she went to her dressing table, the supple movement of her gleaming flesh accentuated by the black accoutrements. She returned with a lipstick.
He pointed with his riding crop at her breasts.
I watched her slender hand, which was as delicate as a butterfly, hover over the warm mold of her breasts, and then, slowly, with a care that surprised me, she began to redden her nipples with the lipstick. She encircled it around them, gently at first, and then, in what I assumed to be her growing humiliation, more roughly, displacing them, beating the hard buds of them back and forth with the moist stick. Finally, her nipples were thickly creamed a bright red, like fresh blood. They stood out shockingly against the muddy whiteness of her flesh.
He pointed to a chair.
She stood up on it, displaying her entire, wonderful body. And as I felt the dull throb of excitement within myself, I began to understand my uncle's insistence on these elaborate preparations. For Anna had been transformed into a naked sexual object, a gleaming body subtly exhibited to the eyes of her despoiler.
But it was not over yet.
Taking the lipstick himself, he walked across to her, and, opening her sex with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he applied the carmine to the wet crescents of her labia: shock-red through shock-black. He stood back to examine his handiwork.
He moved over to the fireplace, thrust his hand up the chimney, and examined the soot on his palm and fingers. Returning to her then, he touched it lightly to the insides of her thighs, close to her sex. The application of the soot heightened the grotto-like impression that the smooth thighs lent to the mound, shadowing and accentuating the carmine-red clitoris, which before the application of the greasy lipstick, had been the color of a sea urchin.
She was naked, or nearly naked: a body ready for the sacrifice.
His first act was to move close to her, grip her firmly by her swelling buttocks, and thrust his face, his mouth open and lascivious, at her groin.
She tottered on the chair. But his mouth pressed firmly against her pubic hairs, his red cheeks framed by the white thighs.
Anna had closed her eyes and thrust her hands up to cover her face. She needn't have, for it was already shielded with the velvet mask.
He sucked at her for some minutes and when his face came away the bottom part was smudged over by lipstick. He removed this with a white handkerchief.
Then he must have ordered her to pose for him, for, without warning, she went into a number of alluring poses. She stood, first, with her legs splayed as far as the chair would allow, and her hands on her hips, as if ready to speak out in anger. Then, fluidly, she moved into another pose, this time spreading her arms out to her sides and bringing her legs in together, so that they touched. She looked up to the ceiling then, and it was as if she were offering herself to the sky. Yet there was no sky. There was only Uncle Harris and he spat at her to change positions. She turned around then, so that her back was facing both me and Uncle Harris and carefully, so as not to tip the chair over, she bent over, grasping her ankles with her hands. Her buttocks, in this position, were as round as the moon, and slightly parted. Uncle Harris walked up to her and ran his finger along the deep crevice of her behind. She winced slightly. Then, she stood again and turned around, her feet moving in tiny steps around in a circle. She did not know what to do next. I marveled at her beauty, and, as if in response to my admiration, she placed her hands beneath her breasts and lifted them up, so that the creamy red nipples nearly touched the underside of her chin.
He made another gesture with the riding crop.
Slowly, she climbed off the chair, turned, and stooping slightly, gripped the bottom board of the bed, so that her creamy, round buttocks, which were stark white above the black stockings and scored by the black straps of the garter belt, were presented to him. He said something. She nodded miserably, her long black hair cascading down her beautiful, white arms to the level of her softly pulsing belly. I would have liked to put my own head there, deep in its softness.
More quickly than I would have imagined possible, Uncle Harris stripped himself naked. His member was half-hard and his sinuous, white right arm swung in half-circles through the air, testing the resiliency of the riding crop.
My eyes returned to Anna. Her buttocks were quivering with fright and her superb, carmine-tipped breasts rose and fell with her breathing.
"Ready?"
It was the first distinct word which came to me through the door.
Without looking around, Anna nodded miserably.
After that, he didn't hesitate. The crop swung through the air and struck the soft flesh of her beautiful buttocks viciously. She shuddered, her whole body shaking uncontrollably in the radiating pain of the blow. He lashed out at her again, this time pausing after the downstroke to examine the thin, red weal, which the crop had made on her shuddering flesh. And then he set to work seriously. Bringing his arm behind his body, he carried it forward in a powerful instant, the whip hissing through the air, and struck her broadside. Her buttocks, which I could see clearly, expanded and contracted frantically. Trembling in the stinging calm that followed, she rounded her shoulders into herself, as though this would protect her, then jerked forward as the whip came down again. He must have struck her ten times. And then he hesitated. Anna had slipped down to her knees, her body huddled in great pain.
Brutally, he grabbed her by the hair and threw her backwards into the bed. As it happened, her slender legs pointed toward me, and fell apart, exposing the warm, lipstick-soiled clot of hairs at her crotch. Only momentarily, however, for my uncle, after one cruel stroke of the crop right at the crux of her thighs, could contain himself no longer. With a guttural croak of lust, he threw himself, huge and rampant, on top of her, forcing her thighs wide apart with the bony blades of his own thighs, while at the same time bringing down his slack, twisted mouth on one bright red nipple which disappeared in his gullet.
I watched her struggle helplessly, her legs flapping under him like broken fins. Then, all of a sudden, he bellowed like a bull and spurted his old man's passion deep in her womb. A few minutes later, while Anna, who had turned over, her white buttocks bleeding onto the black harness, was still weeping on the bed, he was fully dressed and addressing words to her again. I suppose she was listening, but she made no move to turn around and face him.
He spoke for at least five minutes, eyeing her balefully from where he stood, fully dressed. He flicked the riding crop once again against his boot, and then he turned on his heel and left the room. I heard his footsteps receding down the corridor. I waited awhile at the keyhole, watching Anna cry. How slack and white her whole torso looked in its provocative black trappings. The high-heeled shoes, strapped to her slim ankles, were still on her. One of the stockings had a run, but otherwise the whole undignified harness was in place. That scene, relived a hundred times in memory, has been an object lesson for me.
Silently, I went out into the corridor.
My terror faded in the opaque glimmer of the corridor-end window, in the wet sound of the night, in my own heartbeats, and in the small sound of her sobbing through the wood. I found myself unable to suppress altogether the strange elation I felt as I opened the door to her bedroom. She still lay where he had left her, her soft body bereft of all purpose, quivering with shame and outrage.
"Anna!"
I ran over to the bed and pulled her face round to me. It came as a shock to look directly at the black velvet mask with its diagonal, almond-shaped slits, the eyes like dark, wet pools glimmering within.
"Oh, Anna, I'm sorry!"
It was a long time before she spoke and then her voice was subdued and toneless. We were lying in the soft, warm darkness of her bed, my body naked beneath my thinly concealing garment, pressed close to hers, except where I felt the stockings and the garter belt she hadn't bothered to remove. My head was on her shoulder and my hands clutched at the soft odorous flesh of her armpits. I asked her in the softest of voices to tell me what had happened.
As she had emerged from the copse in the morning, she had noticed Uncle Harris standing under a tree not far away. He was smoking and watching her. She'd passed quite close to him, but he had made no move to restrain her. As she had walked away from him toward the house, she'd felt his eyes following her and she had been frightened.
He had not appeared all day and she had been sure something was going to happen.
She had just gotten into bed and turned off the light when Uncle Harris had entered the room. He hadn't knocked. Without warning, he'd switched on the light. He was carrying a riding crop and the bundle and he was breathing heavily. She'd known at once what it was he wanted to do. She'd told him to get out, but he'd laughed and had said that she need not pretend to be virtuous with him. He knew. He might have known before. She was a slut, a common little whore whom he had fed and protected. And before the night was out he was going to show her what a whore she was. He'd dragged her from the bed, tearing the flimsy nightdress away from her trembling breasts.
"But if you had screamed, Anna!"
"He said he would have me deported."
"Send you away?"
"To Russia. I'm not an American citizen," she said bitterly.
"But you could tell!"
"He is a judge. Who would believe me?"
I said nothing for a moment. With one small hand, I was massaging her warm belly. A strange, exciting odor arose from it to my nostrils. She made no move to stop me.
"But you're all right now, Anna," I said at last. "Don't cry any more! I thought he was going to kill you!"
There was a strange harshness in Anna's laugh.
"Do you think he won't come again? He'll come every night now! He said I would have to get used to it. Every night now I'll have to lie awake and wait for him to come until I can't stand it any longer and then, when I'm desperate enough, I'll kill myself!"
"No, Anna!"
Even in the darkness, I felt she was looking at me almost hatefully. My hand froze just above the matted hairs of her lower belly.
"No, Anna!" she repeated derisively. "What then? Shall I kill him?"
"Would you?" I said nervously.
All this talk of killing frightened me and fascinated me at the same time. It was part of a new strangeness that surrounded Anna. I remembered what I had seen in the copse. Was Anna different from other women? Were all women like that?
"Why not?" she answered coldly. "Why shouldn't I kill him? Do you think I like him doing that to me? I hate him!"
"Let me kill him, Anna!"
The words seemed to have spoken themselves. But remembering my thoughts on Inez during the day, I was only half-terrified at what I had said.
She laughed and ruffled my hair. It was a tired laugh. My hands twitched again near her hot, hairy chevron.
"My little Apache!" she said. "If only you were a man and not a little boy!"
"I'm not so little! I could do it!"
Part of me remained detached, listening to myself, like a witness.
"Silly boy! Why should you kill your own uncle? He's kind to you."
"Because I hate him, too, and it was my fault!"
"Your fault! How?"
I was trembling as I told her what I had done.
For long minutes she said nothing and I was conscious again of the rain on the window. I closed my eyes to shut everything out and gradually I became more intensely aware of the soft shock of naked flesh against my own. On the tender undersurface of my right wrist, where the veins pulse, I was aware of the hot bowl of her young, sweat-lathered, outraged belly - my fingers were now entwining themselves in her pubic hairs - as it rose and fell with her breathing. Her strange female odor entering into my tense nostrils seemed to enter my very veins like a paralyzing drug and I was overcome by a terrible lassitude, marked by a dull, throbbing sensation in my groin. I felt a terrible need to be absorbed by her.
"You!" she whispered softly.
"It was the tree, Anna," I said tonelessly. "He was cutting down our tree."
She did not seem to hear me. My slack lips opened near her armpit, and, breathing in deeply, I sought to annihilate myself with her odor. Seconds passed, the rain shattering against the window in gusts.
"And you could do it."
Her hand pressed mine against the wetted hair of her sex.
"Nothing would happen to you." Her voice was soft, but cold.
I didn't answer. The sudden, utter knowledge of her warm, protective nakedness drove all resistance from me. She was looking straight up into the darkness.
Her voice came to me.
"You want to be mine, don't you, Saul?"
I rubbed my face against the warm plasticity of her breasts.
"And you will do it, won't you?"
When I didn't answer, she went on in firmer tones, "You must do it for me because then I'll be able to forgive you for what you did, and everything will be all right again, everything. You must."
I had closed my eyes again and I said "Yes" over and over again until it became easy to say. I was an outlaw in her world.
"You love me, don't you, Saul?"
In the silence, despite my terrible promise, I felt warm and sure. It was as if through contact with her warm, wounded body I were drawing on her courage and her purpose. She was turning toward me, her soft thighs coming against my knees. I saw her smile in the dark. I felt the pressure of her hand on mine.
"Touch me harder," she whispered.
She guided my fingers to the dewy opening of her bristling sex.
"Feel," she said. "Explore it gently..."
The sticky mucous there felt like wet, warm cellophane between my fingers. I felt her hand at my genitals, tickling them, caressing them. She kissed me wetly on the inner cusp of my ear, causing endless shivers to run through my body.
"Ah, you're too young for that," she whispered, her voice coarse yet soft in my ear.
I hardly heard her.
"Show me you love me," she said and, very gently and persuasively, she took my head between her hands. She led me first to her breasts, upon which I pressed my mouth with ardor. I parted my lips and took her nipple lovingly into my mouth. I tasted the lipstick; it was waxen and slightly bitter. I sucked hard until she was clean of it and then I tasted her; she was sweet. Her nipple rose hard in my mouth, like a berry and, very gently, I bit down, as if to extract from that berry the sweetest of juices. She squirmed and led my head further down her body, forcing me down until her hot, urgent odor came directly into my nostrils.
She raised one warm, infinitely heavy thigh and I closed my mouth around her swollen sex. Then she lowered her thigh, enclosing me inside the gateway of her legs, cutting off sight and sound. It was as if I were at the center of a deep, dark sea. I swam, my tongue encircling itself around the center of her sex, which rose hard and, I imagined, blood red, to my lips, as my nose breathed in her salty fragrance. My own sex was nestled, in our position, between her firm, young breasts. I pushed in and out of them, gently, lightly, so as not to alarm her. Had I the frame of mind to stop, I would have, for, in thinking about it, I would have realized that this would, perhaps, frighten her. But, as I was blinded, near drowning, and without thought, I could not help myself; her flesh was too soft, too warm, and too full. I moved back and forth between her breasts, the soft flesh of them enveloping me completely, as if they were waves in which I floated.
With my head gripped between the sleek, white jaws of her thighs, I vaguely heard her say that I belonged to her and then, "Suck, suck, suck." The repeated word measured the rhythm of our desire. All was lost. Her firm breasts gripped me softly and warmed me. My mouth drank of her waters. I loved her frantically. I existed only for her and, indeed, would have drowned there between her legs, had she asked it of me. My mouth devoured her greedily as my buttocks worked to push me deeper into the valley between her breasts. At that moment I became her creature. I felt her sex expanding, pulsing around my tongue, gripping it, sucking it in. I pushed into her breasts and, without warning, was consumed by them. My member throbbed endlessly, it seemed, into her flesh just as it seemed her sex throbbed to consume my tongue. I was only slightly conscious that my fluids were exploding onto her breasts, her chin, her face. I hoped she would not care.
***
If Uncle Harris had had a sense of smell, he would have known that there was more than black currant wine in the glass. And if he had not made a practice of gulping things, he would not have swallowed enough rat poison to die.
I think he had a moment of clarity just as he screamed and clutched his throat and staggered back into the armchair. And even then, he was not dead and the horrified blue eyes were staring at me out of the helpless body which took such a long time to die. And we looked at each other, both of us horrified at what I had done.
My aunts heard the scream and came downstairs and into the library without knocking.
"Harris!"
The bluebell was there first, slapping the paralyzed hand and calling his name to him: "Harris! Harris! Harris!" The goldfish ran to the telephone and called Dr. Meadows to come at once because Harris had had a stroke. And then they were both kneeling at his sides and slapping him like two old peasant women washing laundry.
The dead man still breathed through a fallen mouth, which had lost the power of speech, and, after a moment, his eyes left mine and stared fixedly upward. Uncle Harris was looking at his eyebrows.
Uncle Harris was dead when Dr. Meadows arrived. After examining the body, the doctor turned with a serious expression on his face toward my aunts. They were seated stiffly at the edge of the settee and had not, as yet, taken their eyes off their dead brother.
"Jenny," Dr. Meadows said, "I wonder if you and Lutetia would mind making a cup of tea or something? There's nothing more to be done and I would like a word in private with the boy."
They got up obediently, like puppets, and left the room.
"Well, Saul?" he said when they had closed the door behind them.
I felt myself blushing and looked away from him. I didn't speak.
He lit his pipe with great deliberation.
"I wonder if you can tell me anything about it, Saul?"
"How should I know?" I cried. "He was old! How should I know anything about it?"
He did not speak for many minutes. He seemed to be arguing with himself. He walked across the room to the window, looked out, and teased his long nose between thumb and forefinger. When finally he turned around again, he said quietly, "You will hide this from the others, Saul, but you cannot hide it from me. I know. Do you understand? Now, will you tell me why?"
I was silent.
"I must know why, Saul."
I gritted my teeth and remained silent. We were staring at each other in much the same way that Uncle Harris and I had stared at each other while he slowly died.
"Will you speak?"
I shook my head.
"All right," he said resignedly at last. "Now, run along to bed, but first tell your aunts that I will make arrangements for an undertaker."
As I opened the door to go out, some childish impulse made me say, "How did he die, Dr. Meadows?"
"Very painfully, I should think," he answered dryly.
***
During the days before the funeral, Anna avoided me. I felt like a leper. When I reproached her, she said that it wasn't safe for us to speak. She made me swear over and over again that I would never mention her name in connection with my uncle's death. She explained that they would do nothing to me, but that if she were implicated, they would take her away and put her in prison. I promised. That night she took me to bed with her and allowed me the same freedom with her body. With each new experience of her, I became more entirely her creature.
And then, on the day of the funeral, Anna disappeared.
Driving back from the old town in the company of my aunts, the bluebell told me that Anna was gone. She had eloped, she said, with a servant of Mr. Lewis'.
Inez!
"So soon after his death!" the goldfish said. "It shows you, Lutetia, how you can be mistaken about people!"
"Harris always said," the bluebell began.
"Where is dear Elmer?" the goldfish said diplomatically, with a glance toward me.
I had seen Elmer Lewis at the graveside, a lonely figure on his crutches. He was the last to leave.
In the house, I ran upstairs to Anna's room. It was utterly empty. I stood there until I saw myself in a mirror.
In my own room, I found an envelope with my name written on the outside in her big, childish script. I opened it eagerly, but there was nothing inside but some locks of her soft, black hair. I burst into tears.
Two days later, the hair sizzled in the match flame and I had to draw my fingers away quickly to avoid burning them. Then I was down on my hands and knees searching frantically to save a few strands, but there was nothing left except the pain in my fingers and a few flakes of ash on the lavatory floor.
Chapter 3
I suppose it was Dr. Meadows who advised my aunts to send me back to England. For themselves, I am sure they would have preferred to keep me in America. They spoke vaguely of my health. They seemed to be moving and making decisions in a dream.
I was nearly thirteen when I sailed back across the Atlantic. I never saw my aunts again, for they were dead when I returned to America ten years later.
Of the period between, I shall speak only briefly. I went from school to university and by the time I was twenty-two, I was a Bachelor of Arts. For ten years, I followed the conventional course, studying desultorily, passing examinations, playing a little sport, reading, and occasionally going out with a girl. But without exception, I despised the girls I met; they were pretty, docile, and unserious. Nothing touched them to the quick and they had no more effect upon me than the idiot boys with whom I was forced, at school and college, to associate.
Had I not, after all, killed a man?
I felt myself to be different.
There could be nothing for me in what others called love.
Where was the risk? I despised civilized affections, the soul-destroying quality, the sugar-sweet tendernesses of the liaisons between boys and girls of my own age. What I sought was something much more terrible, something that could be described as a commitment: intense, obscene, even criminal in nature. I wanted to enter into something both physically and spiritually and be defined by it as religiously as a nun defines herself by her vow. Indeed, up till that time, except for my experience with Anna, I was as chaste as any nun. By my twenty-second birthday, I had still not known a woman. The only woman I had ever met who measured up to my peculiar standards was the one who was ever present in my belly from the time I committed murder for her.
Anna haunted me. Her image was evasive: the white thighs, a ripple of olive-tinted flesh, and a fleck of black hair disintegrating in my dreams. I would lay awake at night, the flesh of my belly crushed cruelly between my fingers, aching in every nerve to feel her flesh close, possessing me, and to feel her will move in me again. Would she still be the same? Or had she become soft and fat, in the ten years which had passed since she used me for her fatal lust? I didn't know.
The fact that she would be ten years older, a woman past thirty, excited me tremendously. If she had not gone to seed, if she had preserved that vital quality of contempt, her dark purity, the green fury of her passion, then how much more easily, and with how much more subtle calculation, would she be able as a mature woman at the height of her powers, to take possession of me and make me her own consecrated instrument!
For that is what she had made of me, and the mold, once set, was firm and unchangeable: I experienced no desire to possess, nor to mold in my own likeness another woman. I felt only an urgent necessity to be absorbed, used again even to the point of murder, and to draw my identity from every act done of another's necessity. The memory of Anna electrified me. She alone, of all the women I had met, was fit to receive such homage. Had she not made me commit murder for her? I nurtured the memory, with as much loving care as a poet gives to his creation. I worshipped her. I imagined myself prostrate before her. I buried my head between her soft thighs, knowing their strength. I asked her to judge me, to control me, to administer my punishment. I loved her, called to her in my dreams that I would kill my uncle all over again. She had to exist. She could not be dead, or worse, grown weak and as insipid as the women I met at college. That would be a betrayal. Men have destroyed gods for less.
But my doubts remained. Ten years is a long time, and had I met another woman to whom I could have brought the same religious dedication, I should without doubt have committed myself afresh. I did attempt to do so.
On my twenty-second birthday I traveled to London for a week's holiday. The idea had been growing in my mind for some time. Surely in such a huge city as London I would be able to find such a woman. Somewhere, I had to find her, for, in the act of poisoning my uncle, I had delivered myself over to an obsession.
I was walking along Piccadilly when it occurred to me that I might find my woman among the hustlers who plied their trade there. I had few illusions about a chance meeting with an unprofessional girl. None I had met so far had been remotely like the woman I was looking for. But a prostitute - a prostitute surely had to have some metal in her. I halted at a corner and glanced at the people who were passing by. It was already dark and as the weather was cold the people were muffled up to the ears. Nevertheless, it was easy because of the cold to tell which women were going somewhere and which were not. I counted three prostitutes and considered them one by one. The first was a slim, dark-haired girl, rather pretty, but also rather pathetic, I felt, with her rabbit-fur collar and little pageboy cap. The second was a spiritless, peroxided blonde, about thirty-five, who was constantly stamping her feet on the pavement to keep herself warm. It occurred to me that she would be better off in a brothel. She didn't attract me. The third woman was different. She was a heavily-built woman with a big bust, good legs, and coppery-red hair. She looked healthy and as strong as a horse. She, too, was over thirty, but probably a year or two younger than the blonde. I decided to approach her.
She smiled as I came up.
"Short time, luv?"
I nodded.
"Three quid," she said, looking me up and down.
I nodded again.
She beamed, and when she did so, I nearly walked away. I didn't want this kind of attitude. But I decided to go through with it. When I had her alone in a room I would try to get her to understand. Nevertheless, I didn't hold out much hope.
I followed her through a number of backstreets and into an entrance beside a newspaper shop. It was ill-lit. Instead of mounting the stairs as I had anticipated, she led me under them into a dark corner.
"Do it here, luv," she said.
"Have you not got a room?"
"Cost you another quid," she said.
"Is it far?"
"Just around the corner."
"Let's go then," I said.
She nodded and went out ahead of me. Again I had an impulse to turn back. By this time, I was certain that I had chosen the wrong woman.
We turned the corner and went into an entrance and up a narrow wooden staircase. On the third floor, she knocked at a door with a large brass nameplate on it. We stood for a long time before it was opened to us, first only a sliver and then wide to allow us to pass in. It was an old woman with gray hair and a wart below her left eye who let us in. She pointed at once to one of the rooms on the far side of the hall. My prostitute nodded and, indicating with a motion of her head that I should follow her, went in.
It was a smallish room with a four-poster brass bed. She pointed to it and I sat down. Then she carefully locked the door. When she turned again, she was beaming. She came across to me.
"Present first," she said.
I gave her four pounds. She tucked them away neatly in an inner pocket of her handbag. Then she removed her coat, revealing her large-busted figure in a green woolen dress.
She began to strip.
I watched, fascinated.
Her thighs were fat and the color of damp chalk, wounded where the split sex, almost unhaired, splayed open like a mass of pale calf's liver. Her belly hung down over it in a rounded fold, as abrasive as rough sandpaper where the hairs had been shaved. Crabs probably. She had not removed her brassiere.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed and she was standing about two yards away. I had to summon all my courage to spread my arms wider than her hip span, implying without speech that she should move forward from where she stood. She did so slowly, her big blue-pink knees betraying her hesitation.
And then she halted, the ambiguous mass of her sex about six inches from my face. At that distance, every terrible flaw in her skin was visible: the pitted areas, the places where the fragile networks of veins lay close under the skin.
"Satisfied?"
For a moment the question made no impact on me. It hovered beyond my comprehension, like an irrelevant minor motif in a bad painting.
And then, suddenly, I understood.
She had misinterpreted my desire. She thought I was examining her for purely utilitarian reasons. She had no notion of sacrifice, no acquaintance whatsoever with the sacred. I was, at that moment, confronted by a big, stupid cow submitting dutifully to a veterinary examination! I seized her angrily by the hips to check her retreat and thrust my face squarely between her thighs. She emitted a gasp of astonishment and, grasping me by the hair, forced my head away.
For a few seconds, she looked down and I looked up. We regarded one another balefully. I hesitated no longer. I rose and planted the sole of one shoe firmly in her soft, sagging belly, kicking with all my strength.
She cried out as she hurtled backwards across the room. She tried desperately to find her footing as shock started in her eyes. Her head struck heavily against the edge of the dressing table and, with the sound of air escaping from a soft tire, she fell unconscious to the floor.
I crossed over and looked down at her. Then, with my ear pressed against the door, I satisfied myself that the old woman had not been alerted. There was no sound.
I turned back to the unconscious woman. Some unusual quality in the crooked abandonment of the limbs made me excited. I felt as though I were on the threshold of a discovery. Somewhere outside, a clock struck seven. I approached her without articulate purpose.
Now that she was no longer conscious, no longer free to display her vulgarity, she was beautiful. The heaps of pink and white flesh had a warm life of their own.
With my penknife, I cut through the tag that joined the two bags of her brassiere. I set them aside and gazed down at the breasts. They were heavy, white, and filigreed with tiny red veins. The nipples were as big as olives, and crinkled as olives sometimes are. They were tough, chewable. I took her left nipple in my mouth and sucked it. She didn't stir.
A moment later, I was on my feet again. The torso had the strange humility of the sacrificial lamb. It was a new experience for me, to have another's body at my mercy. I was the priest, invested temporarily with the powers of a deity, and she was the raw material out of which, in some act of piety, I was at liberty to ... what precisely?
Yes, everything depended upon my skill, or rather my knowledge, my intuition. But there was no sudden illumination. And it was the absence of such an illumination that made me hesitate. I was in a state of awe, of lust, of frantic expectancy. I could feel myself growing hard. But what act would bring about the urgent, mystical resolution? What does one do with one hundred and eighty pounds of unconscious female flesh? What act would express the fluency of knowledge?
The naked whore, unconscious, spread-eagled clumsily on the dirty, red carpet, her breasts sagging now that the cheap pink brassiere had been cut away, was mine to do with as I pleased. I could have reacted in any number of ways. I could have called an ambulance or I could have thrown a jug of cold water over her. But how would that have assuaged the strange unrest that had been a prominent feature of my life ever since the death of my uncle?
Priest? I sat down disconsolately on the bed again. A priest without knowledge of the sacraments. What was the use? I stared almost hatefully at the sprawling woman. But I could not bring myself to go just then.
Instead, I sat down beside her and laid the palm of my hand flat on her belly. I allowed it to ride with the movement of her breathing: up, down, up, down. I clenched my hand and her flesh felt like smooth, hot dough, pulsing, living. I laid my ear on her belly and listened to the rumbles within. She smelled quite clean. I opened my trousers and took out my penis, which sprang hard away from its constraints as if it had a life of its own. Then, supporting myself with my hands, I lowered the hot mass of it against her soft, loamy crotch. It felt good. Leaning my whole weight now on that part of me, I joggled about on top of her, her breasts, which fell heavy to her sides, shaking as I did, until I felt the first spasm approaching. Then, carefully, and breathing heavily, half-afraid that she would recover consciousness, I opened the lips of her sex with my fingers and placed myself just inside, the enflamed tip of my penis held by the loose folds of her sex. I reached beneath her to grasp her large, fleshy buttocks, and threw my weight forward. And, in three tremendous lunges, I brought my vital juices smoldering into her belly, blindly slapping her breasts as I did. She never moved.
I felt better after that. It had been an interesting experience.
I withdrew, washed myself in a flowered china bowl, and arranged my clothes.
Now there was nothing for it but to go. Why waste more time? Anyway, she was beginning to stir and I had little desire to have a hysterical woman on my hands. She might even send for a policeman, or worse, her pimp.
I opened the door quietly and gauged the distance to the door across the hall. There was no one in sight. I hesitated no longer. A moment later, I had let myself out the front door and was descending the flight of stairs.
As I walked again through Piccadilly it occurred to me that it would have been possible to kill her.
***
That was the last time I tried to come to terms with myself and my strange passion while I was in England.
The half-abortive experience with the prostitute weighed on my mind during the following months. In May of that year, I completed my studies and wrote to Elmer Lewis saying that I had now decided to return to America and that I intended to live on the old property.
After the death of my aunts, my uncle's estate had passed entirely to me, or rather, it was to be held in trust for me until I reached the age of thirty. Elmer Lewis was one of the trustees.
He replied at once, saying that he looked forward with great eagerness to meeting me again and that he hoped I would always consider him as a counselor and a friend.
I traveled on the Queen Mary. The voyage in Cabin Class was entirely uneventful. I spent most of the time in my cabin and was occupied with two distinct, but allied, questions. In the first place, I was anxious to know whether Dr. Meadows was dead and whether he had died keeping my secret. Secondly, I was curious to know whether Elmer Lewis suspected, or even, perhaps knew the truth, and, if so, what his attitude towards me would be.
Lewis, as I well remembered, was a highly intelligent individual and it was not at all unlikely that he had surmised the truth about Uncle Harris' death. Would he hold the boy's crime against the man? From the tone of his letter, it didn't look like it. He might know, but if he did, he still seemed willing to overlook what had happened. It was not that I gave a damn what Lewis thought. I didn't require his approval for any fantastic theory of history. But, as he was one of the trustees, it was in his power to keep me extremely short of cash during the next eight years. I always had expensive tastes and I had only six thousand dollars a year at my disposal. More than that depended entirely upon the approval of the trustees. And so it would be to my advantage to make a friend of Lewis even though it would be out of the question for me to make him my confidant.
My confidant!
Dear old Elmer Lewis! What would he think if I told him of my intention to search out Anna wherever she was and to make some kind of unholy alliance with her? What if she were married? She might have married Inez. Yes, I remembered Inez.
What if she had children?
I was ready for all such eventualities. I would allow nothing, no one, to stand in my way. Such a strange and immutable purpose was not likely to recommend itself to a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like Elmer Lewis. It would more likely have appealed to my dead uncle.
The thought made me smile.
It was my first intimation of the fact that in some ways my late uncle and myself were alike.
I had not expected to be met in New York.
The skyline of the city rose on the horizon out of the early morning mist like matchboxes. As we left the Statue of Liberty astern, I descended to my cabin to get ready to disembark. A steward approached me with a cable on a tray. I tipped him and entered the cabin to read it. It was from Lewis. It said that he would be meeting the boat.
All the better. Somehow I felt relieved to know that I should meet him again for the first time on neutral territory. If he had not already planned to do so, I would persuade him to spend one night in New York before setting out for Vermont where my late uncle's estate was located. I would pump him as expertly as I could. I wished at once to know three things: Was Meadows dead? Did Lewis know the truth about my uncle's death? And, finally, where was Anna?
I was very excited. I couldn't remember being so excited in a long time.
The familiar figure on crutches was waiting for me as I passed through customs. He looked older. His hair was white. But it was the same round, benign face with small, well-defined features, and watery gray eyes that looked kindly out from behind small, gold-rimmed spectacles. The whole impression, in fact, was one of smallness. He was a smallish man, with small hands and feet. As he leaned forward on his crutches, stretching out both hands to contain one of mine in his, the impression I got was of limitless love and goodwill.
"Glad to see you again, my boy! It's been a long time! Ten years, dear me! Makes quite a difference. You've grown up to be quite a man!"
I laughed as naturally as I could and returned his warm handshake. But I was uncomfortable all the same. This little scholar had seen right through my uncle. I would have to be very careful if I didn't wish him to see right through me.
"Well now," he went on in his fussy way, "let's see!"
I waited for him to go on.
"Yes," he said. "Now, I have my car outside. Traveled here by car, you know. Easier with these pins of mine to be driven. Can't stand trains! John - that's my chauffeur - is outside with the car just now. Let's see..."
I relaxed. It would be better to allow him to make any plans that were to be made. I would do my utmost to give him the impression that I was a well-mannered young man with the appropriate respect for my elders. And so I walked slowly along beside him without interrupting, an expression of polite interest on my face. A porter followed with my bags.
"I'm staying at a small hotel in Manhattan," he proceeded. "Thought it might be a good idea to spend the day together in New York - get to know one another, ha! ha! - and then get a good early start in the morning. How does that strike you? Not too impatient to get back to Vermont, eh, my boy?"
"Just as you wish, Mr. Lewis. I'm glad to be back. It's pleasant enough just to be back. I'm not in any particular hurry to do anything, to tell you the truth."
"Ha! ha!" Lewis twinkled. "Glad to hear it! You're like me, then! Never was in a particular hurry to do anything. Give me leisure, my books, and a few friends, and I wouldn't change places with a sultan!"
I thought it was an unfortunate alternative. In fact, I disagreed with him entirely, but in reply I simply laughed and nodded.
The shining Rolls-Bentley was waiting at the curb. The chauffeur saluted and opened the door for us.
"Climb in, my boy!" Lewis said. "You first. Easier that way with these confounded crutches!"
I did so and then the chauffeur helped his employer to get in beside me. The bags were loaded in the trunk and then the car started up and moved into the stream of traffic.
"Back to the hotel first, John," Lewis said to the chauffeur.
"Yes, sir."
Lewis turned his attention to me again.
For a moment, he said nothing, but simply studied me from behind his spectacles. I felt he was on the verge of saying something very important. He was.
"I want you to know, Saul - you don't mind my calling you Saul?"
I shook my head.
"Good," he said. "I want you to know that I know how your uncle died."
His eyes flickered behind his spectacles. It struck me that they were an asset to him. The lenses were so shaped that in certain lights it was difficult for the person he addressed to see his eyes. He, on the contrary, was able to see the other's eyes quite clearly. I felt myself reddening under his gaze.
"I tell you this at once," he went on, "because I don't wish our relationship to start off on the wrong foot. I want to put your mind at ease. I didn't want you to be obsessed with wondering whether old Lewis knew or not. You know now that I know, and moreover, I understand and don't condemn you for it. Your secret is safe with me. And so that should get rid of any horrible suspicions between us."
"Dr. Meadows told you?"
"He told me just before he died. He thought it was better that I should know."
Inwardly, I cursed Meadows. Once a murderer, always a murderer. I could imagine the old fool's reasoning. Watch that boy! He might do it again! The fact that his reasoning was valid made the situation worse. Lewis would reason in the same way. I felt he approved of Meadows' disclosure. He would watch me carefully.
"You are the only one who knows?"
"Except Anna, of course."
"Anna!"
"Yes," Lewis went on. "I imagined at the time that she must have had something to do with it. You were very much under her influence. I took the liberty of questioning her. She told me everything."
"I see."
"You see, I knew that you wouldn't have done anything like that by yourself. Dear me, no! You were quite fond of your uncle. He wasn't altogether a bad man. In fact, he was my best friend."
"I'm sorry," I said mechanically without looking at him.
He reached out and put his hand on my knee.
"But it's all over and done with, Saul," he said. "I want you to know that. Unless you feel like discussing the matter, I shan't refer to it again. You're a man now and you have all your life ahead of you. You must try to forget. What happened then is no longer important."
How blithely he said it! I wondered bitterly if he believed it.
As the car turned off of Fifth Avenue I asked him where Anna was now, making my voice sound as casual as possible.
"As a matter of fact, she lives not far from your place. With her husband. She married a man called Inez, an old groom of mine. I don't know whether you remember him."
Did I remember him! The man in the copse!
I feigned ignorance.
"It was a long time ago," I said quietly.
"Of course! Dear me, you can't be expected to remember everything!" He hesitated before he went on. "As a matter of fact," he continued, "I told Anna you were coming. I suggested that it might be a good idea if she left the district. She agreed. She said she would talk to her husband. He's a poacher. A drunken lout. I was gravely mistaken in him. No good to God or himself. Poor Anna!"
"I don't think it matters," I said more purposefully than I had intended.
His eyes flickered.
"You mean that she goes away?"
"Yes," I said. "After all, it's a bit thick to ask her to get up and leave just because I arrive."
"Perhaps," he said reflectively. "But I really don't believe she cares one way or the other and I intend to make it worth her while. Don't worry about her, my boy! She can take care of herself."
The old meddler! Why couldn't he mind his own stupid business? So she didn't care! Well, we would see about that!
I pretended to have lost interest in the subject. I didn't want to arouse his suspicions.
"Did my aunts ever know?"
"Poor dears, no. Meadows thought it best not to tell them. Meadows took a risk, you know. He could have gotten himself into hot water. Accessory after the fact, don't you know?"
"I suppose so."
"But then, he was an old friend of your uncle's, a good old family doctor. He had courage." He hesitated. "Well, anyway, it's over now," he said with a small laugh. "It's best forgotten. And here we are, this is my hotel. I've already reserved a room for you. I'm sure you would like a bath. Nothing like a bath to help you relax, eh?"
The car drew up outside a small, but seemingly expensive hotel. The doorman moved out from under the blue and white striped awning, saluted, and opened the car door.
Chapter 4
Three days later, I was seated alone in my late uncle's library. How strange it was to be there in those familiar surroundings, looking at the long curtains of red velvet, the shelves of leather-bound books, the inlaid chess table with the red and white Chinese chessmen, the heavy desk of oak, the oils of Bingham and Cassatt, and the log fire blazing in the hearth. It was not really cold enough for a fire, but I had given instructions for it to be lit all the same. It made the room more cheerful. I was seated in front of the fire in my late uncle's big winged chair, reading a volume of Poe, one of my favorites.
Since my arrival, I had explored the grounds, penetrating even the copse where Anna and I had so often lain together during those bright summer afternoons. I had examined the stump of the tree, our tree, that Uncle Harris had caused to be felled because he was afraid of its antiquity. It was now blackened by wind and weather. Indeed, there was nothing of former significance that I had not minutely re-examined.
It was nearly midnight. The servants were all in bed.
Lewis had left two hours before. He had dined with me that night. He had spoken of Anna.
She and her husband, Inez, it seemed, planned to move to Georgia in three weeks' time. Lewis was sorry he had been unable to get them to leave immediately. He was sure that I would have preferred it that way; such a painful link with the past was better broken at once. Unfortunately, however, the house they were going to in Georgia would not be vacated for another three weeks. Well, there it was. Meanwhile, he suggested that it would be better if I didn't see Anna.
At that moment, I began positively to dislike Elmer Lewis. If he thought he was going to arrange my life for me in accordance with his own skim-milk precepts, he was mistaken. I intended to visit Anna the very next day. Lewis could think what he liked.
I was glad, however, that the departure had been delayed for three weeks. That would give me ample time to change Anna's mind for her, for I intended to put into operation at once my plans to be with Anna. It would be much less trouble to have her in the neighborhood than to be forced to search for her in the state of Georgia.
As he was leaving, I thanked Lewis warmly for his kind attention to this affair of clearing Anna out of the neighborhood. I don't think he caught the undercurrent of irony in my voice. When he was gone, I called Mrs. Kelly, the housekeeper, to the study and posed a number of questions to her. I apologized for bringing her down.
I told her that, having been away for a long time, and as I intended now to settle down on the estate, I wanted to hear what had been going on in the neighborhood during my absence. I asked a few innocent questions to begin with, the answers to which didn't interest me in the slightest. Then I asked her about Dr. Meadows, pretending not to know of his death. She told me he was dead.
"Poor Dr. Meadows!" I exclaimed. "He was our family physician, you know. He was very kind to me when I was a boy."
Mrs. Kelly nodded sympathetically. I had created a good impression on her since my arrival.
"And there was a girl, a woman," I continued. "She was my governess for some years. Anna was her name, I think. I wonder what ever became of her?"
Mrs. Kelly pursed her thin lips.
I raised an eyebrow, questioningly.
"She's still in the neighborhood, sir, at the old Cromarty place," said my housekeeper after a pause, "with that husband of hers. Inez, they call him. An evil man, if you want my opinion!"
"Oh? Why do you say that, Mrs. Kelly?"
"Oh, there's been many stories, sir," said Mrs. Kelly in her old-worldish way. "Not that I listen to gossip myself, but there's no good in that man. Ask anyone."
"What does he do for a living?"
"Steals. He's been chased off your grounds more than once, sir, for poaching. I don't think he's done a hard day's work in his life!"
I smiled. "He's often about these grounds, then?"
She nodded, almost triumphantly, I thought.
"And what about Anna?"
Again, this middle-aged Irish woman whom Lewis had employed to run the house during my absence pursed her lips.
"A woman who'll put up with a man like Inez..." she began.
I waited for her to go on.
She was flushed, as though Anna's behavior came to her as a direct, personal insult.
"Well, sir, there's not much I can say. But she's hardly the type of woman I'd invite to my house - if you take my meaning."
"Perfectly, Mrs. Kelly," I said blandly, making a mental note that I should have to get rid of this disapproving old bitch at the first opportunity. "But tell me, do they have any children?"
She shook her head.
"Miss Coogan - that's the district nurse - is a good friend of mine. There's been three miscarriages in that house in five years. Not that I'm suggesting anything..."
I nodded.
"Well, thank you for bringing me up to date, Mrs. Kelly. You've been most helpful. I've been away for such a long time I'm out of touch with everything."
"Oh, there's a great deal more to tell, sir." Mrs. Kelly said enthusiastically.
"I'm sure there is," I said quickly, "but I don't want to keep you out of your bed any longer. In fact, it was very inconsiderate of me to call you at this hour."
"Not at all, sir, not at all!"
I smiled. "And anyway, I have some important letters to write. Must attend to business, eh?"
"Yes, indeed, sir!" Mrs. Kelly chirped.
"Good night, then."
"Good night, sir."
When she had gone, I poured myself a glass of brandy and settled comfortably by the fire. So Anna lived in the old Cromarty cottage? Well, that was interesting. It was no more than a hundred yards from the eastern boundary of the estate. No wonder Inez was tempted to do a bit of poaching from time to time.
In the morning I would ride over and see her.
What would she be like? I could hardly contain myself. At this moment she would be sleeping not more than half a mile away, her beautiful white thighs relaxed. To think of it! I felt as an old voyager must have felt when, after perilous adventures in foreign ports and on the high seas, his ship finally sailed up the home sound.
I closed my eyes.
"Anna, my darling, I am coming to you..."
***
At breakfast, to keep my mind off things, I made an inventory of my servants. There were six altogether, which was a small number for an estate of this size, but all were new, selected by my counselor and friend, Elmer Lewis.
Mrs. Kelly, without question, would have to go, and the sooner the better. Even if she were to prove faithful to me rather than to Lewis, I could not bear her moralizing and her thousand-and-one old adages. And anyway, she had proven herself unfriendly toward Anna, her future mistress, thus unwittingly doing herself out of her job.
Then there were the two maids: the one who served at table, a breathless little brunette with soft, provocative haunches, Milly Brown, who was pleasant enough and even interesting; and Mona, a thin redhead with green eyes and a very pale complexion, who acted as chambermaid. Of the two, I was more interested in the latter. She had a strange, elfin quality about her. Well, for the moment, I would keep them both. With Mrs. Kelly out of the way, I would have a better chance to get to know them.
As for the cook, she was a fat, blonde Swede, whose name was Kirstin. She looked like a masseuse, was about forty years of age, and, from the look she gave me when I first entered the kitchen, was just the kind of woman I wanted in my employment. Kirstin was all right, and from what I had gathered in the short time I had been home, I surmised that there was no love lost between her and Mrs. Kelly. All the better. Kirstin could stay.
The other two were men. As there were only two horses now, a gray mare and a black gelding, neither of which were of particular value, there was not enough work for a full-time stableman. One of the men, Henry, looked after the horses and acted as gamekeeper. I didn't like the look of him. He had fair hair; freckles; honest, blue eyes; and looked as though he would have been shocked by a pair of French knickers. I could hardly retain that kind of man in my service.
Cliff, on the contrary, appeared to be just the kind of man I wanted. He was dark, with a low forehead and narrowly-spaced eyes, and he seemed to be a deplorably bad gardener, which is to say he knew nothing of his job and would probably not be averse to making up for it in other ways. He was just the type of mean wretch who could be bribed, and who, if his services were generously rewarded, would think twice about opening his mouth to anyone. I liked Cliff. He was very rightly suspicious of a world in which he was forced to earn his living as a gardener, especially as he had probably never seen a garden before his arrival on the estate. He looked more like an ex-jailbird. And so I decided that Cliff could stay.
By the time I had finished shuffling all this over in my mind, I had also finished breakfast. Now it was time to go to see Anna. The reorganization of the household could wait until the afternoon.
I sent Milly with instructions to Henry to saddle the mare, and ten minutes later I mounted and moved off at a canter down the front drive. I glanced to the left at the black stump of the elm as I passed. Well, there were other elms, and there would be plenty of time to cut our initials over again.
***
I emerged from the wood directly opposite the little cottage where old Cromarty and his wife used to live. I reined in the mare and sat still in the saddle, gazing at the trickle of almost colorless smoke that sidled up from the red brick chimney. Anna lived there. I had arrived at last.
I urged the mare on slowly, savoring those last few minutes in anticipation of the woman to whom I was eternally bound, and to whom I had committed and recommitted myself each night before I slept. I would not allow anyone to stand in my way, not Inez, not Lewis, nor even Anna herself. I would make her accept me.
Suddenly, as if to greet me, I saw Anna step through the door with a wooden bucket in her hand. She walked out a few paces before she saw me. She put down the bucket and stared.
I dismounted and, without waiting to tether the horse, walked quickly toward her.
"Saul!"
"Anna!"
A moment later, we were fast in one another's arms.
"Oh, Saul! You shouldn't have come!" she whispered through her tears.
I kissed them away, allowing my whole body to lean against this soft, but powerfully muscled woman. My hands ran up and down her back, caressing her, loving her.
"Come inside!" she said suddenly. "Someone might see us!"
I allowed myself to be led by the hand into the cottage.
As soon as the door closed behind us, I took her in my arms again and crushed my mouth against hers. Her full lips opened and the hot wetness of her mouth mingled with my own.
"You've grown up," she whispered as soon as she managed to free her mouth. "Oh, Saul, it's so good to see you!"
"Darling," I said between kisses, "I've come back to you ... I belong to you! ... I'll never leave you again!"
"Oh, Saul!"
She freed herself and sat down on a chair.
"It's no good, Saul, it's no good! You know that! They'll never let us be together!"
My jaw tightened. "Who's they?"
"Oh, you know, Saul! Inez and Mr. Lewis ... neither of them would allow it!"
The hair rose at the back of my neck. I held out my hands, palms up and fingers spread.
"I'll strangle them with these hands!" I said quietly, and I looked into her eyes.
"Don't talk like that!" she said quickly. "Oh God, you should never have come!"
"Anna," I said quietly, "I killed my uncle for you. You asked me to show you that I loved you. I worship you! You have no right to ask me to live without you. As for Inez and Lewis, let me take care of them!"
"No, Saul!"
I laughed suddenly.
"It might not be necessary to kill them, Anna!"
And then she was laughing, too, and I sank down beside her chair and laid my head in her lap. I felt her fingers moving in my hair and I felt utterly relaxed.
"Little Saul!" she said almost to herself, "I never thought you would grow up."
"I've grown up for you, Anna."
"Yes," she said, her fingers tightening in my hair, and then, simply, she added, "For me."
When she said it, I lifted her cotton dress over her white thighs and exposed her naked sex with its shell-pink clitoris and gleaming black hairs. Her thighs were fuller, still dusky white, and had the same sweet smell of fresh sweat that I remembered. I was kneeling between them, gazing with adoration at the soft, milky tub of her lower belly, down which ran, from her navel to her crotch, a fine spine of black hair. I ran my tongue along it, familiarizing myself with it; it had grown in Anna's maturity and in my absence and I wished to know it as intimately as I knew the rest of her. I leaned forward and, with little nibbling kisses, like a sheep grazing, moved my lips down from her broad, sweating belly to the hot, hairy mass at her crotch. She twitched in her chair, her soft, white buttocks shuddering, slithering forward to bear her pulsing lust deep into my mouth. Only the small of her back now remained in the chair. Her buttocks, thighs and legs thrust out from the chair and I cradled them in my arms, supporting her fully. Mad with desire now, she held my head firmly, with quivering flesh, and her heavy thighs closed around my ears. Her buttock muscles tightened in urgency, in need.
Gently, I drew her onto the cold stone floor, my mouth still buried deep in the swollen folds of her sex, and I felt her arch her back and buck. She whimpered, for, I assumed, the stone floor cut into her back, and yet her pleasure was such that she was willing to exacerbate the pain by grinding her shoulder blades into the floor in order to bear harder down upon my mouth. She rose, it seemed, endlessly on my worshipping tongue until she broke, splintering, I knew, into a thousand shards of light and fell earthward, cushioned by the soft bed of my lips, in her first shuddering spasm.
The pressure of her thighs relaxed then, and, rolling me onto my back, she squatted over my mouth. In the aftermath of her orgasm, her sex still pulsed, making her passion-soaked hairs dance on my lips. My tongue swayed under her soft, hairy cleft like a charmed snake, and I was hungry for her to descend so that I might again contain the soft-dripping flesh in my mouth.
She stood up, allowing the skirt of her dress to fall down and obscure her thighs.
"Come over to the bed," she said. She was breathing heavily and looking down at me strangely.
I followed her over.
She slipped out of her dress and unhooked her brassiere. Then, entirely naked, she lay down, supine on the bed.
I was now able to examine her body. It had thickened. The muscles had become heavier over the years. She had allowed the hairs at her soft, almost pudgy, armpits to grow thick and black and coiling, like soft strands of wool.
She was looking at me, curious, appraising.
"Lick me all over," she said softly. "Start at my toes."
I lay down beside her and bent my head over her left foot, tracing a spider web caress on the hard skin of her soles. My tongue rose and fell quickly, expertly, along and between her toes, my breath feathering her instep, my lips brushing her ankle and parting to her beautiful, swelling white calf. The moment was timeless. I was annihilated and geared to her will, as I tasted each hair, each pore, her sweetness and her musky sweat. And soon I was moving up again, past her dimpled knees and entering into the soft, white gateway of her thighs. At that moment, she raised her knees, allowing my tongue access to the tender undersides of her thighs, the smooth swell of flesh where her legs and torso were joined. I continued to move up her body, my mouth grazing her warm, spreading belly next, all senses at the tip of my tongue as it traced for the second time this fine line of hair between sex and navel. Fine hairs, like dust almost, clung to the slabs of flesh below her rib-cage. I moved softly over them, like a child marveling with the tip of his fingers over the soft petal of a flower.
"My breasts," she whispered huskily.
I approached them from one side, moving up from the satin-soft hollow of her hip. Her breasts were fuller than I had known them, rounder, but still firm, and the nipples, in spite of the fact that she'd had no children, had grown to the size of small grapes. She exhaled heavily as I took one of them into my mouth and sucked avidly. I was transported, wrapped entirely in the warm body of this woman to whom I had chosen again to be committed. Her hands clutched at my hair, urging me to put every nerve at ease. When one nipple was erect, I moved to the other one, applying my lips, abandoned, to the sweet, round surface of it.
"Take off your clothes."
As quickly as I could, I divested myself of them entirely. And then, naked, and with a more urgent erection than ever before, I laid myself almost breathless beside her.
She raised one arm, exhibiting the soft mass of hair at her armpit.
"Under my arm..."
I teased and parted the hairs with my tongue, seeking the pink-white flesh beneath, grazing my cheek against them as I might have rubbed against a cat.
She turned over and kissed me passionately on the lips, her dark eyes open and gazing curiously into my own. Her smile, when our lips parted, was suggestive.
"Do you love me, Saul?"
"Do you not know that I do?"
"How do you love me?"
"I worship you, Anna!"
She almost purred. Her eyes twinkled with amusement.
"Lick me again, first," she said.
I hesitated, for I didn't know what she meant until she moved slightly in the bed and swung one heavy, white thigh over my shoulder. I felt my face crushed against her sopping-wet sex. And then her thighs tightened as though she meant to strangle me.
"Suck me!" she commanded.
Once again, my mouth broke into her smooth, wet vagina and my straining tongue made doting pressures against its walls. Her warm breath was deep. One of my hands lay on her soft, white belly.
"I remember the first time you did this, Saul," she whispered between gasps. "I had forgotten that you belonged to me."
And with that, she tightened the pressure of her thighs. This time, I could actually feel the boiling issue of her sex as it rose to its second climax in my mouth. I sighed deeply and relaxed against the warm pressure of her flesh.
She pulled me up until my mouth was on hers. Her eyes were still open and a faint amusement lingered in them.
"Fuck me now," she said softly.
How can I describe the relief, the ecstasy I experienced as my painful erection was sucked through the soft, soapy lather of her lust, deep into her hot, pulsing belly? The infinite tenderness of her! The breaking of her heavy thighs as they opened to support my hips!
"Darling, fuck me," she whispered.
I rode her, my body balancing on hers, my buttocks gyrating voluptuously with the thick root of my sex crushing against her delirious clitoris. She seemed to enjoy that pressure most of all, for each time I bore down, her hands fluttered like small birds on my back. And then, finally, I felt her stiffen beneath me. Her legs clamped me firmly to her, her buttocks tight and thrusting upward, lifting skyward, her hands seizing my own buttocks and gripping them fanatically, pushing them to her. And then I heard her final scream, which began huskily, almost soundlessly at the back of her throat, and rose from some deep region to her mouth, gaining pitch, depth, ecstasy, as it spluttered wildly from her full, red, grimacing lips. And, as though by sympathetic magic, I, too, burst like a volcanic gusher deep into her womb.
"Oooooh..."
Like a tigress she was up, scratching, snarling, forcing my shoulders flat on the bed with her knees. And then there was blackness; the soft, seething, pulpy mass of her descending onto my face as though to suffocate me. She began jerking her hips, her fingers clutching my scalp, and she painted my face with the thickly wetted brush of her sex.
***
We were dressed.
I was sitting in a chair opposite her.
"I can't, Saul."
"But why can't you? Good God, you don't love him, do you?"
She flushed.
"I don't know," she said. "I don't know what I feel. It's just that he has a kind of power over me, like an animal, like a beast."
"And me?"
"You know I love you, Saul. I've loved you ever since you were a little boy."
I smiled bitterly.
The sound of her voice now made me feel sick. Did she think I had need of sentiment? I began to see at that moment that Anna was not the woman I had created for myself in my imagination. She was another man's woman, his thing. And I began to see what I would have to do. I knew I was in the clutch of an obsession.
"I'm going now, Anna. But remember, I won't allow you to leave the district."
"There's nothing we can do," she repeated in her resigned voice.
I felt a slight twitch within me, like the turning of a compass needle. The situation, as I knew very well, was not unsolvable. I had already come upon the answer.
On the ride back to the house, I weighed it over in my mind.
***
Immediately after lunch, which was served to me by Milly in the dining room, I sent for Mrs. Kelly and informed her of my decision to dispense with her services.
She was mortally shocked.
"But why, sir? What have I done? I demand at least to know what you've got against me! In all my working days, this has never happened to me before! The very idea!"
"And I'm sorry it has to happen now, Mrs. Kelly, believe me. But a man in entitled to choose his own servants. You were chosen by Mr. Lewis, and his taste is perhaps not mine. It's quite simple and there is really nothing more to be said."
"The very idea!"
"I'd like you to leave at once, Mrs. Kelly. I shall instruct Cliff to drive you into town in the car. Of course, I shall give you two months' wages in lieu of notice."
"Well, I must say! You have no right to treat me in this way! I have never been treated in this way before!"
"That will be all, Mrs. Kelly. I have neither the time, nor the desire, to argue with you. You may go now."
"I'll speak to Mr. Lewis about this! You see if I don't!"
"That is entirely your own affair, Mrs. Kelly. Meanwhile, be good enough to leave the premises."
"Well, of all the nerve!"
"Get out, Mrs. Kelly!"
That did it. She bustled out, calling both to God and man to witness her humiliation.
I rang for Milly.
She came in nervously. I smiled. No doubt she had already heard what had happened and would be worrying about her own position.
"Please send Henry to me, Milly."
"Yes sir!"
Henry came about five minutes later, a pleasant expression on his freckled face.
I informed him shortly that I was dispensing with his services.
He took it more calmly than Mrs. Kelly had.
"When do I leave?"
"Today if possible. I will pay you two months' wages in lieu of notice. I'm sorry, Henry, but my mind is made up."
"That's okay," he said. "I hear Mrs. Kelly got the sack, too. I can ride into town with her."
"Just as you wish, Henry. If you need a reference, write me for it."
"Thanks," he said. "It won't be necessary."
"Just as you wish. Come to the library for your money before you go."
"Okay."
I spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the grounds.
As I was walking back toward the house along the front drive, Cliff came abreast of me in the car. He had just returned from town where he had driven Mrs. Kelly and Henry.
He was excessively polite.
"Will you need the car again tonight, Mr. Folsrom?"
"Not tonight, Cliff."
"Then I'll put it away in the garage."
"Do that. Oh, and by the way, Cliff..."
"Yes sir?"
"That man Inez, is he on the grounds much?"
"I've seen him four or five times in the last couple of weeks, usually at night."
"Does he take much away with him?"
"A few rabbits mostly, sometimes a bird or two, but this is not the season."
"Of course not. But he's around here all the same?"
"Yes," Cliff said. "I saw him last night."
I nodded.
"Chase him out if you see him," I said unconcernedly. "We don't want him hanging around the estate."
"I sure will, Mr. Folsrom!"
And he drove away from me up the drive, past the house, and into the garage. The old Buick was still a smart car. Anyway, unless Lewis came across with more money, I wouldn't be able to afford a new one.
Almost as soon as I got into the house, Lewis rang.
Mrs. Kelly had been to see him.
"Did you have any particular reason for getting rid of her, Saul?"
"No, I simply wish to choose my own servants."
"Of course, but she's a good woman, you know, a very efficient housekeeper."
"That's not the point, Mr. Lewis. I just felt I wouldn't get on well with her.
"Mmm. I think you've made a mistake. I've known her a long time."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Lewis, but you'll have to let me be the judge of that."
"Yes, of course. I simply wanted to know if anything had happened."
"No. Nothing."
"And Henry, was that for the same reason?"
"I suppose so, yes. I didn't particularly like the look of him, that's all. It's very simple."
"I'm surprised you should prefer Cliff to Henry."
I laughed at his consternation.
"I didn't say that. It's simply that Henry struck me as an independent type of fellow and I don't consider independence a virtue in a servant."
"I see..."
"We probably have different ideas about this kind of thing."
"Yes," Lewis said thoughtfully. "Your late uncle might have said that. He never tolerated independence in a servant."
"So you see, I'm running true to tradition!"
He chuckled, but I sensed an undercurrent of uneasiness in his laugh.
"I appreciate your point of view, Mr. Lewis," I went on. "You are a pretty orthodox liberal. My uncle wasn't and, as it turns out, neither am I. Tom Paine, the Rights of Man, all that leaves me quite cold. I prefer Nietzsche, for example, to Bentham or Mill."
"I see."
"I'm sorry, but that's the way it is, Mr. Lewis."
He hesitated at the other end of the wire and then, almost mechanically, he said, "Not at all, Saul. Every man is entitled to his opinion, eh?"
"Except a servant," I said, irony in my voice.
He grunted incoherently.
"Silly to discuss matters like this on the telephone," he said in an attempt to be good-humored. "We'll talk about it some other time, over dinner. Much more civilized, eh?"
I laughed.
"Any time," I said pleasantly.
"Sorry to have disturbed you," he said.
"Not at all. Good-bye for now."
He said goodbye and then I heard the click as he replaced the receiver at his end.
As I set down the telephone, it occurred to me that if it were to be done, it would be well to do it quickly.
Chapter 5
It was on the third night of my watch, just before dawn, that I saw his thickset figure break through the undergrowth.
As on the previous nights, everything had been dead quiet for a long time, with nothing more than the occasional night noise. It was windless and the leaves stirred almost imperceptibly. The woods stretched out on all sides and I had the impression of living in another world; a foreign, unknowable world, through which tiny night animals burrowed.
I had almost decided to give up for a third time when I heard the strong crackling of twigs, and the small commotion of a frightened rabbit as it scurried away from his approach.
Silently, I cocked both barrels of my shotgun, held my breath almost involuntarily, and leaned out of sight against the tree.
It seemed ages before he appeared.
I was tense. In spite of the chill atmosphere of the dark woods, I could feel the perspiration on my forehead. After the strain of my long vigil, my courage had almost seeped away.
Yes, it was him.
"...Like an animal, like a beast..." Anna had said in her rich, wondering voice.
It was my enemy, Inez.
As the thumb of my right hand grazed gently across the cocked hammers, feeling them erect, sharp as flint, it came to me that in a few moments time, I would pay off an old score, which went back to the day in the copse when his act confirmed my terrible destiny. Was the man even aware of my existence? And then it came to me. He was not a man, but an animal, a beast. And I was the hunter waiting for him. My excitement grew.
He was so near that I could see the whites of his eyes. He was wiping his broad face with his hand. In his left hand, he carried a single-bore shotgun.
A sudden sense of power rose up in me.
From my place of concealment, I gazed long and hard at him.
Half an hour before dawn. An appropriate time for an execution.
The gun was hard and cool in my hands.
I spoke.
"Stay where you are! Don't move!"
He froze. The whites of his eyes seemed to grow larger as he peered madly in front of him, searching the dark space from which my voice had come. And as his gun moved up protectively across his chest, I shot him twice, with great accuracy, between the eyes.
He fell forward and his own gun went off and the fiery shot burst from the barrel, causing nesting birds to shriek. I felt the whip of pellets tear at my shoulder and I could have cried aloud for joy when my hand, touching it, came away bearing blood.
He had wounded me!
I was still laughing nervously and triumphantly as I leaned over his sprawled body to examine the bleeding mess that had been his face.
***
"What on earth is it, Saul?"
"I've killed a poacher, Mr. Lewis. He took a shot at me and wounded me in the shoulder. Can you come at once? I've already sent for the sheriff."
"Good God!"
"Please! Can you come?"
"I'll be over right away!"
I hung up.
"Pour me another brandy, Cliff. A big one."
"Yes, Mr. Folsrom."
***
The sheriff, pulling up in an old Chevrolet, was the first to arrive.
Pretending to be nearly overcome with shock, I told him my story.
I had been unable to sleep. I had taken my gun and strolled about the grounds, thinking I might have a shot at a rabbit. I had encountered the man in the woods. I challenged him. He swung up his gun and took a shot at me. I fired twice.
The sheriff surveyed me noncommittally and said he would go and take a look at the body. I told Cliff to go with him.
"The name's Inez," the sheriff said when he returned. He lit a small, evil-smelling cigar. "Although, with what he's got left for a face, it's difficult to tell. Fancy shooting on your part. He was a bad devil. Known him for a long time. Knew he'd come to a sticky end sooner or later."
"God! So that's Inez!" I said, collapsing in a chair.
"Know him, Mr. Folsrom?"
I shook my head.
"No. But I hear he married my old governess. That makes me almost parricidal!"
The sheriff laughed.
"No need for you to worry, Mr. Folsrom," he said. "He got what was coming to him. You must have given him a scare when you challenged him. That'd be what started him shooting. He was trespassing and it's a clear case of self-defense."
He made a gesture toward the drink cabinet.
"Help yourself, sheriff," I said.
He nodded casually and helped himself to a long shot of rye whiskey.
He looked at me, almost smiling. I feigned nervous exhaustion.
"Of course, there'll be an inquest," he said, "but that'll be a matter of routine. He was well-known around these parts. A sinister bastard. Yeah, Inez ... boy, you sure messed up his face!"
I winced.
"Here," he said, "let's have a look at that shoulder."
Fortunately, I didn't need to simulate pain as he helped me off with my coat. He cut away my shirt and examined the wound.
"Nothing serious," he said slowly, "but you'd better call a doctor. Some of the shot's gone quite deep. Near shave, I'd say. Might have blown your head off as you did his. You were lucky."
The white flesh of my shoulder was punctured and lacerated in many places; red spots and gray where the pellets had embedded themselves under the skin.
"Yeah, you sure were lucky!" the sheriff said. "Inez was a sharpshooter."
I nodded.
"Lucky you were ready. Lucky he didn't see you first!"
"This might not have happened if he had! He would probably have simply slipped away."
"Yeah, I suppose so."
"It's a funny feeling, sheriff."
"What's that?"
"To have killed a man."
He gulped his whiskey and knocked the ash off the end of his cigar.
"A fraction of a second and you'd have been the stiff, Mr. Folsrom. No. You did right. You plugged him right between the eyes. I'd have done the same in your place."
"Thanks. It's nice to hear you say that. It makes me feel much better."
He laughed. Then he got up and went over to the telephone.
"I'll ring for an ambulance," he said, "and I'll tell them to send a doctor at the same time."
While he was on the telephone, the doorbell rang.
"See who's there, Cliff."
"Yes, Mr. Folsrom."
A moment later, Mr. Lewis burst into the room.
"Dear me! What on earth's happened?" he said excitedly, and then, catching sight of my wounded shoulder, he cried, "My dear boy! Are you all right?" He hurried across to me on his crutches and gazed in bewilderment at my shoulder.
"I've killed Inez," I said slowly.
"Inez! Good God! Whatever happened?"
The sheriff intervened.
"You'll be Mr. Lewis?" he said.
Lewis nodded, gazing from me to the sheriff.
Concisely, the sheriff explained what had happened. From his lips, the story sounded absolutely watertight. I could have embraced him.
"My poor boy!" Lewis said when he had finished. "What a terrible thing to happen so soon after your arrival!"
I thanked my stars for the wound in my shoulder. Obviously, Lewis had swallowed the story without question.
"But think of poor Anna!" I said miserably.
Lewis seated himself on a chair.
"Poor girl! Poor girl!" he repeated.
"That his missus?" the sheriff said without emotion.
"Yes," Lewis said.
The sheriff poured himself another drink.
"No great loss," he said. "She's better off without him. Pretty, isn't she?"
"A very pleasant girl," Lewis said.
"I must go and see her now!" I said.
Lewis blinked.
The sheriff yawned.
"Ambulance'll be here soon," he said, apropos of nothing.
"Do you think you ought to, Saul?"
"I've got to," I said.
Lewis nodded.
"You want to break the news to her yourself?"
"Who's more qualified?" I said, putting a sad bitterness into my voice.
"Get your shoulder attended to first. Wait for the ambulance," the sheriff said. "No point in risking infection. I'll drive round there myself with you. Old Cromarty place, isn't it?"
Lewis said "Yes."
"Do you want me to come with you, Saul?" he said.
"No, I think it's best that I go alone, Mr. Lewis. I'll get in touch with you later in the day."
"Very well," he said. "In that case, I think I shall go home. Thank God you weren't hurt badly."
"Yeah," the sheriff said, "it was a near shave."
***
An hour later, my arm in a sling and most of the pain gone from my shoulder, we drove off the grounds and, by way of the road, reached the cottage where Anna lived. The smoke from the chimney told us that Anna was already up.
I was afraid that Anna might give away the fact that I had already visited her since my arrival on the estate; and was worried, since my companion was the sheriff himself, about the results of such a disclosure.
I need not have worried. As soon as Anna opened the door and saw me in the company of the sheriff, she cried, "Saul!"
"Anna!" I said, moving forward and taking her in my arms. Then, pretending to rub my cheeks against her, I whispered, "This is the first time I've seen you since I arrived."
She told me she understood by a slight pressure on my arm.
"Sorry, sheriff, you understand," I said. "Anna was my governess and we haven't seen one another for many years."
The sheriff looked as though he was not the least interested. He was looking in the direction of the woods and was lighting another of his foul cigars. A moment later, he turned.
"Better tell her at once," he said.
"Tell me what?" said Anna, her eyes widening with surprise.
"Anna, you must try to be strong ... Inez is dead."
Her face went white.
"Dead?"
"Mr. Folsrom shot your husband in self-defense," the sheriff interposed. And I thought he looked at her closely.
She stared from him to me and, with a small cry, she fainted. I caught her as she fell and carried her into the cottage. The sheriff - he was called McCabe - followed me in.
He helped me carry her over to the bed and a moment later McCabe joined me with a glass of water.
"Good-looking broad," he said to me as he handed me the glass.
I nodded, and, raising Anna on my arm, I forced the glass between her lips.
A moment later her eyes flickered open.
She stared at me.
I looked at McCabe.
He grinned. And then, when her gaze flitted to him, he became serious.
"Phone me later in the morning, Mr. Folsrom," he said, giving me his number. "I'll get along now. Be seeing you."
He nodded to Anna and went out.
Neither of us spoke until we heard the car start and drive away.
"You killed Inez!"
I stroked her hair.
"You murdered him!"
"In cold blood," I said. "I waited for him for three nights. He came this morning just before dawn. I shot him twice between the eyes."
"Oh God!"
I thought she was going to faint again, but she took hold of herself.
"I told you I loved him!"
"You told me he had the power of a beast over you. I shot the beast."
She was looking at me as a rabbit watches a snake.
Something stirred in me. I knew that I had to act now or not at all. Coldly, with calculation, I slapped her across the face.
I was now ready to act at every moment in accordance with a new attitude. She had loved Inez. I had thought about that night after night as I waited to slay him.
She had loved me in a different way.
My act of slapping her across the face had the effect of annihilating the past, of reversing the relation between us. In the future, she would obey.
It was not what I wanted, not what I had intended, not the situation for which I had made a thousand preparations while I was separated from her, but I had come to realize clearly that it was the only effective way - at least for the moment, for she was not ready to be that woman of my imagination - of putting things in suspension; I should not have lost irrevocably.
Her expression had changed.
The fear was still there, but it had undergone a subtle modulation: it was no longer stark panic, and all hatred had gone from her eyes. It was as though she were waiting for me to act again.
Slowly, holding her gaze, I bared myself, and as I did so, I felt the sluice of urgent blood move to harden my member. I looked down and her gaze followed my own. When our eyes met again, I climbed onto the bed beside her. Kneeling there, slowly, an inch at a time, I brought it toward her face. She stared at it, her whole attention riveted upon it, and then suddenly, when it was no more than six inches from her, she let out a small whimper, enclosed it like a valuable object in both hands, and took it into her mouth. As she did, her liquid eyes closed, and I felt the warmth of complete envelopment. Her full lips pressed to my hard flesh, sliding up and down it, her tongue twisting madly around the swollen head. She held onto the base of my sex with her hands, squeezing hard. I was on the verge of annihilation.
She was breathing heavily.
I moved around into a more comfortable position, cradling her head between my thighs; and grasping her back in both hands I felt her against me.
A few moments later, I felt her hands move round and thrust my trousers down about my thighs, and then her hands were on my buttocks, gripping and relaxing, gripping and relaxing, until the white spume rose up in me and spilled over into her greedy mouth.
She moaned and swallowed avidly.
I allowed it to remain there until she had consumed every last drop and then, gently, I removed it from between her lips, buttoned myself, and sat on a chair next to the bed.
I lit a cigarette.
She was gazing at me, her lips slack and wet, a haunted expression in her dark eyes. One of her hands had moved down to her crotch and she gripped it as though to contain the pleasures that threatened to escape from it.
"Take your clothes off," I said.
She responded with a whimper of delight.
A few seconds later, she lay naked before me, her heavy, white thighs slackly apart, her knees trembling.
I leaned over from my chair and put my hand to her sex.
Her buttocks tightened and her belly swelled in an sharp intake of breath. Once again, she had closed her eyes.
Gently, I stroked her belly as I would have stroked a cat. She uttered a moan of pleasure. I slipped one finger into her and massaged her clitoris with my thumb. The sweat had gathered on her thighs like hoarfrost. I put out my cigarette and reached for her left breast. I took the budding nipple between thumb and forefinger and squeezed, gently at first, and then with increased pressure. Her white belly swung up in a strong arc as she inhaled deeply, gasping. My other hand became entangled in the glistening black hairs that downed the juncture of her thighs. Softly, I slipped a second finger into her.
She let out a small gasp of pleasure. Her whole body seemed to radiate pleasure, a strange well-being, which was born, perhaps, of the slow consciousness of being an instrument. I played with her then, the fingers of one hand running riotously about her body while the fingers of the other coaxed at her wet crevice until four of them were embedded up to the hilt.
She was delirious and the strange intensity of her desire imparted itself to me, causing me to harden for the second time. But I restrained myself. I turned her over, puncturing her again with four fingers, only this time, as I came from the rear, I moved suddenly and brutally into her anus with my thumb at the same time. Her moan exploded and her buttocks shot into the air. Before she lowered herself back onto the bed, I brought my free hand, the palm flat and rigid, down with full force across her buttocks. She bucked madly and soundlessly, the sweat appearing in small pinheads on her back. I struck again, my mind suddenly overtaken by the scene of years ago when Uncle Harris had thrashed her with the riding whip. A new respect for him crept over me. I saw her again with the garter belt and the silk stockings, all the exciting adornments of her humiliation.
Quickly, I deserted her and walked across to the chest of drawers. In the top one, I found what I was looking for: a black garter belt and black stockings. I carried them back to her and threw them on the bed beside her.
She was quivering with lust.
Obediently, she slipped into the stockings and slung the garter belt around her creamy belly. From under the bed, I took a pair of high-heeled shoes and laid them beside her. She put them on and lay down again on her back.
Slowly, I leaned over her and smelled the heat of her body, and then, without further delay, I stripped naked and threw myself on top of her, my member sliding deeply and smoothly into her in an instant. My belly bore down on hers, feeling the sleek line of the garter belt, and my thighs brushed against hers to feel the smoothness of the flesh under the almost transparent nylon stockings. Still sunk deep within her, I closed her thighs inside mine, imprisoning them, forbidding them movement. Then the nylon was against the soft, inner flesh of my thighs, informing me of her humiliating surrender. With my hands on her rump, I flicked the elastics of her garter belt against her smooth skin, while at the same time rubbing my hardened member against these dainties which she had put on for my delight. I could feel the cool silkiness slipping up and down my burning, smooth flesh. My naked feet slipped into the insteps of her high-heeled shoes. Her legs were open to mine, my muscles bulging into the soft flesh of her inner thighs. I could feel them trembling. Her shins were clamped under the hard weight of mine, the full roundness of her calves pressing into the bed. Her feet were forced far apart by the pressure of mine within the insteps of her shoes. Her whole body was thus laced to mine and her hot, dripping sex was impaled and flowing with fluid like a soft wound from which flowed blood.
It was almost without movement then - the blood surging within us - that we were carried together into delirium. There was a simple, but urgent flexing of the buttocks, a hardening and softening of the muscles of the lower abdomen, a quivering of the thighs; thus we rocked, one body welded to the other in lust, into oblivion.
She was streaming sweat when I rose from her, her whole body emitting the fragrance of woman, her muscles grown flaccid with exhaustion, and her consciousness dying under the burden of itself.
I came away from her wet. Her sweat and my own mingled on my belly and flanks, and the warm sunrise streamed in the cottage window giving my feet a golden luminescence.
Still naked, I moved over to the window and looked out. In the near distance, the woods, within which a few hours earlier I had destroyed this woman's husband, were visible. I turned and gazed at her naked body spread out in lassitude on the bed. In that bed, a few moments before, I had destroyed him again.
"Anna."
I had to repeat her name for a second time before her head fell round to look at me.
A strange and beautiful smile played on her full lips. Her right hand lay on her right breast, tenderly, the arm crooked at the elbow.
"Inez is dead," I said.
The smile did not leave her lips.
I walked over and stroked the loose hair back from her temple.
"You'll come to my home immediately after the inquest," I said.
Her soft black eyes flickered.
Her hand moved up and held mine where it was.
Chapter 6
Two days later, Lewis invited himself to dinner at my house. He phoned around midday and asked whether it would be convenient for him to come. I agreed at once, saying that I looked forward to seeing him again. But he was rather noncommittal on the telephone. He appeared to have something on his mind.
I went at once to the kitchen to tell Kirstin that I was expecting a guest for dinner. The kitchen was located in the basement next to the laundry. As I walked along the stone corridor, I heard a queer noise, which I took to be a girl's whimper. I hesitated and listened. The sound came again.
I walked quietly up to the kitchen door and knocked.
Inside, there was a scuffling movement and then, almost at once, the door opened and Kirstin, a strange smile on her broad Nordic features, looked out at me. When she saw me, she stepped back to allow me to enter.
Mona, the upstairs maid, left the kitchen by the back door as I entered. I was again struck by the exceeding whiteness of her skin under her rich, chestnut-red hair. Green eyes, I remembered - she was a pretty girl.
"Did you wish something, sir?" Kirstin's voice was obsequious, but at the same time amused. The sound of her voice aroused me from my own thoughts.
"Oh yes, Kirstin. I have a guest coming to dinner tonight, Mr. Lewis. That's all, really."
I hesitated, looking at her.
She was a big-boned woman with heavy flesh, and gave the impression, as I have remarked before, of being a masseuse. Her hair was pale blonde and her small, blue eyes were sunk in her dough-like face like buttons in soft wax. Her features were rather fine in spite of the roll of fat under her chin. She was about five feet seven inches tall, and in her high heels, which she wore all the time, she must have stood about five feet nine or ten - two inches, at the most, shorter than myself.
"Very good, Mr. Folsrom," she said, but the expression on her face did not fit the words somehow and I found myself gazing at her without quite knowing why.
Her small, blue eyes returned my stare almost impertinently, and then she suddenly turned and busied herself with the pots in which the lunch was being cooked.
"How's your shoulder, sir?" she said without turning around.
I looked at her back for a moment without replying. Her shoulders were broad and powerful, her buttocks heavily-muscled, her bare calves fat and smooth like codfish.
"Better, thanks, Kirstin. A bit stiff, that's all."
"Soon put that right," she said without looking at me. "A little massage is what you need, sir."
"Massage? You're not a masseuse by any chance, Kirstin?"
"I did a bit of it before I took up this work," she said. "If you like, I'll give you a rub sometime during the afternoon, Mr. Folsrom."
I hesitated.
Was it my own wayward imagination that divined suggestion in her words?
"That's very good of you, Kirstin. Come up around four o'clock if that suits you."
"Very good, sir."
"I think a brace of pigeons for tonight, Kirstin."
"Yes, Mr. Folsrom."
I left the kitchen.
All during the afternoon, the thought returned to me that there was something almost sinister about this big Swedish woman who was now the head of my household staff. What was it precisely? And why did I have a sense of strange expectation from her impending visit? And the whimper, which I had most certainly heard on the way to the kitchen, what did that mean? My curiosity was aroused. Following lunch, I spent two hours reflecting on it.
At exactly four o'clock, Kirstin knocked at the door.
"Come in!"
She entered, dressed as always in her white housecoat.
She took in the furniture of the library at a glance.
"There's a divan in your dressing room, sir. I think that would be more suitable."
I nodded.
"All right. Let's go up."
She paused at the foot of the stairs to allow me to go up first.
"After you, Kirstin," I said.
She went up first and I followed.
In the dressing room, she instructed me to remove my upper clothing. My wound was covered with sticking plaster and lint. She made me lay face down on the divan, and, sitting beside me, she laid her large hands on my back, her thumbs parallel with my spine. Slowly, and with firm pressure, she began to massage me. She had produced a bottle of oil from her housecoat pocket so that the friction would not irritate my skin.
In a few minutes I felt utterly relaxed. Her hands seemed to possess the power of magic, at once soothing and stimulating, caressing and threatening. I breathed heavily, partly because of the pressure she exerted, and partly because her strong hands, imparting something of their mystery, had given birth to a crude sexual excitement in me.
She had massaged my whole back, from my neck and shoulders to the small of my back. Her hands were now at the waistband of my trousers, her fingers slipping deftly beneath them.
"If you'll just push your trousers down a moment, sir, I'll finish you off properly," she said.
I assented without argument, doing as I was bid. And then her hands were at my buttocks and thighs, kneading the flesh like baker's dough and bringing relaxation to all the muscles of my legs. My sex grew hard beneath me, pressing into the hard surface of the table as if in battle with it. One would not give way to the other however, and I pushed down, my buttocks clenching, so that the urgent pressure of my sex to the table caused my body to deluge with warmth. Did Kirstin realize? I wondered. Probably. Her command of my body was such that she probably knew the exact rhythm of my breathing, the speed with which my blood flowed through my veins. Of course she knew! I pushed and pushed, bruising, perhaps, my flesh. But I did not care. My need was great and Kirstin's hands so expert and manipulative of my desire, that I would have rubbed myself against the rough bark of a tree, had that been my vehicle. Instead, it was the table, and, of course, Kirstin's hands kneading, twisting, remolding my flesh.
There is an obvious metaphor: I was like clay in her hands. I think she could have done anything she wished to me at that moment. I couldn't remember ever having been so entirely in another's power. Even as a child, when Anna used me, she had to be coaxed and encouraged to take control. But at the moment, I made the mental resolution that I should resist nothing. Kirstin left off massaging me, took a towel, and rubbed me briskly from head to foot.
"I'm sure you feel better now, sir," she said, looking down at me from her small, blue eyes. "You might take a bath, now."
"Yes, thanks, Kirstin," I said. "It's very good of you to have taken all this trouble."
"No trouble at all, sir. Keeps my hand in. But I must get back to the kitchen now if there's to be dinner tonight."
I nodded.
A moment later, Kirstin and her wonderful hands were gone.
I walked over to the mirror and looked at myself. My face was flushed and my eyes bright; I looked as if I were fevered. And, indeed, I was! My sex stood out a good length from my body, enraged from the unfinished battle it had done with the table, and in pain from the lack, just then, of attention. I took my hand to it. I squeezed. I wet it with my own saliva, imagining, as I did, Kirstin's powerful tongue. And I knew her tongue would be powerful. I ran my hand up and down the length of myself, all the while staring at the movements of my body: my knees were bent to brace myself against the nearing onslaught of my pleasure; my brow was knitted in intensity; my hand was wrapped tightly around my hardened sex; and my sex itself was engorged, red and purple at once, ever expanding. And then, in one instant, all sight was gone from me, my eyes closed tightly, my head bent into my chest. Afterwards, I turned abruptly away from the image of myself. There was an inarticulate shadow of dread stirring somewhere within me.
***
"The pigeon is excellent," Lewis said with a smile. "I'm glad that at least you didn't dispense with Kirstin's services!"
"I doubt if I shall ever do that," I laughed, and, as I said it, a queer feeling of impotence swept over me. It was as though her hands touched me at that moment, firmly, purposeful, moving muscles, jarring nerves, as though they were her own.
Suddenly Lewis became serious.
"By the way, Saul, I have a number of questions I should like to ask you. Do you mind?"
"Not at all, Mr. Lewis. I'll be only too glad to answer. There's nothing I'd like more than for us to understand one another."
"I'm glad to hear it, my boy! I won't beat about the bush."
"Fire ahead," I replied, helping myself to some green peas. "More wine?"
"No thank you, Saul, I have to watch nowadays! A little every day and not too much at a time."
"Gather ye rosebuds!" I said.
Tell me, Saul," Lewis said, becoming serious once again, "tell me why you shot Inez twice."
I was slightly taken aback by the question. When I looked at him, I saw he was watching me closely, ready to weigh my answer.
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Well, I don't know, really ... there he was, taking a pot at me ... I didn't really stop to think. The triggers were together. I fired them both, right, left, like that, automatically."
"I see," Lewis said.
"Why do you ask?"
When he didn't reply, I said, "You're not suggesting I killed him on purpose?"
He was looking at me seriously. He did not reply to my question.
"My God! I didn't even know Inez! And apart from that, it was too dark and it happened too suddenly for me to see who it was at the time!"
"You're quite sure of that?"
"Of course I am! What on earth makes you think otherwise?"
Lewis leaned forward.
"Three days before you shot Inez, Saul, you visited Anna. After you shot Inez, you pretended you hadn't seen her since your return. I want you to think before you reply. The inquest is in a few days and some of these facts may come out."
I nodded. I was wondering just how much he knew.
"First of all, tell me how you know I visited Anna," I said.
"What does it matter?" he said quietly. "You were seen leaving the cottage. You had a horse with you."
"Yes, well it seems that's known," I said in a tired voice.
"Do you see what I'm getting at, Saul?"
"No, I'm damned if I do!" I lied.
"It's just possible that you arranged this killing between you, as you did the other, don't you see?"
"Good God! How fantastic! What possible motive could we have had? You can't think that!"
"I don't know what to think, Saul. I want you to tell me. For example, why did you lie about having seen her?"
I laughed bitterly.
"At first it was simply a desire not to displease you! I know how you felt about it. And then when I'd committed myself, I couldn't go back on it ... remember, I had just killed a man. I was scared. I didn't want to put any stupid ideas into people's heads. I see now I was wrong to hide the fact."
"You certainly were! If the sheriff hears about this, he may become suspicious."
"Not if he doesn't know about the other," I said.
Lewis was looking at me sternly.
"Saul, I must be convinced in my own mind of your innocence."
I made an impatient gesture.
"How can I possibly convince you? You appear to jump to a great many conclusions for a man of your experience and intelligence!"
"I jump to no conclusions!" Lewis snapped. "I simply wish to ascertain the facts. I shall ask you another question. Did you make love to Anna when you rode over to see her?"
He had caught me off my guard. That was the last question I expected. When I hesitated, I decided I would have to admit it.
"Yes. I made love to her."
"Thank you at least for being honest," he said. "Now, in light of this, do you think the sheriff is still without a case?"
"Does McCabe know?"
"That's not the point!" Lewis said sternly. "It is I who must be satisfied."
"Before I answer any further questions, Mr. Lewis," I said coldly, "I'd like to ask you a question."
He nodded almost imperceptibly.
"Are you my friend or my enemy?"
He raised his eyebrows.
"Are there no conditions to friendship?"
"Certainly there shouldn't be if I'm polite enough to answer your questions!" I said. "Normally, in an affair like this, I should consult my lawyer before I made any statement whatsoever. And I certainly shall answer no more questions until I have your assurance on this point."
"Yes," he said at last. "I suppose that is justified."
"I should think it is," I replied calmly. "I wouldn't have dreamt of answering your questions had I not taken your friendship for granted."
When he dropped his eyes to the table, I realized I had touched him at his weakest point: I had appealed to his sense of honor.
What an advantage I had over him!
"I can only say this," I went on in a calm voice, "I give you my assurance on two points. On my honor, I shot in self-defense, and I hadn't the slightest idea at whom I was shooting. I can't say more."
He made a tired gesture with his right hand. It was a gesture of defeat.
When he spoke next, it was to say, "Thank you, Saul. That's really all I wanted to know. I shall respect your confidence. I was simply troubled in my own mind about you. I'm sorry."
"Forget it, Mr. Lewis, I'm just sorry we didn't have this talk immediately after it happened."
He nodded.
"Tell me one thing more," he said suddenly. "What do you intend to do about Anna? I hope you aren't thinking of persuading her to remain in the neighborhood?"
"I honestly don't know, sir. Sometimes I think I owe it to her to marry her, and at other times I think it would be better if she went."
"Much better, Saul. Take my word for it! You should not even contemplate keeping her here."
"Anyway, I must wait till after the inquest. Who knows, they may charge me with murder."
I shook my head in a way that implied how ridiculous I found the situation to be.
"No, I don't think so," Lewis said. "The man had an evil reputation. He is no loss to the community."
"Poor Inez!" I said.
He brightened when I said that.
"I'm glad you said that, Saul," he said. "It makes me feel much better. I think I could even manage some of this cheese!"
I laughed.
"Help yourself," I said.
He looked up, blinking through his spectacles.
"Pearson, the junior in your late uncle's firm, is going to call on you. He will be at the inquest with you. I would tell him as much as possible if I were you. He will advise you what statement to make before the coroner."
I smiled as I watched him cut a liberal slice of Muenster cheese.
***
After Lewis had gone, I remained in the library until shortly after midnight. Lewis' curiosity as to my motives and behavior was rather disturbing. If he persisted in taking this kind of interest in my affairs, sooner or later he would surely discover something which he would feel bound to reveal to the authorities. Thus, although I had no particular plan of action in mind, I made a mental note that it would be necessary to find a way either of making him give up interest in me or of shutting his mouth.
His death, of course, would have solved the problem admirably, but any move on my part to hasten that death would be perilously made. Apart from the risk of murder itself, I had no means of knowing what written records he would leave behind him; a package of papers, perhaps, in some bank vault, marked "To be opened in the event of my sudden death." He was a shrewd man, and dangerous because he was an idealist.
As no immediate solution presented itself, I decided to go to bed, but on the way up I had a sudden desire to visit the old wing of the house, which, to my knowledge, had not been used since I left as a child-murderer for England. Perhaps I would install Anna there after the inquest. The whole wing could be renovated and turned into a large apartment for her.
Thus, on the first landing, I turned right and walked along the passage which led to the old wing.
As I came to the end of the connecting corridor, I was surprised by a slit of light, which appeared under one of the doors toward the end of the old wing corridor. It was all the more startling as the passage itself was in pitch darkness.
I came to a dead stop and listened. Vague noises came to me where I stood, but they were muffled, almost inaudible, and only served to deepen the mystery.
The light and the sounds came from the room that had formerly been Anna's.
And then, suddenly, I remembered the bathroom keyhole through which I had witnessed the strange sexual scene of Anna being taken by my uncle. It was with a growing sense of excitement that I moved silently along the corridor toward the glimmer from the window at the end. When I came to the bathroom, I opened the door silently and went in. A slit of light came from under the door of the adjoining bedroom. As I sank to my knees at the keyhole, I had an overpowering premonition that Kirstin would be involved in the mystery. There was something about Kirstin, a quality which was at once repulsive and attractive, that made me suspect that in some strange way she would be involved in my own destiny.
It is almost impossible to describe the scene to which I was the unseen witness.
The horror of it was something to behold, something at once frightening and beautiful. It was obscene; salacious; lewd. The grave beauty of it was marked by the black sanctity of the setting - later, as we shall see, to be improved - and the strange ballet-like movements of the participants, each of whom, in every erotic gesture, participated religiously, blasphemously, but without any suggestion of mockery; the weird radiance of the paints used on white, willing flesh; the helpless, doting abjectness of the two maids and the cruel and scandalous beauty of the priestess, Kirstin. All this transported the ceremony out of the realm of the common orgy, lending it solemnity. I could see at once that it was dangerous and deadly, and I was right, for blood was to be shed. Three gray rats cowered in the corner near a hunk of red beef, twitching in fear and trembling as the ceremony advanced.
All furniture had been removed from the room. Every imaginable kind of filth had been spread about the floor: straw, ashes, rotten wood, kitchen waste, numberless things without identity, and the gray skeletons of three human beings.
The walls had been splashed with black paint, splotched here and there with red, and what looked to be like sheep's wool. The sight was truly frightening, and the odor which came thick through the small opening of the keyhole, was noisome.
Kirstin was standing stark naked. Her feet were apart and her hands were on her broad hips. It was a stance that commanded obedience.
It was perhaps the most powerful female body I had ever seen. From her thick neck, the muscles swept down and across her chest to the pale, round moons of her breasts. Her nipples the size of large black grapes and tattooed to look like enormous, hairy spiders. The illusion was magnificent. It was as though two spiders clung there drawing blood, their bloated bodies hard with suck. Below, across the sweep of her white belly, a perfect web was marked, spotted here and there with red, and at her navel another spider clung, bigger than the others, looking down the sweeping web to the dark and hairy center at her crotch. Thus did her whole muscled front; the thick slabs of her thighs; her great, creamy abdomen; and her hips support the web, at the center of which was the black hole of her sex.
Her large, white toes flexed themselves in the muck and she gazed down at the two naked girls who sat on the floor, their backs to me, cross-legged, facing her.
The girls, of course, were Milly and Mona. Their hair cascaded down their pale white shoulder blades, from which, shockingly, folds of cellophane were wrapped. As I looked closer, I was able to see exactly what this was: between their slim, white arms and the sides of their torsos, artificial cellophane wings had been stuck to their flesh with adhesive tape, so that when their arms moved, the wings did, too, like the wings of insects.
I watched, fascinated.
Kirstin was talking quietly to the girls, who sat submissively on their soft, young haunches amidst the muck, nodding their pretty heads in comprehension.
Then Kirstin broke her pose and moved backwards to the far corner of the room, still facing me. A bench had been placed diagonally in the corner, one end touching each of the walls.
Kirstin now climbed upon this and stood, her thick legs wide apart and her plump, white arms spread wide and high. It was the position of crucifixion.
I stared in horror.
She was strung across the corner of the room like a massive web of black spiders.
She spoke.
At once, the girls got up and moved naked about the room, fluttering their translucent wings. Each time they neared the corner where the rats were, the rats bared their teeth and the hair rose in coarse, quivering spines at the backs of their necks. It was only as the girls moved that I noticed Milly's belly was shaded a bottle blue, and that Mona's was striped yellow and black, like a bee. I glanced at Kirstin. She was speaking again.
Each girl picked up a skeleton. The fantasy began. I was conscious at once of the fact that the bones had been wired together, and that, fixed firmly to each skeleton, was a rubber penis. Carefully, in a practiced way, each girl slipped it into her, draped the arms of a skeleton over her back and shoulders, and lay down on the filthy straw. To see a skeleton pricking a young girl, the bones bouncing like a beaded parrot-cage on her soft belly, is a strange sight. It did not last long. I had the impression that Kirstin was impatient for her little insects to become stuck in her web. She said something and the girls rose immediately, allowing the skeletons to tumble onto the floor. They began to fly again, or rather, to make the motions of flying. Mona was more graceful than Milly. Her movements were less abrupt and the flesh of her buttocks was a startling white against her red hair.
I was trembling with the pleasure of anticipation. By this time, I had no doubt in my mind that soon I would be taking part in these intimate ceremonies. I saw at last in Kirstin the woman to whom I could become truly committed.
Anna? There was no need to lose Anna now. She belonged to me, but belonging to me as she did, I would never be able to have that from her which I had desired from the beginning.
But these thoughts were soon pushed from my mind by the urgency of what was going on in front of my eyes.
Mona had arrived in front of Kirstin and was fluttering her wings as though drawn there by the wind. It was most life-like, although she was more like a moth blinded by light than a wasp about to be trapped in a spider's web.
Kirstin's small, blue eyes watched her closely. I held my breath. Mona now ran against Kirstin's powerful belly, rubbing her cheek there, and Kirstin's arms descended like claws, which, in fact, they were, for she was wearing something on her fingertips, thimbles, perhaps, with metal points. With one vicious swipe, the cellophane wings were torn away from the pretty shoulder blades and blood trickled from scratches on Mona's white back. She was falling now to her knees, tears blurring her eyes, a frail insect beaten to death by another more powerful, and her hovering lips came suddenly to rest at the dead center of the web, on the black mass of Kirstin's powerful sex. Kirstin's talons at once grasped the fair girl by the hair, forcing the young, tear-stained face into the dark night of her thighs. And then Kirstin was down on top of the girl, who lay helpless on the straw, her head held firmly between Kirstin's massive thighs.
Milly, meanwhile, continued to flutter about the room, but soon she, too, came within Kirstin's reach, reeling almost drunkenly, and was suddenly caught by the ankle and dragged off her feet into such a position that Kirstin was able to suck avidly at her sex with great moans and breathing. The three women now thrashed about on the filthy straw, and Milly's mouth crept up Mona's legs to her sex. I could see Mona's flesh quiver in response to Milly's lips and she opened her legs to allow for Mona's entrance. Soon, the perfect circle of woman's bodies was formed. It was a circle of wandering, indiscriminate limbs so that Mona's hand played in the soft furrow of Milly's breasts, and Milly's arm stroked Kirstin's belly and Kirstin's steel claws continued to inflict clean scratches on both woman's flesh and they bled, the cuts dotted with red as if their blood were dew. It was hard to know whether they writhed in pain or in pleasure.
As their movements became more frantic, Kirstin, ever aware, I assumed, of how to inflict pain on them, withdrew from the circle, thus leaving Milly's sex unsatisfied and Mona's mouth empty. It was with great power that Kirstin then repositioned the women, moving them as if they weighed nothing, and descended upon them, her legs spread to their bleeding thighs, rubbing against them in a kind of mindless fury, their blood mixing with her wet desire until both the woman's thighs and Kirstin's sex were wetted the color of rose. Kirstin continued to rub herself voluptuously against their bleeding flesh until her desire was released. Then her body grew stiff, as if atrophied, and she fell heavily onto their breasts, crushing them under the full force of her weighty release.
The rats, meanwhile, had begun to nibble at the meat.
It was at this point that I came away. I had no curiosity to see any more. I was far more concerned with the possibility of meeting Kirstin on a level other than that of master and servant. I paced about the library, consumed with a mad passion to call her in at once and throw myself at her feet.
Here, at last, was the risk that I was looking for; the intensity, the obscenity, the criminality to which I could bring the willing consent of my own body and soul. The vision of Anna paled before the image of Kirstin. The one wished nothing more than to be a victim; the other would dare to victimize. What hellish green fires must have burned within Kirstin to turn her into the woman-beast I had seen in action!
I had to make a compact at once. I would wait an hour. Then the orgy surely would be over, and then I would ring for her. For the first time in my life, I had met a woman to whom I could dedicate myself utterly. The old craving to be the instrument of another's will surged up in me anew. Kirstin. Kirstin. Faust is waiting for you.
At one-thirty a.m., I rang for her.
Seven minutes later she knocked at the door of the library.
"Come in!"
Kirstin, dressed as usual in her white housecoat, entered.
She looked at me curiously.
"You rang for me, Mr. Folsrom?"
"Yes, Kirstin. Come in, please, and sit down."
With a shrug of her broad shoulders, she did as I asked.
"Something to drink?"
"I'll take a small whiskey," she said.
I poured it for her and carried it across to her where she sat. Her eyes flickered as I handed it to her.
I was rather nervous. I still didn't know how to begin.
"You're from Stockholm, Kirstin?"
"No. From Kiruna."
"That's in the North?"
She nodded. There was a suggestion of impatience in her eyes.
"You strike me as a very strong character, Kirstin."
She shrugged and drained her glass.
"Was this what you called me for, Mr. Folsrom? It's very late and I'm tired. I have to get up early in the morning."
"Not necessarily. I could excuse you from your duties."
"How do you mean?"
"Perhaps I could use you in another capacity, one that would be more profitable for you."
"So?"
"I thought it best to wait until all the other servants were in bed. I didn't wish us to be disturbed. Make yourself comfortable and help yourself to more whiskey." I passed her the bottle from which she poured herself another drink, this time more liberally.
"What's on your mind, Mr. Folsrom?"
"I'm thinking of a spider-woman," I said casually.
"Spider-woman? I don't know what you mean. What is a spider-woman?"
I was gazing at her big calves. Her legs were crossed at the knees.
"Would you mind uncrossing your legs, Kirstin?"
She did so slowly, watching me suspiciously.
"If I were to lie down on the floor and kiss your feet, Kirstin, what would you do?"
She didn't reply. A queer light played in her eyes.
Slowly, cautiously, I went to my knees, and then, lying prone on the floor, I raised one of the fat, white feet to my lips.
She laughed harshly.
"So that's what you want!" she said.
She stood up and removed her white housecoat. She lifted the skirt of her nightdress high above her smooth, white belly, exhibiting the dark shadows of her sex and the hairy spider of her navel.
"Get up," she said. "Oh your knees! Look at it!"
The huge thighs were as white as chalk, connected to her body, it seemed, by the black tendrils of the web.
She hitched the front part of her skirt above her waist and sat down on the edge of an armchair. Her big fingers opened the lips of her vagina, exhibiting the wet inner flesh, which was pink, oily, and obscene.
"Touch that," she said huskily, "and you won't get away again."
I gazed from the flower to the spider. The craving ran like a plague through my body.
"Your lips," she said. "Like you were praying..."
I lunged forward.
My mouth hit her soft crotch with the force of a fist.
Chapter 7
The inquest went very smoothly. The verdict was "Death by Misadventure."
The coroner, in his final speech, extended his sympathy both to myself and to Anna who had come to court in black widow's clothes.
Lewis was present. He seemed preoccupied. I had the impression that his old distrust of me had returned. That worried me, and yet I knew that, for the moment at least, he would not betray me.
"I am giving up my trusteeship of your uncle's estate," he said when the inquest was over. "I have nominated Pearson to take my place and the other trustees have raised no objections. I'm sorry Saul, but as long as these horrible doubts remain in my mind - and I'm afraid I can't get rid of them, I'm getting old, I suppose - I don't feel able to undertake the responsibilities of a trustee."
"You mean you still think I murdered Inez?"
"I don't know what to think, Saul. No ... I don't honestly think I believe that, but Anna tells me now that you have invited her to live at your house and that she has accepted. I must say that under the circumstances I think that is frightfully improper, and I suppose that is the reason for my decision. You must go your own way. And as I disapprove so heartily of your behavior in this business, I feel it would be better for both of us if we had nothing more to do with one another. I feel uncomfortable in your presence. I just do not know what to think of you. One moment I think you are a fine, lovable young man, and the next moment I think you are the epitome of evil: cold, calculating, utterly unscrupulous. I think I am even a little afraid of you. But there it is. I've told you my reasons."
He removed his spectacles and dabbed his eyes with a white handkerchief.
"I'm sorry you feel that way, Mr. Lewis. You must remember that Anna was very close to me once and I feel bound to look after her now. It's not money she needs. That would be easy. It is companionship; the knowledge that she is among people who love her. I'm sorry you can't understand."
He had put on his glasses again.
"I understand, Saul, that she is still your mistress. I find that troubling, and, in light of what has happened, most shocking!"
"If you were a younger man, and if I didn't respect you as I do, Mr. Lewis, I should call you a prude. Does it not occur to you that the sexual act can be beautiful, even utterly spiritual?"
"Perhaps it can be for people who are in love with one another. Are you in love with Anna?"
"Yes."
"You don't say it with much conviction."
"You have romantic notions about love, Mr. Lewis. You consider it to be a kind of pit one falls into. I don't. For me it is something that is chosen; something that is chosen and chosen again. It's the doing. Loving is making love, or caressing, or caring for the person. It's a practical act. We create it in choice and in action."
"Come, I don't wish to discuss it, Saul," Lewis said quite coldly. "If you seriously love Anna, marry her, and then perhaps one day I shall grow to see things your way. But for the moment, goodbye, and good luck."
We shook hands and I watched him move on his crutches toward his waiting car.
Marry Anna?
Of course, that was impossible now. I was no longer a free agent. In only a few days time, Kirstin had made me the doting slave of her body and her will. Kirstin now slept with me every night, or rather, I slept with her, for it was she who had become pre-eminent and it was I who nightly slept with my head between the wet weight of her thighs. It was she who insisted upon this, and I loved and worshipped her for it, deriving more pleasure from my utter abasement than I had ever drawn from abasing another.
I trusted Kirstin's skill and ability to bring me gradually to the supreme joys of suffering. How interesting all this was, for she knew what to do down to the last detail, by a strange, twisted intuition, and I had the intelligence and the imagination to savor every subtlety of her cruel female will. I worshipped her for the subtlety almost as much as I worshipped her for her heavy, hairy sex, inside which I nightly died.
I must now speak at length about this strange relationship which was to lead slowly, but surely, to the utter domination of my will by hers; to the extinction of the very core of my being.
It was very gradual in the sense that she never hurried things, never forced upon me more pain or indignity than I could bear. The coercion was subtle, accepted, desired positively, and entered into with religious fervor. I was seldom required to do anything that I had not already chosen to do in my imagination, and she was patient as she insisted, insinuated, corrupted, polluted, and humiliated me so that hour by hour my love grew more and more monstrous and my servility more complete.
That first night, she had drawn my lips away again, her strong fingers hard and clutching in my hair. "Lick it," she said. "You're like a little pig!" And that was precisely what she wanted me to be, and so I was.
"I'm taking you to bed," she said. "I want to talk all this over with you."
I followed her obediently to her own room.
"Strip!"
She sat fully dressed in her armchair and rapped out the command at me.
I hesitated and then took off all my clothes. I stood naked before her. I had a painful erection.
"Come here!"
I walked across to her.
She took the whole knot of my vitals into her large hands, caressing, squeezing slightly.
"Get into bed. Under the covers."
I did so.
A moment later, she was naked except for black silk stockings and a black garter belt, which she had put on, and she joined me in the bed and switched out the light.
"Easier this way the first night," she said.
A moment later, she moved me so that I lay diagonally across the bed, my head between her thighs. The soft flesh radiated warmth and wetness on my face. "There's your pigsty," she whispered, caressing my neck with her fingers.
In the utter darkness, I gave in fiercely to my desire. I thrust my tongue deeper and deeper into her, mixing my saliva with her moisture, and the hot, viscous substance spread over my eyes and my chin like a soft cloud. It was sticky, salty, and sweet at the same time. I buried my nose in the furrow of her swollen folds, suffocating and swooning at once. I encircled my tongue around the hard, red bud of her sex, beating it back and forth until she arched her back and drove herself hard onto my lips, my tongue, my face. Grasping her full buttocks, I felt them quiver like leaves and her odor enveloped me completely, threatening, with its thick sweetness, to smother me.
The following night, we were standing naked in her room. She took me in her arms and kissed me on the lips. "You'll do strange things for me, my darling!" she said.
Later, under the covers, my head lost in the ecstasy of her sweating crotch, I felt a sudden, sickeningly acrid trickle at my lips. I closed them abruptly and shut my eyes. A moment later, the warm, stale liquid spilled like a wet skin over my face and neck. When I felt the pressure of her thighs, I gave in and relaxed. It was a long time before I fell into sleep, intoxicated by her pungent heat.
In the morning, she lay like a white stain on the top of the red quilt, for the bed was wet and uncomfortable. "Down on me," she whispered.
She ran the house efficiently during the days. In the company of others, both servants and guests, she accorded me all the respect due to the master of the house. But as soon as we were alone, her attitude changed: she would confide in me, invite me to confide in her, and make me do innumerable menial tasks for her. I was to bathe her, to dry her, to perfume her. I was, moreover, to wash her sex with the greatest of care. Then, when it was clean, I was to wash my face with the soiled water. I did so enthusiastically, indeed, with utter servitude and joy, for her sex was my god and I considered myself lucky to wet my face with the water which had cleansed her. As for my vitals, I was to wash them with her saliva and the fluids of her pleasure. This was difficult to do, for it took some time to gather enough together in order to fully clean me. But she was patient and did not allow for impatience on my part. After sex, she ran a towel between her legs, and with it soaked up her release. She spat into a bowl. Then, with the utmost economy, I tended to myself. I ran the wetted towel up and down my member, often giving cause for it to stir into hardness, and rubbed it with her thick saliva. It was exquisite, the slippery smoothness of her fluids soaking into my flesh. I rubbed myself, now hard, with my hand, wetted with her saliva. All the while, she watched to make sure I wasted not one drop of her precious fluids. I felt that this was only as it should be, for, after all, my sex was her dedicated slave.
I was cautioned by her not to sully myself with my own fluids. Yet, I was encouraged to clean myself in this manner. It was impossible not to seek that release, once it began to build, which it did as soon as I took my hand to my sex, that would send me into paroxysms of further worship of her. I tried to forbear, for I knew the fury it would arouse in her, should I, as said, sully myself with my own fluids. And yet, the warmth flooded me, my hand squeezing ever harder around myself, my flesh moistened by her saliva. As the warmth grew more intense, growing to fire, I lost all capacity to reason and took my palm, which she licked, and encircled it around the now reddened bulb of my sex. I bore down upon the base of it with my other hand. I squeezed. I sullied myself. Then, as a punishment, I was to smear my fluids over my body while she spanked me. I leaned over, rubbing the creamy wetness into my belly and thighs and her hand came down hard on my buttocks, once, twice, three times. She hit me hard, powerfully, causing my flesh to burn. And then she spat on me, her saliva dripping down the crevice of my stinging buttocks. And by doing this, she explained, she was assured that my cleanliness, my purity, was solely dependent upon her; I should learn that, without her, I was dirty, my fluids, when not issued forth at her urging, were soiled, unclean; she alone controlled even the most tedious, yet necessary, aspects of my life. But I had to remember, she went on to say, that she would not always explain things to me that she did so only to show me that she was worthy of trust, in the beginning, but not for long, for there were many things she would require of me, and certainly many of them would be quite unreasonable. Many, many menial little tasks, each calculated to intensify my abasement, to prostrate my spirit before her powerful will. I was amazed at her genius for taking control. I loved her more frantically with each subsequent, groveling act she required of me.
On the morning of the inquest, she gave me her soiled knickers. "Keep these," she said. "You'd better buy me two dozen pairs of nylon ones when you're in town today. You must keep my soiled panties from now on."
I put them in a safe place like a dog burying his bone.
"This Anna," she said. "I've seen her in town, I think. I want her. Be sure to bring her back for me."
Marry Anna?
Of course, that was impossible now.
***
When Lewis had gone, I joined Anna where she waited for me in my car. Cliff closed the door behind me.
"The old Cromarty cottage," I said.
We drove in silence into the country. I took Anna's hand. She hesitated to allow me to keep it. She frowned in Cliff's direction.
"Don't worry about Cliff," I said in a voice loud enough for him to hear. His head nodded imperceptibly.
Anna relaxed.
"Thank God that's all over," she sighed.
I leaned over and kissed her on the lips. I leaned over and kissed her on the lips. She parted them for mine and my tongue drove into her mouth, displacing hers, forcing it against her teeth. At the same time, my hand moved under her skirt, running slowly up her long legs to the nexus of her thighs. I slipped my hand beneath her panties, pushing them to the side where they cut into the tendon, which ran buttress-like from the side of her sex down to her thighs. I stroked the beautiful, soft, hairy thing for her and she rubbed against me like a cat. Then I took her onto my knee and, still playing with her, pushing my fingers deep into her passage, I took my hardened member out, squeezing it as I did so as to bring it to its full enragement. Holding her panties to the side, I burst into the hot little cauldron of her sex. She moaned and hid her face against my neck. I relaxed in my seat and eased my power into the voluptuous warm weight. The joggling of the car on the rough road up to her cottage was enough to bring my sliding ecstasy to her womb.
She packed two bags and rejoined me in the car. Ten minutes later, we entered the front door of my house. Mona showed her to her room. I went into the library and sent for Cliff.
He entered obsequiously. "What do I pay you, Cliff?"
"Forty bucks plus keep," he answered at once.
"We'll make it sixty," I said.
He grinned. "Thanks a lot, Mr. Folsrom. If there's anything I can do at any time..."
"Thanks, Cliff. I'll remember."
He went out. A moment later, Kirstin came in. "You've got to make her do things, you understand?"
I nodded.
"And then one day you tell her I want her and that's that, see?"
"Yes."
She smiled at me.
"You can kiss it," she said.
I fell to my knees as she moved forward, raising her skirt.
***
Things were moving quickly.
"You can have Milly," Kirstin said one day to me. "Go and take her now in the bedroom. She's waiting for you."
I went at once.
I opened the door to her bedroom and, at the sight of me, she cowered slightly. I walked purposefully over to her, undressing as I went. She stood by the bed, and, with the deliberation of a frightened child, she began herself to undress. I walked up to her and stood close to her; I could feel her hot breath on my face. I laughed and instructed her to get onto the bed. When she did, I told her to spread her legs. "Wider," I said. She lay with her legs spread as wide as they would go.
"Touch your breasts," I said and her hands went up to close around her breasts. She squeezed them, fondled them, and lightly caressed them; each was an attempt to touch herself in the manner in which I desired. When I told her to take her hands away, she did so. Her breasts, which were small but flawlessly white and capped with large, pink nipples, bore the red marks of her hands. I leaned over her and drove into her at once, my mouth coming down onto her breasts, my tongue licking the curving roads of the red imprints of her hands. I pounded into her, her sex unable to open the distance that my fury, my need, demanded. Each time I thrust in, I felt the folds of her sex clinging to my driving member, carried by my movements into the warm tunnel of the core of her being. I bore down roughly, the base of my sex pressing hard against the opening of hers. I shuddered and encircled myself slowly around her. Afterwards, I made her lick me.
With the same deliberation which she had taken to her undressing, she crawled down to my feet and began to lick my toes, my instep, my heels, my calves. Slowly, she rounded her tongue around the curves of my powerful legs, which could have, should I have so desired, strangled her. She reached the nexus of my thighs and dipped her tongue between them. She touched my flaccid sex and, with avidity, began to lick it clean. It rose once again, and she wrapped her lips around the tip of it and slid her mouth down until I was held firmly and wholly in her mouth. She sucked. As my pleasure increased, my body rushing with warmth, I began to manipulate her head up and down the length of me. She moved without resistance and soon, with her face pressing to my body, the nest of my sex, I felt myself touching the back of her throat and I soaked it for her.
"Good for you," Kirstin said to me later in the day. "I like the way you handled Milly."
Anna was not difficult to handle.
Had I not had the benefit of seeing a genius at work? Gradually, I subdued her. When we slept together, she slept with her head between my thighs. I simply reversed the procedures Kirstin used on me.
Within a week, I led her naked and quivering to Kirstin's bedroom. Kirstin rose naked and powerful from her bed and gestured for Anna to move closer to her. Anna went reluctantly. When the two women stood facing one another, Kirstin reached out with her large hand and ran it down Anna's arm. She brushed the side-swell of Anna's breast and Anna recoiled visibly from the intimate touch. Kirstin slapped her, the sound of her hand coming in hot contact with Anna's cheek like wood cracking in a fire. It was then, perhaps, that Anna knew what her role was to be.
"Put some stockings and high heels on her first, and then let's see you whip her," Kirstin said.
She sat and watched.
I told Anna first to stand with her legs splayed. In this position her calves stretched, it seemed, an immeasurable distance to her thighs, and her ankles were defined to perfection with the aid of the high heels. Her breasts stood firm before her and heaved slightly in her fearful breathing. Her fingers, I could see, worried the black silk-ensheathed flesh at the side of her leg in anticipation of the pain she would shortly endure
"Turn around," I barked, hopeful that Kirstin would be pleased by the resonance and depth of my commanding voice. Anna turned around so that her back was to Kirstin and me.
"Now bend over and grab your ankles." When she did, her knees bent slightly in order not to unduly stretch the muscles of her legs. "Straighten your legs," I said calmly. With some effort, Anna straightened her legs. Then, without warning, I lashed the whip over her white, rounded buttocks. She heaved forward and I, anticipating Kirstin's displeasure, ordered her to remain still. I whipped her ten times, marking her flesh with ten crisscrossing welts. Anna's body went limp under the burden of the burning pain.
"That's enough," Kirstin said. "Now get out and leave this hot bitch to me," she commanded. "Mona's waiting for you in her own bedroom. Go to her."
I moved out like a willing hound.
As I closed the door behind me, I heard the smack of their bodies coming together. I had to see. I opened the door carefully, just enough so that one eye could take in the scene fully. Kirstin was on top of Anna, rubbing against her, her buttocks expanding and contracting as if she were moving in and out of her. Anna writhed beneath her on the bed, her wounds, I assumed, burning under the contact of the bed linen. And then Kirstin pulled back and I saw the instrument strapped around her waist. Of course she was moving in and out of her! How hideous and yet beautiful was the sight! Strapped around her waist was a large phallus. She thrust into Anna hard and Anna turned her head to the side, her eyes closed tightly in the degradation of it all. But, after some moments, she began to respond. Her legs came up to around Kirstin's waist, her heels bouncing on Kirstin's back. Anna arched her body, pulling herself up by the strength of her thighs, and moved fluidly with Kirstin's movements. Kirstin held Anna's breasts in a vise-like grip, squeezing them, marking them, I was certain, for life.
I turned to go to Mona, who met me naked on her knees. Her green eyes shone, her pale shoulders curved forward, ready to encircle me. I walked up to her, my member jutting out from my body, and she took me into her mouth. She swallowed me. She grasped my buttocks and ran her finger along the crevice of them, encircling it around the entrance of the dark passage there. She sucked hard, her tongue twisting around and around the warm flesh of my sex. Her saliva coated me like glaze and, with the image of Kirstin's utter obscenity, I pounded into Mona's mouth and was weakened by the powerful onslaught of my pleasure.
Chapter 8
"Now that old Lewis is no longer a trustee, you should be able to get more money," Kirstin said one day.
"I'll try at once," I said.
"For two thousand dollars we can renovate the cellars," she said. "I want to get some implements. I've decided the women must be branded."
"I'll get the money."
"And we need some more servants," she said. "I'm interviewing some girls tomorrow. I'll take another maid at once and another to start in two weeks' time. It's easier if they come one at a time."
I nodded.
***
Pearson proved quite intractable.
"I'm sorry, Saul," he said, dabbing his sleek, black moustache with his forefinger, "but Mr. Lewis advised me that I shouldn't raise your income at present. And really, I don't see any necessity for it. It was your late uncle's wish that you shouldn't come into the estate until the age of thirty. I think it's only right that we should respect his wishes."
"Is that final?"
"For the moment at least, yes."
"If I speak to the other trustees?"
"I shouldn't think they'd be very cooperative, Saul. They have always allowed Mr. Lewis to do pretty much as he saw fit. I don't think they would be against me in this matter."
"Very well," I said.
Lewis again! The man seemed to dog my tracks, to put every difficulty in my way. What business was it of the old fool's? Why couldn't he leave me alone?
Later in the afternoon I went for a ride. I left the estate and cantered across the countryside.
At about four o'clock I caught a glimpse of another rider; a slim, blonde girl on a gray gelding. I urged my mare forwards to overtake her. After a mock race, we came to a halt, breathing heavily and laughing.
The girl was beautiful. She had superbly slanted, gray-green eyes, long smoke-blonde hair, and a perfect figure which even her riding clothes couldn't conceal.
"Where are you from?" I said with a laugh.
"I'm staying with my uncle for a couple of weeks," she replied. "Mr. Lewis. Perhaps you know him?"
My brow darkened.
"Lewis? So you're Lewis' niece?"
"Yes, why? What's wrong with that?"
"I'm Saul Folsrom," I said, watching her closely for a reaction.
"Oh!"
She was flushed now and seemed at a loss for words.
"You must have heard about me from your uncle. What did he say about me?"
"Nothing really, Mr. Folsrom," she said, recovering her poise. "He wrote of you, you see, some time ago when you first decided to return from England. He said that when I came to visit him, he should at least be able to introduce me to a companion of my own age. You were coming back, you see?"
I nodded and held my horse in check. "Go on ... please."
She smiled and then became serious again.
"Well, when I arrived two days ago and asked about you, he said he felt it would be better if we didn't meet. He didn't seem to want to talk about it, so naturally I let the matter drop. But I made a few inquiries and found out about the accident."
"Yes?"
"And so I brought up the subject again with Uncle."
"And he told you he suspected me of being a murderer?"
"A murderer? No, he didn't say that! He simply said that you were now living with the wife of the dead man and that he disapproved entirely of your behavior."
"Living with her?"
"That's what he said. Isn't it true?"
There was faint mockery in her lovely eyes.
"She's at my place. It was the least I could do. She's a lonely woman. No friend in the world apart from myself. She was my governess at one time. Perhaps your uncle told you?
"Yes, he said something like that, I remember."
I changed the subject.
"Look," I said lightly, "why don't we ride together to the Morden. It's a hotel-country club sort of place. We could have a drink and a chat there. I don't see why we shouldn't know one another. God, there are few enough people in the neighborhood worth knowing!"
She hesitated.
"It's getting late," she said. "It must be after four now. I'm driving with my uncle to dinner in Montpelier tonight. He wants me to be ready to leave at six-thirty."
"We can still make it," I replied. "If you ride back after five, you'll have ample time."
"You don't know women!" she laughed. "I have to have a shower and then dress!"
"No more arguments!" I said jocularly, and spurred my mare forward. "Come on! You follow me!"
She laughed and followed.
"All right, I'm coming!" she said as she came alongside, "but don't tell anyone. I don't want my uncle to know!"
"Of course not!" I said with a laugh, and we cantered away, toward the hotel.
***
"Yes, my uncle told me something about that," Vivian said with a slight frown. "I think it's horrible for you. I told him so. To have all that money and not to be able to touch it until you're thirty!"
I told her about my visit to Pearson in the early afternoon.
"He blamed it on your uncle, but he feels the same way himself. If only Uncle Harris had known me better, he wouldn't have put that ridiculous clause in the will!"
"But he died when you were young, didn't he?"
"Yes, worse luck."
"My father died when I was young, too," Vivian said. "But fortunately I came into my money at twenty-one - just two months ago! It's good to be young and rich!"
I looked at her with a new interest.
"Your father was Lewis' brother?"
"No. His cousin. Mr. Lewis is not really my uncle, though I've always thought of him as my uncle."
"You must be the heir to Lewis' property, too, then?"
She laughed.
"Yes. That's why he likes me to be here. He hopes I'll give up living in Boston and come to settle down in Vermont."
She finished her dry martini.
"Another?"
She nodded with a laugh.
I ordered two more dry martinis.
"You know, Saul," she said, "I think that's why he wrote to me about you. Your uncle was his best friend. I think he hoped we might fall for one another!"
"It's not impossible, is it?"
She flushed.
"No, I don't suppose it is," she said seriously. "But he's dead against it now, because of this woman, Anna, I suppose."
Vivian was really one of the loveliest girls I had ever seen. She drank her second martini quickly and looked at her watch.
"I must fly!" she said.
I didn't try to detain her. I rode part of the way with her.
"When shall I see you again?"
"Whenever you want to, of course," she said.
"I'll meet you tomorrow afternoon, same time, same place." I said.
"Till tomorrow," she said, and, urging her horse forward, she cantered away from me without looking back. I watched her slim figure with the blonde hair gathered together at the nape of her neck until it was out of sight. Then I turned aside and rode back to the estate.
***
"You say she's rich?"
Kirstin sat opposite me in the library, watching me carefully.
"Very rich, I suspect."
She got up and poured herself a drink. Then she sat down again, appeared to concentrate for a moment, and said, "How would you feel about marrying her, Saul?"
"Marry her!" I laughed. "That's impossible - you know that, Kirstin."
"Nothing is impossible," Kirstin said, "and this is not even improbable."
She threw me a taunting glance.
"In the first place, you say she is a young Diana. I like that! A beautiful young woman, a woman of culture and refinement - that's more than we can say for what we've got already. I was down in the cellars an hour ago. They're all settling down quite nicely. The heat from the boiler room is sufficient for the moment. Well, get back to your beautiful Vivian! Are you falling in love with her, Saul?"
I flushed.
"Don't worry about that!" Kirstin said. "Go ahead! Fall in love with her! Bring her back here! You'll soon tire of her. You can work on her slowly, and then, when you think she's ready, we can show her the others. They're happy enough, God knows! All belly, breasts and thighs. Sleep, eat and fuck - that's what they like, no problems!"
"I couldn't bring her here!"
"Why not? You'll do as you're told, Saul. Don't forget that. Come here." Her voice was gentle. "Down," she said, "down, there's a good boy, ah! that's better..."
Her soft sex came against my face, her thighs brushing my cheeks.
"Now, listen to me!" she said. "The second point is that she's got money. We can use that, especially after what Pearson said. And there's a third point. Did it not occur to you? Lewis will be helpless. He won't be able to let out the secret about your uncle - she's all he's got in the world, this Vivian! We'll be good to her, Saul, and when she gets used to it, she'll help us of her own free will. And when you're married to his little Vivian, Lewis will soon see about freeing some of your money. Don't worry about that! He'll think it's the only way he can prevent you from spending hers! Now, how does it sound, Saul?"
Her strong hands massaged my shoulder muscles.
"Come down to the cellar, Saul. I want to show you the meat. Why don't you go in and have a good time with them? Take your riding crop. Keep them up to the mark!"
She led me down the stairs to the cellars. We passed the smaller ones, which contained coal and other junk, and came at last to the huge cellar into which the light of day never entered. It was circular in shape, with a radius of about ten yards; the amount of space was quite considerable. She slid back the small grill on the iron-studded door.
"Look at them, Saul! Aren't they beautiful? Not like the bitches that walk the street!"
The floor was covered with clean straw and, for the moment, the only light was that cast by the naked electric bulb suspended from the dome-like ceiling.
The three women, naked, their soft haunches at rest, were sleeping, curled up like kittens together near the far wall. Beside them was a trough of food and a trough of clean spring water. On the other side of the room there was an open lavatory bowl and what the French call a bidet. Nothing else. A few chains dangled from the stone walls, and that was all.
"The new maid arrives tomorrow," Kirstin said. "I've given Mona her instructions. She's completely with us. I show her a few kindnesses, you know. She is our spy down here, just in case anything should go wrong. Not that I think it will. They've all got exactly what they want: food, water, and good clean straw to sleep on. What more could a girl ask for, eh, Saul?"
I kissed her on the lips.
She reached down and took out my member, caressing it.
"I'm going to bring Mona upstairs tomorrow to corrupt the new maid. She has two weeks to do it. Meanwhile, take your clothes off and go and enjoy them. They're all yours ... they always will be, Saul, as long as you're mine."
She waited while I undressed in the boiler room and then she handed me the riding crop.
"Go in and separate them with that," she said with a laugh. "One good stroke each across those pretty buttocks of theirs! I'll lock the door behind you. I'll come back and let you out in an hour."
I nodded and went in, my enraged member swinging like a small cannon in front of me. She closed the door quietly behind me and turned the key in the lock.
I crossed the straw quickly toward the heap of soft bodies. Anna's full, round buttocks were nearest to me. I raised the riding crop and struck with all my force. She jerked with a gasp, and rolled aside, revealing her beautiful front with its soft apex of jet-black hair. The anger in her eyes died when she saw me. She became seductive, provocative. She understood that she was in competition with the others for my lust. At once, I thrashed the other two into a waking state. They gasped and screamed slightly, cowering in the straw, but when they saw Anna already awake and attempting to excite me with her lovely body, they changed their attitude. Mona moved forward on her knees and took me into her mouth. When Anna moved forward to stop her, I struck my old mistress once across her soft, wheaty belly with the crop which I still held firmly in my right hand. A burst of laughter rang out behind me and the grill closed softly.
Suddenly, I dropped to my knees, pushing Mona away as I did, and, falling supine, I took Milly's plump little sex into my mouth, sucking at it as if I intended to sever it from her body. She straddled my head, her knees grinding into the rough straw and stone floor beneath us. She shuddered with ecstasy and bounced like a balloon on my face. A moment later, I felt Anna's soft, moist crevice sliding against me. I reached out and ran my hands over the curves of her hips, urging her to impale herself on me. Mona, still standing, draped her thighs over Anna's shoulders, rubbing her wet flesh on the warm, soft flesh of Anna's neck. Anna lowered herself onto my uprising member, taking me in fully with one fluid motion. Milly ground down on my face, her sex expanding and pulsing in the moments just before her release. Mona, it appeared, rubbed Anna's neck raw.
Soon, Anna was pounding onto me, gasping, falling forward under the weight of Mona, whose own release was evident in her breathing and the circular motions of her lower body. I opened my mouth to drink from the bounty of Milly's sex, for she was now pushing herself into me, sucking in my tongue and pulsing, squirming over my red, wetted lips. I felt my member throb against the inner walls of Anna's sex. I saw Mona take Anna by the shoulders, in order, I assumed, to brace herself, to bear down on her neck. Her legs rose into the air at my sides, so I knew that Anna supported her fully; the hard heaviness of her pleasure rubbing to Anna's tender neck. In ecstasy, we all groaned and heaved and twisted on the straw. It was as if our tension, ever rising, had been strung taut from one body to the next, snapping in an instant and unraveling in first this body, then that one and so on until we were all panting with exhaustion.
When it was over, I laughed and joked with them until Kirstin came to take me away. Once outside in the corridor, she told me to lie down naked on the cold stone passageway of the cellar. The very suggestion caused my member to harden again, despite my exhaustion. I got down onto the floor. My face pressed to it and I could smell the dirt and dust of dozens of years of accumulation. Kirstin, ever aware of my thoughts, said, "Lick it." She was referring, of course, to the stone floor. I stuck out my tongue, reluctant yet excited at once, and ran it roughly over the floor. It tasted of dirt and dust. "Again," she said. I licked it again. Then I felt the first cutting stroke of the whip over my buttocks. I jerked upwards and fell, hard, back down, my hardened member bearing the burden of my falling weight. Then, blindly, I began to rub it viciously to the stone floor. She knew. She commanded me to lick the floor again, to continue licking it until she told me to stop. I did. As I did, I rubbed myself to the floor. And, as I rubbed myself to the floor, she whipped me cruelly, mercilessly. I was in agony and my agony was heaven. My buttocks trembled and became enflamed. My sex cut against the rough stone floor, breaking against it, it seemed. The whip came down in a cracking, obliterating instant. I dug myself into the floor in response to it. I exploded in pain and ecstasy. Afterwards, as I lay trying to regain myself, I heard the hollow thock of her footsteps die away along the corridor.
***
The new maid, Ursula, arrived while I was out with Vivian. Vivian had had nowhere to go that evening, so we'd talked together until nearly seven o'clock.
She spoke with enthusiasm about a European trip that she intended to make in the autumn. I laughed and told her I knew Europe well: Paris, London, Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and many other great cities.
She asked me all sorts of questions and laughed delightedly at the answers. Neither of us noticed the passage of time.
"Is Paris really so lovely?"
"Lovelier," I said. "In springtime there is no other place to be!"
"And in autumn?"
"Lovely, too," I said. "Arrive at Gare St. Lazare, and go right into the streets. It's a new smell, a new atmosphere. The caf�s are all busy, and they're crammed out front with baskets of oysters and clams and shrimp and people sit outside drinking wine. It's best in the evening. Then the sky's gold-gray. From St. Lazare walk up to Montmartre, go up to the Place du Teret and along to the terrace of the Sacr� Coeur and look down across the city. You can see everything: the Seine, the Isle de la Cit�, the Isle St. Louis, Notre Dame, the Pantheon, the Louvre, the Place de la Concord, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe."
I was watching her closely. Her eyes were lit up with pleasure. Good. She was a romantic. It would probably be very easy.
As I watched her beautiful gray-green eyes, the lovely curve of her cheek under the soft, ash-blonde hair, my heart suddenly went out to her. I really loved this beautiful creature, and a twinge of guilt stole over me. I repressed it at once. It occurred to me that it was precisely the absence of such twinges that made Kirstin my superior. It was right that she should control me. I closed my eyes and imagined my radiant face falling against her belly to suck...
"Where are you?" Vivian said with a laugh.
"Paris," I said with a smile, "the queen of the world. I was just thinking," and my face grew serious and sad, "that I'd have loved to go with you."
"Why don't you, Saul?" Vivian cried, taking my hand in hers across the table.
I shook my head with a wry smile.
"You know it's impossible, Vivian. It takes all I've got to keep the house going, and your uncle certainly wouldn't release any money for me to go on a trip with you!"
"Oh, please, Saul!" she cried, squeezing my hand. "I have plenty of money, more than I could ever spend! Please come with me! You can be my guide and show me places. It would be much nicer than having nasty old professional ones!"
"I don't think I can, Vivian," I said quietly. "Let's drop it for the moment. We can think about it some other time. Autumn's a long way off."
"Promise me to think about it at least!" Vivian said, making a face.
"I promise."
"Oh, it would be wonderful, Saul!"
I smiled and nodded, without replying.
"We could do so many things together!"
"Time we rode back, Vivian," I said quietly, looking at my watch. "Lewis dines at eight."
"Oh hell!" Vivian said charmingly. "What a bore! Oh, he's so sweet and good-natured, too, Saul, really he is, but he talks all the time about history, and the meaning of the words, and about how the American liberal tradition is one of the noblest things in the history of idea - oh, I suppose it's true! And he's so sweet about it! And he's so concerned about seeing I get everything I want! But I don't really care about all that, Saul! I just want to live and be myself."
"You don't really care?"
"Oh no, of course not!" she said laughing. "Do you?"
I shook my head, allowing her to see that she was making a great impression on me. At once, she reached forward with her other hand and took my hand in both of hers.
"Let me read your palm!" she said. "Yes! It's just as I thought," she said in a mock-serious voice, "You're going on a long journey, probably in the autumn!"
I laughed and squeezed her hand.
"Come on now," I said. "You're going to be late for dinner."
We walked out, holding hands, to the horses, mounted and rode side by side to where we had parted the previous night. I dismounted. She at once did the same.
"'Bye, Saul," she said, holding out her hand to shake mine. I took it and drew her quickly to my body; I kissed her softly on the lips.
"I'd be a dangerous guide."
In reply, she rubbed her soft hair against my mouth.
***
"This is Ursula, Mr. Folsrom."
"Ah, yes! Show her in, Kirstin! I was wondering if she had arrived."
"What age are you Ursula?"
"Nineteen, sir."
I looked her up and down. She was a tall girl, almost as tall as Kirstin, with fair hair and a solid figure - the muscles heavy and powerful - and she looked Puritanical.
"Ursula's a member of the Plymouth Brethren," Kirstin said with a smile. "I told her we wanted a good, careful girl with strict morals, one who is not easily influenced by the wrong kind of people."
"Yes, of course," I said. "I do hope you won't be a disappointment to us, Ursula?"
"Oh, no sir!"
"Very good, Kirstin, you had better show Ursula to her room. Kirstin will tell you all about your duties, Ursula."
"Yes sir! Thank you sir!"
They went out. I waited impatiently for Kirstin to return. She came in about five minutes later. She was smiling.
"What do you think of our new recruit?"
"She looks wholesome. She's probably a virgin."
"Oh, without doubt," Kirstin said with a laugh.
"She may be difficult to corrupt."
"But how much more interesting!" Kirstin said. "When we finally pervert her, think of the fervor she'll bring to her lust! You know, she reminds me a bit of myself when I was young. I think that's why I fell in love with her. Most of the others, perhaps all three, like to have indignities inflicted on them. She's probably cruel. You wait and see!"
I laughed.
"You're wonderful, Kirstin!" I said. "I don't know how I ever lived without you!"
"You didn't," Kirstin said, raising her skirt and showing me her shockingly pale thighs. "Before, you only dreamed."
Chapter 9
The next time I met Vivian, we confessed our love for one another. She did not wish to ride to the hotel as usual.
"Let's go into the woods on your estate, instead," she said brightly. "It's such a wonderful day. I don't want to sit in the beastly old hotel lounge!"
I agreed willingly and we rode back to my place and tethered our horses to a fence.
"What wonderful trees!" she exclaimed.
"The elms, yes! My uncle used to be very proud of them."
"No wonder! They must be as old as the hills!"
I laughed, reminded of something.
"Let's go into the woods," I said. "They're pretty extensive."
"Oh, they're beautiful, Saul! How lucky you are to have them!"
I took her hand and we walked deeper into the woods.
"Oh, hold on a minute," I said, "there's something I want to show you!"
"What is it?"
"Wait, we must leave the woods this way. It's a small copse I used to play in when I was a boy. It's a wonderful place. Completely isolated from the world!"
"How lovely! Is it far?"
"Not far. This way." I took her gently by the hand and led her out of the woods toward the copse. We wended our way through the bushes and came to a halt in the small mossy clearing.
"How wonderful!" Vivian said happily. "It's true. It's as though the rest of the world didn't exist!"
As she turned to face me, I took her in my arms and kissed her passionately on the lips for the first time. She responded warmly, her slim body relaxing utterly in my arms. I kissed her neck and ran my hands through her superb blonde hair. A moment later, she slipped down to the ground, drawing me down beside her.
She had closed her eyes. Her lovely face was calm, the temples waxen, the soft red lips wet and smooth. Gradually, under my caress, her whole body arched to be taken, but I resisted. Instead I simply pulled her blouse out of her riding breeches at the back and caressed her sides and shoulders.
When she opened her gray-green eyes, I told her that I loved her and that I didn't care what Lewis thought. She smiled submissively and drew my head down to kiss her lips.
I didn't make love to her. I felt she was not quite ready to give everything, but we had already spoken of marriage, each of us seeming to hesitate, and we agreed that we should meet again in two days' time each with our decisions.
I rode back with her nearly as far a Lewis' place before I returned to the estate.
Kirstin was waiting for me.
"Saw her again?"
I nodded.
"How is it going?"
"Well."
"I want to know more," Kirstin said.
"It may be necessary for me to go on a European tour with her. Even if we were married soon, she would want to go there for the honeymoon."
Kirstin laughed.
"Why not?" she said. "Two young people in love could have a wonderful time in Europe. And then when it's all over, you'll bring her back for Kirstin! She'll cause a sensation in the cellar."
I wasn't quite sure that I enjoyed speaking of Vivian like this. I really loved her. But of course, Kirstin was right. Kirstin was always right.
"How's the new maid shaping?"
"Mona made improper suggestions to her last night," Kirstin said with a laugh. "She says she thinks that Ursula nearly gave way. Mona pretended to have a toothache and asked Ursula if she could go into her bed for a while. Ursula agreed, and Mona cuddled up against her with her cheek on Ursula's shoulder. Mona's a clever girl!"
I agreed and poured myself a drink.
"Well, a little while later," Kirstin went on, "Mona moved her head down onto Ursula's breasts. She said her tooth was still aching and that she wanted to keep it warm. Ursula didn't resist. It was only when Mona had her cheek on Ursula's naked belly - about two inches from her sex, Mona says - that Ursula finally froze and leapt out of bed."
Kirstin paused to light my cigarette for me.
"Thanks," I said, rather surprised at her thoughtfulness.
"Mona went after her," Kirstin said, blowing out the match. "She actually got her mouth on Ursula's sex, but Ursula kicked her away finally."
I made a face.
"And this morning she came and told me about it."
"Who? Mona?"
"No. Ursula!" Kirstin said. "She said that Mona had tried to seduce her and that she couldn't stay on if Mona stayed."
"How did you get out of that?"
"I asked her to give Mona another chance and when she seemed as though she were going to refuse, I asked her if it would make any difference if I allowed her to punish Mona. 'How?' she asked. I told her that I thought Mona ought to have a good whipping and that, as she was the injured party, Ursula ought to administer the punishment. Oh, I didn't make any mistakes about that girl! She hemmed and hawed, but I could see she was dying to give Mona a whipping!"
I waited eagerly for her to go on. I was speechless with admiration. Machiavelli would have doffed his cap to my Kirstin!
"So I called Mona and scolded her for what she had done. Then I told her to fetch a riding crop, that Ursula was going to be allowed to punish her. Mona pretended to be scared, but she loved the idea really. She couldn't wait to get her clothes off. But I thought I might as well arrange things properly. So I took them both down to the cellars. You know that little cellar at the other end of the corridor from the Lair?" - I smiled at the name she had given to the women's cell - "Well, I led them in there. I had already gotten Cliff to fix chains to the wall in there. I thought we might need a place like that sometime. I told Mona to strip, chained her naked to the wall, and gave Ursula the riding crop. You should have seen that girl give it to her! Mona screamed blue murder. But she enjoyed it well enough. I congratulated Ursula on her determination. She was feeling very moral but she was obviously in a hot state of sex by that time. So I gave her the key and told her that it was completely up to her how long Mona remained there, chained to the wall like that. I told Ursula that she was to be Mona's warder and feed her during her confinement.
"Ursula was frantic with joy. I left, and left her to it. She was going upstairs and downstairs all day. She couldn't keep away from Mona, can't yet. I think she'll probably sleep down there! The last time I went down, I peeped through the grill. They were both naked. Ursula was thrashing Mona and proclaiming that sex was dirty. Each time the whip came down on Mona's jerking body, Ursula uttered a new word for it: 'Dirty! Obscene! Ungodly! Vile!' Her invectives mixed with the sound of the cracking whip to sound like the very flames of hell consuming them.
Soon, the conflagration burned freely and Ursula, when shouting her last invective, which was, I believe, 'filthy,' threw herself to her knees, as if she were going to pray, clutched Mona's enraged flesh, and licked it. She continued to mutter about how dirty it all was as her tongue darted like flames into Mona's sex. Ursula's hands crept up to grasp Mona's breasts and she pulled at them as if trying to tear them from her body. She cried, she moaned, she stood up and pressed her naked body to Mona's, her breasts crushed to the other's. She withdrew from Mona and whipped her again, cursing her as the Devil himself. She lashed out again and again, and each time, Mona's body jerked uncontrollably against the rough stone wall to which she was held enchained. Finally, with an unearthly utterance, Ursula began to shake as if she herself were possessed by some evil demon, and her hand went to her sex and she rubbed herself until she fell panting on the ground, her body splayed naked on the stone floor."
I burst out laughing.
"You're a genius, Kirstin!"
Kirstin nodded her head calmly.
"At this rate, we should get Ursula into the Lair by the end of this week. If we do, I'll get in touch with the other girl and tell her to come a week earlier. I think Anna might have a shot at seducing the new girl. What do you think? Is she ready for that kind of work yet?"
"I'll talk to her and tell you what I think."
"Good. By the way, just as soon as we get Mona and Ursula out of the little cellar, we must go ahead with the branding. I won't feel really secure until these women have been branded."
"What exactly's the idea?"
"Don't be stupid," Kirstin said, getting up and going to the door. "We've got to make these women feel that they belong."
As she closed the door behind me, the uncomfortable thought struck me that one day Kirstin might insist on branding me.
A chill came to my stomach and I sat there wondering if I would I be able to resist.
***
Vivian looked pale when I met her two days later.
"What's wrong, darling? Has anything happened?"
"Let's go somewhere where we can talk, Saul."
"Where would you like to go? The copse?"
"No. I think I'd prefer the hotel. It's more impersonal. Let's go at once."
I cantered after her.
When we were seated alone in the small cocktail bar - as yet we were the only customers - she began to speak immediately.
"I told Uncle Elmer that I loved you, Saul, and that we were thinking of getting married."
"Oh God!" I said. "What made you do that?"
"Well, I knew he felt cold toward you, but I thought he had a right to know. Since my father died, Uncle Elmer has been a kind of second father to me. I didn't feel right, somehow, not telling him."
I nodded.
"And what did he say?"
"He begged me not to."
"I'm not surprised," I said dryly. "What did you say to that?"
"I asked him what his reasons were."
"Did he tell you?"
"He didn't want to, but finally he did. He thought it was the only way he could stop me from marrying you."
"And will it?"
"I don't know, Saul!" She was nearly in tears. "I don't know what to believe! I love you!"
"What exactly did he say to you, Vivian? Tell me. I have a right to know."
"Of course you have, Saul!"
"Go on then, darling." I took her hand and she didn't try to escape.
"He said that when you were a boy, that woman Anna had a terrible influence over you. He said that you poisoned your uncle because of her, that she might even have persuaded you to do it! Oh, Saul, did you? Did you kill your uncle?"
"Yes, Vivian darling, I killed him. I can't lie to you!"
She squeezed my hand.
"But why, Saul?"
"I loved Anna," I said, "and he pretended that he despised her because she was a Jew."
"Didn't he?"
"He went to her bedroom one night and forced her to strip naked for him. He threatened to have her extradited if she didn't obey him. She came from Russia. God knows what would have happened if she'd been sent back there. Her mother was in a brothel at that time and she probably died there."
I weighed my words carefully, enunciating clearly, and watched the gradual signs of understanding and forgiveness well up in Vivian's beautiful eyes.
"Anna was helpless," I continued. "Uncle Harris had gone into town that day. He brought back a pair of black silk stockings, a pair of black high-heeled shoes with ankle straps, and a frilly black garter belt. He made her put them on..."
An expression of horror had come to Vivian's eyes. The stray thought passed through my mind that sometime, quite probably in the near future, Vivian would gladly abase herself utterly in the same humiliating manner. I squeezed her hand. My loins stirred.
"Do you want me to go on?"
She nodded urgently.
"He told her to fetch her lipstick. She did. He made her paint her nipples. Then he made her stand on a chair and he opened her sex and painted her labia."
I allowed time for that to sink in and then I continued. "By the way, I forgot the mask. He made her wear a mask. I can't describe what he did next, Vivian. It was too disgusting. But then he thrashed her with a riding crop, not only on the bottom, but also on her sex."
Vivian emitted a gasp of horror.
"And then he violated her," I said shortly. "And his parting words to her were that she should be prepared in the future to perform for him whenever he desired it." Luckily, we were seated at a table, our laps concealed. As I had told Vivian the story, my sex had grown hard, urging itself against the thick fabric of my trousers. Of course, I could not let her see this, for then everything would have been ruined. She could have no idea that Anna's degradation, indeed, the very idea of degradation itself, gave me such pleasure. And yet, despite what I was risking, I had to ease the ache in my loins. So, as I had been telling the story, I reached beneath the table as if I were merely resting my hand upon my leg, and pressed my palm hard into my trousers. I couldn't help it! This is what the memory did to me. Vivian had no idea, and, as Anna's degradation grew more severe, so, too, did my desire. I pressed ever so subtly, rubbing slightly the hard edge of my member, which I could feel through my trousers, so that Vivian could not possibly know what I did not two feet away from her. And, by the time I was telling her about the riding crop, I shuddered with great forbearance, all the while keeping my composure and horrified countenance.
"So I killed him. I loved Anna. It was the only way."
"Oh, how horrible! How humiliating for her! Oh, I don't blame you, Saul. What a terrible thing to happen. And you were only a child. Did you see all this?"
"I saw it through a keyhole."
"Does my uncle know about this?"
"Some of it, at least. I think he must. He talked to Anna."
"Then what has he got against you?"
"If only I knew, Vivian!" I said with a tired smile.
She squeezed my hand and went on.
"He said something about this accident."
"Yes?"
"He said that he wasn't sure it was an accident, that you made love to Anna before you killed Inez and that now you've taken Anna again."
I laughed sadly.
"It sounds all so purposeful when you put it that way!" I exclaimed. "Well, I did make love to Anna. We hadn't seen each other for years. We fell into each other's arms, and before we knew what we were doing, we were making love. Do you understand?"
She nodded, her eyes shining. "With all that passed between you, of course."
"When it was over, we agreed that she had better go away with her husband as they had arranged to do. She didn't really love me, and I didn't really love her. We said good-bye. It was over. But then the accident happened."
"Tell me about that, darling," she said softly, squeezing my hand again.
"I didn't know Inez from Adam!" I exclaimed. "I saw the man once, at a distance, when I was a kid. And anyway, the woods were very dark. I couldn't sleep, you see, so I took my gun and went to the woods. It was just before dawn. I hoped to bag a rabbit or two. Suddenly, I heard someone coming through the undergrowth. I got the scare of my life. No one had any right to be in the woods. I waited. And then a man appeared. I couldn't see him properly, just his outline. I told him to stop where he was. I was just about to ask him who he was and what he was doing there when he brought up his own gun and took a pot at me." I tapped my shoulder. "Well, I didn't think as I saw that gun come up. I fired, twice, and at the same time I felt myself struck in the shoulder. Even when I turned him over I didn't know who he was. His face was half blown away. It was a horrible mess. I went back to the house and phoned the police. That's all there was to it. It was like a nightmare."
"Poor darling!" said Vivian, moving closer to me. I put my arm around her and we sat, saying nothing, for a few moments.
"And Anna?" she said at last.
"She's still at my place, and she can stay there just as long as she likes and your damn uncle can go and hang himself!"
She laughed for the first time in a long time. "Poor Uncle Elmer! It's all so easy to understand! He'll come around, Saul. You'll see!"
"Does that mean you're going to marry me?"
"Of course I am darling! I couldn't live without you! Especially now that I know all about you!"
I laughed.
"There's not much to tell. I'm really a very ordinary person, Vivian."
"And Uncle Elmer even called you mad!"
"Mad?"
"Yes! He said there was a possibility that you were a homicidal maniac!"
"Do I look mad?" I said, looking into her eyes.
"Just mad enough for me!" she said, screwing up her pretty nose, and planting a sweet, soft kiss on my lips.
"You'd better be careful, darling," I whispered, rubbing noses with her. "I may be dangerous..."
"You said that before!" she whispered softly. "I think I might like you to be dangerous..."
***
"How did it go?"
"We're engaged to be married. We drove into town and she chose an engagement ring this afternoon."
"You're a quick worker, Saul. Perhaps I'll give you something nice tonight."
"Oh, old Lewis helped!" I said with a short laugh. "I don't care what he says about me so long as he makes it interesting! A couple more murders wouldn't do me any harm! She'd come and ask me about them and I'd explain and she'd understand. And she would! She really would. She's wonderful. I love her very much!"
Kirstin bellowed with laughter. She opened her legs and nodded for me to come to it. I moved at once and kissed its wet, hairy surface lightly.
"The trouble with young women these days," Kirstin said, "is they've got no moral sense."
***
"Come down to the cellars. We've got business to do."
I was lying on the couch, my mouth buried in Kirstin's magnificent crotch, and she was seated, her thighs raised, to allow me better access. I didn't want to move at that moment and I pretended not to hear her. She said nothing for a few moments, suffering me to go on with my tongue. And then she said, "Did you hear me, Saul?"
"Yes."
"Now, then."
I got up reluctantly, straightened my tie, and followed her down to the cellars.
"This way," she said.
She led me to the small cellar at the end of the passage.
"The fish is in the net," she said. "This cellar's empty again."
I followed her in.
She pushed the bolt behind us.
"Strip," she said shortly.
I hesitated only for a split second before I obeyed. I stood naked before her.
"Over against the wall," she said. "Stand with your face to it. Between the chains."
A moment later, she had clicked the metal cuffs on my wrists and ankles.
"You realize, Saul, that I do everything for your own good?"
"Yes," I said huskily, staring at the wall in front of me. I already felt my sex twitching with anticipation.
"You love me and you want to go on loving me and you'd be miserable if you didn't," Kirstin said. "That's why sometimes I have to be cruel. But I do it for my own pleasure, too, Saul. I like being cruel to you. I want to humiliate you. And you want to be humiliated, is that not right?"
"Yes," I whispered.
"I'm not doing this because you disobeyed me just now. I'm doing it because I want to hurt you. I'm not going to stop until you scream for mercy, you understand? Look around!"
I looked over my shoulder and saw that she held a thick, black dogwhip in her hand. I had an impulse to flee, but the chains prevented me. A moment later, I thought my back had split open as the first stroke of the lash crashed like a pistol shot. I shuddered. What was happening to me? Did I want this? This was mad! Insane! My thoughts were interrupted by the sudden knife-like cut at my buttocks. The pain rose up through my entire body and made my head ring. I gritted my teeth. I wanted to yell for Kirstin to stop the madness, but the words didn't come to my lips. The third and fourth strokes followed in quick succession. An agonizing pain swept up the length of my back. I felt that the flesh was hanging from the bones, and horribly, as my head fell, my chin touching my chest, I noticed that I had become hard and that the knob of my member was grazing itself against the stone wall!
I pressed against it, rubbing against the cutting, vicious stone. It was all I could do; the pain of my desire was so great that I was willing to endure even the most excruciating pain in order to ease it. Kirstin must have seen the contraction of my buttocks as I pressed against the stone wall, for she lashed out again, saying something about the fact that my pain is my pleasure. I writhed like a fish on the line, my flesh tearing against the stone. I imagined Kirstin's powerful body behind me and I urged myself deeper into the wall, though it would not yield to me as her soft body would have done. Then, as she thrashed the whip over my shoulders, I became conscious only of the pain. I felt my mouth hang open and I screamed, no longer counting the strokes. My body was a conflagration of hotly rising welts, excruciating pain and unfilled desire, for still I desired her sex, my release.
When she unlocked me, my wrists rubbed raw by the bonds, I clung to her as I would have clung to my savior. She eased me down onto the straw, gently reassuring, and gave her hot sex to my lips once again. I was like a baby at its mother's breast and I was glad, glad that I had been hurt now that I was there amidst her softness which she gave to me because she loved me and I belonged. I belonged as a monk belongs to God. I wet the warm flesh of her thighs with the exertion of my pain: my sweat, my tears, my saliva. I was willing to die there, suffocated by her fullness, her softness, her warmth. I was hers and she could do with me as she pleased.
As I licked her, drank from her, she teased my wounds with the end of the dangling whip. I writhed away from the pain, but she held me firm between her thighs. Soon the whip exacerbated my agony, my pleasure, as she spilled forth into my mouth. I drank to be nourished, satiated. Afterwards, she rubbed her fluids over my wounds like balm and my pain eased. She was then my benevolent god and I worshipped her for her kindness.
***
It was half an hour later when she pushed back the grill of the Lair and asked me to look for myself. Big Ursula was lying with her belly on the straw near the other women. She was dozing. The other three had been talking quietly to one another. They stopped when they heard the movement of the grill.
"Do you want to take her now or afterwards, Saul?" Kirstin said at my shoulder.
"Afterwards," I said, "but we haven't decided which one's to be branded first."
Kirstin laughed.
"Milly, of course! Always the weakest first! That is a first principle in this kind of thing!"
I nodded.
"Well, let's get it over with," Kirstin said. "I'm impatient to see how she takes it. Inside a week she'll be showing it to the others with pride. You wait and see! Think of when we do it to your pretty new bride!"
I closed my eyes, but no resistance would rise in me.
"Go and heat the iron in the boiler room," she said. "It's standing beside the boiler. 'S' for Saul. I'll get the girl along to the other cellar."
I obeyed. I watched the iron "S" grow white-hot in the furnace and I held it at arm's length, staring at it.
I walked heartlessly along the passage to the little cellar at End. I felt as if my spirit were dying. Kirstin was already there and the naked girl was already in her chains.
"Get your dirty little bum out, girl!" Kirstin said as soon as I had closed the door, and, putting her shoulder at the young girl's thighs, she raised the buttocks into a more accessible position.
"Now, Saul, on the left buttock! Before the iron gets cold!"
I lurched forward, hesitated and thrust the brand against the soft flesh. The scream that followed seemed to shake the stone walls of the cellar. Kirstin, still forcing the buttocks up against the brand, had a terrible light of triumph in her eyes.
I pulled the brand away. It had a tendency to cling. It came away with a puff of smoke which smelled of burning meat.
When Kirstin stood up, the girl flopped on the straw. She had fainted. Kirstin threw a blanket over her.
"Leave her here for the night," she said. "We won't put her back with the others until most of the pain's gone. Then she'll say it wasn't so bad. She'll be proud, you'll see. A mark of distinction. The others'll be jealous. They'll dream about having the same thing."
"Can I not stay with her for a while?"
"Certainly not! You've got work to do! Go now and mount Big Ursula! Give it to her hard! She's a virgin."
I went, exhausted, as I had been told to do, to Ursula. It seemed she was waiting for me, though this I guessed was a misperception, attributed probably to the intensity of my recent experiences. She was lying prone on the floor, her buttocks rising and falling with her breathing. With one eye peeking out from the darkness of the pillow of her arm, she watched my approach.
"Turn over," I said. She turned over. She gazed at my hardening member, which rose to the idea of her virginity, and I thought she smiled. Without being told to, she spread her legs. I kneeled before her and clambered onto her, driving into her without ceremony; I was too tired. Still her sex gripped mine as it had never been gripped before. The feeling was exquisite.
She lay with her hands to her sides, as if her palms were nailed to the floor, and looked ceilingward. Still, I thought I gleaned a shadow of a smile on her face. It was not a smile of simple pleasure, but one that seemed to hold the secreted knowledge of evil. I was, surely, going insane, for Ursula had no knowledge of evil, but was virgin soil, untainted, pure. Surely. I drove into her harder, in confusion perhaps, and she closed tightly around me, and I released my seed deep into her womb. There was, afterwards, again that smile, that evil smile!
I kneeled up to remove myself from the hideous, yet lovely sight of her furtive meaning. She looked at me, my body kneeling before her.
"Now pray," she uttered, her voice hoarse, dull. "Pray and then lick me clean." Obediently, I did as I was told. As my tongue came out to meet the mixture of our fluids, I realized the gravity of my actions, for then, intoxicated by her heavy, sweet fragrance, I was committing sacrilege, worshipping a new god. She clamped my head between her flawlessly white thighs, the tender flesh of them burning my cheeks, my ears, suffocating me and cutting off all sound. It was then, as I swirled in the thick eddy of her release, that I gleaned the future: I would have to prove my devotion to her; there would have to be a sacrifice.