There was a new tension between us as we made our way to the alley, where we were to meet the tall stranger. I have to admit that I quite liked this new thrill. She was a little afraid of me and this pleased me greatly. I thought it fair for all the humiliations I had suffered. The embarrassment of being so frightfully over-educated and so dreadfully poor. She had given me money and she had debased me with her generosity. So if she feared me that night as we walked silently towards our destiny, it enhanced my contentment.
Oh, how I could hear the bells of Sacré-Coeur ringing for the souls of the dead, how vital, how omnipotent and wild I felt as those bells ran through my body. When we arrived at the narrow, foul-smelling alley our guide was not there. I was in despair, yet my heart still raced. We stood in grim, tense silence as the final tolling of the bells tore through the darkness. And then suddenly on the breeze a subtle caress of my mistress’s perfume.
I stood perfectly still without turning to look at her. She moved close to me, breathing heated kisses on the back of my neck. Her hands wrapped around my waist and immediately she began to unclasp the buttons of my trousers. She squeezed my balls and erect sex firmly, and the sight of her long, elegant white fingers tipped with blood-red enamel stirred me beyond measure.
“I need you,” she whispered into my hair.
I turned to kiss her. She looked supernaturally beautiful. The translucent powder on her face made her eyes and lips glow like fire in the dark. She wore a simple silk shift the colour of champagne and over that a luxurious fur coat. Between the sheer pleats of fabric, I could see her nipples and the full shape of her perfect breasts. She wore an extra-long strand of pearls around her long, white neck, fatalistic tears all the way to her sex, which I could see framed with the dark triangle of hair covering, no, framing, her perfection. I wanted to possess her, give her pleasure suddenly as a form of absolution for all the horror and violence to which I had given rein.
The night was cold and I swung the enormous cape around both of our bodies. I bowed my head without hesitation and I began to taste her breasts through the paper-thin material of her shift. Her nipples responded immediately to my touch. I raised my head and kissed her delicious lips, thrusting my tongue deep into her mouth. I avoided looking at her eyes for fear that some expression of doubt or fear might still linger there. Besides, taking her lips between mine, her tongue in my own mouth was far more telling, for my mistress’s eyes rarely betrayed her state of mind. It was her mouth that told all without speaking, her lips that would betray her. Her tongue greeted my kisses and I was compelled to bite her tongue hard. I took that organ between my teeth and crushed it. How tender, how delicate the tongue really is, how easily I could have bitten it clean off. Her knees bent slightly under the pain I was affording her. Her moan was a sound beyond pleasure. I stopped just after the luxury of drinking a few droplets of her thick, warm blood. She tried to pull away but my hands reassured her of impending pleasures. I slipped my fingers under her dress between her thighs to find her secret anatomy alive and betraying her passion for mingling pleasure with a little bit of terror. Her sex was hot and inviting. I imagined her juices to be warm blood and I was hungry to taste of her. I kneeled.
The flesh of her labia seemed to coil round my lips. I had never felt the terror with another woman as the terror I now felt of tasting her thus. I was overwhelmed with a primordial fear that had no words. All my anticipation of the evening’s events, all my desire for my mistress paled in the light of this new terror. But as quickly as it came upon me, it left, and I let the lips of her sex consume me. I drew my tongue along the outer rim of her soft, hot flesh and let her juices fall on my lips, on my ready tongue. Her body wrapped around me like a bloody mantle. I felt her hair on my lips, I was suffocated in the involuntary thrusts of her body in paroxysms of pleasure. I was filled with a hunger. I wanted to mangle her with my tongue. I stabbed it inside her as though it were my cock. As my tongue went inside her I felt as though I were tasting a great and powerful light, a wonderful and horrible sensation, cannibalistic, wondrous. I had to stop before something dreadful happened.
I abandoned her on the edge of a catastrophic orgasm. She was moaning, crazed, tearing at my clothing. I stood and watched her with a dispassionate stare. I loved the way she was pleading and begging. I was pleased by the fact that she was a helpless victim of her own needs.
I reached down to my trousers, willing to take her there in the alley, but she pulled my hand away. She kneeled in the dank passageway and, pulling the fabric of my trousers away with her teeth, she released my raging cock unto her kisses. She took my member into her mouth, letting it slide sensuously into her open throat. Her lips sucked lightly at first round the tip of my sex, and, as she raised and lowered her head in a steady rhythm, she pulled with her lips more powerfully. She ran her tongue like a feather over the tip of my cock, and with her hands she teased the rim of my anus, gently squeezing my aching sac. I felt more and more helpless as my desire grew. She was a great cat sucking with feline prowess on my throbbing sex. I felt like a child and this made me angry though I felt that could not stop the locomotion of my veins, pressed her head down on me hard and without relent until my seed fell into her throat. It was an awful moment: fleeting images of the Japanese woman, pictures of bleeding and screams more like memories than fantasy.
“Come along, my darling,” she said in a voice husky with pleasure, “we don’t want to miss the show.”
The sound of her voice took me out of my misery for a moment. I helped her to her feet and brushed her hair from her face, an awkward attempt at apology. She smiled at me as if to say she too was sorry.
We linked arms and made our way more deeply into darkness as we moved unguided towards L’Enfer. The last chimes of Sacré-Coeur sounded off the damp sides of the crumbling buildings of Montmartre. We stopped in front of the same nondescript door. My mistress boldly stood forward and knocked three times, waited, and then five more times. The tiny wooden-hinged window inset swung open and the grey eye of the Gypsy could be seen clearly. He closed the small window and opened the door just wide enough for us to slip inside.
Tonight the Gypsy doorman wore a black leather mask over his entire head. It was a sort I had never seen at any masquerade and resembled a medieval executioner’s mask. His beautiful black hair and handsome face were hidden and all that appeared were his eyes. There were holes in the leather for his nostrils and an aperture for his mouth, but this was sewn shut, a feature both violent and alluring. His chest was exposed, assuring both my mistress and me that it was indeed the same man who had greeted us two nights before. His body was unmistakably magnificent, even more enticing with the sinister black mask. Without hesitation, my mistress reached into her small beaded purse and withdrew a bundle of francs. I noted that her hand trembled slightly and I thought that unusual. She was ordinarily so calm. The doorman had enough manners not to count it, but he seemed to know by the sheer weight of it that it was not enough and he bowed discreetly and urged my mistress to give him more. She did, and she trembled more at this. We both seemed to know that more money meant something more rare, and probably more terrifying. The doorman seemed satisfied and bowed again at the waist then turned to lead us down the narrow red corridor, towards the theatre of L’Enfer.