The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (16 page)

“Wait!”

She thought he’d changed his mind about sparing her life.

“Please, Majeed, let’s . . .”

His knife hand began to tremble. Val lunged past him for the door. Majeed grabbed her arm and flung her backward onto the bed.

“I said you can’t . . .”

But Val heard it now, the footsteps approaching up the hall. She had no reason to think they heralded disaster except from Majeed’s reaction, which left little doubt as to his terror. He was darting about the room in a frantic dance of wasted motion, a trapped gerbil, running from window to window in a hopeless effort to find some avenue of escape.

“No,” said Val, when it became clear Majeed meant to jump. “It’s too high. You’ll kill yourself.”

Their room was three floors up. Both windows overlooked a narrow, stone-paved alleyway crowded not only with passersby but with a hodgepodge of vendors, their wares spread out on mats upon the stones. A fall from this height, though possibly not fatal, would shatter bones and organs.

Still, Majeed was forcing one of the windows up and would clearly have taken his chances with the fall had not the door, which Majeed had locked upon his return to the room, suddenly burst inward.

The Turk, in all his corrupt nobility, strode across to the window and locked an arm that was all vein and sinew around Majeed’s throat.

“You betrayed me, bitch,” he crooned in Majeed’s ear. “You promised me her life tonight. You swore.”

Majeed responded by twisting with reptilian grace, the knife still in his hand. Filakis wrenched it from Majeed’s grip and hurled it across the floor. Val heard fingerbones and joints crunch sickeningly. Majeed wailed.

“Don’t,” said Filakis, guessing Val’s intention toward the knife.

He twisted Majeed around, so he could face Val. Behind him the open door tempted with the possibility of escape, but Filakis barred the way. He stared at Val – an odd and terrifying sizing up of her that seemed rife with disgust, abhorrence.

Meanwhile, Majeed struggled in his captor’s arms, choking and sputtering as Filakis applied more pressure to his neck. There was something odd about Filakis’s palms, Val noted. At first, she’d had the impression that they were smeared with blood. Then, she realized the man’s flesh was hennaed with jinn-spells and incantations, a practice designed to ward off evil spirits that she’d observed among the Berber women.

But Val had little time to reflect upon the oddity of the Turk’s indulgence in this superstition. The knife he’d wrested from Majeed lay within easy reach, a temptation that, in the present circumstances, was irresistible. Val grabbed it, thinking to plant the blade in Filakis’s bony neck and would have done so, had she not been halted by a crackling sound and the unfolding of a spectacle before her that rendered her immobile.

Tongues of pale green fire were licking at Filakis and Majeed. Mere tatters, at first, the flames soon grew, tonguing and plucking at Majeed’s face and breasts, at his captor’s opulence of hair. Majeed writhed and screamed in Filakis’s grasp, but the Turk uttered not one cry as the fire climbed his torso, igniting flesh and clothing in its luminous embrace.

Majeed stretched out a hand to Val.

She reached to take it, but fire blossomed from her lover’s fingertips like thorns. There was a moment’s indecision, when Val might have grabbed Majeed’s hand anyway, but the flames were devouring with such speed that, in the instant that she hesitated, Majeed’s hand was burned away, the fingers curling back upon themselves like desiccated fetuses.

Electric, crackling tendrils spread across Majeed’s and Filakis’s faces. Skin cracked and peeled. What lay below, shimmering suet and tendon and bone, was soon unveiled and melted down. All cries stopped and, presently, all motion.

The flame bulged out at its height and formed a funnel, which whirled like some inhuman dervish about the floor, consuming what remained. For several seconds, it danced and capered on the carpet with terrible exuberance, then lost volume and momentum and sputtered out into a tiny heap of rubble and cold ash upon the floor.

Left behind, for an instant only, there glowed an afterimage: steepled towers and squat, dun-colored houses, shimmering like bleak mirages behind medieval walls. The walls, when Val peered closer, appeared to be composed of writhing human bodies, living, faceless, and crudely formed, all locked in carnal congress.

Val blinked – the scene did not disperse, but took on form, dimension. There was a moment when, remembering it later, she was sure she could have simply walked inside the rent in space that appeared open to her. But by the time she gathered wits and courage, the image turned translucent, its third dimension sloughing off like worn-out skin, the remaining threads of form and color liquefying into a few drops of dewlike mist that hovered in the air, then dispersed to nothing.

Even as the shock of seeing Majeed’s fate rooted her in place, a small burst of celebration fired her heart. The place she’d glimpsed could be nowhere except the City. That, or Hell, and she meant to find out, one way or another.

Majeed and his mysterious abductor had left behind a small pile of remnants on the floor. She went over to inspect it. Swatches of cloth and leather, scorched and frayed as though they’d been through an incinerator, Majeed’s opium pipe, or what was left of it, reduced to a lump of ivory and melted gold, dollops of glass, coin-sized, that must have once been a hypodermic syringe.

And something else: a pale green piece of stone, slightly smaller than a hen’s egg, rounded at the top but with a flat base. Val picked it up and turned it over in her hand. The object was similar to a number of the incense burners Majeed had set out on the windowsill – in the case of the latter, the top could be unscrewed and removed to reveal the candle contained inside.

Unlike the incense burners, however, this jar offered no seam to indicate where the top could be twisted off. It seemed to be a solid piece of stone, onyx or malachite perhaps. If so, its function was entirely ornamental, yet so closely did it resemble the others that Val couldn’t help but think a seam existed somewhere in its intricately carved sides, but was simply far more subtly crafted and inconspicuously designed.

She turned the small jar in her hands a dozen times, yet found nothing to indicate it opened into halves. Its varnished surface was carved with some kind of complex floral pattern. Leafy spirals and overlapping whorls interlocked in patterns that at first appeared both random and simple, but, upon closer inspection, proved to be teasingly complex, provocative in their design. Stamenlike shafts writhed and twisted into budded knots upon the top while along the sides, carved blossoms formed fantastic arabesques that defeated each attempt Val made to trace them to their source in the design.

At length she put the object down, but not before it had revealed at least one secret. At the warmth of her hands, it began to emit the faintest of odors, a musk so subtle in its fragrance that Val could sense it only with her nose pressed to the stone.

In any case, there was no time for further inspection. In the courtyard down below, a crowd had formed among the vending stalls, people gazing up at the room where someone must have seen the flickering of flames. Val heard shouted Arabic and French. At this hour, the hostelry was locked up for the night, but men were rattling at the gate, yelling undoubtedly for the proprietor to come down and unlock the door.

Val had no wish to be caught and questioned. She grabbed her tote bag with passport and wallet and headed through the shattered door toward the back stairwell. The carved piece of stone she slipped inside her pocket with a promise to herself that it would yield its secrets to her yet.

For a few more days, Val remained in Fez in the hope that Majeed might somehow still be alive and make his way back to her, but restlessness soon overcame her. She took the train southwest to Marrakesh, then to the beach resort of Agadir. From there, she traveled to the town of Taroudant, a market center tucked in a valley between the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas Mountains. Always she kept the incense burner in her pocket, to be brought out and handled at odd moments, its complexities explored.

In Taroudant, whose marketplace offered natural toiletries made from the musk of gazelle glands and desiccated lizards sold as potions to ensure good health, Val spent hours studying the carved convolutions. It seemed to her that, over time, a pattern could be discerned and that occasionally, upon repeating a particular sequence of touch, the scent emanating from the jar became more powerful. At times, the scent was so alluring that she focused only on the jar, blind to the sights and sounds around her as she gave in to her obsession.

It was toward the end of her fourth day in Taroudant, while taking refuge from the high heat of early afternoon in her hotel room, that Val first felt the minuscule beginning of a dismantling of the jar’s design. A portion of its pattern seemed suddenly to be less than solidly attached. Val shut her eyes and traced the complex arabesques like Braille. There was a subtle sliding, followed by a snap, and an odor almost indecent in its seductiveness wafted to her nostrils. She looked down in her palm and saw a tiny aperture had opened up in the center of one carved whorl. A half-inch wick, the kind found on any ordinary candle, protruded up.

Before she lost her courage, Val lit a match and touched it to the wick. A flame like a serpent tongue swayed forth. Val took a step backward; the flame grew and leaned in her direction, as though sniffing her out. It split into two tongues, which forked again until the greater portion of the wall was covered with a tree of emerald fire. The tree limbs undulated, spread, and Val could see that within each searing branch and twig were silhouetted spectral couplings: a compendium of every sort of depravity, every sexual excess of which flesh is capable.

Val stared into the flame, felt its obscene allure.

“Majeed,” she said and touched her hand to it.

A hand was all the flame required. A fingernail, she realized later, would have sufficed. The fire seized her, fed. There was no burning, but a cold and weightless dazzle and then a light that blinded, deafened, numbed, with her senses being subtracted until all that remained was the odor of desire, and that odor suffused every pore and everywhere it brought oblivion.

It was the wind that woke her. It was full of sand and stinging hot, and yet each particle of sand that blew against her skin was like a tiny, tingling penetration, invigorating and indecent.

She got to her feet, felt eyes on her. A bearded Bedouin was staring at her from behind a donkey’s dappled flanks. Man and beast made not a sound, but a slow and almost imperceptible thrusting on the man’s part, a look of stoic boredom on the donkey’s countenance, told her the nature of the mute transaction. Such acts weren’t to Val’s taste, and yet she had to force herself to look away. The sand was nipping at her flesh like lovers’ kisses, the wind hotly seductive as it whirled through her hair.

At first glance at her surroundings, it appeared to Val that she was still inside the city of Taroudant, looking up at its pale pink, crenelated walls, its decaying medieval ramparts. Yet it was different. But for the bearded sodomite with his equine mate and a few haggard old people, the streets seemed strangely empty. Only the evidence of commerce – huge burlap bags of grain, their contents in big golden piles upon the ground, bright yellow
babouches
, or slippers, tapestries, and vegetables – argued for some semblance of normal city life.

From somewhere in the winding, shadowed streets, a chime echoed. Its silvery tones shivered through Val’s body; its vibrations pleasured heart and lungs and entrails. The sound came again, melodic, light. Val leaned against a wall, flustered by her body’s unequivocal response to the sound. A parrot flew by above – a gaudy slash of green and scarlet against searing blue sky – and the sight brought delight that was almost unbearable in its intensity. Nor were simple, everyday sensations less capable of inspiring ecstasy. The odor of bread baking, of overripe persimmons and citrus smells and almonds, of musky human sweat that wafted from the cloistered doorways as she passed – each was author to an exquisite sensitivity of mind and loins, making of each pore a tiny vulva, ravenous for more.

She wandered the mazelike streets and tunneled corridors, aware of others who observed her, their eyes taking her in like the languid scent of some new flower as she passed before them, this newcomer to their center, but staying always out of her sight. Occasionally, in the rapid turning of a corner, the sudden glance behind her back, Val was positive she glimpsed some of the City’s inhabitants. It was difficult, if not impossible, however, to keep her concentration focused – when the slap of her sandaled feet on paving stones, the metallic ting of chimes, the gold threads in an ornately woven rug glimpsed in an open courtyard wrung such sensual delight that she felt exhausted, frazzled, giddy with the unnatural opulence of her surroundings.

As her wanderings led her deeper into the labyrinthine streets, Val caught sight, here and there, of other people: an old woman lying splay-legged in an alleyway, her grizzled, thinly furred sex exposed. She held a musical instrument, a long flute-like thing with a curved end, which she simultaneously used to play and penetrate herself, moaning out the notes as she played herself to orgasm.

At another intersection, the narrowness of the convergence forced Val to step around a copulating trio, two men and a young woman locked in silent rut, one penetrating the woman’s cunt, the other buggering her in an almost somnambulistic torpor. They barely moved as Val passed by, but the sex-scent wafting off them was enough to make her reel, her vaginal muscles clenching and releasing with contractions.

Still farther on, a narrow passageway opened up into a courtyard where two naked women embraced within the rippling shallows of a fountain, one sucking on the other’s breasts while the first leaned back and spread her legs, the better to allow the cascade of water access to her clitoris. And there was the goateed man she passed who grunted and sighed out ecstasies as he made love to an ornately painted gourd, an aperture carved out of its pulpy meat to allow for such conveniences. He took no note of Val’s presence, but bucked and thrust arhythmically, the gourd’s surface already slicked with evidence of previous man-vegetable love.