The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (15 page)

“But we just got to Fez. We have more traveling to do.”

“I thought you said Morocco was the gateway to the City,” Val reminded him. “How do I even know there is such a place if you won’t give me some details?”

“You trusted me this far,” Majeed said. “Why not a little farther?”

“Because I’m tired of your games.”

Majeed sighed heavily. “Then allow me to show you a new one.”

He offered Val the pipe.

“Please, go ahead. The experience will be so much nicer for us both.”

She took it, pulling the sweet, narcotic smoke into her lungs and holding it until she felt the irritation seeping out of her, replaced by a warm and scented glow that bathed her cells in languor. She took another hit. This time the smoke didn’t just fill her lungs, but traveled through her bloodstream, illuminating her internal organs with what seemed to be a pale, internal glow.

She heard chimes in her voice. “What is this stuff?”

“High-quality opium.”

“Quite nice.”

“I think so. The only thing that’s better is to have sex while you’re doing it.”

Val took another toke. Her head turned and she started to lie back, but the bed anticipated her direction and lifted up to meet her. Pillows, sheets, and mattress all folded round her in a soft and pliant nest.

She was wriggling into this new womb when Majeed crawled over to her and began unbuttoning her clothes.

The opium gave Majeed’s body a beauty so intense that it was almost frightening. His cock, flaccid for once, was sheened like polished ivory; behind it, his labia unfurled like blossoms from some mutant flower, petals distended, redolent of musk.

He leaned forward to help Val remove her blouse. She reached up idly, ran a fingertip along his cleavage. Her gaze lingered on his face. There was something askew there, although Val was at a loss to know exactly what. The eyes, something about the eyes. That charmed-snaked look. For an instant, it had made her think of –

No! She slammed a mental door on the memory of her mother’s face the night she took Val to the Sewing Room.

It’s just the opium, she thought, not even wanting to guess what her own eyes must look like now. She probably had test pattern written on her pupils.

“There’s plenty more where this came from,” Majeed said, offering her the pipe again.

She took it, sucking first from the pipe, then on Majeed’s nipple, which dangled appetizingly in her face as he leaned across her. Something cool touched Val’s left wrist. She heard, as if far distant, the swish of silk.

“Now your other arm,” Majeed said as he lifted away the pipe.

“What are you . . .?”

“I’m sure this isn’t something that you’re new to,” said Majeed, securing Val’s other wrist to the bedpost with a scarf. “But I remembered what you said about fearing confinement. Fear and arousal are so closely linked. I guessed this must be a major turn-on for you.”

“It can be if . . .”

“I thought as much. This time will be especially memorable for you, believe me. Before we go on, would you like another hit?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Please. Go ahead.” He put the pipe between her lips; Val drew in the fragrant smoke. “There may be parts of this that are difficult for both of us.”

Majeed leaned across the bed and put his mouth to Val’s. When she breathed out, he caught the smoke in his own mouth and held it.

“You don’t really need to see the City,” Majeed said. “I can show you many of its delights right here. Tonight.”

He was rummaging around inside his suitcase. Val watched, the narcotic effect of the opium blunting her perceptions in a way she found increasingly distressing. But being bound was always a pleasure of contradictory excitements: arousal and submission and panic like actors vying for center stage, each taking a turn before relinquishing the spotlight to the next. The trick, she knew from much experience, was similar to life: relax into the game, submit, and the ferocity of pleasure that resulted could be so akin to pain that the two were almost indistinguishable.

“I’ve grown too fond of you for my own good,” Majeed was saying.

He turned around, the effect of the narcotic in Val’s system making his eyes appear more feline than ever, gold-green slits that would have bewitched her gaze entirely had she not been suddenly distracted by the sight of what was in his hands – an eight-inch-long knife that curved up into a sweeping, saberlike blade.

“Don’t worry,” said Majeed. “I’m not going to use this now. I’m only going to let you look at it a while.”

He ran a finger up the blade. In the pale light, it gleamed like something living, like the horn of some exotic beast lacquered with the moonlight spilling through the opening in the shades. Like Majeed’s, its beauty was hypnotic. Val couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“I bought it in the bazaar tonight. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Elegant, well-crafted, and quite cold – the way you’ll soon be. When I saw it, it made me think of you.”

He pressed the blade against Val’s throat, nickingly close, then laid it flat atop her belly, tip pointed toward her eyes. In the warmth of the room, the steel was shockingly cold. She could feel the knobs and ridges of the heavy carved handle making tiny indentations in her flesh.

“One last thing, before I go,” Majeed said. He took a pair of underpants from Val’s suitcase and plugged her mouth, then secured the gag with tape. She made a sound meant to be argumentative – it came out a powerless groan reminiscent of Santos’s inhuman sounds.

“I doubt that you’d cry out, but one can’t take the chance. Especially when I tell you I’m going to kill you. Few believe me when I tell them that at this point, but you might be the exception. I can’t take that chance.”

He bent down and closed Val’s eyelids, kissed them both, then unlocked the door, admitting for an instant only a few words of an argument shouted out in Arabic up the hall, the aroma of couscous and lamb simmering somewhere nearby, then he was gone. She lay there, staring at the knife blade lit up with moon. Her skin tingled at its proximity. Her fingers ached to touch its metal blade.

It was a game, of course, a brutal game meant to seduce with terror. She reassured herself of this so many times it started to sound true, until Majeed’s fundamental harmlessness seemed as inexorable as the law of gravity.

She tried to work the scarves up over the bedposts, though – just in case – but found them snagged beneath some baroque convexity of the post’s design, impossible to slide. Sleep seemed unthinkable, and yet she dozed, dabbling first at the edges of unconsciousness like one wading in the shallows of deep water before plunging, unexpectedly and with mounting fright, into dreams that rushed at her in fragments, like jagged glass. Nightmares flashing past in jigsaw form held to no particular pattern except the terror they inspired.

“Do you like to bleed?”

She thought at first it was another nightmare, this one masking its counterfeit nature behind a facsimile of Majeed’s voice. Then the pain bit into her, and she came awake with a muffled gasp. Majeed stood by the bed, the knife in hand. The cool blade gleamed with blood. She looked down, saw the shallowest of incisions extending in a line between pubic hair and navel. In places, the skin wasn’t even broken. In others, her blood bubbled up like scarlet sweat.

She tried to speak. The gag reduced her words to the gurgling of an imbecile or choking victim. Majeed wiped the blood off on her flank. He caressed the blade across her throat. The lightest of pressures, barely enough to dent the skin.

“I could slash your trachea and you’d never speak again.”

He moved the blade up to one of her bound wrists. “Or open up the veins here and let you bleed to death.”

He traced the blade across Val’s face, lingering on her eyelids, her nose. “Or I could simply remove the parts of your face that make you look human. You’d be surprised how long you could live in that condition. Assuming that you’d want to.”

She made a helpless, rasping sound. Her eyes followed his every twitch, beseeching leniency. If this was a game, the point of pleasure was long past. Her wrists ached. Her heart stuttered with terror, its every beat seeming to squeeze out more drops of blood from the cuts across her belly. Majeed held the knife vertically between her eyes, so close she couldn’t focus on it properly. She saw only Majeed’s pallid face, insectile in its out-of-focusness, bisected by the glimmering slash of silver.

Then a deft flicking of Majeed’s wrist and sudden pain – blood clung in ruby droplets from her left earlobe before dripping off to plunk hotly upon her shoulder. Val thrashed upon the bed, eyes darting from the knifepoint to Majeed’s eyes and back again and back . . .

She couldn’t get Majeed to meet her eyes. That, more than anything he’d yet done, terrified her. He teased her with the knife a while, not cutting her again, but running the blade across her flesh like a divining rod. When Majeed laid down the knife again, he finally met her eyes, but Val’s hopes faltered: There was neither ice nor heat in them, only distance, as though he looked at her from some schizoid universe where pain and love were meaningless in equal measure.

“Since you don’t seem to be enjoying this, I might as well.”

He began withdrawing objects from his pants pockets. Hypodermic syringe and powder: the talismans of addiction. Soon he was busy with the paraphernalia of his habit. He tipped a bit of heroin from bag to spoon, then cooked it with a cigarette lighter held underneath. All this Val watched with stricken eyes, imploring him to end the game but failing to find the least compassion in his vacant gaze. When it came time to tie his arm off and shoot up, Majeed turned his attention back to Val.

“Understand that I don’t want to do this. But if you scream, I’ll cut your vocal cords. So consider very carefully before you yell for help.”

So saying, he reached behind Val’s head and freed her mouth, then used the scarf to tie off a vein.

“Majeed, if this is a game . . .”

“It’s not a game. It’s what I have to do.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I owe somebody.”

“Filakis, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You owe him . . .?”

“A life, taken in a bloody fashion.”

“Why mine?”

“Your curiosity has a self-destructive bent. It led you to search for the City. It also led you to me, the one who’s going to kill you.”

“Why
my
life, Majeed?”

“Because he enjoys suffering and he knows I . . .” he grimaced, searching for the vein. “Look, just shut up or I’ll find something else to gag you with.”

“Don’t do this. Please. I can’t die yet.”

He tilted a derisive eyebrow and concentrated on drawing the heroin up into the syringe.

“It’s not as though most people expect to choose the moment. Besides, you told me you preferred dangerous . . . people. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Your lifestyle almost demands an untimely end, wouldn’t you agree?”

“But not like this . . . not you.”

“I’m as competent a killer as the next.”

“At least . . . you said you’d take me to the City. Do that at least and then . . .”

“Shut up! You don’t know what you’re asking for. There’s no such place. It’s a lie, a myth, dreamed up by people bored by everything else life has to offer, bored out of their minds, quite literally.”

“Don’t make me die like this. Not shackled like the way . . .”

“. . . the way someone once did to you? Who was it, Val? The friendly old physician, the priest? A funny uncle or your crazy mother? What did she
do
to you?”

“What do you . . .?”

“No, never mind. It’s too late now. Besides I’m tired of listening to you prattle. When I’m not using you for sex, you’re really very tiresome.”

The syringe was full. Majeed squirted out a tiny bit to clear air bubbles. He struck at the vein and missed. His hands trembled so violently the needle appeared to dance.

“Majeed, what did you mean before? About why Filakis wants me to be the one you kill?”

“Shut up. It doesn’t matter. I promised him I would or he won’t let me back into . . .”

“The City? Isn’t that it? So that’s who Filakis really is, the Turk.”

“What difference does it make?”

“Is the place that wonderful? That you’d kill me if Filakis said it was the only way you’d get back in? If that’s the case, why did you ever leave? Why didn’t you just stay there?”

Majeed’s inability to hit a vein was making him increasingly distraught. Sweat beaded on his forehead, ran down his face.

“Is it like the opium?” Val pressed. “You want to stop, you want to leave, but you can’t? It always pulls you back, and you pay any price for readmittance?”

“Shut up!” shouted Majeed and threw the syringe aside.

Val held her breath. The effect of the opium had diminished beneath the more potent effect of terror, and if she was still high, she couldn’t tell it. She felt petrified, frozen in her fear like an insect trapped in amber, her muscles tense as wires, her heart unbeating stone.

If I’m going to die, she thought, let it be something memorable
.

Majeed picked up the knife and came over to the bed. He traced the dark line of dried blood that bisected Val’s belly, then lifted the blade tip to her neck. It popped the skin an inch above the hollow at her throat and pooled there before over spilling and streaming down her ribs. The pain was distant, unremarkable, her senses pinpointed entirely on Majeed.

“Why am I the one you have to kill?” she whispered. “Why not someone else?”

“Goddamn you.”

“Why me?”

Majeed raised the knife. His voice was barely audible, the low whistle of insect wings. “Because he knows I love you, damn you.”

He raised the knife and brought it down – twice in quick succession. The blade slashed flesh, but only superficially. The main direction of the thrust was through the scarves that bound Val’s arms.

Majeed waved a dismissive hand. “Go on and live your wretched life. You’ll end up murdered anyway. It just won’t be by me.”

Val breathed again. She rolled off the bed, struggling into items of her clothing with arms that had gone numb as logs, no longer under her command but senseless stobs of flesh. She beat the circulation back into them, had managed to put on a pair of jeans when Majeed suddenly leaped across the bed and stood before her, bloody knife in hand. His eyes were wild, his skin an unnatural, sickly cast, malarial.