The Coven

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Of course,’ said James. ‘And I thank you for all your inventive ideas for my party. Dalmatians? That’s going to be extraordinary! Five virgins deflowered by Dalmatians! It’s going to be the talk of the town for years!’

  Leda Sheridan left them and went out into the hallway, where she was greeted with loud shouts of ‘Mrs Sheridan!’ and ‘Bravissima!’

  Beatrice leaned close to James, and said, in a low voice, ‘She’s here, James. Grace. I found her in a bedroom upstairs, but she’s been drugged and I can’t wake her up.’

  ‘My Lord,’ said James. ‘But what can we do? I don’t think there’s much chance of them standing aside and allowing us take her out of here, is there?’

  ‘I considered calling a watchman, but I think that would be futile. Don’t tell me that Mrs Sheridan doesn’t have the Drury Lane watch in her pocket.’

  ‘Well... we could rescue her by force,’ said James, looking round to make sure that Leda Sheridan couldn’t hear him. ‘Some of my pupils have fathers and brothers who are right hackums, believe me. I could muster some of them together tomorrow morning and we could break down the door and carry her off, whether her ladyship liked it or not.’

  ‘My idea is to conceal myself somewhere in the house until later,’ Beatrice told him. ‘One of the girls said that Grace was going to be tonight’s star attraction, whatever that means. After that, perhaps, and when everybody else has retired to bed, I could manage to sneak her away.’

  The doorbell rang again, and even more people came pushing their way into the house. Some of them had to back into the drawing room as the hallway overflowed. All of them were wearing masquerade masks, like Beatrice – the men with black masks like highwaymen or pirates or demons, and the women with silk masks decorated with feathers and sequins and pearls. They were all finely dressed, both men and women, and several women wore filmy lace or organdy bodices through which their bare breasts were visible. They were all laughing and shouting as if they were highly excited, and drunk, too.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll have to find anywhere to hide,’ said Beatrice. ‘I’m sure I can mingle with all of these and Mrs Sheridan won’t notice me.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said James. ‘If she does recognize you, there could be the Devil to pay.’

  ‘I don’t think I need to be concerned about the Devil himself, James – only about people who behave like the Devil. But what is the worst that they could do to me? Throw me out into the street?’

  ‘I’ll wait for you,’ James told her. ‘The Denmark coffee house is only a few doors away, and they don’t close until their last customer has fallen flat on his back.’

  He took hold of her hand, and briefly squeezed it, and then he kissed her on the cheek. ‘All I ask is, take the utmost care, won’t you?’

  32

  The front door was still wide open, and the hallway was now packed with shouting, jostling revellers, so James was able to elbow his way out and leave the house without Leda Sheridan noticing that he was leaving on his own. In any event, she had now mounted halfway up the stairs, so that she could turn around to the crowd below her and raise both hands for their attention.

  ‘Lend me your ears, please, all of you! Welcome – welcome and good evening! Tonight you are going to witness the most shocking and extraordinary performance that you have ever seen – ever! – and I promise on my honour that none of you will forget it for the rest of your natural lives!’

  A great cheer went from the revellers, followed by applause. Beatrice was standing among them, but close to the wall, so that she was half-hidden from Leda Sheridan’s sight behind one of the red velvet swags that hung down from the ceiling.

  ‘For your refreshment, you shall have a choice of wines of all kinds as well as geneva and brandy,’ Leda Sheridan continued. ‘You will also be served oysters and scotched collops and quails and chickens, as well as biscuits and tarts and various sweetmeats. And to whet your appetite even more, you will be presented with our principal entertainment for this evening – the delectable black virgin from darkest Africa, YaYa!’

  There was another cheer, even louder than the first. Then Leda Sheridan descended the stairs and led the way along the corridor to the back of the house, her black ostrich feathers swaying like the black plumes on a funeral horse. Her guests all followed, still talking loudly and laughing, with Beatrice in their midst. She stayed close to a very tall man with a long-nosed Venetian carnival mask. He had four or five young women clustered around him, so she thought that she might simply be mistaken for one of his entourage. He was wearing an expensive orange frock coat with gold braid and gold-plated buttons, and he spoke with a loud, commanding boom, so she imagined that he must be a man of some importance.

  The guests filed through double doors into a large room where a coal fire was burning in a large, blue-tiled fireplace. The walls were papered in blue, and featured scenes of voluptuous naked women having congress with minotaurs and centaurs. As the guests entered, four musicians seated in the far corner struck up with ‘Lady of Pleasure’ – a violinist, a cellist, a flautist and a curtal player, all dressed in white with elaborate white periwigs.

  Against the left-hand wall a long table had been laid with a white damask cloth on which silver tureens and bowls and plates and cake stands were set out, as well as red and green and orange jellies and dozens of bottles of wine and spirits, and crystal glassware.

  On the right-hand side there was a low semi-circular stage, its edge decorated with white silk roses and chrysanthemums and white silk ribbons tied into bows. In the centre of the stage stood an oval table, about seven feet in diameter at its widest point, and this was also spread with a white damask cloth.

  About thirty gilt chairs had been arranged around the stage, even though Beatrice guessed that the revellers gradually filling up the room must number close to a hundred. The only lighting came from six silver candelabra standing on the table, while the main chandelier that hung from the ceiling remained unlit. This filled the room with constantly moving shadows, as if it were filled not only with living people, but with memories of living people, and ghosts.

  Beatrice found a chair at the far end of the stage, where the shadows were at their deepest, although she could see that Leda Sheridan was too busy taking care of her guests to notice her. Even if she had, she had paid so little attention to her when she had been talking to James that she probably wouldn’t recognize her.

  Once all the revellers had entered the room, Leda Sheridan stepped up onto the stage and clapped her hands. Immediately a door beside the back of the stage opened up and five naked girls came tripping in. Like the revellers, they all wore masquerade masks, as well as red agate necklaces and bracelets. All their pubic hair had been shaved off, and each girl’s right buttock had been tattooed with a swan, presumably to show that they belonged to Leda. One of the girls was Chinese or Japanese, and another was dark-skinned, with tightly curled black hair, but Grace wasn’t among them.

  The girls tiptoed quickly across to the tables and began to pour out glasses of wine and hand around plates of oysters and slices of game pie. The shouting and laughter in the room was almost deafening, especially when the girls gave out drinks to the men, because they gave each man’s crotch a quick fondle as they did so.

  Leda Sheridan opened the door at the back of the stage, and beckoned, and two more girls came out. They were wearing pink silk day gowns and high pink wigs, and both of them wore pink silk masks with fluffy pink feathers on them. As they mounted the stage, the musicians began to play ‘The Frolic’, and the revellers clapped in time to the music.

  The girls’ day gowns were fastened at the front, and they untied their ribbons and opened them up – first to the left and then to the right – giving the audience a quick glimpse of their naked bodies underneath. Then they gradually let the day gowns slip from their shoulders, baring their breasts; and after twirling around and around, they let them drop to the floor. Their pubic hair wasn’t completely shaved
, but it was trimmed to a heart shape and bleached white.

  They wrapped their arms around each other and gave each other a long, lascivious kiss. After that, they stood side by side facing the audience and stretched their vulvas open as wide as they could with their fingers. The audience cheered and clapped, both men and women.

  Now one of them climbed onto the oval table, lying back and parting her thighs. The other reached under the table and produced a huge ebony phallus, highly polished. She positioned the head of it against her partner’s anus, and then slowly pushed it inside her, rotating it as she did so, until less than an inch of it was showing. The musicians were playing ‘The Frolic’ faster and faster, and the audience were stamping their feet now, as well as clapping.

  The girl standing beside the table leaned forward, stuck out her tongue, and started to lick the prone girl’s clitoris, tipping the velvet as fast as the music. After two or three minutes, the girl on the table let out a little scream, and shuddered, and kicked her feet, and this brought even the seated revellers to their feet, knocking some of the chairs backwards.

  The two girls left the stage, but three more performances followed. In the first, two fat, hairy men wearing miserable clown masks had simultaneous sex with a naked girl in a smiling fairy mask. Beatrice couldn’t guess the girl’s age, but her breasts were still budding, so she was probably no older than thirteen or fourteen.

  In the second performance, a bare-breasted young brunette in a white ball gown fellated two naked men, her head ducking frantically from one to the other until both of them climaxed on her face and left semen dripping from her lips and the end of her turned-up nose.

  ‘Oh, heavens above!’ exclaimed one of the young women in the orange-coated man’s entourage, pressing her hand to her mouth. ‘I think I’m going to cast up my accounts!’

  The orange-coated man was standing behind her and patted her on the shoulder. ‘You know what they say, my dear Gemma?’ he bellowed. ‘Better fellate than never!’

  Next, three men and three women with strapped-on dildoes made a daisy chain, performing a rippling thrust that went from one end of the chain to the other, all to the sound of ‘The Jolly Brown Turd’, with deep suggestive farting notes from the curtal.

  Yet where is Grace? That redheaded girl said that she was going to be tonight’s main attraction, and Leda Sheridan announced her as YaYa, but so far there’s no sign of her. Perhaps she’s still too drugged to perform.

  The five naked girls flitted around, filling up the revellers’ glasses and passing round sugar-cakes and jellies, and then Leda Sheridan climbed up onto the stage again.

  ‘And now, the very highlight of tonight’s entertainment! An act which I guarantee will give my gentlemen clients the hardest pego they have ever known, and which will flood Eve’s custom house of every lady here!’

  The three musicians started to play a slow version of ‘Lady Lie Near Me’. The door at the back of the stage opened again, and Grace appeared, wrapped in a long white silk cloak trimmed with white feathers, and supported by two of the men who had appeared in the previous performances, both bare-chested but now wearing tight white breeches.

  Beatrice could see that Grace’s eyes were open, but she still looked glazed, and her knees appeared to buckle as she came through the door, so that the two men had to lift her up onto the stage. She was the only person in the room not wearing a mask, and she stared at the assembled crowd of masked faces as if she couldn’t understand where she was or what she was doing.

  While the two men held her up, two of the naked girls who had been serving drinks climbed onto the stage and stood either side of her. Leda Sheridan clapped her hands and the musicians played a dramatic chord. As they did so, the girls dragged off Grace’s cloak and tossed it off the stage, so that she was naked, too. She was full-breasted, with crinkled nipples as dark as prunes, but otherwise she was very thin, with prominent pelvic bones and a wide gap between her thighs.

  Between them, the two men heaved Grace onto the table and lay her down on her back. The girls then bound her wrists and ankles with white silk ribbons. They lifted the tablecloth to reveal four brass rings attached to the underside of the table, and they ran the ribbons through these rings and knotted them, so that Grace was pinned down and unable to move. She didn’t struggle: she only lifted her head a little, and then let it drop back down again, as if she were still half-comatose.

  The two men and the two girls left the stage, and then the musicians played another chord. The door opened and out stepped a muscular young man with tousled black hair and tattoos on his chest and his forearms. Beatrice thought that he was handsome in a brutish way, with deep-set eyes and thick, rubbery lips. From his physique, she guessed that he could have been a chairman or more likely a lighterman – a keel-bully as they were called. He was completely naked, with a tangled rug of black hair on his chest, and legs as hairy as an ape’s. He was holding his purple-headed penis in his left fist and it was already half-erect.

  The hubbub in the room grew even louder, and as the hairy man stepped up onto the stage, some of the women let out little screams of delight. He turned to face the revellers, and grinned, and licked his rubbery lips, and gave his penis four or five hard rubs, as if he were pumping the handle of a butter churn.

  Dearest Lord, thought Beatrice, what is he going to do to poor Grace? Although the room was crowded and hot, she felt as if her blood had turned to ice water, and she couldn’t stop herself from shivering.

  The hairy man climbed up onto the table, and hunched over Grace on his hands and knees. Grace lifted her head again, and stared up at him, and let out a thin, pathetic mewling sound as if she knew what he intended to do to her.

  He lowered himself between her skinny black thighs, and opened her up with his thumb and forefinger so that he could force his penis into her, as far as it would go. Then he began slowly and rhythmically to move his buttocks up and down, grunting under his breath with every thrust.

  The revellers were hushed to begin with, but when he pushed harder and harder – so hard that Grace’s hips were jolted up off the tablecloth with every thrust – one of the men started to count each thrust out loud.

  ‘One-a-penny! Two-a-penny! Three-a-penny! Four!’

  Two of his friends joined in, and soon all the revellers were chanting. The hairy man turned his head and gave them a grin, licking his lips lasciviously to show them how much he was enjoying himself. He was sweating now, with his sweat dropping onto Grace’s breasts, and his face was as red as a freshly boiled crab, but he kept on pushing himself faster and harder, and grunting louder and louder as he did so. Grace’s eyes were closed, and she might just as well have been unconscious. Beatrice hoped that she was.

  When the counting reached a hundred, some of the revellers started shouting, ‘Where is he? Where’s the nim gimmer? That’s what you promised us, Mrs Sheridan! Where’s the nim gimmer?’

  Beatrice looked around at the crowd, bewildered and frightened. Nim gimmer was slang for a surgeon, she knew that, but why should these revellers be calling out for a surgeon?

  ‘Nim gimmer! Nim gimmer!’ they chorused, the men hoarse with drink and excitement, and the women shrill, and all of them clapping in time to the hairy man’s grunting.

  The door beside the stage suddenly opened again, and the revellers all cheered. Out came the tall figure of a man wearing a floor-length white robe and a white pointed hood, like a phantom, or a Nazarene penitent in a capirole, with only two small holes for his eyes. Without hesitation he climbed up onto the stage, and stood beside the oval table.

  ‘Nim gimmer! Nim gimmer!’ chanted the crowd.

  The man in the white robe looked at the hairy man, and Beatrice could just make out his eyes glittering. He seemed to be aroused, or anxious, because the front of his hood was being sucked in and out very quickly as he breathed. The hairy man nodded, and said something to the man in the white robe, although the shouting all around her was so loud that Beatrice couldn�
�t make out what it was. He slowed down his thrusting, though, and before each thrust he drew his penis completely out of Grace’s vagina, and then paused for a few seconds before he slid it back in again.

  ‘Come on, then, sir!’ shouted the man in the orange coat. ‘Give us what we paid good money for!’

  The man in the white robe reached into the folds of his garment and drew out a short curved sword, like a scimitar. He raised it up above his head and circled it around and the revellers roared their approval.

  Beatrice thought: No! He’s not going to hurt her, is he? Oh, dear God, don’t let him hurt her!

  The man in the white robe stepped up closer to the table and held the sword above Grace’s neck. He looked again at the hairy man, and they nodded in unison as if they were two musicians about to play the same piece of music together.

  Beatrice stood up and screamed out, ‘No! You can’t! Stop it! Stop it! You can’t!’

  She tried to push her way up to the stage, but she couldn’t force her way past the rows of chairs in front of her, and now more and more of the revellers were standing up, and blocking her way through.

  She kept on screaming, ‘No! You can’t! In the name of God, you mustn’t!’ but her voice was drowned out by the shouting and the stamping and the clamour all around her.

  Grace still had her eyes closed. If she were conscious, she would have heard the pandemonium in the room, but she wouldn’t have realized what was about to happen to her.

  The hairy man nodded, and the man in the white robe leaned forward and sliced Grace’s neck from side to side, so that dark red blood flooded out and sprayed all over the tablecloth. Grace opened her eyes in shock, but then the man in the white robe sliced her neck again, separating her vertebrae with a forceful twist of his wrist like a Smithfield butcher.

  Grace’s head rolled sideways and tumbled off the table, onto the stage. At the same time, the hairy man let out an exultant shout and climaxed into her decapitated body, his buttocks tense, his leg muscles rigid, and both of his feet curled up.