Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (11 page)

She shivered and pulled on the robe.

Mariah opened the door a crack. “Aunt Helen?”

“Are you all right?” Aunt Helen asked.

“Tired.”

“Ah.”

Mariah swallowed, worked up enough spit to speak. “Did you have a nice meeting with your friends?”

Aunt Helen blushed. “Yes. Dear, what did you do with yourself while I was gone?”

Mariah lowered her gaze. Aunt Helen was her host. Mariah had broken unspoken rules. If she told, would Aunt Helen kick her out? How could she confess to anybody what had happened? What
had
happened, anyway? In the light of day, she was convinced it had all been a wildly erotic dream. Nothing like that could really happen, could it?

“Did you go into my study?”

Heat swept over Mariah’s face. Aunt Helen had been nothing but kind to her. Where were the easy lies of her adolescence, when she had told her parents she was studying at someone else’s house while she was really out riding in cars with her friends, smoking pot, drinking, exploring each other’s bodies?

She couldn’t lie like that anymore.

Mariah nodded.

“Oh, dear. I was afraid of that. Did you look in my big leather book?”

Mariah nodded.

“Did you—try anything you saw in there?”

Mariah nodded.

“Oh, dear,” said Aunt Helen. “Did it work?”

Mariah nodded again.

“Oh, dear. Oh, dear, oh dear. I had a feeling you would have a natural aptitude for the craft. Did you tidy up afterward?”

“I swept the floor. I thought I got it all up.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Did you send whatever you summoned back where it came from?”

“I—” Mariah shook her head. “I don’t know
what
I did, but I sure didn’t do that. I don’t know how.”

“Oh, dear.” Aunt Helen’s eyes sharpened. “I thought there was a smell of wild magic still around the house. Well, we’ll have to banish it. Who knows what it’s been up to since you set it loose? Do you remember the spell you used?”

“It was in another language,” Mariah whispered.

“Of course,” said Aunt Helen. “But there would have been a title, something to make you want to say it. Which one was it? ‘Come and Converse’? That’s a favorite of mine since the Bowens moved away. I’ve gotten quite in the habit of using that one. Silly, I know, when I’ve got you I could be talking with, but my friend who comes across the veil and I, we’ve had a long while to grow accustomed to each other’s company, and—oh, not that one? Did you do a summoning for fortune? Probably not, those accomplish a task and they’re over. You called something over from the other side, didn’t you? Come show me what you did.”

Mariah followed her aunt downstairs and into the study, where her aunt spoke softly to the big leather book as she untied it. Aunt Helen laid the leather thong open and stepped back. “Show me,” she said, her voice strict and unfamiliar.

Mariah put her hands on the book.

Tidy up. Put away your toys.

But he wasn’t a toy, was he?

If they put him away, would she ever see him again? Now that Aunt Helen knew Mariah was a snoop, would she ever leave the book out where Mariah could study it again? Copy the spell? What if she told Aunt Helen the wrong spell?

God, the sex. Cataclysmic, mind-blowing. Sure made her forget all her troubles. Her lower self twitched just thinking about it.

She sighed and flipped pages until she found the spell to call forth the Satisfying One. Could she memorize it with just a look? But Aunt Helen was watching, and the words were too strange. She laid the book flat and stepped back, her face hot.

“Oh, that one,” said Aunt Helen, whose face flushed, too. She turned the page and looked at what was written on the back. “But that’s self-limiting. One satisfaction per summoning, and then off it goes again, nice and neat.”

“There’s two pages?” Mariah asked.

“What?” Aunt Helen darted her a glance, then flipped back to the previous page, stared at the bottom. “You stopped
there
?”

Mariah nodded.

“Oh, dear,” Aunt Helen said. “So that’s been unfettered since last night? I wonder what kind of dreams my neighbors have been having. Oh, dear. We’d better tame it right away.”

Mariah’s robe tightened around her breasts, squeezed them gently, released, squeezed. The rough cloth rubbed back and forth over her nipples, raising tingles. The tail of the robe’s belt snaked inside, muscular and supple, and pressed at the groove between her legs. The whole robe came alive, the nubby material massaging her, immobilizing her with delight.

“You must unsay the spell,” Aunt Helen said.

The robe grew a hood, which draped itself over her head. “Say my name three times,” something whispered in her ear, “and I’ll stay with you forever.”

Her body purred and hummed and revved. Forever!

Wow!

So
the opposite of Jason!

“Mariah? Mariah!” Aunt Helen said in her new strict voice.

Just this, joy forever? The rest of her life? Everything around her a potential partner? Hot, wet lips suckled at her left breast, then her right, shocks and shudders of delight.

“Tidy up. You can always summon it again,” Aunt Helen said.

Mariah staggered to the desk, trying not to notice that he was inside her again, fevered throbbing that sent her pulse racing.

“Read this aloud three times.” Aunt Helen pointed to the passage on the second page of the spell.

The hood dropped lower, tightened over her eyes. She reached up and pushed it back, held it back as it struggled to embrace her head again. She felt hot and shifty, close to shooting up into the sky. She read the rest of the spell aloud, even as he stroked and rubbed her. Read it again. Then a third time.

Her robe died.

Her body hummed, poised on the brink. Hummed. Stuttered. Staged down, itching and aching and irritated.

“Good,” said Aunt Helen. “Go back to bed. When you wake up, we’ll start formal training.”

Mariah stumbled twice on the stairs, crawled under her bedcovers with the robe still wrapped around her. “Tell me your name again next time,” she whispered, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

THE WITCH OF JEROME AVENUE

Tsaurah Litzky

Y
ESTERDAY MORNING
I went to art school at the Brooklyn Museum, but our teacher felt sick and sent us home. I was disappointed. I loved drawing the magical objects in the museum’s collection, the kachina dolls and pharaoh’s crowns.

It was my mother’s idea that I go to art school. She signed me up when she saw me doodling in the margins of my school notebooks. She made me the pink brocade shoulder bag that I use to carry my art supplies.

When I got off the bus at our corner, I realized I could still catch the Saturday matinee with free popcorn at the Valentino Cinema on Avenue L. It was
East of Eden
, starring my heartthrob, James Dean. My mother and little brother Seymour weren’t home. They were at a science fair at Utrecht High School, where my brother had won some kind of prize. His revolting interest in the earthworms he dug up from the swampy marshes near our house had paid off.

Maybe my father was home and would go to the movies with me. I loved going places with my handsome father. Women were always looking at him, and I wondered sometimes if they thought I was his date. When we’d go to the movies, he’d always buy two Hershey’s bars with almonds—but give me the almonds from his, because he knew how much I liked them. On the way home, he would ask my opinion of the movie. He told me I had a very smart, insightful mind.

Our gray Plymouth Fury was in the driveway, an encouraging sign. I went in the side door that led to our finished basement. I thought he’d be down there reading the newspapers in his big leather chair.

My father was in the basement, but he wasn’t reading newspapers and he was not alone. He was leaning over the studio couch, his pants down to his thighs. What happened to his underwear? There was a woman beneath him and she wasn’t wearing clothes. He was moving up and down on top of her and she was letting out silly little squeals like my brother’s pet hamster, Eisenhower.

I knew exactly what they were doing. My parents had a book,
Love Without Fear
, they kept in the drawer of my father’s bedside table. I used to read it when I was alone in the house. I knew all the position illustrations by heart.

The woman had such big boobs they spread out on either side of her like yeasty white dough. I could see my father’s scrotum, pink as a chicken neck, bouncing up and down below his ass. He bent his head; started to kiss her chest. Her nipple was exposed, a sloppy brown stain like a coffee spill, but that didn’t stop him from taking it into his mouth.

Then I saw her face. She had an ugly little snout for a nose, and bright orange lipstick smeared all over her mouth and chin. She looked like a clown. My father started pounding into her harder and harder. I stood on the bottom step, as if rooted, unable to tear my eyes away from the horrid scene. I felt a quickening between my legs where I was cleft. The tiny button that was there, which
Love Without Fear
called a clitoris, began to twitch. My insides were heaving and churning. I felt sick.

I made myself go back up the stairs and outside. A few doors down from our house a brand-new pink and white Oldsmobile was parked. I’d never seen it on our block before. I knew this was the evil chariot that had brought the clown to our house.

I ran down to Seaview Avenue, the border between the development of split-level houses where we lived and the fields beyond. I went out through the bulrushes into the swamps, way beyond Canarsie Pier, until I found the spot I was looking for. It was a deep dip in the sand surrounded by rocks and tall reeds, a little distance from the Belt Parkway. I went there with Jerome Rothman three times to make out. I crouched between the rocks, crying and throwing up. After a while I went home.

The Oldsmobile was gone from its spot, and our car was gone, too. The door was locked so I let myself in with my key and went up to my bedroom. I lay down on my belly, unzipped my jeans, and put my fingers inside the crotch of my panties. This was the position I liked best when I wanted to comfort myself. I put three fingers into my slit; my mother liked to call it a lily. I pretended I was wearing a pharaoh’s crown and Jerome Rothman was my body slave. He was rubbing baby oil all over me and between my legs. He saved my clitoris for last. After I came twice, I dozed off.

I heard my mother and brother talking downstairs. I found my mother in the kitchen washing dishes; my brother was watching the TV in the living room. When I told her what I saw in the basement, she staggered to the kitchen table and fell into one of the chairs, still holding the soapy sponge in her hand. She told me she loved me very much, and then she told me to go watch
The Amateur Hour
with my brother. That evening, my father didn’t come home for supper.

In the middle of the night, terrible yelling woke me up. My mother and father were having a big fight. I put my thumbs in my ears and my pillow over my head, but I could still hear them.

The next morning my mother told me we were going on an adventure, a visit to my Aunt Zippy in the Bronx. She sent my brother to spend the day at his friend Bruce’s house.

When we got on the train at Utica Avenue, my mother started to tell me about Aunt Zippy. I only knew her from weddings and bar mitzvahs. She was an old lady who wore velvet dresses and funny hats on special occasions. Even though she was bent over and had wrinkles on her face, the men buzzed around her. She danced every dance.

My mother told me that Aunt Zippy’s full name was Zipporah. She was a witch, a real witch with potions and spells. She’d studied with the most famous witch in Lithuania, Hephzibah the Hebrew.

Aunt Zippy came to America long, long ago. On the day she arrived, she was standing on a street corner trying to hail a livery carriage. She had the address of a Witches Association in Rego Park, Queens. A distinguished gentleman in an elegant carriage pulled by two snow white horses drove up and offered to take her anywhere she wanted to go. It was Diamond Jim Brady. He was captivated by her ravishing looks and brilliant wit and helped her set up shop on the top floor of the Woolworth building. She was quickly successful, drawing her customers from the cream of New York society. The Great Houdini came to drink champagne with her after his magical feats. Boss Tweed, with whom she had a passionate affair, was among her many admirers. Powerful men among her acquaintances helped her make some good investments in real estate.

Then she fell in love with a musician, a saxophone player named Slim Fats she met at a speakeasy. I knew what a speakeasy was because I had seen
The Public Enemy
. She soon found out Slim Fats was already deeply in love with someone else—his sister. All Aunt Zippy’s spells and incantations were not strong enough to break that tie. When Slim Fats left her, she went out of her mind and was sick for a long time.