"Sal and Jimmy," Katya said. "They fool around like that all the time. It's a little lynching game."
He pulled his hand out of hers. "This is too much."
"It's all right," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of."
He waved them away, like a child trying to ward off nightmares. "I don't want to see them."
Laughter came out of the darkness to meet his demand. The ghosts were apparently much amused. Their laughing made faces blossom all round him. Several he could name: famous beauties, returned to their perfection in this bizarre after-life, as though they'd remembered themselves as their public would have willed them to be. Merle Oberon and George Sanders, Mary Pickford and Veronica Lake.
Todd started to retreat up the lawn, still waving them off. The phantoms came in giddy pursuit.
"All right, enough!" Katya yelled at them. "I said enough!"
Her word was apparently law, even in such stellar company as this. The laughter rapidly subsided, and the divine faces stopped pressing toward him.
He took the moment to hasten his retreat, turning his back on the assembly and hurrying back in what he hoped was the general direction of the house. His thoughts were in chaos. It seemed at that moment that his life since Burrows had been one long downward spiral into a kind of insanity.
"Wait, love!" Katya had come after him, her voice as pliant as ever. She caught up with him.
"I'm losing my mind," he murmured. His hands went to his face, pressing his fingers into his tender flesh, as though the pain might help drag him back from the brink.
"You're not crazy, you're just seeing things clearly for the first time."
"Well I don't want to see them."
"Why not? Isn't it reassuring to know that death means nothing? That there's life after death? Pleasure after death."
"Pleasure. You call that—" He glanced back at the Pool House, where he'd seen the excesses of so many of these people, recorded for posterity.
"We had no shame then. We have even less now."
As if to prove Katya's point there was an eruption of libidinous laughter from somewhere nearby, and Todd followed the sound to see a woman tied up in the trees, naked but for a long string of pearls which ran like converging rivulets between her breasts. Her wrists were bound together, and her arms lifted high above her head, so that she hung, her pale body shaped like a bow, her toes grazing the ground. It was she who was laughing, despite the apparent vulnerability of her situation. There was a man on the ground between her legs, licking the base of her feet, while another, standing behind her and massaging her breasts, bit into the tender flesh of her shoulder and neck. The hands went from her breasts down to her groin, and parted the lips of her pussy, from which came a shimmering arc, raining down onto the man adoring at her feet.
The recipient began to masturbate, obviously moved to fever-pitch by the shower.
Aware of Katya's gaze, Todd glanced over at her.
"Would you like to fuck her?" she said.
The girl was beautiful, with long red hair and that frothy laugh of hers, which sounded so very much more innocent than what she was up to.
"She's yours if you want her. Ava!"
The girl looked up.
"This is Todd," Katya said.
"Hello, Todd."
"Go on," Katya said. "Don't worry: I'm not going to get jealous. I'd like to see how you give pleasure to a woman."
Despite the hint of judgment in this remark, Todd might have taken the opportunity to have the woman if the man at Ava's feet hadn't suddenly begun to moan, and raising his hips off the ground ejected a copious load of semen. The sight of this eruption was enough to keep Todd at bay.
"Another time," he said to Ava, moving away.
She called after him, but he didn't look back.
"There's plenty more where she came from," Katya said, catching up with him. Her hand casually brushed the front of his pants, as though to make the point that she knew he was aroused. "You should go to one of them," she said.
"Why?"
"Just to see what it's like . . ."
"Fucking a ghost?"
"If you want to put it that way."
"I don't know. It's weird. I'm not sure—"
Her hand went back to his hard-on. "Yes you are. You love the idea."
Her hand went from his groin to his wrist, which she caught hold of, drawing him away from Ava into a kind of bower lined with honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine, their mingled perfumes so strong they were practically intoxicating. It was darker here than it had been under the trees where Ava hung, but Todd could see bodies on the ground, in various combinations of coupling. Somebody reached down from a branch overhead, and ran his or her fingers through Todd's hair; someone else came up behind him and pulled his shirt out from his trousers. Again, he looked for Katya; and again found her close by, smiling.
"Katya?"
A girl's voice, off to the right, and Todd saw a naked young woman being carried toward Katya on the shoulders of three men, one at her head, the other two supporting her knees, in such a way as to hold her legs wide open. Even in the dim light Todd could see what a gloriously tender sight the girl presented. She had been shaved between her legs, making her look even younger than she was, which was surely less than twenty.
"Lick me, Katya," she said, her voice dreamy. "Will you please? Nobody does it to me like you. Lick me deep."
Katya glanced round at Todd.
"Do you mind?"
"Help yourself," he replied, as though the girl were a plate set before her.
Katya smiled, her hands going up to the insides of the girl's thighs, venturing up to the spot where they met but then before they quite reached the place and offered any satisfaction, retreated again. It was a tantalizing game, and it drove the girl crazy with anticipation.
"Oh please," she said. "Please, Katya, please."
Todd stepped a little to the side so as to have a better view of what was unfolding here. Katya had very quickly bared her breasts, so that now, as she approached the divide of the girl's legs, her nipples stroked her partner's thighs. Her hands were delicately parting the girl's labia, as though investigating the most exquisite of flowers.
Todd could feel the blood thumping at his groin. Was there no end to Katya's capacity to surprise him? Whenever he thought he was beginning to get a grasp of the woman, she changed the rules in some subtle fashion and found a new way to astonish him. Was this really the same woman he'd discovered in bed a while ago, looking like a disheveled angel?
Katya glanced back at him one last time—just to be sure that he was indeed watching her—then she applied her mouth to the girl's flesh.
The recipient of this tonguing let out a long, contented sigh, stretching out on her bed of hands, opening her legs a little wider. Katya proceeded to press deeper into her, advancing with lickings and nibblings, occasionally seeming to murmur against the woman's sex. The girl was no longer relaxed. She had grabbed fistfuls of the hair of the men who supported her knees, pulling herself up almost into a sitting position one moment then falling back, her body convulsed with little shudders, her tiny nipples hard, her flat belly shiny with sweat.
Katya slowly escalated the sensations she was inducing in the woman's body until her victim (there was no other word for it) was thrashing and sobbing beneath the tiniest of touches.
Somewhere in the midst of this, another occupant of the bower, on her knees in the shadows beneath the spread-eagled girl, came forward and freed Todd's erection from his pants. He didn't attempt to dissuade her. The girl took him into her throat and kept him there. The mingling of the sight of Katya working on the girl and this new sensation was almost too much for him. He had to gently ease himself out of the girl's mouth so as not to lose control too quickly.