by Monica Belle
I had a tagger, maybe a oner, maybe a crew, perhaps Biggy or Snaz. Now was the time to stay silent, to get as near as I could, revealing myself only when we were feet apart. I let Lilitu pull me in among the stones, her strength far too great for me to hold the instant I allowed her forward, into the yew avenue and across it, now snuffling at the ground. A light flickered across the cemetery, from among the tangle of sycamore that hid part of the far wall, yellow and quickly extinguished. I caught a hiss, a whisper, excitement blending with fear as again the yellow light flicked on and I made out a hooded figure crouched low where the sycamores half hid the tomb of Sir Arnold Radlett.
There was a moment of ambiguity as I imagined the outraged spirit of the pompous and egotistical Sir Arnold, but I bit it down. He deserved tagging, but they were on my turf, and putting my occupation of All Angels at risk. Sympathy was out and, besides, it was too much fun.
We drew close, Lilitu now by my side, my hand clamped over her muzzle to quiet her eager whining. The temptation to simply let her slip free was so strong, but I forced it down, holding her as I sank into the shadow of a tombstone, just metres away. Again the torch flicked on, pointing downwards into a rucksack full of cans, and then I saw the writing, a full-on piece, just for a moment and still half-finished, but unmistakable – Snaz.
Again I moved forward, my heart in my mouth as the soft hiss of the aerosol sounded just feet away. He was filling using his trademark green to give a heart to fat letters of fuchsia pink, rapt in concentration, his companion admiring the work instead of looking out for trouble, trouble that was right behind them. I was two rows away, then one, biting my lip with tension as I ducked into the shadow of a stone angel. The hiss stopped, the torch came on, and off, and I stepped out from behind the tomb just as their vision would be weakest.
I’d meant to challenge them, maybe pretend to set Lilitu on them, but I caught myself at the last second, remembering just how much bloody-minded defiance I’d had when I used to tag. In place of my angry shout I gave a hollow groan, even as I ducked back behind the angel. The effect was instant: a voice, tinged with fear, then another.
‘What the fuck was that?’
‘Shh!’
My mouth was twitching in an uncontrollable grin, the urge to laugh impossible to control, my second attempt at a groan coming out as a weird, bubbling cackle. Both swore, and ran. It was too much for Lilitu, seeing her prey break. She lurched forward, jerking free to send me sprawling on the grass. I heard her deep growl, a thump, a scream, running feet, and I was up, yelling for her to leave off as I picked out the black bulk of her body and something grey beneath it.
5
LILITU HADN’T SAVAGED a writer, only his hoodie, which was really just as well. I couldn’t stop laughing afterwards, cackling really, but I was scared too and shaking. It took ages to get to sleep, even with Lilitu beside me, my adrenaline high and the incident running over and over in my mind. At last I drifted off to sleep with the first grey tinge of dawn shading the vestry windows.
I woke to full sunlight, and Wednesday started much the same way as Tuesday had done, with me scrubbing paint, only not before I’d climbed up the scaffolding inside the tower and run Snaz’s hoodie up the flagpole. They’d dropped their bag too, full of cans, including fat-cap Molotows that cost a bomb. I knew it was only likely to rile him, and that he probably didn’t have the sense to back off, but I had to do it. It felt good, and made cleaning up a lot less of a pain. When I’d finished I was still on a high, despite running sweat from the hot sun.
Even in broad daylight Sir Arnold’s tomb radiated indignation, barely diminished by my scaring off the desecrators or cleaning up. He’d been a local worthy, and dedicated to law and order, believing in hard labour, flogging and even death for the most trivial offences. To have his tomb tagged would be making his spirit boil with fury, and from what I’d read I knew that he would have thought of me as an impudent guttersnipe, whatever my actions.
As I’d said to Michael, I do believe that people leave some sort of spiritual presence after death, and it was certainly the case with Sir Arnold, also Eliza Dobson. Just being near her tomb brought out my feelings of defiance, and it was the same with others. Major Goodwell I was sure had been a randy old goat, because his always gave the feeling I was being interfered with, as if my bottom was likely to be pinched or my nipples tweaked. The Braidault family made me feel homely, Lisbet Stride saintly, Isaac Foyle inspired. He was inside, in a little chapel of his own with the roof half-collapsed, creating an atmosphere I had savoured many times, and where I had intended to make my atonement before I was disturbed.
I still felt I should do it, more if anything as I was certain the tagging crew had been keeping an eye on my movements. They had fled over the back wall too, into the gardens behind, so possibly one of them even lived in the houses there. Had I not gone with Stephen, they might have stayed away, adding to my guilty feeling. More than that, I knew deep down that my need for atonement had more to do with Michael than anything else.
With Sir Arnold’s tomb probably cleaner than at any time since he was put inside it I went back to the vestry to scrub myself down, naked in the big sink. As the smell of paint and meths faded I began to enjoy the feel of the cool water on my bare skin and my thoughts turned back to Michael. It was such a shame we hadn’t been able to have sex, preferably on Eliza Dobson’s tomb the way we had talked about it. The fantasy had been glorious and I knew the reality would have been better still, even if her ghost would only have been in my head, or not.
Knowing Michael offered so many possibilities, both sexual and artistic. The thought of my face and body appearing in the magazines I had enjoyed so much over the years was wonderful, and all the better for the fact that I would be screwing the artist. If he did the one of us fucking as Eliza Dobson’s ghost clawed at our bodies it was going on my wall, framed, whatever it took to make him part with it. There was the thought of joining him in ritual lovemaking too. He would understand ideas like atonement, and help me too.
Sadly he was not on hand, but that didn’t stop me imagining him in his cowled robe, standing over me as I knelt naked in prayer. Possibly he was some sort of Satanist, but simply not ready to admit it, in which case he might know all sorts of things. In any case he was sure to be able to give me penance, something he frequently put into stories. Inevitably my atonement would become erotic, but that would not make it any less genuine, more so if anything, as I find it so hard to give myself over to the control of another. That was with Michael. For the moment I would content myself with a ritual before Isaac Foyle’s tomb.
Clean and fresh, I climbed out of the sink and dried myself. The day was hot and as still as the night before, the air inside the church heavy and humid. I made up, turning my eyes to dark pits and shading my cheekbones with ash grey. Seven of the black candles, matches and a pot of chrism oil went into my bag. I needed to be naked, as every supplicant should be, but put boots on because of the floor, nothing else. I was confident in my repairs to the corrugated iron blocking the main door, and in Lilitu. She was lying in a patch of sunlight in the nave, eyes closed but one ear pricked up. I spent a moment tickling her under her chin.
I had always wanted to locate the spot where the heart of Father James O’Donnell was buried. As the first priest he would have been the ideal person to make atonement to. His body lay in a village churchyard in Tyrone, but his heart was somewhere beneath the floor in All Angels. I had often wandered the interior, trying to sense the air of sanctity I associated with him, but had never succeeded. Instead I knelt to Isaac Foyle, by his tomb in the little chapel beside the archway to the tower.
Just stepping into it gave me immediate strong feelings, the sense of invention his spirit brought, and apology. Taking the candles, I placed five in a cross among the ornate carving of the tomb lid, each spot already thick with wax, and one to either side of where I would kneel. I lit each, immediately filling the air with the scents of incense and wax, to wh
ich that of chrism oil was added as I twisted the lid from the pot. Pushing my finger well in, I pulled up enough to be sure it would show and crossed myself, breast to breast and neck to belly button. I was beginning to tremble a little as I looked down to view the dull gleam of the cross on my chest, and more as I knelt, knees together, my hands crossed in my lap, my head bowed.
The silence was absolute, the scent growing slowly heavier, quickly starting to get into my head. I focussed on the inscription in front of me, Isaac Foyle’s name as he had carved it months before his death. The letters held, still and harsh in the stone, cold and unyielding. For one moment I thought I had lost my gift, or been somehow rejected. I drew the scented smoke deep into my lungs, my eyes closed, then open. Slowly, very slowly, it began to happen. The trance state that I am able to bring upon myself by strength of will and meditation. The letters gradually blurred, filling me with hope and then awe as Isaac Foyle came out to me, easing into my head as my gaze rose, swimming, my focus lost as the world closed in around me.
A sense of regret filled me, of a drive to create being broken by death; a bitter-sweet emotion so strong my mouth came wide open and my eyes filled with tears. I let them roll as I completely gave up myself to the spirit, my muscles growing slack, the broken tiles of the floor cold on my hip, my arm, my back as I collapsed. I lay there, broken on the floor, my body wracked with sobs, shivering and jerking, barely aware of reality as he took over my senses.
I heard my own moan and exaltation fill me as my thighs spread, offering myself, open and yielding. No lust came, only a sharp pang of fear, and I was loose, lying on the floor, shivering violently, but on my own. I pushed myself onto one elbow, biting my lip in the hope that the pain would clear my head. Foyle had gone, scared by the lust I’d been unable to hold down. Yet I was still high, and still in need.
Shaking hard, the church spinning around me, I clawed myself to my feet. Bowing, my forehead touched the stone of Foyle’s tomb in an apology I knew to be futile. Hot wax spattered my arm and belly as I snatched at a candle, bringing warmth as I struggled to focus on my smeared flesh. I took another, tipping it down my chest and laughing at the sudden, sweet pain as a black line sprang up between my breasts. My head went back, the candle high above my chest to splash hot droplets on the skin of my breasts, between, on one nipple and the other, piling it high.
I panted out my ecstasy as I crossed myself in black wax, laughing and babbling between cries of pain. A second candle in hand and I was back, propped on hard, cold marble, another tomb. My thighs came wide, my neck arched and I was building the balls of the cross, top and bottom, filling the hollow of my throat and my belly button. It hurt so much, every splash sweet pain, and waves of lust were running through me, and more, a spirit eager to fill me from beneath. I cried out once, and he was in.
My body slid down the face of the tomb, onto the hard floor, my knees high and open. The rounded base of the candle pushed at my sex, and in, the tip still lit as I fucked myself, my back arched, my mouth wide. My bottom came off the ground, a gasp of refusal left my lips, too weak, and I was pushing the base of the second candle at my bottom hole. In it went, my own juices easing it, and I was squirming on the floor, doing myself deep and hard, my palm spread on my sex, my back arched tight, writhing in wanton ecstasy to the man in my head.
I came, gasping in pleasure, but it didn’t stop, my fingers still pushing the candles in and out of my body as I jerked in my contractions. He was in control, completely, into my pussy and bottom deep and hard, revelling in my naked body, using me. Again I came, utterly helpless, crying louder still and wriggling on the twin shafts inside me, two cocks, his and another man’s, a servant, using my bottom as the master fucked me, stripped and marked.
Then I was there, laid out on my back in a great darken space, on a man, his cock up my bottom, another looming over me as he thrust hard between my thighs. Above, the face of a huge goat stared down at me, great curled horns, a lolling tongue and demonic eyes. Black-clad figures stood around, yellow, candle-lit eyes staring out from the shadows of their cowls, drinking in the sight of me. As I tilted my head back to kiss the man beneath me I saw the inverted cross at my head; at the same instant ice-cold sperm erupted into my body.
All of it vanished as quickly as it had come. I was left spread-eagled on the floor, my thighs rolled high, my fingers still easing the candles in and out of myself by instinct, my mind too fuzzy to stop it. It was Lilitu licking my face that finally brought me back to something like normal awareness. I tried to pull myself up, but had to be content with kneeling, my balance completely gone. Lilitu stood looking at me, her great brown eyes radiating concern for her mistress.
Finally I managed to get to my feet, and to pull out the candles. It was impossible not to smile as I limped to the vestry. I had really put myself through it, what was intended to be an atonement through trance and meditation turning into a session of truly wild masturbation. My knees were scraped, my hip bruised, my bottom hole sore, my body aching in a dozen places and hot where I had poured wax on my skin. Yet I was smiling as I picked the hard black spatters away with my nails.
I could remember every detail, the feel of the man’s spirit in me, just how rude he’d been with my body, the helpless ecstasy of my response, and the crazy vision at the end. All of it I had experienced before, if never so strong, but not the vision. I had taken myself to a new level, beyond anything I had experienced in communion before, and how. It was disturbing, but still filled me with pride. I had been in a Black Mass, or some similar ritual, really there, or at least I had felt that I was.
Although it had simply been a product of my fevered imagination, the memory was as clear as that of sex with Stephen the day before. Maybe it was one of those time-slip experiences; glimpses of another reality – of things that actually happened on this very spot. Only as I remembered that the man on top of me had come did I realise that I could check. His sperm had been icy cold, a sure mark of the Devil, for all that I had sensed him as a man possessing me. As my hand stole down to between my legs I had a brief wild vision of myself pregnant with a demonic child, like in some 70s Hammer horror movie, but while I was damp it was only my natural juice, or so it seemed.
I wanted to do it again, but more than anything I wanted to talk about it. Michael was the obvious person. For all his unfocussed beliefs there was a spirituality about him, and he did have an open mind. At the very least he wasn’t going to label me as some kind of demented freak. Stephen was a different matter. From the way he behaved it was all too clear that he regarded my Gothicism as nothing more than an immature fancy. So far as he knew it extended to my look and a passion for sex in cemeteries, and that was the way it was going to stay.
It was ironic, really, as he could have gained so much by breaking free of the armour he had built around himself over the years. Yet he didn’t even realise that he was repressed, that there was more to personal liberation than a dirty mind and a bit of care and attention to his partner’s needs. I had met men before who wanted to release themselves fully but couldn’t, clawing at the temple door, as I had once done, but no more than that. Stephen didn’t even know the temple was there.
Michael did, only his scepticism keeping him out. I wanted him, and again I considered giving up on Stephen if he didn’t get in touch, only for him to turn up on the Thursday evening. We went out, to dinner at a restaurant well off the beaten track and then back to his flat for sex Stephen style, slow and attentive with lots of tongue applied to my pussy.
Friday was little different, except that he cooked for me again, and that after a while on top I let him put me on my knees. He licked me like that, which was wonderful, and left me floating all the way back home. It was so easy to accept his attention, and as I knelt quietly in front of Isaac Foyle’s tomb on the Saturday morning I realised that atonement or no atonement, I was Stephen Byrne’s lover.
Both nights I made a point of going around the cemetery with Lilitu and a torch, but there
were no new pieces or dubs, not so much as a marker pen tag. It had been a while since I’d found any needles or cans either, and I began to hope that the whole tribe of them might finally have decided it was easier to take themselves elsewhere.
When I’d first come to All Angels the cemetery had been a warren of little paths leading to dens, while the walls and a good half of the tombs and stones had been hit with everything from crude scribbles to head-high pieces. Now, for the first time, there was nothing. As I climbed to the roof after my brief atonement I felt that I belonged in a way I had really never done before, that All Angels was mine. There was also the relief that it wasn’t about to be torn to pieces by do-gooding local government busybodies.
I stayed for a good hour, just padding over the warm lead of the gutters or peering down at the graveyard beneath me. It was empty, Snaz’s hoodie the only evidence of anyone other than me, Lilitu and the dead. I remembered how I’d first seen Michael and my thoughts turned to our relationship. He was due back late that night, and I was to go over in the morning, to model, to talk, to fuck.
It had to happen, or I was going to go nuts. He wanted me, I knew, and if there were sure to be complications with Stephen, that was easy to push from my mind. Stephen was back in Suffolk anyway, with his cold wife, the ‘Designer Mannequin’ as he called her. Michael and I would be together, alone. Once we’d taken out our passion on each other we would talk, maybe even as he drew me. I would explain my experience, and perhaps he would help me to understand.
