Whispers of the Flesh (2 page)

“I shall bear that in mind, Mr. Archer. And now, if you will all forgive me, gentlemen . . . Miss Lili . . .” Beckett stood and bowed in Lili’s direction, “I regret that the hour has come when I must retire to my chamber. The letter of which I spoke will be a lengthy one, and all I really want is a good night’s sleep.”

“May you get your wish, Mr. Beckett,” said Lili, her gaze following him as he crossed to the door. “Pleasant dreams.”

Two

11 October 1829
Grotte Cachée, Auvergne, France

My Lord Bishop,

This dispatch will serve, I trust, as an account of the progress thus far of my inquiries on behalf of your Lordship and of our superiors in Rome and France. You will be gratified, I think, to know that I am presently ensconced in a guest chamber of Château de la Grotte Cachée, having successfully drawn upon the horticultural expertise I acquired before entering seminary to adopt the guise of a landscape gardener.

This fortnight past I have enjoyed the hospitality of Archbishop Bélanger at his own remarkably beautiful château in the region of Auvergne, where his secretary made me privy to allegations dating back some six centuries of strange happenings in and around Grotte Cachée. Notable amongst these were reputed acts of extraordinary wickedness and lechery committed there by certain individuals whose descriptions and actions would suggest a diabolical nature.

Such accusations have generally been regarded as heated imaginings, and therefore rarely committed to writing save for the most cursory of notations. As a consequence, there exist few pieces of written evidence detailed enough to be of use for our purposes. Per Cardinal Lazzari’s instructions, I penned but one copy, translated into Italian, of each of these documents, which I shall dispatch to Rome for His Eminence’s inspection on the morrow. First, however, I shall summarize them frankly herein, transcribing verbatim the most condemnatory passages. I do so, I need hardly say, at the express direction of your Lordship, much as it appalls me to relate incidents of such an impure stripe.

The earliest of the written accounts, which is undated but believed to have been recorded in the late 13th century, is a description in Latin by a parish priest of events related to him—not, I hasten to add, under the seal of confession—by a young woman named Fabrisse who had served briefly as a chambermaid at Château de la Grotte Cachée. She gave distraught testimony of having witnessed a libidinous interlude involving four men and a woman engaging in “deplorable acts of sodomy.” Particularly distressing to her was the fact that the men were visiting Knights Templar, one of them the Grand Master himself. Fabrisse was deeply disillusioned, having been reared to revere the Templars as upstanding soldiers of Christ.

Following the evening meal, the knights and the woman, a comely, fair-haired resident of the château whom Fabrisse knew to be a wanton despite her aristocratic bearing, amused themselves by playing chess in the great hall.

The priest recorded Fabrisse’s account thusly:

“The woman, having been the victor in a match against one of the knights, declared that she could vanquish them all, and that should she fail to do so, she would relieve the lust of every man in the room. The knights looked to their commander, who eagerly accepted the challenge. The lady won the second and third matches, but lost the fourth, after which she stripped naked and did as she had promised with careless good humor.

“While all sat about watching, she defiled herself with the first two men by lifting their robes and committing the sin of coitus oralis. The third, expressing a desire for coitus analis, placed her on her elbows and knees and sodomized her.

“The last among them to receive her favors was the Grand Master himself, who instructed her to kneel and relieve him through oral copulation. Instead, she lay on a table with her legs opened wide, boldly offering herself as she caressed her breasts and mons veneris. He mounted her and they fornicated in the conventional manner.”

Afterward, according to this account, the woman slipped out into the night, and as Fabrisse watched, uttered words of enchantment that turned her into a male. Thus transformed, this “aberration of nature” proceeded to climb the exterior wall of a tower with naught but his bare hands and feet, stealing into the bedchamber of a female visitor to the château, the widow of an English baron. There came a scream of terror from the widow that greatly alarmed Fabrisse, however, it was followed in short order by a moan of pleasure.

“The lustful groans and cries, both male and female, that issued from that window for the remainder of the night left little doubt in Fabrisse’s mind as to the activities transpiring there.”

The priest sent this report to the Bishop of Clermont (under the
Ancien Régime
), who transferred it to the Archbishop of Bourges, who dismissed the matter, having judged the young woman, sight unseen, to have been bereft of reason. It is worth noting that it had been, and still is, the long-standing practice of the seigneurs of Grotte Cachée to make frequent and generous donations of land and monies to the Church.

The second of these documents was an age-worn, velvet-bound book titled
Una Durata di Piacere
, being an erotic memoir by a Venetian nobleman named Domenico Vitturi, which was privately published under a nom de plume for the author’s intimate friends in 1665. Several chapters thereof concern a number of visits to Grotte Cachée by Vitturi and favored courtesans for the express purpose of training them to pleasure men in unorthodox and sinful ways.

This instruction was carried out most zealously by two men fictitiously named Éric and Isaac, who schooled the courtesans in extraordinarily obscene forms of sexual congress. They were taught to employ various objects, devices, furnishings, and even implements of torture, for the purpose of exciting lust in themselves and their bed partners. They became adept at such debaucheries as sapphotism,
le vice anglais,
ménage à trois, the use of bindings, blindfolds, and gags, and other practices of an even more debased nature.

A notable aspect of these depictions of fornication, many of which Vitturi viewed sub rosa as it were, from a secret hiding place, was the prowess of the two trainers, which strikes one as exceeding the natural abilities of the mortal male. By Vitturi’s account, Éric could perform the act of copulation a dozen or more times in brisk succession. Isaac, while possessed of a more conventional, though still remarkable, sexual vigor, boasted a generative organ described as being quite literally
“come il penis dello stallion.”
Furthermore, one of the courtesans claimed that Isaac possessed “a tail, slightly pointed ears, and a pair of very small, horn-like protrusions on his head, his hair effectively concealing the latter two peculiarities.”

This book was brought to the attention of high personages at the Vatican, who handed the matter over to the Archbishop of Bourges, who declared that Vitturi’s reminiscences were simply too fantastical to warrant investigation.

The third document in Archbishop Bélanger’s possession was the letter that prompted this investigation, which was sent this past June from a Mrs. L____ in New York City to an old friend summering at her family’s château in Lyon. (In case this letter should fall into the wrong hands, I shall refrain from using the actual names of the parties involved, as they are prominent in New York and London society.) It was this letter, retrieved by a laundress from a hidden pocket in a skirt belonging to the recipient, which made its way to the Archbishop, who being of a more inquisitive humour than his predecessors, resolved to prove or disprove with finality the existence of diabolical beings at Grotte Cachée.

Upon greeting her friend with the curious salutation, “From one little red fox to another,” Mrs. L____ proceeds to reminisce about a “slave auction” they had attended at Château de la Grotte Cachée twelve years ago. Having been “sold” to dissolute libertines for one week’s sexual servitude, they were locked into collars and cuffs of gilded steel, led about by leashes, and made to engage in activities of the most appalling degradation.

Mrs. L____, being currently “bound in marital monotony” to a much older gentleman, makes casual reference to alleviating her tedium through sexual affairs with other men. On those rare occasions when her husband comes to her bed, she manages to feign interest in the act by recollecting (in language that I blush to reiterate, doing so only in deference to your Lordship’s directive) “that game of blindman’s buff during Slave Week, when Sir E_____ took me dogways before the entire company of masters and slaves. As I lie upon the glacial sheets of my marriage bed, with that dusty old goat snorting and twitching atop me, I relive every detail—me stark naked with my face pressed to that scratchy wool rug and my arse in the air, hands clasped dutifully behind my neck, Sir E_____ blindfolded and trying to guess who I was by the feel of my chink. He said he would make me come so as to identify me by my voice, do you remember? I can still feel his fingers on my cherry pit, diddling away while he fucked me silly. I came with such fervor, I thought my heart would burst, and then he uncunted and I felt volleys of hot spurts all over my back and arse. Heaven! T_____ thinks himself quite the swordsman for making me spend every time. Little does he know it’s actually Sir E____ doing the deed for him.”

What most intrigued the archbishop was Mrs. L____’s description on the next page of “that curly-haired devil with the lovely smile and towering tallywag.” It is in relation to this man that the lady writes, “I do not, as you accuse, dear M____, credit the existence of Satyrs, but I tell you I did espy, in the course of bathhouse disportments, what looked to be a tail—and I was only very slightly tipsy from the opium. Perhaps his mother, whilst in a delicate condition, received a fright from a beast with such a tail. Is it not through such maternal impression that some babes are cursed with birthmarks resembling animals, or even more monstrous disfigurements?”

The three preceding documents represent the only extensive written accounts of unnatural doings or unclean spirits at Grotte Cachée. There is, however, one additional source of information.

It seems that in August of 1771, a young carpenter by the name of Serges Bourgoin was hired by Lord Henry Archer, the English
administrateur
to the lady who was then mistress of Grotte Cachée, to replace a door and a pair of window shutters. About a week later, as Bourgoin and another carpenter were making repairs at the home of a local physician, the physician’s wife overheard him whispering to the other man of the bizarre and ungodly things he’d experienced at Grotte Cachée. She urged him to report these things to their parish priest. When he refused, she did so herself. Given the nature of her allegations, the fact that they were hearsay, Serges Bourgoin’s reputation for overindulgence in wine, and the lady’s own reputation as a gossip and intermeddler, the priest penned a brief memorandum of the conversation and pursued it no further.

When I was informed that Bourgoin was still alive, I made arrangements to visit him. At eighty-five, he lives with his daughter in a nearby village, and he still enjoys his drink. Having been told this, I brought him two bottles of one of the finest local wines, from a vineyard in Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule, not far from here.

At first, he denied having ever been to Grotte Cachée, but after I explained that I was attempting to confirm or refute the presence of demonic forces there so as to determine whether the castle or its occupants might be in need of exorcism, and that I would share his tale only with trusted ecclesiastical personages, he saw fit to confide in me. I confess, it was helpful to my purposes that he was already somewhat inebriated when I arrived that afternoon.

I took detailed notes while Bourgoin spoke. The substance of what he related to me is this: He had arrived at Grotte Cachée to replace the door and shutters, only to be led by two Swiss Guards up a forested mountainside to a gap in a rocky outcropping. He would never have known it was there, since it was hidden behind a pair of walnut trees so huge and old, they looked to him like “the legs of giant soldiers.” From what he overheard of the guards’ conversation, he surmised that this was one of several entrances to an extensive cave system.

The opening, although irregular in shape, was fitted out with a door that was old and weathered, its green paint peeling. Next to it was an aperture in the wall of rock to which had been attached a pair of window shutters in a similar condition.

The cave chamber within, he describes as
“une petite salle confortable,”
furnished with a bed, a rug, and bookshelves. Although in appearance a cozy little room, Bourgoin tells me that he felt somewhat muzzy when standing in it, that his skin prickled as it did during a violent lightning storm, although all was calm and quiet. There were more books, he tells me, in a larger chamber adjoining the smaller one, this “secret library” being hidden behind a tapestry. He claims that when he removed a book from its shelf to look at it, it was wrenched away from him and shoved back in place by an unseen hand.

Unsettled, he installed the door and shutters as dark clouds filled the sky. By the time he was finished, a violent thunderstorm was lashing the valley, forcing him to delay his return home. Bourgoin spent that night in a room in the castle’s servants’ quarters, where his disorientation persisted.

When he awakened the next morning, he recalled having been visited during the night by a black-haired female, a
“Démon féminin,”
who ravished him in exceptionally sinful ways while he lay powerless, unable to move his arms and legs. Startled to hear a male voice, he saw that a tall, fair man was sitting in the corner with a glass of wine, watching.

“He spoke to her as one speaks to a lover,” Bourgoin told me, “but from time to time he would suggest to her things that she should do to me, depraved things—and I roused to her as I have never roused to another woman, before or since. He told her to lick and suck me until I was crazed with lust, and then to ‘bind’ me. I discovered what this meant when she buckled a leather band around the base of my
bite
. By this means she kept me hard as a pillar of stone, on the verge of release but unable to achieve it, while she rode me like a wild creature, moaning with one
orgasme
after another. When she removed the band, I exploded, my
sperme
shooting like a fountain. She knelt astride my face so that I could pleasure her with my tongue, which I confess I did eagerly, while the man thrust a phallus of polished black marble in and out of her
chat
. This she then took and pushed into me, rubbing it back and forth inside me and murmuring soft, filthy things until I shot off again . . .”