Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (18 page)

PANDORA’S OTHER BOX

Greg Boyd

Never can I pass without a shudder through those gates of ivory or horn that separate us from the invisible world.

—
Gerard de Nerval
, Aurelia

W
RAPPED IN A DARK WOOL OVERCOAT,
I wander along the narrow cobblestone streets of a foreign city, where the crooked upper stories of the buildings lean over me like a thick canopy of branches in a fairy-tale forest. It’s twilight on a winter’s day, and I’ve taken a wrong turn while searching for a subway station buried somewhere beneath the spider web of surface streets. The path I’ve taken has curved away from the river, winding up a steep hill. I admit that I am lost. To make matters worse, I’ve left my tourist map back at the hotel.

Single again, after years of marriage, I’m looking for adventure and it’s the last night of my trip. I wonder what my colleagues at the International Folklore Conference would think if they knew I’d declined their dinner invitation to seek out strip clubs and sex boutiques, to window-shop the girls working the rainy neon night. No doubt I should have taken a cab. Taxi drivers always know where to go.

Along the darkening street, doors are shut tight against the cold weather. The windows are unlit. I pass a tailor’s shop with a bare cloth and wire mannequin bust behind a large pane of streaked glass. The mere suggestion of a naked bosom makes me horny. I hurry forward, but the steepness of the hill and the chill in the air take my breath away, so I stop for a moment beneath the awning of a storefront. The window displays a pyramid of antique poison bottles with cracked and yellowed paper labels, and three stuffed rats with noses, feet, and tails the shocking color of coral.

It’s raining harder now. I push my hand against the bottom of my pocket and cradle my cold penis as the wind slaps my face and penetrates the wet wool of my coat. I peer again into the window stuffed haphazardly with antiques and
objets d’art
. An old bicycle with a giant front wheel and a high seat catches my eye. Surrounding the bicycle are bronze and silver coins with imperial faces, a set of cobalt blue glassware, a framed lithograph of a hypnotic odalisque, a small wooden chest with an inlaid top depicting a trumpeting elephant, a carnelian intaglio of Medusa, a stack of old books with raised and rounded spines, a pair of high-heeled Victorian lace-up boots, a faded silk kimono with a red and black dragon motif, a Napoleonic shako, a medieval falconer tapestry, and a small bronze Aphrodite figurine. Though I can’t decipher any of the other signs on the street, I see that the wooden shingle hanging from the wrought-iron post over the door reads in English, C
URIOSITY
S
HOP
.

On the street behind me a car hisses past, spraying water from the gutter onto my legs and soaking my feet. Through the shop window I detect the warm glow of electric lights. I see there’s a small handwritten note that reads
Browsers Welcome
. I shake out my hat and enter, rubbing my hands together. A bell tinkles as I shut the door behind me. I’m surprised that no one greets me.

Inside, a suit of chain mail stands guard next to a marble Eros. An antique soda machine rests on a Byzantine floor mosaic next to a brass clepsydra. On a circular rack at the far end of the room, wedding dresses with tiny waists and yellowing lace await a second chance. I note that each item has a card stock label affixed to it with a piece of string. Though there are no prices, the tags contain brief descriptions penned in precise but tiny orthography.
Gentleman’s leather wig stand. Sterling silver nipple clamp.

The shop smells of incense and freshly baked bread. I wonder if someone lives upstairs. I unbutton my coat and pass through a doorway into the adjacent room, which smells in turn of cinnamon and vanilla, ginger and saffron. Among the crowd of masterful paintings that cover the walls, I discover a colorful Japanese woodcut of a samurai stuffing his enormous cock inside a plump courtesan’s hairy snatch. Nearby, a stuffed grizzly rears up over a scale model of a flying machine from Leonardo’s notebook and the pitted Roman spearhead that pierced the side of the crucified Christ. A thick layer of dust covers everything.

Surrounded by fringe, beads, and crystal, I’m reading the label on a vial of rare Tonkin musk and running my hand through an ancient wig made of lustrous human hair smelling of olibanum and myrrh, when I’m startled by a voice behind me. I turn to find a woman with the classical features, proportions, and posture of a statue carved of white marble. Her sapphire eyes sparkle behind rectangular lenses set in a heavy frame. Magnificent breasts with puffy nipples stretch her tight turtleneck sweater. “Can I help you find something?” she asks, in accented English. A strand of chestnut brown hair has come loose from her chignon and fallen onto her long neck. Her perfume makes me dizzy.

I realize I’m staring at her breasts and look quickly away, my eyes drifting to the opposite end of the room, where I see a giant model of a man dressed in a white suit and a rakish, long-billed driving cap. “Actually, I’m wondering if you could tell me a little about the item in the corner.”

“The Automatic Man,” she smiles. “A recent acquisition from America. It turned up in an old barn last year, and my representative there bought it at auction. It’s a battery-operated mechanical being created in the late 1890s by Louis Philip Perew, an inventor from Tonawanda, New York. It stands seven feet tall, wears size thirteen shoes, and is made of painted aluminum over a rigid metal frame. The original canvas duck clothing is in remarkably good shape, don’t you agree?” She bends over slightly to show me, which seems impossible in the pencil skirt she’s poured into. But nothing deters her.

“It’s designed to walk at a brisk pace,” she says. “The robot originally pulled a small wagon-carriage attached to its hands by a chain. It can also roll its eyes and speak a short recorded message from an internal phonograph.”

“What does it say?”

“I’m going to walk from New York to San Francisco.”

“Fascinating.”

“But not exactly to your tastes, I see.”

“Not exactly,” I laugh. “But I’m quite sure there’s something here that I absolutely must have.” I lick my lips and look into her eyes.

She smiles again, Sphinx-like. “Perhaps I can help. There’s a particular curiosity that I suspect you will find most beguiling. Would you like to see it?” Already she’s moving toward the doorway.

“Yes, of course,” I say, following her past a giant butterfly pinned to the wall and into the next room. Her high heels click noisily on the polished hardwood floors as she leads me through a maze of small rooms crowded with mysterious objects. I keep my eyes fixed on her tight, round ass, as it wiggles beneath the short wool skirt. I imagine licking the perfume from behind her ears as I touch myself through the pocket of my coat.

At the end of a hallway, she stops before a door marked private. As she searches for the key to the lock, I pretend to admire an oversized cartography of lost continents spread open on a mahogany tabletop. She leads me down a set of narrow stairs to the basement. My heart is racing. Amid a chaotic profusion of as yet uncatalogued objects, she gestures for me to sit in an empire chair next to the skeleton of an upright
Parasaurolophus
and a metro sign with leafy lampposts and bulbs like curved flowers.

She reaches up to undo the chignon and shake out her hair. My legs are trembling. She stands directly in front of me, between my thighs, and places her hands on my shoulders.

“Now sit still and stay perfectly silent,” she says. I look up at her and try to speak, but she puts her finger against my lips and shakes her head. She’s looking down at me and standing so close that I can feel the heat from her body. She bends forward and curls the fingers of both her hands under the hem of her herringbone-pattern skirt.

Sitting before her in the chair, eye level with her waist, I watch her slide the gray wool slowly up her marble white thighs. She uncovers the garters hooked to the dark stripe of nylon at the top of her stockings. The hem of the skirt is like the curtain of a theater, slowly revealing as it rises, the double feature of her inner thighs. A moment later she stands before me with the skirt bunched up at her waist, her secret unveiled. She is not wearing panties.

Framed by the black lace garter belt, her sex is marvelous, intoxicating, alluring. It is Gustave Courbet’s painting
L’Origine du Monde
come to life. I shake my head and pinch myself. One moment I am wandering cold and wet in the rain, and the next I am surrendering all sense of logic and time to the contemplation of an exquisite pair of creased and folded labia minora, gateway to further mysteries. My breath quickens with the moist heat and the musky smell of arousal only inches from my face.

“Come closer,” she says. “I want to tell you a secret.”

I lean forward, so that my nose touches the soft skin of her pubis. Suddenly I realize her vagina is whispering to me. “But first, give me a kiss,” it says.

I don’t hesitate. Spreading the fleshy lips with my fingers, I slide my tongue the length of her damp opening, and then press against her, pushing inside. I kiss and lick the bare skin at the top of each thigh and circle the tip of my tongue around the hood of her clitoris. I drool onto my fingers and rub saliva onto her labia, making her still wetter. “That’s nice,” the vulva says. “Now let me feel your fingers.”

When I place my index finger at the fleshy opening, she sucks it inside immediately. By now she is very wet. One by one, I feed her more, rubbing above with my thumb, until it slips inside as well. She lifts her sweater above her breasts and pinches her large nipples, sighing and moaning as I stir the pot, which comes quickly to a boil. She grabs my elbow and pulls until half my forearm disappears. The lights in the basement pulse and get brighter when she pushes roughly back against me, shouting Elizabethan obscenities and crying out as her muscles contract.

I bounce around on the seat of the chair like water on a hot griddle. The zipper of my trousers claws at the head of my erection. She presses a fat nipple between my lips, teasing me. She pulls my hand out and bends over to unbuckle my belt. Without a word, she frees my cock and slips it into the relief of her mouth. I grab the back of her head with one hand, pulling her deeper. With the other hand I grip the wooden arm of the chair, my mouth in full scream.

Then things get really strange.

As the blood pulses through my engorged organ, the tight skin expands outward, nerves quivering along every inch of my body. My heart pounds at the center of my cock. My legs, my hands, even my head swell with sensation and push out to rub against the wet warmth of her mouth, as though I’m nothing more than a giant phallus. She has shrunk me down to the size of a samurai cock, transformed me into a throbbing hot dildo. I gasp as she picks me up off the cushion of the chair and squeezes me in her hand.

Her warm tongue washes my face and tickles my torso. She sits down with her legs spread wide, knees draped over the arms of the chair. I watch her unfold the opening of her cunt with her fingers and align me with her sweet-talking lips. “Give me all your love,” she says. “Let me wrap myself around you.” Teasing herself, she pushes me in, up to my neck.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to breathe, that I will drown or suffocate. But as I glide past the soft creases and travel farther into her wet grasp, I give myself up. I am her toy: she uses me roughly, slapping my face against her clit, holding me by the ankles and plunging me rapidly in and out until my head spins. “Stab, thou happy dagger,” she hisses, sucking in her breath. Moaning, crying out, cursing, she bucks her hips wildly. “Deeper, thou ruttish common-kissing codpiece!” Her muscles contract and spasm around me, and I explode with pleasure.

When I regain consciousness, I find myself inside a wire birdcage modeled after the Taj Mahal. It hangs from a hook in the ceiling of a room upstairs, the one with the grizzly bear and Aladdin’s magic lamp. Sitting on a little wooden perch, I chirp for a moment and shake out my wings. On the wall behind me is an unknown painting by Van Gogh of a caged bird in a yellow and blue bedroom. The tag tells me the artist painted it in Arles and offered it in trade to a prostitute who kept a canary in her room above the bar with the red walls, hanging lamps, and the billiard table he immortalized in
Night Cafe
. On the top shelf of the bookcase next to me stands a tiny carved limestone figurine with the shape and features of the Woman of Willendorf.

I shift my weight from one foot to the other and pivot my head from side to side. I let myself drop and glide toward the floor of the cage, then fly effortlessly up to another perch. Meanwhile, I can hear the woman humming contentedly in the next room.
I’m pregnant,
she tells me telepathically.
I’m making up some new labels
. I notice that she’s filled the water dropper and scattered a thick carpet of seeds on the floor. I also see that she’s left the door to the cage wide open.
Wonderful
, I sing back to her through my little beak.