Bones

by Eli Easton

  Tiyah ignored my words. She tilted her head, as if listening to something, and then danced away. The crowd began dancing along with her. I saw a man, a very large man, convulse, his eyes rolling up in his head. He began making strange, jerky movements not unlike those of a rooster. Someone blew smoke directly in my face, sickly sweet and acrid. I coughed. Someone else danced by me, brushing against my back—breasts pressing against me so that I could feel her nipples. I whirled, outraged, but she was already gone, and I could not tell who had done it.

  Fear was beginning to trickle in, despite the drums, despite the smoke and the surreal feeling of the whole evening. I’d lost my hold on dear old Hodgets somewhere along the way, and perhaps myself too. I was intoxicated, and I was not among friends. Indeed, I had no idea where I was. I’d also lost sight of Tiyah, and I felt vulnerable and exposed.

  Had I really expected anything from this but humiliation? Making up my mind, I turned to go. I’d find my way home one way or the other.

  I pushed my way through the writhing bodies toward the forest until suddenly I found myself directly in front of the center pole once again. Tiyah stood before me, legs spread wide, her skirt rucked up to her knees. Her eyes were still rolled back in her head, and her mouth was open in an “O” like a silent scream. She turned her palm up and shoved it, hard, on my stomach. We both froze.

  “It is here,” she whispered in French. Il est ici. “That which you swallowed. That which you buried.”

  “W-what?” I stuttered.

  “Bring it!” she ordered the man at her side. He left and stepped back a moment later with a cage. It was an old gilded bird cage, made in England or France and repaired crudely with wire where it had begun to fall apart. Inside the cage was a bird. It was large—at least the size of a very large crow. But it was not a crow. Its body was white underneath and topped with blue-black feathers. The top of its head was the same deep blue, and its eyes were perfectly round and a brilliant red. It was an exotic thing, like Jamaica herself.

  Were they going to sacrifice this bird too?

  “Ici,” Tiyah-who-was-not-Tiyah repeated. The tips of her fingers dug into my stomach over the stiff cloth of my trousers. “Ici.” Here, here.

  Her fingers hurt, but I found I could not pull back. My feet felt rooted to the earth, heavy as lead.

  “Ici!” She screamed.

  The man who had brought the bird stepped forward. In a moment he had unfastened the buttons of my linen vest and pulled up my white shirt. He pushed down the waist of my trousers, exposing my navel and lower belly to the night. I gasped and tried to move, but it was as if I was paralyzed entirely.

  It’s an illusion, the power of suggestion. You can move. You must move!

  But I could not. Not even my tongue would work. It lay flaccid and numb in my mouth.

  Tiyah muttered in French, too low and slurred for me to make it out. Her fingers returned, digging into the naked flesh and muscle just above my groin. It was excruciating, and I felt a wave of nausea as her fingers pressed deep. I looked down, transfixed. Bright red blood sprouted around her fingers as if she were penetrating my flesh. I tried to scream and could not.

  “Il est profond. Très profonde,” she muttered, her teeth clacking as her fingers dug into my belly.

  “God help me,” I choked out, as another strong wave of nausea wracked me. I gagged. I was being held up now by two strong men on either side, my arms slung around their shoulders. I did not remember getting there, but it was good they propped me up because my knees had given way.

  “Bâtard!” Tiyah cursed angrily, though whether at me or my belly, I couldn’t tell. She hissed and looked into my eyes with those blank whites of her own. “You must bring it up. It is too deep. I cannot reach it,” she ordered in harsh French.

  I gagged again as her fingers relentlessly pushed, causing pain unlike any I’d ever know.

  “Spit it up, Colin Hastings! I order you! Now!”

  She dug even deeper, and my vision pulsed black with agony. I felt the hot splash of blood running down my stomach and soaking through the fabric of my trousers. I retched and retched again. It felt like my bowels were coming up into my mouth—bitter and sour and tasting of death. And then there was something there, in my throat, something thick and slimy, like uncooked liver. It choked my airway.

  Tiyah held out her hand, and I spat the horror into it, repulsed to my soul and gasping for breath.

  In her hand was a black orb, black as if filled with dark blood. It was the size of a goose egg, and it pulsed. It looked like nothing I’d ever seen, like a badly deformed heart or a half-formed embryo.

  “Ah!” she said, cradling it in both hands with a satisfied air. It was then I realized that her fingers were no longer digging into me. I looked down, but though my belly was smeared with blood, there was no wound.

  A parlor trick. It’s all a parlor trick. You’ve been mesmerized, like in those theater shows. This isn’t real.

  Still, I could not stop staring at the thing in her hands and feeling like it was part of me, both repulsed and attracted to it.

  The man who had brought the bird cage opened a little door, and Tiyah reached in with her bloodied hand outstretched.

  The bird, dear God!, it ate up the thing in her hand in one greedy gulp.

  I retched again at the sight, disgusted.

  “There. There. Oiseau doux. Oiseau bon.” She crooned to the bird as she latched the door shut.

  I slumped against the arms that held me up. Sweat sprung up all over my body, like when a fever breaks. The breeze was cool against my face, and I felt a rush of giddy relief. My breathing calmed, and my heart soared. It is probably the shock, I thought. But I felt so bloody good.

  Tiyah grasped my face in both her hands and looked into my eyes. It was Tiyah now. Her own eyes were brown and a little bloodshot, but they were Tiyah’s eyes. “Tis done, Missah. You take good care dis bird. Feed ’im. Treat ’im well. Long as he live, your passion be free. And he live long time, ey?”

  I blinked up at her, not knowing what to say.

  Tiyah smiled knowingly. “Tis well, Missah. Sleep.”

  As if I had been waiting for those words, I fell immediately into unconsciousness.

  ~6~

  I HAVE no idea how I got back to Crosswinds, but when I awoke next, I was in my bedroom. I’d been having an amazing dream in which I was soaring high in the sky like a bird, gliding on air currents while looking down on the landscape, searching for prey. Only what I felt was not a hunger of the stomach, but a hunger of the loins. The bird—me—was searching for something to mate.

  The dream was so real, and so primal, that when I woke up, I sat in bed, trying to hold on to the feeling of being that bird, the indescribable joy of gliding on cool air, the intense focus of my search, the pull of desire.

  But, as dreams do, it slipped away. As the bedroom became more solid around me, I found that my body was fully aroused and throbbing in a demand for attention.

  I shoved off my bedclothes and tore the nightshirt over my head. I was so bloody hot I was sick with it. I ignored my body’s awkwardly swollen state, pushed aside the mosquito netting, and opened the door to the veranda to try to get some air into the room.

  Then I realized the heat was coming from within me, not without. I could feel a breeze on my face and a coolness against my skin. It felt like rain, like a storm was coming. I could see the palm trees swaying strongly in the wind. But this did nothing to relieve the burn making my skin moist with sweat and pooling in my groin in a maddening ache.

  Passion.

  Was this feeling a result of the ceremony? Was Erzulie doing this to me, or was it yet another instance of the power of suggestion?

  Oh, God. I didn’t care. For once, I felt no need to fight it.

  The night was dark, clouds obscuring both moon and stars. Yet still, somehow, I could see, as if there was a dim glow in the air. The distant fields of sugarcane rippled like approaching snakes. There was no one i
n sight across the open yard in front of the house.

  And then there was.

  He came walking from the trees, a silhouette, calm and steady. He kept on coming until he was standing in the yard in front of me, maybe twenty feet away. By then I could see the whites of his eyes and the glow of his… bare skin. He wore nothing at all. The top curve of his manhood, partially erect, was visible to me, as was the smooth, hairless skin of his chest and two peaked nipples.

  Lust roiled in my stomach, making my head reel as if I were still aboard the ship. I heard myself moan before I could control it.

  He was beautiful, this male, and I wanted him. I wanted that maleness, in my hands, my mouth, rutting all over me.

  I tried to hang on to a scrap of reason. Who was he? He looked young, but his face was obscured. He was a native—I could see the dusky color of his skin—and yet, from one blink to the next, it was not dark but glowing white, his chest strangely familiar to me.

  Richard.

  I knew it wasn’t Richard. Richard was in England. But I pushed this knowledge from my head deliberately. I wanted it to be Richard. I missed him so much. And I wanted to touch him. I wanted this all to be a dream that I could indulge in without guilt and without fear of consequences. I chose for it to be so, willingly. My fear and self-consciousness were not absent, but they were small voices, and distant, overwhelmed in a flood of need.

  He opened up his hands in supplication, his cock growing larger as I stared at him. I could not be bothered with the stairs at the other end of the veranda. I scrambled over the wooden railing of the balcony, ran across the lawn, and then he was in my arms.

  He stood still as I pressed into him, my arms clutching around his back, my face buried in his shoulder. He was tall, and solid, and smelled of smoke and rain and sweat. He was real in a way that was frightening, reminding me this was no dream. He was lithe, lean, his skin soft. My mind flashed on a native youth I’d seen looking at me before when he worked in the field, a beautiful boy I had purposefully avoided.

  Colin, a voice whispered in my mind, Richard’s voice. The stiff arms relaxed and came up to embrace me.

  I moaned and pushed hard against him. I didn’t quite dare to rut, but the pressure of him against me was a necessary thing. His cock grew harder against my belly, and I found the edge of his hipbone and couldn’t stop a thrust of my pelvis. Embarrassed at this animalistic urge, I pulled my head back and kissed him. I thought to redirect the need, express something more civilized, but his mouth was all tongue and wetness and sin, and there was nothing civilized about it. He pushed me back toward the veranda.

  When my back hit the railing, he broke the kiss to clamber gracefully up and over, pulling me along by my hand. And then we were in my room and on the bed.

  There was a sense of secrecy there in the dark, behind the mosquito netting. He placed me on my back and removed my drawers, exposing me to the air. I looked and felt harder than I’d ever been in my life, flesh turned to turgid steel with the force of my blood. I didn’t fight him. If anything, I felt proud of my state, the boldness of it. I arched eagerly and reached for him. I could see, as he sat on his heels, a glimpse of his face. He was smooth and mocha-colored, with full lips and long, dark eyelashes. He was that unusually pretty youth I had seen before. But his eyes burned with wanting me, and he leaned over and took my cock into his mouth, and I couldn’t find it in myself to care.

  I closed my eyes, my hands clamped on the sheets, and I pretended it was Richard.

  His mouth was like nothing I’d ever imagined. It was infinitely better than my own furtive tugging, and I could hardly remember my single time with a woman. This was deliberate, his tongue rubbing rough and flat and perfect against my glans, his mouth suckling like he was a child with a candy. His head moved up and down, and one hand fondled my sack.

  I gritted my teeth, squeezed my eyes shut, and gripped the bed harder, not wanting to spend quickly, like a virgin schoolboy. But it was beyond me to resist the suck and drag of that mouth or the bliss that was shuddering through me. I had no idea it could feel like this, that there could be so much rapture in it, that my skin could be so sensitive, the delight so sharp. I savored it as long as I could, which was not nearly long enough. Lightning pulsed through me, hot and transcendent, and I screamed as I spilled into his mouth. He did not pull away but kept at me, extending the sensation until I could no longer bear it and was forced to push him off.

  He came over me then, laying his hot skin chest to chest with mine and kissing me deeply. I tasted the bitter musk of my own spend in his mouth, and it didn’t repulse me. It was obscene and erotic and almost enough to stir me again. He ground his hard member against my stomach as his tongue played against mine, his hips moving faster and harder. I was barely recovered, but I helped him as much as I could, arching my back and holding myself stiff to give him a firm surface to grind against. I clutched his lower back tight with my hands.

  He came with a whimpered cry into my mouth. I felt him pulse wetly against me—hot, liquid spurts.

  The feeling and sound of his pleasure roused me, and I wanted to do it all over again. I clutched him and kissed him hard, but before I could reinvigorate my lust, exhaustion crept in and my limbs felt heavy and slow. I let them fall away from him as he kissed my cheek.

  I closed my eyes and feel asleep.

  WHEN I woke the next morning, the sun was bright and my head was clear. The night came flooding back to me. I had a glimmer of hope that it had all been a dream, but I was naked under the bedclothes and I had spend dried on my stomach. I could still smell him on the sheets and on my skin, a darker musk than my own. I found a short black hair on the pillow, curly and coarse.

  It had not been a dream.

  I rose and washed thoroughly at the basin. Then I rang for Philip and, not meeting his eyes, ordered my usual tea and breakfast on the veranda. I sat in the morning sun, drinking my tea, my person as tidy and English as it ever had been, and waited for the panic to come.

  But it didn’t come. I only felt numb and tense.

  What was done was done. I’d been caught up in the frenzy of the Obeah ceremony, that drugging smoke, and Tiyah’s power of suggestion. I’d been sent the youth for the purpose of seduction, clearly, and seduce me he did. I had no reason to feel shame or that I’d taken advantage. I had not gone to his house and dragged him here. It was he who had placed his mouth eagerly on my cock. It was he who then lay on top of me and took his own pleasure.

  At the thought, heat flashed through me again, and I wanted, dear Lord, I wished I could feel it all over again.

  I took a sip of tea, my hand shaking.

  The issue was where to go from here. I could ignore the sly looks and innuendo I would likely get from the natives. I could pretend I didn’t remember. If anyone had the temerity to write to the authorities or my father and reveal my sins, I would deny it. I’d be believed before any of them.

  But strangely, these thoughts were like the ghosts of thoughts I used to have. A few days ago, I would have been horrified that I’d kissed a man, let him touch me, would have been humiliated that anyone might know. But now, while the thoughts still came, I felt only a mild echo of fear and a great deal of confusion.

  I sipped my tea, staring into the green trees.

  She sent me a man.

  That succeeded in twisting a knot in my stomach.

  Tiyah sent me a man, and I wanted him. I loved it.

  My teacup clattered to the saucer.

  I loved his maleness, wanted it. And when we touched, kissed, I thought of Richard.

  I will give you your heart’s most secret desire.

  I shoved my hat onto my head and went out to work so I didn’t have to think anymore.

  ~7~

  Eton, 1859

  “VULGARIAN!”

  “Boor!”

  “Peasant!”

  I stood at the kitchen door with the pot of tea I’d prepared for Thorkell warm in my hands. Three of the senior boys were
in the hall outside the kitchen, pushing around another junior. I’d noticed the boy before. I was small for twelve, and he was as slight as me. He had an agreeable face and ruddy cheeks that looked like someone had just pinched them. There was a certain congenial shyness about him that had made me want to befriend him at first glance, but so far I’d not even learned his name.

  He was doggedly trying not to spill the tray with the cup and pot of tea he’d prepared, even while being pushed around. He said nothing, keeping his eyes on the floor.

  One of the boys snatched the pot from the tray, opened the lid and sniffed, then made a face. “Don’t even know how to make a proper English tea. You’re a disgrace!”

  “Do it again!” another ordered. “And make it right this time or else.”

  I’d only been at Eton for a few weeks, but I’d heard stories from my older brothers, and I knew enough of the way things worked to assume two things. First, the boy was not of the upper classes. He might be a scholarship case or maybe even a foreigner. Hence the bullying. And second, the state of the boy’s tea had nothing to do with it. They’d likely reject any pot he made.

  All first year boys like me were “fags,” or servants, to an upper class boy. Fags made their fag-masters breakfast, midday tea, brushed their shoes, and did whatever other small chores they might need. In exchange, the fag-master acted as mentor and should, in theory, protect a boy from just such bullying. But in fact, bullying was rife at Eton. I’d had my share of it, despite my name.

  My name. I straightened my spine and tried to summon the imperial affect I’d seen my older brothers use. “What are you up to there?” I demanded, approaching the group with the pot of tea still in my hands.

  One of the senior boys eyed me up and down. “Who are you?”

  “Hastings,” I said proudly, lifting my chin. “And my brother will not be amused to be delivered cold tea.”