The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

Tarot ^{Florence Dugas}

Noon was gently moving towards two o’clock. As it was already summertime, no one could tell: somewhere in the world it’s always noon. It was as if the sun had given her a sign, and she didn’t return to work.

The sound of her heels against the stone of the road and the sidewalk is like a clamour of victory. She supplies a rhythm to the city, and her long, thin legs move, map, and order its topography, like a defiant army marching ahead under the newfound sun, celebrating the coming of spring. It is good to feel the heat spread across her skin, caressing her knees like two warm hands, even moving up between her thighs now no longer under the protection of nylon. The sun almost draws a crown of gold around her head, as if she were a chosen being. From time to time she even swings her head from side to side, like a racehorse in heat. Saying yes and no to her invisible mount while her heavy stream of hair undulates across her back. She straightens her back, holding her stomach in, and the flow of her hair swims gloriously in motion.

She walks as if she were leading a victory parade. The very word echoes across her brain, to the rhythm of her heels, and it amuses her to invent more meanings for it. To parade is more than just to walk at random, no mere promenade where you never know where the next step leads. “ To parade is to move like God across his garden,” Brisset used to say. It even makes her look a little drunk, dizzy from her newfound freedom. Walking along, parading, as if she were about to become the heroine of some medieval ballad sung by a troubadour beneath the window of a captive king. So much sun is unusual. Walking as she is, head high, she can no longer hear Paris surrounding her, just the sound of her heels clicking along; nor can she see the cars and passers-by, just the winged Génie of the Bastille, flying high up there close to Icarus. She is on parade: she’s come out of her shell, the whole world is on offer, her steps are conquering space, taking her into a wholly new dimension.

The clock on the Gare de Lyon betrays an impossible hour, which even the sun denies.

“The next train? Well, you’ve got the Paris – Vintimille, in ten minutes. Seats? Oh, as many as you want. Non-smoking? Isn’t the weather lovely? The sky is so blue. Yes, I understand.”

The railways guy sitting behind the immediate departures window is actually not bad-looking at all.

It’s true, there are few people on the train. In her compartment, just five men: four of them are playing cards, while the fifth, further down, appears to be sleeping already, with just his neck and short, greying hair visible from her vantage point.

With all those empty seats available, she chooses to sit on the right-hand side, so she can enjoy the sun for the rest of the afternoon.

She feels blandly happy, sunny, watching all the cows outside pass.

The train does not stop before Valence.

She walks out onto the platform to move her legs. A two-minute stop. Up in the sky, the sun hasn’t moved at all, but the heat is now more oppressive, a sign they are further south, in the Midi. She can feel the sun rising ever so stealthily up her thighs, so much more aggressively than in Paris, and this metaphor first makes her smile, then makes her feel dreamy.

She shakes her head. I’m getting delirious, she thinks. But on the other hand she feels ever so free. She returns to the compartment from the other end and walks down the rows of seats as the train begins speeding up again. She sways dizzily between the wooden seats.

The man with grey hair is not sleeping. He is watching her navigate the passage, struggling against the train’s increasing motion, as if he were looking through her. The thought that somehow between Paris and Valence, on this stolen afternoon, she has physically dematerialized amuses her. Is the man not really looking at her? He is quite handsome, in a prematurely greying way. His eyes are the same colour as his hair, pale grey veined with black – a man of marble. As she passes him, she gazes at his hands, laid out flat on the table. Quite beautiful hands that, in her imagination, she is already placing within her intimate theatre, the hands of a pianist, or perhaps a surgeon’s hands ready to sew someone’s wound up, or even a pair of warm and dry hands alighting on her knees, sliding up her skirt, moving into her underwear and grabbing her butt cheeks, hands capable of measuring her ass so much more than the sun outside.

She shakes her head, both amused and annoyed by her own cliché fantasy.

The four men are still busy with their card game. As she passes them, she sees it is a tarot deck, the same high numbers and cards, but something catches her attention: the images on the cards aren’t the ones she knows, the turn-of-the-century scenes so familiar to the tarot. She slows down imperceptibly, still moving ahead, and turns back to look again, not quite brave enough to stand still. She’s right: the characters on the cards are mostly naked, unlike the images she’s familiar with. The man nearest to her, an ebony-coloured African man, still holds four cards in his hand – two small squares as well as an eleven and a twelve. On the first one, the characters are sitting around a picnic scene imitating Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe; the seated woman is naked, but the man lying down is also, and another man, who is leaning towards her as if to bite her breasts, is getting undressed. She has difficulty seeing the other card, obscured as it is by the man’s thick black thumb, but again the woman in the boat is nude. On the twelve, she can see only the upper half of the card: a ball somewhere in the background, but on the right-hand side the image of a man seemingly offering his cock deferentially to two sitting women whose clothes have been partly pulled open. One of the women is thrusting her peach glove-covered hand towards the imposing virile member. The man whose cock it is has grey hair, and it makes her think right away of the silent passenger in the seat a few rows back.

The black man throws the twelve down, and another of the men adds the twenty. She just has time to glimpse the image of four men sitting at a table playing cards, all in the buff, while a woman under the table is seemingly sucking off the player on the left. The illustrator had frozen the scene just as her mouth is about to devour his mushroom head and her cheeks are delicately deformed by the intrusion.

She shrugs. Scenes from a brothel, she reckons, no doubt a belle époque set of cards.

She walks back to her seat and distractedly watches the landscape roll by, sky moving between white and blue. The Rhône river flows heavily by, moving between nuclear power stations. At any rate, the stations do not affect the area’s luminosity.

She senses a movement to her left and turns. The man with grey hair is there, looking over her shoulder. And like earlier, he has the same distant and detached look, as if his eyes are fixed on a point some ten centimetres behind her.

“May I?” he says, sitting next to her. He has a vaguely English accent. He calmly pulls up the arm separating their two seats, deliberately abolishing all distance between them, or any form of misunderstanding.

“May I…” These are the only words he says, and her quiet agreement, as she does not object, is all he needs for approval, as if those two words and the unspoken answer will justify all that will follow.

The man’s right hand skims by her neck while his left hand takes hold of her knee. His skin is just as she expected: warm and dry.

He allows her just a few seconds to imagine what is about to happen. His fingers tread ever so lightly across her skin, as if he were caressing water without creating a stir across its surface.

His fragrance is both pleasant and discreet. She doesn’t know why, but his smell reminds her of Louis XV furniture, burnished wood pieces.

For a while he doesn’t move, his face just inches from hers, his hand almost motionless on her knee, his fingers delicately skimming her neck.

The dark clouds inside his grey eyes make him look like a phantom. And finally he bends slowly over towards her and kisses her. She holds on to him, slides her own hands under the fashionable grey jacket he is wearing, takes hold of his shirt, grabs his tie… The hand on her knee begins a slow and deliberate journey upward along her thigh and cups her cunt, forcing itself against the already wet silk. The man pulls the thin panties to one side of her gash, his fingers lingering against the soft and delicate lips with assurance. “With a sense of contained violence,” she thinks aloud. And the mental image of her cunt in his grasp makes her smile and hold herself even more open. She allows her hand to slip under the man’s belt, and through the thin material of his trousers grabs hold of his hardening virility, an initial contact that surprises her by its brazenness. She pulls on the zip of his fly and extricates the jutting cock now pulsing against her fingers, just as she leans her own body slightly backward so that the man’s hands might have easier access to her stomach and, she hopes, her ass.

They caress each other for a few minutes. He inserts two fingers deep into the swamp of her cunt, two very long fingers with short, invisible nails, deep into the pit of her belly, exploring her with even more avidity than his cock could, seeking what she desires with an almost feminine science.

He has no need to change the pressure of his fingers against her neck. She leans over of her own accord towards the cock now surging through the folds of grey material and takes it into her mouth. It feels fresh, almost cold. First the thick, split apricot, which she surrounds with her tongue and bathes in her saliva, then the rest of his mast, as far as she can take it. Three-quarters of it almost, her mouth spreadeagled by this meat of desire, to the point of gagging against this dangerous weapon heading straight for her innards. She retreats to catch her breath and impales her mouth anew against the blood-engorged tip of his cock, torn between the need to suck him forever and forever, to fill herself with his wooden citrus flavour, and the sheer craving to feel him flow wildly inside her mouth, waves breaking against the back of her throat, and the freedom to drink all of him in.

The man then pulls his fingers out of her heaving cunt and, taking advantage of her position leaning back, moves them, still coated with her vaginal secretions, towards her ass and digs them both into her sphincter. She buckles, rears against the fingers now stretching her wide and, doing so, opens herself even more to his rough caress. And when the man’s thumb at the front now starts applying pressure to her clitoris, she comes violently, feels her asshole spasm against the fingers now burrowing deep inside her, and only the cock now embedded in her mouth prevents her from screaming.

He allows her to enjoy the moment. His fingers are still digging deep into the very fundament of her ass. His thumb is held hard, unmoving, against her inflamed clitoris. He gently pulls her by her hair and allows her face to rest against his chest while she gasps for air.

Once the contractions slow down, he slides his fingers out of her and pulls her up against him as he moves onto the seat in front of her, between her splayed legs, and forcefully pulls her down onto him. Initially she fears she won’t be able to accommodate him, that she’s not open enough – he’s so much bigger than anything she’s had inside her before. His cock is still growing as he breaches her, his head brushing her labia aside as his shaft sinks deeply into her. Inside the hot furnace of her cunt, the man’s cock feels as cold as ice. She bites her lips to keep from screaming when she feels the cock assault her back wall, and she takes hold of the top of the seat facing her and, seizing it desperately, allows herself to sway wildly, allowing his cock to plow every inch of her insides as she holds back her pain. The man, his hands gripping the sides of her ass, helps her rise and then again and again brings her down onto him, every time deeper and deeper, as if she were a cave with no end.

A few metres away from her, she can only glimpse the heads of the other four men every time she rises above the seat: they are still playing cards, oblivious to what is happening to her.

For a brief moment she realizes she would like to feel him flow inside her, mingling his sperm with all that is floating within her, then the thought is violently abolished because she comes again, ferociously, wantonly, literally screwed onto this cock that is splitting her apart, piercing her very heart.

She is gasping for breath when the man’s hands let go of her butt and move under her shirt, partly freeing her breasts from the push-up bra, lengthily caressing her hard, sensitive nipples, enjoying himself, then pinching her breasts hard to bring her back to reality from her swoon. Through the waves of ecstasy she is also confusedly angry at him for having discovered she enjoys the combination of pain and pleasure. The man withdraws from her, settles to her left and folds his still-bulging cock so wet from her secretions into his trousers. Will she ever know the taste of his sperm, or just this lingering smell of wet rosewood? His smile is muted, almost affectionate, but distant again as he moves back to his seat, and the last thing she sees of him is his straight neck and his short grey hair.

She frees herself from the wet panties now cutting into her crotch and shudders, face against the windowpane. She watches the Rhône outside. An old piece of poetry by Victor Hugo comes into her mind: “The noisy river flows, a fast and yellow flow…”

The heat of the sun, the cool of the glass against her cheeks, and the dying vibrations inside her belly now peaceful, moving away, drying up…

She doesn’t wake up in Avignon, nor in Marseilles. When she opens her eyes again, she can still hear the echo in the air of the voice that has just announced their arrival in Saint Raphaël. It is now evening, and only the sporadic lights of the approaching station puncture the darkness.

She had thought of going to Nice, but why not Saint Raphaël; she’s never been here before.

She is now alone in the compartment. She rises, still unsteady on her legs – she fell asleep in an awkward position and her left foot has fallen asleep – and moves forward with a slight limp, gracelessly, towards the exit, and almost topples over as she walks down the train’s steps. Blood flows back into her brain, the vertigo fades… she takes a few steps forward on solid ground and the dizziness returns.

I must be hungry, she thinks. And the act of thinking it makes her hungry. She walks towards the station’s exit, figuring that, like all train stations, there must be a bar nearby, a bistro, some Arab grocery.

But all there is nearby is a Rolls-Royce parked close to the pavement, a very old model with the driver’s seat open to the air and the back shrouded by dark opaque windows. The chauffeur, holding his cap in his hand, turns towards her. “Mademoiselle,” he says, “we were waiting for you. Would you please…”

She is so surprised that she allows herself to be led, just two metres of pavement between freedom and the green English leather seats of the luxury car, and the door closes silently behind her.

Immediately, it’s night behind the dark windows, which banish even the glow of the street lights, barely allowing pale haloes to survive, just like the mad stars in Van Gogh’s skies.

The car is totally silent; it could be stationary, just a hint of vibration betraying its motion. They drive for a long time, and the young woman, who is hungry and thirsty and badly needs to pee, is now in a bad mood. They stop for a red light and she tries to get out, but the doors are locked from the outside. She raps her knuckles on the glass separating her from the driver. The man’s neck doesn’t budge.

The Rolls-Royce leaves Saint Raphaël and takes a small, winding road that rises above sea level and leads deep into the hinterlands. A long time. Hunger. Thirst…

At last, the car slows down as it runs parallel to a high wall that leads them to an intricate metal gate topped by a mess of white metal arrows. The door opens by itself, no doubt electronically controlled, unless there is an invisible caretaker in attendance…

Crunching across a gravel path, the car drives up to a small castle, one of the many modern-style monstrosities that the Côte d’Azur has given birth to over the past century, and comes to a halt in front of its steps. The stylish chauffeur gets out and ceremoniously opens the door.

In a rush, the sound of the early cicadas of spring invades the Rolls-Royce.

She alights, intrigued, worried, still angry. A man stands there, on the second step, and, astonished, she recognizes the grey-haired stranger from the train. How in the hell could he have reached this place before her?

“Please accept our apologies,” he says. “You must be quite tired?” He ceremoniously takes her hand. He is now wearing a smoky grey lounge suit, the same colour as his eyes. “Come,” he says. “We’ve prepared some food for you.”

She agrees to enter the castle, although she also knows this might be a mistake, that maybe she shouldn’t, now that the falling sun has retreated with all its elementary seduction and the menace of night is ready to take over.

Once inside, she glances back – intuition or ultimate temptation. The moon is full and shines over a freshly mowed lawn at the heart of which stands a white marble statue, maybe of Venus, or even Diana the huntress without her slings and arrows, the languorous shape of the goddess bathing in the moonlight.

The young woman turns back and, with quiet determination, enters the house.

“If you wish to freshen up,” the man says, pointing to a door.

“Yes, I’d like to spray my warpaint on again,” she jokes, repressing the anxiety quickly rising inside her throat.

As she washes her hands, she gazes at the reassuring image in the mirror: she is still pretty, still looks fresh despite all those hours on the train; some would even say the darker shade below her eyes was an added bonus. “What a face,” she says nevertheless, almost out of habit.

A snack? On a small table at the centre of the art deco living room filled with delicate furniture, she can see all the things she likes: patisseries, fruit, finger-sized delicacies, lemonade – she is still at an age where you are allowed to enjoy sugary things. In the meantime, the stranger is busy starting a fire inside the big fireplace, kneeling in front of the first orange flames longer than he normally would, exposing his slim neck to her gaze, no doubt aware she is full of questions and in no hurry to supply answers.

He finally rises from his prone position while she finishes biting into a thin slice of an exquisite tart. “I will take you to your room,” he says. “You’ll find something you can wear for dinner. Take your time. If you want to take a bath, just tell Nora, and she will arrange it.”

With his hand, he points to a corner of the room where a young coloured woman in a domestic’s uniform is standing, straight and silent. She has pale grey eyes, shining in the light of the nearby flames like the eyes of a cat.

She hadn’t even heard her enter the room. “We dine at eleven,” he adds.

They walk up a wide, pink, marbled set of stairs, a bit too ostentatious for her taste. Then, after passing through a red vestibule, down a long corridor punctuated by doors numbered one to nine. At the other end, there is another set of stairs, probably leading up. They stop at number seven. The maid opens the door and stands back to let her go in.

The room is spacious, tastefully furnished. Not one piece of furniture is contemporary; every single piece, from the straight geometry of the dresser to the vanity table with its crystalline mirror to the bed shrouded with delicate linen, appears to be brand new, although they all obviously were made in the twenties.

On the wall, a Millet-style print: three farm laborers resting in a field, enjoying a drink, while a woman awaits them, sitting against a haystack; it’s unclear what she might be waiting for, as, unlike any character in a picture by the Barbizon artist, she is totally naked, and when you take a closer look, her hands, though held against her knees, are tied with a thin piece of string.

This sets her thinking again of the four men playing cards on the train, the same sense of discontinuity between the image you expect and the more disturbing one…

“Do you wish to take a bath?” the maid asks. There is no trace of the Caribbean in her voice.

“Yes, please…”

The bathroom that connects to the room is huge, all green marble, all three walls covered by mirrors, as is, curiously enough, the ceiling. Exotic plants, suspended from shelves and metal stands, spread a delicate perfume of wet earth and heavy flowers throughout the room. The bathtub, carved out of a single piece of dark marble and held up by sphinx-like feet, is positively enormous.

The maid runs the water, pouring in perfumed oil that rises in bubbles, the strong fragrance of which blends easily with that of the green plants in the room. The perfume rising through the steam now obscuring the mirrors transports her back to that sense of dizziness she experienced on the train; it’s like feeling slightly drunk on an empty stomach.

The maid comes towards her, unbuttons her shirt, unhooks her bra and then the skirt. She does not remark on the fact that she is wearing no panties. The young woman allows her to do so, suddenly assaulted by tiredness, or at any rate using the tiredness as an excuse to surrender to whatever is about to happen to her.

In the water, it feels to her as if she is swimming in the immensity of the tub. Above her, she sees the shrouded reflection of a young blonde woman in the misted-up mirror, her skin ever so pale, like a white mummy floating inside a green marble coffin, the blue-grey of her eyes lost in the distance. But the steam rises and finally wipes out this lazy landscape of curves.

The maid allows her to soak for a long time in all the fragrances the heat is now breaking up. Finally, she comes back and hands her a Japanese robe, pale green, embroidered with birds of paradise.

“Do you want me to give you a massage?” she asks. “The bath will wash the journey away, and the massage will wash the bath away. Afterwards, I shall apply your make-up. The commander has given me very precise instructions.”

She lets herself go, agile fingers skimming across her skin with exquisite softness, slowly untwisting her nerves, polishing her muscles, effectively providing her with strength again after her energy has been sapped by the bath. The maid has her lie down on a folding table once she has slipped out of the robe. First, lying on her stomach, she is massaged from her neck down to her heels, unavoidably feeling something stirring inside her when the long, brown fingers knead her ass and thighs. But she’d rather believe it’s just a feeling of comfort. She almost falls asleep anyway, listening to the gurgling sounds of the emptying bath.

She is then turned round. Above her, the mirror is clearing up.

The young Creole woman is working her shoulders, the beginning of her neck, grazing her breasts whose tips are hardening, not that she notices as her hands lower themselves towards her midriff, before moving back to polish her nipples from time to time. Her brown hands make the extreme winter pallor of her pale skin appear almost indecent.

The young woman looks at herself in the ceiling mirror, and from her perspective, the girl massaging her appears closer to her than she in fact is, as if it were her mouth, her lips massaging her, and not her fingers. But very soon, it is actually her darker lips that are now attaching themselves to her taut nipples, licking then sucking on her hard tips, racing across her tremulous skin, her pretty café au lait face soon ensconced between her thighs. All she can see is the back of her head, a mass of short, dense curls when the maid’s mouth alights on her cunt, and the masseuse’s tongue separating the delicate lips of her opening, skimming across her dilated clit. She feels as if she wants to come that very moment, if only to release all the tension building up inside her since she walked into the house. With her hands, she grasps the short dark curls and pulls the girl’s face hard against her stomach – black against white – her lithe tongue butterflying over her clit now feeling more forceful, more incisive.

The young maid pulls her body down towards the edge of the table, both her legs now winging over the sides, the indefatigable tongue squirming around her red-hot button, plunging down into her wet vagina, tiptoeing across her anus and delicately forcing it open – she has never had the courage to tell any of her previous lovers how much she would like to be sodomized by a hard, burning tongue – all this while her long bronzed fingers keep on playing with her breasts. Finally she comes, no longer able to restrain her voice, flooding the girl’s face with her juices. The maid rises, wiping her mouth, her chin, and her nose with a towel and, curiously enough, smiles not at her but towards the mirror on the ceiling. The thought that someone has just witnessed the whole scene through a one-way mirror dawns on her with absolute certainty. What other traps are to follow? She slides off the massage table, pulls the young maid by her hair as she had done earlier, forces her to kneel before her and presses her face against her cunt, the heavy-lipped and violent mouth against her small blonde bush.

“Drink,” she says.

And she slowly pees into the open, willing mouth that doesn’t miss a single drop, still watching the ceiling as she does so, now smiling at the mirror, pleased to be conveying in such a way to the master of the house that by defiling his slave, she is resisting his will.

She is then made up by the maid, slowly, a bit too gaudily for her taste. Then she is given a long evening dress, a glossy couture piece with classical lines that Madame Gray would have appreciated. Once inside the formal dress, she feels like a marble statue sandwiched inside a skin of blackness, the exquisite pallor of her skin enhanced by the nocturnal black of the material. No underwear or lingerie underneath the dramatic dress. The silk adheres to her breasts, her ass and her stomach; the sudden crispness of the wrap awakens her nipples.

“You are beautiful,” says the young maid. “I’m happy the commander has brought you here.”

Once again the stairs. The maid guides her from one door to another. She hears a bit of conversation; she knows that very soon she will be told where she is. She is both curious and worried and slows her steps.

The girl swings the door open and invites her in.

She is greeted by intense light. There are four or five men in dinner jackets and six or seven elegantly attired women; they all briefly fall silent and watch her walk towards them. Meanwhile the grey-haired stranger moves in her direction, takes her by the hand, and smiles, putting her at her ease.

“You are quite ravishing,” he says. And he truly looks as if he believes it.

She smiles back, still cautiously, but holds on to him, surrounded as she is by all these unknown faces.

“Friends,” he says, with a semicircular gesture of his hand. “All charming people, as you will see.”

Why does he not introduce her to anyone? Why isn’t she even provided with a name, a surname?

Just then a servant attired in quite incongruous Louis XV style calls out loudly that dinner is served, and they all march into the immense dining room, where a very long rectangular table dominates the proceedings. The plates are exquisitely sober; the silver knives and forks and crystal glasses shine wildly under the glow of the candelabras.

The grey-haired man is at the head of the table and indicates she should sit to his left. Facing her is a very beautiful woman whose splendour has however seen better days, a thousand wrinkles smiling, a thousand small pains betraying her long and cruel past.

On her left is the youngest man in the room; he is younger than her even, his face and skin barely out of teenage years, radiant, almost effeminate. He is all smiles and his conversation is artfully banal.

The meal offers all that Provence can supply, from the most refined to the most colourful dish. Her taste buds sing along. Stylish servants see that their glasses are never empty and provide the right wine for each course: a sublime Cassis white followed by a racy Gigondas from the Aix vineyards, and soon champagne, small bubbles adhering under her gaze to the shape of the cut glasses. Very soon, she experiences a new kind of drunkenness, like an aggravated echo of her dizziness on the train. The feeling surrounds her like a scarf; she feels she is burning up, her legs are like cotton wool, her breath is short. Her breasts rub anxiously against the silk of the dress, her nipples harden again under the black material, becoming quite visible. She has the impression that everyone present is watching her, evaluating her, judging her, as if the woman facing her, eating her strawberries and drinking her champagne, is already promising her a whole set of caresses and indulgences. She feels as if her stomach is incandescent, a combination of fire and water, and the wide smile of the woman across from her indicates she is aware of it, that she recognizes the torment inside her body, that behind the combined fragrance of the wines and the food spread across the now crumpled tablecloth, she has caught an early whiff of the purple taste of her inner juices. Right then, a foot deliberately brushes against hers, caressing her ankle, gliding across her leg and the silk sheathing her. She isn’t sure if it is the smiling woman or her attentive host, or maybe the gauche young man on her left. The champagne bubbles float upward to the surface of the crystal glasses, and her eyes are transfixed by the thin rising columns, as if she were the one drowning inside the glass and her oxygen was running out…

When they all rise to make their way to the living room, she stumbles.

“Come,” says the woman, holding her arm, “are you feeling unwell? You must lie down for a quarter of an hour, allow all that alcohol to settle…”

Together, they climb the monumental stairs. “I’m in number seven,” she stammers.

“No need to go that far,” the woman says. “I’m in one.”

The room is predominantly green, with an array of heavy brown curtains; the bed is covered with a dark-green satin quilt, which feels so wonderfully cool when she settles her cheek against it and allows herself to relax. The woman helps her lie down, pulling her shoes off, caressing her thin ankles, taking them into her hands as if she were about to handcuff them.

But the girl is still overcome by dizziness and knows she will allow anything to happen.

She tries to overcome the feeling, she turns her head around, sees a painting on the wall, attempts to focus on its image, to capture some sense of reality from the shimmering fog in which the painting floats.

It’s a small canvas, like the country scene in room seven, in which a court jester is offering a rose to a comedic maid – the very image of card one in the tarot – but the woman here has pulled her skirt up and is displaying a regal, sculptured ass to him. On closer inspection, it appears that the jester is actually not about to offer the rose to the young woman, but is preparing to pin the thorny flower straight into her satin globes. It even looks as if he has begun punishing her: a long, pink cut already criss-crosses her right ass cheek, petals lie on the ground following the first blow, and the girl’s face reflects pain and submission.

This is when she realizes that the older woman has folded her dress back up all the way to her thighs, and is now twirling the blonde curls of her pubis with her fingers, even briefly inserting a finger into her gash, then smelling it with half a smile before licking the wet finger clean and returning her hand below to stroke her swollen cunt.

The woman suddenly stands and walks over to the wall, where she rings a call bell. Then she leans back over the prostrate young girl, lips grazing her mouth, skimming the breasts barely concealed by the crumpled silk of the dress, lingering over the uncovered stomach and the thighs that part automatically under her caress.

There is a discreet knock at the door. “Come in,” the woman says, without looking up. It’s one of the servants who had served at the dinner table; he has a peasant’s wide and tawny features, which she had earlier found almost comical beneath the powdered wig he is now no longer wearing. But he is still attired in the Louis XV outfit meant to emphasize his thin waist. On him it has the contrary effect, highlighting his thick muscles, the incredibly wide shoulders and the lack of neck. He is a heavy-set man; his ferocious eyes remind her of a dog’s.

“Come here,” the older woman says. “Take your uniform off. That’s good. Show us your cock, now. So, what do you think, my dear?”

The object emerging from the salmon-coloured silk pants is just like the man himself: short and massive. Sitting on the edge of the bed, the woman takes hold of the purple glans between two fingers, just as earlier she had been handling the strawberries. With her nail she gently pulls on the cock’s crumpled surplus skin and the shaft begins to grow. Short but very thick, no more than fifteen centimetres long, but so thick she has to use both hands to circle it. The prone young girl sees it all as if in a cloud; the painting on the wall is the focus of her attention, but another part of her is also aware that she is about to be breached by this almost unreal object. The mushroom head is dark purple, the blue-black veins bulge, the hard brown shaft is pointing towards her, emerging from dirty pink boxer shorts – the whole thing seems more animal than human.

“Fuck her now,” the older woman orders.

The domestic positions himself between the girl’s thighs, spreads them wide, and places her feet high up on his shoulders, his thick shiny cock lurking at her entrance. He gradually forces himself in. Slowly, his cock plunges in, her diameter expanding obscenely as if it were literally sucking in this monstrous cock, and she finally feels its head butting her inner walls as the silk of his pants and the rough touch of his pubic hair rub against her thighs. She comes immediately – the tension was too strong, the expectation too intense.

Now the domestic methodically plows inside her with brute force, and she cries out repeatedly, the inebriation of her orgasm blending with the alcohol vapours, thrusting her ever higher on the scales of sheer pleasure. She can’t help crying, throwing her body forward, impaling herself even deeper, opening herself wider. At the same time, she feels ashamed to be enjoying this weird cock so much, and the shame doubles her pleasure, as if her being whored in this improvised way gives her latitude to scream as no other man has made her scream before, to give herself like she has never given herself before.

Prompted by the woman, still sitting close to her, the domestic withdraws from her and, with two sharp movements of his wrist, jerks himself off, long, creamy jets streaming across the now for ever soiled black dress, thick snail trails of sperm jetting from his bursting cock and landing all the way up to her neck.

The woman dismisses him with a single gesture.

Once again, she leans over towards the still breathless girl, who is on the brink of tears as her orphaned cunt still gapes open, mumbling under her breath like a fish out of water, begging for the return of the cock that stretched her so, and she kisses her. The taste of her tongue is sharp, warm, and clever.

She then guides the girl to the nearby bathroom and undresses her. “Arms up,” she says, as if to a child. Helping her out of the long, soiled sheath of the dress, pulling it over her head, and then the blissful feel of water running unendingly down her neck, her back, her breasts.

Then she brings her back to the large bed of crumpled satin, her body so deathly pale against the green surface, and dries her, methodically mapping every contour of her body, drying behind her ears even and between her splayed toes…

The woman indicates the silk dress, now all crumpled up at the foot of the bed. “Won’t be much use again,” she says.

From a dresser, she pulls out a maid’s outfit, almost the same as… what was her name? Nora? was wearing earlier. A straight black skirt, a black shirt, and a white apron with an embroidered pocket. Before she is allowed to slip the uniform on, the older woman helps her roll on a pair of hold-up opaque black stockings and, finally, hands her a pair of small, dainty, zippered boots.

The woman quickly separates her hair into thick plaits and arranges a faultless chignon, with just three or four hairpins, almost a work of art.

Inside the apron’s pocket, there is a key.

“It’s a pass,” the ageless woman explains. “It allows you access to every room on this floor or the next. Come, girl. It’s all up to you now. You must prove to us that we can trust you.” And with a gentle slap on her butt, she dismisses her from the room.

In the corridor, the young girl hesitates. Should she walk down again? With the pass, she opens the next door, number three.

It is empty.

On the wall there is a painting depicting a city scene with three young women wearing fancy hats, all holding each other by the arm, all totally naked. Somewhere behind them, another woman seen from the back is walking away, same hat, same nudity. She appears to be following a soldier whose silhouette can be glimpsed in the distance. The three women are aligned by height, from left to right. Curiously, the shortest one sports the heavier breasts, the next one’s are pear shaped, well proportioned, and the tallest woman’s are barely the size of two small apples, high on her chest, tiny.

“The tarots,” she says to herself.

She leaves the room just as another identically dressed maid comes running.

“Ah, there you are, hurry. Number twenty has called again.”

Off they go; she follows instinctively, entranced by the madness of the place, down the corridor, up a spiral staircase, then through another passageway where they come across two other maids, one of whom is Nora, the only one whose name she actually knows, standing outside the door marked twenty.

“What took you so long?” Nora asks.

She knocks on the door and turns the handle while doing so, just as a loud “Come in!” reaches their ears. Inside are four men playing cards, with a fifth man watching them – the grey-haired man from the train, the commander.

The girl barely has time to register the fact that these are the same four men, one of whom is black, the tarot players from the Paris-Nice TGV train – was it just this past afternoon? – when the grey-eyed man calls to them: “Come, girls, come!”

Flabbergasted, she watches as her three companions go to kneel before three of the men and, without even being asked, burrow inside their respective trousers and quickly gobble up the still soft cocks they discover there.

“Come here, young one,” the man insists.

And now she finds herself on her knees by the black man, but the cock surging through his fly is already hard. It’s like a long ebony stick, shining like polished wood under the light of the room’s lamps, its skin taut like bark, an endless mast whose girth is fortunately moderate, so she doesn’t have to dislocate her jaw to take it all into her mouth. However, the cock soon reaches the very back of her mouth and brings tears to her eyes, a sudden burst of nausea she represses as she moves her lips back down to the cock’s head. But soon she finds the right rhythm, the adequate depth.

“Keep at it,” says a voice.

The man exudes an animal smell, strong, tenacious. It occurs to her that she could well be sucking a horse or a wild beast. With the hand that is not holding on to his cards – none of the men has stopped playing – he occasionally applies pressure to her neck, precisely communicating the changes in rhythm he wants her to follow. He holds her by the chignon, forcing her to first slow down and savour every one of the centimetres she swallows and then relinquishes her; then he makes her speed up and suck faster and faster, as if he were about to ejaculate in ten seconds, each time assaulting the very back of her throat, fiercer every time.

All of a sudden, there is a clap of hands. The black man pulls her away and slides his cock out of her mouth. Fascinated, she looks at the glazed, obsidian member. He pulls her up, flips her round and throws her down on the table, pulling her skirt up at the same time. She is face down on the table, as are her three companions, heads aligned next to each other; her cheek touches Nora’s. The black man bends over her and with no word forces himself inside her. His saliva-coated cock plunges deep into her asshole, quickly reaching the bottom, and never before has she felt so deeply impaled. Like an iron bar reaching for her heart, then retreating, before digging into her again. Never has she been fucked in the ass so hard, so deep as by this harder than hard ebony-coloured cock, this iron cock, this cock from hell.

On the table, right beneath her eyes, is the last hand of cards, and the courtly smile of the excuse card, and his mandolin.

Nora turns her head in her direction and kisses her, digging her tongue as far as she can into the girl’s mouth, holding on to her tongue, both women grasping each other with the energy of despair as the continuous thrusts burrow through their asses, kissing and crying as the table shakes beneath them. There is a scream, a deep guttural roar, and the black man stops, still planted deep inside her ass, and she feels his come pouring out, burning her. She distractedly visualizes the powerful white jets irrigating her guts, like an unholy, boiling enema. Nora pulls herself away from her mouth and screams in turn, a shout of triumph as her flesh welcomes both pain and joy. But instead of withdrawing, the black man comes and goes a few more times inside her ass and she climaxes yet again, maybe because of the angle of the table pressing hard against her clit or the influence of the many orgasms occurring all around her. She swims in a sea of lust.

There is a pause. Then she hears hands clapping, slowly, in the background, ironic; the commander is smiling, complimenting them all.

“Excellent, ladies. Thank you. Now you may go.” And specifically to the girl: “You’re awaited in room four,” he says.

She knocks on the door; there is no answer, but she enters anyway. There are two men in dressing gowns sitting on either side of a table, talking. The first thing she notices is that they are identical twins, although one already sports white hair, as if he has aged prematurely. She wonders what sudden emotion one day caused his hair to turn so white. He can’t be much older than forty. She recognizes the two men, they were at dinner earlier, but they were seated at the other end of the table and she hadn’t really noticed them.

The man with the white hair is handing a piece of paper to the other man. The heavy dressing gown’s belt is loose and uncovers his right thigh, a heavy-set leg which she didn’t expect from his cultured facial features.

The other man, not even acknowledging the presence of the visitor, is reading aloud: “They caress each other for a few minutes. He squeezes two fingers into the swamp of her sex, two very long fingers, nails cut short, into the deep of her belly, exploring her so much better than a penis could, his almost feminine scientific intuition aware of her innermost desires…”

He stops. “Not bad. But why ‘sex’? Or ‘penis’?”

“Why indeed? What would you have written?”

“I don’t know… ‘pussy’ and ‘dick’? A sex, it’s so anonymous.”

“What would a woman say when referring to her sex? ‘Vagina’ is too scientific, ‘uterus’ is too medical. In this present context, maybe ‘pussy’ is too vulgar. Or it might depend on the woman. Anyway, I’d definitely cut out the ‘swamp’. Reminds me too much of the worst of Henry Miller. In Quiet Days in Clichy, doesn’t he write of ‘a drooling pussy that fitted me like a glove’? No, ‘pussy’ just won’t do. So we’re left with ‘sex’.”

“And ‘penis’?”

“Still too generic. Its so-called exploration is no more than a continuous series of thrusts into the pit of her belly. Too prosaic for what the male member is capable of.”

“Why not use a metaphor?”

“Which? A split apricot? A dick-shaped mussel? A mustachioed wallet? As it is I’m uneasy with the ‘swamp’, although I do enjoy its muddy, soaked-earth quality, a combination of liquid and hard matter.”

“And her cunt? Just call it a cunt? Do women really think of their parts that way?”

“There’s just a surfeit of metaphors. You can’t just string too many of them together. ‘Her cunt’s swamp’: it just feels wrong, too strong an image.”

“The truth is you don’t like metaphors.”

“That’s true. So, what would you suggest?”

“‘He slides two fingers into her divine gash, all the way down her magic walls, exploring her so much better than…’!”

“You’re getting funnier all the time. But not very practical. Laughter and fucking, you know… Many years ago, when I was still fumbling among the amatory arts, at the beginning of my literary career, I was writing erotic stories with a friend; we were trying to use every expressive resource we could, we wanted to avoid all vulgarity, to retain a dash of poetry about it all. We tried everything: the subjective point of view, long sentences and little punctuation, like James Joyce in the midst of tits and ass, if you see what I mean, then more subtle metaphors – ‘under his fingers the flower of her love garden blossomed… at the end of the path the labyrinth of Cytherea… exploring her so much better than all the previous arrows of desire had punctured her…’ all rubbish of that kind, a compost heap of mythologies. But all it proves to us is that metaphors, however deceptive and clever they might be to the intellect, just pour cold water over any hard-on; a man who thinks too much just disconnects, if I can put it that way… But why don’t we ask this girl…” He turns towards her.

She’s been standing there silently, surprised that they hadn’t even acknowledged her presence until now, seeing they had summoned her here.

“My dear, what do you think? How do you refer to your sexual organ?”

She is somewhat taken aback, but replies: “Actually I seldom refer to it by any sort of name.”

“But if you had to?”

“‘Hole’ or ‘pussy’, most often. No, not really. It sort of depends.”

“On what?”

“On the situation. Sometimes I will enjoy shocking myself by using dirty words. Especially when it comes to the rear. I seldom use ‘sodomy’, too biblical in essence. ‘Fucked in the ass’, that’s what I say, when it’s about me. But that’s mostly when referring to the act, not when it’s actually happening.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, ‘I’m being fucked in the ass’ occurs so often figuratively speaking, that I can’t really use the expression properly, if I think about it… But ‘I want to be fucked in the ass’ presents no ambiguity.”

“And right now?”

“I’ve just been fucked in the ass,” she says. “By a very well-endowed black man. His come is still inside my ass. See how useful the right words can be…”

She emphasizes this as the two robes both open like a theatre’s curtains and two honourably sized cocks are standing to attention, like twins, ever so slightly curved, thick-veined helmets shining between the folds of the material.

She moves towards the men, gets on her knees, and caresses them both, although neither of her hands can grasp the full girth of the cocks. Slowly, delicately, she jerks them off; then, moving her head from side to side, she alternately sucks them both. They taste the same, smell the same…

But their reactions are different. Very soon, the man with the white hair lies down on the bed and pulls her onto him and positions himself deep inside her. As this happens, she feels the other man’s hands spreading her ass cheeks and a cock, identical to the one fucking her, forces its way into her anal opening. She screams as he tears her apart, and realizes she has never been filled this way. Just a moment later, all three are motionless, she is impaled on their twin cocks, and feels they are surely about to breach the thin membrane that separates them and merge into one single hammer. One of the men is gently biting her breasts; the other scratches her shoulder. She flexes her whole body, offering her crotch even more fully, tightens her sphincter muscles and feels the cock’s swollen ridge move deeper inside her, while the one in her cunt almost slips out. The invading cocks are burning her alive, but still manage to penetrate deeper within her, and as the one in her ass settles for a second, her cunt gapes open fully.

They all come almost at the same time. The ever so slight time delay allows her to experience the stream flooding her ass, and then the waves breaking inside her belly. Then the cocks lose some of their hardness, dilate and soften, and pleasure now takes a firm grip of her own body, she whimpers and squirms while still breached by the hot twin cocks and, in a moment of panic, she seeks the mouth of the man with the white hair.

They have not even undressed and, as soon as she leaves the bed, she is once again the image of a perfect, if somewhat crumpled, maid.

All of a sudden a telephone rings.

One of the brothers – they are both lying flat out on the bed, side by side, breathless – rises and picks up the antique set from the bedside table. “Yes?” he says.

She looks around her. Inevitably, on the wall, there is a painting. This one shows two men sitting, discussing literature, on either side of a small table, the man on the right-hand side holding a sheet of paper. Close to them, a naked woman, kneeling, visible only from the back, her long blonde hair reaching down to her waist, is seemingly sucking off the man on the left, the one with the white hair.

“You’ve been summoned,” the brown-haired man says. “Room six.”

As she leaves the room, they are already deep in conversation on either side of the table, with the sheet of paper held by one of them. She hears only the final words, read out by the white-haired man: “‘She flexes her whole body, offering her crotch even more fully, tightens her sphincter muscles and feels the cock’s swollen ridge move deeper inside her…’”

The other protests: “‘Sphincter muscles’. What about Sybil’s hole?” “The artist’s entrance?” “The purple flower?” “Saint Luke’s grotto?”

The door closes and she can no longer hear them. Room six? The sperm poured into her is running down her thighs.

The scene in the new room is almost symmetrical to that in the previous one. Two women, both naked, are sitting on either side of a table, their positions, their dark-red hair held up in chignons, not unlike creatures by Rossetti, the heaviness of their breasts, the exaggerated length of their nipples, the pale complexion of their pink skin and haughty, almost disdainful, facial expressions, all striking features including, as she moves closer to them, the colour of their eyes, grey changing into green.

However, this time around, they are not identical.

“Come, my dear,” one says. “Come.”

They ask her to stand still, between the two of them, and four hands quickly undress her, throwing the maid’s outfit aside. They only allow her to retain the stockings, which emphasize the pallor of her thighs. The pale hands roam across her even paler skin.

“Look, she’s just been fucked…”

“In front and behind,” says the other. “There’s a small stream of come emerging from her ass…”

“She’s been well fucked,” the first one says. “She is still very dilated.”

“So it seems,” the other calmly declares. “I could push my finger into her ass without even touching her edges.”

The girl is momentarily shocked by the contrast between their poised appearance and the filth of their language, and particularly the clinical way in which they are describing her, as if they were conducting an autopsy.

She stands between them and, suddenly, the two women get down on their knees and without a word begin sucking her cunt and her ass, licking up the drops of come drying on her skin, biting the delicate flesh, digging their tongues into the still bruised openings.

The girl feels dizzy. The two women are so artful, even their violence has a touch of elegance, teeth assaulting her lips, fingers sliding deep inside her…

No man has ever sucked or penetrated her like this. The first one then the other, thrusting two then three fingers inside her cunt and her ass, withdrawing them and then occupying her again but this time with four digits, as if their hands were becoming slimmer, thinner, and soon she has a whole hand inside each of her openings. She moans when the hand forces her doors, but now her cunt and ass tighten around the invading wrists and she feels delirious.

Inside her, two hands are searching her, carving her innards apart, parallel hands as if in prayer, as if she were the object of a terribly ancient cult, being honoured and consumed by the members of her sect…

She has never experienced a vaginal orgasm this strong. Her sphincters are seizing up so hard they could cut the hands off at the wrists, to hold them captive inside her forever.

“She’s really enjoying this, the bitch,” the first one says.

“You’re right,” says the other. “It feels as if her ass is breathless.”

“She’ll never want to come any other way,” says the first one.

They gently pull their hands out and the pain is atrocious, not just the initial one in reverse, but the very thought of losing them, to be confronted once again with the terrible void inside her, the emptiness of her life…

“Don’t worry, my dear,” says the first one. “We have many ideas where you’re concerned.”

“Do you want to take her to fifteen?” the other asks. “You were thinking of that, too, weren’t you?”

Both women slip on almost transparent negligees, those spiderlike clouds a star of the silent cinema would wear, and move forward with the grace of goddesses. But as for her, they leave her naked; they just slip a dog collar around her neck and lead her all the way down the corridor and up to the next floor on a leash. She is surprised at how obedient she has become, so unlike herself. Or maybe they recognized this docile streak within her, the desire to submit to a master’s orders, the repressed craving for slavery and the whip.

Had she known her tarot better, she would have realized that in room fifteen she would find a photographer, and one of those old-fashioned devices standing on a single leg and under the black cloth of which the operator must dive to ensure he is focused correctly on his subject.

The photographer is waiting for them. He is dressed in Second Empire attire, a short blouse and crumpled trousers, with a thin moustache and small Napoleon III-type beard. Next to him is the young man she had met at dinner: now undressed, she can see he is no more than sixteen years old at most. He sports the thin and curvy shape of a classical catamite, a lazy if gracious body spread over the bed, distractedly playing with his half-erect cock as they enter the room.

“Hello, darlings,” says the tired adolescent.

“Hello, asshole,” says the second woman. “How are you?”

“So-so,” says the young man. “He’s only fucked me twice since night fell. Do you think he no longer likes me?”

“Don’t you like him any longer?” the first one asks the photographer.

“He bores me,” says the photographer. “So what are you bringing me here?”

“Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

“Very,” the photographer says. “I so enjoy such pale milklike skin.” He examines the young girl all over. She blushes at being so exposed. “Her eyes are so shiny,” the photographer says. “Have you just made her come?”

“Insanely,” says the second woman.

“Sit down on the bed,” the photographer tells the girl. “Take your stockings off, please. And you, little fag, come here.”

She sits herself down on a short square of black silk, in the same pose as Rembrandt’s Bathsheba. It all feels like a dream. The photographer moves his heavy apparatus and disappears under its black cloth. She hears the muted sound of his voice, commanding her: “No, thighs apart. Good, yes, like that. Lean backwards, steady your arms, breasts to the front, perfect.”

He reappears briefly . “You,” he says to the young boy, who is pretending to be terribly bored, “come and suck me off while I’m working, it’ll keep you busy.”

“Yes, uncle,” says the young man with a touch of irony in his voice. “Right away, uncle.”

The photographer again disappears under his cloth and, on his knees facing him, the boy, with obvious dexterity, pulls out a remarkable cock, disproportionate in places, whose fat and swollen helmet emerges triumphantly from a dry, nervous stem. The boy licks it quite methodically and witnesses the bulging fruit thicken even more under his ministrations.

“Swallow,” says the voice under the black cloth.

Obediently, the young boy opens his mouth wide and, jaws wide apart, devours the strange and monstrous fruit.

All the while, the photographer is taking picture after picture, only making appearances to change the plates and sprinkle more magnesium into his flash, just his voice emerging from beneath the black sheet. “Yes… now each of you suck one of her breasts… like that… ah, a hand on her thigh… open wider, my pretty one… against that black silk background, you are just sublime. Throw her backward, now. One kissing her, the other licking her… yes… more profile, please, I can’t see your tongue… no, don’t look at the camera… very good, head thrown back… and you there, suck a bit better than that or I’ll have you whipped right in front of these ladies…”

“Oh, yes,” says the catamite, interrupting his labors.

Together with her two new friends, he has her adopt the most lubricious poses, ever on the lookout for the moment when she comes. Under their tongues and fingers, she experiences a whole series of orgasms, until she totally forgets where she is. Only the bright explosion of the flash, from time to time, reminds her that a man is taking photographs of her while…

Is it the caresses that are generating her pleasure or the fact she is being photographed? The orgasms, the flashes of light, one or the other or both are levitating her out of her body. Every time her mouth opens on a silent scream, the flash of the magnesium betrays the fact that the photographer has captured her moment of selflessness, stolen yet another parcel of her soul, her life… it’s as if she was being emptied from the inside, as if her very substance was now flowing down her thighs, captured by the photograph, disfigured, transformed…

The sound of the door opening…

A bit later, a cock thrusting up her ass, another forcing its way down her throat, the room is now full of men and women, all the guests from dinner, each and every one fucking her in every way, and from orgasm to orgasm she feels herself grow wider, dilate until she is just a set of openings, of holes, deep abysses where cocks are ejaculating before being replaced by larger cocks or more numerous ones. Now they are penetrating her two at a time, in her cunt, in her ass, they come in twos to tease her mouth, and innumerable pairs of hands roam across her body, pinch her, sometimes spank her, and above it all the voice of the photographer encouraging them, and the brightness of the flash, and that anxious feeling that she is now no more than an empty space being furrowed, a nothingness full of come, devoured, eaten from the inside by a horde of vampires. Soon there will be nothing left of her, just some long blonde hair matted with sweat, a white expanse of flesh torn apart by caresses, a set of pale eyes she holds tightly closed while all of her is being impaled and only the violent flashes of light make their way through to her dead eyes.

Suddenly they all abandon her. From one moment to the next, it seems to her, there is no one left. She runs her hands in front of her eyes as if she were blind. The commander is standing in front of her and watching: the same cold marble eyes, the same early taste of the tomb. He gently applauds her, as he had earlier, but now there is no sign of irony on his face.

“Very good, my dear, very good indeed. I knew we could rely on you.” He comes towards her, takes her hands, invites her to rise from the deeply soiled bed of black satin. “Come,” he says. “There is one final thing for you to do.”

Together they walk down the stairs. There are so many rooms, so many passages she will know nothing about, whose anonymous numbers will not be revealed. What masked ball or orgy in room twelve, what improvised concert in room eight? They find themselves on the steps outside the castle. The cicadas are now silent, the night is still far from morning, but she hesitates. The moon has moved across the roof and a wide geometrical shadow now covers a whole section of the lawn. All that emerges, on the frontier of darkness, is the statue of the goddess, even whiter in the light of the moon.

The commander leads her to the statue. The grass is mown short and feels hard against her bare feet. She shivers, not because she is cold, as spring down here already has a touch of summer, but because of the anxiety that always strikes towards the end of a night’s party, when all is over and loneliness is about to knock on the door again and all you are left with is memories…

“Get up on the pedestal,” he says. “Yes, like that, with your eyes facing the eyes of the goddess. Take her into your arms – very good, now your hands on her ass, yes. Now, don’t move.”

Methodically, he ties her to the statue with thin string. He ties her tightly, the rope biting into her flesh, her breasts crushed against the stone breasts of Venus – or is it Diana – and then her legs are pulled up against the legs of marble, ankle against ankle, until she can barely move an eyelash, her face pressed against the stone head.

“They’re the same colour,” says a female voice.

“That’s true,” says another man. “Maybe it’s the statue that’s actually tied to her.”

“Predator and prey,” jokes yet another. Are they all there?

“Let’s begin,” someone says. “It’s time to end all of this.”

The sharp whisper of the first lash precedes by a microsecond the blow that lands on her rump. She screams, or is it her tortured flesh that screams under the assault of the whip? But she is not surprised; she is already resigned, abandoned, punished because she is innocent. Innocent of what?

She screams, tries to wriggle out, but she is tied so tightly that the marble bites into her. She cries out as the whip keeps on finding her, with every new blow her skin opens up, like paper under a knife. Soon her ass, her back, her shoulders have become the mad canvas of a mad artist, blood spurting in lines and blotches, spreading, merging. The blood now turning her flesh dark, woman of bronze tied to woman of stone. Pain begins to anaesthetize pain, she is an open wound, furrowed, overtaken by heat, by fire irradiating from the very centre of her belly, and she is aware that this unbearable heat rising towards her heart will soon kill her as surely as the cold poison killed Socrates. She no longer screams, just feels the heat rising, the whip opening up new valleys, Venus watching her in silence, and when the time comes a ray of moonlight reaches out to seize her in its grasp, and she dies of unbelievable pleasure, part and parcel of the immense fire of the whip.

The moon finally moves behind the house, the darkness drowns the statue and its victim. They leave her tied there and walk back to the house in silence, satisfied.

There is but a bare sketch of dawn. A gentle breeze weaves across the park, though the wind is not strong enough to lift the bloodied strands of blonde hair now slowly drying.

In an hour or two, the cicadas will begin interrupting the silence again.

Noon, Gare de Lyon. The young woman with brown hair, captivated by the sun, has walked onto the first train. She will pay for her ticket on board, too bad about the likely supplement.

There is almost no one in the compartment. Further down the aisle sits a man with steel-grey hair, but she can only see his straight neck. Closer to her are four men playing cards, already well into their game. One is black, very black. When she walked past them, she noticed they were playing with tarot cards, and the black man was about to throw down a fifteen: a photographer, head buried under the cloth of an old-fashioned camera, is shooting an undressed model, a pale-skinned woman with long blonde hair. At his feet, an effeminate young boy is sucking him off with studious application.