Last Licks

by Troy Conway

  The room was silent. We could hear the gurgle of the water sliding past the hull as the Athena slipped through the Aegean Sea We were traveling at night; we had our riding lights on; we were well beyond the Sea of Candia between Crete and the Greek island of Santorin by this time.

  Suddenly I heard sounds on deck.

  Shrill cries and the thudding of feet, the slap of a hand on flesh, the deeper voices of excited men; we could hear them in the stateroom as if they were just beyond its door. Ilona started and turned her head a moment toward a porthole, staring, scarcely breathing. Then she turned back to me.

  “We must hurry,” she murmured. “Come, undress me.”

  She turned her soft, creamy back, bisected by the strap of her brassiere. I came up behind her, so close that she could feel my excitement nuzzling at her soft thighs. She was panting harshly, head thrown back a little. I could feel her thighs move against me.

  “Please! Please hurry,” she whimpered.

  At the time, I did not understand the reason for the hurry. The boys and girls outside on the deck were having themselves a time. They would not rush in to interrupt us. My only worry was her husband, but she had assured me he would never enter her room without a specific invitation.

  The brassiere cups drooped as I unclasped the strap. I was peering over her shoulder as I had on deck the first time I had set foot on this yacht, but now we were alone. I was free to indulge the caresses which I knew she would enjoy. I kissed her bare shoulder with my open mouth and ran my lips up to her soft throat.

  My hands slipped along her ribs to her swollen breasts. I slipped my palms over them and held them gently. Just as gently I began a bouncing movement, up and down, up and down. I reached for her turgid nipples. I fondled them, rotating them between my forefingers and thumbs. Unable to stand my teasing, she turned and plastered her front against me.

  Ilona Fortescu was panting like a bellows. Her hips swung; her thighs opened to fasten upon my body; her girdled hips bucked and looped.

  “Aiiie!” she wailed, thighs tightening their grip, and driving her breasts against my chest, clinging to my upper arms with her hands as she dragged her stiffened brown nipples back and forth against my chest hairs.

  She was unwittingly performing the rite of tekhfidz, as the Arabians call it, which is the brushing of the male member back and forth between the labia minor, in a form of mutual pleasure between man and women. The Latin terminology knows it as penem fricatum inter femorum. There is no penetration, there is only the excitement of both male and female erogenous zones, which leads, by its very intensity, to a mutual orgasm.

  Ilona Fortescu held me in a painful finger grip; her eyes were squeezed shut; her lower lip was caught between her white teeth; her head hung back, moving from side to side as if she was caught in the coils of a epileptic fit. She was unable to control the agitated movements of her hips and thighs. Her physical side had taken complete command.

  I was nudging her backward, toward her bed—when someone screamed in agony outside the cabin wall.

  The sound ran through us like a knife in butter. Ilona jerked back, the motions of her hips stilled. Her eyes popped open and showed me the stark terror inside them, through which the glaze of pleasure was slowly fading.

  “What is it?” she panted.

  “Never mind that. They’re having a party, deckside.”

  “NO. You must—go see!”

  Her hands pushed me away. As if she was suddenly ashamed of her actions, she turned and ran toward a closet, reaching inside for a chenille robe to throw about her girdled nakedness.

  “GO see, go see,” she begged.

  “Like this?”

  “Your ducks—put them on. Please, Rod!’

  I shrugged. The intense pleasure I had been enjoying was still in my nerve ends. I felt like a starving man dragged from a feast. I knew rage and a sudden weakness. I was frustrated and furious at the same time.

  I climbed into the white ducks, I slid a shirt over my chest. I pushed feet into socks and shoes. Ilona Fortescu was huddled beside her open closet door, staring at me with wide eyes.

  “Ill be back,” I promised.

  I went out into the companionway, closing the door behind me, and I could hear the laughter and the shouts more clearly. Men and women were yelling, screaming in an orgiastic excitement. And a girl was screaming in utter terror, in a fear that was riddled with white-hot agony.

  I ran.

  I came out onto the deck to the sight of what seemed to be an orgy out of a voodoo cult. On the deck, tall candles were glowing, illuminating the stark naked body of the pretty little maid, Angelique. She was writhing and twisting to the hands that held her down on a valspared hatch coaming. Her face was contorted with fear and revulsion as she stared upward at a flopping chicken in the hands of the ship’s cook.

  A knife was being drawn across the chicken’s neck.

  Eduardo Herrara had planted himself between the widespread legs of the maid whose ankles were gripped by a couple of the crewmen. As the kniie sliced into living flesh, he drove himself forward into the screaming girl.

  Angelique jerked, screeching like a lost soul.

  The knife ran cleanly into the chicken and blood gouted downward across her heaving breasts and belly. The people massed around the hatch moaned and screamed in answer to the double blooding, for the maid had been a virgin. Vaguely I was aware of throbbing drums, as I told myself she might have been the only virgin on board.

  I stood frozen for a moment, not believing what I was seeing. This was voodoo all right, from the cabbalistic candles to the rada drums. I remembered suddenly that there were voodoo cults in Paris, and ceremonies to which the initiated might bring guests.

  Angelique was flopping about almost as much as was the decapitated chicken. Her screams were punctuated by the laughter of the onlookers and the shouts of sensual joy Eduardo Herrara was making as he violated her body. The candlelight, the shadowed faces of the onlookers, the blood streaming across the white flesh of the raped girl, was like something from a psychedelic nightmare.

  I came out of my paralysis slowly.

  The intense surprise of seeing a voodoo rite performed on a yacht deck in the waters of the Aegean Sea had held me rigid. Too, the sight of Herrara driving himself with metronomic rhythm into the body of the screeching girl probably touched some sadomasochistic chord deep in my own being, keeping me from interfering earlier.

  I was vaguely aware that the guests of Georges Fortescu had joined the crowd of loa worshippers and were themselves participating in the orgy. I recognized Celeste Maillot, maturely curved in black brassiere and nylon panties and high-heeled shoes, her diamond rings flashing on her fingers as she moved them, and beyond her, the Spanish dish, Juana Batione.

  Juana displayed no jealousy for what her man was doing. She was bent forward, loose black hair falling in a spill of ebony past her heavy white breasts, her entire body stark naked above her shoes. A crewman was beside her, his hand moving across her plump buttocks, making them jiggle as she stared at the voodoo rite.

  The blonde dancer, Donna Romminet, was pressed against her lesbian friend, the icy brunette with the almost painfully thin body and the oversized breasts, caressing those breasts with frantic, nervous hands, as they both watched what was being done to Angelique in something like hypnotized horror.

  I made out Alain Maillot with his arm about two pretty waitresses, grinning from ear to ear as he held them tightly to his unclad body. Neither of the girls wore a stitch of clothing. Even their feet were bare.

  Then I came out of it.

  “Hey,” I yelled, lunging forward.

  It was a mistake. No sooner had I taken two steps then the men all whirled and hurled themslves upon me. In a comer of my mind, I know this had been rehearsed. Nobody acts that fast to an interruption. It was as if the entire tableau had been planned with one fact in mind: to get Damon!

  I ducked under a fist and grabbed an arm and used the gumura—the majo
r wheel throw—to hurl my first attacker into the air so that he went flying across the deck and into he chest of a second man. Somebody leaped on my back. It was a woman; I could feel her hard breasts pressing into either side of my spine as her perfumed forearm went about my neck and hooked my throat. A fist came out of the lights to drive into my belly below my belt buckle.

  I went backward off my feet.

  My body was like a piledriver slamming into the soft body on my back, that hit the deck with a sodden thud. The woman screamed with pain in my ear. I rolled off her, kicking upward into a male crotch and listening to the man echo the screech of the female.

  I rolled over and over, driving into a pair of naked legs and upending the woman in the bra and panties—Celeste Maillot—angling her fall so that her hurtling body took a husky crewman out of the action. I came to my knees throwing punches at three men driving for me. My fist met a jaw. The knuckles of my other hand slid off a shoulder.

  Then a body rammed me backwards.

  I hit the deck hard with a muscular crewman on top of me. I surged upward, trying to throw him off, but somebody kicked me in the head with a foot. The foot had a shoe on. I saw more stars than there were in the night sky overhead.

  A knee rammed my middle. The breath whooshed out of my lungs. I tried to turn on my side but a fist was catching me across my jaw. The back of my head bounced on the deck planks.

  “Don’t kill him,” a woman yelled.

  “We want to have our fun,” a girl shouted.

  Fists and feet hit me, again and again. I bucked and grunted to the force of those blows. I hurled a fist; I sought to knee a man, but the fury was gone out of my muscles. A man stood over me, and as strong hands held my wrists and ankles, he drove a bare foot into my belly. I tried to double up against the pain shooting throughout my body; I could not. The men who held my wrists and ankles were too heavy to move.

  The foot hit me again. Again. Again. . . .

  Nobody could take a pounding like that and not lose consciousness. I was no exception. I went away into a blackness for a few minutes, where it was quiet and peaceful.

  The peace and quiet did not last.

  I came to on my feet. Somebody began yanking off my clothes until I was standing there in front of everybody, stark naked. I was dizzy, sick. My body ached from the beating it had sustained, and my middle seemed to be a voice telling me how badly it had been bruised.

  Hands pushed me stumbling backwards until cold wood and metal touched my spine. I was being shoved into the mast. Then ropes were flung around me, tightening at my belly and my thighs, being wrapped about my arms that were drawn behind me. Fingers were knotting the ropes on the other side of the mast.

  A crewman was moving about with a pail of cold water, dumping some of it on the faces or heads of the men I had knocked out. I watched these bruisers shudder, shake their heads, lie there on the wet deckplanks, gasping and groaning. I felt a little better when I saw the damage I’d done.

  There was respect in the faces of the men, and something like awe in the eyes of the women as they gathered around me. Georges Fortescu was there, puffing on a cigar, smiling wickedly at sight of my helplessness. In the shadows beyond him, I could make out his wife, Ilona, in her chenille robe.

  “Sorry about this, Damon,” Fortescu said slowly. “You were a good steward, the finest we ever had.”

  Fleur Devot was giggling uncontrollably, trying to stifle her laughter with both hands. “Tell him, Georges, tell him what we are going to do to him!” she was crying between bursts of gleeful laughter.

  “In good time, Fleur. There are some things I want him to understand first. He is a flic—a police spy sent to report back to the authorities about what we are doing on my little yacht.”

  This was a blatant lie. I knew Fortescu knew I understood it, because he winked at me slowly. I began to grasp the situation. Georges Fortescu was a S.E.L.L. man. One of the members. of that Secret Enemies of Liberty League which battens upon the fears and intrigues of world powers. Let someone find a new weapon or a new chemical formula, and S.E.L.L. will beat a bloody path to his door, to steal his invention from him and offer it to the highest bidder in the world market.

  As a Coxeman, I have fought S.E.L.L. before. I have been shot at by, and I have killed, S.E.L.L. secret agents. If S.E.L.L. was interested in the mermen, I knew why I was being set up for the kill. I had seen mermen following the Atheno, I had reported my discovery to Fortescu, who was a S.E.L.L. agent. Therefore, I must die.

  I wondered about men and women like Fleur Devot, Celeste and Alain Maillot, Juana Batione and Eduardo Herrara, and all the other assorted guests. They could not all be S.E.L.L. people. Or could they? Maybe this Athena was a S.E.L.L. possession, and all of its people were on a semi-holiday, on their way to the Greek island of Thraxos where they would be briefed on the sales pitch S.E.L.L. would use to auction off its discovery to the world power most willing to pay its price.

  In any event, knowing all this was doing me no good at all. They were going to kill me, here and now, on the foredeck of the Athena.

  But—how?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The beautiful blonde dancer told me.

  She came striding naked across the deck, a thin bamboo rod in her hand, sadistic glee in her eyes. Georges Fortescu drew back to give her room. She lifted her right arm, far back, then brought it forward. The thin rod came down across my belly, just above my manhood.

  “Nnnngggg!’’

  It was not a scream. My teeth were clenched, my tongue was curled up in my mouth, I could only make that sound deep in my throat, my every muscle strutted against the agony eating in my flesh. My head rammed back into the mast, my body came up on its toes.

  “Man,” Donna Romminet sneered, like it was an insult. The rod drove into me again, across my loins. This time I could not help it. The pain was too intense to fight. I threw back my head and howled out my agony.

  Donna laughed harshly. “Scream, scream all you Want—man!”

  The bamboo rod lifted and fell, lifted and fell. It whipped my manhood, it flailed my flesh until I knew I was bleeding like a stuck pig. I was half out of my skull by this time. I kept flopping and hopping on the deck plankings, trying to get away from that rod that was trying to make a eunuch out of me. I could not look down to see the damage that .was being done; there was a rope across my throat, so tight as almost to choke me, which kept me from lowering my chin.

  I could only imagine what my manhood looked like, and my imagination had me in shreds. I had never felt such pain. I hoped I never would again.

  The blonde lesbian would have killed me all by herself if left to her own devices, but Georges Fortescu made a gesture with a hand and two crewmen came up behind Donna, caught her bare arms and yanked her away.

  The thin bamboo rod was covered with blood.

  I wanted to die.

  “Naughty girl,” Pierre LeMoines said.

  The handsome young movie actor came forward with a bowl and a soft washcloth. He sat down at my bare feet and began to inspect me.

  “She left you in a pretty bad way,” he muttered.

  He lifted the washcloth, soaked in oil, and began to wash my bloody flesh. Some of the others watched, but off to one side I could make out through the red haze that swam before my eyes, the sight of Barbe Serrelle kneeling before the sobbingly excited Donna Romminet, red-nailed hands clasping her soft white buttocks, arms about her thighs, kissing the shaven flesh of her inamorata, while the blonde stood with spread legs, head thrown back, eyes wide open but unseeing as she stared blindly upward at the stars.

  The hands at my bruised, bleeding flesh were curiously gentle, almost as if they wanted to repay me with pleasure for the pain Donna had caused. He almost crooned to himself, seated before me.

  He laughed suddenly, looking up at my face that was held fast by the rope around my throat. “I’ll bet you thought you were going to have a ball with Ilona, didn’t you? You didn’t how she was setting y
ou up for us, did you? To let us get the stage ready. You’re our star performer, you know. Oooohh, and you really are a star!”

  “Five stars, Pierre,” whispered Ilona Fortescu from behind the actor.

  “You should know, darling,” breathed Celeste Maillot, leaning to rake my chest with hr fingernails, not roughly enough to draw blood, but enough to hurt. Her eyes glistened with excitement. “Was he fun? Did you have enough time for cracher?”

  I was writhing to the touch of the oil-soaked cloth when Celeste pushed Pierre away. “Enough! It is my turn to torment him. Ma fail I have never seen anyone so formidable!”

  Celeste knelt down naked before me, kissing my toes. Her fingernails ran up and down my thighs, very gently. It was very pleasant, her kissing. It sent a chill of desire down my spine that settled in my manhood.

  Ilona whispered, “Sacré! bleu! He is growing even more, Celeste!”

  The lips creeping up an ankle said, “We shall kill him with the torments of the senses, dear Ilona. We shall make him burst a blood vessel, yes? We shall rupture him with rivancher, as Chinese courtesans used to kill a man with the torture of the thousand caresses.”

  Lips and a wet tongue on my thigh, moving upward. Bright red fingernails sliding before them, scratching lust into my every neuron. I twisted and shook, I felt the delight gorging my blood vessels with tumid power. The mouth moved open-lipped across my thighs to my belly, bypassing the straining flesh that practically begged for release.

  Celeste was a past mistress at this titillation of the senses. Her teeth nibbled, her tongue licked, her lips ran wetly here and there. Where her lips went, there went her long fingernails. My teeth were biting my tongue against the pleas trembling on it. I wanted to ask for relief; I wanted to beg for satisfaction; I felt I had been teased enough.