Kiss of Death (Modern Erotic Classics)

by Valentina Cilescu

  ‘But . . .?’

  ‘No more. I fear for your soul, Mr Hunt; I fear greatly for your soul.’

  Click.

  She had hung up on him. And as Eleanora’s sombre words echoed in his mind, he realised that he was indeed utterly alone.

  He discharged himself from hospital the following day. The car was a complete write-off: just a lump of twisted metal. How anyone could have survived such a crash was beyond him.

  His head still ached, and he knew that he really ought to go back home and have a rest. Not to mention the fact that he hadn’t been in to work for three days, and his editor was probably on the ceiling by now, wondering where the hell he was. He had a choice: do the responsible thing – go home, face the music and hope the police would find Mara before it was too late; or take off on impulse and try to track her down himself.

  Sod it. He’d always hated people who behaved responsibly. Maybe that was why he was such a good journalist.

  With his foot right on the floor, the hire-car got him to Chester by eight o’clock in the evening: this time, Hunt overcame his fear of motorways and sped down the M6 like a bat out of hell, lucky not to collect a speeding ticket to make his week complete.

  All the glossy brochures described Chester as a pretty, touristy sort of place: a beautifully preserved ancient town complete with Victorian half-timbered buildings, Roman walls and a wonderful Gothic cathedral. But it wasn’t living up to its chocolate-box reputation today. Hunt arrived in the middle of an unseasonal thunderstorm. It was a spectacular electrical storm – the sort you seldom see in Britain – with great jagged bolts of multicoloured lightning arcing across the dark looming sky and rain pelting down in great sheets, flooding the gutters and sending timid citizens running for cover. Early as it was, the old city seemed deserted: like Hamelin, five minutes after the Pied Piper had left.

  Hunt pulled the collar of his coat up round his ears and stooped to lock the car door. At that moment a huge bolt of lightning caught the lightning-conductor on the cathedral tower nearby, then others began to strike the ground around him. Puddles sizzled like witches’ cauldrons.

  In the nearby cathedral close, lightning leapt to earth down the trunk of an ancient oak, splitting it in two and kindling foot-high flames which even the torrential rain struggled to extinguish. Hunt winced as the wild night closed in around him and the thunder rumbled deafeningly overhead. This was beginning to feel uncomfortably personal. Hunt wondered vaguely if God – or the Devil – was trying to tell him something. If so, he wasn’t being very subtle about it.

  He dismissed the thought with a smile and turned to run towards the door of a nearby restaurant. At that moment, an enormous bolt of lightning struck home just inches away from him, instantly blackening the overnight case which was standing next to him.

  Suddenly more afraid than he had ever been in his life, Hunt pulled his coat around him and ran. He knew he must be imagining it, but he could have sworn he heard faraway mocking laughter as he scrambled for cover.

  One good meal and two bottles of excellent wine later, Hunt felt distinctly better. There was nothing like a good claret for putting things into perspective. This whole catalogue of unpleasant coincidences now seemed nothing more than that. Tomorrow, he would do some local research on the publishing house. And maybe someone would have seen Mara. He was bound to turn something up.

  A Hungarian gypsy band was accompanying a stunning dark-eyed girl who was singing folk-songs. She had a breathtaking body: firm and ripe as only gypsy girls can be and, in spite of his tiredness, Hunt felt an insistent stirring in his loins.

  The girl was dancing seductively from table to table, singing her songs and laying a blood-red damask rose on each snow-white tablecloth. A nice touch, thought Hunt, wondering what it would be like to thrust his hand down inside her low-cut peasant blouse, to grab hold of those lovely bubbies and suck their teats until she cried for mercy, begged him to sink his prick into her sopping cunt.

  She was at the next table now, dancing as she sang. Her spreading buttocks curved invitingly beneath her embroidered skirt, and Hunt could scarcely take his eyes off that wonderful arse. Almost as if she could feel the weight of his gaze upon her body, the girl turned round and looked Hunt straight in the eyes. The directness of her gaze unsettled him, making him dizzy with apprehension and desire. Those insolent dark eyes seemed to challenge him: ‘Take me. Here. In front of everyone. Or not at all.’ Their magnetism ate into Hunt’s soul, sweeping away his inhibitions, his fears, his sense of who and where he was.

  The girl lifted the hem of her skirt to reveal a generous naked thigh. She took a single, blood-red rose from her garter, and tugged down her crisp white cotton bloomers, baring a curly brown fleece. Parting her cunt-lips with the fingers of one hand, she wiped the flower-head lasciviously across her juicy quim and then handed the rose to Hunt. He inhaled its scent deeply – a rich mingling of rose-petals and the girl’s own honey-dew.

  Slowly, he began to unbutton his trousers and reached inside for his prick. He was unaware of anything but the terrible throbbing of his erect penis, the urgent rhythms of the gypsy music, and the gypsy girl with her dark eyes, her heavy breasts, her juicy backside . . .

  Quick as a flash, she was on her knees before him, pushing the table back so that she could reach his penis comfortably. In one swift movement, she stripped down the front of her ruffled blouse, pulling out each brown-tipped breast in turn and running the head of Hunt’s straining prick over the erect nipples. And then she gently took his purple-headed manhood into her mouth, never taking her eyes from his for a moment. It was as though, if she were to look away, the spell would be broken. He felt the tip of his cock slide smoothly against the back of her velvet throat, and he cried out with joy as she cradled his testicles in her cool, cool hands.

  She sucked at him with a true delight, with all the naturalness of a country girl; and he surrendered to her utterly, rising on the dizzy tide of music and pleasure until at last he exploded in a cascade of falling stars and warm waterfalls.

  He looked down at the girl. Thin trails of semen were running out of the corners of her parted lips. She stared deep into his eyes once again and this time she smiled a strange, wicked smile which Hunt knew only too well. His heart missed a beat. For her lips drew back to reveal two exceptionally long canine teeth, wickedly sharp and ready for the kill . . .

  When he came round, the gypsy band were still playing and he was surrounded by solicitous waiters. There was no sign of the gypsy singer. He looked down and saw that he was unharmed and fully clothed.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked, weakly.

  ‘You’d finished your meal and you were just drinking your coffee, sir,’ explained one of the waiters. ‘You were listening to the band. All of a sudden, you just collapsed. Fainted. How are you now, sir? Should I call an ambulance?’

  ‘No, no. I’m fine,’ insisted Hunt. ‘Where is the girl singer?’

  The waiter looked puzzled.

  ‘We do not have a singer, sir. Only a gypsy band, as you can see.’

  Hunt’s head was spinning.

  ‘Perhaps if I could just have a glass of water . . .?’

  As he was waiting for the water to arrive, Hunt suddenly became aware of a sharp pain in his right hand. Looking down, he realised that his fingers were tightly clasped over the stem of a blood-red rose. The thorns had bitten cruelly into his palm, and blood was oozing from between his clenched fingers.

  In the centre of the flower-head he found a tiny rolled-up slip of paper. He unrolled it. On it was written a single word:

  ‘WINTERBOURNE’

  * * *

  The wind rattled the windows and doors of Winterbourne Hall and the rain lashed hard against the window-panes. Naked bodies writhed and sweated; the whores laughed and danced; and it seemed that there could never be an end to pleasure and desire.

  The Master was well pleased with his work. His strength was growing; the day of his deliverance was near. Cast
ing his spirit out into the stormy night, he looked down on a bewildered man in a restaurant, a blood-red rose crushed in the palm of his hand. Had the Master been capable of any movement, he would most certainly have smiled.

  18: Sabbat

  The following morning, still shaky and with his hand sore and bandaged, Hunt slipped out of the hotel after an unenthusiastic breakfast, and set out to look for the publishers Mara had been negotiating with when she vanished. Maybe they would be able to provide some clues to her sudden disappearance. It was about time somebody gave him some answers.

  As he trudged the streets with his A to Z, Hunt’s restless brain ran over the events of the previous evening. If it hadn’t been for his bandaged hand and the weird note he’d found in the rose, he would have put the whole thing down to an attack of the shakes. He’d been drinking too much lately and he knew it. And then again, there was the road accident. He’d had a nasty bump on the head – maybe he was still suffering from concussion? Just maybe, even now, there was room for a logical explanation to all these illogical happenings . . .

  Down the subway. Up again into Northgate Street. Where next? He consulted the map and saw that his best bet was to follow the city walls round to the Water Tower, and then take a left turn into a small alleyway. That in itself was odd. You wouldn’t expect any respectable sort of publishing company to have its offices in a tiny backstreet, but these days nothing surprised him any more.

  It was a pleasant enough walk round the walls, up above the town, looking down on the activities of the inhabitants in the autumn sunshine: delivery vans, housewives out shopping, businessmen walking to work . . . he even spotted one toothsome brunette getting dressed right in front of her bedroom window, pulling off her nightie and jiggling her breasts as she teased them into her bra – nice breasts she had, too. She might not have been an early riser, but Hunt certainly was. His penis sprang to immediate and insistent attention. Good God, he thought: there’s no keeping the damn thing down these days. I’m turning into a sex maniac.

  The thing felt so uncomfortable, poking through the front of his boxer shorts and rubbing up against the inside of his zip, that he checked no-one was about, ducked into a dark corner and had a quick wank. Thinking about that woman’s big soft breasts as the come spurted against the sandstone wall made him think about Mara and her big firm ones. And the thought of Mara made him feel immensely guilty. He had work to do.

  He put his cock away and set off in search of 3, Bishop’s Yard, the address he’d found on a letter in Mara’s desk. It wasn’t easy to find in the rabbit warren of tiny backstreets. At last he came upon it, tucked away in the lee of the Cathedral, not so much a backstreet as the sort of dismal alleyway you might find behind a backstreet. It certainly didn’t look the type of place where you’d find a publishing house. A couple of derelict warehouses, a car-repair workshop (closed of course), and an empty dustbin rolling around in the middle of the road were all the place offered at first sight. As he turned the corner into Bishop’s Yard, a scrawny cat with extraordinary orange eyes leapt off the wall beside him and he almost jumped out of his skin. It was a spooky place, this. A place in hushed limbo, waiting for something to happen.

  And then he noticed the front door: badly warped and cracked, with peeling and faded red paint. Number 3. This was it. But that was impossible: no brass plate, no painted sign outside. Nothing. Frankly, it looked completely deserted and run down. He rang the bell, but it was obviously not working; so he hammered on the door. The sound echoed through the building with an ominously empty sound.

  He was just about to give up when an old woman with a halo of plastic curlers popped her head out of the door of the car repair shop:

  ‘What you looking for, love?’

  ‘Magus Press. This is the address I was given.’

  ‘No use knocking there, dearie. Not unless you’re trying to wake the dead.’ She gave a horrible chuckle which pulled back her thin cracked lips to reveal toothless gums.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why, the place has been derelict for nigh on thirty years, since old Mr Gittings was found there. Stone dead, he was. Heart attack they said, but he had a horrible look on his face. Sheer terror, I’d say. I always knew he’d come to a bad end.’

  ‘And was this . . . Mr Gittings . . . he didn’t happen to be a publisher, did he?’

  The old woman laughed: the wheezing, sixty-a-day sound of a broken down accordion.

  ‘Not likely. Undertaker, he was. Used this place as his workshop. There’s some as say there’s a few unfinished coffins still in there. Wouldn’t care to look, myself. Might have left one or two of his clients behind.’

  With a macabre chuckle, she popped back inside, and Hunt was left staring blankly at the door, a nasty feeling of having been thoroughly conned clutching coldly at his stomach.

  If the Master had been capable of it, he would have split his sides laughing.

  Hunt sat in his hotel room and racked his brains to think of some way of tracking Mara down. The publishing lead had drawn a pathetic blank; the police just weren’t interested; and all he had left to go on was that mysterious piece of paper he’d been given in the restaurant. He took it out of his wallet and looked at it again:

  ‘WINTERBOURNE’

  It meant nothing to him. Well, not quite nothing. Somewhere in the back of his mind he thought he might have heard the name before, somewhere, somehow – but in what context, he couldn’t for the life of him recall. It was like being a contestant in some macabre game-show: a game-show in which the stakes were life and death.

  So who, or what, was Winterbourne? What did it mean? Could it be the name of a person? Or a place? Or something else entirely?

  He was lost in thought and started abruptly when the phone rang. He wasn’t expecting a call from anyone. Even the editor didn’t know where he was. Cautiously he picked it up.

  ‘Yes?’

  It was the switchboard:

  ‘I’ve a call for you from a Miss Paolozzi. Will you take it?’

  He’d never heard of anyone called Paolozzi, and he was getting a bit nervous about unexpected telephone calls from mysterious women. But what the Hell . . .

  ‘OK. Put her on.’

  The girl’s voice was soft and husky, yet there was a hidden strength in it. Hunt wondered idly if she was pretty. His prick twitched appreciatively at her silky smooth yet assertive tones, and he almost forgot his determination to be suspicious.

  ‘Hello, Mr Hunt. My name’s Luisa Paolozzi, and I’m a friend of Mara’s.’

  His ears pricked up, and his fingers tightened around the receiver.

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No, but I do know she’s in trouble.’

  ‘You’ve heard from her?’

  She chuckled.

  ‘Not in the way that you mean, Mr Hunt. You see, I am a psychic, like Mara. I know that you are a sceptic, but I hope that you will trust me when I say that I have received a very clear message from Mara across the astral plane.’

  ‘Go on. I’m listening.’ He sighed, convinced that he was being led up yet another garden path.

  ‘She appeared to me in a dream, and told me she was being held against her will, I could not tell where or by whom. But she was very distressed, and kept calling out for you by name. She told me to contact you, that you were the only one who cared enough to try to help her. And that is why I have called you, Mr Hunt.’

  ‘Yes, well . . . I appreciate your concern, but I don’t see how your dream is going to help me find Mara. At the moment, all I have is one word to go on: Winterbourne. And that means nothing to me. Absolutely zilch.’

  ‘I think there may be a way. But you must cooperate with me, Mr Hunt. You must suspend your disbelief and do whatever I tell you to do. Can you accept that?’

  His every instinct told him to tell Miss Paolozzi to go fuck herself, and slam the phone down. He was a respected investigative journalist. He couldn’t trust some girl he’d never met
who claimed to have had a vision. And yet . . . he knew that he must. There was no other way. And when all was said and done, surely it could do no harm.

  ‘OK. Just tell me what to do.’

  ‘I will meet you at your apartment at eight o’clock tomorrow night. There are many preparations that must be made. You must have ready as many of Mara’s possessions as you can. Personal effects: clothing, jewellery, books, that sort of thing. That is all. I will see you tomorrow, Mr Hunt. Goodbye.’

  Click. She had put the phone down on him. Already he was feeling uneasy. But what else could he do? He picked up his keys from the bedside table and went downstairs to Reception to settle the bill.

  * * *

  She was tall, dark, aristocratic; and more than a touch sinister. Her spare frame reminded Hunt of a thoroughbred racehorse – beautiful, lissom, unpredictable . . . and just a little dangerous. She looked into his eyes and seemed to scan his soul with a single glance. She made him feel like a child in the headmistress’s office.

  And she made him feel sexy, too. There was something exceptionally erotic about the way she moved: something liquid, elegant, catlike. Her slender hips swayed with an exquisite balance, and the strangely pubescent swell of her tiny breasts invited the touch of a bold, lascivious hand. It was all Hunt could do to restrain himself.

  Luisa had brought with her all manner of arcane paraphernalia: pewter candlesticks in the form of naked maidens, chafing-dishes full of incense and sweet woods which she instructed Hunt to set burning on a small side table, a magnificent long robe in red silk, embroidered with gold, and a wicked-looking scourge which Hunt eyed with mingled apprehension and desire. He rather liked the idea of using it on Luisa’s taut young flesh. It would be just like whipping a fine thoroughbred filly past the winning post at Cheltenham. In spite of himself, he could not suppress a wry little grin.