A maidservant came to relieve the Chinamen, who set a wayward course for the rear of the house, changing direction whenever he encountered someone and bowed. I studied the girl. As she bent to pour, her rosy breasts were revealed to the nipples. Her full lips glistened with moisture, a pulse throbbed in her neck, her motions were fluid, and yet.... I could give my suspicion no coherent form, I dared not give it a name, and I concluded that a combination of Surprenant’s wild talk and strong claret had thrust me into an opium-dream as meaningless as those of the degenerate Coleridge.
When the maid left the room with a tray of empty bottles, I followed. I heard a chinking as of glass ahead of me, but the passage was lightless. Even granting that she knew her way about the house, it seemed impossible that she would dare this darkness without a candle. Hurrying after the sound, I collided painfully with a wall.
I still heard the chink of glass. Checking my throbbing nose for blood, I went on more cautiously. It was my plan to probe her credentials as a human being. The damned girl had aroused me, flaunting her pert nipples in my face, and I should surely be able to tell whether I was rogering a machine or a living woman.
“You, wench!” I called, and the echo of my voice warned me that I was on the edge of a pit. I thrust my arms out and very nearly stumbled down a flight of stairs.
The noise I had followed rose from the foot of the narrow stairs, but it sounded less like glass as I tiptoed closer. It had a metallic ring, and there was far too much of it for a mere tray of bottles. A sturdy door blocked my way at the bottom. It was locked.
A fan of light radiated from a keyhole, and I knelt to peer through it. The chinking and clanking quite clearly came from the room beyond this door, but all I could see was part of a table strewn with metal rubbish. A dark-skinned arm moved rhythmically, like a tinker tapping at a kettle; but to produce the varied sounds would have required a dozen tinkers tapping at a dozen kettles. The arm moved steadily, tirelessly, it mesmerized me. I thought how pleasant it would be to doze here, lulled to sleep by the tireless tinker in antique armor....
That thought snapped me to my senses. Armor? Why would a workman sheathe his arm in bronze? And bronze it was, not just dark skin, for it shimmered with metallic glints. I twisted this way and that to catch a glimpse of the hand of the workman, or his face, but I could not, nor was I entirely sure I wanted to. I crept back up the stairs.
In the drawing room, the glare of infinitely reflected candlelight woke me fully, the clatter of a dozen noble tongues brought me to my senses. The night was not warm, but I was sweating. I had drunk too much. I had played peeping Tom on some elaborate machine, another of Surprenant’s wonders, and had mistaken a piece of machinery for a man’s arm.
“More claret, my lord?”
I stared, rather wild-eyed, at the very girl I had pursued. She stared back, guilelessly attentive, a perfect face in the Classic mode, framed with chestnut curls. Her blue eyes were as clear and bright as Chinese lacquer. I reached out to steady myself on her shoulder, but my hand, as if with a will of its own, slid into her bodice to clasp her bare breast.
“My lord! I am an honest girl!” she cried, but she made no move to withdraw.
“Haw!” I noticed that Lord Cummerbund, fresh from his failed battle of wits with the mechanical ape, was paunch-to-elbow beside me. “Haw! Still not a wasted word or motion, eh, m’lud? Dash right into the thick of things, just as at La Haye Sainte.”
I cupped her breast, the firm, cool fleshy weight of it, with no hint of bronze beneath. The nipple had extended to prod my palm. Her heart beat very fast and her cheeks burned pink, lending her eyes the brightness of a marsh-light. What more proof did I need? I withdrew my hand and touched it to my lips, tasting her fine sweat.
“What is your name, honest girl?”
“Coppélia, if it please your lordship.”
“Haw! His lordship is pleased, I’ll warrant.”
We both ignored him, our eyes locked. “A strange name.”
“My master’s whim, my lord.”
“Do you bow to all his whims?”
“I try to give satisfaction to my betters.”
I felt Phyllis’s angry glare before I turned to see it. She knew my ways, of course, as I did hers, but we never made a public show of them. Her hand on Surprenant’s arm, she moved closer to him while he feigned interest in a rather blatant painting of amorous demigods. She turned to give him all her smiling attention.
“More claret, yes.” As the girl poured, I said, “Your English is even better than your master’s—you are French, are you not?”
“Indeed, monsieur le comte.” As if my words had triggered a mechanism, she suddenly seemed more foreign. “But I studied your language at one of our more notable—what is your word?—nunneries.”
* * * *
I woke alone in a spinning bed. Lurching onto my side, I reached for the chamber-pot before puking copiously. This must be my proper bed, since my man had apparently dressed me in my nightshirt, but I had no memory of getting here. I had a vague recollection of being beastly to our host. I had rallied him about the mechanical men who were making even more mechanical men in his cellar.
“They reproduce themselves, even as we do.”
“Then—haw!—” At a certain stage, I fear, my manner is very much like that of Lord Cummerbund—“they must have mechanical women.”
“Assuredly, my lord.”
Had this conversation taken place, or had I dreamed it? The naked ballerina spinning in an empty drawing room among broken bottles and guttering candles was surely a dream, as was the strange music. Mozart?
“No, the music of Hoffmann, my favorite,” she had said.
I had heard that name tonight, but as a writer, not a musician. This false twist on a real memory seemed to prove it had been a dream.
Decidedly odd, seeing a ballerina display her hairless quim and her muscular bum as she raised her legs this way and that in the figures of her dance. These were sights I had never pictured before, I was sure, nor had I ever supposed that a depilated pudendum could so fascinate. The lips were prim, tight, virginal, but they had glistened as the dance went on. I laughed aloud at the fecundity of my fancy. Coleridge just wasn’t in it.
Despite Phyllis’s earlier attentions, I had a stand that a blacksmith could never have beaten down. Getting to my feet drove a spike between my eyes, but I padded forward in much the same wayward manner as the Celestial automaton.
Unexpectedly, the countess’s door was unlocked. I opened it and moved across the moonlit room to the shadowed bed. Patting the coverlet, I discovered at once that it was not only empty, it had not been slept in. Damned whore! I was in no condition to search for her. Thinking about the way I felt stirred a violent rebellion in my stomach, and I half-fell toward the open casement in time to spew painful strands of bile.
The low moon shone through an opposite window, and most of the lawn was shadowed by the bulk of the manor. I thought I detected motion. Those birds? But the motion was too localized: a pale, vertical thing seemed to undulate. I rubbed my eyes, replacing the tears with red and orange splashes. Making out any object on the lawn through a fog of wine and half-sleep was nearly impossible. Everything was a crazed mosaic, and everything seemed to move: trees, benches, statues....
I persuaded myself, more by recalling its location than seeing its form, that the vertical object, the one that really moved, was the statue that had accosted us. It seemed larger than before, bulkier, as if a second figure clung to it, arms about its neck, legs about its waist, heels pressing its gyrating buttocks. The hair of the clinging figure was brighter than moon-pale skin or stone, bright as my lady’s hair.
What I describe are mad conjectures, not actual sights, but they seemed real to me as I peered into the darkness until my eyes watered again, and they cinched a tighter knot than nausea in my stomach and cored the heart from my breast. The damned woman, oh, the damned woman!
On that thought, I fell asleep.
“A failed suicide, Neddy? May I help?”
I woke to find myself hanging half out the window. My stomach churned, but all I could do was spit and cough. The statue stood exactly where I thought it had.
“Where have you been, trollop?”
“Riding.”
“Riding statues on the lawn all night, eh?”
“Neddy, would you please give me ample warning when you know you must be locked in the attic like the late earl, your father? One does hope to plan for the event.”
“Foul strumpet—”
I turned to see that she indeed wore equestrian clothing. Illogically, this muted my suspicions. I threw her across the bed while she shrieked and giggled wildly, then hiked up her skirts until they masked her face and muffled her cries. This permitted me to inspect her female parts under the guise of merely toying with them. Given the size and presumed texture of the statue’s virile member, I would have expected some inflammation of her thick lips, but they looked no different from usual. Of course frequent and enthusiastic use had probably made hers more flexible than most, so this proved nothing.
I slid my tongue in deeply, expecting ... what? Stone-cutter’s dust? Moss? It tasted much the same as ever, allowing for a musky ripeness that could have been explained by her morning’s exertions, or by last night’s exertions with a man of flesh and blood. She made free use of her boots on my spine, she raked me with her nails, she battered my ears with her riding crop while I growled and sucked.
When her cunt began to drool, I wrenched the crop from her grasp, rolled her over and whipped her arse until it burned red. The bitch loved it, I knew, despite her shrieked prayers and promises. Annoyed that I was doing no more than amusing her, I shoved my cock into that hole she deemed inappropriate. It was like skinning my prick with a loop of wire, but I persisted, and gave her a buggering so vigorous that it would have earned oaths of admiration on the lower gun-deck of the Fighting Téméraire.
When she stopped shrieking and began cursing in a surly way, I tore her gown open and whipped her shoulders to evoke some proper screams. Her excitement had not abated. By the time I uncorked her bum, her juice had slicked her inner thighs to her knees. Slamming into her cunt, I screamed myself as she tightened the sleeve into a death-grip, but I kept on and on until it was she, for a change, who begged for a respite.
She didn’t get one, not for another hour, the damned whore.
* * * *
Disliking our host, annoyed with Phyllis for doting on him, annoyed with myself for letting it trouble me, I drank far more during that week than is my wont. I tried to find that servant girl with the strange name on several confusing midnights, and I recall falling down more than one flight of stairs, but she seemed to have vanished from the house.
“I see some value in your ideas,” I told the marquis one morning as we were shooting. “An iron stomach would do me far better than the one I have.”
“You might have several.”
I fired at a pheasant, and missed. My shooting is done without pausing for thought, but it is far better than most. The marquis, having paused to aim and calculate in his methodical way, brought the bird down. Strange as it sounds, he never missed, one more good reason for disliking him.
He had kept prattling on, as ever, but the gunfire had distracted me. “Eh?”
“The essential self could be kept safe at home in some object while the mechanical bodies went forth to do its bidding and share their sensations.”
“You mean, I could keep my soul in a teapot while my metal lackeys clanked off to live my life for me?”
“Exactement!” He seemed amused. “But a teapot would be a poor choice if you employed clumsy servants. Or if they happened to like tea, n’est-ce pas?”
His mention of servants tempted me to ask what had become of Coppélia, but this was really not the sort of thing one asked. As I pondered this, he regained my attention with the astounding remark, “Your shooting would improve if you did not move your ass so much.”
“Sir, my arse and all the rest of me remain quite still when I shoot.”
“No, your ass!” It surprised me that he should insist on the vulgar pronunciation, but then decency was never your Frenchy’s strong suit. “You must fix your ass on the target.”
“Yes, agreed, it would be scarcely possible to miss if I went and sat on the bloody bird before I fired,” I replied with some heat.
“With your ass!” He was growing no less vexed than I. Throwing up his hands in exasperation, he cried, “Keep your ass under control!”
I jerked back, anticipating an assault as he thrust his forefinger in my face, but then I realized the silly bugger had meant to say, my eyes.
* * * *
I had explored the manor in my boyhood, when it had been a derelict ruin. It should be easy—or so it seemed on the last of those confusing midnights—to find the servants’ quarters and the wench I lusted for without coming to grief yet again.
Confident that Bacchus would guide me, if not Venus, I took no light, but stuffed a bottle of claret in each of my pockets.
For hours, or so it seemed, I lurched, paused, pondered, drank, then went to lurch in some new direction. Nearly stumbling, I caught at something in the darkness to steady myself: a silken sleeve. Soft skin beneath it. I pulled the lithe body against me, confident that the gods had inerrantly guided me to her.
“Coppélia,” I breathed in her ear.
“What you seek is that way,” said a voice that was unmistakably that of the mechanical Chinaman.
“Damn you, sir!” I cried, scouring my lips on my sleeve as I shoved it against the wall with a tinkling clank. Moderating my tone, I asked, “Which way?”
I got no response. Feeling before me, I found it sitting against the wall, its arm extended, its finger pointing. The feel of its skin was unnervingly lifelike.
“Sorry,” I muttered, fearing I had broken it.
“The fault was entirely mine, my lord. Forgive me for startling you.”
Feeling I had been gulled by these things again, I stalked off. My course grew surer. I realized that I could now almost see my surroundings. I was moving toward a light masked by curtains. Putting my eye close to the thin gap between them, I found myself staring into Surprenant’s face.
I jumped back, my knees shaking. But what was I, a lisping girl who squealed at shadows? Other and far more terrible faces had leaped up before me in that blazing Belgian farmhouse, and I had met those with a laugh and a saber-thrust. I stepped forward again.
The oddness of his face had unmanned me, that was the answer. He stared at me, but he didn’t see me, I was sure of that. His was the fixed stare of a corpse.
He sat naked at a table in a large and dimly lighted chamber, his own bed-chamber, I believed. A cloth was draped over his shoulders. How could a dead man sit upright at a table, leaning on his forearms? Rigor mortis contorts the features, but his face was blank. Drugged, then, not dead, although I detected no motion whatever.
I felt a second and even greater shock when a naked woman came into view. Before I raised my eyes to her face, I recognized her by the firm muscularity of her legs, the precise tilt of her breasts, but most of all, by her shaven cunt, but I recognized these details from what I had thought to be a dream. It was Coppélia, the elusive serving-girl and sometime ballerina.
Surprenant seemed as unaware of her presence as of mine. She held something in her hand, and I almost cried out in warning when she moved it to his back. I thought she held a small knife and meant to stab him, and so it looked, but he showed no reaction as she performed some unguessable operation on his back.
I raised my eyes to her face, but she was intent on whatever she was doing. Odd glimmers, like reflections of the candlelight on a mirrored surface, danced on her skin as she worked. The other side of the cloth that draped his shoulders might be beaded: this was the only explanation that occurred to me.
I glanced down at Surprenant’s fac
e and got my third and worst shock. He could see me. His respiration had resumed. He smiled.
“Come in, my lord.”
“Forgive me, I lost my way. Didn’t mean to intrude—”
I made as if to back away from the curtains, but he beckoned me. The girl smiled, and that tipped the balance. I stepped forward.
She had finished her task and pulled the cloth from his shoulders. She seemed to be fastening it at his back. He stretched his arms, flexed his fingers, released a sigh as of relief.
“I cannot recommend too highly the benefits of oriental massage.” He rose and, with alarming suddenness and brutality, hurled the naked girl toward me. She would have been injured if I hadn’t caught her, and she nearly knocked me off balance. With a sneer the marquis added, “Nor of love.”
As he walked toward the bed, his back toward me, I wondered what had become of the garment I had seen her fastening, for his skin was bare. I was more acutely aware that hers was, and that she was trying to pull off my clothing.
“You have remarked at length on our respective styles of shooting,” he said. “Perhaps you may best me with a different sort of weapon.”
I laughed. “Are you proposing a contest?”
“Indeed.”
“And a wager?”
“Of course.”
He had found my Achilles’ heel—well, one of them: I really don’t have enough feet to accommodate them all. I would never decline a wager. I was distracted from the precise terms of this one, however, by Coppélia’s ardent kisses, and by my own efforts to squeeze every inch of her velvety skin. All hope of achieving lawyerly exactitude on the bet flew out the window when she knelt before me and pressed the soft ring of her lips around my cock.
He proposed a quiffing-competition, with Coppélia as the judge, the playing-field and the prize. More correctly, she would be one of the prizes. The other would be Lady Nether Dunwich. But as befitted their respective stations—and I remember this detail quite clearly—I would have Coppélia in perpetuity if I won, while he would gain only one night with the countess. Since I suspected to the point of certainty that the scoundrel had been fucking her up one side and down the other all week long, I felt that I had nothing to lose by this wager, and I cried, “Done!” as I dragged her to her feet and flung her down on the table.
Nasty Stories Page 15
