The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (12 page)

And madder grew the dancers and wilder their excesses with flowers plucked to make bouquets protruding out of anuses and cocks garlanded with spring anemones and vaginas sprouting orchids and rockroses.

The celebrants grabbed Mira by her hands and breasts and buttocks. Their feverish caresses stripped her clothes away and she was swept into the orgy. They peppered her with kisses but reserved the most ardent tonguings for the wound upon her belly, where Baubo’s kiss had left a puckered replica of a tiny cunt.

“Baubo has returned to us,” some of the old ones murmured. “Baubo has a priestess now, and we can dance again.”

In the evening, before returning to the village, they brought Mira jugs of wine and beer and platters of the finest food. The women cleared the earth and made a bed for her amid the ruins of the temple. In the growing dark, alone now, she squatted naked on the hillside, gazing out to sea, trying to remember what was lost to her.

There had been a life for her out there once, school and home and lover, but all that seemed pale and vapid now, dim and distant as the far-off stars and moving rapidly away from her. She let it go with a sense more of relief than loss.

In the night, when she awoke in brief confusion, with fear plucking at her like the beak of some flesh-eating bird, she had only to touch her belly wound and pleasure spiraled up her spine. Her body bloomed with orgasms and her heart with song.

Someday you’ll come to love this
.

Those were the words the jailer said when she clicked on the chain. The chain was secured to a leg of the bed, and the bed was of heavy oak. The prisoner wasn’t strong enough to lift it.

The jailer held a threaded needle which she had sterilized in, boiling water in the kitchen.

It’s just a game
, the jailer said.

And began to sew.

The prisoner screamed and begged and made promises of future perfection, future obedience to any and all rules.

The jailer reminded the prisoner that she had run away before and would likely do that again – and more besides – if given the opportunity.

Still, the prisoner cried bitterly, so the jailer took her in her arms and held her, stroked her, kissed her, touching her in places where she both dreaded touch and craved it.

Thus soothed, she finally tumbled into fitful sleep.

Someday you’ll come to love this
, said the jailer.
Someday you’ll understand
.

The prisoner was nine years old.

In early fall in the city of Hamburg, Val Petrillo arrived late for a slave auction. It was held in the basement of Das K, one of Europe’s most notorious sex clubs, and consisted of nude or seminude men and women, willing participants all, being auctioned off for an hour or two of use in one of the private rooms in the establishment.

Val had heard about the auction – and about a particular “slave” – only hours before and had interrupted a weekend tryst with a Japanese businessman to fly in from Geneva.

It was her first visit to Hamburg, and she regretted the necessity of rushing directly from the airport to the club. Such untoward haste was not her style. She liked to savor a city at leisure and at length, to arrive by train, preferably with the sun just coming up and to sit by herself on the platform for a few minutes, observing the purposeful strides of the commuters, the slink and slouch of the derelicts and whores, the foreign tourists, often timid and unsure, and trying not to look so, but uncertain of the language or the proper direction in which to forge, and feeling their way with caution in an alien terrain. Val never considered herself part of this joyful, seedy, bubbling throng, but rather a distant watcher, the way a pigeonkeeper might observe the milling, shitting, shuffling of the flock.

Sometimes in such a moment of private observation, she’d see a particularly striking face, an eye-catching shape of hand or jaw, a memorable breast or ankle and, if the watched one happened to look back, a brief moment of meeting, of connection might occur, and Val would think, “You might have been my sister, brother, friend for life. You might have been my lover.”

Sometimes such people did become her lovers, but the beauty promised in that first gaze never quite matched Val’s expectations, no more than the skylines of the cities that she visited, some gleaming, thrusting ornate minarets or towering slabs of glass proudly into the sky, others squat and shabby or drab with soot and the grit of harbored pestilence, ever quite lived up to her dreams.

So she stayed on the move. From city to city, bed to bed. Indulging her two addictions. Wanderlust and fleshlust. The passions of her life. Over the past few months, however, a new purposefulness had infused Val’s journeying. In the sex parlors and private clubs she frequented, she’d begun to hear strange rumors. Occasionally, from a pair of lips made slack by drink or satiation, she’d heard whispered tales of a place she’d dreamed about but not yet visited, a carnal city of such perversion that it tested sanity, a place beside which the fleshpot Sodoms and modernday Gomorrahs of the known world paled by comparison.

Always the teller of the tale was vague in his or her allusions, but more than once she’d heard tell of a man known only as the Turk. It was he, so the rumormongers claimed, who could offer entrance to the City.

It was in pursuit of the Turk then, be he real or the fabrication of minds too corrupted by venality to know truth from lies, that Val had come to Das K. A young man from the Philippines, an unskilled laborer who loaded and unloaded cargo on the Hamburg docks by day and indulged his taste for SM by night, was scheduled to be “auctioned off” in a few minutes. Word had it that he had met the Turk, had even ventured to the City. Intrigued, Val was intent on meeting him.

In her early thirties, Val was a slender woman with black hair curtaining a tanned and oval face and features sufficiently symmetrical and absent of expression to make her, if not quite conventionally beautiful, at least inscrutable. Edgy with anticipation, she sat alone now at a back table of the club, sipping Courvoisier. A pair of twins, two young Nigerian women with enormous flaring nostrils and lips the size of dark red rose petals, were being auctioned off, sold at last to an older, professorial type in bifocals and tweed.

A blonde young woman, leashed and corseted, was purchased by a leather dyke, who handcuffed her prize before leading her off the stage. Then a man, all strut and beefcake, with a complex lacery of green tattoos entwining his arms and thighs in a kind of epidermal kudzu, was sold for an outrageous price to a flamboyant creature with sequins in her false eyelashes and a bulge in the crotch of her spandex tights.

When the Philippino boy was finally brought on stage, Val let the bidding rise, then quickly bid a sum so large no one ventured to try to top her. As she was going to the cashier to pay before collecting her slave, Val felt herself observed. Turning slowly, she saw a platinum-haired young man with green lynx eyes watching her from the bar. He wore a silk shirt and loose-fitting black satin vest, a diamond earring and ghoul eyeliner that would have shamed a whore. His flesh was so pale it looked translucent, a stitching together of gossamer insect wings. When their eyes met, he raised his drink, a tiny cordial glass containing what appeared to be a gold liqueur and pantomimed a toast. Val gave him no acknowledgement. Pretty though he was, at the moment, she had no use for any but her purchase.

Minutes later, alone with her slave, Val quickly forgot the hauntingly pale features of the apparition at the bar. She took the Philippino boy, whose name the auctioneer informed her was Santos, to an upstairs whipping room, where she initiated the proceedings by stripping and ordering the slave to fuck her. He did so with might and gusto, but after a few minutes, Val feigned displeasure and secured Santos’s wrists to a pair of manacles affixed to one wall. Then, availing herself of the sturdiest of a selection of whips, she beat the boy’s naked back and buttocks until his glossy, nut-brown flesh was a tapestry of raised pink welts.

Through it all, the slave uttered not a sound, which disappointed Val somewhat, as she found the chief reward of flogging to be the moans and cries of a submissive, and so she wielded the whip with greater vigor but managed to wring forth not one plea or cry.

At length, she freed Santos’s hands and allowed him to fuck her to climax, her own and his, which he accomplished with much writhing and shuddering but not a single sound. They lay still for a while then, breathing the heady, pungent odors of orgasm, hearing laughter and applause from the auction still continuing downstairs.

“I heard about you in Switzerland,” Val began in German, one hand covering and idly petting Santos’s cock, “I’ve been told you’re quite the connoisseur of perversions.”

He smiled and shrugged. It occurred to Val that perhaps he spoke no German. She tried English then, with no better results. Summoning up what meager Spanish she possessed, Val persevered, “Is it true you’ve had relations with a man known as the Turk? And that you’ve been to a place they call the City?”

Again, that small apologetic smile, but this time Val knew he’d understood. His penis, when she uttered the words “the Turk” had stiffened beneath her hand.

“You’re still my slave, you know. And I asked you . . .”

Santos leaned forward, pressed his full mouth to hers. His lips parted. Val entered him with her tongue, probing, thrusting, then . . .

She pulled back, skin goosefleshing, with a cry of dismay.

Santos grinned at her, opened his mouth wide for her inspection. His mouth was empty, a vacant cave, the stump of tongue a grey cauterized root deep in his throat. He gave a gurgling, half-formed sound, a kind of muffled oink.

Scarcely flinching, Val snatched up her handbag and dug out a pen and paper. “Answer my questions,” she commanded. “Write it down.”

Santos held the pen as if it were a foreign object. At the top of the page, he scrawled an “X.” Val asked again and got the same response. The boy was either illiterate or pretending to be so. His cock, however, was far more communicative. Fully erect now, it pressed lewdly against Val’s belly. She slapped the offending piece of meat aside and began to dress.

Santos would tell her nothing, and she was furious. But in another way, she realized, perhaps he’d told her more than she really cared to know. That made her even angrier and, perversely, more anxious than ever before to see the City.

“You didn’t keep him very long. He must have disappointed you.”

One green lynx eye winked at her above a full mouth uptilted at one corner with bemusement: the pretty young thing from the bar. He’d come up beside her when she left the club and fallen into step.

“He was fine,” Val said. “Quite worth what I paid.”

“Except he’s maimed.”

“Not where it counts.”

“Unless you purchased him more for what you hoped he’d say than what he’d do.”

“I didn’t buy the boy for conversation.”

“Oh, didn’t you?”

Val stopped. They were walking along a narrow street, still in the St. Pauli district, but a good mile north of the Reeperbahn’s famed glitz – all neon, sizzle, and glare – and a hundred years away in atmosphere. Here, winding cobbled streets converged and serpentined, dead-ended and then reemerged, a medieval maze of narrow, gabled houses illuminated by pale cones of incandescent light thrown by iron streetlamps. Alone, Val had been content to wander, even at this hour. Now she considered summoning a taxi and going back to the hotel where she’d left the overnight bag with the few belongings she’d seen fit to bring from Geneva. Tomorrow perhaps she would fly back, resume her tryst with her Nagasaki Romeo, assuming he’d not found other company himself.

She turned and stared into those feline eyes, darkly flecked with green and amber.

“Who are you?”

“Majeed,” the boy said, extending a pale, long-fingered hand which Val ignored.

“Why are you following me?”

“I’m not following you. I only thought perhaps I might offer you what Santos, with his unfortunate speech impediment, could not. I know you came here seeking information about the City. It’s possible that I could help. But now I see I’m only bothering you. You want a hard cock like your little slave’s, and here I’m offering you merely words. I’ll leave. I wouldn’t wish to force my company on you.”

He turned to go and Val let him – for six paces. Then curiosity overcame her pride and she called out, “Wait. You’re right. I didn’t come to Das K for a hard cock. I came for information.”

As it turned out, however, Majeed apparently had both. Val took note of the bulge in the tight jeans, sculpted to the youth’s body. Majeed told her he had an apartment merely blocks away, but when they arrived, his “home” turned out to be a dilapidated hotel, the kind where rooms are rented by the hour and the sheets are blotchy with questionable stains.

“You will come in with me?” Majeed pulled Val into the shadows. He slid a hand behind her neck, pressed his mouth to hers, enticing her with a lithe tongue made all the more erotic by its equivalent’s repulsive absence in her most recent lover’s mouth. The boy smelled of musk and cloves, his lips flavored with the lingering trace of mint liqueur. He sucked and nibbled Val’s lower lip as one would suck the pulp from a slice of citron.