Trolley No. 1852

by Edward Lee

  “Ammi likes to eat a box,” she grated, “so she can get her little fuck-face over here and eat this one!” whereupon she grabbed the wickedly grinning Ammi by a crude fistful of coppery hair and shoved her face into the tensely splayed crotch. Ammi’s mouth squandered no time whatever in ministering as directed. The activity begat a sound like an animal nursing.

  “Fuck!” the blonde grunted. “This guy’s tallywhacker is so big it’s punching my goddamn stomach!”

  All the girls shrieked laughter at the remark.

  Between the sensation of my organ buried in her bowel and that of Ammi’s tending oration, the blonde soon became a veritable dervish of flesh as once again she clenched and shivered, and then was wracked by another clearly thoroughgoing orgasmic salvo. And though I’ll admit that the much more precise purchase of the act of sodomy rendered some pleasing sensations to myself, I was now quite lost in an unfathomable ennui. Women could be so silly sometimes, could they not? I forced my mind to focus on the task of letting nature, however contorted, take its course, and was grateful to then deliver the viscid proof of my own crisis into the prophylactic.

  Finally!

  “Fuck,” the blonde moaned only to sidle over as if narcolyzed. Ammi giggled, wiping her sheened mouth. “Mister,” she said to me, “you just fucked five whores to kingdom come!”

  The remark, which I supposed was a compliment, left me inwardly very weary. “Well, Ammi, ladies. That was, uh, quite nice but I think I’ll bid my adieu now and repair to the atrium.” I frowned at the sullied condom on my now-slackening penis. “But I’d best get rid of this thing first…”

  I prepared to remove the vulgar sheath, but then Ammi reached forward, strangely as if in alarm. “No, no!” she shrilled. “I’ll take care of that! After all, it’s, uh… it’s my job,” and with that curious comment, she gingerly removed the soiled vulcanized barrier.

  Then, even more curiously, she held the thing out, suspended from her fingertips, for all to see, and in an excited squeal, said, “Girls! Look at this!”

  The four other docile women looked at the unrolled object in what seemed absolute astonishment.

  “Can you believe all that jism?”

  Indeed, my expended seed was quite milkily obvious as it depended at the prophylactic’s tip, though I couldn’t imagine what the fuss was about. What else would these silly girls expect? I wondered.

  “That’s a lot of nut!”

  “Shit. Looks like enough cum for half a dozen guys…”

  “Mr. Big Dick is a walking creamery!”

  Ammi chuckled her way out of the room, carrying with her the ridiculous sheath of latex. But in all this ballyhoo, and in spite of the undeniable attractiveness of my coarse-mouthed companions, I’d simply had enough. Ah, but I couldn’t leave just yet, could I?

  “Ladies, if I may impose upon you a moment?” I requested and showed them the photograph of my only sibling. “This is my sister, Selina Phillips, and I’m most dire to locate her. Might any of you have seen her about anywhere?”

  The question set my heart to racing!

  The naked and quite exhausted quattro all squinted at the photo, registered blank expressions, then shook their heads no.

  Drat! All that tomfoolery for nothing!

  I mumbled specious niceties in my departure, and bound for the door…

  “‘Bye, Mr. Big Dick!”

  “Yeah! ‘Bye!”

  “There goes the cream-wagon!”

  “Come back again, please!”

  I didn’t waste my breath in informing them that such a prospect presented a very low order of probability…

  Whew! I thought once back on the stair-hall and finally away from the dizzy cluster of trollops. More trollops (and likely just as dizzy) would have to be sought out and questioned about Selina; for the moment, though, I desperately needed a breather.

  Past the stair-hall rail I noticed a spectacular hanging candelabrum; from there, I looked down and saw several male patrons loitering about the banquet table, most seeming to slurp down more of the loathsome oysters. These men had obviously finished their first sexual assignations and were affording themselves a break before pursuing another. There was no sign, however, of my associate Mr. Erwin.

  A shrill rabble of feminine bombast resounded at the hall’s end, where I spied Ammi’s bare form proudly displaying the depending condom to another nude sprite—a pointy-breasted brunette. “Holy cow!” exclaimed the latter one eyeing the semen-filled reservoir. “Look at it all!”

  “I know,” gushed Ammi, “can you believe it? And the guy fucked the daylights out of all of us!”

  “Holy cow!”

  Great Pegana, I thought dismally. Could I help it that my seminal deposits were evidently much more voluminous than the average?

  “And you should’ve seen his goddamn prong! Big as a baby’s leg, I swear—he fucked me so hard I’ll be walking like a cowboy for a week!”

  I hid behind a somewhat Doric display pedestal, so not to be seen; what I needed less than anything just then was this pointy-breasted one wanting to sample my wares, too.

  “I better get this upstairs,” Ammi said, more quietly, of the ludicrous condom. “You already take yours?”

  “Yeah, two so far…”

  I felt my brow furrow at the arcane discourse. They’re clearly talking about… spent prophylactics. How eccentric…

  The elfin pair separated, Ammi moving up the stairs to the fourth story—or I’d be more accurate to say limping.

  At that same moment a door farther down clicked open and out stepped another brazenly unattired prostitute—this one with nipples sticking out like persimmons—only to turn down the stairs and proceed behind Ammi. But this woman, too, had a spent prophylactic dangling from her fingers!

  And a moment later?

  A third woman did the same…

  My astonishment was plain. What cryptic onus could POSSIBLY charge these petite strumpets with the task of carrying away used prophylactics UPSTAIRS? Surely, the nearest waste basket would do…

  The hall remained clear, but when I emerged from my hiding, my eyes inadvertently fixed on the previously unnoticed object sitting atop the display pedestal: a crude beige cylindrical clay-shape roughly the size of a common pail; when recognition alighted, I muttered beneath my breath a shopworn, “Oh my God!” for I knew all too well what the unlikely object was:

  A cuneiform cylinder.

  As any archaeologist and, indeed, professor of ancient histories would know, these objects provided humankind with its very first “books,” the most famous example being the Cyrus Cylinder which, in intricate cuneiform, detailed the conquest of Babylon by the Persian warrior Cyrus the Great and verified the prophet Isaiah’s prediction in Old Testament papyri scrolls of the same two centuries previous. This cylinder, however (as, I add, without meaning to brag, that I am well-versed in many variations of cuneiform) did not bear the typical assortments of logograms, pictoglyphs, and polyphonous sequences of wedges and slants that the early writing system is known for. Instead, the clay cylinder before me was covered entirely with the exclusive stylus marks used to denote numbers.

  The entire cylinder, I reiterate, had been so inscribed.

  Oh, if I only had a month’s time to decipher this cylinder, I lamented.

  I let my considerations stew, along with my adjacent perplexity regarding the mysterious redeposition of expended condoms to some paradoxical upward recess of the building. I knew I must not make myself obvious; therefore, I strolled about the stair-hall half-pretending to examine various statues, paintings, and other pedestalled objets-d’art. Periodically, however, I took hasty opportunities to put my ear to each invaluable nine-paneled door I passed…

  “Ooo-ooo-ahh-ahh… oh, YES!”

  “Churn me like butter, honey!”

  “Good, good! That’s a good boy!”

  All of the shrill exclamations were in feminine tones and clearly indicative of some manner of fornication.

>   The hall quieted, then, in seeming increments; alternately, the doors I’d just quitted opened to release, first, a brawny man with a sated smile on his face, and then his corresponding fornicatress.

  Each naked woman, as I might’ve suspected by now, dispatched at once from the room to the stairs, and up. And from the fingertips of each suspended a spent prophylactic.

  The bizarreness of my observations were by now getting the best of me. Clearly, more rooms existed upstairs on the fourth floor, yet not one prostitute had taken a man thither; which left me to deliberate: The only person I know for fact to be up there is the club’s madam … Miss Aheb…

  Could it be to Miss Aheb that these shapely, bouncing-breasted “slatternettes” were delivering the epigrammatic soiled condoms?

  And if so…

  Why?

  I hadn’t a notion. Eventually I repaired back to the exorbitant atrium where I found my friend Erwin (looking a bit dogged) helping himself to some refreshment. His grin greeted my arrival. “This place is something, huh, Mr. Phillips?”

  “Something… yes,” I uttered.

  “The girl I got was pure dynamite, and she was none-too-disappointed with my performance, if ya don’t mind me sayin’ so.”

  “Not at all,” I told him distractedly.

  “Which girl did you get?”

  I nearly moaned. If you mean which FIVE GIRLS did I GET, I couldn’t begin to tell you. I simplified the response by merely saying, “A more-than-satisfactory little hussy by the name of Ammi, quite uniquely possessed of various hair colours.”

  “Don’t know what mine’s name was but I can tell you, she’s quite good at putting more than food in her mouth.”

  “A laudable endorsement, indeed,” I chuckled. I leaned over to keep my whisper more discrete. “But allow me to ask, and I apologize for the crudity, but… did your partner, um, make off with the soiled condom once the business was done?”

  “Matter’a fact she did, Mr. Phillips, and now that’cha mention it? They always do.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as singularly peculiar?”

  He stroked his stubble-blued chin. “Yeah, it does. Ya’d think they’d just drop it in the room’s waste can but maybe they dispose of ‘em all in the same place, as a safety precaution.”

  I squinted at his conclusion. “I’m afraid I’m not comprehending you, Mr. Erwin.”

  “Well, any red house is always leery of a raid. If the coppers broke in and found used skins in every room, it’d be a snap to get a prosecution, wouldn’t ya think?”

  “Why, I hadn’t thought of that,” I confessed, and I admitted, too, that in the remotest sense it did make some juris-prudential sense. But…

  Somehow, however abstractedly, I couldn’t quite fathom the notion to any sufficient degree of acceptability.

  “I’ll be going back for seconds, Mr. Phillips. You?”

  “Oh, indeed,” I transfigured the truth. More sexual frolic was most definitely not my preference, but I thought it best to obfuscate the truth to maintain more the air of a “team player.” I did very much need to screen more of the working girls, to show them Selina’s photograph.

  Erwin seemed suddenly frustrated. “That is if there’re any girls left I could grab seconds with. You heard the rumor, Mr. Phillips?”

  “Rumor? Why, no.”

  “Heard two girls yacking about it a minute ago. Apparently one of the men was with us on the trolley is quite the stud. They say he took care’a five girls in one go-round and wore ‘em completely out. They won’t be hob-knobbin’ with no one the rest’a the night. They also said the fella had something ‘tween his legs that should’a been hangin’ in the smokehouse.” He elbowed me with a wink and a smile. “That fella wouldn’t be you, now would it, Mr. Phillips?”

  I let out a strapping laugh. “Only in my most delusory dreams!”

  “Well—” He theatrically dusted off his hands. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be… and may God forgive me.”

  I rolled my eyes and laughed.

  “You coming up too?”

  “I’ll be along presently,” was my erroneous response.

  Erwin embarked for the stairs, in his search for “seconds.”

  The other refractors, as I’d come to think of them, had also returned upwards in the same search, leaving me the atrium to myself. At once, I contemplated my next tactic; any women who might recognise Selina’s photo would be upstairs as well, on the second or third story. However…

  An echoic click came to my ears, that elevated my gaze.

  The conductor, I thought.

  For there he was, the regulation cap perched atop the macabrely immobile white face. In the fashion of an automaton, he took slow steps up the winding stairs—to the fourth story…

  Though my tactic remained undelineated, it was my sheer curiosity that overrode any action of greater utility.

  You see, I had to know: exactly what was taking place on the ominous fourth story.

  I gave the conductor only enough lead-time to conceal my movements; then, with stealth, speed, and deliberation, I traced his identical steps. Upon the fourth-floor landing, I hid behind another Doric display pedestal; this one providing the base for an ancient basalt idol whom I believed to be the notorious demon Baalzephon so actively worshiped by luciferic sects of the Middle Ages. Eye lined up along the pedestal’s edge, I watched the conductor propel himself to the center of the grandiose stair-hall, pause, and then enter a door.

  Now’s my chance, I realised.

  No one else occupied the hall, so I made haste across the plush carpeting. But my dilemma was plain; for although more than half a dozen doors lined the wall-side of the hall, I could not be certain exactly which door the blanch-faced man had entered.

  Somewhere near the center, was all I could deduce. Each door I silently passed stood identical to the previous, until (somewhere in proximity to the hall’s mid-point) I stopped to stare at the tiniest brass emblem mounted upon the door I currently faced. Inscribed upon this plaque were, I’m utterly certain, the cuneiformic markings that denoted the following numerals: 1852.

  I checked both ways down the hall, was satisfied I was not being surveilled, then stooped to one knee, and to the ornately plated keyhole, I then put my wide-open eye…

  It troubles me that I cannot in any accuracy convey to you the details I now beheld. It was a spectacular bed-chamber displayed to my clandestine view: sumptuous carpet and wall-coverings, lovely antique furniture and in addition a veiled four-poster bed whose gorgeously carved post and headboard appeared adorned in gold leaf; oil portraits and statuary that were no doubt high-mark collector’s items. These facts, however, rendered the chamber nondescript when compared to the room’s (and I’m not sure I can even summon an adequate term) sensorial bearing…

  There seemed to be a light that was not light but some peculiar cast unlike any I’d observed. This counter-luminescence (somehow foggy yet clarity-sharpening) made the room and its contents fairly shimmer as if through mist; and seemed preternaturally magnified via some phantasmal lens-obscura, and to that I must not fail to add…

  Two rod-like objects stood upright at either side of the grand bed. These objects were likely simple wooden dowels (nothing peculiar there) but what covered the top half of each was a mass of some unidentifiable substance that seemed to be partly translucent and rather ill-hued. The only simile I can summon is to say that these poles looked like bunches of wizened white grapes on a stick.

  “There you are,” issued the unmistakable and faintly accented voice of Madam Aheb. She immediately stepped into view from the rightward side of the key-way, and it was the paste-faced conductor to whom she spoke. The madam’s black hair as well as the diaphanous, low-cut gown iridesce’d in the bizarre accentuation of the room’s light.

  Her voice turned scolding, “And it certainly took you long enough to get here. You know how I can’t abide to have this awful stuff on me for a minute longer that it need be.”

 
I could only see the conductor’s back from this voyeuristic vantage point, yet the capped, heavy-jacketed man appeared to bow his head at Miss Aheb’s remark of disapproval.

  “But of course, I’m aware you and the Thogg were preparing the trolley for the next ingression…”

  My head turned atilt. Thogg? What was that? And what did she mean by ingression? And what was this ‘awful stuff’ she’d referred to? What I’d seen thus far assured me there was nothing at all awful about how she appeared.

  “I’m ready now,” Madam Aheb said and sat eloquently in a spectacular spoke-backed Revolution-era chair.

  My view of her was blocked when the conductor stood in front of the madam and, with a linen towel, appeared to be wiping off her arms, shoulders, and graceful legs. “Good, good,” she half-moaned. The conductor’s hands kept busy in their task but remained a frustrating visual blockage to exactly what was being done. Nevertheless, he continued to wipe the exposed skin of his mastress.

  What in the name of Pegana is he wiping off? I pondered.

  Still blocked by the bulk shape, Miss Aheb stood up from the chair; and it was the movements of the conductor that led me to believe he was now removing the madam’s gown.

  “Ah, there. That’s better. I just so much prefer to be naked…”

  When the silent conductor stepped away, Miss Aheb stood in full view to my prying eye—

  The image forced me to press my hand across my lips; otherwise the horrific image of what I now saw would’ve surely caused me to scream quite blood-curdlingly…

  I was looking at a dichotomy of unspeakable magnitude: a collision of obscene and utter opposites stripped bare; indeed, the force majeure of physical beauty and physical horror. I say, Miss Aheb now stood naked, and in her nakedness came the accentuation of the sum of all her parts: flawless contours and perfect feminine lines; the sweep of impeccable legs; a sleekness that was robust and healthily slender simultaneously; and high-riding, distendedly nippled breasts that existed without flaw.