The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (19 page)

“But you’re the one who showed it to me.”

“To scare you, not to make you want to leave me.”

“And I never have,” said Val. “I’ve carried you around in my head like soiled clothing at the bottom of a suitcase. I’ve carried you in my dreams. I’ve hated you for being there in every place I ever went to, every bed I ever slept in. You’ve always been there, haunting me, spying on me, watching.”

“Then forgive me,” Lettie said, “and I’ll go away.”

“Unlock the door.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Don’t lie.”

Val raised her hand up in frustration, then brought it down without delivering the blow. The accumulation of her wounding made her weak, but Lettie’s sadness weakened her still more. In the shadows, Lettie’s face appeared to dance with minuscule pinpricks of light that mimicked the crosshatchings of the cat’s cradle.

“Forgive me,” Lettie said again.

The thaw in Val, though incomplete, was tenfold more painful than the freeze, a blossoming of anguish that shivered out in razor-sharp, concentric circles from her heart. She was conscious of Majeed watching her in a trance of immobility, as silent as an inheld breath, waiting.

“I forgive you,” Val said, though each word felt like it cost her a lifetime’s worth of pain. “I forgive you . . . Mother.”

Lettie might have smiled. Val never knew. The flickering sparks that strobed her face intensified. Her skin peeled back in sections, bleeding pulp and sweetness like overripe fruit. Her hands lifted up beseechingly. Val saw the tattooed palms. Her mother’s face dissolved and, in its place, appeared the Berber girl’s, laughing as she held up to Val the jinn-spells on her hands. That illusion lasted just an instant, though, before the child’s face and body transformed again and Val was staring at the Turk’s scourged flesh and ribby torso and shrunken, useless genitals. Then he, too, was gone as the room’s walls folded in on themselves like the wings of origami swans. The bed, the desk, the window with its unreal view of New England fields dismantled into shreds, the shreds reduced to tatters, and these to gaudy flecks that whirled through the air like stiletto-sharp confetti.

“Filakis?” Val said, unbuckling the collar from Majeed’s neck. “How does he . . .?”

He’s a conjuror. He fucks in any shape except his own. In his own form, he stays as chaste as any virgin. Pure. He thinks it makes him godly.”

“More like Satan, I’d say.”

“The City’s his creation, his haven for lost souls. He’s God and Satan both, here.”

Val finished freeing Majeed. She plucked long needles from her chest and torso. Majeed gave her his blouse.

“Come on!”

“But the door . . .”

“There isn’t any!”

Majeed was right. The illusion of the Sewing Room had fallen away to be replaced by the dark staircase leading up through Filakis’s prison. They lost no time in climbing it. Above ground, the City’s winding alleyways were swathed in midnight dark. But if by day the inhabitants of the City had remained for the most part secluded, nightfall had changed all that.

Now bodies writhed and twisted on the cobblestones, locked in violent congress with each other and themselves, with objects, animals, and beings that, glimpsed in passing, Val could not identify as either alive or dead. If lethargy infused the sex act by day, savagery and necrophilia ruled it at night. Nor were those copulating so concentrated in their efforts that they ignored Majeed and Val. Tongues flicked out to stroke their passing flesh. Hands touched and pressed, and fingers fluttered in mute cajolement.

They avoided the on-going orgy as much as possible and plunged into the blacker corridors where, by daylight, the marketplace had offered its obscenities. Now the streets were empty of all merchandise except the human trade. In the pale illumination of a paltry moon, Val saw the abominations that the light of day had shamed into concealment. Around a heaping, stinking mound the tribe of shiteaters squatted, dining with their hands. No sooner was their vile repast consumed than their bodies evacuated the meal again, and they recommenced their feast. Forced to pass within an arm’s length by the narrowness of the walls, Val and Majeed were prey to dozens of soiled fingers dangling out at them, dripping enticements as they proffered their foul treats.

Beyond that, as they approached the area of the tanneries, Majeed slipped on something in a darker patch of dark. He fell to one knee. Val stopped to help him up. Liquid ran cold and clotty on Majeed’s leg. Val’s hand on him came away reeking of copper. She’d barely had time to register the fact that they were skidding in a pool of blood when the moon skimmed out from under cloud cover again, revealing a huddled cluster of figures, the worst of the City’s worst, the deformed and mutilated, the self-created amputees, eaters of dung and dead flesh. Val whispered something to Majeed, who’d faltered again, perhaps from shock at seeing the display in front of them.

Cannibals
?

He shook his head. Less shock, thought Val, than abject fascination. Not cannibals in the truest sense, she realized, but flesheaters just the same. With razors and with small, thin-bladed knives, they sliced off tiny portions of themselves and popped these awful delicacies into their mouths, chewing with ecstatic sighs, while the men’s erections hardened into steel-like batons, and sex ran down the women’s legs as copious as urine. They paused in feasting only long enough to rut against each other’s blood-streaked skins before returning to the next course in their macabre meal.

Val and Majeed’s passing provided an unexpected distraction and the possibility for new and undiscovered flavors. The group broke apart and formed a circle around Majeed and Val. They held their razor blades and knives in fingers sliced to the bone and missing digits. It was only the clumsiness their wounding had induced that allowed Val to hurl a loose stone at the nearest one and break an opening in the circle. Majeed did the same. Another flesheater staggered back and toppled. His nearest comrade saw opportunity in this and stooped to slice off an eyelid and a speck of nose. Raw wailing rent the air.

“Come on!” Val shook Majeed. He seemed entranced but came alert when the rest of them crowded in again. Val’s heart was racing, but she attributed it to fear and flight. Only as they approached the tanneries did she realize she was light-headed with lust as much as terror and that her inner muscles were clenching and unclenching in response to a steadily increasing need. The very air seemed drugged with pheromones. To breathe was to have sex. A hand reached out. Majeed.

“They’re coming.”

She looked behind. At first the narrow street appeared blocked by a low wall. Only when the moon performed its fan dance with the cloud again, overturning like a bowl and spilling out its light, did she recognized the “wall” to be a thing composed of flesh – night denizens of the City distracted from their coupling by the possibility of something new, fresh meat to fuck and fondle. In the mob, Val saw a few that appeared almost healthy, those who’d evidently resided in the City only a short time, but most were the derelict and drained, those far along the way to literally fucking themselves to death. The women cupped their bruised and flopping breasts, the men worked cocks made raw and scabrous from overuse, but kept erect by cock rings tight enough to bite into the flesh.

A hand slid up between Val’s legs. She gasped, looked down. A hugely obese man, nude and masturbating, was crouched down in the shadow of a doorway. The sight of him – suety flesh overlapping in great grayish dollops – revolted Val, but more appalling still was her reaction to the touch. Her nerve endings keened with fresh desire. It was all she could do to kick free of her molester and dash behind Majeed into another alleyway.

Ahead she heard the approach of others closing in. She grabbed Majeed’s hand and they swerved left through an ancient doorway into a dark foyer. A new smell, one Val recognized at once, assailed her nostrils.

“The tanneries,” said Majeed, his hand tightening on hers.

The courtyard in which they stood was filled with immense vats dug into the ground. A heavy, suffocating odor rose up from the murky green liquid. Val felt her stomach lurch.

Outside, the stillness of the night was broken by the panting gasps of the on-coming orgiasts. In another few seconds, they’d be upon them.

“Get in,” Majeed said.

“What?”

“Come on.”

Holding her breath against the stench, Val followed Majeed along the slippery stepping-stones that formed narrow walk-ways between the vats. She heard a mucky splash, and suddenly Majeed was not beside her.

From one of the reeking vats, a voice: “
Get in
.”

At the same time, from outside, other voices. The pack following them was splitting up. Val heard footfalls in the outer courtyard. Squatting down over one of the vats, she lowered herself as quietly as possible into the foul-smelling muck. Animal skins in various stages of softening swished softly around her legs as their pursuers entered the courtyard.

In the darkness, she prayed they’d be afraid to walk too near the tanning vats, that they wouldn’t see her face or Majeed’s lifted above the ghoulish green stew. She prayed, too, that she could stay concealed, that the mere presence of so much flesh, available and eager, would not seduce her out of hiding. In a doorway across from the vats, Val saw a couple silhouetted, locked in slow and rhythmic copulation. Barely moving, the woman hoisted up one leg around the man’s thigh. He bent to take her nipple between his teeth. She fought a trembling urgency to cry out, betray herself to the mob and fall into a sea of flesh no less disgusting than the pulpy wallow in which she now was crouched.

She bit her lip against the urge. Her cunt contracted and released in pulsing, ever faster waves. The vile stench of the tannery no longer reached her brain. Instead the room was a perfumery of sex, lush and intoxicating. The woman in the doorway was writhing on her partner’s penis. Her long hair swayed. Her sleek thighs clenched. Val felt the City acting on her brain like a narcotic, its mesmerizing power taking deeper hold. Its carnal wonders, even the eaters of excrement, the consumers of their own flesh, evoked less disgust now than compelling wonder and, worse, the desire to do more than look, to touch and feel, participate . . .

She had to get out.

The woman grinding on her lover’s dick reached down to grab his buttocks. Her hands turned briefly outward. Val saw Filakis’s hennaed palms. Get out now or never leave. Hoisting herself up out of the tanning vat and calling to Majeed, she sprinted past the lovers in the doorway and ran on without looking back to see what transformations might be taking place.

The streets that she and Majeed followed all led uphill, away from the City’s heart. There was no more serious pursuit. By dawn, they were standing on the hillsides overlooking the earthcolored Casbah. The crenelated ramparts, towers, and courtyards lost density against the watery pastel of dawn, shimmering with ever lessening brilliance until scarcely an outline remained. To the north, another city skyline loomed, but this one curved around a wedge of dark Atlantic. Val recognized the skyline of Agadir.

Majeed caught Val’s hand.

“I can’t keep going.”

“We’ll rest then.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“Then . . . what?”

“I think I’m making a mistake. I don’t think I can . . . leave.”

“That’s crazy. If you go back, you’ll die.”

Majeed’s gaze was rivetted on the space where vestiges of the City’s walls still were faintly visible. There, silhouetted against the day, stood a lone figure. At this distance, Val couldn’t see a face, but she was sure the figure was Filakis, his arms extended, pious in his mock chastity and grand in his forgiveness.

Offering that which he despised – temptations of the flesh.

“You can’t, Majeed. Don’t even think about it.”

“I have to.”

“But he tortured you.”

“Yes – no. It’s just a game, after all. An endless game. The torture, then the pleasure. You didn’t stay there long enough to learn. You still remember how it is Outside, where the world is something besides a sex organ.”

“Don’t do this.”

“Give me the incense burner.”

“No.”

“If you love me, Val, you will.”

“You won’t last back there. You’ll die.”

Majeed shrugged. “There’re worse ways to die than being fucked to death.”

“And me?”

“The Turk has a forgiving heart. I’m sure he’d be willing to give you another chance.”

Val shook her head. She handed Majeed the incense burner and backed away. He struck a match and held it to the wick. Pale emerald leaves of fire blazed. Val shut her eyes.

When next she looked, Majeed’s befouled clothes were reduced to stinking embers. The incense burner, not even charred, lay among the pitiful debris.

“Do you want to make love again?” asked Val’s newest lover, a silversmith in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He’d come up behind her, laid his hands atop her shoulders, was rubbing his hard penis into the crack of her ass.

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on. I’ll bet I can change your mind.”

He tried to take her hand. “What’s that you’ve got?”

She held the incense burner out to him, let him inspect it with his artist’s eye, exploring its design.

“Nice carving. Where’d you get it? India?”

She shrugged and plucked the object back from him too quickly, her haste betraying a greater fondness for the artifact than for his penis, which she was already weary of examining.

“Come on now, let me suck you. Eat out your pretty pussy.”

He sank to his knees. Val spread her thighs just wide enough for him to get his tongue in. She put one hand atop his head and stroked him idly. With the other, she fingered the incense burner, which smelled, she thought, though very faintly, of temptation and desire. If she held onto it, she knew the day would come when she’d no longer be able to resist its possibilities. She’d light the flame and step inside to be consumed.

Or she could pitch the object out through the open window this minute, if she wanted. Hurl it high and far and never suffer its obscene allure again. Perhaps, she thought, in time, she’d make the choice. But not yet, she thought, and stroked her lover’s face. Not yet.