by Monica Belle
‘Could be. And this felt completely real?’
‘The memory is as clear as . . . as what we did last night. I’m not saying that I was physically transported, but it felt that way. I could feel their cocks inside me, I could hear, and I felt the cold of the sperm in my body.’
‘That is some experience. You are truly blessed, or perhaps cursed. But come downstairs.’
He’d been sitting on the bed, and rose, the brief glimpse of his hard buttocks beneath his robe bringing back the night before to me as I followed. A piece of artwork was spread out on the drawing desk. He nodded at it.
‘The Goat of Mendes, in draft. I was working on it in my hotel room.’
I looked, the rough scene he had sketched out with me as the model now executed in elaborate detail. There was the cabal, in their black robes, faces hidden or indistinct. There was the altar, a heavy table at the centre of a darkened room with a black cloth draped over it and an inverted crucifix at one end. There was the young man, leering eagerly at the prospect of sex with the Priestess, then horrified as he discovered that it was he who was to be penetrated. Next he was on his back on the table, held from beneath by a man in coarse tweeds, the Priestess in him. In some frames the ceiling showed, with a hideous goat’s head where the light boss would normally have been. My mouth came open in amazement. Michael chuckled.
‘Similar, isn’t it?’
‘Yes . . . but . . . but I didn’t know . . . your story wasn’t complete, nothing like.’
‘Close enough for your mind to form an image, I think. You are exceptionally sensitive to atmosphere, to suggestion.’
‘So . . . so you’re saying that it was all from inside my head? That everything I’ve experienced is nothing but elaborate fantasy?’
‘No, not necessarily, but I am offering it as an alternative. We can be fairly certain Sir Barnaby Stamforth wasn’t a closet Satanist. These things tend to come out over the years, especially if you have a good-sized group. There are always schisms, and people who want to tell the world what they’ve done, either to gloat or confess. Look at Crowley and the Golden Dawn.’
‘True.’
‘And even in Victorian times it would have been hard for respectable citizens to go around deflowering virgins, especially on a regular basis. Pimps, blackmailers, relatives . . . someone’s going to let the cat out of the bag.’
‘True, and your scene is very close – only if I was fantasising, I’d be the Priestess.’
‘Ah, yes, normally, but you were off your face, and you said you couldn’t do it again.’
‘Not off my face completely, and no, I couldn’t. But what about the cold sperm? I felt it! And the goat’s head? You hadn’t put that in at all, not even in rough! It was just like that.’
‘Exactly like that?’
‘Yes! No . . . I don’t know, I was coming! It was pretty close though, teeth showing, tongue hanging out, staring eyes, great curly horns.’
‘Our minds tend to run on the same lines, and we had discussed the whole goat thing. Maybe it stuck in your head?’
‘What about the sperm then?’
‘If it was the Priestess, with an ejaculating dildo, the cream or whatever would be cold. You would know that subconsciously.’
‘I’m not convinced. So how do I pick up on atmosphere from places and people I know nothing about?’
‘Hard to say. It could be a little thing, evident only to your subconscious mind, like with the sperm. In France you would have been aware of the great war cemeteries even if you hadn’t focussed on them. The tombs at All Angels are very personal, each reflecting something of the personality of their occupant . . .’
‘No, the tombs convey the essence of how their occupants really were – not the personas they created in life, but only how they saw themselves. Sir Barnaby’s tomb is grand and fine; he may have thought of himself that way, but he was pompous and stuffy. The same with Eliza Dobson. Her inscription makes her out to have been the next thing to a saint, and I’m sure she thought of herself that way, yet the tomb radiates outrage and bigotry.’
‘What was saintly to her is bigoted to you. What was grand to him is pompous to you. Or, there could be something spiritual there . . . perhaps a lingering aura related to the dead individual, without their spirit being cognisant in any way. Perhaps a bit of both, what you experienced being a combination of influences – my story and a spiritual dimension. Or maybe you’re right. Maybe you had a vision of another time. Maybe you fell through some kind of portal; a quantum leap across dimensions.’
I nodded, my mind whirling with ideas, wanting to believe I had some special power. What he said made sense, at least some sense, but I didn’t want to accept it. It felt as if he was trying to be kind by extending his ideas to admit the possibility of mine. Kind, yes, but it was hard not to see it as condescension. I didn’t answer him, but stood there looking at the illustration and trying not to look sulky. After a while he went on.
‘The servant thing is funny though, and hard to explain. I hadn’t put him in my draft at all, had I?’
‘No.’
‘So you couldn’t have seen him, yet you came up with the same image, allowing only for the difference in sex between you and Dave there.’
‘Dave?’
‘Dave. Guys who have awful things happen to them in my drawings are generally called Dave. I’m hoping it will become an accepted noun for a hapless male, “a Dave”.’
I smiled despite myself.
‘You’re right. How do you explain it?’
‘I can’t, but I know where the servant thing came from in my head. It was in a graphic novel I saw when I was a kid. A naked woman, sexy in an upper-class sort of way, with a tattoo on her belly saying “servants’ entrance around the back”. I thought it was funny at the time, but it left me with this vivid image of upper-class women inviting their servants to have anal sex. So, yes, when a servant fucks any woman but another servant, it’s up her bottom.’
‘I swear I never saw that comic.’
‘No? So why did you feel it was appropriate? Something from Sir Barnaby? Some bizarre genetic memory? Some memory buried in your subconscious?’
‘You’d say the last option, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d say most probably the last option. After all, you might have been, say, on a bus, and have heard the joke told. You don’t remember. Maybe you didn’t even hear it consciously, but it still fixed in your head.’
Again I nodded. There was a cold logic to everything he said, impossible to refute, but irritating, and it was impossible not to feel mocked. My sense of defiance started to rise but I bit down the comment that came to my lips. We’d made love, and it had been wonderful, strong and spontaneous and uninhibited. To spoil it because we didn’t see eye to eye on just one point would have been stupid. Besides, he was keeping an open mind, or at least he said he was. I allowed my defiance to switch to a determination to prove myself right as I made my excuses.
‘I must go. Lilitu needs feeding, and I’ve been having problems with writers.’
‘Problems with writers?’
‘Graffiti artists, taggers. They call themselves writers.’
‘Oh. I used to do a bit of that as a kid.’
‘So did I, well, as a teenager.’
‘I found it too crude a medium, but some of it can genuinely be called art.’
‘Sure, but not in my graveyard.’
‘Absolutely.’
I moved close to kiss him, then made for the bathroom. No way was I going back in my dress and boots and tourmalines without my face right, so I took a while making up. It was gone noon when I left, the sky leaden with clouds, the air warm and sticky. I took a bus back, not really feeling up to the walk in my heels with my body still tired from the night’s sex.
Michael had fixed me toast, but I was still starving, and got off a couple of blocks from the church, just as soon as I’d seen that Snaz’s top was still safely in place. I bought milk, dog food and
a packet of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, just right to see Lilitu and myself through the day, and set off alongside the railway arches. I hadn’t gone fifty metres when I saw it, a huge double piece, painted on the old dark brick of the railway – Snaz and Biggy.
I couldn’t help but smile. They were still up, out but not down as it were, painting for all they were worth but not in All Angels. That was just fine by me, British Transport Police can take care of themselves, and while it was desecration to bomb the church, on the drab arches it was a definite improvement. It was a great piece too, far beyond anything I could have done.
The letters were taller than me, and had real style, both pieces. Biggy’s were balloon fat, as if each were about to burst, in brilliant purple with silver highlights fading in through mauve and black low lights through indigo. The background was silver, and ended in a dead straight diagonal where the roof of some long vanished building had once been cemented to the bricks, creating a perfect boundary for the vivid pink background of Snaz’s piece. His letters were a riot of colour, crazy interlocking snakes of violent electric blue, sky blue, his trademark green and a rich leaf green, each picked out with darker lowlights to bring the whole thing into relief.
To do it they had had to climb onto the roof of a garage and in some cases up on the big hooks supporting the cables for the railway, risky stuff, and I knew. Even when I’d taken in the letters I was still trying to figure out how they’d reached some parts. It was signed ‘TST’, obviously their crew name but not something they’d ever used at All Angels.
I only walked on when my arms started to tire from the weight of my shopping. At the end of the alley I put it down briefly to rest and glanced back for one more look at the piece, knowing it might well not last long. It looked even better from a distance, the blend of colours finer, and with a train on the railway above. I wasn’t the only admirer either. There was a girl taking a photograph. I’d have done the same if I’d had a camera, but it made me pause for thought.
She was my age or a bit less, pink hair, crop top, bare midriff, low-rise jeans, Timberland’s. As she turned to get a different angle I saw that the top of a pink thong showed over the waistband of her jeans, cutesy, very cutesy. She might have been an art student, someone wanting to be a photographer or a reporter, just someone who got a kick out of graff, except for the Timberland’s. Everything else she had on was made for showing out, the boots were not.
I watched her, wondering if she could just possibly be Snaz. There was something girlie about the style, and while one of the people I’d heard in the graveyard had undoubtedly been male, the other had just hissed. I hadn’t seen anything more than the outline of a hoodie, but her height seemed right, her build reasonable. She was certainly taking an interest in the piece, photographing it repeatedly, and she seemed well pleased with herself.
She hadn’t seen me, I was sure, a thick overhang of sycamore on the railway plunging the turn of the alley into deep shadow. So I watched for a while, wondering if I should pass her and see if she recognised me. If she did, she had to be Snaz, but she was hardly likely to be friendly. I was going to do it anyway when the question was answered.
A man stepped out from the café at the far end of the alley – young, black, pushing six foot and hefty, a sandwich in one hand. He came towards the girl, grinning, turned to look up at the piece, slapped hands with her and walked on. She slipped the camera into her pocket and quickly caught up with him. He had to be Biggy, and that made her Snaz. I melted into the shadows.
As on the nights before, All Angels was untouched, Lilitu undisturbed. I double-checked, walking her right round the outside wall, even under the sycamores that were rapidly forming a copse at the bottom. There was nothing, not so much as a beer can or a fag end, and I went in certain that I really had succeeded. Snaz and Biggy had moved onto other things, the others likewise. I was secure in All Angels, and if I had to confess to a faint sense of disappointment as I lay thinking on the roof that afternoon, it was a minor thing.
The major thing was Michael Merrick. I had to go back for my modelling session later, once he’d caught up on sleep. We’d fuck, and I wanted to, but our conversation that morning had spoilt something of the intimacy I’d felt for him. In telling him about communion I had revealed my most private secret, and while he had accepted it, he hadn’t believed. I wanted to prove it to him, to make him just a little less certain, just a little less smug. Only then would I be able to let myself go completely the way I had the night before. Just a suspicion, right at the back of my mind, suggested he’d done it on purpose, to make me more determined. If it was true, then he’d succeeded.
How to go about it was a very different matter. First I needed to prove it to myself, because Michael had sowed the seeds of doubt in my mind, which was not good. When I had the time, and was a little less sore, I was going to have to select an important tomb, probably in another cemetery, indulge in communion, see what happened and then find out about the person. Ideally I would be led there blindfolded, but that raised the complication of having someone else to help me, someone I could trust. It could hardly be Michael, and Stephen only if he was then prepared to go away and leave me in peace. He could hardly be expected to be happy about that.
The situation with Stephen was another problem. After the way Michael and I had been it was impossible to tell him about Stephen. We were lovers, but we hadn’t set out the dos and don’ts of our relationship. Generally I don’t bother, and it puts me off when men do, as it might well put Michael off if I did. Stephen was a different matter. I was sure he was only waiting his moment to make it clear that he was only in it for the sex. That was fine, and would give me an excuse to tell him about Michael. If he didn’t like it that was just too bad.
Had it not been for Michael’s condescension I would have been ready to drop Stephen. As it was I didn’t see why I shouldn’t have both, at least for the time being. In bed Michael had been uninhibited but very male. Everything centred on his cock and where he could stick it. That was great, so far as it went, and he had licked and kissed plenty, but not in the way Stephen did it. With Michael it was raw passion, with Stephen it was . . . almost worship.
I climbed down from the roof with the sun already turning the lead dull gold. Michael would be waiting, I knew, but I felt only a little of the urgency I had the night before. Not that he seemed to notice one way or the other, greeting me with a friendly kiss that quickly turned into an open-mouthed snog. He was hard to resist, and I’d have gone for it if he’d pushed, but he broke away, turning back to the art desk.
‘OK, I need some expression here. This is the second spread. You’re with the cabal, you’re talking, discussing the import of the ritual deflowering and why it didn’t work.’
‘It didn’t?’
‘No. The idea is that an act of extreme debauchery will draw in the spirit of the Goat of Mendes, the Regency cabal leader, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It didn’t happen and you’re taking it over. Most of the cabal are just background, but there’s the founder, Albrecht Dawes.’
He pointed to the page, where he’d drawn a face that radiated confidence and strength, also evil. It took me a moment to realise he’d modelled it on his brother Chris.
‘He’s been something of a Svengali figure to you, Bernadette . . .’
‘Why Bernadette?’
‘A strong name but a pretty one, I thought. It’s hard with female names. You don’t want to be too corny, or too soft, or too harsh. Not only that, but Bernadette’s a name I can use equally well for both the British version and the French one.’
‘Right.’
‘So think Bernadette. You started out much as you really are, and you’ve been drawn into Albrecht Dawes’s cabal. You’re no innocent though. In fact you’re already starting to break away from his influence. He thinks the details of the summoning were wrong. You think sodomising Dave simply wasn’t debauched enough. It’s getting quite heated.’
‘I’m with you.’
I sat down on a chair he’d set out in the middle of the floor and waited while he set up a big spotlight just a few feet from my face. The bulb was deep yellow, and not all that powerful, but I could feel the heat. I tried to think of myself as Bernadette, myself but older, with more knowledge. Could I have lulled a young man into a false sense of security with the promise of sex and then sodomised him on an altar?
The answer had to be yes. He’d wanted sex, and he’d got it, perhaps not quite the way he’d expected, but then who does? Perhaps he’d been pushy, cocksure, laddish, the sort of man who thinks it’s funny to come in a girl’s face. I’d met them, like Johnnie Moore, ‘RJ’, who I’d been on a date with shortly after I’d left school. He’d been the best-looking boy around, the dream date for just about every girl I knew, and a complete bastard. Yes, I could have buggered him as he writhed on an altar, happily . . .
Michael broke into my thoughts.
‘Perfect, that look I have to capture.’
He’d already done it, penning the expression on my face as I had considered how RJ would have looked with eight inches of rubber dildo stuck up his bottom. I looked evil.
Michael continued.
‘Now you’re talking to Albrecht Dawes. You know the ritual of summoning was right. You went over every detail yourself. You don’t like to be doubted.’
I focussed on being Bernadette, skilled and methodical. Like me she would read avidly, taking in every detail to feed her craving for knowledge, my craving. I would know I’d surpassed my mentor, and that he knew it too, his doubt driven more by envy than anything rational. I’d have said from the first that it was no good merely sodomising Dave. Dave needed to be corrupted, to be brought to the point where he revelled in the act, crawling naked on the floor with his anus lubricated, on my chain, begging me to have him, whip him and fuck him . . .
‘Great, beautiful. Now you’re trying to persuade him that it would be better to corrupt Dave.’
‘That’s exactly what I was thinking.’
