Whispers of the Flesh (6 page)

“Such demons,” he continued, “will exploit a human’s vulnerability to evil—his lack of faith, or a secret taint of sin—in order to exercise their diabolical influence.”

“An influence that would be impossible, or at least unlikely, if a human were exceptionally pious—or at least exceptionally desirous of piety.”

That statement cut close to the bone, as it was clearly intended to do.

“You believe in this?” she asked.

“No doubt you find that laughable.”

David had learned not to discuss demons and the like except within the ecclesiastical community. His brothers used to taunt him mercilessly, donning grotesque costumes and leaping upon him in dark places amid hellish cackles and shrieks. Even some of his fellow clerics were openly skeptical about the existence of diabolical entities. He would not be expounding on the subject with Lili had she not broached it herself by showing him this pagan effigy—not that he regretted it. It could prove beneficial to his investigation to establish the attitude of Lili and her fellow Grotte Cachée residents in regard to demons and demonic forces.

“I don’t find it at all laughable,” she said, so soberly that David was disposed to believe her. “Did I not tell you that my mind is open to all possibilities? It is just that so few hum—people still credit the existence of these types of beings. I can’t help but wonder how you came to believe in them.”

“It was my nursery governess, Mademoiselle Levesque. She was an elderly spinster who had served my father’s family for decades in France.”

“Your parents are French?”

Cursing that slip, David said, “Just my father.”

“A Frenchman named Beckett?” she said. “I gather he anglicized his name.”

David didn’t correct her assumption. “Father had a family in France, a wife and children, before he came to England and married my mother. They were arrested during the Reign of Terror—not my father, who was away at the time, but his parents, his wife, and his four children. A band of revolutionaries abducted them from their château, carted them to the town square, and guillotined them all.”

“Oh, how awful.”

“Mademoiselle Levesque witnessed it all, and described it to me in . . . rather graphic detail—how the freshly severed heads of the victims were lifted by the hair to face the mob, because their brains would remain alive for ten to fifteen seconds. Their eyes could still see the faces twisted in hate, their ears could still hear the taunts and jeers.”

“She was your nursery governess, you say? How old were you when she told you this?”

“Five, six . . .”

“What on earth was she thinking, recounting such things to a child of that age?”

“The Terror had traumatized her deeply. She was devoted to my family, had helped to rear my father and his siblings. Two of his three brothers, who were priests, were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned to the guillotine. The third was beaten to death by a mob. His only sister was among sixteen Carmelite nuns put to death at the Barrière de Vincennes in the final days of the Terror.”

“I know of them,” Lili said. “Their martyrdom wasn’t in vain. People were outraged, and that outrage helped to bring down Robespierre.”

“By the time I knew Mademoiselle, she was . . .”
Half mad.
“She was a melancholic, deeply tormented soul, very much lost in her wretched memories—she talked of little else. My father was the only member of his family to survive the Revolution. He escaped to England, along with Mademoiselle, in the summer of ninety-four. Two years later, he married my mother, who was a good deal younger than he, and started a second family. He told me he’d very nearly become a Carmelite monk instead, but after praying on it, he knew that wasn’t the path that God intended for him.”

“I am deeply sorry for your family’s losses,” Lili said, “but I don’t quite see what this has to do with demons.”

“Mademoiselle Levesque used to tell me that the revolutionary mobs had been acting under diabolical influence. How else to explain such rabid brutality?”

“You are young, David. You have not seen the
enragés
, with their wild red eyes and their filthy hair, you have not heard them screaming for the blood of the innocents. The Devil’s minions, they crawl into the hearts and minds of the impious and make them commit these
actes d’abomination.
God has a purpose for you,
mon chouchou.
You have a vocation,
oui?
You will hunt the demons down and cast them out, banish them to the fiery pit. This is your destiny, your sacred obligation.”

David said, “My father told me it was true, what Mademoiselle had said about the demons inciting the Terror. He also taught me that honor, duty, and religious devotion would protect me from Satan’s influence, and that there was no more worthy calling on earth than the . . .” David bit off the rest, cursing his loose tongue.

“Than the priesthood?” Lili smiled. “You said last night that your parents are content with the path you’ve chosen. I’m glad of that for your sake. A man should choose a vocation based on what he’s passionate about, not afraid of. A life devoted to fear is a sad thing, indeed.”

David tried to summon a response to that, but none was forthcoming.

As they were walking away from the
Cella,
David turned to glance behind them at the stretch of corridor that led deeper into the cave. It was black as Hades that way, the cresset torches extending no farther.

Testing the waters, as it were, he said, “I would dearly love to explore a bit more. Is this cave system really complex enough to get lost in?”

“Oh, it’s a warren of twisting and turning passages,” she said. “Even I get confused if I wander too far off the main corridors, and I daresay I know this terrain as well as anyone—except, perhaps, for Darius.”

“I have yet to meet this mysterious Darius.” David’s investigation would be sorely lacking in scope were he to leave here without having personal contact with each and every inhabitant of Grotte Cachée. “I cannot help but wonder if he really exists.”

“Darius is a solitary soul,” she said. “He tends to avoid our guests. As for the cave, if you really want to go deeper, I suppose I could guide you, say another half mile or so—providing you don’t tell Archer. There’s something rather interesting that you might enjoy seeing.”

“Indeed?” said David, thinking of the curious little bedchamber described to him by Serges Bourgoin. “I should be very much in your debt.”

“You would, at that,” she said, smiling as she wrested a cresset from its bracket. “But I believe there is a way you can repay me.”

Seven

O
NE WISH,
DAVID mused as he stood gazing at what Lili called the Lake of a Thousand Diamonds—which was resplendent, but which was not Bourgoin’s
petite salle confortable.

He had promised to grant her one wish of her choosing—her whimsical notion of how he could “repay the debt” of her having guided him here against the
administrateur
’s wishes. Not once, that he could recall, had he ever reneged on a promise, and he did not intend to do so now. He prayed that what she asked of him wouldn’t be something he would have to confess to Father Cullen when he got back to Stonyhurst.

That is, part of him prayed for that. The other part, the part that lived chained up in the shadows, hot and hungry and trembling with need, would gladly say a lifetime of Hail Marys for the chance to cast off those crippling fetters just once.

“What think you, David?” Lili gestured with her cresset toward the shimmering subterranean pool, a crescent-shaped widening of the cave stream, which flowed mostly belowground.

The pool was tucked into its own glittering grotto, the walls and ceiling of which were encrusted with a dazzling array of crystal formations—flowers, feathers, coral-like nodules . . . Rippling draperies of peachy, translucent stone swooped and swayed at the entrance to this enchanted niche like curtains frozen on a summer breeze. The water itself was a glassy aquamarine that glowed from within, projecting lazy waves of iridescence onto the interior of the grotto, making the crystals sparkle and wink.

It was dizzyingly beautiful—literally. All that dazzling splendor . . . it just looked so unreal, so not of this earth. A rush of vertigo overtook him for a moment, then faded away. The light-headedness he had experienced previously had escalated considerably as they’d ventured deeper and deeper into the cave. His perceptions felt skewed, his thoughts strangely slippery. David couldn’t help but recall Domenico Vitturi’s account of the delirium and strange apparitions the deeper precincts of this cave could produce. Was he feeling this way because Vitturi had put the suggestion in his mind, or because there really was some supernatural energy emanating from within these walls of rock, this mountain of cooled lava?

“Was it worth the trek?” Lili asked.

“It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” David said. “Astonishing. Where does the light come from?”

Pointing, she said, “If you’ll look beneath the surface on that side, you’ll see two outlets. They’re tunnels that curve upward, opening to the outside and letting the sunlight in. If we want to swim here at night, we sometimes put torches out there, so that their light emanates from below.”

“Extraordinary,” David said.

“It cannot be properly appreciated when there are other sources of light.” Lili lifted an iron bucket tucked between two of the pinkish stone “curtains” and filled it with water from the pool.

“Wait,” David said, walking toward her. “What are you doing? You’re not going to—”

The cresset sizzled as she plunged it into the water, hissing the dirty tang of doused embers and engulfing them in darkness—except for the radiant pool behind her.

“Why the devil did you do that?” David asked, hating the strident edge to his voice. “That cresset was our only source of light for the return trip.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Lili shoved the cresset with its iron basket full of sodden pine chunks into a bracket on a floor-to-ceiling natural column. “That’s full of more pitch pine,” she said, pointing to a kindling box on the floor nearby, on top of which sat a tarnished brass casket about the size of a deck of cards. “And there are Lucifer matches in that match safe.”

Thus reassured, David was in a more receptive state of mind to appreciate the sight of Lili backlit by the Lake of a Thousand Diamonds as she shucked off his coat and hung it on a nearby stalagmite. She untied the shoulder ribbons of her corset, reached behind to loosen the lacing, and stepped out of it. Holding his gaze, she walked toward him, her body silhouetted by the lambent glow through her chemise.

David grew instantly hard.
Please, God, don’t let her see,
he thought, since he no longer wore that concealing coat.

Lili came to stand before him, so close that he could feel her heat, breathe in the exotic floral warmth of her skin, plummet headlong into those inky eyes.

She reached up and, with a fluid gesture, lifted his hat off his head and spun it away into the darkness. His heart thundered in his ears as she untied his cravat, pulling that off along with his collar.

Unbuttoning the top few buttons of his shirt, she said, so softly that he could barely hear her, “Swim with me.”

David undressed down to his shirt and drawers as she waded into the pool. When it was deep enough to swim in, she did so, disappearing around the curve of the crescent for a little while before reappearing. She swam with practiced grace, seemingly unencumbered by her chemise.

She stood, whipping her head back to fling her wet hair off her face. The water rose to just beneath her breasts, to which the chemise clung damply, revealing their lush contours and the shadows of her nipples.

“You’re not going to leave your shirt on, are you?” she asked.

“Yes.” Even if he was willing to invent some specious excuse, it would be pointless. Lili was a woman experienced in the ways of the flesh. He was quite sure she knew why he wanted to retain the long, concealing garment.

David braced himself for a jolt of cold as he stepped into the water, only to feel a delicious, all-encompassing warmth . . . followed by a thundercrack of lust so profound that it almost brought him to his knees.

“Are you all right, David?” she asked.

“Just a bit . . .Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’m fine.”

She beckoned him with a provocative smile as old as mankind.

The stone floor of the pool felt pleasantly smooth beneath David’s feet as he entered the water, with just enough friction to maintain his footing, and no trace of the sliminess he’d half expected. It sloped downward until he was standing waist deep with a suitable expanse of water, about two yards, separating him from Lili. The watery phosphorescence set her face aglow, as if she were bathed in the very light of heaven.

“Keeping your distance, are you, Mr. Beckett?” she teased. “Is it to protect me from you, or the other way ’round?”

He looked away, a grudging smile tugging at his lips.

She splashed him with water, which so startled him that he gasped with laughter. He reflexively splashed her back. With a squeal of mock outrage, she leapt upon him and dunked him underwater.

He surfaced, his legs tangled in the clinging billows of her chemise, his hand brushing a soft and weighty breast.

He took two stumbling steps backward, skimming the hair off his face.

With a nonchalant smile, she said, “Come,” then turned and swam away.

David stood staring after her for a moment—
One wish . . . Swim with me
—and then he swam, too. He followed her around the curve of the crescent to find that the pool narrowed, flowing through a doorlike opening before widening again. Very little light from the main pool penetrated into this secondary lagoon, making it seem as if night had suddenly fallen—a moonless night, but alive with darkly glinting stars, courtesy of the crystalline walls.

The water was deeper here, as David discovered when he found his footing; it came up almost to his neck. It was too deep for Lili to stand, of course. She kept her head above water by holding on to his shoulder with one hand and the side of the pool with the other, and lazily treading her feet.

There was no gradual declination here, the pool walls being roughly vertical. Peering into the darkness, he could see that they were almost completely surrounded by a flat shelf of stone. He squinted at a heap of something, trying to make it out. The shelf, although no more than six or eight feet wide at its broadest point, was furnished with rugs, pillows, and perhaps a dozen fat, unlit candles on the floor and in iron wall sconces.

“We call that
la Galerie des Diamants Noirs
,” she said.

“The Gallery of Black Diamonds,” he said. “Most appropriate.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “I thought you didn’t speak French.”

Scrambling for a response, he said, “The, er . . . most of the words sound like their counterparts in English—
galerie, diamants
. . .”

“As for ‘noir,’ I suppose it’s been used in enough poetry and so forth . . .”

“Exactly.” He cringed inside at this wormy prevarication. Having long ago resolved to be, in the words of the Fifteenth Psalm, “He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart,” David was determined to avoid outright untruths during the course of this investigation. He had realized some lies of omission would be unavoidable; he just hadn’t realized how many would pass his lips.

Redirecting the conversation to safer territory, he said, “This is quite a cozy little haven.”

His voice sounded both hollow and strangely deep as it echoed off the walls. There was a winded quality to it, too, not because that brief little swim had tired him, of course, but from Lili’s closeness, the warmth of her hand on his shoulder, the teasing underwater caress of her chemise as her legs pumped back and forth in a languid rhythm.

“This is one of my favorite places,” she said, her own voice taking on a velvety resonance that seemed to vibrate within him, stoking his arousal even as it soothed his nerves.

The strange intoxication that had crept up on him as he’d ventured deeper into the cave took on a different, dreamier quality in this dark little sanctum. There was that lingering surge of lust, yes, but something else as well, a sense of ethereal harmony such as he had never known. It was like being drunk, but without the mental bedlam, just pure and idyllic contentment.

“You seem . . . contemplative,” she said.

“I’m not sure that’s the right word. In truth, I feel . . . not quite like myself.”

With a knowing smile, she said, “Our guests ofttimes experience a certain confusion of the senses in here. It has to do in part with the hardened lava that formed this cave system eons ago. From what I’ve been told, it is imbued with a special sort of magnetism. We call it
le magnétisme hallucinatoire.
Some experience a milder form of the same disorientation within the walls of the castle, and also the stable and carriage house, because they were built of volcanic stone taken from this mountain. This force even affects the water of the cave stream.”

“And the other part?”

“Other part?”

“You said the phenomenon was due ‘in part’ to the hardened lava.”

Lifting her hand from his shoulder to stroke his cheek, she said,“You are a man of many questions, David. This need to get to the root of everything, to ferret out answers to the unknowable . . . it will only lead to misery. As will the demands you place upon yourself. You are so rigid, so correct. Your expectations of yourself are exacting to the point of cruelty—self-inflicted, to be sure, but cruel nonetheless.”

Her eyes, enormous in the scintillating darkness, were almond-shaped, heavy-lidded, utterly mesmerizing. David could not, for the life of him, tear his gaze from hers.

Softly she said, “Have you never wanted to lie with a woman, David?”

“Of course.” To deny that would have been absurd.

“Most young men of your station relieve their urges by frequenting the local brothels. Were you never tempted to visit them yourself?”

His hesitation must have been telling, because she said, “You did, didn’t you? But you paid the women there to pleasure you without actual intercourse—to fellate you, perhaps?”

“No! My God, no,” he said, momentarily astounded to hear her speak of such a thing—but of course Lili was no ordinary lady. Some would protest that she was no lady at all, but despite her libertinage, she was far from some common grisette. “I never . . . nothing like that.”

“But you
have
been to brothels,” she said.

“Just once.”

“When?”

David looked away, raking a hand through his wet hair. He could refuse to answer her, but in his pleasantly bleary state of mind, he just couldn’t quite see the point.

“My, er, my brother Louis dragged me to one in London shortly before I left for . . . left home for the first time.”
“Come on, Davey, don’t be such a Nancy boy. Don’t you want to exercise the old lob before those Jesuits make a bloody eunuch of you?”

“What of your reverence for the bodily integrity represented by virginity?” Although Lili was echoing his words, to her credit, her tone was not mocking.

“I had no notion where he was taking me till we were in the place. It was a handsome town house, finely appointed. One would never have known it was . . . that sort of establishment. Louis had poured gin down my throat beforehand—all part of his scheme, of course. I told him he could lead a horse to water, and so forth. He said, ‘Fine, let’s just watch the show. Perhaps you’ll have a change of heart.’ ”

“Show?”

With that interjection, David became suddenly aware of what he was telling this woman whom he’d met barely twenty-four hours ago. It was the lulling influence upon his mind of the strange forces lurking in the walls around them, the very mountain looming above them. He should have been ashamed to be here like this with Lili, much less recounting this particular experience, but he felt too tranquil for shame.

“Tell me,” she said as she stroked his arm. “I won’t be shocked. Was it a lewd performance?”

“You know of these things?”

“I’ve seen them.”

His jaw literally dropped.

“Was it just a little tableau in the drawing room,” she asked, “or something more elaborate?”

“Well, er . . . more elaborate, I should say.” Emboldened by her candor, the nocturnal intimacy of the dark little grotto, the voluptuous embrace of the water, he said, “It was a . . . well, a stage play of sorts, conducted in a double parlor that had been turned into a theater, with chairs and couches facing a little stage that had been furnished like a sitting room. Some of the couches for the audience had curtains ’round them so that . . . well, for privacy if a fellow was sitting with one of the . . . women of the house.”