Trolley No. 1852 (7 page)

The four other docile women looked at the
unrolled object in what seemed absolute astonishment.

“Can you
believe
all that
jism?
”

Indeed, my expended seed
was quite milkily obvious as it depended at the prophylactic’s tip,
though I couldn’t imagine what the fuss was about.
What else would these silly girls expect?
I wondered.

“That’s a
lot
of nut!”

“Shit. Looks like enough
cum for
half a dozen
guys…”

“Mr. Big Dick is a walking creamery!”

Ammi chuckled her way out of the room,
carrying with her the ridiculous sheath of latex. But in all this
ballyhoo, and in spite of the undeniable attractiveness of my
coarse-mouthed companions, I’d simply had enough. Ah, but I
couldn’t leave just yet, could I?

“Ladies, if I may impose upon you a moment?”
I requested and showed them the photograph of my only sibling.
“This is my sister, Selina Phillips, and I’m most dire to locate
her. Might any of you have seen her about anywhere?”

The question set my heart to racing!

The naked and quite exhausted quattro all
squinted at the photo, registered blank expressions, then shook
their heads no.

Drat! All that tomfoolery for nothing!

I mumbled specious niceties in my departure,
and bound for the door…

“‘Bye, Mr. Big Dick!”

“Yeah! ‘Bye!”

“There goes the cream-wagon!”

“Come back again, please!”

I didn’t waste my breath
in informing them that such a prospect presented a very
low
order of
probability…

Whew!
I thought once back on the stair-hall and finally away from
the dizzy cluster of trollops. More trollops (and likely just as
dizzy) would have to be sought out and questioned about Selina; for
the moment, though, I desperately needed a breather.

Past the stair-hall rail I noticed a
spectacular hanging candelabrum; from there, I looked down and saw
several male patrons loitering about the banquet table, most
seeming to slurp down more of the loathsome oysters. These men had
obviously finished their first sexual assignations and were
affording themselves a break before pursuing another. There was no
sign, however, of my associate Mr. Erwin.

A shrill rabble of
feminine bombast resounded at the hall’s end, where I spied Ammi’s
bare form proudly displaying the depending condom to another nude
sprite—a pointy-breasted brunette. “Holy
cow!
” exclaimed the latter one
eyeing the semen-filled reservoir. “
Look
at it all!”

“I know,” gushed Ammi, “can you believe it?
And the guy fucked the daylights out of all of us!”

“Holy
cow!
”

Great Pegana,
I thought dismally. Could I help it that my
seminal deposits were evidently much more voluminous than the
average?

“And you should’ve seen
his goddamn prong! Big as a baby’s leg, I swear—he fucked me so
hard I’ll be walking like a cowboy for a
week!
”

I hid behind a somewhat Doric display
pedestal, so not to be seen; what I needed less than anything just
then was this pointy-breasted one wanting to sample my wares,
too.

“I better get this upstairs,” Ammi said,
more quietly, of the ludicrous condom. “You already take
yours?”

“Yeah, two so far…”

I felt my brow furrow at
the arcane discourse.
They’re clearly
talking about… spent prophylactics. How eccentric…

The elfin pair separated,
Ammi moving up the stairs to the fourth story—or I’d be more
accurate to say
limping.

At that same moment a door farther down
clicked open and out stepped another brazenly unattired
prostitute—this one with nipples sticking out like persimmons—only
to turn down the stairs and proceed behind Ammi. But this woman,
too, had a spent prophylactic dangling from her fingers!

And a moment later?

A third woman did the same…

My astonishment was
plain.
What cryptic onus could POSSIBLY
charge these petite strumpets with the task of carrying away used
prophylactics UPSTAIRS?
Surely, the
nearest waste basket would do…

The hall remained clear, but when I emerged
from my hiding, my eyes inadvertently fixed on the previously
unnoticed object sitting atop the display pedestal: a crude beige
cylindrical clay-shape roughly the size of a common pail; when
recognition alighted, I muttered beneath my breath a shopworn, “Oh
my God!” for I knew all too well what the unlikely object was:

A
cuneiform
cylinder.

As any archaeologist and,
indeed, professor of ancient histories would know, these objects
provided humankind with its very first “books,” the most famous
example being the Cyrus Cylinder which, in intricate cuneiform,
detailed the conquest of Babylon by the Persian warrior Cyrus the
Great and verified the prophet Isaiah’s prediction in Old Testament
papyri scrolls of the same two centuries previous.
This
cylinder, however
(as, I add, without meaning to brag, that I am well-versed in many
variations of cuneiform) did not bear the typical assortments of
logograms, pictoglyphs, and polyphonous sequences of wedges and
slants that the early writing system is known for. Instead, the
clay cylinder before me was covered entirely with the exclusive
stylus marks used to denote
numbers.

The entire cylinder, I reiterate, had been
so inscribed.

Oh, if I only had a
month’s time to decipher this cylinder,
I
lamented.

I let my considerations
stew, along with my adjacent perplexity regarding the mysterious
redeposition of expended condoms to some paradoxical upward recess
of the building. I knew I must not make myself obvious; therefore,
I strolled about the stair-hall half-pretending to examine various
statues, paintings, and other pedestalled
objets-d’art.
Periodically, however,
I took hasty opportunities to put my ear to each invaluable
nine-paneled door I passed…

“Ooo-ooo-ahh-ahh… oh, YES!”

“Churn me like butter, honey!”

“Good, good! That’s
a
good
boy!”

All of the shrill exclamations were in
feminine tones and clearly indicative of some manner of
fornication.

The hall quieted, then, in seeming
increments; alternately, the doors I’d just quitted opened to
release, first, a brawny man with a sated smile on his face, and
then his corresponding fornicatress.

Each naked woman, as I
might’ve suspected by now, dispatched at once from the room to the
stairs, and
up.
And from the fingertips of each suspended a spent
prophylactic.

The bizarreness of my
observations were by now getting the best of me. Clearly, more
rooms existed upstairs on the fourth floor, yet not one prostitute
had taken a man thither; which left me to deliberate:
The only person I know for fact to be up there is
the club’s madam … Miss Aheb…

Could it be to
Miss Aheb
that these
shapely, bouncing-breasted “slatternettes” were delivering the
epigrammatic soiled condoms?

And if so…

Why?

I hadn’t a notion. Eventually I repaired
back to the exorbitant atrium where I found my friend Erwin
(looking a bit dogged) helping himself to some refreshment. His
grin greeted my arrival. “This place is something, huh, Mr.
Phillips?”

“Something… yes,” I uttered.

“The girl I got was pure dynamite, and she
was none-too-disappointed with my performance, if ya don’t mind me
sayin’ so.”

“Not at all,” I told him distractedly.

“Which girl did you get?”

I nearly moaned.
If you mean which FIVE GIRLS did I GET, I
couldn’t begin to tell you.
I simplified
the response by merely saying, “A more-than-satisfactory little
hussy by the name of Ammi, quite uniquely possessed of various hair
colours.”

“Don’t know what mine’s name was but I can
tell you, she’s quite good at putting more than food in her
mouth.”

“A laudable endorsement, indeed,” I
chuckled. I leaned over to keep my whisper more discrete. “But
allow me to ask, and I apologize for the crudity, but… did your
partner, um, make off with the soiled condom once the business was
done?”

“Matter’a fact she did, Mr. Phillips, and
now that’cha mention it? They always do.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as singularly
peculiar?”

He stroked his stubble-blued chin. “Yeah, it
does. Ya’d think they’d just drop it in the room’s waste can but
maybe they dispose of ‘em all in the same place, as a safety
precaution.”

I squinted at his conclusion. “I’m afraid
I’m not comprehending you, Mr. Erwin.”

“Well, any red house is always leery of a
raid. If the coppers broke in and found used skins in every room,
it’d be a snap to get a prosecution, wouldn’t ya think?”

“Why, I hadn’t thought of that,” I
confessed, and I admitted, too, that in the remotest sense it did
make some juris-prudential sense. But…

Somehow, however abstractedly, I couldn’t
quite fathom the notion to any sufficient degree of
acceptability.

“I’ll be going back for seconds, Mr.
Phillips. You?”

“Oh, indeed,” I
transfigured the truth. More sexual frolic was most
definitely
not
my
preference, but I thought it best to obfuscate the truth to
maintain more the air of a “team player.” I did very much need to
screen more of the working girls, to show them Selina’s
photograph.

Erwin seemed suddenly frustrated. “That is
if there’re any girls left I could grab seconds with. You heard the
rumor, Mr. Phillips?”

“Rumor? Why, no.”

“Heard two girls yacking
about it a minute ago. Apparently one of the men was with us on the
trolley is
quite
the stud. They say he took care’a
five girls
in one go-round and wore
‘em completely out. They won’t be hob-knobbin’ with no one the
rest’a the night. They also said the fella had something ‘tween his
legs that should’a been hangin’ in the smokehouse.” He elbowed me
with a wink and a smile. “That fella wouldn’t be
you,
now would it, Mr.
Phillips?”

I let out a strapping laugh. “Only in my
most delusory dreams!”

“Well—” He theatrically dusted off his
hands. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be… and may God forgive me.”

I rolled my eyes and laughed.

“You coming up too?”

“I’ll be along presently,” was my erroneous
response.

Erwin embarked for the stairs, in his search
for “seconds.”

The other refractors, as I’d come to think
of them, had also returned upwards in the same search, leaving me
the atrium to myself. At once, I contemplated my next tactic; any
women who might recognise Selina’s photo would be upstairs as well,
on the second or third story. However…

An echoic click came to my ears, that
elevated my gaze.

The conductor,
I thought.

For there he was, the
regulation cap perched atop the macabrely immobile white face. In
the fashion of an automaton, he took slow steps up the winding
stairs—to the
fourth
story…

Though my tactic remained undelineated, it
was my sheer curiosity that overrode any action of greater
utility.

You see, I
had
to know:
exactly
what
was
taking place on the ominous
fourth
story.

I gave the conductor only enough lead-time
to conceal my movements; then, with stealth, speed, and
deliberation, I traced his identical steps. Upon the fourth-floor
landing, I hid behind another Doric display pedestal; this one
providing the base for an ancient basalt idol whom I believed to be
the notorious demon Baalzephon so actively worshiped by luciferic
sects of the Middle Ages. Eye lined up along the pedestal’s edge, I
watched the conductor propel himself to the center of the grandiose
stair-hall, pause, and then enter a door.

Now’s my chance,
I realised.

No one else occupied the
hall, so I made haste across the plush carpeting. But my dilemma
was plain; for although more than half a dozen doors lined the
wall-side of the hall, I could not be certain exactly
which
door the
blanch-faced man had entered.

Somewhere near the
center,
was all I could deduce. Each door
I silently passed stood identical to the previous, until (somewhere
in proximity to the hall’s mid-point) I stopped to stare at the
tiniest brass emblem mounted upon the door I currently faced.
Inscribed upon this plaque were, I’m utterly certain, the
cuneiformic markings that denoted the following numerals:
1852.

I checked both ways down the hall, was
satisfied I was not being surveilled, then stooped to one knee, and
to the ornately plated keyhole, I then put my wide-open eye…

It troubles me that I
cannot in any accuracy convey to you the details I now beheld. It
was a spectacular bed-chamber displayed to my clandestine view:
sumptuous carpet and wall-coverings, lovely antique furniture and
in addition a veiled four-poster bed whose gorgeously carved post
and headboard appeared adorned in gold leaf; oil portraits and
statuary that were no doubt high-mark collector’s items. These
facts, however, rendered the chamber
nondescript
when compared to the
room’s (and I’m not sure I can even summon an adequate term)
sensorial bearing…