Feelings of Fear

by Graham Masterton

“You’re having a baby, and yet you’re still doing this?”

  “What else can I do?”

  “You can contact your local department of welfare, for starters. You can get all kinds of financial help. You’re a single mother-to-be, for Christ’s sake, you’re entitled. You don’t have to work for Mme Leduc.”

  “But I do.”

  “No, listen to me, you don’t. This really isn’t suitable work for anybody who’s pregnant.”

  She looked up at him. “So what are you trying to tell me? That you wouldn’t have picked me if you’d known that I was fat?”

  “You’re not fat, you’re pregnant, and if you want to know the truth I find you extremely attractive. But this isn’t socially responsible.”

  “You don’t want me, then? You want Eloise instead? Or Martine?”

  “I didn’t say that. I simply said that in your condition you shouldn’t be working in a bordello.”

  “I don’t have any choice.”

  “Yes, you do. You do have a choice. There are plenty of people you can turn to. I mean, what about your parents?”

  She looked away. “Dead, both of them.”

  “Brothers or sisters? Aunts or uncles?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then, listen, maybe I can help you.”

  She said, “I don’t want you to help me. I don’t want you even to try. This is what I do. This is what I am. Other men have offered to help me, too, and every time I have to tell them the same thing.”

  Vincent didn’t know what to do. He walked over to the white-blinded window and then he walked back again.

  “You came here for pleasure,” said Catherine, standing exposed in front of him, making no attempt to hide her complete nakedness with her hands. “Why don’t you enjoy it while you’re here?”

  She came up to him and stood close so that her distended stomach touched the bulge in his pants. “Pleasing men is what I do best. I got pregnant, pleasing a man. Let me please you too.”

  “I don’t know. I—”

  She kissed his chest. She unbuttoned the last of his shirt buttons and then she started to unbuckle his belt.

  “What about the baby?” he said, weakening. “Isn’t it dangerous or anything?”

  “There’s plenty of room inside me,” she said, pulling down his zipper. “Once I had three men inside me all at once, and baby, too.” Without any hesitation, she wrested his rising cock out of his shorts, and pushed him back toward the bed. He sat down on it, and she dragged off his pants and his socks.

  “Listen,” he said, “maybe a blowjob’ll do it … I don’t want to take any risks.” But he could hear his own voice and he knew how ineffectual he sounded. He wanted her desperately, he wanted her so much that his cock was visibly pulsing with every heartbeat. She pressed him down so that he was lying amongst all of those white downy cushions, and then she knelt beside him and took his cock into her mouth, running her tongue around his shiny purple helmet, sucking at it, licking it, and then sliding her tongue all the way down to his walnut-crinkled balls.

  From where he was lying he could see underneath her body, her big swaying breasts, her rounded stomach. He reached out and cupped her breasts, feeling her rigid nipples brushing against his palms. Then he smoothed his hands around her stomach. He was surprised how hard it was, how tight it was. He thought to himself: another man has fucked her, and left life inside her, and here it is, growing. Although he couldn’t understand why, he found the idea of it unbelievably erotic.

  As she sucked him, he looked down the length of the bed toward the cheval mirror, and through the curtains of her hair he could see her lips enclosing his red, glistening shaft. She glanced up, and caught sight of his reflection. She smiled, and gave the head of his cock a long, lascivious lick.

  In return, he lifted her right leg so that she was kneeling right over him. Right in front of him was her smooth crimson vulva, her lips thickened with pregnancy, her vagina flooded with juice. He buried his face in it like a man burying his face into a watermelon, licking as deep inside her as he could, then taking whole mouthfuls of her and sucking her until she let his cock out of her mouth and gasped, and pushed her hips even more forcefully into his face.

  He lost all awareness of time. He gave her one orgasm after another, until her stomach was rock-hard and he was afraid that she was going to give birth. At the same time, she played with him, bringing him right to the edge of ejaculation and then letting him subside, until his balls ached and he was right on the edge of anger.

  The bedroom was dark when she led him over to the chaise-longue and made him lie on his back. She straddled him, looking down at him, and it was so gloomy now that he couldn’t see her face beneath the shadows of her hair. He could smell her, though. Her sex and her perfume and the same smell that he had detected on Mme Leduc: the smell of memories.

  “I think you should make love to me properly,” she whispered. “It’s what you want, isn’t it, to share my body with my baby?”

  He half-rose, saying, “I can’t.” But she pushed him back again. She took hold of his erect penis and positioned herself right over it. She rubbed the head of his penis backward and forward between her lips until it was slippery with juice. “You want to meet my baby?” she teased him. “Don’t tell me that you don’t want to meet my baby.”

  She sank down on him, until he was buried right inside the warm elastic tightness of her body. She leaned forward so that her nipples touched his chest, and then she kissed him, and made a snorting sound of satisfaction in his ear. He climaxed with such violence that his whole world went dark.

  It was almost eight o’clock when he left her sleeping on the four-poster bed. He dressed, and crept out, taking one last look at her. She was lying on her back with her hand lying idly between her legs, her hair fanned out across one of the pillows. It unnerved him to think that he had probably started to fall in love with her. He knew for sure that he would have to see her again. You can’t have an encounter like this and just forget about it, just let it go.

  He had never experienced an afternoon like it in his life. The way she had eaten his balls as if they were fruit. The way she had rubbed him until he had climaxed all over her breasts, and it had dripped from her nipples like milk.

  “I want to feed my baby, when it’s born,” she had told him, massaging his sperm around and around.

  “So when will that be, exactly?”

  “I looked at my horoscope and my horoscope said soon.”

  “What about your gynecologist?”

  She had frowned at him as if she didn’t understand what he meant.

  He walked back along the gloomy corridor feeling both elated and deeply guilty. He loved her, he wanted her, but he knew that he had to save her, too. He had to save her from Mme Leduc. Most of all he had to save her from men like him.

  He had almost reached the hallway when he saw the shield-shaped plaque on the wall. He stopped, and peered at it, like Lawrence of Arabia peering at a mirage. It said “École St Agathe, fondée 1923,” and underneath the lettering was an emblem of a goose flying from a blood-red lake.

  He was still peering at it when a voice said, “Did you have a good time, Vincent?” He turned to see Mme Leduc standing in the hallway. He didn’t know whether it was the dim evening light or maybe his own sexual satiation that made her look older, much older, and far less beautiful. She looked rather like the Snow Queen, from the story that his mother used to tell him when he was young, frigid and stern.

  “I had a very good time, thank you,” he told her. “Well … let’s put it this way, I had a very interesting time.”

  She reached out and stroked his cheek. Her colorless eyes were almost sad.

  “Why do you—” he began, and hesitated. Then he managed to say, “Why do you do this? These girls, they’re all so young. They have so much in front of them … so much life to lead.”

  “You disapprove,” she said. “I thought, from the moment that I opened the door, that y
ou would disapprove.”

  “It’s not that I disapprove. It’s more like I don’t understand.”

  She gave him a smile like diluted milk. She unfolded and refolded her negligée and gave him the briefest flash of heavy white breasts, with areolas the color of rose-petals, as they turn to brown.

  “It isn’t necessary for you to understand, Vincent. All you have to do is to enjoy yourself, and pay.”

  “I mean, how did you discover this place?” Vincent asked Baubay, as they drove back toward Montreal along the Laurentian Autoroute. “It’s great, I’ll grant you that, but it’s so strange.”

  “What’s strange about it? I think it’s very normal. I went to a club in San Francisco where everybody was jerking off all over the place and there were three guys trying to make out with a one-legged woman. You’ve been closeted, Vincent. You don’t know the half of what goes on. Group sex, leather clubs, bestiality. Compared to all of that, Mme Leduc is respectability itself.”

  “So how did you find it?”

  “Some guy at Dane Shearman Philips told me about it. Mme Leduc encourages her clients to pass on her card to anybody who might appreciate what she has to offer.”

  “Seven young girls, not much more than eighteen years old. One of them six months’ pregnant.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it. Don’t tell me you won’t be going back.”

  Vincent said nothing, but looked ahead at the glittering lights of downtown Montreal. It looked unreal, like a city painted on the sky.

  And of course he did go back, only three days later, and on his own this time. The hot weather had broken into a thunderous electric storm, and even though he parked his rental car right outside the house he was soaked by the time he reached the porch. He was still drying his face with his handkerchief when the door opened and Mme Leduc appeared – dressed in a robe of peach-colored silk.

  “Why Vincent. I didn’t expect you so soon.”

  “I should have called, I know, but I didn’t know your number.”

  “And you didn’t want to ask François for it, because you didn’t want François to know that you were coming here?”

  Vincent gave an awkward shrug. “I just wanted to see Catherine, that’s all. Well, I wanted to see you, too.”

  “You’d better come in, then,” she said, as another deafening burst of thunder shook the roof of the house.

  Vincent followed her inside. “I’m worried about Catherine, if you must know. I haven’t been able to get her off my mind.”

  “You’re not the first.”

  “It’s just that it isn’t right, a pregnant girl having unprotected sex with strange men. Think of the infections she could pick up. Think of the baby.”

  “You had sex with her.”

  “Yes, I did. And I feel more guilty about it than I can possibly tell you.”

  “So what do you propose to do?”

  “I propose to make you an offer. Let me take Catherine away from here so that she can have her baby someplace quiet and comfortable, with a decent clinic nearby. I’ll make sure you’re not out of pocket. If you work out her potential earnings for, say, the next six months, I’ll pay you in advance.”

  Mme Leduc took him through to the living-room. The blinds were still drawn tight and it was so gloomy that he could barely see her. “Why don’t you sit down?” she asked him. “Would you like some tea, or a glass of wine?”

  “No, no thank you. I just want to hear you say that Catherine can come with me.”

  Mme Leduc stood facing the mirror over the fireplace, so that Vincent could see only her dim reflection. “I’m afraid that’s impossible, Vincent. None of us can leave this house, ever.”

  “Why the hell not? What happens when the girls get older, and lose their looks? You can’t run a cathouse with a collection of senior citizens, can you?”

  Mme Leduc was silent for a long time. Then she said, “If I tell you why Catherine can’t leave, will you promise me that you’ll leave here, and never come back, and forget all about her?”

  “How can I make a promise like that?”

  “It’s for her own good, that’s why.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’ll think about it, okay? That’s as far as I’m prepared to go.”

  “Very well,” said Mme Leduc. “I suppose that’ll have to do.” She turned around and came toward him, standing so close that he could have lifted his hand and touched her face. “A long time ago, in the 1920s, this used to be a school, an academy for young girls.”

  “I saw the noticeboard in the corridor. St Agathe’s, right?”

  “That’s right. It was quite a famous school, and diplomats and wealthy businessmen used to send their daughters here during the summer to learn cookery and dressmaking and riding and all the social skills.”

  “I see. Kind of a finishing school.”

  Mme Leduc nodded. “One July day, in 1924, some of the girls were taken by their teacher to Lac du Sang, for a picnic. Lac du Sang is a local beauty spot, and very beautiful it is, too. They call it Lac du Sang because it’s surrounded by maples, and in the fall, when the leaves turn red, the lake reflects them, and looks as if it’s filled with blood. They say it was a magic place, a sacred place, where even the Indians would never venture.

  “Anyway, the girls set out their picnic and the day was perfect. There was never such a day in the history of days. The lake, the trees, the sky so blue that it could have been ceramic. The teacher stood up and looked around at her girls and said, “What a perfect, perfect day. I wish we could all stay young forever. I wish the day could last for twenty-four years, instead of twenty-four hours.”

  Mme Leduc stood looking at Vincent and Vincent waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. After a while, he said, “Go on. She wished that it would last for twenty-four years. Then what?”

  “Then it did.”

  Another long pause. “I don’t understand,” said Vincent.

  “It’s not difficult,” said Mme Leduc. “The day lasted for twenty-four years. At least, it did for them. The sun stayed high in the sky and they didn’t notice the time passing by. It was all like a dream. When at last they returned to the school they found that it was closed, and that all their friends had gone. It was no longer 1924. It was 1948.”

  She went over to a rosewood bureau on the opposite side of the room and returned with a yellowed newspaper. “Here,” she said. “This is what happened.”

  It was a copy of The St Michel-des-Monts-Sentinel. The front-page headline read SEARCH FOR ST AGATHE GIRLS CALLED OFF – Little Hope of Finding Missing Nine and Teacher, say Mounties.

  Vincent read the first paragraph. “Police now believe there is little or no hope of them ever finding the teacher and nine girls from St Agathe’s Academy who went missing three months ago on a picnic at Lac du Sang. The entire area has been thoroughly searched and there is no evidence to suggest that they all ran away together or that their disappearance is a practical joke. RCMP inspector René Truchaud called the Lac du Sang incident, “The greatest single mystery in Canadian police history.”

  Mme Leduc said, “They came looking for us on the day after we disappeared, but of course we weren’t there. To them, we were still in yesterday, still lying in the grass by the lake.”

  “It was you? It was you and your girls?”

  Mme Leduc gave him a sad, elegant nod. “We had a day like no other day has ever been; or ever will be. But we came back here and found that half of our lives had passed us by. I still don’t know what happened to us; or why. I still don’t know whether it was supposed to be a gift or a curse. But the first part of my wish came true, too, and so long as we stay here, inside the house, we remain as we were, all those years ago. It’s almost as if my wish diverted us out of the stream of time, into a backwater, and that me and my seven girls are doomed or blessed to stay here forever.”

  “It says here nine girls.”

  “Yes … there were nine. Two of them left – Sara five years a
go, and Imogene just before Christmas. Sara tried to come back but she didn’t look like a young girl any longer. Time had caught up with her, and aged her over forty years in a single week. I received a letter from Imogene. Only two lines. Do you want to read it?”

  She passed over a sheet of paper that had been folded and refolded until it was soft. The handwriting on it was so crabbed and spidery that Vincent could barely decipher it. It said, “Chère Mme Leduc, I am very old and close to death. Tell all of the girls that I will wait for them in Heaven.”

  Mme Leduc said, “It appears that the further time leaves us behind, the quicker we will age if we try to leave. So … the rest of us decided to stay.”

  “I can’t believe any of this,” said Vincent. “Days can’t last for twenty-four years. People don’t stay young forever. Who are you kidding? You’re just trying to stop me from taking Catherine away from you. All you care about is how much you can make out of her. A pregnant teenager, what an attraction! Jesus, if you cared about any of these girls you wouldn’t be selling their bodies to every lecherous old guy with a fat enough wallet.”

  “You exclude yourself from that category, I suppose,” said Mme Leduc.

  “I was tempted, I admit it. She’s a beautiful girl, she tempted me. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to put things right.”

  “Vincent … has it occurred to you that this is the only way in which we can make a living? None of us can leave the house, so what else are we supposed to do? We may stay young forever, but we still need to eat; and we still have bills to pay.”

  Vincent laughed and then abruptly stopped laughing. He looked at Mme Leduc and said, “You’re seriously crazy, you know that? If you really believe that you disappeared in 1924 for twenty-four years and that you’re never going to grow old … well, I don’t know. I’d just like to know what stuff you’re on.”

  At that moment Catherine walked into the room in her long white nightgown. Her hair was tied back and she looked especially young and vulnerable. It had only been three days since Vincent had seen her, but he had forgotten how mesmerising she was. The way she looked up at him from underneath her long, long eyelashes. The way she pouted. The way her breasts moved underneath the fresh-pressed cotton.