The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor

by Lucy Taylor

  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.

  A dozen or so yards on, Val came upon a square devoted to magicians, storytellers, and oddities of every sort: Here a tattooed boy made fire caper up and down his arms, then masturbated with the flames. A nude woman whose only covering was the strawberries and lemons sewn into her skin did a slow, lewd dance. A dark-skinned man picked dates and olives off the ground with a prehensile penis; another bent his ten-inch cock backward and belabored his own anus.

  In the midst of such monstrosities, a Berber girl with eyes like sapphires and emeralds held up her brightly hennaed hands so Val could see the spells tattooed there. She caught Val’s eye. Her hands wove mysteries. In the space of several eyeblinks, she transformed herself into a goat, an aging hag, a priapic dwarf. Val stared, trying to get at the root of the illusion, but her eyes were always drawn back to the tattoos on the child’s palms, where the illusions seemed to be
created by some hypnotic effect induced by the movements of her illustrated hands.

  At length, she forced herself along, although exhaustion was leeching at her enthusiasm for further exploration. Indeed, all the people she encountered seemed depleted, slacked. Even those who copulated with each other did so not with the natural frenziedness of lust, but in a kind of stupor, like lewd sleepwalkers who, upon colliding with each other in a darkened hall, engage in mating more from habit than desire and without ever being aroused sufficiently to waken fully.

  As the afternoon wore on toward dusk, she became aware of moving shadows, skeletal denizens of the City creeping out to find each other, meeting and merging with scarcely so much as a cry before interlocking lips and loins. Yet even then there was less a sense of passion than of a famished mutual feeding upon each other. Sometimes the wraith-lovers interrupted their mating to follow Val a pace or two, but they were slow and clumsy, their unsavory caresses easy to elude. More than once, she gingerly intruded on an embrace to ask about Majeed, but the inhabitants of the City seemed to understand no language but the one of touch and offered her no answers but their own slicked cocks and cum-soaked thighs and parted, pungent vulvas.

  The streets grew steeper, narrower. She peered inside a courtyard and discovered a tannery where animal skins were soaked in stinking vats before being transferred to a row of dark, dank rooms. Here silent figures pulled the fur with ghoulish zeal, then stretched and beat the skin while others took the opportunity to yank their own hard meat, so that the smell of cum commingled with that of the tanning juices. The very repugnance of the place was sickeningly seductive. Val didn’t linger long.

  A short way beyond the reeking tanneries, she came upon a marketplace little different in outer appearance from those she had encountered in Moroccan cities of a more conventional nature. Only the wares displayed were a departure from the usual – on one blanket, a treasury of dildos in every size and shape, on the next, a sadist’s spree of whips and clamps and restraints, across the way a man who sprawled supine, mouth plugged with a gigantic dildo which he offered up, beckoning to passersby to sit upon his face and take their pleasure there. He didn’t lack for business; a line had formed and both sexes took their turn lowering themselves upon his phallus-mouth.

  A few blocks beyond the souks, Val was almost sideswiped by a nude and legless man, a repulsive lummox propelling himself along on gorilla-muscled arms, penis swelling up obscenely to bob against a convex bud of navel. He was obese and hideously mutilated, his chest and shoulders stitched with scars as though some mad graffiti artist had used his flesh for scrawling.

  Val felt a deep, internal shiver. Dismayed by her reaction, she tried to look away but the man was staring at her with a gaze of open invitation. His strangely luminous eyes compelled respect, each blink a blatant proposition that weakened her with want. Appalled by her own desire, she approached the vulgar wretch and squatted over him. She took in all his ugliness, the cock in full and virile jut between the stumps, the corded arms, the scabbed and scarified chest. Obscene he was – and bloated, gross – and yet his very repugnance increased her lust.

  He urged her on in Arabic. She spread her legs and lowered herself, letting her skirt flare out as she set her weight, impaled herself. The lemon-emerald eyes half closed. He sighed and thrust. She reached back and clutched his stumps. The scars were odd, not flat or smooth but intricately textured, whorled, and ridged. The motif was familiar now; it brought to mind the ridged stone of the incense burner, of doorways wildly arabesqued, of hennaed hands, of . . .

  “You!”

  She pulled back, even as the man impaling her began a seamless transformation: Broad hirsute chest reshaping into nubile breasts, slabbed cheekbones and simian forehead refining into the almond eyes and heart-shaped face of the Berber child-magician. At the appalled look on Val’s face, the little girl pealed forth bright laughter. She held up those gorgeous, hennaed hands so that – for an instant only – Val could stare transfixed at the lurid dazzle of the moving patterns on her palms.

  The child leaned forward, touched her lips to Val’s. Her kiss seared.

  Val let her lips part. The Berber girl’s tongue tasted of mint and honey.

  “Majeed?” the girl asked. “You want?”

  Val nodded and replied in French, “Where is he?”

  Like the keeper of some wondrous secret, the child smiled slyly. She led Val through more winding streets to a stone stairway that descended between red mud walls. After the first few steps, the darkness was impenetrable, the air tainted with a sewer stench that made Val’s stomach roil.

  They reached a landing, where the Berber girl produced a flashlight from her trouser pocket and proceeded down yet another, steeper flight of stairs. She moved with such sureness and fluidity that Val had to struggle to keep up. Occasionally she paused to catch her breath and heard, emerging from below, the most distressing sounds, plaintive wails and frenzied keening, the staccato yap of tongues convulsed by insanity or pain.

  At the deepest point of their descent, they stood before a bleak and narrow corridor of ancient prison cells. A dungeon, thought Val. The girl pointed ahead and indicated Val should proceed, that she’d come as far as she intended to go. Val hesitated.

  “Majeed!” the child said, scowling.

  Val peered into the gloom. “I can’t.”

  The girl relinquished her light to Val and motioned for her to continue, repeating Majeed’s name. The noise level, at the entrance to the corridor, had by this time intensified to a din. Sounds of suffering and, perhaps more disturbingly, low moans and sighs that either pain or passion might be father to. Holding the light ahead of her, Val continued on her own.

  A few paces farther on, the narrowing staircase petered out entirely at a hole in the wall where a stone had been removed. It was from the other side that the sounds of suffering were emanating. Val crouched, holding her candle out before her, and slithered through the opening.

  She found herself in another corridor, this one even grimmer than the one she’d just traversed. On either side were narrow cells, each one containing an isolated occupant. Ripe with youth or withered with age, the effeminate and virile, the bestial and the lovely, each endured his or her own ordeal – some hooded, with clamps attached to swollen genitals and nipples, others forced to sit upon huge dildos that stretched anuses and vaginas to the ripping point. Still others suffered cock rings of heated metal and brutally snug corsets, bindings so unnaturally tight the flesh popped between the ropes like risen bread. One man, a contortionist, was positioned on his back with legs behind his head. His cock came within a millimeter of his mouth but so cunningly was he secured that not even his most ardent struggling allowed his tongue to reach his engorged head.

  Val wandered on, appalled and mesmerized by this symphony of frustrated arousal. The floor became increasingly wet. She heard a soft sloshing and, rounding a bend in the torturous hallway, saw a shallow pool just large enough to accommodate a body. In it, nude and bound, leeched utterly of color, floated face down an emaciated angel, dead to all appearances but with a breathing tube resembling a small flute extending from its mouth. Given its pallor and stillness, Val was highly doubtful the thing was capable of breath at all.

  She ran the flashlight beam along the creature’s body and gasped with recognition. No ethereal being this, but quite the opposite – Majeed. But in what condition! Fetuslike, he floated in his swollen sac of womb. Naked, touching nothing, ensconced in darkness and silence.

  Val reached into the pool and floated Majeed over toward her until she could untie his hands and flip him on his back. Dead, she thought. Pale and, to all appearances, devoid of life, his clammy flesh seemed formed from tallow and slimed with ashen mucus. Yet Val had already witnessed sufficient wonders in the place not to concede Majeed’s lifelessness too soon.

  She lifted Majeed’s head out of the pool, removed the tube from his mouth and shook him hard. His head lolled back and forth, his eyewhite
s gleamed. He didn’t seem to breathe, but, with a hand between his breasts, Val felt the ticking of his heart, its pace so slow that her own heart beat a dozen times to Majeed’s one.

  “Majeed!”

  She slapped his head from side to side, then bit him on the ear until blood flowed. His eyes came slowly into focus, squinting into the painful glare of the flashlight. His skin and hair, always fair, were alabaster. He looked, Val thought, like an albino eel raised in some subterranean cavern, its translucent flesh never touched by sunlight.

  “Majeed, it’s Val. What have they done to you?”

  Majeed began to shake and then to sob. With Val’s help, he managed to drag himself up over the side of the pool where he collapsed shivering, his nerves capering in mad jigs beneath the skin, tics working at his face and muscle twitches making his limbs flail.

  Val realized then the nature of his peculiar torture. In a world where even the rustling of leaves produced erotic shivers, Majeed had been deprived of even the most meager stimulation – even his beloved opium had been denied him.

  Val’s hands were covered with the liquid from the pool. She became aware now of the coolness and viscosity of what at first she’d taken to be water. Not water, though, she realized now, but cold and clotted semen.

  “Majeed? Answer me. Come on, get up.”

  She hoisted Majeed to a sitting position and struck him in the back. He took a gasping breath of air, then another. His eyelids fluttered open and he gazed at her, as mindless as an idiot child before leaning over and vomiting into the pool.

  “How did you . . .?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Val said. “Right now, we’ve got to hurry and get out.”

  She led Majeed back along the corridor with its rows of cells and naked captives, through the opening in the wall where she had first gained access. Far ahead, a wan light filtered down.