The Orgies Of Stone's Island is an interesting addition to the field of modern erotic literature. In the tradition of the modern masterpiece Candy, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, The Orgies Of Stone's Island deals heavily in surrealism, fantasy and symbolism-all primarily of a sexual nature. Unlike Candy, however, The Orgies Of Stone's Island is definitely not a sex-spoof. The author, R. John Smythe, is quite serious in his portrayal of an emotionally disturbed mind.
The sexual description here is destined to raise the hair on some heads. Many will argue with the author's choice of a vehicle and contend that the emphasis on sex is far too heavy. I would tend to agree with this, except that the psychological problem outlined here is of a sexual nature and the treatment the author gives it is quite accurate from the Freudian view. Even more important, this book deals with a contemporary battle between man's morals and the mores of society, and through the protagonist, Drake Hackett, we see a rather unique portrayal of man's inner conflict resulting from a rather experimental area of contemporary sexual behavior-wife-swapping or "swinging."
First of all, let's discard some of the literary devices employed by the author. There is no "journal," nor is there actually a "Stone's Island." In truth, the author does not seriously expect the reader to take these devices literally. He even warns the reader in his opening paragraph: "I have come to think of my descent into the dark bowels of Stone's Island as a sort of journey into my own mind, into those perverted catacombs of the unconscious into which one will not look while awake." This warning is repeated near the close of the story as it races to its final climax with the words, "... the stupid notion that I had heard something dark and prophetic about myself."
What the author is doing here is using the "substitute" device so often encountered by psychologists in the first interviews with disturbed patients. "Doctor, I've come to you to talk about a close friend of mine... " After the ice is broken it turns out that the "friend" is the person himself, and he used this device to protect his ego. This substitutive method is in itself a defense mechanism. While the individual may subconsciously recognize that something is amiss in his personality, he will not consciously admit this to himself or others. The analyst's job, of course, is to bring this disturbance out into the open and make the patient come to grips with the truth about himself.
If we accept the author's clues and warnings and view The Orgies Of Stone's Island as a tour de force through an emotional disturbance, we then see that we are in truth witnessing one man's private hell. That man is Drake Hackett, and his hell is his own inner conflict over his practice of unlimited sexual freedom.
How do we reach this conclusion? Take the opening sequence of the book and analyze it carefully. We find the protagonist, his wife, his six-year-old son and two prostitutes with a handsome young life guard. The author makes it quite clear that these people are engaged in swinging or wife-swapping, and that the protagonist and his wife enjoy complete sexual freedom. Rather than hide this from their young son, they encourage him to join them.
Think for a moment. Just what purpose does this scene serve in the overall narrative? It is not placed at the beginning to sexually stimulate the reader because the sexual description is choppy and does not take the action to climax. It serves no real purpose for the sub-plot of what takes place on Stone's Island, and really has little connection to that segment of the story. The author could have opened with a family picnic on the deserted island, or any one of a number of story devices which would have served him better. Yet he chose this rather unique and strange opening. Why?
The answer is obvious. The author wanted to state his problem at the very beginning, launch his narrative from a dramatic moment when the emotional disturbance manifests itself in the individual. Drake Hackett watches another man make love to his wife and is struck with jealousy. "Even though he had just come from an hour's tumble with her in the cabin of our yawl Argo anchored offshore, he couldn't seem to keep his hands from creeping up over her tits as he talked."
We next see him comparing his wife's body with that of the prostitute he has hired for himself, and then we're introduced to his son who has been raised on sexual freedom. The conflict in Drake's mind is evident in the description during these passages, but we see his real doubt come to the front when he begins to hear the organ. He is at that moment engaged in a sexual contact with Honey, the prostitute, but he breaks the contact to leave the group and go off by himself.
Before going off into the realm of fantasy, the author provides us one more clue almost immediately. As Drake and his son climb the hill, the son looks back and notes to his father that his mother and the prostitute are engaged in a homosexual contact. "Look, Daddy, Mommy and that lady are playin' sixty-nine." Again, this is something that serves no useful purpose to the story-unless the author is placing another facet of the problem before the reader. And this is exactly what he is doing, for we find that one of Drake's largest areas of anxiety throughout the narrative is that his wife will turn homosexual.
In order to see this we must cut through the heavy symbolism used in the book and discern that Drake is also Stone and that Yvonne, his wife, is a part reflected in each and every female character portrayed. Stone, the island, the orgies, the Black Mass and every element in this part of the narrative are fantasies in Drake's mind. They are quite literally the inner turmoil he suffers as he wrestles with his sense of morality.
The symbolism here is perhaps overdone and underpolished, but it is psychologically accurate and tells an important story of its own. Sex becomes the devil, and instead of a beautiful act it becomes an unpleasant mixture of darkness, fire and everything vile. This, of course, was intentional on the author's part. Drake has come to grips with his own sense of morality and suddenly recognizes the ugliness in his and his wife's behavior pattern.
It's important to note that Drake does not blame his wife for what has happened. He shoulders all the blame himself and a great deal of his disturbance is centered on what will become of her. One notes that he fantasizes Lesbian behavior all through the narrative, and all of the sexual sadism portrayed is directed at females. Perhaps this is best summed up with Drake's own words spoken through the "journal" device: "-There she lay in that treacherous cave. Amanda, my bride, on a bed of filthy rags. The stench of death and decay welled out of the cavity in a nauseous wave-yet I stood my ground. Her eyes were gone and her teeth hung loose in their bony sockets; scraps of rotted flesh hung on her skull and fluttered from her bones- Ahg!"
Following this same theory we can see why children play such a predominant role in the narrative, and especially in the ending where the young girl becomes a sexual machine in the hands of a Lesbian; i.e. the wife. This is all a manifestation of Drake's concern over his young son and what sexual freedom might eventually do to him. The sex transference at the end is simply an extension of his own homosexual anxiety.
The nature of his disturbance becomes clear to Drake at the end of the story, and this is evidenced in his statement that "Stone,"
"Confused darkness with light, and light with darkness... "
Then Drake discovers that Yvonne had temporarily become a prostitute, something about which he had evidenced a great deal of anxiety in his erotic fantasies, and, after a moment's rage, resolved his conflict. "I looked down at the handful of bills. Then I looked into her eyes-deep, deeper maybe than I ever had before, deep into those clear green eyes of hers, trying to penetrate the mask-if it was a mask. Had I too gotten the roles wrong?... suddenly it didn't seem to matter very much."
Discussing each of the hundreds of symbols and dream-fantasies used by R. John Smythe in The Orgies Of Stone's Island would take a book in itself, and it would serve to spoil much of the reader's fun in spotting these psychological clues to the meaning of the work. Mr. Smythe makes some interesting observations on contemporary sexual behavior in a round-about way and these should provide some food for thought for serious students of psychology and human behavior. Take the two missing skeletons for example, could these be Drake and Yvonne returned to life?
Much, both good and bad, has come to us from modern erotic fiction, and I think it is refreshing that we can now enjoy frankly adult themes in our literature.
-Douglas H. Gamlin, Ph.D.
* * *
PART ONE - THOSE WHO COME IN THE AIR
CHAPTER ONE
January, 1969.
I feel I should set down at the beginning the circumstances under which I stumbled upon the bizarre secrets of Stone's Island, buried these thirty-seven years. I make no pretense as to the relevance of these events to the actual story of Simon Stone, and yet in my own mind I cannot separate the two; I have come to think of my descent into the dark bowels of Stone's Island as a sort of journey into my own mind, into those perverted catacombs of the unconscious into which one will not look while awake. As a matter of fact the whole affair seems to me to me somewhere between a nightmare and a wet dream! I am put in mind of that sentence composed by the fifteenth century alchemist Basil Valentine on the initial letters of the word vitriol: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem, which in English reads, "Visit the bowels of the earth, in order that you may come upon the hidden Stone by rectification." (Pun intended.)
One of the few structures still standing more or less intact on Stone's Island today is the great concrete arch called the Dragon Gate which overlooks the little cove where Stone's boat docks once stood. This grotesque but magnificent piece of sculpture guards what was once the estate's southern approach, now only a weed-covered terrace of crumbling flagstones, breached here and there by a casurina tree or an ancient-looking gumbo limbo. It was on a night in January of 1969, sitting on this terrace and watching the full moon like a bubble of cold fire rising over the Dragon Gate, that I first heard a bit of the legend of Stone's Island. Rick Morgan sat with his back to the Gate, facing Honey and me across the fire; my wife Yvonne sat between his legs, the flames warming her feet and Rick's chest warming her back. Even though he had just come from an hour's tumble with her in the cabin of our yawl Argo anchored offshore, he couldn't seem to keep his hands from creeping up over her tits as he talked. I had asked him why the mansion had been torn down.
"Wasn't torn down, it burnt down. You mean you been in Lake Leethy a whole week and haven't heard about Stone's Island? You ought to talk to some of those old timers over at Sago Docks. According to them this little island is crawlin' with ghosts, man. Stone came here before the Boom days and built this place-practically built the island, they say. He dredged sand out of the lake to make that hill, and then built his main house right on top of it. I've seen some pictures of it, looked like a Spanish castle or something, spooky as hell, man. First there was just Stone and his wife and daughter and a bunch of spades, but then after his wife and kid drowned-the old timers'll tell you he murdered them-after that there was a girl's school set up here, and nobody knows what happened to Stone. Some say he died, some say he went away, but the best story is that he stayed here and fucked the pants off all them little girls! Ha ha ha!-yeah, that's what they say. Anyway, then the place burned down in-when was it, Honey?"
Honey said, "1932, I think," without lifting her head from my lap.
"Yeah, that's right," he went on, "burned to the ground, no survivors-'cept for them dragons there." He indicated the Dragon Gate by a jerk of his head, since his hands were tied up. "And the old fishermen'll tell you that when the wind is right you can still hear old Stone up there on the hill playin' his organ and-" Here I had to interrupt. "Yeah," he replied, "he had a full-scale pipe organ installed in the house, at least that's the story. See, the thing about Stone is that nobody really knew anything about him, that's how all these stories got started, I guess. He was sort of a hermit, holed up in his castle like a rat. The old men admit, most of them, that they never laid eyes on the man. That's why nobody seems to know when he died, I guess. But anyway they say you can hear the organ, and on a full moon, like tonight, you can see his daughter's ghost dancing on the beach. Some weird shit, huh?"
"Well," says Honey, snuggling in my crotch, "the only organ I hear is the one knocking against my ear."
And Rick says, as he slips his hands inside my wife's sweater, "That's no organ, Honey, that's a skin flute. Why don't you play us a tune?"-which she did.
Honey was one of two whores I had picked up that afternoon, and Rick was a lifeguard whom my wife had seduced the day after we sailed into Lake Leethy. The other whore, Marie, we had left in the cabin of the Argo sleeping off the combined effects of the grape and a vigorous gang-bang inflicted upon her delicious young body by the rest of us, including my six-year-old son Billy who always likes to get in the act. Lake Leethy was to be only a brief stopover for us on our way to the West Indies, and these people we had just more or less picked out of the hat for a little sexual fun. Had we wanted an admixture of intelligent conversation we would have fallen short of the goal, since our new friends turned out to be far better endowed between the legs than between the ears, but as it was they ideally suited our purpose.
It was partly the action of Honey's head in my lap and partly the firelit view of my wife's large breasts responding to the uplifting caresses of the hands inside her sweater that had caused me (ghost story or no) to raise another erection. Honey now had my cock out and was going to work on it with her well-trained lips and tongue while Rick and Yvonne watched. Soon Yvonne was out of her sweater, leaving her tits bare and glowing like flickering moons in the firelight. I pulled Honey's sucking mouth from my cock and told her to stand up and strip. She was wearing nothing but a micro-length beach tunic, because the bikini which had been beneath it when we left the dock had disappeared long before we anchored off the island. She had short honey blonde hair and one of those odd but exciting "composite" type bodies which one comes across every now and then-a body, that is to say, which looks as if it were made up of parts from several different types of women: this girl was of small-boned medium stature, slim hips and legs -legs which could have stood a little more meat in the calves-and enormous tits! She said her bust measurement was forty-one D, and I believe every inch of it. To be sure, they sagged a bit, these massive pi�atas, but so much less than one would have suspected that viewed raw they boggled the mind! Though her body was evenly tanned from head to foot from sunning herself daily in the nude, her nipples still retained a bit of their girlish pinkness; the areolae of these striking turrets were a good three inches in diameter, but the inflation of the over-developed glands was so great that the knobs at the centers just barely broke the parabolic contours. In other words, even the nipples seemed to have been intended for a smaller set of jugs; whenever I see a nipple like that I think of a balloon blown up halfway, painted at the tip with a small circle, then inflated just short of the breaking point. You know the type.
My wife's body is altogether different-even to the color, since we were only a few weeks out of the cold north and her skin was still white as cream. She is the very picture of the center nude (the redhead) in Renoir's painting The Bathers, except that Yvonne's nipples are a bit bigger. She has one of those soft plenteous bodies which strike such a delightful medium between fluidity and firmness; between the plump and the slim. I am a tit man, pure and simple, and my old lady's boobs, pound for pound and inch for inch, certainly could not measure up to Honey's overblown footballs, but when I burrow between those smothering 38-Cs like the happy mole that I am, the comparison doesn't bother me in the least.
Anyway, when Honey got up to unveil that impossibly top-heavy body of hers, Yvonne wriggled out of Rick's tentacles and joined her-already stripped to her hip-hugger bellbottoms. Honey slipped her little tunic off over her head and stood there naked in the yellow glow as my wife unbuckled her belt and stepped out of her slacks. She too wore nothing underneath her clothes. Standing there together beneath the two huge stony dragons, their jaws locked in deadly combat overhead, the naked girls looked like two sacred prostitutes at the gate of some ancient pagan temple-the dark-skinned Honey like Diana of the Ephesians, the thousand-breasted goddess of the fertile earth; Yvonne like bright Venus herself, inviting Mars into the nectar-filled darkness of her womb.
Little Billy broke my contemplation. "Her pussy's not as hairy as Mommy's, is it, Daddy?" This sent Rick into spasms of laughter. "That kid's too much, man," he croaked, "I don't believe it." Ignoring this, I replied to the boy's observation: "By Jove, I believe you're right, Billy." The girls eye-balled each other's twats. Honey's bush was only a little darker than her hair and made a striking contrast against the deep tan of her belly and thighs; its pattern was a sort of double triangle, like a two-barbed arrowhead, the two lower barbs extending their fuzzy points out along the slight creases where her crotch met her thighs, the upper two bristling along the line at which her flat belly gave over to the rise of her mound. Unlike the general run of cunt hair, it did not have a definite termination at the top, but rather trailed off in an ever-narrowing line of golden down (like the shaft of the arrow), disappearing into her navel. Also, her hairs were less curly than most and, for this reason probably, seemed longer, tending to hang downward and give the whole sun-bleached patch the appearance of a misplaced goatee. This delightful foliage clothed one of those solid, ridge-backed, deep-scored cunts common to many lean-bodied women. At any rate, Billy's comparison, while crude, was not inaccurate: because though Honey's maidenhair was by no means sparse, it could not stand up against my wife's in denseness.
Yvonne's love nest is one broad, sharply defined triangle of thick flame-colored curls reaching halfway from slit to bellybutton and covering a gently swelling bulge, cleft at the bottom into two puffy cheeks soft as faerie pillows, forming a cursive flaming W at the confluence of her milky thighs.
The two girls shook their hair-Yvonne's long and red, Honey's short and blonde-and preened their fuzz for our inspection. Overhead the dragons glowered down in fierce depravity, rattling their silent scales in the flickering shadows, as the moon like a single bared breast showered us with a spray of ethereal milk. Those two vividly contrasting bodies on the ruined terrace seemed to polarize the night into its negative and positive poles: Honey with her great heavy pink-eyed breasts and her downward pointing arrowhead of white-gold on dark bronze was the very form and substance of the dread Night Huntress, stalking the wild satyr upon the subterranean plain of Tartarus; while Yvonne, like a baroque Minerva with her moon-white skin, her flaming bush and livid nipples, seemed somehow lighter than air, as if at any moment she would float away to rejoin her lover in the Olympian sky. I was enthralled with the sight; I made them hold their positions while I gorged my eyes and let my imagination run rampant. Gold on bronze, fire on snow-it was like some Persian vision, some obscure allegorical scene from Zoroastrian cosmology, the duality which drives the wheels of life and death-
It was at this moment that I heard the organ, and I suppose that's the reason that whenever I envision that nude scene at the Dragon Gate, and the one later in the altar room, I am immediately reminded (with a shudder!) of the following lines from one of Charles Williams' books on witchcraft: "The angels of the abyss say to them, 'Look, we will show you the things that are to happen,' and they fill the place with mighty phantasms."
"Did you hear that?" I whispered, raising my hand to silence the chatter.
"Hear what, big daddy?" said the lifeguard.
My wife said, "What is it, Drake?" walking over to where I sat.
"Maybe he hears the organ," said Honey with a giggle.
"That's exactly what I did hear-at least that's what it sounded like. Didn't you hear it?-what about you, Billy?"
"Hear what?"
"A sound like, oommm-very low."
"Gosh no!" The boy glanced around, peering into the dark. "Was it a ghost?"
"I think your daddy's got a mosquito in his ear, Bill. My ghost story musta gone to his head. Let's get on with the party, Drake."
"Yeah, sweety," cooed Honey, nuzzling in my ear and fondling my cock, "let's get on with the party-"
I was certain I had heard something. I gently but firmly rescued my genitals from Honey's eager fingers and stood up. "Honey, you beautiful big-titted nympho you," said I, kissing her on both nipples, "you and Red here keep the party going till I get back." I drilled a finger playfully into my wife's navel. "Just be sure you save some of that stuff for me."
"Where you goin', baby?" asked Yvonne. I told her I was just going to take a little walk up the hill, I'd be back in a few minutes. Billy wanted to come too. As we left the terrace and started up the eroded and overgrown path that once led up to the big house, I heard Rick say in an inspired voice, "Hey, I got it! Why don't you two make out till the professor gets back?" and when we topped the rise, Billy looked back and said, "Look, Daddy, Mommy and that lady are playin' sixty-nine." And so they were, with Rick scrambling around them on his hands and knees as if he were trying to get the view from all angles at once. "Now, Billy, if you want to go back and watch, you go ahead. But if you're going to stay with me, keep quiet-and keep your ears open."
We made our way northward across the rubble-strewn, tree-covered tabletop of the hill, stumbling frequently until our eyes adjusted to the moonlight. I was reasonably sure that it was from this direction that the sound had come-if there had been a sound at all. We followed a relatively clear corridor through the weather-beaten sand pines-it must have once been a ground floor hallway-until we came upon a grassy clearing falling away to the right. This extended all the way to the top of the east bluff, and from there we could look down on nearly the entire east shoreline of the island. Stone's Island is, I would say, about a thousand feet long, bearing north and south, and about four hundred feet across the south end, tapering to the north like a curved fang and ending in a sharp swampy point. The hill on which the old house had stood rose steeply from the north edge of the terrace of the dragons (to give it a name) and fell away just as abruptly near the island's waist. The east and west slopes of this flat-topped hump are veritable precipices, plunging straight to the narrow beach and held in place evidently by the network of sand pine and casurina roots. Standing on this ancient-looking bluff, it was rather hard to believe that it was not a natural hill, that it had been pumped and scooped from the lake bottom, heaped up and shaped by hand, but then there had been very little else that was "natural" about Stone's Island since it had got its name, as I was about to find out.
Lake Leethy itself is one of those wide places in the Intracoastal Waterway common to the southeast Florida coast, a lagoon separated from the Atlantic by a narrow strip of land on which much of the region's tourist trade is concentrated. There are two inlets cut through this barrier ridge, the Lake Leethy inlet near the south end of the lake and the Sago Beach inlet twenty miles to the north. Stone's Island lies more or less equidistant from the east and west shorelines and directly in line with the north inlet. From my position on the bluff-forty feet perhaps above the water-I had a beautiful view of the lake, the inlet and the ocean, the black waves edged in moonlight and the red eye of the bell buoy out beyond the jetties winking and bobbing on the rising tide. Suddenly a low unearthly sound cut through the distant clang of buoy. The organ again.
It was louder now-as though it were coming right out of the ground beneath my feet. At the same time a cold draft swept over me, a deathly chill, shivering me to the bone! Was I imagining it? Had the weird sound merely sent a chill up my spine? Or-
"Daddy, look!" Billy stood at the brink of the bluff, pointing down at the beach; his voice was a frightened whisper. "-It's a ghost!"
There at the water's edge a slim girl, as naked and pale as the moon itself, danced like a weightless phantom over the white sand...
It may well be that if I had not seen this "ghost" I would never have uncovered the secret of Stone's Island. Let me explain. No matter how I might deplore the fact, I am a child of the twentieth century, a product of the technological society, and therefore a born skeptic. But at the instant I recognized Billy's apparition I realized that up until then I had harbored a germ of irrational doubt that these phenomena-the hellish music, the cold draft, and (for a moment) the moon girl-were the result of natural causes. If it had not been for the girl, I have the rather shameful feeling that I would have crept away from Stone's Island and put the whole uncanny business out of my mind, purely because of this irrational fear.
The girl of course was not Simon Stone's daughter, but Honey's girl friend Marie, who was supposed to be asleep aboard the Argo. She had apparently revived somewhat and swum ashore. I suppose my reflexive logic ran something like this: "Well, since she's not supernatural, then neither are the other things," and at that moment I resolved to root out that damned noise and the shivers that went with it.
"That's no ghost, Billy," said I, "that's our friend Marie. Hello, down there!" My shout seemed to scare the hell out of her for a minute. Then she said, "Hey, whatcha doin' up there? Come on down!" She jumped up and down in the water and her small titties bobbed in the moonlight. I was tempted to accept her invitation-she was a very sexy little piece of ass-but at the moment I was more interested in proving my sanity. "I'd rather you came up here, love," I answered her. "Go get the others, will you? I want to show them something."-though I didn't know exactly what it was I was going to show them. She said she'd seen it before, and I said that wasn't it, and she said she didn't want to see it then-but finally she skipped off down the beach, her little bare butt glowing in the dark. "She's still drunk, Daddy," observed Billy, again quite accurately. As I watched her go, I lit my pipe and noticed that the wind had swung around to the northeast.
I turned around and studied the clearing we had crossed. It was pockmarked with holes, like bomb craters, all different sizes. Much of the hilltop was underlain with concrete or stone slabs-the remains of the mansion's foundation-and these pits were apparently where the slab had fallen into rain-eroded hollows beneath it. I stood on the spot where I had heard the sound and waited. Billy wandered about the clearing, peering into the holes.
When the others finally arrived, groping through the trees, I was still there. I had heard nothing. I let them piss and moan for a while about my interrupting their fun, imaginary noises, dementia, and what not; then, raising my hand with an air of undaunted confidence, spoke I. "Now if you will all please shut up for a moment or two, and stand perfectly still, you will hear Simon Stone playing his organ... "
And by God there it was, right on cue, just as if I had summoned it up-that cacophonous, nerve-tingling chord, which seemed to seep up out of the ground. Again I was enveloped in a foul, chilling breath, the icy flame of eternal death. It was as though we had stumbled upon the mouth of Ge, the earth mother, through which she sings her eerie songs of unrelenting vengeance and revolt against the heavens.
"Goddamn," said Rick, suddenly a believer, "I heard it."
"So did I," gasped Maria, "-and I thought I was straight!"
"You are," I said. "Now listen, did any of you feel anything? like a cold draft?" None of them had felt anything except a spinal chill and goosepimples.
"Then it's coming from somewhere over here."
"Say, man," Rick said with deadly seriousness, "let's get the fuck outa here."
"Shut up, kid, I'm thinking," I said, pulling at my beard. "At first I thought it was coming out of the ground right where I'm standing. But that time it seemed coming from-that direction generally." I pointed west. "Yet it can't have come all the way across the clearing because Yvonne didn't feel it. She was standing about thirty feet in front of me, on the other side of one of the sink holes. That means it must have either been generated out of nothing somewhere between us, or else it came up at an angle-out of that hole."
"But there's nothin' down there but sand, Drake."
"Are you sure?" I said. "What if there were a slanted flue of some kind drawing a draft from below-a corridor maybe, or a staircase. That would cause the air to flow up at an angle. Come on, Ricky me lad, let's dig."
And dig we did, though my enthusiasm was somewhat exceeded by the reluctance of our friend the lifeguard. Honey and Billy went down to the boat and came back with a flashlight and a couple of kerosene lanterns. The bottom of the pit was covered with loose rubble, through which conceivably my "cold chill" could have emerged, and I expected at any minute to break through into some sort of opening. But at the end of an hour or so of heaving stones we had found nothing but more stones. Though we had deepened the hole by only about four feet, we were exhausted, and Rick was becoming more and more persistent about abandoning the project. I was just about to relent-partly from fatigue and partly because the three beautiful women standing naked in the lamplight were beginning to deflect my interest in ghosts to things more substantial-when Billy fell through the bottom of the pit.
When Rick and I had climbed out for a rest, Billy had jumped in and started dancing around on the rubble. All of a sudden the bottom gave way like a coal chute and, with a yell, the boy, together with probably a hundred pounds of shattered concrete, disappeared through the end of the funnel.
In her surprise and panic, Yvonne nearly fell in on top of him. "Stand back!" I yelled. "Everybody get away from the edge, before the whole thing caves in. Rick, throw me that flashlight." I got as near to the edge as I dared and shined the light down into the darkness. I couldn't see anything, but then Billy started crying; by the sound of it he wasn't very far below the cave-in. "Billy, are you all right? Calm down, boy, and tell me if you're hurt." Finally he stopped crying and I got him to move his arms and legs, one at a time; apparently no bones were broken. We lowered the flashlight down to him on the end of a stick. "Now move back away from the hole, Billy m'lad, the old man's coming down!" I cut a pole from the thicket, shoved it down to the bottom, and lowered myself through the opening.
Billy was okay, just a little shook up. The floor of the well was covered with a thick, uneven layer of sand, but I could tell by the solid feel of it that there was concrete underneath. Standing upright I could just reach the crumbling lip of the hole, and in a few minutes I widened out the hole and cleared away most of the unstable rubble. The chamber had a room of heavy timbers and was entered evidently by a trapdoor, but the door and parts of the roof had nearly rotted away, so that only a thin shell had been supporting the burden of sand and rubble. The whole inside of the cubicle was blackened with soot and ashes. The west wall, just as I had suspected, opened onto a stairwell. It was dark and steep. I shined the light into it, but about twenty feet down it made a sharp bend to the left, so that I could see no further.
"We've got a staircase, everybody," I called up triumphantly, "come on down."
Rick said, "No shit?" but he hesitated for quite a few moments before climbing down the pole. Soon we were all in the chamber and, with lanterns held high, we started down the winding corridor. In places the wall, which had been shored up with timbers, had caved in, nearly filling the tunnel with sand. The concrete steps were covered with a layer of black soot. A tremendous fire had obviously raged through this passage with the fury of a blast furnace. The darkness was alive with the sound of scurrying rats, and we could see them scrambling into holes in the walls and fleeing down the stairs just ahead of our light. I believe that we all harbored a secret hope that we would not hear that demonic music again just yet; it was one thing to hear it in the open air under the familiar moon, and quite another to imagine it welling up in this dismal, evil-smelling grotto...
At last we reached the end of the stairwell, It seemed we had descended into the very gullet of the earth, but we could not have gone deeper than sea level or the whole place would have been flooded with ground water. All that was left of the door was a blackened frame, and through this we passed cautiously into a high-vaulted, tomb-like chamber of indefinite dimensions. It was ankle-deep in ashes and filled with heaps of burnt timbers. Here and there huge cones of sand loomed up where the roof had given way, but much of the shorings were of concrete and the portions of wall and ceiling that remained appeared fairly substantial. There were several round holes high up on the walls-ventilation ports, no doubt-and several doors, at least one of which opened onto another staircase, but most of these were badly blocked by charred debris and mounds of sand. For some time we pussyfooted about the room, conversing in whispers, for some reason. Billy clung tightly to his mother's hand, and big Rick kept closer to me than my own shadow. But our investigation turned up nothing new-the whole place was completely gutted by fire-until Honey and Marie found the skeleton.
They had come upon an unblocked doorway at the far end of the room-the south end-and passed through it to have a look. When I heard the scream I dashed through the dark opening, bold as you please, raising my stick, ready for anything. But I hadn't traversed half the distance from the door to the place where the two girls stood when my boldness underwent an instantaneous change to cold intestinal fear. In an icy rush that unholy song of living death flooded the hollow chambers and pierced every one of us to the bone.
It is perhaps because of this one moment-or rather, the impact of this moment upon me-that I have felt compelled to add my own voice to those of the former denizens and victims of Stone's Island. It is a personal reason, to be sure, but whether or not it is irrelevant only time can tell. It struck me, this scene, with all the force of an apocalyptic vision; it was as if these empty cells, untrodden by human feet for nearly four decades, had some hellish power to draw into themselves only those living forms from which they could construct images of their own horrid past, images which were prophetic because of their fateful and fatal ability to reproduce themselves, however obliquely, down through (and perhaps beyond) human history.
The skeleton lay stretched out on its back upon a raised slab of stone, an ornate but corroding dagger lodged upright in its breastbone. At either end of this massive bier the two naked girls trembled in the droning draft like satanic concubines. Honey's blonde arrowhead cunt and the black innocent-looking puff at the bottom of Maria's belly both bristled in the stale howling air as if electrified. They were like Hecate and the dread Lilith, the incubus and the succubus, attending at the infernal throne. And upon the concrete backdrop of this somehow obscene stage Rick's lantern behind us cast the distorted and grotesque shadows of myself, my wife and my child. The wavering image of my upheld stick had the appearance of some crooked scepter, some netherworldly baton conducting all by itself the echoing dirge of Simon Stone's organ.
The rest can be summed up in a few words before turning directly to Stone's diaries. The immobilizing spell of the moment was broken when the draft and the music-if it can be called that-died out. Obviously the legendary organ had not been up in the house as Rick had said, but down here in the hill; it didn't take long to find its remains half buried in the rubble and ashes behind the altar stone. The console and the wind chests and so forth had of course been consumed in the fire and most of the pipes had been crushed or scattered, but several pipes from what must have been the eight-foot stop (that set of pipes covering the range of the human voice) were still bracketed together and only bent or warped a little. These lay with their foot-holes directly in the open mouth of an air vent which must have emerged somewhere on the east slope of the hill near the beach. When the wind blew in some precise combination of direction and intensity, a circulation was set up between the vent and the stairwell we had descended, forming a "natural" bellows for the old pipes. The descent of the air through the damp earth was enough to cool it to a "chilling breath."
Somehow the discovery of the other skeletons didn't give us nearly the shock the first one had. The bones of the man on the altar were for the most part only charred and blackened; the others were less intact-of some only the teeth and parts of the skull survived the flames. Altogether we found the remains of no less than thirty-two per sons, some of them definitely children. Had no one ever wondered about the absence of teeth or bones in the ruins above?
In a small cell behind the organ I found the last skeleton. This room had escaped the fire but not the termites: the shell of a desk fell into dust at my touch and the other furniture had already collapsed. The skeleton reclined on the bare springs of a rusty iron bed against the wall; all about the skull wisps of long white hair hung from the scaling coils.
It was in this same room among the dust and splinters of the collapsed desk, that I found the small metal chest containing Stone's journals and several bundles of letters, many of them unposted. To me-a writer with an incorrigible obsession for unearthing the secrets of the past-this discovery was like finding buried treasure, and I spent the rest of the night aboard the Argo pouring over those cracked and yellowed pages. (That is, I spent most of the night doing that.)
On the lid of the box was an intricate bas-relief in black bronze inlaid with silver; it was a miniature copy of the Dragon Gate, exactly like the one on the terrace except for one thing: beneath the locked jaws of the dragons was an open scroll bearing the same inscription as another gate described by Dante:
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE
CHAPTER TWO
Simon Stone's Journal, 1915 Feb. 15-The work on the island is proceeding better now than at the beginning, though I am still having some difficulty with the workmen-careless malingerers, all of them!-have to watch them every step of the way. These Florida swamp rats are not used to such a large project, and the climate, too, is not conducive to hard work. Still, if I keep up the pressure, it will be done. How magnificent it looks already! It is impossible to make the hill as high as I had planned, but even as it is, from our temporary quarters on the west bank of the lake, it looks like a veritable mountain in contrast with the flat landscape and the other swampy islands. In my mind's eye I can see my future castle in the most intricate detail, perched high in this almost Mediterranean air, overlooking the squalid fishing village of Sago like a Spanish manor house. Indeed, among these rude "frontiersmen," a man with money like myself truly has the power of a feudal lord-or almost so. I can hardly wait until the upper structures are finished!-I have decided to wait until then to begin the underground work; no hand but mine and my Negroes' will have a part in it. What fun, after all, are secret chambers if they are not secret?
Last night, for the first time since the marriage, Amanda seemed really to get into the spirit of things. Naturally, she has always complied with my wishes-she even agrees that the sexual experience is more exciting when dramatized-but there has always been a touch of distasteful reticence about her actions, an excessively strict adherence to my instructions, none of those impassioned improvisations which seem to come so natural to some women. Still, I do not forget that those women were sluts and whores, fallen women, whereas Amanda is the very flower of youth and innocence-seventeen!-a child bride; how lucky I am to have her! I wonder was it by accident or by unconscious design that I have come into possession of such an unblemished bud of beauty. Have I imitated Poe without realizing it? Perhaps I should change her name to Anabelle-Ha ha! What inexplicable ecstasy to watch such a bud in the throes of bloom, opening almost insensibly to the moonlight of carnal lust-O exquisite unfolding flower of evil! Salut, Baudelaire, wherever you are!
Last night.-These rooms leave much to be desired for the purpose of our games, but I fitted the windows of the spare bedroom with black drapes and hung the Prometheus painting. I unpacked the purple silk coverlet which I bought in New Orleans and covered the bed with it. I was a little uneasy about bringing the chains up; in their place we used silk scarves-a stimulating innovation! It is an attic room with a few exposed studs across the rafters, and over one of these I threw a length of rope and had her hoist me up by the wrists to my tiptoes- wrists and ankles bound with the scarves. I wore nothing but a rag of cheesecloth about the loins, the stage thus set, she hurried off to prepare herself.
These preparations always take a long time- everything must be just right: her hair, her gown, her make-up and jewelry, even her skin tone is of the utmost importance!-but this time she was gone over two hours, the longest yet. No matter what roles we are assuming, what sort of scene we are acting out, this waiting period is always an integral part of the action. It must be spent in an uncomfortable position-the more severe the discomfort the livelier grow the workings of the imagination. I never know, nor do I wish to know, just when she will reappear; hence the ingredients- pain and suspense. Her long absence this time had me a-tingle to the breaking point-because I knew that she was giving herself over completely to the game, torturing me with the ecstasy of waiting, drawing it out, examining and re-retouching every tip and crevice of her tender body to make it cruel and agonizingly beautiful, an instrument of torture all of itself, letting the pressure build, the juices rise-when the moment of her entrance arrived, we were no longer Simon and Amanda Stone...
After Gaius Valerius had, in jealous spite, published a poem accusing Clodia of poisoning her husband, the former governor of Cisapine Gaul, so that she might without further complications continue sleeping with her brother, she had the love-mad poet taken in secret and imprisoned in her villa outside Rome. She had him bound and dangling by his wrists in her apartment for several hours, alone, before she presented herself to him.
She wore a red gown of the sheerest fabric, bound beneath her breasts with black cords and falling loosely to her sandaled feet. Her long black hair cascaded about her bare shoulders and fell in ringlets over her forehead; against the white skin of her flat belly and slim thighs the egg-shaped patch of maidenhair gleamed like a black medallion through the scarlet mist of her gown. From her ear-lobes hung great sunbursts of gold and jet, and between her small swelling breasts a flashing ruby swung on a golden chain. But the two rubies of flesh at the tips of her breasts far surpassed the beauty of the stone. In one hand she carried a leather scourge.
"Well, Gaius, you've finally succeeded in getting into my bedroom, haven't you? Are you comfortable?-can I get something for you?"
"No,"-Gaius fought to keep from wincing-" I require nothing, Clodia. Just to be here, my love, where you have slept-what more could I ask?"
She laughed cruelly. "But I do not sleep here alone, Gaius. I have many lovers to warm my bed, as your poems have told all Rome."
"All Rome knew it anyway."
"Perhaps. Anyway, you can thank my brother for your good fortune. The poor fool only wants to be your slave, he said to me, why not grant him his wish? So I have. You can be my personal slave and hang there at the foot of my bed every night while I entertain my lovers. If you are good, I will beat you from time to time."
"I ask no more," said Gaius with a pained smirk. "Unless it be that you should become a vulture and visit me once a day to feast on my liver."
"Ha, ha! Perhaps I will do that too, my sweet Prometheus." She stepped closer to him and brushed his taut stomach with the hard knobs of her veiled nipples, drawing a jeweled dagger from her girdle. "But you know, Gaius, if you are to be my bedroom slave, you will have to let me keep these for you." She drew his loin cloth aside and tickled his testicles with the point of the dagger.
"Of course," he answered-but he trembled inwardly with the thought that she might actually do it!
How brave he is, she thought. "It is only an act of kindness-it will save you from much torment in watching me entertain in my bed."
"Yes, I quite agree. Perhaps you could make a necklace of them and wear them between your lovely breasts."
"Oh, no, that would look silly! I will put them in a small box on my dressing table-and I'll leave the lid open all the time, in case you should forget."
"My body as well as my heart is yours; do with it as you please."
With the point of the knife she traced a line around the base of his scrotum. But the penis valiantly retained, its erection. How big and beautiful it is! she thought, And how fearless! She jabbed gently at the pulsing blue veins and the stiff member jerked and recoiled-but did not wilt. She moved the razor sharp blade beneath the cloth until he felt its edge along the root of his genitals, point up. "It will only hurt for a second. Are you ready?"
"Yes."
When she made the quick savage upward thrust with the dagger, Gaius could not restrain a cry of terror. It was just what she had wanted, to expose his fear, destroy his will. Now her laughter broke down the dam the knife had pierced, the dam of his romantic will, and he whimpered like a child. Nothing but the cheesecloth rag had fallen to the floor, but he felt as though his testicles, his maleness, had fallen too. Now it was time for the lash-before he could regain his composure. With every blow he cried out in unashamed pain, tears streaming from his eyes. When his back and buttocks were well striped, she hung the scourge over her shoulder and stood before him, smiling in triumph. She had broken him.
Through burning tears he saw the blur of her body undulating before him like a lascivious snake, saw the red cloth fall from the ruby-nippled whiteness of her exquisite moons-from one and then the other-struggled to focus upon the delectable form, the revealed flesh-
"Are these what you came all the way from Verona to see, poor Gaius?"-cupping her naked breasts in her palms. He could only whimper in reply, like a beaten cur. "-Or was it this?" She drew back the folds of her gown and showed him the black perfumed ringlets between her legs. Letting the gossamer curtains close, she approached him again and let her bared bosom touch his hot trembling body, looking up with quickening breath into his contorted face. She slipped a hand inside her gown, ran a finger along the oozing inner lips of her vagina and raised the finger to his nose. With an animal whine he seized on it with his teeth, sucking off the pungent honey. His cock jerked urgently against her belly, spotting her gown with its leakage. I would like to suck it, she thought, but then he would see my need and weakness. Let him crawl for it! "Would you like to make love to me, Gaius?" A passionate grunt escaped his lips and his pelvis began to thrust in spasmodic jerks like a dog in rut, but the only hole his prick found was her navel. Laughing, almost breathlessly now, she stepped back, ungirding her gown, and sat down on the edge of the silk-covered bed to remove her sandals. It took a great deal of effort, but she did it slowly-as an added torture. Then she unpinned the top of the gown and spread herself out in the center of the bed. The red folds fell away as she stretched her limbs and the unblemished whiteness of her naked body against the violet silk dazzled and stung his eyes almost to the point of blindness. Between her spread thighs the downy lips opened and he saw the livid pink beauty of her inner flesh. She taunted him thus until he was on the verge of a spontaneous ejaculation, from pure visual stimulation.
Then she raised the dagger to the rope secured above the bedstead and slowly sawed it through. Gaius fell heavily to the floor and for some time lay crumpled in a heap, unable to move.
"I'm waiting, Gaius. Do you want me or not? I can't keep my brother and his friends waiting all night, you know."
With pure sexual energy Gaius Valerius, his wrists and ankles still bound, slithered across the floor like a snake toward the bed. He drew himself up and peered over the edge straight into her gleaming slit. His arms and hands had no feeling in them and were all but useless to him, but at last he succeeded in climbing onto the bed and plunging his face between her thighs. Though his teeth hurt her, she thrust her pelvis hard against his mouth and his tongue reached deep into her drooling warm cunt. He sucked mightily, drawing the thick elixir from every pore and fold of her silk-lined fountain. It was a balmy brew and it brought the blood back to his limbs and strength to his muscles. Summoning all his energy, he brought one knee up hard and freed his ankles from the bonds. Before she could struggle he sprang up and sat heavily on her chest, pinning her arms with his knees and slapping her several times hard across the face with his hands. When she lay still and whimpering beneath him, he got the dagger from the bedstead and in a moment cut the cords from his wrists.
"And now, sweet Clodia, your slave Gaius is going to fuck you as even you, whose cunt is public property, have never been fucked before."
And so he did. After bringing her savagely through four separate climaxes, he lifted her quivering buttocks and drove his rock-hard cock brutally into her asshole, while with his thumbs he manipulated her tiny stiff clitoris, his fingers wriggling deep into her flooding well. As his torrent of come gushed into her rectum, she went into a bone-wracking chain of orgasms which left her body limp and lifeless and her brain full of black flashes...
-What fun we will have when the dungeons are finished!
CHAPTER THREE
New London, Conn.
Nov. 24,1925 Dear Manda, Just received your disturbing letter. I can only think that you must be mistaken about Simon!- he seemed like such a nice and proper gentleman when he was here, and so well educated. Even in ten years how could he have changed so? You know, Manda, that I was just as much against your marriage as Mama and Papa were-you were so young!-but it's done now and a thing of the past. You should try to make it work, even if only to prove us wrong-and you have your daughter to think of. Oh, I just can't believe your fears for little Eleanor are justified-I won't believe such a thing! I don't even dare show your letter to Charles. Honey, if I thought there was a shred of truth to your story, believe me, I would have the man committed myself. But you've always had such a wild imagination-I don't want you to think I don't trust you, I only want to ease your mind. I couldn't possibly interfere as you suggest. Charles and I have had our problems too, and no one would have helped us work them out-we had to do it ourselves. I know you and Simon will find a way. For Eleanor's sake.
Maybe a change of scene would help. Why don't you all come up and visit us for a couple of weeks? After all, you haven't been home in ten years. We would love to see you, especially Eleanor. I'll bet she's a living doll! It might be just the thing to set everything straight, Manda. Do speak to Simon about the trip and let me know what you decide.
Love Always,
Pat West Sago Beach, Fla.
Dec. 1,1925 Dear Pat, For Eleanor's sake, you said! Oh, Pat, that's why I wrote you, why I asked for your help. If I must beg for it, I will. Do you think I would beg for myself? Have I ever? I have had ample reason long before now, and maybe I should have-maybe if I had this would not be happening now. But I didn't. I loved Simon in the beginning and went along with his deviations to please him-I even enjoyed them myself sometimes-and later, when it got worse (almost intolerable for me sometimes!) still I did not complain, because he was my husband and I wanted our marriage to work-maybe, like you said, just to prove you and Papa wrong. But now it is no longer a matter of pride-I am pleading for my daughter's safety! I am twenty-seven years old, Pat, you simply must stop scolding me as though I were still your baby sister and try to understand the seriousness of this.
In fact, my age is one of the main problems. I'm getting too old for Simon-he likes young women, girls. That's why he wants to bring Eleanor into his "games." The more I oppose him in this the more sullen and irritable he becomes. I am ashamed to go into the details of these games of ours-what I have already told you should be enough: he wants to have sex with his daughter. Would I tell you this (you, of all people!) if I were not desperate?
At first I tried to persuade him to go to Jacksonville or Miami and bring back as many girls as he wants-It may shock you, but there are such creatures for hire, at all ages. But he won't do this. He never leaves the island any more. There is a kind of fear in him, growing stronger year by year, day by day-a fear of people, of the outside world. The island is our world. You probably won't believe this either, but I have not set foot on dry land in over four years. I say it that way because this island does not seem like land to me any more-it's more like some kind of horrible sinking ship. Have you ever seen that painting, "The Ship of Fools?"-Simon has a print of it in our bedroom! That's just what this island is to me, a ship of fools.
This is perhaps the last distress signal I will be able to send you. I had to bribe one of the Negroes to deliver your letter directly to me when it arrived -if Simon knew of this correspondence he would put a stop to it. I'm afraid he is suspicious already. He won't let anyone off the island, as I started to say, except for a few of the older Negroes-they bring the mail and supplies from town. Two years ago he took Eleanor out of the private school in Sago Beach and hired a tutor for her. Tutor!-an old man on his last legs, one of the few people Simon ever befriended here. I am almost as afraid of him as I am of Simon, one is as mad as the other. Poor Eleanor! We are prisoners here, Pat, that's the only word for it. There isn't a one of the Negroes I can trust, not even the old mail carrier. (I only hope this letter reaches you.) They are all in Simon's power. I hate them and pity them at the same time. He has made zombies out of them, puppets. They think only of how he rewards them, never how he mistreats them. They practically lick his feet for a tidbit, they perform for him like dogs. These ignorant creatures are my sole companions. I am alienated from every living person on earth except for Eleanor and you-and now he threatens to take her from me, and you scold me for my wild imagination. Oh, if you only had an inkling of Simon's imagination! He hired (or bought) the Negroes in New Orleans-ten men, six young women and four boys (some have died since then, ten years ago, and some have been born) and as soon as we were settled in our house he renamed them all-in a christening ceremony I cannot describe to you. He gave them such devilish names as Belial, Moloc, Mammon, Gorgon, Charon-oh, it was all a joke at first, to add to the atmosphere of our "castle," Simon said. But now-not always, but sometimes- he seems to really believe they are demons or something, his "allies of Hell," he calls them. There is one huge young man-Beelzebub, Simon named him-Once Simon told me in all seriousness that he believed Bub was "actually an incarnation of Satan." Even knowing Simon as I do (I mean, knowing that he is harmless), all this is becoming very frightening to me-especially now that I know he wants to implicate Eleanor.
I hope I have said enough this time to convince you. The visit you suggested is of course out of the question-and escape would be futile and dangerous to Eleanor, I've tried it before. All I ask is that you come here and see for yourselves, you and Charles. Then if you still think I am childish or crazy, you may leave and I will never bother you again. Please, Pat, come as soon as you can, before it's too late.
Your loving sister, Manda*
[*This letter was never posted. D. H.]
New London Dec. 21,1925 Dear Simon and Manda,
I can't tell you how delighted I am to know you two lovebirds are happy again! I knew all the misunderstandings would straighten themselves out, they always do. Ah, it almost makes me wish Charles and I were still young enough to have lovers' quarrels-ha ha!
Well, this is just a note to thank you for writing, Simon-your wife did have me a little worried- but don't be embarrassed, I understand completely. (Sorry about your hand, Manda-try soaking it in green tea, the best thing for a burn.) When you get this, Charles and I will be on the boat for Europe. A bad time of year, I suppose, but Charles has to go to Paris on business, so we thought we'd have a little vacation in Greece afterwards. Now that I know you two are all right, I can really enjoy myself. Well, I have to run now. We'll send you a card from Paris.
Love always,
Pat
CHAPTER FOUR
Stone's Journal, 1927 New Year's Day-At last Amanda has ceased opposing me. How perfect she is now!-how gentle and permissive, how wanton! With utter calm she invites all the world to enter her body through the yawning gates between her legs. And my stupid blackamoors-! I spat on them-had to beat five of the black bastards. Try as I might, the Devils would not enter them. If only I could discover the exact formula! When the Devils are absent from them, they are nothing but thick-headed niggers. Ah, but when They come!-Orcus and Demogorgon and Charon and the others-then they attend my every want as if I were the Master himself, and my dungeons are transformed into a temple of Hell. So much have I accomplished, with the help of Him, in the short space of ten years.
But last night it was as if all my training and teaching had been for nothing. She lay so beautiful and naked on the altar-her teats were firm again, as in her youth, all the flab and heaviness gone from her hips and thighs, her hair for once unkempt, flowing in wild wet strings about her face, her cheeks smooth and gleaming, white as porcelain. Even her nipples had lost their distasteful brown color and become tight and pale; a touch of rouge and they jutted forth in all their original youth, rosy islands of sin! I commanded them: "Come on, you black dogs! This is my wife, joined to me by the sacraments of God; I give her to you. Fuck her in the name of Satan. Baptize her with your black sperm, cleanse her of the last waters of the tyranny of Heaven! Here is her white ass on a black pillow, she beckons you, sink your black cocks into that crimson cunt. You, Gorgon, mount!"
But all I could get from them was, "No suh, mista Stone, no suh." They knew I would beat them, they asked me to beat them-anything but that, they said. I beat them, all right, and I made them beat each other, but still they would not obey. A prize like that, and they refuse! The fear I have tried to purge from their ignorant skulls came rushing back as if I had taught them nothing. All but Bub.
Ah, Bub!-what plans I have for him! He alone has the power to take into his body the spirit of the Master. He was but a child when I got him, a blank slate on which I have written the words of Hell- his black brain knows only the black truths I have put into it. By a lucky chance, due to his mother's death at childbirth, he had not yet been baptized when I purchased him. He is the perfect crucible for the inhabitation of our Infernal Lord. He did not back away!-not Bub. He is now twenty years old and lusty as a he-goat. With a laugh and a sneer at his elders, he mounted the altar. His huge jet-black form hunched over the lithe pale female flesh, dwarfing her fragile form, drooling in the dark beard between her spread thighs. "Lap it up, Bub," I cried, "it's the Devil's own brew, my lad!-and he sank his thick beautiful tongue into her gaping abyss...
While the others cringed in their chains at the sight of this ultimate adultery, Bub gripped my wife's white hips and drove all thirteen inches of his iron-black poker into her hungry body. As he panted over her, I got an idea. I ordered a large mirror brought to the head of the altar, and climbed up astraddle Amanda's lovely face, my back to Bub. I had the mirror held high and at such an angle that I could watch Bub at work behind me, and slipped my cock into Amanda's pale smiling lips. Ah, the cool breath that flowed from her!-the closeness of her throat which opened without revulsion and accepted my sounding length! Oh, my little Lesbia, my lascivious Lilith, how perfect you are!
All the while old Minos played the organ, improvising a hellish fugue in counterpoint to our grunts and cries, and Amanda's wild, joyful shrieks filled my throbbing head. (Even now I can hear those lewd siren strains!) At the peak of an inspired crescendo, Bub discharged his copious load through his long cock and into her juicy rut, and her limber legs fluttered over his head like white streamers in the torchlight. I followed his lead, pumping my juice straight down her laughing throat. But even these molten injections could not warm her serpent's blood.
Later, near dawn, I took her into my cell, alone, and fucked her time after time on the iron cot which she hated so before. It was her most perfect performance-better even than those times before our marriage, in the days of her youth. And she is as happy now as she was then, all her grotesque reticence gone forever; she is the cool, pristine flower of her warm and unstable girlhood, so fleeting and corruptible. She is here on the cot beside me as I write, sleeping now, the picture of calm and eternal youth. The very sight of her brazen nudity is stirring my loins-that black woolly hole in her crotch (I must trim and shave the hair a little to restore it), those smooth hips and still unsagging teats-I must break off and have her again!
Night-Amanda and I were interrupted in our pleasure this morning by the stupid constables. There was nothing to do but go up and receive them. They asked the same idiotic questions they asked before-over and over again!-and then had the audacity to ask me to come with them, "to headquarters," as they put it. How pompous and self-inflated they are, these public servants! Nothing I could say about my ill health, my duties, or their own rude impropriety would dissuade the idiots from their purpose-until I flapped a bill or two within reach of their greedy hooks. Ha! How quickly their righteous integrity deflates at the sight of a few crumbs! I doubt they'll bother me anymore.
Amanda rests quietly, as before. In spite of the troublesome intrusion today, now as I look at my new bride (for so she seems to me) a great calm and security comes over me. Her scolding tongue has softened to me, her glance is no longer one of chastisement, but of love and desire-and peace. The bite is gone from the air. When my limb of love enters that cool vestibule to her inflamed womb (O delicious chill!), my soul seems to pass out of this troublesome time and into an age before even the fires of Hell were kindled, an age before our long suffering Lord was cast from Heaven, before the seeds of good and evil began their long travail. Why this endless revolt? this eternal struggle, these wars of the torch and the book? this shrinking from the light? Do I long for the warm oblivion of that ghastly woman's-gut from whence I whelped like a smoking turd? or for a time before that, a time before the first vile wiggler polluted the empty seas, before the planets spun, the moon shone, the sun burned, before the stars violated the uncreated void, when the universe was an empty egg without a shell? Am I beast or angel who seeks this ancient stillness? Ah, but my pen runs away with me, and I have promises to keep.
Tonight I will know the pleasures of both worlds.
Now at last, with Amanda's consent and blessing, I will penetrate that most precious of secret flesh, the bittersweet fruit of our lust. Show me the way, brave Lucifer, lord of the dark wing; show me the exact recipe for the living pentagram, unlock to me the invulnerable reservoirs of Power! I am your loving servant, your companion-in-arms against the Sons of Light, faithful in all things to our Pact of blood. Truly a new year is upon us.
MOTHER, DAUGHTER DROWNED IN INLET*
[*Excerpt from a story in the Sago Beach Sun-Times, dated January 1, 1927, same as the above entry in the journal. I have placed the article after the entry instead of before it, in the hope of conveying a little of the shock which I myself received when I read it for the first time; I found it in the Lake Leethy Memorial Library only after I had read the bulk of the journals and letters in the metal box. The journals themselves are completely devoid of any description or allusion to that cold night in the inlet (the paper reported a low of 45 degrees); apparently there were some things which even Stone did not care to set to writing. D.H.]
Mrs. Amanda Stone, 27, and her daughter Eleanor, 11, wife and daughter of local million-aire recluse Simon A. Stone, died last night when their 14-foot boat overturned in the Sago Beach inlet. Mrs. Stone's body was recovered by her husband, also in the boat, but the body of the daughter has not been found, Police Chief Marlin Kendrew said. Chief Kendrew said dragging of the inlet will begin today, but, he said, "It isn't likely we will find it because the tide was going out."
... Stone said they were fishing when a large wave capsized their boat.
He was able to reach his wife, he said, before her body sank, but could not revive her. No autopsy report was mentioned.
Stone said he lost sight of his daughter in the dark after the wave struck. As they were some distance from shore in about forty feet of water, authorities
said, she is believed dead.
After a brief investigation last night, the body of Mrs. Stone was released to her husband for a private burial on the grounds of his estate on
Stone's Island in the north end of Lake Leethy near the scene of the accident...
CHAPTER FIVE
Stone's Journal, 1928*
[*In September of that year the worst recorded hurricane ever to strike this part of Florida caught the populace unaware and left a broad swath of death and wreckage all the way from the coast to Lake Okeechobee and beyond. Coming as it did on the heels of the 1926 Florida Depression, it was doubly disastrous to the area. D.H.]
Sept. 16-Ah!-safe again at my desk. Ha ha! How weak and stupid I was to doubt Him-and myself. God's blood! The whole hill is shaking. I hear the aid house rattling its bones up there, but what of it?-let it collapse, let the ground seal over us! I spit on the upper world, I spend the last breath of my servitude on a great green glob in the faces of those harassing hypocrites. Now I will be free. The great Fiend has sent a liberating host to me on the tempest. I have seen them with my own eyes, entering, impregnating, activating my black-bored witches, young and old alike! Now with what dark hordes will I plague your huts, you pious dolts- what evils will I unleash in your streets; Like Gulliver, I piss upon your "palaces" and shit in your churches!
This wind is surely a black herald from Hell, pregnant with pestilence. Such fury! Maybe it will wipe out the town, leave it as it was when I came here to find peace, to escape from the very mobs which have followed me! Truly there is no place on the face of the earth free from this rabble, this crud and scum of middle-class dungheads. They suck dry the swamps and level the mountains, no place however dim and remote is safe from their poisonous meddling. Perhaps this wind comes as a purge from the Black One, a blast of defiance to reassert His power in the world, and to insulate me, his disciple, from the encroaching hoards of usurpers (except for those I desire). Ha! how they must be cringing now in the teeth of the blow-that shredded sky'll turn their blood to water or I don't know them!-while ours grows thicker and blacker! Fuel for our fires, that's what it is. This furious draft makes our torches blaze up as never before, and the soul-fire of Mammon glows with rejuvenation all through the chambers under the hill.
How the niggers loved it! Something about the smell in the air corning through the vents this morning made me go up to the house. The lake and sea were all afroth, and the spray and sand were blowing all the way up the east slope and striking the Dragon Gate like shotgun blasts. Yet the sun shone through a sky of ragged cloud and salt-mist. The weather so refreshed and thrilled me, that I decided to give the blacks the day off. I gave them free run of the terrace, and they immediately set about a great feast, singing and dancing, as heedless as I of the growing storm.
Toward evening I descended from the house to the beach and stood for a long while at the south point of the cove. The sky had darkened and descended until it seemed to lay flat on the earth, whipping land and sea into a hissing turmoil. But still it did not rain, and the fires on the terrace and the hillside blazed higher than ever; the blacks danced and sang over the howl of the wind, their passions seemed to grow with the gale; the blacker the sky the hotter grew their blood. But this I only heard in progress behind me at the top of the stairs; my eyes were turned seaward, watching the great toothy rollers steaming into the jaws of the inlet. The lake seemed like a giant beast sucking in the fury of the storm from the east and farting it out over the towns and fields to the west. And me and my island in the middle, in the viscera, a demonic liver transforming the phlegmatic sea water into a spreading discharge of black bile. Huge riddled columns of cloud grew up on each side of the inlet and became dragons, snapping at each other over the raging water, and scanning the surface below for sign of boat or ship to devour. I fell on my knees and thanked Satan aloud for sending me this vision and asked for a key to its meaning. But nothing came but a blast of spray which soaked me to the skin. In the time I had stood there the water had advanced toward me some thirty feet and now lapped my boots and ate away at the sand, scooping great scallops from the shoreline. Suddenly I was aware of a presence behind me, though I had heard nothing. Turning, I saw the Black Man himself, Beelzebub, looming against the glowering sky, his eyeballs aglow like coals.
"Come on, Mister Stone," he said in the voice of my man Bub, "You gonna wash away down here." I told him to lead on, and we climbed the stairs from the cove. At the top the two stone dragons were copulating furiously; one was fucking the other in the rectum, flame shooting from his scaly cock. I trembled and held back, but my companion urged me on. I protested; doubts and fears began to assail my soul. "Come on now, Mister Stone, come on up, they ain't gonna hurt us." I followed him close, and the dragons reassumed their positions over the gate.
On the terrace, the blacks, finished with their feasts and drunk with the wine I had given them from the cellar, had fallen into wild revelry, dancing half-naked around the fire or pairing off to fuck. Fat old Baubo cackled like a hen as she rode on the back of a young buck who kept changing from a man to a pig and back again. She gyrated her hips, rubbing her cunt frantically on the ridged back of her mount, trying to get an orgasm from it and shaking her huge dark jugs in the firelight.
In the skulls of those who were already possessed I could see a demonic glow, making their eyes burn brightly. The others lay with open mouths and legs, waiting to be ravished by the spirits now rapidly filling the air. In they came from the inlet, from the north and east, born on the black gusts. One came hurtling through the sky in the form of a scrap of canvas, bursting into human form only when it fell savagely upon the spread-eagle form of Hecate, one of my younger witches. She shrieked as he ripped her clothes from her body and sucked the fiery milk from her teats; then he milked them with his clawed hands, and two fountains of incandescent milk arched up into the air and blew away in sparks and blazing droplets. Orcus stepped up and opened his great maw in the stream of fluttering milk; when it struck his throat it hissed and turned to steam. His throat burst into flames and he fell on his back, shrieking with laughter. The demon rose from Hecate's prostrate body and, standing over Orcus, pissed a raging stream into his mouth to put out the fire. Smoke rolled from his throat and the pungent smell of hot urine spread over the terrace. The demon lifted Hecate up by the hips, upside down, and dipped his long pointed tongue into her smoking asshole. A fart filled his cheeks and he blew it into the fire where it ignited and became a whirling fireball, tumbling off over the hill. This sent old Baubo (for she is Hecate's mother) into such spasms of laughter that she pissed all over the back of her steed, the pig-boy, who almost broke his neck trying to lick it off his shoulders. The demon saw this and, pointing one of his young hostess' teats toward the boy, squirted a stream of igneous milk full in his face. Hecate was now so inflamed by the spirit's manipulation of her body that her every breath ignited when it struck the tempestuous air, and sparks shot from her nipples, her navel and her cunt. Her devil-lover placed her on the flagstones by the fire and stood over her; gripping his great scabrous phallus in both hands, he pissed on her face and body at each point of ignition until she was well-soaked and steaming. Then he lay down upon her with his face in her crotch and his great shaggy balls dangling in her eyes, and entered her bristling hole, tongue first. In a smooth, rolling curve he flowed into her body: when his head disappeared, her cunt-lips tight about his neck, her eyes began to glow-dim and red at first; then his shoulders collapsed and slipped in-his waist, his hips, thighs. With every inch her eyes grew brighter, until with a snake-like wiggle his ankles and long-toed feet slithered in through her quaking slit, and her pupils became pinpoints of white light in penumbras of blazing brimstone.
This possession by ravage was going on all about us, as my chuckling guide led me across the terrace. In our path lay a naked black girl-Diana, just a baby when I brought her here, now swollen into puberty with fattened hips and new-sprouted teats, their nipples jet-black and jutting stiff from the firm cones of brown flesh. She lay spraddle-legged, love-hole foremost; artesian streams of thin milk flowed straight up from her little chocolate udders and were blown off in yellow mist, while steaming globs shot glowing from the scant-wooled mouth between her thighs and fell with wet smacks onto the flagstones. She looked up at me and her white teeth flashed like lightning. "Doncha want some o' this, Mistuh Stone?" she asked. I fell down and sank my face in that spouting crack, and the hot globs jetted down my throat as though shot from a cannon! I let them splatter against my face and run down my cheeks. Hellfire was in those gelatinous projectiles! They charged my blood with the balm of Dis!
Bub urged me away, on up the hill. "These niggahs gonna all blow away directly, Mister Stone, les you and me get on up to the house." Thus He spoke, but there was more in his speech than the words alone revealed. He seemed to want to hurry me away from this carnal scene. Why? Again doubt poisoned my blood, my faith faltered; at that moment, in the midst of the howling, hissing air, my whole life seemed to hang in the balance: the words of Kierkegaard (which I thought I had long forgotten!) came back to me in a heavy rush-"Either this, or that." What was this madness? Had I not long ago made my choice? Made all the choices? Was my course not set? Had I not most decisively turned my back on the church of my father? Had I not vowed vengeance and sealed my oath in a covenant of blood? Yet here again was the old choice-a last hurdle, perhaps?-Thrown across my dark path by this tempest-but by whom? God or Satan? And what form was it to take, this last temptation?
One side of the hill up which we climbed was fast being eroded away by the wind; the sod was gone and the black roots of the trees protruded from the naked sand, writhing like snakes, gelatinous antennae of giant insects. Snares of the mind, these hissing serpents funneled my gaze to a particularly deep wind-gouged hollow in the face of the stripped bluff. Something was there, a figure, only a little lighter shade of blackness than that which surrounded it. I gripped my black Virgil by the arm and pointed to the spot. "Look there, what is that? Let's go look."
"That ain't nothing. Mister Stone. Them roots'll keep the sand up. We can shovel it back up when the weather clears up."
"I know you don't want me to see it," I said, shocked at my own blasphemy, "but I have to. You know me, you know I must see all. Otherwise I am nothing to you, a worthless idiot, like the others. If I am to lead and do your work properly, then I must not be shielded from temptation, but lead straight into it. Test me!" I don't remember his words to this, but at least in this matter I felt he was powerless to resist me. I approached the gaping hollow. It was a black maw, a mouth of rotten teeth, surrounded by those writhing tentacles, a poisonous flower drawing my gaze into its trap by undulations of its cilia. Only for a moment did the vision clarify itself to my eyes, but that moment was enough to petrify my very bones.
(Ha ha! the day Stone turned to stone! I can laugh at it now. It was only a trick, for the "vision" now lies beside my desk, smiling peacefully, whole and beautiful as ever, and ready for love.)
There she lay in that treacherous cave, Amanda, my bride, on a bed of filthy rags. The stench of death and decay welled out of the cavity in a nauseous wave, yet I stood my ground. Her eyes were gone and her teeth hung loose in their bony sockets; scraps of rotted flesh hung on her skull and fluttered from her bones-Augh! I cannot describe it!
When I opened my eyes again, it was gone, and Bub was leading me forcefully up the hill, chuckling to himself. Now horror mixed in my soul with jubilation: I had seen, and I had not succumbed. I had not groveled, I had made no sign of the cross; I had at last passed through the gates. Now all things would come to my fingers, and no door would be locked against me. And so it will be-even if the bloody house falls to splinters and blows away. Of what concern is it to me?
Yet, as I say, with this thrill of new power was mixed the taste of horror, and I confess I was anxious and not a little afraid of what I would find in my cell. Who knows what a night like this might bring? My head spun with apprehension and revulsion and it seemed Bub and I were mounted on huge black horses, surging up the hill like the wind -yet making no more speed than a snail; it was all potential, bottled-up fury, and I fought involuntarily to hold it back, restrain what minute headway it could generate, lest it draw me headlong into my cell before I could prepare myself. Down the dark stairs crashed the ponderous horses, fire from their nostrils lighting the way, and I walked those last fearful steps to the door of my cell-and opened it.
Now nothing, no one, will assail our walls. We are safe, my love, my two loves-and all my sweet black witches!-and we are ready to act. Thanks to this great storm we begin anew; that which weakens them fortifies us, and we will not lag in our advance. No more holding back! Our grottos cry out for fresh young blood, smooth white skin-Let this howling wind broadcast our overtures throughout the town-whatever's left of it.
Enough for tonight, Amanda grows impatient.
* * *
PART TWO - THE DAUGHTERS OF GE
CHAPTER SIX
The reader will appreciate that for the purposes of this volume I can only lift excerpts here and there from the journals and letters, hopefully sufficient to tell the tale. And since I am trying to arrange these papers and interviews in such a way that the story will roll off more or less chronologically, I now ask you for the time being to climb with me out of the little metal box and accompany me on a visit to a certain whorehouse of good standing in the city of Rodriguez, some fifty miles south of Sago Beach.
Much of the tale would have gone untold-at least some of its more colorful aspects-if it hadn't been for the lucky chance of having Honey Jones with me that first night on the island. Without her I would never have struck the trail of Molly Goldsmith, according to the old newspapers the only survivor of the Stone's Island fire. (I have a feeling this is not completely true, that a few of the others, at least one of the Negroes, may also have gotten out alive, but this is purely a personal opinion.) We were all in the cabin of the Argo-day was just beginning to dawn-poring over the contents of the box. That is, my wife and I and Honey were poring over the contents; Rick and Billy were fast asleep. Honey had come upon some ledger sheets listing donations and expenses for the Verlain Home for Girls, evidently the "girl's school" Rick had mentioned earlier. It was apparently a formal report to Stone of the school's financial standing. On one of the sheets was a list of girls' names, fourteen of them.
"Hey, look," she said, "Molly Goldsmith, it says here. I used to know a Molly Goldsmith. She runs a cat house in Rodriguez." At first I dismissed the idea; it's a common name after all. But the thought that I might be able to get a firsthand account of Stone's activities was tantalizing. Later I asked Honey how old her Molly Goldsmith was. "Well it was a couple of years ago when I worked for her-I don't know, she looked around fifty, I guess. Kind of a weird old lady, but she treated her girls well. I just got sick of working in a house, that's all."
"Does it give the girl's ages on that sheet?" I asked.
"Yeah, it gives their ages for 1929. They were all between nine and sixteen. Let's see... Molly was thirteen." That would make fifty about right; maybe we were onto something after all. I asked if Molly had ever lived in Sago Beach. Honey didn't know, but she told me a very interesting thing: "She had her name changed. I don't know when, some time before I met her. She goes by the name Holden, but I knew it was really Goldsmith because a couple of times people came to the hotel and asked for Miss Goldsmith, and Molly would come out and fix 'em up. Maybe they were from Sago Beach, I don't know. Then one time a letter came for Molly Goldsmith and she took it." Honey didn't know where the letter was from either. It was all beginning to sound very suspicious, and that afternoon when I dug out the old newspapers at the library and found Molly Goldsmith listed as the only survivor of the 1932 fire, I was convinced. The next day I left Yvonne at the cottage with Billy and her lifeguard (so called), and Honey and I took off in her car for Rodriguez.
The Hotel Mandalay was wedged loosely into a row of somewhat newer buildings-some commercial, some residential-on a street bordering the ghetto. Its architecture was of the stucco-and-tile imitation-Spanish type popularized by Mizner and his disciples during the Florida Boom. (It was an early devotee of Mizner, by the way, who designed Stone's Mansion, according to the journals.) The neglected exterior was contrasted by a plush, baroque atmosphere inside-everything in meticulous, dust-free order, like a museum of antiques. Miss Molly greeted Honey with a warm kiss and after sending for a pot of tea led us into a small parlor off the lobby.
Molly Holden (or Goldsmith) made an immediate and strong impression on me. If she was truly our Miss "M" of the journals, she would be fifty-three; yet to me she didn't look much over forty-five. Her black hair had begun to turn gray, but was still very thick; she wore it pulled high on her head and fastened in a jeweled barrette from which it cascaded to her neck in soft waves ending in ringlets. The crow's feet about her eyes gave a certain sparkle to her face rather than an aged look, and the loose lapels of her flowered silk kimono-like garment revealed the upper swells of a smooth and voluminous (though no doubt well-brassiered) bosom. Though the hem of her dress struck her above the knees, displaying her rather thick-ankled legs sheathed in black net, somehow she didn't have that embarrassing appearance of older ladies who try to dress like young girls. She had in fact a very dignified and cultured air about her, in spite of the earthiness of her conversation.
A young buxom blonde in a mini-skirted peasant outfit came in with the tea and dangled her unharnessed tits over the table as she filled our cups. Miss Molly lowered her eyes discreetly as I stared into the blonde's gaping neckline. Without looking up, she said, "Is this something like you had in mind, Mr. Hackett?"
I looked back at the blonde. "Well-"
But before I could explain, Miss Molly went on- "Mina honey, show the gentleman what you have to offer." The blonde smiled, and with a slight wiggle and a shrug of her shoulders, the loose blouse fell from her breasts. They were big and ripe, almost blue-white around the cherry-pink nipples. Somehow my explanation got stuck in my throat. Miss Molly turned aside to Honey and said, "She's new. Nice, huh?" Honey agreed, with a wink at Mina. "Draws almost as much business as you did." Honey laughed. "Sure you won't come back with us, Honey?" In other words, there were no hard feelings between Honey and her former boss, but I lost track of the conversation when Mina, having displayed her boobies from several angles, lifted her short skirt to give me a look at her hairy snatch. I knew I had better speak my piece before I forgot all about Stone's Island.
"Actually, Miss Holden, I came only to talk, but I must admit the merchandise is very tempting. If I were to find the time-say tomorrow night-Miss Mina here would certainly be my choice." The girl smiled and thanked me as she smoothed down her skirt and tucked in her jugs.
"Consider her reserved then," said Molly, nodding to Mina. When the blonde had gone out, Molly's face seemed to have lost some of its friendliness. I suppose that she had been under the impression that Honey had brought her some big business. "Now, Mr. Hackett," she said, "what can I do for you?"
I blurted it right out. "What can you tell me about Simon Stone, Miss Holden?"
Her face grew pale and her mouth hardened. She stood up and glared down at Honey. "Do you think I'm running some kind of information service, Miss Jones?"-and to me-"Mr. Hackett, as you know, my business is girls, not local history. I'm getting fed up with you newspapermen and your hot leads on a story that was stale news thirty years ago. I know, don't tell me, somebody told you my name used to be Goldsmith, right? But I'm not the Molly Goldsmith you're looking for, Mr. Hackett, and I never knew Simon Stone. Now if you'll please excuse me... " She held the door open for us.
"Miss Holden, I'm not a newspaperman, I-" I was at a loss as to how to proceed; maybe she was telling the truth. Right or wrong, I felt like a nosy bastard, and was about to make my apologies and duck out, when I noticed something that changed me from a person normally considerate of other people's privacy back into a ruthless sleuth.
From the wrist that held the doorknob dangled a bronze medallion on a chain bracelet. On both faces of the slowly spinning disk, in low relief, flashed the burnished image of the double dragon. I didn't have to read the encircling inscription to know what it said.
I gently but firmly took her hand from the knob and closed the door. All this was embarrassing Honey, but I was determined.
"Let me explain, Miss Holden. Please sit down. As I say, I'm not a reporter. Nor am I a detective or anything of the sort. I am, however, a man who enjoys a good story, and one who is quite willing to pay for the privilege of hearing a good one."
"I'm not interested," she said. "I sell love, not stories."
"Ah, but a good story and a good woman can be equally valuable commodities, and sometimes serve the same ends. But all right then, let me go further. I'm not a newspaperman, but I am a writer-a novelist. I may or may not write a book about Stone's Island. If I do, even without your side of the action I have enough information to reveal those parts of it which you have been sitting on all these years- that is, the parts concerning you and your girl friends." Her expression changed from anger to fearful anxiety. "You see, Miss-Goldsmith, purely by chance I have discovered the underground rooms of Stone's Island. In one of the rooms I found a metal box, with this-" I reached down and held the medallion in my open palm "-on the lid." .
"A box-?" Her voice trembled.
"Containing Simon Stone's diaries covering the years between 1915 and 1932."
"But everything-" She put her hand to her mouth.
"Burned?" I said. "Not quite everything. You are referred to as simply 'M,' but his description of you is quite adequate. Maybe you haven't changed as much as you think since then." (I was lying about the description; Stone's descriptions, though sometimes extremely detailed, were not concerned with purposes of identification. They were in fact nothing but spontaneous products of the auto-erotic tendency which apparently compelled him to keep the journals in the first place. In the majority of entries Stone's highly imaginative and startlingly lucid style of self-directed pornography reads like an extended verbal masturbation.
At last Molly sat down. The age which she had staved off so well seemed now to siphon towards the surface. She looked so pitiful, almost desperate, that I began to hate myself again. I sat down on the divan beside her and took her hand in mine. Her palm was cold.
"Miss Goldsmith, I didn't mean any harm. Maybe I've gotten carried away with all this. I guess I'm not very good at prying into other people's pasts. If you don't want to talk about it, I won't bother you anymore. I'm only in Florida for a few weeks."
She seemed to regain some of her composure and stood up. Honey said she was sorry, and Molly smiled her forgiveness. "Come back tonight, Mr. Hackett. I have to think. I'll let you know what I decide then."
Honey had an appointment to keep in Sago Beach that night, so after we had lunch I sent her off. She was to give the news to Yvonne and meet me again the following evening at the Mandalay. I didn't want to hurry my Miss "M" or seem overanxious now that I had her on the hook, so after supper at a little spaghetti house, I took in a movie. It was around ten when I walked up the front steps of the hotel.
The girl at the desk had a message for me: I was to go directly up to Miss Molly's rooms on the second floor. To my surprise the old girl actually seemed happy to see me. I suspect that for a long me-unconsciously, perhaps-she had felt a growing need to unburden herself of that buried segment her life from which she barely escaped with her sanity, not to mention her life. Now, with the truth finally in the hands of another, it was as if a great weight had been lifted from her, a weight she had borne precariously for the last thirty-seven years. However, the only explanation she gave for her change of heart was that it didn't matter anymore, she was getting old, etc., and that since I was going to publish the story anyway, she would rather I heard her part as it really happened, instead of solely through the eyes of a madman.
She was dressed informally in a flimsy silk wrapper of pale yellow with large hand-painted flowers. On her feet were gilded slippers and her long gray-streaked hair, parted severely in the middle, hung in thick waves over her shoulders. She looked-if somewhat older-even more ravishing than she had that morning. She looked the way every beautiful woman hopes she will look at fifty-three, but rarely does. I sat with her on a curved Louis XlV-ish divan in a room lit dimly with red-shaded lamps. A beautiful brunette in a smock of black gauze came in with a chilled bottle of champagne. Molly locked the door after her.
In that atmosphere, that ambience, her voice an appearance were charming almost to the point of being hypnotic. There was in her voice a certain barely perceptible substratum of-what shall I say madness?-hysteria? I can think of no better simile than that gripping undercurrent of despair in the opening choruses of Bach's St. Mathew Passion which slowly and painfully intensifies itself until in the fifty-fourth recitative it explodes in that insane spine-chilling cry of the mob- Barabbam!
Molly: My mother and father were both killed in the 1928 hurricane; I was twelve years old then. It was such a terrifying experience, I guess my mind blacked out during the confusion. I don't remember how or when I was separated from my parents and brothers. It was like the whole world was blown away. They say that half the buildings in our town -we lived in Chaclahatchee-were completely destroyed. Anyway, I was rescued somehow and ended up in the orphanage in West Sago Beach along with a lot of other half-drowned kids like myself. But I was there only a day or so before Mrs. Verlain came and took me away.
Mrs. Verlain was a widow-in her late thirties, I guess, at that time. She had a charter to operate a school for homeless girls, but very meager funds to get started with. Nevertheless, with the depression in full swing and the storm on top of it, she soon filled her house with refugees of one sort or another, until in a couple of months there were fourteen of us. The house she rented was much too small, and she was always on the verge of losing it, because she was operating almost wholly on contributions-her small inheritance was nearly gone. But small as the place was, it was a thousand times better than that damned orphanage, and Mrs. Verlain was so kind and gentle with us that we all soon loved her like a mother.
I often wondered in those days why she had picked me out of all the girls at the orphanage. She knew nothing about me and I was too scared to tell her anything. The girls came from all sorts of backgrounds, some were farm girls like me, others were from the cities, and our ages ranged anywhere from nine to sixteen. But there was one thing alike about all of us, though it didn't occur to me till later: we were all quite pretty.
Mrs. Verlain wasn't bad looking herself, in a severe sort of way. I shouldn't say she had a masculine look, but her features had a certain hardness to them, you know?-and she carried herself straight as a ramrod. She was part Indian-Blackfoot, she told us proudly-and you could see it in her face, the high cheekbones, full but hard lips. Her nose was too big and had a slight hook to it, and eyes black as coal-really beautiful eyes. She wore her hair cropped short, but never allowed any of us girls to cut a single strand of ours. She was a tall woman, not lean exactly, because she had a good set of tits. May I speak in the vernacular, Mr. Hackett?
Hackett: Please do. And, Molly (brushing a strand of hair from her face with my fingertips), call me Drake.
Molly (smiling): All right then, Drake. Mrs. Verlain had a nice set of tits, and her ass was smallish but not masculine. She seemed lean because of her hardness. I mean, her tits and ass were as hard and firm as her legs and arms, solid, like pure muscle. I'll bet she didn't have an ounce of fat on her whole body.
But like I say, this was only her appearance. Her manners and personality were just the opposite- gentle and loving. She fed us as well as she could, going hungry herself sometimes, made all our clothes and drilled our lessons into us. She was so strong that despite the hard times we all felt as se-cure and happy as baby ducks under mama's wing.
But our security was an illusion, and after less than a year Mrs. Verlain's money-if not her strength-finally ran out, and one night she got us all together and told us that this was the last month we would be able to stay in the house, she couldn't raise the back rent and the landlord was going to foreclose. I wasn't worried in the least until she told us there was a chance we'd have to go back to the orphanage. That night all of us girls cried in each others' arms, and Mrs. Verlain sat in a straight wooden chair until dawn, staring out the window. But in the morning all her strength and faith seemed to have returned. She scooped up the last few bills and all the loose change in the money box, stuffed it into her purse, put on her hat, and walked out the house, as casual and as buoyant as ever.
She spent our last dime on an ad in the newspaper, fully stating our plight and humbly requesting donations. We had barely enough food in the house for two days. On the second day a colored boy brought an envelope from Simon A. Stone containing a check for the back rent plus an extra hundred dollars-and a message.
Mr. Stone offered Mrs. Verlain, free of charge, the use of a large guest house on his island which he said could easily be converted to a dormitory and classrooms. He said since the death of his wife and daughter, he had no use for the extra buildings, and it would give him great pleasure to be of service to her in her admirable project, and so forth.
Well, to us it seemed like a dream come true- life on an island! How wonderful it would be! But our mistress seemed to have some misgivings. Everyone had at one time or another since 1926 heard the rumor that Simon Stone had murdered his wife and daughter. The rumor has persisted, as you know, all these years, even though the law couldn't even bring it to trial. This was part of Mrs. Verlain's worry, I suppose-a lone woman and fourteen girls living on an island with this man. For another thing, his generous offer seemed very strange. Stone had been known for years as an incorrigible recluse-he never left his island for anything and was reported to have nothing but hatred for the townspeople. Also, he had a reputation as a miser. But of course there was really no choice, and after another night in her chair, Mrs. Verlain paid a visit to Stone's Island.
She returned convinced of the man's sincerity. It was out of remorse for his dead family, she said, that he had opened his heart to us. Now she was as excited as we were, and within a month we had moved into the house on the island.
And it was wonderful. It was even better than we had imagined. It was idyllic. I can't describe the effect the setting had on us that first year, I had never known anything like it, and never would again. It was a year full of such joy and innocence, such-! But I really don't have the words for it, Drake. Seeing the island as it is today, you can't imagine what it was like then, the trees and flowers, the rolling lawns and fountains, the garden full of birds...
But most important, it was the year I fell in love for the first time. I was thirteen, naive as they come, ripe and ready to be picked.
Living as we did, it was natural that we would sooner or later discover the pleasures of Lesbianism. Maybe Yvette and I were the first ones to become lovers, but it wasn't long before many of the others began to pair off at night too. It got so bad-or so good, I should say-that after a while a lot of us didn't even bother to get under the covers when we did it. If Mrs. Verlain knew what was happening, she never let on.
It started with us-Yvette and me- the very first week on the island. Stone's Negroes had not yet completed the alterations of the guest house, so we had to double up in bed for a while. Mrs. Verlain had her own room, by the way, apart from ours. Yvette was sixteen and I think the most beautiful of all those beautiful girls. To me her little breasts -but they were big to me-were the loveliest thing about her. They were developing so fast that I seemed able to watch them swell day by day. We had already become good friends, so she and I slept together till the dorm was finished. The first night, when the lights went out, she pulled the sheet up over our heads and whispered in my ear that she thought I was the prettiest girl in the Home. I just laughed at her and told her not to talk so silly. Then she kissed me on the lips and turned her back to me.
That little kiss disturbed and thrilled me like nothing ever had before! It was a long time before I went to sleep.
The next night I asked her why she said I was the prettiest one when everybody knew that she, Yvette, was the prettiest of all. She said, "Shh! Pull the covers up so the others don't hear." With the sheet over our heads again, we put our faces close together and talked in whispers. She said she wished she was slim again like me. "Rose and Joyce are always giggling behind my back," she said, "They say I'm getting fat." I told her Rose and Joyce were just jealous because they didn't have any figure, and because she looked like a movie star. I told her I was jealous too. "I look so stupid and flat-chested beside you," I said.
"You are not flat-chested," she said, "Let me feel." I lifted up my pajama top and she felt my little titties. "You're not flat, Molly. Gosh, they're getting big!" I thought it was taking her a long time just to see how big they were. She kept rubbing my hard little bumps with both hands, and I started getting all tingly again, like when she had kissed me. Then she said, "Don't you want to feel mine?" and I said yes. She opened her pajamas and I timidly reached out in the dark and touched her warm bosom with my fingertips. Oh, her tits were so soft! So shapely to the touch! She said, "Don't be afraid, silly," so I pushed my palms against them and felt the flesh yield and the nipples push back against my hands. Her breathing got heavier and the air got hotter and hotter under the sheet as our play got bolder and bolder...
(Molly had ceased by this time to look at me as she talked. She seemed to have passed over into another time, her blood stirring to old passions long dead; her speech was almost sing-song sometimes, childlike, or else it became surprisingly lucid in its expression, rhythmic and flowing like a Sapphic hymn. Minute by minute the accumulated months and years seemed to lift from her voice, and suddenly I was able to identify that faintly hysterical substratum I spoke of: it was the ghost of her youth, flying backward in time, giddily, like a moth toward a candle. She went on-)
... I noticed Yvette's nipples had gotten stiffer than they were before, and when I called her attention to this we both started giggling, and after a few minutes some of the other girls told us to shut up, so we didn't play anymore that night. But before we went to sleep, Yvette kissed me again, and this time she pushed the tip of her tongue between my lips. That night I dreamed of a handsome prince on a white horse. I sat in a flowing robe beside a black pool, and the prince was riding toward me, cutting his way through a field of sugar cane with a shining sword. He had long golden hair, like Yvette's, blowing in the wind; and on his chest, sticking out through round holes in his mail, were two lovely white female breasts with scarlet nipples...
The third night Yvette pulled the covers over our heads again, but for a long time-at least it seemed like a long time-she didn't say or do anything. Then she said, "Molly, do you have any hair between your legs yet?"
I said, "Yes, a little bit."
"Look at all this!" she said and wiggled out of her pajama bottoms. Of course I couldn't see anything, but she took my hand and put it on the fleecy thing at the bottom of her stomach. It felt so thick and soft-it gave me goosepimples! "Isn't it awful?" she said. I told her I thought it was wonderful, and asked if it was blonde like her head. She said it was, and that as soon as we got a chance she'd let me see it in the light.
"Do you want to feel mine?" I asked, "I've just got a little stupid fuzz."
She said, "Hurry!" so I pulled down my pajamas and she put her hand between my legs-Oh! I'd never known such a feel as that, the sensation of those soft fingers on my pussy! I tried to do what she was doing, and her slit started getting all wet and slippery. Her lips covered mine again and this time I touched her tongue with mine and arrows of love went all through my body!
There was no giggling that night. Yvette pulled off her pajama top and almost ripped mine open, she was so eager to get at my breasts again. I was just as eager, and we took turns passionately kissing each other's nipples, until our chests were all wet and heaving. Then Yvette said that when she was at the orphanage one of the older girls had shown her another way of kissing. "You want me to show you?" she whispered. I said sure, if it was fun. She twisted around under the covers until we lay head to foot, and I felt her breath on my belly. She gently opened my thighs with her hands and kissed my pussy with her soft lips. Then she paused, spreading her own legs, but I didn't know what to do at first, I was trembling so with excitement. She kissed me again, this time using her tongue like when we kissed each other's mouth. How I tingled! -it was like a fire between my legs! Then all of a sudden I knew what to do-I wanted to do it, to repay her for giving me such pleasure. The smell of cheap soap and young sex filled my nostrils and drew my mouth to just the right place. I spread back her silky curls with my fingers and kissed that pouting mouth with my lips and tongue. Oh, that taste!-I will never forget that sweet, bitter taste of my first lover's body!
It wasn't long before Yvette's hips and thighs began to tremble violently and I heard her whining strangely down there in the dark. I was about to stop and ask her if she was sick or something, but she clamped my head with her thighs and her pussy jerked again and again against my mouth, almost smothering me.
Finally she relaxed, and I heard her say, "Thank you, sweet little Molly," and she went to sleep. All night I lay close against her shapely body-so big and warm it seemed to me!-and what dreams I had! We did the same thing the next night, but it wasn't until the time after that that I found out what the trembling was all about. Do you remember your first orgasm, Drake?
Hackett (Startled!): Huh?-Why, uh, yes-yes, I do.
Molly: You must tell me about it sometime. A woman always remembers her first time...
Anyway, that was the way it went. The others gradually discovered these delights for themselves or else imitated us-after all, we couldn't hide our activities for very long, all of us living in the same room like that. When the dorm was finished, Yvette and I would take turns sneaking to each other's bed. Sometimes you would run into another girl in the dark on the way to her own lover's bed, and a few times I ended up on the floor with the girl I ran into. But I don't think there was much swapping around. Yvette and I were never deliberately unfaithful to each other until-but I don't want to get ahead of myself.
I just want you to see that, no matter what happened later, that first year was filled to the brim with nothing but innocent love and happiness. It was like the Garden of Eden must have been. Now don't misunderstand-we didn't just make love all year, and we didn't spend all our time on the island. Mrs. Verlain was a very strict and thorough teacher, and if you fell behind in your studies, she could make you feel like an outcast just by looking at you a certain way, so I must say I think we got a much better education than most kids were getting in the public schools in those days. And then we worked in the garden too, and did the house cleaning- everybody had their chores. But there was a lot of free time too, and Mrs. Verlain would take us to a movie in town whenever she could afford it. But more and more we came to prefer the island to the town. Mrs. Verlain never prevented us from pairing off with our girlfriends for chores, and there were so many beautiful bushy places to hide in the garden or along the shore-to make love or just to sit and talk. We felt complete there, we needed nothing from town to fill out our days-they were full to the brim, and all the tragedies of our former lives had blown away on that warm wind from the sea.
As for Mr. Stone, we never saw him. Our house was set off from the main house on the top of the hill and separated from it by a sort of wild park of Australian pines. You know how the hill terraces off on the south slope?-well, our house was then on the high part, above and to the left of the park where the gate was as you approached the big house from the docks. Even though the house had been badly damaged by the hurricane and Mr. Stone had done nothing to repair it, his Negroes still mowed the lawns and trimmed the trees in those days, but we girls did most of the yard work, and sometimes Mrs. Verlain even sent some of us up to the big house to help the maid with the house-cleaning. She said that was the least we could do for all Mr. Stone's kindness to us. On several occasions she would send rum a cake or a pie or a bouquet of flowers, but if there was ever any response to this I never heard about it. Mrs. Verlain often said, "How lonely he must be." But at the same time she was relieved that he was evidently content to leave us alone, because she had been afraid that he might be a problem.
But anyway, all we ever heard from him that year was the lovely music of his organ. He played- or we thought it was he who played-every morning and evening, sometimes late into the night, waking us to those bright warm days and lulling us to sleep after our games of love...
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stone's Journal, 1929 Aug. 10-They are already in my power and don't know it, bless their little cracks. The fumes from my crucibles and the music from my organ have already driven them mad with love. They have begun to tongue each other in broad daylight, beneath my very windows-and the other day two of them who came to help with the cleaning curled up on a sofa and went at it. Right under the Prometheus painting! Ha!
At night they become a sea of flesh, rolling and swelling, turbulent as a maelstrom, serene as the moon, shameless as Venus! How many times in the last few months have I thanked Him for giving me the strength and persistence to complete the south tunnel in spite of all the difficulties-and the one-way mirrors work perfectly. Tonight the place sounded like a kennel at feeding time, they set up such a slurping with their little pointed tongues. They don't bother to cover themselves anymore- 1 fact, they seem to want the others to watch them, especially the ones without a partner, to make them envious and jealous.
I wonder if they would even mind if they knew I was watching them every night. Ah, how sweet it will be to touch that tender, unrent flesh! Especially Y, the loveliest of them all! Ah, to trade places with M for just one night. But soon she will lose that quality-oh doomed transient flesh!-if only I could free them all from the slump and decay of time as I have freed Amanda. Soon Y's firmness will begin to relax, her teats will fall, her belly will bloat, her hips and thighs will grow heavy and groesque-Shit!-if it weren't for the damned squaw I would move immediately.
Still, there is such pleasure in anticipation. I'll bide my time-watch them pee and crap and bathe and suck pussy, while I splatter the back of their mirrors with semen hot as hellfire-
I'll have my chance...
Nov. 24-Soon now, Master, I will lay at your feet he first morsel of hot trembling girlflesh. The proper course of action has suddenly become clear. If I had been in the least attracted to the squaw- just enough to take a peek into her room-I would not have been this long in making my move. But what matter? Have I not deliberately hung weights on the hands of time to prolong our ecstasy, yours and mine?
Tonight, instead of going back the usual way after Y and M went to sleep, I continued on around the passage of the south wall and looked into the squaw's mirror. A small light was burning. She was not in the room. I thought this was odd since it was quite late and I was under the impression that she turned in early. I checked her bathroom. It was empty. Puzzled, I started back toward the dormitory, but as I passed the end of the hallway which separates the girls' beds from the squaw's room, I thought I heard a noise. There is no mirror here, but I had a peephole cut behind the clock. I opened it and peeked into the dark hall-
There she was, crouched at the door to the dormitory, her hand between her legs, peering through the keyhole.
So! She knows what's going on. This makes all the difference...
She will be my lever to pry wider the hairy gates of Hell!
Nov. 27-Last night I saw clearly into the nature (and into the cunt!) of that dyke-Valkyrie, the squaw Verlain.
One of the girls, R, is sick-nothing serious, apparently; a doctor came over yesterday evening and gave the girl a sedative to knock her out for the night, and I heard the widow say she would sleep in the infirmary so she could keep an eye on Miss R. An eye on her indeed!
As soon as she turned the lights off in the dorm, down she goes to the infirmary where R was resting peacefully, dead to the world. Such a pretty little thing-fifteen years old, wavy light brown hair and teats like a young nanny goat. I wonder if her lover was faithful to her last night; I didn't even go up a watch the others, I was so eager to see what the squaw would do with this opportunity.
At first I thought nothing was going to happen, he sat on the bed adjoining R's, sipping tea-all very prim and proper. After a while she got up and locked the doors and checked all the windows to make sure the shades were drawn, then came back and stood silently over the sleeping girl. I watched her face change as she looked down at the lithe form on the bed: her forehead seemed to smooth out, her cheeks soften. A passionate longing came into her eyes, and I could see the savage blood beating at her temples. She called the girl's name several times, to make sure she wasn't going to wake up. Then she touched R's pale cheek. No response. Her hand trembled as it moved down the girl's face and neck to the top button of her gown. She laid back the bed covers and gingerly opened her collar; bending over, she kissed the soft pink lips-
As she kissed the girl's lips, eyes, cheeks, ears and neck, her hand continued down the front of her body, opening each button as it went. But before he got to the last button her hand shook so she lad to use both hands to complete the task. Her breath came faster and faster, and as she laid open the flannel gown and gazed down at that white glare of naked beauty, she seemed on the verge of swooning with emotion. R's pink-tipped little mounds rose and fell in tranquil counterpoint to the she-wolf's violent panting. Her long brown fingers lightly touched those rosy nipples-rolled them slowly between her fingers-traced spirals of perspiration outward over the snow white flesh- clutched them!-throwing her head back, a low howl of animal anguish rising from her open mouth, her fingers like boney snakes gone mad, bruising the soft young breasts!
Suddenly she regained control and tore her hands away, leaving red and white marks where her fingers had gripped the tender mounds. In a moment she had changed completely, metamorphosed from a guilt-ridden school mistress, tortured by desire, into a calm, ruthless savage. She was all lust now-her true self had broken through, all inhibitions fallen away. Her black eyes still burned, yes-God's blood, how they burned!-but her hands no longer trembled, her fingers no longer fumbled; her thin lips ceased to twitch, and curled up slightly in a smile of anticipation as her fiery gaze raked the naked body from mouth to mouth.
She walked with a certain powerful swagger over to the mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed-the mirror behind which I stood-unbuttoned her long gray dress and let it fall to the floor, followed by her slip. I was stunned by her body! I have been so preoccupied with the girls I'd hardly looked at the woman, never thought of her as other than an obstacle to my purposes. Her body has an unassailable quality about it, a body fully capable of rape, but not of being raped! Hard, hard as a rock-yet it is unmistakably a woman's body: the teats shapely, yet dense and unyielding, as though composed of gristle through and through (Ah, to get her pregnant just for a draught of milk from those grumose jugs!-Ha!-one swallow would fell an ox! But what man, what devil even, could mount that Amazon? Unthinkable!); the belly flat and well muscled, but cradled in a wide female (if not feminine) pelvis, which gives her hips a gentle flare, though the flesh on them is lean and sinewy; legs- what legs!-undulating columns carved with savage precision from red marble, with feet that grip the earth like the roots of a mountain pine.
She removed her brassiere and I saw that the knobs at the centers of her black nipples were long and blunt, stiff as hard rubber. They vibrated at summits of her chest like divining rods, sniffing out the sexual waters of her prey. Then she pulled down her step-ins and showed me her hairy hump. What a beard she has, black as a crow's wing. The outer labia of her cunt were ajar, so the pink inner lips shone in a livid swath through the shaggy tangle. She looked at her nudity and smiled, white teeth flashing. She ran her long-fingered hands down over her hard body till they reached her mound; slowly her fingers slithered in through the coarse curls toward the gash. She applied pressure to the lips, and something appeared at the upper corner, something round and scarlet. It was her clitoris- but what a clitoris! Surely such a thing has never been seen, even in Hell. Out it came from its lair, gleaming and dancing. At full erection its exterior portion alone was a full two inches of pulsing meat, curved upward like a scimitar!-What manner of creature is this?-is it he or she, devil or angel? (Whichever it is, it'll be witch before long, or else I'm a Methodist.)
She returns to the bed. Nothing could have presented a more vivid contrast than those two naked figures-one standing, one prone; black nippled cones of muscle against flower-soft hillocks, blushing at the tips; raw sienna against zinc white; strength against weakness, and that black-bristled beard against a tan tuft of downy fuzz-
In a flowing, perfectly controlled wave of motion, the woman climbed over the girl, planting a knee on either side of the slim torso, spread the limp thighs and lowered her mouth to that sweet spring. All I could see then was the back of her head and neck as she seemed to devour the tender flesh like a humpbacked vulture, lowering her hips and jerking her crotch back and forth over the girl's bosom.
At last she lifted her face and looked into the mirror-that is, straight at me-her finger-tipped teats pointing downward. Her eyes blazed, her wide nostrils flared, her drooling mouth hung ajar, teeth bared like a rutting tomcat. Below, R's little slit was soaked and dilated, and her pelvis twitched a bit, though she had not regained consciousness.
Now Verlain rose from all fours and stood over the ravaged girl like some beautiful, terrifying colossus, her feet spread wide on the mattress astraddle the dimpled knees of her victim. She bent her legs slightly, hunched forward and began some violent action with her right arm, but her back was to me. What was she doing? The motions did not seem those of a woman fingering herself-more like-! I had to see! I dashed around to the west wall. There was no mirror here, but I had a peep-hole behind the medicine shelf. Frantically I dropped to my knees and opened the slide...
I nearly laughed out loud with delight. She was masturbating, all right, but you could hardly call it "fingering"! Jerking off is what she was doing. She had that scimitar-like clitoris between her thumb and forefinger in the manner of young boys when they first begin to manipulate their little pricks, pumping away in short lightning-fast strokes-and in a blur of flesh and a chain of hip-grinding spasms, she came to her climax, and-or do my senses deceive me?-yet I saw it clearly: A burst of fluid spurted from her cunt and splattered upon the sleeping child's face and bosom, and some of it dripped from the colossal thighs in dewy droplets to the sheet...
CHAPTER EIGHT
Stone's Journal, 1929, (continued) Dec. 2-So. It is done. At least it is begun. We are allied, she and I. Hail, Satan!
How neat and straight-laced she looked corning up the hill, how pure and motherly. It wrenched my imagination to watch that long-skirted school marm prancing primly up the steps and to remember at the same time how she looked the previous night. I knew I was going to have trouble getting through that hard shell to the she-dragon that slumbered beneath it. It was the philtre that finally did it.
As soon as I told her what I knew she became a rock of indignant outrage. She would remove her girls from the island immediately and inform the police of my spying. She called me all sorts of names. I let her rave for a while. Then I said, "But where will you go, Mrs. Verlain? You have no money, after all. And besides, who will contribute to your little, ah, institution after the pictures have been made public?"
"Pictures," she says, "what pictures?"
"Oh, didn't I mention the snapshots?" I explained the principal of the Leica camera to add a touch of credibility to my story, but in fact I do not have such a camera. I marveled about the clearness of the prints. "Would you like to see them? You make a striking subject, you and your friends. You have a very, ah, photogenic quality about you-"
Now she dropped the pretense of denying it all, but her rage grew, and the dragon was stirring in its lair. "And what price do you expect for these snapshots of yours? As you yourself just told me, I am practically insolvent."
"Price? No, no, Mrs. Verlain, you misunderstand me. I only meant that when the police come to investigate your complaint, they will surely find the pictures. I myself would not dream of publishing them! Did I not tell you in the beginning how much I admired you and your cause? I haven't changed my mind. I did not send for you for the purpose of accusing or criticizing-nor even to confess my secret admiration of your, ah, activities. On the contrary, my only purpose, now as before, was to help you."
She called me a beast. Hee hee. But I went on; her veneer was unbroken, but it was thin, and the dragon inside was listening with all ears. I told her that I had noticed her quite understandable hesitance in openly propositioning the girls, that I was acutely sympathetic toward her anguish of waiting for some chance opportunity for taking her pleasure without her partners' knowledge. "Even though I am sure many if not most of the girls would not object if you made your wishes known to them," I said, "I quite understand your embarrassment in revealing yourself. In your situation I imagine I would not act differently. And so, I thought that this"-I held up the little vial of green fluid-"might be of some assistance to you."
Now I could see the school marm and the dragon waging desperate war behind her blazing black eyes. I knew who the winner would be.
explained to her the uses of the philtre and its effects. She hesitated-then said, "There is no such drug. Do you think I would fall for such a trick? I am an educated woman, Mr. Stone, not a witch-wife." (I almost said, Just give me a little time.) Then she added in a lower voice, "What is it made of?"
"Many things, Mrs. Verlain-a powder made from certain dried beetles, a few Mexican and Brazilian herbs, scallop shell hinges, and other things." She laughed in ridicule, but her eyes did not leave the vial. "But I don't expect you to take my word for its effectiveness. You will have to give it a test." I instructed her as to the proper dosage and placed the vial in front of her on the table. She hesitated.
Then, without another word, she snatched up the bottle and marched out of the house.
And so, the thing is nearly done. When she comes back for more-and she will be back-I will name my terms. All is going according to plan...
Molly: Then in December of that year, things began to change. The girls, some of them, began to tell of strange dreams. The strangest thing about he dreams was that they were all very similar, almost identical. They dreamed that a beautiful woman came to their beds in the night and carried them to another place, where they were treated to such pleasures as they had never known before. Some said the woman was Mrs. Verlain, or someone like her.
The ones who had the dream began afterward to quarrel with their lovers all the time. Jealous triangles, intrigues, secret affairs began to develop. None of them seemed to be able to get satisfaction anymore from their bedmates. All our former tranquility and happiness began to disintegrate.
I thought at first that some of the girls were lying about the dream, or that they had it because of the vivid description that May gave-she was the first. Then one day Yvette told me that she noticed that every time Mrs. Verlain fixed hot tea for a girl who wasn't feeling well at bedtime, that girl had the dream. But even if the tea caused them to dream, why should it make them all dream the same thing? I puzzled my little head over this until I had the dream myself. Far from solving anything, this only confused me more than ever. Because then I wasn't so sure it really was a dream.
I was getting a slight cold; I told Mrs. Verlain I had a headache that evening and she fixed me a cup of tea. It tasted strange, almost bitter. Yvette came to my bed when the lights went out, but I was too drowsy to respond. She went away and I dropped off immediately.
But it was a strange sleep. I knew I was asleep, yet I was aware of things in the dorm-two girls made love on the bed beside mine, three others were quarreling on the other side, I heard the waves lapping the beach at the foot of our hill, the breeze ruffling the window curtains...
Long after everyone went to sleep, I kept going over and over again my old dream of the prince with Yvette's hair and breasts, savoring every detail of it, longing for the prince to kiss me, to touch my body, but I could not make this happen. There was always a distance between us, a tantalizing distance that made me burn with desire. I felt if I could wake up, I could reach out and touch him, or her, but I couldn't. I suppose eventually I would have had an orgasm in my sleep, but it began before that happened.
When she appeared beside my bed, I remember thinking, So, it's true. How beautiful she was in the moonlight! She wore a long flowing robe of fluted silk, white as milk against her dark skin. I loved her on sight, and at the first touch of her hand rose and followed her from the dorm. She led me into a room I had never seen before. It was lit with several large brass candelabra, and two entire walls were covered with mirrored panels reaching from floor to ceiling. These walls faced each other, and gave a dizzying effect of an infinite corridor of candle-lit rooms, spinning away into space. In the center of the room was the only piece of furniture, a large round bed, covered in black silk. My bare feet sank into a deep-piled scarlet carpet that stretched from wall to wall, and the high ceiling was a blur of shadowy red, gleaming with gilded ornaments. Strange as it was, it all seemed quite normal to me, as things do in a dream, and I calmly watched the beautiful woman in the mirror as she removed my pajamas and led me to the black bed.
I lay down on my back and she took my ankles in her strong hands and spread them wide apart. She leaned over me and kissed my lips. I heard her say, "Do you love me, Molly?" and I answered, "Oh, yes!" I felt one hot hand on my tits and the other on my pussy, caressing my fuzz and parting it in the middle. She took a large black pillow and put it under my hips. I remember giggling when I saw my furry little pussy sticking up in the air with the shadows dancing all around it. She sucked on my nipples till they puffed up, then put her long lovely tongue in my bellybutton and I giggled again when the warm spit went running out over my belly in little rivers.
Then she stood up beside the bed and removed her gown. Her naked body glowed red in the candlelight, and I remember so clearly how her black nipples cast long pointed shadows across her breasts and torso. She climbed onto the bed on her knees and straddled my face, and her strong smell flooded me. Oh, it smelled so good! Intoxicating! I opened my mouth and breathed it in. I said, "Oh my, you have such a lot of hair! None of the girls have that much. It's so beautiful!" She laughed and lowered her hips a little so her long hair brushed over my face. It hung down between her legs like a stiff black mop, so thick I could hardly see the crack. She moved her hips in a circle, trailing the long hair around and around my face, my eyes and lips-oh!-it tickled me so I could hardly stand it. When I looked up through the hair, I saw her nipples making slow black trails through the air. Then she reached down and took two handfuls of hair and drew them apart so I could see her crack. The long lips were open, and you could see right into the pink part. I put my tongue out and licked it, like I did Yvette's, but this one was so much bigger! I opened my mouth as wide as I could, but I couldn't cover the whole thing. It closed on my tongue and she tickled my eyes with the two tufts of hair in her hands, and her pungent juice leaked down my tongue and ran into my cheeks, and I licked faster and faster to make her happy like I made Yvette happy...
But all of a sudden something funny pushed against my tongue. It startled me and I pulled back to see what it was. A little red knob was sticking out of the top of her slit. For a minute I was scared, but then I remembered it was just a dream, and I giggled. She laughed too, from high up in the air, it seemed like. The thing kept coming further out. It was curved and red and about as long as my little finger. It twitched and throbbed like a live thing. She leaned forward over my head and made the thing go into one of my nostrils. I didn't even struggle.
It went in and out, in and out, faster and faster! I put my hands on the hard cheeks of her behind and felt the muscles moving, vibrating. If she was hurting my nose, I didn't notice it. It seemed so natural and thrilling! I found her asshole with my hands, and I remember thinking that I'd better be careful, "Mrs. Verlain might get angry if I stick my finger in her rear end!" But then I remembered that it was a dream, and went ahead and did it.
Immediately she hunched up over me and began to moan and lurch, and that belly came down and jerked against my face so I couldn't see anything, and her long thing swelled up in my nose and I felt a hot burning sensation in my sinuses and something hot and wet sprayed all over my face-
For a while after that, I wasn't aware of anything much; I seemed to have gone to "sleep" for a while. I knew that she was lying beside me, panting, with one leg still thrown over my face, but I don't remember her moving from this position. The next thing I was aware of was her lovely face rising up like the moon behind my pussy-I was still propped up on the black pillow. She spread my legs wider and took one of her tits in her hand and guided the stiff black nipple up and down along my pussy till it was all slippery. Her nipples were about that long (she indicated the first joint of her little finger) and seemed to get longer and longer the hotter she got. She wiggled it back and forth over my clit and I got my cookies almost immediately. But I still wanted more, and she gave it to me with her tongue. That tongue!-oh, it was so long: It went up inside me and I thought it would never stop!-and all the while she did the most delightful things to my titties, and my little pink nipples got so fat I thought they would burst.
When I came that time, she had to hold me by the hips to keep me from bouncing off the pillow, and when I got through, my pussy hair was all soaking wet and her saliva was all over my belly, running into my belly button and on down all the way to my titties. She stood between my legs on her knees and smeared it all over the front of me till I was all slippery and sparkly in the candlelight. Then she got one hand wet again between my legs and wiped the other one through her own crack and rubbed the juice over her breasts and face till she was as shiny as me.
After that she put my legs over my shoulders and put her pussy up against mine. This is the part that seems most like a dream to me. It was sort of the way I had imagined my prince would make love to me. She rose up so high and strong... I don't know, I guess I went into a kind of swoon when I felt the thing go in. It was like she became the prince, and I remember thinking how strange it was that up close his hair was short instead of long and his nipples were black instead of pink, his skin red instead of white...
Then it came to me all in a flash, and I said to myself, "Why he's not Yvette after all!"
And so that night all my romantic fantasies and girlish dreams were fucked out of me. I knew then why the other girls were no longer satisfied with their lovers. How can I explain the effect on a fourteen-year-old girl of being fucked for the first time by a woman?
Hackett: The best of both worlds?
Molly: Please don't joke about it! I was never the same afterward. After that night, even the incredible things that came later seem somehow unreal, unimportant, as if they followed naturally from this one act. That little red-hot poker jabbing in and out of that tender twat of mine burned away everything that had come before, and left me wide open to everything that was to follow. I yielded to everything. And it was the same with the others.
She gave me my first chain-orgasm, I thought it would never stop. And that savage grunting, those iron fingers clamped on my hips, that thing stabbing into me, the slip-slop noise we made with our cunts, and those hot bursts and sprays that came out of her-I never forgot those things, they never lost their vividness...
I might not have doubted that it was a dream, except that when I woke up the next morning my nose was all bruised and sore. And I had a burning discharge of fluid from my sinuses.
Dream or not, there was no doubt in my mind that it was Mrs. Verlain. It came as no surprise to me when I happened to wake up one night and see her leading Yvette from her bed. We never got along well after that, Yvette and I. In the weeks that followed we tried out many new partners among the girls, but every affair ended in jealousy and anger. No one could satisfy us now but her, and we all knew it, even the very young girls, eventually. We were in such a state of anguish and longing, we hardly even made a show of resistance. Our innocence was dead, and we were all anxious to bury it deep.
CHAPTER NINE
I asked what she meant by "others," though I knew the answer.
"The black men," she said, "they came out of the walls and carried us off to the initiations under the hill. But you didn't know that until it happened to you-"
There was a knock on the door. "What is it! I told you we were not to be disturbed."
"I'm sorry, Miss Molly, but it's urgent." It was the voice of the brunette who had brought the champagne. Molly drew the lapels of her wrapper together-they had gradually migrated outward at the persistent urging of her unharnessed tits, which bye the bye (stretch-marks notwithstanding) didn't look bad, and went to the door. I heard some kind of commotion down the stairs, but was more interested in the way the hall light shone through the brunette's gauze smock, outlining the bare hips and thighs inside it. All that lezzie talk had got me hot as hell in spite of myself. I may as well admit it, because it had a bearing on what followed.
The girl was in a panic. She said the so-and-so brothers were there again, drunk and tearing things up-including the girls. Molly threw on a robe and said she was sorry, but I'd have to excuse her for a few minutes.
"Need any help?" says I, "I'm pretty good with the old judo chop."
"Thanks, Drake, but I can handle it. This happens every month or so. It may take a while though, I hope you don't mind waiting."
"Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. Call if you need me." I hadn't wanted to take notes while she talked for fear of inhibiting her, but I was itching to jot down some of those pregnant phrases-key phrases. Some of them-knowing through the journals what lay behind the words-made my hair bristle like a porcupine. So as soon as she was gone, I whipped out my notepad and started scribbling. 1 hadn't been at it very long when I became aware of someone standing at the door, though I had not heard it open.
I looked up to see a little girl, about ten yean old, standing there looking at me. She had big blue eyes and her blonde hair was tied in two pigtails. In her plain white dress and loafers she looked like she might have just stepped out of a school room. She startled me so that it was a moment before I realized how out of place she was here.
Hi," she said. "Watcha doin'?"
Her face... it looked somehow familiar. But that was impossible; I'd only been in the state a few days, and never before today in Rodriguez. I asked her what she was doing here.
"Waitin'," she said, chewing on one of her pigtails and grinning at me mischievously. Waiting for what, I wanted to know, now knowing exactly how to proceed, though I am not usually uneasy around children. "Can't tell ya," was her answer. She followed it up with a giggle. Whatever the joke was, I was missing it.
"I bet I know what you're doin' here," she said in t teasing voice. Too big for her goddamn britches, I'm thinking, but I ignored the remark and got up to shoo her away. But the little bugger didn't shoo so easy, and those big blue eyes were something else. "Where'd ya get that funny beard?" she said.
"I didn't get it, I grew it-"
"Why?"
"Because I'm a sea captain, a pirate, as a matter of fact, and sometimes I kidnap nosy little girls like you and throw 'em to the bilge rats."
"I'll bet," she sneered. My hand was on the doorknob, but I hesitated.
"Listen, why don't you tell me what you're doing here? If you sneaked in off the street, your mama's going to be very mad when she finds you. And it won't go easy on you when the lady that owns this hotel finds you up here opening doors."
"I didn't sneak any place. My mother's right in that room down there-" she pointed down the hall "-and Miss Molly don't care what I do."
"Your mother-? You mean your mother works here?"
"No, she just brings me. But tonight we gotta wait."
"You? I suppose now you're going to tell me that you work here, eh?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" she said. The sassy little brat had me curious as hell now. In a few more minutes I might have pumped the truth out of her, but just then a door opened down the hall and up runs Mama.
"Kathy, what are you doing in there? Can't I take my eyes off you for one minute without-I'm sorry, Mister, I can't take my eyes off her for one minute without-Kathy, get back in the room!"
The woman's voice had an unpleasant dullness to it, but she was young and shapely, and had a certain loneliness in her eyes that appealed to me at the time, though her face was actually rather plain. Her flaring hips and legs were encased in a pair of metallic silver-blue slacks, into which was tucked a silk blouse of pale yellow stretched so tightly over her boobs that I could see the flowery patterns in her black lace bra, and the knobs of her nipples poked defiantly through both lace and silk. The first two buttons of the blouse were undone. She gave the impression not so much that she was trying to be sexy, as that she just didn't particularly care what showed. But even dressed like that, she was no raving beauty, and another time perhaps I would not have looked twice at her, but that night, as I say, even old Molly had begun to look good to me.
I assured her that the little girl had not bothered me, that I was just waiting for Miss Molly. "You too?" she said, and then looked as though she wished she hadn't. "I gotta go. Come on, Kathy," and she grabbed the little girl by the arm and started down the hall.
"Er-wait a minute," I called after her, stepping out of her room, "I'd like to talk to you. I mean, since we're both waiting. Come on in and have a glass of champagne." I really wanted to know what a little girl was doing in a whorehouse, especially now, since it apparently concerned Molly in some direct way. The woman paused and looked back at me. A strange smile curled the corners of her lips without affecting her eyes.
"I can't," she said, "but we can use my room."
I leaned over the banister and peered down the stairwell. I couldn't see Molly, but I could hear her smooth-talking the two drunks, who didn't sound quite ready to curl up with a warm whore. I guessed she'd be at it for a while.
"All right," I said, closing the door to Molly's suite, "that'll be fine."
Maybe I had some vague ideas in my head of things other than the gleaning of information, but I was totally unprepared for what followed.
As soon as the three of us were inside the room, he woman said matter-of-factly, "Turn off the light, Kathy."
The room went dark except for a dim, green shaded night light. Warm scented breath rippled over my face and two soft muskmelons flattened themselves out on my chest. Her lips covered my open mouth and her tongue touched mine, just as I was about to say, "But-!"
While we kissed, I was rehearsing my explanation-what I would say when she broke off: "I'm afraid you misunderstood me," I would say. "You see, I really did just want to talk to you," and so forth, but when she deliberately brought her cunt hard against my prick in a rolling uppercut, it all went right out of my head. So that when she pulled away and said, "Come on, but we'll have to hurry. Miss Molly won't be very long down there." I followed her to the dim-lit bed like a puppy dog.
The shimmering silver slacks opened at the side with a little hiss and unveiled a broad-cheeked ass half contained in a pair of black transparent bikini panties. Kicking off slacks and sandals, she finished opening her blouse and sent it fluttering off into the gloom. She faced me and reached behind her back for the hooks; her tits came out of the bra like two big phosphorescent jellyfish. She jerked her pants down off her butt and sat on the edge of the bed. I bent over and slid them the rest of the way down her outstretched legs, dropped my own drawers and crawled onto the bed with her.
She spread her legs wide, ready to go at it, and her big hairy crack smacked in the dark like a clam. I let her steer my cock for the hole while I grabbed a few quick mouthfuls of those big glowing jellybags, but her cunt was too dry; it was no use.
"Oh, shit," she said in an irritated voice ,"maybe you better go back. We haven't got time to-"
But I wasn't going anywhere just yet-except into that steaming twat-even if I had to rape the bitch. I mean, after all!
So I said, "Wait a minute, I'll take care of that," and I start licking those unprimed lips for all I'm worth. But damned if the pressure of the situation hadn't made my mouth as dry as her cunt. The more I licked the drier my tongue became. Finally, in desperation, I sucked up all the saliva I could from my glands until I got a pretty good mouthful, pried open her gash with my thumbs, and spat a big wad right into the hole. Bullseye! I worked the jaws up and down against each other until she was well-lubricated, and remounted her.
The tongue-work and whatnot had heated her up a little, and her own juices were now adding to the pot, so that this time it went right in-slick as owlshit, as the Floridians say. But no sooner had I started throwing it to her, when the little girl lets out a giggle. I had completely forgotten about her till then; she'd evidently been standing there watching the whole thing, peeking around the screen beside the bed. Mama jerked her head round and hissed at the kid, completely destroying our rhythm, "Kathy! Get the hell away from there, goddamn it!" Goldylocks ducked out of sight.
I threw her legs over my shoulders and gave her a series of fast jabs to the button, and in a minute I had her mind cleared of all outside interference. The Pope could have been watching and it wouldn't have bothered her. As for me, I buried my face between her boobs and imagined that Kathy was still standing there watching us-fingering herself, maybe...
I make that confession for one reason. Just as my young lady was squeezing the last few drops out of me with her twat, a sudden realization came to me that struck a chilling chord along my spine-a resounding echo of that moment under the hill when my own shadow stood ominously over the blackened bones of Simon Stone: the realization that this was just the sort of thing HE would have enjoyed.
At the time, however, I took this little flash only at its face value, namely, as a reminder that I was forgetting why I had come to the Hotel Mandalay. As I put the money on the dresser, I tried one more time to find out what she and the kid were doing there. I was certain she wasn't one of Molly's regular whores. In fact, I didn't think she was a whore at all, from the way she handled herself, at least not a professional. But she wouldn't talk. "You better hurry up, Mister-and please, don't tell Miss Holden about this. I'm not really supposed to-" I told her that I understood and that I'd keep my trap shut. The last thing I saw as I slipped out the door was little Kathy sitting in the corner with a smirk on her face, sucking a lollypop. I was more confuse now than before I went in there, but I made up my mind to get to the bottom of it before I left Rodriuez. I had a vague premonition that that little girl had some connection with the legacy of Stone's Island.
I had just settled down again on the couch and lit my pipe, when Molly returned.
"Get 'em bedded down all right?" I asked.
"Yes, at last. Those two are a big pain in the butt, but they've got money and don't mind blowing it, so I can't afford to run them off. Sorry I kept you waiting so long. Any champagne left?"
"Plenty. I hardly touched it. Do you feel like going on with the story?" She lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke slowly up into the candlelight...
"I've started it now. I have to tell it all, but the rest is... " She removed her housecoat and sat down beside me. "Well, some of it is hard to believe, even for me. I think that over the years I had almost come to believe that it didn't really happen, that it was some kind of delusion, a nightmare or something. But-" she looked me in the eye, intensely "-but it did happen, didn't it?"
"Yes," I said, "it happened."
She took a sip of champagne. "Where was I?"
"The initiations-"
She nodded. "The initiation. God, how I longed for it, and how I dreaded it! I didn't know what there was to dread, none of us did, because the initiated girls were sworn to secrecy, but we dreaded it anyway. The suspense was unbearable, you never knew when your turn would come. It was like Death Row, I guess, with just about as much chance of escape. Not that we couldn't have escaped, if we had really tried, but I don't think anybody thought about it like that, not seriously. That was part of his plan, to make us want it to happen to us, and at the same time to make us terrified at the thought of it-to be petrified when those black ghosts came stalking through the dark.
"They started with the older girls, more or less, and generally never took a girl who had not started to menstruate, but there were exceptions even to that, and there was really no way you could know when it would come. Sometimes they would take a girl a week, usually on Friday, but sometimes there would be only one in a month. They were gone four days, and on the night of the third day you heard such sounds in the air and in the ground! Oh, God -sounds that would freeze your blood-
"But then they came back. And how we envied them then! They were completely different-they acted different, talked different, dressed different. They had the free run of the island-except for the big house; they only went there when he sent for them."
"Stone?"
"Yes. They called themselves the 'Wives' because they got to sleep with him. Of course we didn't know anything about the little games he made them play with him, or that they only went| up there when he sent for them; they wanted us to think they went whenever they felt like it, and did whatever they pleased. They wouldn't even talk to us, hardly, except to swear at us. That shocked me, I think, even more than the way they dressed, I mean the way they talked in front of Mrs. V. They were really the upper crust, you know? - the aristocrats of our little society, and they let you know it too."
"You say they dressed differently?"
"Yes. What do you think of the way I dress my girls here?"
"Very nice, very sexy, the ones I've seen."
"Well, they're dressed for church compared to the way the Wives dressed. I remember how I blushed when Celia came down the hill that day. She was the first. We didn't know what had happened to her, she was just gone from her bed one morning, and Mrs. V wouldn't say a word about it, except that she'd be back soon. On the fourth morning we were out on the lawn beside the dorm having our art class, and here she comes down the path from the big house. We hardly knew her at first without her uniform on. We all had to wear long gray skirts and white blouses, you know.
"At first I thought she was naked, and she almost was. She had a long flimsy blue gown that you could see right through, and nothing underneath it. We were speechless! Celia was kind of plump, she had the biggest tits of any of us, and how they bounced as she came down the steps to where we sat! Her neckline was so low it looked like they would fall out at any minute, and you could see her pussy plain as day. We were all sure she'd catch hell from Mrs. Verlain when she saw her, but we were wrong. When Mrs. V came out she paid no attention to Celia at all. We were dumbfounded.
"After lunch we were sitting around on the steps waiting to go back to classes, when here comes Celia again, swishing along the garden path, smelling the flowers, with her tits still half-naked and the nipples showing through, and you could count every hair in that black bush of hers. She went right past us and down the path to the terrace where two colored boys were trimming the bushes. They stopped working and stared at her. We saw her motion to them and sit down on a bench behind a bush. They came over to her. Even from where we were we could see them grinning from ear to ear, and in a minute her gown came fluttering up over the bush. You can imagine how shocked we were, and how envious. Mrs. V had never even allowed us to talk to the Negroes except when absolutely necessary, and I don't think there was a one of us older girls that didn't have vague yearnings for them. They were the only men we ever saw. And now this! We would have all run down the hill to see what was happening behind that bush, but just then Mrs. V called us in.
"From then on our studies went to pot. For a while yet Mrs. V made a pretense of holding classes, but few of us made an effort to keep up. Other things were happening now. Something was entangling us. At night when that eerie music would start, I used to get the feeling that black things were creeping up out of holes and spinning a web all around us. You see, by this time we were confined completely to the island, no more trips to own. And now the weekly abductions, the strange behavior of our mistress, our little romances all shattered-well, I began to get a feeling of hopelessness. But it was almost a willing hopelessness, if that makes any sense. I mean, it was only at first that I, personally, thought about escape; after that I only thought about going deeper, however frightening it might be, going right to the center of the web. After all, where would I have escaped to? My whole world now was Stone's Island. It's important , to me somehow that you understand that."
"I understand perfectly. Please, don't think that I'm out to judge anybody, Molly. Everybody lives in his own little island, and few escape it this side of the grave." But this seemed to go over her head. That strange undertow of muted desperation was coming back into her voice, renewing its ponderous friction.
"Thinking about those nights now, it seems like me long dream of tall black shapes, manshapes, moving through the darkness, a slow dance to the tune of that organ growling under the hill. One girl after another was taken away and returned transfigured into a cruel sprite, a lusty lake nymph, free as the wind. This was the freedom I longed for, and none other. I used to lie awake in my bed, hoping and fearing that the phantom shape would come for me. For me! Longing and terror, those are the two words that describe it best-longing and terror in the same bed.
"But it was months before it happened. Once during this period my longing and curiosity got the best of my terror, and I did a little spying. It was the most frightening thing that had happened to me, including the hurricane; I trembled for days afterward.
"More and more frequently the Wives would go up to the big house at night. They never came back before morning. If you asked them what they did up there, they would say, 'Shut up, you little queer!' or 'Suck my ass!' or something like that. One day I decided that after everyone went to sleep in the dorm, I'd sneak up there and see what I could see.
"When the time came I was scared to death, but I was determined to go through with it. I got out of the dorm window without any trouble, but when I got near the big house I saw one of the Negroes guarding the front door. So I went around the east side of the hill through the bushes and came up on that side of the house. There was one light burning, way up on the tower at the northeast corner. There was a double door up there that opened on a narrow balcony with a wrought iron rail, and a window, but the curtains were drawn enough so that I couldn't see anything. A big vine grew there on a trellis that reached from the ground to the balcony, but it looked awfully high and scary. I was about to give it up again, when I heard girls' laughter coming down from the tower... "
It wasn't until Molly was well into her account of this adventure that I was able to identify its counterpart in Stone's journal. It is a passage reminiscent of some of the fantastic entries in his earlier books, though, unlike them, it is wholly devoid of my direct reference to reality. The entry is dated February 4,1930, and begins-
"While the Black Death rages through Europe, Grilles de Rais, Marshal of France, dwells secure in his castle, almost nightly taking his pleasure with the 'Maid' Joan, right under the noses of both the Dauphin and his young wife, Nastasie. But last night Nastasie heard the whinny of a horse in the courtyard and saw the Maid, disguised as a monk, ascending the tower to her husband's private chamber. She followed and secreted herself in an adjacent room, where she watched everything that occurred between Joan and de Rais through a parted curtain.
"The Marshal lay naked in his bed, his blue-veined yard bolt-upright. Joan smiled when she saw it. 'Monsieur!' she said, 'You have drawn your sword too early. The battle has not yet begun.'
"De Rais laughed and his yard dipped in salute. 'What outcome to the night's encounter do your voices portend?'
" 'My voices are silent,' said she, 'Another mouth speaks to me tonight.'
" 'Ah? May I see it?'
" 'Certainly, my lord,' quoth the Maid, lifting the skirts of her robe... "
By now Molly had climbed the trellis and crept up to the window with knocking knees. "The first thing I saw," she said, "was a big four-poster bed-it was right by the window-with Mr. Stone stretched out on it, propped up on a lot of silk pillows, and his red-headed prick sticking straight up in the air! That was practically the first time I had ever laid eyes on a man's genitals, and what a jolt it gave me. Those hairy balls hanging down and that big slimy thing jerking and jumping-actually it wasn't all that big, Mr. Stone didn't have much of a cock, but it looked big to me, especially since it was practically right in my face. Then I saw Carol standing near the foot of the bed. She was dressed in a long brown robe with a hood and a rope tied around the waist. A big silver crucifix hung around her neck, very thick and elaborately sculptured. She didn't have anything on underneath the robe, and she was holding it up in front so he could see her pussy. They were talking and laughing, but I couldn't hear what they were saying."
Then Molly saw the face of Celia, who was playing de Rais' wife in this little drama, peering out through a curtain near the bed. "She was clearly visible there, but Carol and Mr. Stone didn't seem to see her. Then Carol took off the robe and the crucifix and threw them on the floor. She climbed up on the bed with both feet and stood over Mr. Stone. She bent her legs a little and held her pussy open with her hands so he could see in... "
But Stone writes, "The Maid stood naked and majestic on the bed astraddle de Rais' hips, and he watched her coynte open of itself like a vicious flower. It yawned and snapped and made a hissing noise. 'It sings a sweet song,' said de Rais, stroking the hairy petals with his big toe. 'It is a battle song, my lord,' says she. "Then let us have at it, my pretty knight,' answered the Marshal, thrusting his toe into her parted flesh.
"All this Nastasie watched with outrage and alarm, but she did not dare reveal her presence, and in spite of herself her blood began to warm with passion."
It was affecting Molly the same way; already her land was inside her pajamas. "Carol stood like that or a while, giggling while Mr. Stone wiggled his toes around in her crack. Then she pushed his foot away and sat down on his chest. She pinned his arms down with her knees and rubbed her tits back and forth across his face. She took them in her lands, like this-" Molly cupped her big bazooms in her hands and hoisted them to attention "-and jabbed her nipples in his eyes. He kept snapping at them with his teeth, but she kept out of reach... "
Stone writes that de Rais was "nearly blinded by the thrusts of those red-hot pokers! She used her teats like battering rams, laughing with glee as she battered his face mercilessly. But when she spit in his face, the tide of the battle turned. De Rais overturned the kicking wench and covered her hips with his, thrusting his tongue down her throat. She became passive, subdued, undulating with her need for him. He put his hands between her open thighs and sank his fingers into her honeycomb. His wife could no longer restrain herself as the bulging head of her husband's great love-engine searched through the Maid's dark forest for the smacking rut, oozing with honey: she jerked up her skirt and with her finger went frantically to work in her coynte... "
"I watched this part very attentively," said Molly, "trying to imagine how it would feel to have that thing inside me. They rolled over so that Carol was on top again, and she raised up on her knees and straddled his prick. She took it in her hand and started rubbing it up and down the lips of her cunt -Oh!-I got so hot watching that I almost forgot my fear. I had my drawers down and my face pressed right against the window. Carol gave a little wiggle of her ass and settled right down on that throbbing thing. I had a perfect view of it sliding up into her hole. I could almost feel it myself! In and out, in and out-like Mrs. Verlain did to us, only slower-and so much deeper. Carol hunched forward a little and really went to work on him, she gave it to him good, and when he shot his cum, the bed damn near hopped across the floor with his lurching... "
"No sooner had the spurting explosions of his come died out, than the Maid drew her dripping coynte from de Rais' yard and sprang across the room to the door where Nastasie stood. She tore the curtain aside and de Rais sat up in surprise. There stood his wife with her nightdress up around her waist, her hand and coynte well lathered, her face red and bosom heaving.
"'Behold the beholder, my lord!' quoth Joan. 'Well, well,' said the Marshal, 'Won't you join us, my dear?' 'Yes, do,' said the Maid, jerking her into the room. Nastasie was speechless with fright and embarrassment. Joan threw her onto the bed and ripped her nightdress from her body. 'She's beautiful, my lord! I compliment you on your taste.'Thank you,' said de Rais with a bow, but she really is a frightful bore, don't you know.' 'Oh, please, Gilles,' cried Nastasie, weeping, 'please let me go back to my room! I'll pretend I saw nothing! Please!' But the sight of his young innocent wife lying there naked, pinned down by his mistress, also naked, was rejuvenating de Rais' passion, and already his mind was exploring the possibilities presented by this unexpected turn of events. 'Oh, you may as well stay, my love, now you've come. Ah, but you two haven't been introduced. Nastasie, this is Joan from Domremy. Joan, my wife Nastasie. The trouble with Nastasie, Joan, is that she is miserably inexperienced; perhaps you could instruct her in some of the, ah, livelier arts?' 'Why, I would be delighted, good my lord. Fetch me a length of rope, if you please.'"
They stretched Celia-Nastasie on the bed, face-up, and tied her wrists and ankles to the bedposts. By now Stone had regained his erection, and Saint Joan and her lover proceeded to instruct young Madame de Rais on the finer points of the Medieval blowjob, peasant-style. Carol lay across the bed on the side of Madame's face, while the good Marshal knelt on the other, so that his cock met her hips just inches above Madame's eyes, which "bulged with shock and disbelief," or so it is written. Carol first went over his penis and scrotum with her tongue, liberally bathing them with saliva so that the excess dripped onto Celia's face. When Stone gripped Carol's head in both hands and began rhythmically thrusting his member into her mouth, the slobber ran even freer, and soon Celia's pretty face was running with spit and sexual leakage. This sort of thing delighted Stone, and to heighten the effect he put his hand between Celia's outstretched legs and collected some of the lather she had generated in masturbating: this he spread over her cheeks and lips; another dip into the pot and he had her tits and belly well anointed also.
Meanwhile, Molly had already come in her hand once, and when she "saw the white stuff spurting out of that thing," as she said, she forgot all caution, plastered her face against the glass, and gave her hot box the finger-whipping of its life.
And here our two accounts intersect: Stone writes-
"Just then de Rais chanced to notice the face of his and Nastasie's young daughter Emma at the window, wide-eyed with wonder. For hearing he mother leave the bed chamber, she had followed and seen her stealthily enter the tower; fearful of following directly, but too curious to go back to sleep, she had slipped out a side door in the castle wall and climbed up to the balcony outside the tower window. 'Good,' thought de Rais, 'Let her see all, for soon it will be her turn,' but he told neither his wife nor his mistress of the watcher, nor did he make any sign to the child that he knew of her presence."
This discovery no doubt quickened the restoration of Stone's twice-drained organs, and before long his prick stood again at the ready. He now had his "imminent conqueress of Orleans" give Nastasie a lesson in the Lesbian arts, while he stood aside and watched. But he was most interested in watching the watcher watch!
Surprisingly soon (under the circumstances of the drama) Joan's rapid tongue brought Nastasie to a jerking climax, but Monsieur de Rais stroked his penis slowly, savoring the carnal display he was giving his daughter...
"I didn't even see Mr. Stone then; he must have been standing off to the side of the window. Pretty soon Carol rolled off of Celia and picked up the crucifix she'd had around her neck. She sat on Celia's chest with her legs spread and held the big cross in front of her face-"
"' I confess that I have not been faithful to your husband, Madame,' said the Maid, pressing the Holy Tree between her teats. "This is my other lover, who directs me in battle-'"
"Then I saw Carol stick the crucifix into her cunt, feet-first, and fuck herself with it. I could tell it was getting Celia hot again watching it at such close range-I mean, for all the heterosexual experience they had gotten in the last few months, I think they were still basically Lesbians. I know it was a long time before I began to really prefer a man to a woman. And there's something about seeing a holy image like that-something you're supposed to worship-being sloshed around in a wet cunt, that-well, anyway, it got me hot too. She got her cookies on it, or pretended she did for Mr. Stone's benefit, maybe-and then pulled it out and went to work on Celia with it. And then it happened-"
"Suddenly, with a shout, de Rais leapt in front of the window, pointed his fire dragon at his daughter's startled face, and discharged volley after volley of thick steaming love-sap upon the glass, obliterating the image in a teeming cataract!"
In cold panic Molly jerked up her pajamas and somehow got over the rail and to the ground without killing herself. She didn't stop running till she reached the open dorm window, but once she looked back-just before she rounded the front corner of the big house...
Stone was standing on the balcony, illuminated by the yellow light from the open doors, stark naked with his cock hanging over the rail, urinating and laughing up at the full moon like a wolf on a mountain ledge. And he cried out in a ringing voice which must have resonated over Lake Leethy from shore to shore: "I PISS UPON YOU ALL FROM A GREAT HEIGHT!"
And so, in that world as in ours, then as now, the watching went on. The watching and the waiting. Molly would not have much longer to wait. As Stone had said in the voice of Gilles de Rais, who was burned for heresy, "soon it will be her turn," her turn to watch the watchers watching her. Re-member that old cartoon in the Journal-the Watchbird? "The Watchbird watches YOU," it said. But who is the Watchbird? and who does he really watch? Maybe we're all voyeurs under the skin, eh? But what is it we're watching? Molly watched Stone who knew she watched; in this knowledge what was he really watching? And me; I was watching the whole phantasmagoria unfold before my eyes, watching the very island pump itself on and on toward its last fiery orgasm, its final bloom as a flower of flame. What was it I was really watching?
I think now of Narcissus, whose eyes saw only the reflected image, whose ears were deaf to the echo, the echo perhaps of an inner voice which would have shattered the fantasy. Was it this voice that needled through the moaning chord that pierced me to the bone that first night on Stone's Island?-this voice alone that had driven me on from the very first to uproot the gruesome secrets from those dead ashes? What are those bidden truths which we all instinctively avoid and yet drift insensibly toward as if on some relentless tide, some subterranean undertow which sucks us on toward that vague black vortex which threatens our very existence, toward the sharp-edged voice which seeks the breastbone?-a voice which perhaps will come upon us at the last ditch and say, in the words of Stone's Maid of Orleans, "Behold the beholder!"
CHAPTER TEN
While Molly's fears and longings continued to build, Simon Stone was carefully plotting every detail of her coming initiation. From the first, he had taken a special interest in his "luscious little M," and would have begun his weird gamut of pleasures with her long before, if it hadn't been for his preoccupation with the "ecstasy of waiting," and for wanting to pluck her just at the moment of her psychological ripeness. It seems to me that for all Stone's madness he had an instinctive ability to determine the mental climate of his victims. He seems to have deliberately picked the strongest girls first, those who were most likely not to break during the ordeal, and then to use them like corrosive chemicals to eat away the resistance which the other girls would normally have had-that feminine "reticence" that he disliked so. On the other hand he didn't want them too willing; then they would not respond properly to his terrorizing processes. In the case of Molly for instance, he wanted to bring her to "the perfect balance between fear and longing, revulsion and envy." As we have seen, Molly's account of this period amply testifies to the accuracy of the man's observations and insight, and to the success of his technique of playing the initiates against the novices.
Another reason for his excitement over the approach of Molly's "moment" was no doubt the fact that she would be his youngest flower to date. A careful study of Stone's seventeen journals would show, I believe, that his pedophilia was growing gradually worse over the years. That is, the ideal age of his victims seems to have decreased in some sort of inverse ratio to his own age, so that in a few more years it would probably have dropped well below puberty. (I am going to make no attempt here, by the way, to solve the riddle of Stone's age; the various opinions I have been able to collect are at such absurd variance with each other that it is impossible to come to a conclusion.)
Anyway, the ecstatic waiting at last came to an end, and Molly's moment arrived. Stone's entry of March 3,1930, began as follows: "The torches have been lit for the consecration of the eighth virgin, M. It will be a special event; the oracle has prescribed some innovations, certain changes in the ceremonies to bring us even deeper into the spiritual pit, even closer to the dark fountains of the body of the Evil One, whence gush the waters of eternal life."
That night Orcus went down the south tunnel to the girls' house, up the narrow stairs to the second floor, and entered the dark dorm through the sliding wall panel. Now that Molly's time had come, she was frozen with fear; she said that if she could have moved a muscle she would have fought for her life, "But I was paralyzed. And yet it was like he had picked me up by the nerve-ends; I could feel every vein and ripple in those steel arms, and I could feel the black heart beating inside him." She said the sobs and screams welled up in her throat but would not break free. "That was the first time I can remember since coming to Stone's Island that I ever thought about my mother. I wanted so bad for it to be a horrible dream. I'll wake up in a minute, I told myself, and I'll go hug Mommy's neck and cry on her shoulder and tell her about it, and she'll stroke my head and say, 'Oh, poor little girl, don't be afraid, Mommy's here now, it was just a bad dream,' and then she'll hold me in her lap in the rocking chair and sing to me. But then we went into a dark part of the tunnel and I felt a cold draft and I remembered that Mommy was dead and that Mrs. Verlain was one of them and that I was only fourteen years old and there was nobody anywhere to save me-"
But the sheer horror of what followed crowded all such thoughts from her mind. For now their route took a sharp turn down and to the left and the narrow corridor opened out into a howling cavelike chamber full of long darting shadows. Along both sides of this hall were ranked black demonic figures, their loins girded in shaggy skins with holes cut to admit the genitals, and brass chains hung around their necks. At the far end, silhouetted against a huge monstrous face illuminated by a ring of torches, stood the figure of Simon Stone in a black cowl and robe, arms folded before him like a priest. The close damp air was filled with a whining whirr that echoed through invisible hollows, growing louder and louder as though at any minute the chamber would be filled with hoards of insects. And cutting through this terrifying hum was the brittle squeal and clatter of steel on rock.
Suddenly Stone raised his arms over his head, and the cacophonous clamor died down to a low breathing sound. Though his words cut into Molly's brain like needles, she had at the time of our meeting forgotten all but a few phrases. This speech, according to the journals, ran as follows:
"I am the priest Loki, slave of Lucifer, servant of the goddess Hel. You are one shorn of name and identity, and you have entered the sacred lair of the dragon Thuremlin-Midgard to be devoured. Thuremlin-Midgard will taste you with his tongue: if he finds you sweet, he will swallow you whole, but if he finds you are bitter and resist his caresses, his great teeth will gnaw you through and you will cease to be. That is your first test. Then, if in the course of your passage through his body, at any time you repulse him, he will vomit you up in a great wave and his teeth will not spare your contemptible flesh. But if you are found worthy, you will on the third day pass from his body as excrement and we will form from your digested remains a new shape with a new soul and a new name, and your former inferior soul will remain forever in the bowels of Thuremlin-Midgard. Thus reborn, you will lie in holy communion with the Black Master to consecrate your body to His service and be admitted to His fold. But first you must swear a sacred oath never to divulge to any mortal ear these things which you are about to witness and undergo... "
Molly swore the oath in a voice which must have been barely audible. Then Stone clapped his hands and a black man stepped up with a closed basket, and brought it out clutching a snake by the throat, live and writhing. Orcus's iron fingers forced Molly's mouth open. Stone held the serpent up before her face.
"This is a child of Nidhogg the Snake King, whose tongue knows truth from falsehood. If she tastes deception in your mouth, she will tear out your tongue by the roots. But if your oath was sincere, she will not harm you."
Stone then lowered the head of the snake into Molly's mouth and its foul breath hissed down her throat, but she was evidently too frightened even to vomit. (I would guess here that the snake's jaws were bound, but who knows how mad Stone really was?)
"Very well," says Loki, "you have passed the first test. But if you ever break this oath, in whatever remote time or place, the snake people will seek you out and deal unto you the penalty of final death. Prepare her for the sacrifice!"
Molly was then stripped naked and placed on a small raft, probably made of coconut logs. Her legs were spread wide and strapped in place and another strap was passed over her waist, but her arms and upper body were left free. Several Negroes then stepped from the sides of the hall and like savage pall-bearers lifted the raft and solemnly carried her, feet first, toward the gnashing teeth of the dragon.
I became very curious about this "dragon," Thuremlin-Midgard (Stone often referred to it as "Womb-belly," or simply "Old Cunt-mouth"), and one day I finally discovered an unblocked stairwell leading down into the lower chambers where I knew it must be. These sea-level tunnels are now nearly completely filled with lake sand, but with a shovel and a little guesswork I was able to make out a wheel-like design; the rim-which formed the belly of the dragon-runs nearly the whole circumference of the hill and is connected to a central shaft by a number of hollow spokes. By making my way through one of these spoke tunnels, I was able to find the "entrance hall" where Molly was taken and, with a little more digging, the head of Old Cunt-mouth himself-or herself.
The thing had evidently been carved from sandstone blocks erected at the end of the antechamber. It stood about twelve feet high, had bulging reptilian eyes, rimmed with rough-hewn scales, and a huge gaping vertical mouth fully eight feet tall and shaped exactly like a vagina with the lips spread open. On either side of this mouth, behind the stone "folds" were little alcoves with raised platforms on which two men might easily stand. And all along both "lips" small slots had been cut through the stone. By these devices Stone was able to fit his monster with teeth: four men, two on each side, evidently crouched concealed in the platforms and manipulated eight swords through the slots. Molly said the teeth were "long and curved, dripping with blood, and shiny like steel." The great eyeballs were hollowed out from behind with slits cut in front like the pupils of a cat's eye, and inside each was a socket for a torch. Similar sockets were cut into the wall of the "lair" up and down both sides of the head.
Even as it was when I saw it, by flashlight, dead and toothless, this grotesque visage numbed me to the bone. Imagine how it must have affected little Molly Goldsmith who lay helpless before it that night, her tender private parts bared to its stabbing teeth gleaming in the torchlight, and its ghastly eyes blazing down at her! Nor did she see cold stone as I did: "The jaws were all red and bleeding and the teeth seemed to cut right through them, and all around the mouth and eyes was a thick mossy beard-!" Because when Stone wrote, "Thuremlin-Midgard awaits his prey, new-decked in hot flesh," he meant just that. Before every initiation he had the monster's lips covered with the raw flesh of dogs and cats collected from the town by his servants. As for the pubic "beard," this must have been made from moss and brambles wedged under the stone scales, and serving among other things to conceal the teeth-wielders.
Now Molly is brought before the maw of this voracious worm, the shadows of his clashing teeth darting over her naked body.
"Behold the tongue of Thuremlin-Midgard!"
And out through the meshing teeth comes a long, limber pointed tongue, whipping and flickering the shadows above the trembling girl, red-fleshed and glistening. She watches horrified, afraid to resist, as the dripping tip creeps up her white leg toward her crotch. Clumsily, crudely, it jabs at that quivering flower between her thighs, but enters only as far as the inner lips. As the "tasting" continues, the insect-like hum increases to a howling drone, and the teeth grind and clatter louder and louder upon their stony gums.
At last the tongue withdraws into the dark maw, and Molly feels herself being thrust up into the foul breath of the dragon, through the bloody jaws, iron fangs hissing above and below her, missing her by inches. She glances to one side, panic-stricken. A drooling scimitar darts from its bloody slit, straight for her eyes. She blacks out.
When Molly came to, she found herself afloat on the raft in the vile-smelling belly of Thuremlin-Midgard. For a while the distant torches beyond the throat sent grim shadows of his teeth stabbing into the gloom overhead, but soon she found herself plunged in total darkness, and the sound of the gnashing fangs died out. Only then did she become aware of another sound beneath the low drone of the worm's breathing: the scurrying sound of tiny clawed feet...
"I kept thinking, No, not three days, they won't leave me in here three days, he was just saying that, it was just part of the game, and that's not really rats I hear, they're just making sounds like rats to frighten me-"
But soon there appeared in the gloom ahead a cold glow. It was a bundle of phosphorescent seaweed, and as she approached it she saw the rats in the greenish light, hunchbacked and popeyed, running to and fro along a narrow ledge just above the water, stretching out their forefeet toward the raft. Long after the raft had passed beyond the phosphorus glow Molly kept her eyes tightly shut and her arms stiff against her sides. She tried to force all thoughts from her mind except those of what a grand life of pleasure and warmth she would have when it was all over, of how much fun it would be to lord it over the little girls, and of what beautiful sexy clothes she would be allowed to wear-
But she was not to be left free to choose her thoughts; Stone was too thorough a terrorist, too perverse a lecher, for that. He had a million surprises planned for her along the way. At certain intervals Stone or one of his men would appear in an opening in the inner wall of the tunnel and douse her with water, or something worse. Once in a while a burst of sewage would shoot over her raft, or a black man would step out on the ledge and urinate on her as she drifted past. Sometimes she would come upon a Negro man and woman copulating on the ledge among the rats, and when she approached they would wipe their genitals and throw the slimy rags at her face and body.
At certain times they dangled a chunk of half-raw meat over her head on a pole, and if she tried to grab it with her hands they jerked it away. But on the second day she learned that if she didn't use her hands, they would allow her to eat whatever she could snatch off with her teeth until the raft drifted beyond reach of the pole. The only liquid she got was whatever blood she could suck from that stringy gristle.
On and on she went, day after day, until her mind was a running sore. Sometimes the hum and scurry would be overlaid with a moaning chant: "Dead, dead, dead. You are dead, dead, dead... " It seemed to come from all directions at once. At other times her forward progress would cease, and they would haul her backward for hours on end. At these times the thought of going back through those teeth nearly broke what was left of her will to survive.
But survive she did, and after some seventy hours on that gastric river of death, Molly was at last rewarded with a glimpse of torchlight, its yellow fingers flickering just around the next bend. But at this point "fat old Baubo" was hoisted over the stream in a commode seat, and as the white girl passed below, the old witch thoroughly defiled her, and her mad cackling filled the resounding caves.
At last Molly felt the straps being loosened from her waist and ankles; strong hands cast her from the raft into the foul water, which with a sudden belching surge, washed her limp body through the rectum of Thuremlin-Midgard and out into a great heap of wet dung, smoking in the firelight.
Stone now considered our heroine quite dead, digested and soulless, and was anxious to begin the rites of rejuvenation. Molly was bathed, blindfolded, and carried upward through a series of winding corridors to the altar room of the Cathedral of Satan. There she was chained to a pillar and her blindfold removed.
Her three-day ordeal in the dragon had so shocked and blurred her emotions that she now viewed the bizarre scene before her with a kind of uncomprehending passivity, just what Stone wanted: a clean photographic plate, well-emulsified, ready to be exposed to the images and imprinted with the will of Hell.
To one side of her, on a wooden semi-circular bench, sat the seven neophytes in casual flirtatious poses, legs crossed or spread, lips painted in scarlet. They were dressed in short red tunics of a transparent material, pleated and loose. The upper parts of their breasts were bare and their nipples were hardly blurred by the gossamer cloth. Around their necks hung the double-dragon medallions on fine gold chains. Their heads swayed from side to side in time to the dirge-like music of the organ played by old Minos, invisible at the console behind a stop of gleaming pipes. The music and the luxurious side-to-side swinging of the girls' long lustrous hair had an almost hypnotic effect on Molly.
On the other side sat seven tall muscular Negroes on another curved bench. They too swayed from side to side with their hands on their knees and their flashing eyes all on Molly. They were dressed in crimson kilts of fine satin embroidered with cryptic signs in black and gold, and around their necks also hung the chained medallions. Bands of hammered bronze encircled their upper arms, and each had a gold ring in one ear.
In the center, between Molly and the elevated organ, stood the altar, a large flat stone resting on three rough-hewn boulders of encrusted limestone, wrenched from a sea reef. The smooth surface of the slab was stained with blood.
All about the gallery the walls were hung with red velvet curtains, and at even intervals stood tall bronze braziers of yellow fire. At various places the curtains were drawn aside to reveal massive gilded doors, each painted with a red rune-like inscription. The journals say they were painted with blood, but Stone does not translate the runes.
Soon the music died to an eerie murmur, and inside his cell behind the organ Stone bent over his wife Amanda, gave her a nice Venetian kiss in the crotch, put on his headdress, and stepped out into the quivering light of the apse.
For all her dulled reflexes, Molly caught her breath when she saw him. For though he still wore his priestly black cape (without a cross), now from out of the cowl thrust the long-fanged snout of a great wolf, and its eyes were empty sockets, black and hollow. He took his stand behind the altar and raised his arms aloft.
"I am the priest Loki-Anubis, judge of the living dead," he said. "We are gathered here to consecrate to our purpose and cause the Asar M, here before us without name or soul, to test whether she be found pleasing or loathsome to our supreme master, the Black Lord, and, if He finds for her, to restore her miserable remains and infuse them with a new name and soul of His choosing."
Here the dog-snout swung straight toward the chained girl and the hollow eyes fixed her with a black stare.
"Does the nameless Asar know that she is now but lifeless excrement, nothing more than a vile turd, fresh shit from the anus of the soul-eater Thuremlin-Midgard? putrescent clay to be molded according to the dictates of our god Satan-Lucifer?"
Molly told me, "I was so frozen with fear, I couldn't say a word or move a muscle," but according to Stone she nodded her head.
"Very well," he went on, "You shall now, accordingly, be permitted to watch that which no unconverted eye may witness on penalty of death by torture: the Black Mass."
Whereupon the supplicants, black and white alike, set up a moaning chant over the echoing continuo of the organ. Molly looked at her former lover Yvette and hardly recognized her distorted face, but she felt no emotion. Only ragged scraps of memory of a world and time before her "death" in the jaws of the hellworm fluttered across her consciousness and blew away in the wind of that droning song.
When it was over, Loki-Anubis turned his back on the altar and muttered a long rasping incantation of unintelligible gibberish. Then it was time for communion. The "black Host" was brought through one of the wide doors on a tray of hammered silver, held high by a beautiful Negro girl (Hecate) wearing nothing but a "gown" of white beads strung on long strings and fastened together only by a wide collar of copper wire; the clicking strands parted in two places where they fell over her bosom, completely exposing her jutting black-tipped breasts and giving striking contrast to the rest of her bare brown body. She placed the tray on the altar. It contained sixteen triangular wafers, lack as coal, and a crude chalice of green copper. Stone boasts that these "Hosts" were all stolen from local Roman Catholic churches, then cut and blackened with menstrual blood; but he doesn't say how he managed these thefts. As for the consecrated wine, nowhere does he give his recipe, but Molly said, "it had a horrible bitter taste. I could never drink it without breaking out in a sweat, and it turned ice-cold in your stomach."
Loki-Anubis now leans over the tray, his yellow fangs dripping, and drools upon the black Hosts. Having thus received their final consecration, they are once more borne aloft by the bead-clad altar girl, but the chalice is left for the present on the slab. Hecate and Loki-Anubis first cross to the bench of the Negro supplicants, and the priest takes one wafer at a time from the tray and places one on each extended tongue. The black men partially chew the crackers but do not swallow them. Now the priest and the girl step aside, and the white "sisters" rise from their pew.
Across the apse in front of Molly they come, with slow seductive steps, their bare butts winking through the red veils, and the organ begins a slow swinging chant, eerie and erotic. When they reach the leering black men, they jerk up their skirts and sit down on their laps, legs straddling the men's hips. Molly watches Yvette take her partner's face between her hands and raise up on her knees; black fingers slip up under her tunic and cup the pale buttocks, creep between them with bold caresses...
Yvette lifts the man's face up from where it burrowed between her breasts and plunges her tongue into his mouth, fishing out a portion of the half-masticated wafer. When each girl has swallowed her morsel, she rises again to her feet; but before returning to their places a few of them bare a breast and brush a teasing nipple across the lips of their partners. (Wherever Stone describes this part of the Mass, he invariably has it that at least one of the girls squirted a stream of milk into her partner's face!)
When the girls are seated again, the second part of the communion begins; each communicant has so far taken only half a Host into his body: he must eat a whole one. Old Jackal-head crosses the floor to the other bench, Hecate by his side, the prominent cheeks of her brown ass thrusting aside the bead curtain as she walks. Loki-Anubis kneels before each girl, who in turn holds up the hem of her skirt and spreads her legs to receive the Sacrament. Then, one by one he inserts seven black cookies into seven fuzzy pussies, and tamps them home. Now the Negroes rise and cross the floor like a skirmish line of black warriors, their erect pricks standing out under their kilts like tent poles. They kneel before the sisters and kiss their knees for admission. It is granted, and the shadowy thighs open wide. Again Molly watches Yvette. The thick-wooled head of her "brother" twists and turns as his tongue probes deep for the unholy Host, and the strong dark hands again slip into her tunic from below and slide slowly up her belly and ribs until the long white-nailed fingers close gently over her cherry-crowned tits...
Celia's co-communicant was the first to succeed in extracting from her twat the hallowed tidbit. Still kneeling, he lifted his face to hers, the limp wafer between his teeth. Celia then gripped it in her own teeth, and together they tore it in half and ate it, nose to nose. As soon as a couple completed his maneuver, they would fall to kissing and caressing each other with hand and tongue, keeping it up until all had communicated properly according to the rules of the coven. Then the men rose, gave the girls a short jab in the face with their satin-covered cocks, and returned to their seats.
But the pseudo-Eucharist was not quite over yet. Molly, being still a novice, could not of course take Communion, but there was still Father Loki and his altar girl. This was accomplished in a separate ceremony and witnessed by the congregation.
Old Minos deadened his rhythm a bit, and went into a heavy fugue on the reed stops. Loki-Anubis stepped up to the altar, turned his back to Molly and with a ceremonious flourish draped himself over the slab. Hecate steps up, whirls around once making her beads stand out, flips up Stone's cape and solemnly crams one of the two remaining Hosts into his asshole.
This done, the priest drops his skirts and steps back. Hecate now mounts the altar facing Molly, her buttocks resting at the edge of the stone, legs spread and dangling off, tits bare and pointed upward. Loki-Anubis spreads the beads from her cinnamon loins and steps aside to give Molly a clear view of the altar girl's black-bristled cunt. Deftly he parts the wool and shoves the last black wafer out of sight between the glistening lips.
Now Minos lurched into an African tempo, a howling love chant, and Hecate let out a yell and leapt from the altar. She began to dance, a whirling, bumping, grinding, tit-shaking dance, around and around Molly's pillar, while Loki-Anubis dropped to all fours, barking and howling and pretending to snap at the brown girl's ankles as she whirled past him. As she spun wildly around the column, her whistling beads whipped and stung Molly's naked thighs and belly, and the supplicants cried out hysterically, clapping their hands to the thunderous beat.
Suddenly Hecate shrieked gleefully and leapt onto the back of the barking jackal, but mounting ass-backwards, so to say-foot to head. As he thrashed about, making a show of trying to throw her off, the girl jerked up his skirts, dug her heels into his armpits, and plunged her face between his bared buttocks, snapping at his balls and jerking at his prick with her hands. The congregation cheered and shrieked when she sank her claws into his cheeks, spread them roughly apart, and sank her tongue into his asshole, sucking out the black lozenge.
The Host clenched between her teeth, Hecate rolled off onto the stone floor, and with a savage snarl the wolfman pounced on her with all fours, pinning her down. He unhinged the jaw of his wolf mask and lowered his face to hers, tearing off his part of the wafer with his teeth. Molly said she had he most terrifying feeling that at any moment the wolf-jaws would snap shut and crush the girl's skull.
When they had savored and swallowed the fouled sacrament, Stone whirled around and, with his genitals in Hecate's face, savagely wrenched open her highs. She nibbled at his balls and sucked his cock is his tongue fished deep into her cunt for the hidden cookie. As soon as he drew it out in a mucoid blob, the black girl bowled him over in a flurry of lying beads and sat heavily on his chest. She opened the wolf-jaws with her hands and plunged her face between them like a lion trainer in a circus.
And so ended the breaking of the bread at the evening service of the Stone's Island Church of the Antichrist, as at our heroine's feet the long-eared celebrant and his beaded aide, with drooling fang and heaving breast, ingested the last slimy shred of the black Host. But Communion was not over yet.
Having ritually eaten of the tortured flesh of the Dark Angel, the communicants now turn to the drinking of "His black blood, boiled in Dis, frozen in Cocytus, yet eternally potent."
To this rite, as to the celebration as a whole, Stone had made some additions and "improvements" on the classical models of traditional witchcraft. Though obviously well-read in both science and the humanities, modern as well as ancient, Stone held to the Aristotelian belief that male semen was highly purified blood-and, conversely, that female "semen," that is menstrual fluid, was blood of an extremely impure nature (which should give us some idea of at least one ingredient in his sacramental wine). He also went along with the Seventeenth Century investigators Hartsoeker and Dalempatius, who saw in every sperm cell a tiny, long-tailed human embryo, fully formed. But since his blackamoors were possessed by "intelligences from the pit," Stone believed their sex organs to be irreparably altered, so that, as he put it, "In every wiggling sperm of their black loins crouches an un-coagulated demon from the body of the Great Proliferator!" In accordance with these concepts, he proceeded thus with his Eucharist:
Two wooden stools were brought out and placed at each end of the altar. The priest mounted one stool, the altar girl the other. With a crooked pine wand Loki-Anubis traced the ancient sign of the swastika over the blood-stained slab, then lifted both arms in a grotesque semaphore of the crucifixion. The seven black men rose now and spaced themselves evenly along the altar, three on one side, four on the other. At a nod of the dog-snout, they hopped onto the waist-high stone and lay back on it with their legs hanging off the sides and their pricks standing straight up under their kilts. The banquet being thus laid, the film-clad witchlets came to table; each stepped up between a pair of black legs and threw back the satin coverings.
Then quoth Loki-Anubis in a loud voice, "The Lord Seth, overseer of the pit, Black John, triumphant, saith: 'This is my blood, drink ye all of it!' "
With a joyful shout they fell to feasting. Molly watched Yvette-who was on the other side of the altar, facing her-bend hungrily over the huge twitching tuber before her and touch its oozing mouth with her tongue. She gripped it with both hands and smeared the spittle and leakage all up and down the throbbing black trunk and down over the corrugated scrotum. Then, with her laughing eyes on Molly, she slid her painted lips down, down over that demonic cock as far as they would go. In a burst of wild laughter she sprayed her partner's belly with saliva and prick-juice, and he rubbed it over his skin and into the long blonde hair that draped his jet hips. Molly stared, dimly amazed that she could be aroused after what she had been through, as Yvette's head began to bob over the enormous member in rhythmic caresses with her lips and tongue.
All around the table, as their juices rose higher and higher, the men groped freely in all directions, clutching and caressing any and all tits within reach, male and female alike grunting and gasping with swelling passion. Meanwhile, back at the console, old Pops Minos was blowing a dirty, lowdown, whorehouse blues, and on their pedestals above the communicants Wolfman and the bead girl were laying down a wild syncopated chant, with strophe and antistrophe, and doing everything but the hambone.
Finally the orgasms began, and the cum flew like seafoam. The sexual tide of Yvette's man was one of the first to crest and break into those pink-tongued lagoons. Stone's perverted muse describes it this way: "The first burst blasted Y's head completely off the muzzle, nearly breaking her neck, and the thick smoking bombs exploded over her face, blinding her and filling her nostrils-" But as Molly remembers it, Yvette simply raised her face and pumped the prick with her hand, letting the cum shoot into her mouth.
It was important that the girls swallow the entire load, even as it is written, and so whenever the good father spotted one of his children waxing deficient in this duty, he would give her a smart whack on the ass with his staff.
And so when the possessed blackamoors had all been thus ceremoniously blown and temporarily divested of their "uncoagulated demons," Loki-Anubis immediately took up the great battered chalice and gave it to the supplicants to pass around, urging them with howls and curses to drink it down, drink it down, "Faster! Faster!" When it came back into his hands, he up-ended it and drained the last drop. This ended the communion, and everyone now fell to the floor as if in a dead faint.
"For a long time they just lay there like they were asleep," Molly said, "and then another girl in beads came in with some food on a tray. I don't know what it was, something hot. She put pieces of it into my mouth and I ate it, because I was half-starved. Then she poured some cold water into my mouth and left. After that I went to sleep- standing up, chains and all. I don't know how long I slept, but suddenly I was aware that the music had started again. It was a high-pitched, sing-song kind of thing, like... " She hummed a folksy little ditty that reminded me of the music to which the dwarfs come dancing through the forest in that modern TV ballet The Evil Queen, somebody's adaptation of the Snow White story, but Molly's tune was even spookier than that, what with the candlelight playing on her pallid face and that gradually building undercurrent of hysteria in her voice, like a Wagner opera whispering on toward the soul-rending thunder of its climax.
"When I opened my eyes, I saw the girls dancing all around me and the altar, shaking their tits and flipping up their little skirts in back to show their behinds. The men were still on the floor but they were sitting up, clapping their hands in time, and grinning at the girls. Sometimes they'd pinch their butts if they got close enough, but Simon wasn't with them. He was sitting in a tall wooden chair on a raised platform behind the altar. I hadn't noticed the chairs before-or thrones I should call them; there was one to the right of the altar-the one Simon was in, and another empty one to the left. In the center of the platform was a heavy dais of oak, carved all over with horrible faces and strange signs and letters. Hecate stood Reside Simon with her titties poking through her beads.
"Anyway, they danced and danced, getting sexier and sexier, and closer and closer to their audience on the floor, and the boys were getting hard-ons again. I was beginning to think-or to hope, anyway-that maybe my ordeal was about over, so that I almost enjoyed watching this part-" As I say, Stone seemed to know exactly when the physiology would crack, precisely when it needed rejuvenation. "Finally one of the men made a grab for Yvette's tunic and ripped it right off. She laughed and kept dancing around naked, but the next time around the same guy tackled her around the knees and jumped on top of her. He ate her pussy and then fucked her... " (Stone's version: "His abrasive tongue got her cunt so hot that a cloud of pungent steam hissed out of it and scalded his ears... and when he shot his molten load into her, I saw the incandescent gobs glowing inside her stomach, her radiant skin transmuted to a lucent foil by the ambient passion of the Dark Presence... " Nowhere outside of Criswell's Book of the Worms have I read such wild raving as in these last few notebooks of Stone's journal.)
So the dancing rapidly degenerates into fucking, until, one way or the other, all the suppliants have been had. But no sooner has the last wad been shot, when Molly is nearly deafened by a sharp explosion beside her left ear.
A loud voice boomed out of nowhere: "Nerthus-Njord of the Cold Lake, scourge of Hel, queen of Niflheim!" And suddenly in the wings of this weird theater appeared a tall muscular red-skinned woman, her oiled body and polished trappings flashing in the torchlight. From her right wrist, on a leather thong, dangled the butt of a blacksnake whip which lay out before her at full length on the floor. On her head was a bullet-shaped helm of bronze that extended to the nape of her neck in back and to the bridge of her beak-like nose in front; the cruelly slanted eyeslits had sculptured lids and feathered brows, skillfully incised. Slender upcurved horns sprouted from the temples, and from her ears hung swastikas of black iron. About her rippling upper arms she wore brass bands inscribed with runes, and her solid-looking breasts were held in round cups of bronze mail held in place by leather thongs; at the centers of the cups were large holes through which her black nipples thrust their long tips straight out before her. Her feet and calves were encased in tight rawhide boots studded with brass and silver bands in criss-cross pattern. Her graceful midriff was bare to the hips, around which was girded a belt of large polished disks, stamped with the image of the double-dragon, and from this belt hung a thigh-length skirt of coarse unbleached muslin with a panel removed from the front to reveal her genitals. Out from her pubic hump and down between her thighs, parted in the middle into two combed strands, hung a jet-black tight-waved beard. (Stone has its length at halfway to her knees-and maybe it was... )
But most obscene and terrifying of all, from out of the midst of this beard, from the top of her open slit, protruded a thick livid member of stiff flesh, curled upward like a beckoning finger.
Molly demonstrated her pose to me; I was put in mind of certain Egyptian or Babylonian colossuses, those fearsome monolithic reflections of masculine femininity, dream images of the tyrant mother: She stood straight and rigid, with her high-heeled feet wide apart, and her arms stiff at her sides, held out at a small angle from her body, palms turned outward, fingers unbent and slightly parted, each bound with a brass ring and tipped with a steel talon.
This image, though I only got it second hand, will follow me to the West Indies and 'round perdition's flames, as Ahab said-it will haunt me the rest of my days.
Frequently, during those last few years, Stone's diary writing would shift from first to third person narration, sometimes jumping from one to the other without warning, as though his "observing self" dwelt one moment in the body of Simon Stone, the next in one of those omnipresent demons of his "who come in the air." This is how he describes his liturgical rape at the hands of the amazon:
"The judge Loki-Anubis then prostrated himself upon the altar of Satan in order that his body might be purged of whatever secret conceits of self-righteousness still dwelt there, whatever vile vapours of Christ's blood still lingered within him." (In this way Stone rationalizes his masochistic compulsion-and incidentally gives us one of the few allusions to his Catholic upbringing to be found throughout the journals.) "Nerthus-Njord, with gleaming helm and nippleless byrnie, addresses the blood-soaked rock and, by authority of our Banished Prince, strips the vestments from the confessor's back. She spat upon his bared rump to whet the flesh and spread it about with her clawed hands. Her long lash like a living snake coiled upward among the black witnesses afloat on the living shadows, and in a whistling shriek rent the trembling flesh. With savage precision, for the Master guided her hand, the lash wrote upon his backside a magical benediction in bleeding runes, and from the flayed flesh rose black smoke, and with every crack of the whip the wolf-eyes glowed brighter and brighter with the reflected light of Hell, the internal fires of the soul dedicated to the Night. His fangs drooled with bile, green then black, and the red tongue lolled on the stone, twitching like a death-bound worm." And so forth.
Molly says that, indeed, Mrs. V beat the hell out of him, and that (though she remembers no smoke or bile) the blood ran free. "But he seemed to enjoy it," she said. "He never put his hand to his cock and neither did she, but he got his gun all right. He kind of hunched up, you know, and you would see his butt jerking up and down. That was her signal to stop, and when she rolled him over, I saw the sticky pool of cum on the altar and on his stomach. Some of it was still leaking out of him in a long string. Mrs. V smeared her hand in it and rolled him back over. Then she rubbed it into the crack of his ass... "
This was for lubrication. With the torn robe she mopped the blood from his back and rump-the cuts could not have been too deep, for all Stone's boasting-and vaulted up onto the altar. She straddled his striped bottom and stood over him for a moment in that colossal pose, clitoris twitching like a thirsty tongue thrust through the vertical lips at the parting of that black shag that hung down to God knows where. Though she tried to sweep it from her mind, Molly could not help being reminded of the grizzly jaws of the leviathan Thuremlin-Midgard who had eaten her alive. All that was lacking were the teeth.
Now Nerthus-Njord bent over and gripped the hips of Loki-Anubis with her hawk-like talons, lifting his ass till he rested on his knees, head and shoulders still flat on the stone, arms akimbo. He still wore the wolf head, but nothing else save his black sandals. Dropping to her knees behind him, she brutally spread the cheeks of his ass, guided her fleshy dagger to the exposed hole-and rammed it in!
Details of the conversion of the "squaw Verlain" into the Teutonic hermaphrodite Nerthus-Njord, full-fledged member of Stone's coven, are missing, but he makes it clear that this was the first consummation of his dream of being raped by the strange creature he watched in the infirmary that night through his trick mirrors. And raped he was -literally and brutally ravished. He says her clit darted in and out of him so fast that "a wind of brown blood broke from the tortured hole!" As she pumped away, her hands went around his hips to his crotch, and she milked his prick at her own copulating rhythm and clawed at his balls with her steel nails.
Finally she got her cookies, and Stone says that, "Loki-Anubis shrieked in ecstatic pain as a bolt of blue lightning shot out of the He-She and exploded in his rectum like a bomb of needles!"-at which time he too offered up another spurting volley of semen to Black John.
Now the time had come for the Devil to appear in person and accept the sacrifice of the virgin M. (Stone considered every girl a virgin once she had passed through the digestive tract of his dragon, no matter what had happened to her previously.) If she was found acceptable by the "tall black man," as the Inquisitioners used to call him, then she would be infused with a new soul and christened with a new name.
Loki-Anubis was sponged off, revived with wine, and clothed in a fresh cape, while the He-She carried a great horn of strong drink to her adoring covey of naked neophytes on the bench. The black brothers also partook of this brew, and old Minos started up a whining sirensong that seemed to strain the very forests of Transylvania through his shivering pipes. Molly says the music and the drink changed the mood-a dream-like atmosphere settled over the gallery, and the worshippers began to sway back and forth as though in a trance. Again the priest took his seat to the right of the dais, the beaded Hecate at his side, and Nerthus-Njord sat straight and silent on the other chair, her chainlink breast-cups expanding and contracting rhythmically as she breathed.
Two of the brothers now approached Molly and fitted a black blindfold around her head. She was then unchained from the pillar, but her wrist and ankle shackles were left on. She was carried to the altar and chained down on her back in a spread-eagle position, except that her knees were bent and strapped to two wooden uprights set in sockets near each side of the slab-sort of a delivery table setup. She was left like this for some time, and a cold flame of fear grew in the pit of her stomach until her bones turned to ice. Then suddenly a chilling draft swept over her naked body and through the blindfold she saw the torchlight waver and go dim for a moment. (Stone has it that "every flame was extinguished and the cathedral was stricken with a flash of darkness... ")
Then the blindfold was removed and Molly was aware of a huge presence at the foot of the altar, but cold fear locked her gaze into the shadowy vaults of the ceiling. Over the tense strains of the organ she heard heavy guttural breathing with a rattling hiss at the end of each breath. Then she knew she was going to have to look. She didn't want to look, didn't want to know what it was that stood there dark and heavy at her feet, leering down at her secret flesh. "It was like driving fast down the road and knowing that in a minute you will swerve over into the other lane and hit another car head-on, and there is nothing you can do to prevent it, it's just something that you know your muscles will do all by themselves. I felt-or it seemed that I could-his shadow creeping up my legs, over my stomach, my breasts, and I knew that when the shadow got to my face, I would have to look-"
Stone writes that "the scream of the offered corpse when she viewed the face of her lover made the very flames in the braziers shrink with alarm! His smoking nostrils flared and the scales of his ridged brow clattered in anticipation of the morsel before Him, empty and devoid of the vapours of His enemies. Mounting the altar, he swung his great black phallus in a wide circle with his horned hands, and his blazing eyes scorched her flesh! Down he came, the point of his long tongue darting about her face, tasting her pale lips, quivering into her ears. His serpent lips nibbled at her eyes, sucking up the gushing tears and spraying them back into her face as steam from his nostrils. His fangs, sharp as needles, pierced her neck, and he fed upon the undead blood, sweet as sin... "
"I felt his scaly lips scrape down between my breasts, and his rough fingers pinched my nipples. His breath was hot and strong smelling and it seemed to flow all over me at once. His tongue was like a lizard's tail, long and slimy. He licked me between the legs with it, and wiggled it up inside me. Oh, God, how he burned me! He split me in two with that tongue that wasn't even a tongue, it was like I really became two people-one was still a terrified little girl, full of horror and loathing for that thing, that beast, snuffling and rooting in her crotch like a pig and scratching her with those awful claws, but the other one! -the other one was shocked beyond belief that she could be aroused by such a monster, but she was aroused. That tongue, those scaly lips, they were kindling a fire in my cunt-not the cunt of the little girl, but the cunt of a wanton slut who actually reveled in the sheer horror of being fucked by the Devil!"
"Ha! I could hardly keep my hand off my yard when I saw that beautiful shell, that passionate husk, rippling with lust for the Black Fiend! He took his huge scabrous member in his thorny fist and scraped its bulging head on the lips of that dainty gash, and the tender flesh opened in a soundless scream of joy and horror! In one voice the faithful gasped and intoned their dissonant hymns of adoration, and as the head of that one-eyed dragon squeezed into its new-found burrow, distending the crimson walls, the first sparks of living earthfire appeared in the eyes of the slaughtered lamb. How lovely she was, how brave! How her spine curled as she folded herself over the black ram between her flowering thighs! In, in, in it went, and the hymn rose to a shrill crescendo, a wave of fire and ice, breaking over us and him and her in a crash of gas and crystals... "
Imagine it. The wolf-headed priest and the bronze-masked dyke with her black nipples and bearded cunt, the naked brown girl in her curtain of beads, the intoxicated worshippers, naked and gleaming with love-juice, swaying and moaning in the torch light, and in the center, at the throbbing axis of the spectacle, on a stone slab such as men have sacrificed upon since the Paleolithic dawn, the toad headed black giant laboring over that white-skinned slip of a girl whose breath comes in grunting gasps from the sheer force of the terrific engine grinding through her body, battering down the last frail barriers to her womb...
"He destroyed me, he split me all apart with that thing. I felt my very bones opening up and spreading out, and my head kept flashing red and orange and black. Sometimes he would raise his head and hold my face in his claws and make me look at him-at his eyes-and he panted on me and the whole room went whirling around, slow, sickeningly slow. It felt like his thing was right up in my stomach, getting bigger and bigger and spreading me all out of shape, and my eyes would go out of focus. I couldn't close them, I had to look and look and keep looking till I died, and I kept thinking in a minute I would die and that horrible face was the last thing I would see, with the green flames burning all around it like a frame-and I did die. I died over and over again but I still saw it and felt it, and I kept falling apart in smaller and smaller pieces till there was nothing left of me at all. I blacked out completely, I know I did, but it kept on killing me just the same. I dreamed, and even in the dream I couldn't get rid of that whore in me who could feel the pleasure all through the hurting-
"I saw my body go all limp like a rubber sack, and the long pole went right through me and came out my throat, and when the black head came out he took it in his own scaly lips and floated up into the air, going over and over and round and round like a wheel, with me skewered on that thing. I was nothing but shreds of rubber, fluttering in the wind as he whirled away into the dark. Then way up ahead I saw a light, a yellow light, and a voice said, "It will take a million years to get there, where the light is, but then you'll be safe." And we flew for a long time, and the light got bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter-and then I knew I was really going to explode. There was a bomb in me, filled up with all the deaths that had killed me, that had tried to kill me, but they could not kill the one little park, and that spark was the bomb, and I knew in minute it was going off, and when my eyes opened there I was back on the stone, covered with sweat, and it went off. One of the girls told me later that I was laughing when he got his gun-I guess I was laughing because that light we had flown toward so long, where it was supposed to be safe, that light was right there in the room, right back where we had started. I realized that sometime during the explosion. It was so clear to me, and awful. Doesn't make any sense now, does it?"
"As He brought her to her climax the hill shook to its very bones and the torches lashed the faithful with stinging shadows. In a moaning hiss the black steam rushed from her navel and fountains of milk like magma erupted from her distended nipples, and her limbs quaked and lurched in demonic spasms, and Loki-Anubis could see the green glow of rushing fluid surging from the hidden springs of her ovaries. Her thorax swelled with the sacred semen that flooded her every pit and hollow-blast after blast!-until it leaked from her pores, her ears and nose, and ran from her mouth and eyes in thick, smoking runlets...
"... As He withdrew from the mouth of her carnal crucible that massive cork, such a spurting flood poured from her that it ran off the altar in seven boiling cataracts!"
Molly had no recollection of her assailant's departure from the cold couch, but Stone says he cleared the distance from the altar to the dais "in one effortless bound, slow as cooling pitch," and reclined there in a satyr-like pose, his dripping cock draped over a black thigh.
Loki-Anubis, at the right hand of Satan, now rises to speak (though Molly remembers none of this):
"Kneel, children! This unworthy gift has pleased our black Lord. Hail Satan!" The worshipers take up the cry. "The tongue of His dark member has rent the restored hymen and tasted the dead blood of the nameless one, the Asar M, and found it pleasing. He accepts this husk, and finds it a fitting vial for His sacred poison. Now, in His presence and in His name, shall the Familiars know also of her flesh, for she is without totem or spirit, a vessel to be filled. Let the Familiars approach!'
Molly says that she was in a stupor during most of what followed. "It was so much like a horrible nightmare that even when it was all over I didn't believe it had really happened. I didn't believe it until later when I saw them do the same thing to the next girl... "
A rasping hush fell over the room, a scurrying hiss of silence that resonated in soundless echoes through the dismal vaults. The silence in that room is almost a tangible thing; I have sat there, alone, and felt it pressing on me, funneling in toward that one place from all those burnt-out voids in the honey-combed hill. It's as if the dead had imprinted their voices on the stale air, embalmed their essences in the scratching scurry of rats feet and the rip of rainwater. There is almost a roar of silence in the place, as in a seashell or a skull. It must have been the same then, the same voiceless sound that Molly heard and felt through her delirium that night thirty-nine years ago as she waited for the next assault upon her tormented body; because the hill was a tomb even then; it was a tomb even before Stone drowned his wife and took her corpse to his bed; like an Egyptian pyramid it was erected for that purpose alone. But it was worse than that, thousand times worse than a pyramid, because this tomb was intended for the living.
The rustle of feathers and the inhuman hiss were more an intensification of the silence than a breaking of it; and the broad spread of black wings at the foot of the altar was more a fluttering blur behind the eyes than an indication of shape and mass. But then sharp claws raked her inner thighs, and the pain forced her whole body into focus: in a black flash she saw the great swan beat the air, its long neck thrusting at the shadows which held it, its clawed feet flailing furiously. With a clattering hiss he bird's hot breath scorched her belly in a swooping arc. She remembers a black hand dipping into a small pot and smearing something greasy and bad smelling between her legs, and then the swan jabbing at her with its beak, jabbing straight at her eyes-then nothing. "I must have fainted again," she said. "The next thing I remember is that snaky neck swaying over me-I thought it was a snake at first, a dancing snake. It bit me, it bit my breasts and my neck-it kept striking at my face and hissing, but they held it back. Then it stopped biting, and its wings stopped beating my legs, and it put one foot on my stomach. I was so sore all over I hardly felt it, but I saw it there, pushing hard on me, and when it dug its claws in it was like nails being driven into every inch of my body, all at once. It seems like I should have known what was happening, what would come next, but I was utterly shocked when it stuck that thing in me! I thought I was being set on fire-'They're going to burn me alive!' I remember thinking. I heard screams of horror and flapping shapes all around me, and I thought, 'Why are they screaming?' and then I realized that I was the one who had screamed, the rest were echoes-echoes and hallucinations. 'I'm dreaming that a swan is fucking me,' I thought, 'I'm dreaming that a big black swan is fucking the life out of me.' "
For Molly the rest was a blur. She dreamed that she was being ravished by black animals of all descriptions-sphinxes, serpents, vultures, rodents, insects. Stone's account is hardly more intelligible, but it is clear that she was to be given sexually to three black animals-all important shapes in Stone's mytho-demonic system: a swan, a dog, and a goat. Other animals were used for other initiations, so that each girl was given a different "soul," her own personal hybrid totem.
Molly vaguely remembers being unshackled and set upon her hands and knees. "I fell, but they held me up," she said. The goat was brought to the altar, and judging by what Molly remembers and the bruised condition of her body afterward, it must have been quite a struggle; but Stone says, "The goat Dionysus, long horned, shaggy and smelling of dung, mounted the lusting girl-shell with a will, clutched her slim waist with his hooves and pumped his torrid brew into her sucking hole with such an ear-piercing bleat that a thousand devils sprang anew from the Pit to view the spectacle."
Far off, in the dark corners of her numbed perception, Molly heard the vicious snarls and smelled rank urine, as the dog Fenir-"a black mongrel, half wolf," Stone says-was beaten into position behind her. "When the drooling beast dismounted, the yawning cunt of the newborn was a scorched hull of black flesh, a limp sack, a smoking gate, open forever to the phallic children of the Pit... "
At this point they must have given Molly something to revive her; Stone wanted her awake to witness her own christening. She found herself unchained, lying on her back upon the altar. All round her towered black giants, naked and gleaming in the torchlight, their cocks in their hands. Each one put his hand into her cunt to lubricate his member. "I knew I wasn't tied down, but I couldn't move a muscle. I could only watch. The music had started again, and it got faster and faster and louder and louder as they masturbated. By the time they started shooting on me, it was deafening, didn't even have the strength to turn my head-it spurted all in my eyes and nose and mouth, and felt it splattering heavy and wet all over my tits and belly."
It wasn't until then that she noticed the dog headed Loki-Anubis on his knees at the foot of the altar, hunched over, his drooling snout thrust up between her legs, furiously jerking off in the storm of semen raging out of the black cocks over his head. With ecstatic groans and gasps he approached his orgasm, and his passion-strained chant drummed through the driving howl of the organ-"Your name is Oni-Kalma, your name is Oni Kalma, your name is Oni-Kalma." He shot his load straight into her gaping wound: "ONI-KALMA IS YOUR NAME!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The games and the initiations went on for two more years. Stone drew it out, savored it, added to it; he increased his sway over his flock to an absolute tyranny, a tightly closed system responding to his slightest whim with the utmost sensitivity; but at length he tired of it, as perhaps he had tired of his wife Amanda. In spite of his attempts to arrest all movement, he saw movement continuing, saw the girls aging in spite of the spiritual death he had inflicted upon them. He had also wanted to shock the town, but the town seemed indifferent to him. I have not done enough, he seems to have thought, I must go further.
In the last entry of the journals, dated December 22, 1932, Stone makes his decision: "The time has come for the dead to die again. It shall begin with her. Tonight." And that's all. For the rest I must rely on Molly and my own imagination.
The torches are lit and the music begins. The Master has ordered everyone present, though no mass was scheduled. Strong wine is passed around and soon there is almost a party atmosphere in the gallery. The dais and the thrones are empty. Soon Molly begins to feel giddy and sexy. She decides to dance. She is wearing a long-tasseled G-string and gold pasties. Somewhere, behind some screen, through some peephole, Stone is watching, perhaps with his joint in his hand. What is he feeling at this moment? All the transformations have been made, all the wild dreams incarnated and carried out to their bloody ends, all the luscious twats tickled, pickled and fucked to a fare-you-well-What was left him? Remember the voice that sang in Molly's head while she was being raped by the Devil?-"It will take a million years to get there, where the light is, but then you'll be safe." Had Stone run his million years and found himself in the end right back where he had started? Had he forged his chains so tightly that even he could not escape them? Does the hot blood still rush into his prick now as Molly tears off her pasties and waggles her tits in the faces of his Negroes, little innocent Molly whom he snatched from the outside world and transformed into a lascivious slut, ready to fuck at the drop of a hat? Does his breath still come hot and heavy as she throws her cunt in Gorgon's face and lets him take off her G-string as she pulls him to the floor in front of the others and sucks his cock and smears her juicy slit over his face, as he spurts his load down her throat and she swallows every drop and sucks for more, because, as she told me, "I really got to enjoy the taste of a man's cum, I washed down every meal with it!" as she rolled him over and stuck her tongue up his asshole as far as it would go? as her old sweetheart Yvette steps up, rips off her clothes and buries her face in Molly's sudsy cunt, as Charon drops to his knees and shoves his black dick into her asshole? as little Mary, not contrary, eleven years old, climbs with a giggle on Mammon's lap and skewers herself on his pike? Does he beat his meat as of old, and "splatter the walls with volley after volley of smoking love-sap?"
I want to tell you something, John, and you can leave it in the script or take it out, it's all the same to me. In fact, you can take the whole goddamn thing and burn it for all I give a shit. I wish to Christ I'd never stuck my fucking nose into it. I've got one hell of a bad taste in my mouth over it, and this morning I damn near threw the son-of-a-bitching thing in the motherfucking ocean. As I write this, I'm already halfway to Barbados and don't even know why in the hell I'm going there. I tell you this thing has got me all fucked up, John- I'm sick to death of it. I wish I wasn't the sort that has to finish every goddamn thing he starts; some things ought to be left hanging, abandoned. I started getting a funny feeling about it even then, that night the old whore was spinning it out. I got the goddamnedest urge to just get up and leave and never know how Simon Stone died or how the fucking place burned down. Let me spit it right out, John: I'm too much like that son of a bitch and I don't want to be like him!-Remember what he said-"I've got promises to keep." Promises my ass! It's just another way of saying that you have no control over the direction you're going. And that's just why I keep working on this cockeyed thing, because I promised myself I'd finish it. It's just like that asshole in Frost's poem that stopped to look at death in the cold woods; he too had promises to keep-that's the only thing that kept him out of those woods. But, goddamn it, John, that's no reason to go on living, just to get to the end of some fucking road that you don't want to come to the end of. Stone went his own way, and maybe that's what interested me about him, but now it becomes crystal clear that even he ended up right back on the road, the road that goes round and round and always ends up right back where it started, not a gnat's ass closer to the "light." And me, sailing off to the West Indies as if that's where the light is. I tell you, John, the whole thing is depressing the shit out of me. Excuse me for puking all over the paper. What I wanted to tell you is something that happened on my last night in Lake Leethy.
Yvonne had met a new one and invited him to the cottage that night. As usual, Billy and I ducked out the back door and took our stand at the window. She greets him with a sloppy kiss and says, "We're in luck, my husband just left." I could see his prick pushing his pants out as he watched her walk to the kitchenette for the drinks, her bare ass twinkling at him through her black negligee. She winked at me out the window as she set the drinks on the nightstand beside the bed.
Seeing she was ready for action, he didn't waste any time. "You look beautiful," he said, running his fingers through her long red hair and staring down the front of her negligee. She breathed a "Thank you" in his ear and pressed her lightly veiled cunt against his cock, "Wouldn't you like a better look?" You bet he would. She stepped back and opened the front of her gown, and those big tits of hers nearly knocked his eyes out. He dropped right down on his knees in front of her and reached up for her jugs, burying his face in her thick bush. She spread her legs for him and his tongue slipped into her slot like a fish into a sack. It was a lively fish and it didn't take but a few seconds to turn her on. "Oh, wait," she pants, "I want it to last longer!"
In a moment he had doffed his clothes and joined her on the bed. He mounted her backward and they went into a fast-moving sixty-nine which brought them both off together in a very short time. Yvonne took the whole load in her mouth like I taught her, losing only a little. It was a copious blast, but she'd picked a virile young stud this time, and he was soon ready to go again. This time he fucked her straight-that is, in the cunt-with her big beautiful ass propped up on two pillows and her legs wrapped around his neck. This cat was so well hung, so long and lean, that he was able to double himself up and lick her clit while he fucked her without missing a stroke. (In the old days of the Alley Patrol such a sight would have really turned us on, eh, John?) Next time she got up on her hands and knees and he gave it to her in the ass, dog-style, fingering her twat and rolling her nipples as he worked...
All of a sudden two things popped into my head: one, the picture of Simon Stone standing at his peephole in the last few hours of his life; and, two, the realization that I didn't have a hard-on.
I left Billy standing there and stormed in the back door like a mad bull. I must have caught Slim right in the middle of an orgasm, because his cock came out spitting like a grasshopper. I grabbed the son of a bitch by the neck, dragged him out the front door and kicked him down the steps. On the second bounce he came up running, fast. I threw his clothes out the door, but they were still there the next morning.
When I came back in, Yvonne said, "What the hell did you do that for? What's the matter with you?"
"I got bored, that's what's the matter! Pack up the goddamn gear, we're shipping out of here in the morning!"
Now, what the fuck's happening to me, John?
So what was left Simon Stone, who had built his fortress on the doorsill of Hell? He had exhausted the pleasures of hot blood; he would now turn to the cold. He would take that final step over the threshold, because there was no other way for him to go. There could be no turning back for him now; he had made his total commitment to death in 1928 when Hell sent a great wind against his enemies and lured the sweet victims into his snare. He had even gone through the pretense of making a choice, a final affirmation: either this, or that. But that's all it was, a pretense; he had made his choice long ago.
I see him leaving the peephole, moving down the dark corridor to his cell. He opens the door and the stale stench of death envelops him. Who knows how it smelled to him? If he smelled it at all? He stands over the dry bones, looks into the empty sockets of her eyes, long since emptied even of worms. Who knows what he saw? Nothing he ever wrote, except for that fantastic record of his "vision" during the hurricane, indicates that he saw anything but cold, pristine beauty, the image of the perfected female, young and unchanging, saved forever from the transformations of time. Just as the slightest altering mark of time upon living flesh cut him to the quick, so to the same degree was he able to ignore completely the alterations of death-the decay of the flesh, the invasion of the worms, the reek and rattle of hollow bones. He had perhaps prophetically hit the mark when he likened himself to Poe, for he loved his Anabelle in death far more than he ever could have in life.
So what was left Simon Stone? Death, that's what, though he would not have called it by name, the last step over the doorsill, the final ultimate advance which would at last bring him into that realm of light where he would be safe, where a million years would have no more effect than a day. He would fill his castle with the pristine beauty of death. And he would begin tonight. He would begin, as he said, with "her."
"We had a chain going. I was sucking off Ades while Abadon fucked me in the ass, and Ades was eating Barbara who was eating Yvette, and so on. We were all half-drunk and fucking and sucking away, when all of a sudden the music stopped and there was Simon, standing on the platform. We stopped and started to go back to our seats, but he told us to go on with our fun and sat down on his chair to watch. He had his priest's outfit on but no mask, and he had a sort of faraway look in his eyes. So we' kept on until everybody had shot their wad, and then went back to our seats. Simon just sat there for a long time, staring up at the ceiling. We wondered what was up and started whispering to each other... "
Then Nerthus-Njord came in and took her seat to the left of the dais. Except for snakeskin boots and her bronze helm she was naked; she carried her whip in a coil over one shoulder. She sat as usual with her legs spread, displaying the shaggy beard and open jaws of her grim gash. The heavy roar of silence was broken only by the hiss and sputter of the braziers. Was this pause planned, was it an intentional prelude, a death-hymn to the first act of this vast new drama about to unfold? Or was Stone growing impatient? Were the muscles of his face twitching? Was something happening in the bowels of the hill unknown even to him who imagined that he knew all? Another drama long in progress of which he knew nothing? Some waxing, outraged force at work against him, a counterforce equal to all the strength he could muster from the Pit? Had he miscalculated somewhere?
Soon the great doors swing open and two tall blackamoors enter with measured step. They carry between them a black cushion. Stone rises and approaches the altar. The cushion is brought forward and placed upon the slab. On it lies a jeweled dagger, long and sharp. Stone grips the dagger with trembling hand and holds it aloft. The blade flashes with black fire, the gems of the hilt flickering in a silent song. With a triumphant flourish he throws back his hood.
"Behold the knife of truth, the key to the infernal city! Look at it! See how it gleams! It is the spiritual knife of liberation, forged on the anvils of Dis, tempered in the waters of Cocytus, born of ice and fire and the power of our king, Satan-Lucifer, triumphant!"
There was more, but Molly was more fascinated by the strange light in his eyes than the words in his mouth. There was something about the sacrifice of a white lamb, and she remembers the words, "twice-dead" and "the gift of flesh." Then the speech ended, and awkward silence again settled over the room. Stone placed the dagger on the altar and stared at the closed doors at the back of the hall. What was happening behind those doors? What was causing this delay of ultimate pleasure and fulfillment?
At last the coffin is brought in. It is borne down the aisle on the shoulders of six black men and placed carefully before the altar. Something stirs inside, scratches at the lid. The pallbearers back off into the shadows, and Stone steps to the foot of the coffin. The dagger shivers on the altar like a live thing, impatient to be fed. The watchers grow rigid. The air is drawn and tense, tight as a bowstring. The priest waits... but nothing happens; the silence crackles like a burning fuse...
And now Stone does the unthinkable: he loses his temper.
"GODDAMN IT, WHERE IS HE? HE HAS TO BE HERE!"
Immediately he regained his composure, but it was too late; he'd blown his cover. He had gone out of character. In that brief moment he had shed the aura of an all-powerful priest of Satan and revealed the frustrated sex-fiend within. If this outburst was not Stone's undoing, it was at least Molly's salvation; its effect on her was tremendous.
"Can you see how it was?" she said. "Can you understand that we all really believed that the Negroes were demons and that the Devil really visited us in person? He had made us believe it so thoroughly that it had never even occurred to us to doubt it. I don't know how the others took it, but in that one moment the reality of the situation came crashing in on me like a landslide. Suddenly Simon was like an angry little boy throwing a tantrum because his playmates would not go by the rules of the game. I didn't know what was in that coffin and I didn't know what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to be something horrible. And for the first time since we'd come to the island, I wanted to run away and never see any of those people again. I started looking around for a way out and noticed that one of the doors on the east side was open. I could swim to one of the little islands, I thought, and hide there until a boat came by. Of course I would never have had the courage to actually try it, and anyway they would have caught me before I got halfway across the room. I'm just telling you what was going through my mind, because if I hadn't spotted that door then, I never would have gotten out alive."
But if in that moment she had begun to see the light, what followed was to plunge her into darkness and doubt for years to come.
At last the double doors swing in, the flames flicker and dim in the chill draft from somewhere, and down the aisle comes the Angel of Darkness, the claws of his toes rhythmically rasping upon the cold stone. The faithful fall on their knees as usual, moaning their chants of suppliance to the Master. Like a great flesh-eating bird he passes by them and mounts the platform, but he does not sit. Stone looks at him curiously. The Fiend glares back coldly through his reptile eyes, the scales of his neck and jowls rattling ominously, his long tongue quivering in the gloom. His giant form is shrouded in a black cape, and he looms over the assembly like some great lizard-headed bat; he leans slightly forward, as if at any moment he might spread his wings and soar through wall and earth into the brooding dark. A confused, fearful murmur passes through the ranks of naked bacchants. Perhaps Stone felt-as I did, listening to it-some terrific unresolved syncopation, alien and retrograde, perhaps his first indication of a sub-rhythm long in progress which did not respond to his baton and never had. But whatever he feared, if he feared anything, he could wait no longer; he stood now at the very threshold of a new beginning, a new realm of wonder-and the Devil could stand or sit, just as he pleased. He rises to his feet and proceeds with the sacrifice.
"It was like when I was chained on the altar. I didn't want to look, but I had to look. I knew something horrible was going to come out of that coffin, and I didn't want to see it. He opened the lid and at first all I could see was something white inside the box. Suddenly I wanted very much to be dressed. It was like one of those dreams where you find yourself naked on a busy street, and there's no place to hide. I groped around in the shadows for something to put on, but I couldn't find anything. I touched Yvette's leg accidentally, and it was ice cold and covered with goose pimples. Then the white thing raised up out of the coffin, and it was horrible-it was horrible just because it was so beautiful.
"It was a girl-or the ghost of a girl-and her beauty was like a sharp pain in my eyes. She was so white that she seemed to glow, like those phosphorescent lamps in the dragon's belly. Her hair was snow white and hung below her waist, it draped her shoulders like a shawl of spun silver. I remember thinking it must be true that your hair keeps growing after you die, like people said. Because I think that whatever doubts I had begun to have about Simon and the Devil and the demons and every other fantasy he had drummed into us, I never for a moment doubted that that girl was dead. You could almost feel the cold of death radiating from her body. Any slim hope I might have had of going through with my escape plan vanished into thin air; I was frozen solid with fear and awe.
"The ghost looked as blinded by us-or by the torches-as we were by her. She seemed to shrink in fear from the light, dim as it was, like she hadn't seen light of any kind for a thousand years. It seems like she stood there trembling like that for an eternity, but at last she took her hands away from her eyes and looked around. She looked but she didn't seem to see anything. Those eyes of hers will haunt me to the grave. They were the color of the moon-that's the only way I can describe them. It wasn't even a color really-just a deep dead glow. Like the moon...
"But that was the only thing about her that you could describe as having color. Even her nipples-she was stark naked; I could stand up right now and strip off every shred of clothing, every piece of jewelry, every speck of make-up, and I would not be that naked; if her skin had been peeled off, she could not have appeared more naked-even her nipples were colorless. And the hair between her legs was like a mat of cobwebs. You got the feeling you could see right through her skin, see the veins and the bones-I don't mean to say she was thin; she wasn't. Her figure was perfect-high breasts, slim waist, full hips-it was just that she seemed to have no weight. Even when he lifted her, it was like he was just going through the motions to give the illusion that she was really made of flesh and bone. If someone had opened one of the vents and let a draft in, she would have drifted up onto the altar without his laying a hand on her-like a puff of lint. But he picked her up anyway, and lay her face-up on the slab. She looked frightened, maybe not in a human way, but frightened just the same. She seemed to have no power to move of her own accord; she was like a doll with movable joints, so that wherever he placed her limbs, that's where they remained. This made her seem all the more like a corpse. Not until the very end did she make a move under her own power-like that was the one thing in the universe that could animate her."
"What? What thing?"
"Wait. Simon spread her out on the altar, just as he had spread all of us out so many times before -with her legs open and knees slightly bent. He lifts his robe and climbs between her legs...
"We'd all seen Simon fuck-seen it so many-times that nothing was more commonplace to us. But watching him mount that colorless ghost, that painfully beautiful corpse-I tell you it was the most grotesque, the most horrifying sight imaginable! To me-surely to all of us-who had been steeped for three years, three of the most impressionable years of our lives, in the careful study and deliberate practice of blasphemy, this, beyond all other things we had done or heard of, seemed blasphemous! It was absolutely... excruciating in its blasphemy!
"The only sound was the slip-slop of Simon's slimy prick going in and out of those white lips. We sat there numb with shock, watching that man- our husband-having sexual intercourse with death. It was a rape of the dead, a death-fuck. And right in the middle of it, Simon laughed, and I would swear that even the Devil shuddered! Every living thing in the room shrunk back from that hideous sound. Even when he finally had his orgasm- and it seemed like an eternity before it happened- even this didn't have the effect of that laugh. Remember that as far as we were concerned we were witches, and we rubbed shoulders daily with the supernatural-it was common fare for us-but this! -this was the laugh not of a devil, but of a man, a madman between the legs of death herself! It was shocking beyond words.
"When he got off, she just lay there, staring up into the shadows, as she had through the whole thing, wet and dripping between the legs. I wanted to tell him to close her legs, please close her legs, but he didn't. He picked up the dagger that lay beside her on the pillow, and held it up to Satan with both hands. He was still standing there in front of his dais. For a long time he just looked down at Simon, nothing more. Then Simon said, 'She is yours, Oh King. Take her. Freely I deliver unto you this treasure, flesh of my flesh. Take her, free her from the bond of bone! This is your instrument, your hand alone will it fit. Take it! DO THE DEED!'-It was not quite, but almost the same voice he had used before, when he lost his temper.
"Finally a claw came out of the cape and took the dagger by the handle. He unfurled his huge black body and came down from the platform with the knife held out before him. Simon took a torch from its standard and held it high over the girl, and the Devil slowly approached the altar. Simon was still breathing hard from his exertion, but he wasn't tired; he had a ghastly leer on his face, as though he was anticipating something wonderful about to happen. It was all too clear what was about to happen: the lovely white ghost was going to be killed. To me the fact that she was already dead made it even more terrifying-I know it makes no sense, but that's the way I felt. It wasn't the time or place for logical thinking.
"Up went the knife, clutched in that scaly fist, the point directly over her throat. The air was so thick you couldn't breathe, and Simon's hand-the one that held the torch-shook so with excitement that the whole room seemed to tremble. And then it happened."
It must have happened so fast that Molly missed some of it; or perhaps the panic that followed muddled her memory. She said that suddenly the Devil changed himself into a Negro, a Negro none of them had ever seen before. "And he had tears in his eyes," she said, "he was sobbing like a child, and the Devil's head lay all limp and hideous on the altar. Simon said-something, I don't know, one word-and then the Devil, or whoever he was, had him by the neck. He lifted him right up off the floor by the neck like he didn't weigh anything at all and there was a sound like-like an egg cracking, and the torch fell on the floor. Then he just stood there, holding Simon up in the air at arm's length, sobbing and sobbing, tears rolling down his face."
Here Molly's voice cracked and she stopped talking. I realized for the first time that I had gone rigid, stiff as a post. I wanted to say, Go on, go on! but there was a lump in my throat the size of an apple, and I was unable to let out so much as a croak. I had the feeling that that moment I had been anticipating and dreading had already come and gone, that it had come not as the mob cry of the Passion but rather as an implosion of supercharged silence, the same silence which I myself had already experienced as I sat alone in that bone-strewn altar room in the hollow hill. After a long moment Molly drained her glass, took a deep breath, and continued in a voice strangely empty, a voice which no longer revealed its inner torment: the substratum of tension was either gone or it had sunk to an inaudible level.
"I'm sorry... The next thing I knew the whole place was in flames. The big Negro had picked up the torch and thrown it the whole length of the hall, and I guess it hit the drapes by the main doors because that was the first wall to go up. Everybody started screaming then and running for the door, but at first the fire didn't seem important to me. I kept thinking, Why doesn't he put Simon down? I guess that's what I was waiting for. I lost sight of the altar for a second in the smoke and confusion, and when I saw it again there was Simon, stretched out on the slab, just like the girl had been a moment before. The handle of the knife was sticking up right in the center of his chest, and the front of his robe was all soaked in blood.
"Everyone was going crazy with panic by then. I saw Mrs. Verlain tear off her helmet and run for the door, knocking down everybody that got in her way, and then her hair was on fire and she was screaming and rolling on the floor. It was no use, nobody could get to the door, and in a few seconds all the other walls were on fire too. I remembered the open door I had seen; I couldn't see it now for the smoke, but I ran for it anyway. I ran right through the flames and somehow got through the door. I was burnt pretty bad, but I made it.
"I don't know how I ever got to the top without killing myself, because the corridors were dark as pitch and I didn't know where I was going. I kept running into walls and falling on the stairs, but I didn't stop, and at last I came out into the house. But the fire had already gotten there ahead of me. It must have come up some of the other stairwells. I don't remember much after that. The walls were ablaze all around me and the roof started caving in, and then I was falling, rolling through the burning bushes. I guess I jumped or fell out a window and rolled down the hill. I had a broken leg and a brain concussion when the fireboat picked me up. I was in a coma for a week."
"But the girl, Molly, what about the girl?"
"Yes. That's the last thing I saw before I ran. She and the Negro were still standing beside the altar. They had their arms around each other, as if there was no danger at all, as if the fire couldn't hurt them. They just stood there, calm as anything, staring into each other's eyes... "
But I had to be sure. I had to pin down the unseen and unsuspected force that had infiltrated and destroyed that indestructible edifice; I had to hear it spoken.
"What was in their eyes, Molly? I mean, what expression?"
"Why, love, Drake. Anybody could see they were madly in love... "
CHAPTER TWELVE
And that was the end of it, or it should have been. That was all I had set out to discover, how the end had come and what had led up to it. I filled Molly in on the parts she could not have known. The one word Stone had uttered before he died, for instance: "What did it sound like?" I asked.
"I don't know, it was a short word-like 'but,' or something like that."
"Bub," I said. "That was the Negro's name, short for Beelzebub. He was your Devil. I suppose you never saw him without the mask."
"No, that was the only time I ever saw that face. But the girl, who was she?"
"Stone's daughter, Eleanor."
"But-you mean-?"
"No, she wasn't really a ghost, but she may as well have been. You see, Stone really did kill his wife in 1926, but he didn't kill his daughter. He kept her hidden in the hill all those years for his own pleasure. He killed Amanda partly because she was getting too old for him, and partly because she would not allow him to sleep with Eleanor, who was only eleven then. Then he saw Eleanor aging too, in spite of all his magical efforts to preserve her youth. It was the same with you girls-he couldn't bear to see you change. But he knew what to do about it, and that night of the fire was the beginning of his remedy. You didn't know the corpse of his wife lay in the little room behind the organ, did you?"
"Oh my God!"
"It was on his bed. The bones are still there."
"There was a smell-whenever he opened that door-"
"I can well imagine. But he seems to have preferred her-or that, I should say-to all of you, including Eleanor. He would have made you all like that, if it hadn't been for Bub. It would have been worse than the fire."
"But... he was the Devil. I-mean, he was with Simon in everything. How could he have-"
"I know what you mean. He played his role to the full, and it must have been the only role he knew-he was only eleven years old when Simon got him. Evidently he scarcely saw the light of day for at least four years. He was a slave in every sense of the word, body and soul. Stone never dreamed Bub would turn against him. Bub was the Devil to him just as much as he was to you, more so perhaps. He forgot that behind the mask was a human being."
The rest is pure conjecture on my part. I can see the huge black form of Bub quietly descending that hidden corridor while Stone frolics in the tower with his girls, that tunnel where no torch was allowed to burn. He slides back the iron door and enters the damp chamber. With sure ringers he frees the bolts and opens the lid of the coffin. He has brought her some fruit perhaps, or maybe a sweet roll that old Charon smuggled in from town, or a pitcher of hot tea. They talk in whispers. Later he spreads a pallet on the cold floor and they lie together in the crawling dark, the gargantuan black man and his secret moonwhite love.
How long had it gone on? Who knows? At the time Eleanor was entombed, in 1926, I figure Bub to have been about twenty years old; it may have started then, perhaps even before. Stone's references to his daughter in the journals are so oblique and fantastical that it is difficult to make any sense out of them, but it is clear that he knew nothing about her romance with Bub. He rarely if ever took her from her crypt, and only at night was she allowed to emerge from the coffin, just long enough for him to lay her. She was fed some unnamed food which Stone thought appropriate for the dead, and whatever it was, without some supplement from somewhere no doubt she would not have lived as long as she did. It is pointless to say more. The reader can make his own explanations and draw his own conclusions. But what other flame than that flame could have kindled the inferno which destroyed Stone's Island?
It was dawn when I stumbled out of Molly's suite. Before I went down the stairs, I couldn't resist a peek into the room where I'd knocked off the quickie. It was empty, but I noticed a note on the nightstand: "Dear Miss Molly," it read. "Sorry but couldn't wait any longer. If you want me to bring her back tomorrow night call me at the Club." It was signed Lorraine.
I spent the morning walking the streets of Rodriquez like a somnambulist. At first I decided I wouldn't go back that night, wouldn't keep my appointment in bed with Mina. I'd meet Yvonne outside and split. Because whatever was going on, I wasn't at all sure I wanted to know about it. I'd heard enough for a while, I needed time to think, to get the taste out of my mouth, to get rid of the stupid notion that I had heard something dark and prophetic about myself.
So I walked. I walked it all out of my mind- Molly, the note, the face of the little girl, the whole fucking business. By noon I had worked up a sweat and a leg cramp: I felt better. I stood on a street corner and watched the cunt go by. It was like a purge. I even followed a waggling butt for a few blocks, just to lose myself in the rhythm. A sandwich and a cup of coffee and I was a new man. I sat on a park bench and watched all the poor bastards running back and forth like their pants were on fire, and began telling myself again how lucky I was to have gotten off the workaday treadmill. Let 'em stick the "American dream" up their asses, says I to myself, I'm off for the Spanish Main, the South Seas, Eldorado-who knows where I may end up? I'm a footloose tramp, a carefree son of a bitch, free as a bird! (It was my way of patting myself on the back for having become a writer after dreaming about it for so many years.) What the hell could I have been moping about? Why, I haven't a worry in the world! The only thing I needed now to top it off was a plate of spaghetti and a piece of ass. And so, with a full belly and a hard-on, at nine o'clock sharp I'm back at the Mandalay just like a yo-yo.
Molly was nowhere in sight, and I didn't ask for her. Mina met me in the lobby, all smiles. With her long flounced gown and her blonde hair piled on her head in a topless cone, she looked like she might have just stepped out of the palace of Minos, especially since her bosom was bare. Bare, that is, except for sparkly pasties not quite big enough for her rosy nipples, from the centers of which extended fine shimmering tendrils that curled gracefully outward over the plush swells of her whipped cream tits. The gown was wine-red with purple and gold embroidery; it had elbow-length sleeves, and the "neckline" was cut from her shoulders down around the outermost roots of her breasts, over her ribcage, swooping inward a bit at the waist, following her voluptuous contours all the way to her hips where it ended in a dazzling loop below her navel. This too -the bellybutton-was decorated with a sparkling flower like those on her nipples, only slightly smaller. Below that-in just the right spot-was embroidered an ornate delta of curling gold threads, an exquisite pussy, just so you wouldn't forget what you had come for.
"Wow!" I said, giving her the once-over. "Do you always get this dressed up to go to bed?"
She laughed, and her flower-tipped tits jostled together delightfully. "I just came from a party."
"Must have been some party."
"It was. How do you like my new costume?" She held her arms out and whirled around once.
"Breathtaking," I said.
"Don't worry, it all comes off."
"Good. Shall we get to it then?"
She led the way up the stairs and I followed with my nose practically up her ass, so eager was I to crawl over that luscious thing. Some men turn to the bottle to forget their troubles; me, I turn to cunt. I can drown a veritable sea of troubles in a warm pussy: bury my face between a set of warm tits and I'll fuck my way through doomsday and never be the wiser.
Her room was lit with parchment-shaded lamps that gave her blue-white breasts and belly a soft warm wash of color. She stood before the dresser mirror and unpinned her hair. As it fell in soft waves over her shoulders, I came up behind her and embraced her hips, pressing my cock into the crack of her ass. With my fingertips I stroked the gold swirls of the pussy-design on her gown, watching my hands at work in the mirror and savoring the cushiony feel of the real thing underneath. She cooed like a pigeon and moved her pelvis forward and back, first pressing her ass against my prick, then her cunt against my palms. She lay her head back against my chest and I ran my hands up her belly to her tits. They were heavy and warm to the touch. I fingered the pasties.
"Pull," she breathed, "they come right off."
I pulled, and watched the nipples stretch with an elastic firmness before the adhesive let go. God, what a body she had! I squeezed her tits so hard she winced with pain, but she loved it. I was going to be rough with her, I could see it coming. There was an anger in me, a nameless thing, eating at me; if I could get rid of it no other way, then I would shoot it out the end of my prick. At least I see it like that now; at the time I only felt like being brutal.
I forced my hands down into the front of her gown and my fingers rustled into her thick crisp bush. Her deep slit was already juicy. She slipped her arms out of the sleeves and pushed the gown over her hips. It fell in a heap at her feet and I drank in her delicious nudity in the mirror-that dark blonde bush with its deep rut, those creamy flaring hips and heavy thighs, those voluminous cherry-tipped tits...
I almost became outwardly angry when she turned around to undress me: I just wanted to look at her-in the mirror-with the hands, my hands, playing over her naked body forever.
When I came to my senses, and it was just a split second thing, I was even more irritated at myself than ever. I tore my eyes from the reflection of her bare butt and dragged her straight to the bed. I had come for cunt, goddamn it, and cunt it was going to be. I got on her and fucked her blind. I fucked her like a blind bull: I fucked her in the ass and I fucked her in the cunt, it made no difference; I fucked her up one side and down the other, I lost myself in the labyrinth of her uterus, I sunk into her twat to the ankles and boiled myself alive. It was the sort of fuck that leaves you limp as a fish and foaming at the gills.
But it wasn't enough. I suppose I had known all along that it wouldn't be enough, even if I fucked my bloody brains out. All that horseshit I fed myself at the park?-Ha!-just a way of talking myself into coming back quietly and not at the end of a rope. Because I had to come back, one way or another. Like a two-bit sleuth I had to come back and sniff out the last few bloodstains, the last dry turd.
"Mina, where is Miss Molly?"
As I expected, she said she didn't know. I pulled out an extra ten and placed it on the dresser on top of the other bills.
"Where, Mina?"
"Downstairs. In the basement. But please, Drake, if you tell her I-"
"Show me," I said, pulling a housedress out of her closet and tossing it to her. She hesitated...
"All right."
We must have looked like a couple of thieves, creeping down the hall. Mina kept glancing around nervously, as if she expected someone to pop out of a door at any moment and clap us in irons. She quietly opened the door at the end of the hall and we slipped out onto the fire escape landing. The iron steps led down into a dirty alley which ran darkly through a narrow corridor of dingy buildings, defined here and there by yellow windows that seemed to give off no light at all.
When we reached the alley, Mina led the way to a wooden door near the corner of the hotel. The stucco on this side of the building was black with mold and dust, and only a few patches of peeling paint remained on the door. Here Mina stopped and pulled me close.
"Now listen," she whispered, "once we get inside, don't talk, because she'll hear. Oh, Christ, if she ever finds out I brought you here-"
"Don't worry. After you show me, you can go. And I promise you, you'll never see me back in this part of the woods again."
She looked at me curiously. "You're really not a cop, are you, Drake?"
"No."
"Why do you want to... to see this?"
"Because I am a stupid son of a bitch who has to see everything. Lead on."
She turned the rusty knob and opened the door with painstaking slowness, but the hinges creaked in spite of everything. We entered a dark dusty storeroom of some kind-a shell of a room, really: its only window was paneless and boarded up, and the studs and rafters were stripped of paneling. Even the floorboards were gone-or had never been there-which at least allowed us to move quietly. There was a dim filtering of yellow light emanating from some obscure source up ahead. It gave just enough illumination to reveal a shadowy blur of roaches scrambling out of our path and swarming up the walls. Mina held my hand tightly and moved at a cautious crouch toward the light.
At the far corner of the room, behind a pile of scrap lumber and roof tiles, was a short hallway into which opened a doorless closet. We squeezed in. The light was coming from behind a loose board along the floor. Mina put her lips to my ear and whispered-
"Move that board and you can see down into the cellar, but be careful!" She kissed me on the cheek and was gone.
I dropped to my knees. All the nails had been pulled from the board, and it came easily away from the wall. I crouched low and peered through the crack...
The room below was small, narrowly oblong in shape, and divided in half by a bamboo-and-bead curtain. At the far end of the room, through the curtain, I saw it: the concrete top of a picnic table set on four cinder blocks. A pathetic imitation. That part of the room was bathed in harsh electric light, which cast sharp shadows and gave the place a barren look, a certain coldness, a vacuous permanence. At first I saw no one, heard nothing. No sound or shape rippled the stark stillness. Maybe I had missed it; I was almost relieved.
But then I heard whispering directly below me in the darker part of the room. There was a small bed near the wall, but I had to press my face against the dusty lathing and practically lay on the floor to see it; two figures lay there. I couldn't see their faces well in the shadows, but it wasn't difficult to identify them: Kathy's golden locks presented a brilliant contrast to the gray-haired head which nuzzled her neck. I had just situated myself to get a clear view, when suddenly the sheet was drawn over their heads. For a few moments I watched the suggestive undulations and tried without success to make out the muffled murmurs, punctuated now and then by little squeals in brittle falsetto and grotesque giggles from the woman.
But something was missing. I scanned both sections of the room. No one in sight. Then I understood: the mirror. It was mortared crudely into the wall over the bed and framed with black curtains. It wasn't necessary to see the watchers; there would at least be Lorraine, the child's mother, maybe a few others, a select few, sworn to secrecy.
Soon the giggles and whispers had become ecstatic gasps, and in a flurry of movement the sheet was thrown back. Molly was on top, hunched over the girl, devouring her tiny breasts and vigorously massaging the sparse peach fuzz between her open legs. Whatever signs of youth Molly's body had retained were greatly diluted now, seeing her contrasted so starkly to the firm pink body of the little girl. Though her back had not entirely lost its feminine charm and though her waist was not over-thick, her age was plainly indicated by the abrupt bulge of her now ungirdled hips and the slack, dented flesh of her quivering buttocks.
She swung a heavy leg over the girl's waist and dangled her great pendulous jugs in her face. Kathy giggled and took one wrinkled nipple between her teeth, stretching it out until Molly squealed with pain and delight. She buried the girl's face between them-they were each as big as Kathy's head-and turning them inward, plugged a nipple into each ear. Meanwhile Kathy's small hands were playing over the pitted expanse of Molly's ass, stroking the cheeks, exploring the great crack between them and tickling the brown crater of her anus.
Now the woman wheeled around with a wolfish snarl and straddled the young face, lowering her lips hungrily to that dainty crotch. From my position over them I could see only the back of Molly's head, but I had a clear view of the shaggy gorge between her jiggling thighs and of little Kathy's tongue lapping its slack jaws. In a flash I realized why the little girl's face had looked familiar to me last night: it corresponded exactly to the mental picture I had gotten from Molly's description of her first love, Yvette!
Molly shivered like an enormous sack of custard as the kid went to work on her, practically sinking her whole face into that bubbling stewpot, and in a short time apparently had an orgasm-or at least went through the motions of having one. Whatever it was, it left her heaving like a beached walrus, and she didn't even seem to notice when Kathy slithered out from under her, skipped over to the dividing curtain and drew it back. Now I had an unimpeded view of the "altar" in the illuminated part of the room-as would anyone behind the fake mirror.
It was apparent now what was to happen next. I wasn't surprised when the door opened and the tall naked Negro youth strode up to the bed. He lifted Molly's limp bulk in his arms, carried her into the light and placed her gently on the low slab. A low chant started up, a dull monotone, growing gradually louder. Kathy stepped up on the altar just as her mother came in the door. At first I thought she was going to protest. Maybe I even hoped she would; maybe I was hoping to see some sign of shock, outrage, indignation-even lust!-anything but this cold, impassionate carrying out of instructions. But no: Lorraine's entrance was just part of the schedule. It was apparently her job to arouse the young man enough to do his job. The necessity of this was made quite clear by a glance at the unappealing relic of flesh on the altar and at the Negro's cock, which was so far as slack as Molly's tits.
Molly lay on her back on the slab with her ass right on the edge, her feet on the floor. The black man stood at the foot of the altar, looking at Lorraine with a nervous smile and toying with his cock-long and thick for all its limpness-while Kathy stood right over Molly's grinning face, twitching her little slit and playing with her own nipples. Somewhere-probably in the room behind the mirror-someone put on a scratchy record and Lorraine started to dance, peeling off her clothes in time to the music. The chanting, however, continued as before.
With each piece of clothing that fluttered to the floor, the "demon's" cock grew larger, and by the time she was down to bra and panties it was a great throbbing pound of black meat. His eyes still on Lorraine, he lowered himself between Molly's legs and slipped it into her gaping cunt. Lorraine released her bra and shook her big boobs in the harsh glare; she wiggled out of her panties and with spread thighs ground her hips and parted her cunt hair with her fingers-but her face was an unheated mask, her smile mechanical. The Negro, however, wasn't looking at her face, and soon he was throwing his cock to the old girl like he really meant it.
But I'd seen enough. I was almost afraid the next thing I saw would be a dagger on a black cushion. Perhaps Stone had prevented change after all-or perhaps he need not even have bothered. But how is it that Bub, in stark slavery, in utter mental subjugation, with the aid of not so much as a ray of sunlight, had somehow broken his bonds and, if only for a few blazing moments, gained his freedom, while Molly, whose freedom was handed to her on a silver platter, with no strings attached and no living tongue to tell the tale, has remained enslaved to this day and will remain so till the day she dies? From the very first Stone miscast his players. He got the roles all wrong. He confused darkness with light, and light with darkness...
I quietly replaced the loose board and made my way through the roaches to the alley. The last thing I heard as I went out the door was that monotonous chant, barely audible:
"Oni-Kalma, Oni-Kalma, Oni-Kalma... "
In the lobby I found Honey and Billy waiting patiently. I was in no mood for delay; I felt like I'd been dipped in urine.
"Where's Yvonne?" I snapped.
The answer made me want to start breaking things. It seems as though a certain customer had drawn a bead on my old lady and had immediately taken such a hankering to her-and was apparently such an idiot-that he could not be made to understand that she did not work there and what's more was not even a whore. He made a fuss and threw such a tantrum that Yvonne finally agreed to go with him, if the girl behind the desk would be so kind as to lend her a room for a few minutes. She reasoned that, since I wasn't there anyway, she might as well put the time to some use. The clerk was delighted to comply, just to keep the headstrong bastard from wrecking the place. I was speechless with rage.
Just then, here she comes down the stairs, grinning like a pig shitting apples.
"Hi," she says, opening her purse. "Look what I made!"
I looked down at the handful of bills. Then I looked into her eyes-deep, deeper maybe than I ever had before, deep into those clear green eyes of hers, trying to penetrate the mask-if it was a mask. Had I too gotten the roles wrong? Suddenly it didn't seem to matter very much.
I looked down again and thumbed through the money. "Well," said I, "looks like we damn near broke even."
We laughed all the way down the stairs and halfway back to Sago Beach. Except for Billy, that is, who laughed the whole way.
There may have been even more. For instance, the reader may recall that we found only thirty-two skeletons on Stone's Island; if my count is correct, there should have been thirty-four. Did Bub and Eleanor get out alive somehow, as I would like to believe? Would a little more sleuthing have turned up a huge old black man with a crazy white woman for a wife, living perhaps in some God-forsaken backwater in the Everglades? Maybe. But Lake Leethy and the Dragon Gate are now far astern, and tomorrow morning, if this wind holds, we should raise St. Lucia; then it's through St. Vincent Passage and on to Barbados. And if all goes well, this manuscript will be aboard the first plane out of Bridgetown, on its way to my friend John Smythe, to whom I turn over full rights to dispose of it as he sees fit, with due consideration of course for those still living who might be injured by its publication.
If I have started out to record a history, and ended by writing a confession, I can only say, so be it. To put it simply, I wash my hands of it.
Drake Hackett February, 1969 The yawl Argo, at sea.
(NOTE. On March 7, 1969, a month after I received Mr. Hackett's manuscript, Molly (Goldsmith) Holden was bitten on the finger by a coral snake and died on route to the hospital. R. J. Smythe.)
