“Let’s go home, darling,” my mistress managed to whisper. She sat staring at the potentially gruesome tableau, unable to move. She was waiting for me to motivate the action of fleeing this scene. She was going to have to wait a long time. Or so I thought.
The panther stood up lazily, but her movements became more agitated, more predatory, as she heard and felt the sound of human fear. For some of the guests this bestial passion play was a bit too realistic.
“I only came here to realize fantasy!” I heard one woman exclaim indignantly as she and her escort stood to leave.
Good, I thought. It is good and right that all those unable to endure the instinctive realities of our bloodthirst, all those who would deny a chance to witness the feral, the barbaric savagery that sat within every heart, should well leave. L’Enfer was no place for merciful.
“Please, I’m begging you. Take me from this place,” she said. For the first time I saw in her eyes real terror. I was so disappointed in her. Her eyes, her wonderfully sharkish eyes, were the feature of her I most adored, most admired. And now in the face of this she wanted to run. She had shown her humanity and I couldn’t forgive her.
The panther tried to lunge into the tables and chairs. She tried to swipe at the conductor in the small pit. But her chain kept her from making fatal contact. I ignored my mistress.
Finally, as though the panther had had the dignity not to attempt the obvious first, she at last turned towards the prey meant for her. The girl bound in the chair had already started screaming. But when the panther got closer, she stopped and began pleading. The girl beseeched the audience she could only hear. She begged certain people by first names, perhaps her abductors, her masters, her lovers… I watched as the panther circled in slowly. I could not pull my starving eyes from the scene.
“I must… I must… go… I must…” My mistress stood and stumbled to the floor.
I started to laugh when, through spraying blood, the poor girl on the stage began to actually pray to God.
I yanked my mistress to her feet. She fell against me. We started to move through the thick, sanguine air of L’Enfer. There were very few guests remaining seated. I thought the whole tableau brilliant and knew that I would certainly be back for more. The next morning, as I drank my chocolate in the sunny little flat, the newspaper was delivered. On the first page was a story concerning the murder of a beautiful young society woman found floating in the Seine. Her body had been torn to shreds and the police could only believe it was the work of a beast, a maniac, yet the tears on her body resembled claw marks. Her husband, an elderly gentleman, offered what I thought to be a minor reward to anyone giving reliable clues or information to the police.
I wake sometimes, plagued by a recurring nightmare. I have finally persuaded my new mistress, a wealthy girl rebelling against her family, to accompany me to L’Enfer. I know that only a visit to that place will sate my appetite.
I have become so hungry.
She is to be here any moment, at the flat she has recently rented for me.
Erotophobia
O’Neil De Noux
This story is for Debb
She shook out her long brown hair, turned her cobalt-blue eyes towards me and winked as the slim Negro named Sammy began to unbutton her blouse. She was trying her best not to act nervous. Sammy’s fingers shook as he moved from the top button of her green silk blouse to the second button.
I leaned my left shoulder against the brick wall of the makeshift photo studio and watched. The second floor of a defunct shoe factory, the studio was little more than an open room with a hardwood floor, worn brick walls lined with windows overlooking Claiborne Avenue and two large glass skylights above. It smelled musty and faintly of varnish.
The photographer, Sammy’s older cousin Joe Cairo, snapped a picture with his 35mm Leica. Joe was thin and light-skinned and about twenty-five. Shirtless, he wore blue jeans and no shoes. His skin was already shiny with sweat. Sammy was also shirtless and shoeless, wearing only a pair of baggy white shorts. His skin was so black it looked like varnished mahogany against Brigid’s pale flesh.
Yeah, her name was Brigid. Brigid de Loup, white female, twenty-seven, five feet three inches with pouty lips and a gorgeous face. Gorgeous. With her green blouse, she wore a tight black skirt and a pair of open-toe black high heels.
She bit her lower lip as Sammy’s fingers moved to the third button, the one between her breasts. She looked at him and raised her arms and put her hands behind her head. Sammy let out a high-pitched noise and moved his fingers down to the fourth button.
My name? Lucien Caye, white male, thirty, six feet even, with brown eyes and wavy brown hair in need of a haircut. I stood there with my arms folded and watched, my snub-nosed .38 Smith and Wesson in a leather holster on my right hip. I’m a private eye.
“You’re going to have to pull my blouse out,” Brigid told Sammy.
Sammy nodded, his gaze focused on her chest as he pulled her blouse out of her skirt and unbuttoned the final two buttons. He pushed the blouse off her shoulders and dropped it to the floor.
I loosened my black and gold tie and unbuttoned the top button of my white dress shirt, then stuck my hands in the pockets of my pleated black suit pants to straighten out my rising dick.
Brigid looked at me as she turned her back to Sammy, who fumbled with the button at the back of her skirt. Her white bra was lacy and low cut. Jesus, her breasts looked luscious.
I moved to one of the windows and opened it and flapped my shirt as the air filtered through the high branches of the oaks lining Claiborne. The spring of ’48 was already a scorcher, yet the air was surprisingly cool and smelled of rain. A typical afternoon New Orleans rainstorm was coming. I could feel it.
Brigid had come to me two weeks earlier, in a Cadillac, with diamonds on her fingers and pearls around her neck, and told me she needed a bodyguard.
Yeah. Right.
“I suffer from erotophobia,” she said, crossing her legs as she sat in the soft-back chair next to my desk.
“What?”
“It’s the fear of erotic experiences.”
Yeah. Right.
If someone had told me back when I was a cop that a stunning dish would tell me that one day, I’d have looked at them as if they were retarded.
She told me her doctor prescribed “shock therapy”, and she needed a bodyguard.
“I want to feel erotic. But I also want to be safe.”
She told me she was married and her husband approved of what she had in mind.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Sexy pictures.”
Sammy finally got the button undone and unzipped her skirt.
“Go down on your knees,” Joe the photographer told Sammy, repositioning himself to their side. I kept behind Joe, to keep out of the pictures.
“Now,” Joe said. “Pull her skirt down.”
Brigid looked back at Sammy and wiggled her ass. Sammy’s hands grabbed the sides of the skirt and pulled it down over her hips, his face about four inches from the white panties covering her ass. Brigid turned, put her left hand on his shoulder and stepped out of her skirt.