I nearly moaned. If you mean which FIVE GIRLS did I GET, I couldn’t begin to tell you. I simplified the response by merely saying, “A more-than-satisfactory little hussy by the name of Ammi, quite uniquely possessed of various hair colours.”
“Don’t know what mine’s name was but I can tell you, she’s quite good at putting more than food in her mouth.”
“A laudable endorsement, indeed,” I chuckled. I leaned over to keep my whisper more discrete. “But allow me to ask, and I apologize for the crudity, but… did your partner, um, make off with the soiled condom once the business was done?”
“Matter’a fact she did, Mr. Phillips, and now that’cha mention it? They always do.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as singularly peculiar?”
He stroked his stubble-blued chin. “Yeah, it does. Ya’d think they’d just drop it in the room’s waste can but maybe they dispose of ‘em all in the same place, as a safety precaution.”
I squinted at his conclusion. “I’m afraid I’m not comprehending you, Mr. Erwin.”
“Well, any red house is always leery of a raid. If the coppers broke in and found used skins in every room, it’d be a snap to get a prosecution, wouldn’t ya think?”
“Why, I hadn’t thought of that,” I confessed, and I admitted, too, that in the remotest sense it did make some juris-prudential sense. But…
Somehow, however abstractedly, I couldn’t quite fathom the notion to any sufficient degree of acceptability.
“I’ll be going back for seconds, Mr. Phillips. You?”
“Oh, indeed,” I transfigured the truth. More sexual frolic was most definitely not my preference, but I thought it best to obfuscate the truth to maintain more the air of a “team player.” I did very much need to screen more of the working girls, to show them Selina’s photograph.
Erwin seemed suddenly frustrated. “That is if there’re any girls left I could grab seconds with. You heard the rumor, Mr. Phillips?”
“Rumor? Why, no.”
“Heard two girls yacking about it a minute ago. Apparently one of the men was with us on the trolley is quite the stud. They say he took care’a five girls in one go-round and wore ‘em completely out. They won’t be hob-knobbin’ with no one the rest’a the night. They also said the fella had something ‘tween his legs that should’a been hangin’ in the smokehouse.” He elbowed me with a wink and a smile. “That fella wouldn’t be you, now would it, Mr. Phillips?”
I let out a strapping laugh. “Only in my most delusory dreams!”
“Well—” He theatrically dusted off his hands. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be… and may God forgive me.”
I rolled my eyes and laughed.
“You coming up too?”
“I’ll be along presently,” was my erroneous response.
Erwin embarked for the stairs, in his search for “seconds.”
The other refractors, as I’d come to think of them, had also returned upwards in the same search, leaving me the atrium to myself. At once, I contemplated my next tactic; any women who might recognise Selina’s photo would be upstairs as well, on the second or third story. However…
An echoic click came to my ears, that elevated my gaze.
The conductor, I thought.
For there he was, the regulation cap perched atop the macabrely immobile white face. In the fashion of an automaton, he took slow steps up the winding stairs—to the fourth story…
Though my tactic remained undelineated, it was my sheer curiosity that overrode any action of greater utility.
You see, I had to know: exactly what was taking place on the ominous fourth story.
I gave the conductor only enough lead-time to conceal my movements; then, with stealth, speed, and deliberation, I traced his identical steps. Upon the fourth-floor landing, I hid behind another Doric display pedestal; this one providing the base for an ancient basalt idol whom I believed to be the notorious demon Baalzephon so actively worshiped by luciferic sects of the Middle Ages. Eye lined up along the pedestal’s edge, I watched the conductor propel himself to the center of the grandiose stair-hall, pause, and then enter a door.
Now’s my chance, I realised.
No one else occupied the hall, so I made haste across the plush carpeting. But my dilemma was plain; for although more than half a dozen doors lined the wall-side of the hall, I could not be certain exactly which door the blanch-faced man had entered.
Somewhere near the center, was all I could deduce. Each door I silently passed stood identical to the previous, until (somewhere in proximity to the hall’s mid-point) I stopped to stare at the tiniest brass emblem mounted upon the door I currently faced. Inscribed upon this plaque were, I’m utterly certain, the cuneiformic markings that denoted the following numerals: 1852.
I checked both ways down the hall, was satisfied I was not being surveilled, then stooped to one knee, and to the ornately plated keyhole, I then put my wide-open eye…
It troubles me that I cannot in any accuracy convey to you the details I now beheld. It was a spectacular bed-chamber displayed to my clandestine view: sumptuous carpet and wall-coverings, lovely antique furniture and in addition a veiled four-poster bed whose gorgeously carved post and headboard appeared adorned in gold leaf; oil portraits and statuary that were no doubt high-mark collector’s items. These facts, however, rendered the chamber nondescript when compared to the room’s (and I’m not sure I can even summon an adequate term) sensorial bearing…
There seemed to be a light that was not light but some peculiar cast unlike any I’d observed. This counter-luminescence (somehow foggy yet clarity-sharpening) made the room and its contents fairly shimmer as if through mist; and seemed preternaturally magnified via some phantasmal lens-obscura, and to that I must not fail to add…
Two rod-like objects stood upright at either side of the grand bed. These objects were likely simple wooden dowels (nothing peculiar there) but what covered the top half of each was a mass of some unidentifiable substance that seemed to be partly translucent and rather ill-hued. The only simile I can summon is to say that these poles looked like bunches of wizened white grapes on a stick.
“There you are,” issued the unmistakable and faintly accented voice of Madam Aheb. She immediately stepped into view from the rightward side of the key-way, and it was the paste-faced conductor to whom she spoke. The madam’s black hair as well as the diaphanous, low-cut gown iridesce’d in the bizarre accentuation of the room’s light.
Her voice turned scolding, “And it certainly took you long enough to get here. You know how I can’t abide to have this awful stuff on me for a minute longer that it need be.”
I could only see the conductor’s back from this voyeuristic vantage point, yet the capped, heavy-jacketed man appeared to bow his head at Miss Aheb’s remark of disapproval.
“But of course, I’m aware you and the Thogg were preparing the trolley for the next ingression…”
My head turned atilt. Thogg? What was that? And what did she mean by ingression? And what was this ‘awful stuff’ she’d referred to? What I’d seen thus far assured me there was nothing at all awful about how she appeared.
“I’m ready now,” Madam Aheb said and sat eloquently in a spectacular spoke-backed Revolution-era chair.
My view of her was blocked when the conductor stood in front of the madam and, with a linen towel, appeared to be wiping off her arms, shoulders, and graceful legs. “Good, good,” she half-moaned. The conductor’s hands kept busy in their task but remained a frustrating visual blockage to exactly what was being done. Nevertheless, he continued to wipe the exposed skin of his mastress.