The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (17 page)

A dozen or so yards on, Val came upon a square devoted to magicians, storytellers, and oddities of every sort: Here a tattooed boy made fire caper up and down his arms, then masturbated with the flames. A nude woman whose only covering was the strawberries and lemons sewn into her skin did a slow, lewd dance. A dark-skinned man picked dates and olives off the ground with a prehensile penis; another bent his ten-inch cock backward and belabored his own anus.

In the midst of such monstrosities, a Berber girl with eyes like sapphires and emeralds held up her brightly hennaed hands so Val could see the spells tattooed there. She caught Val’s eye. Her hands wove mysteries. In the space of several eyeblinks, she transformed herself into a goat, an aging hag, a priapic dwarf. Val stared, trying to get at the root of the illusion, but her eyes were always drawn back to the tattoos on the child’s palms, where the illusions seemed to be created by some hypnotic effect induced by the movements of her illustrated hands.

At length, she forced herself along, although exhaustion was leeching at her enthusiasm for further exploration. Indeed, all the people she encountered seemed depleted, slacked. Even those who copulated with each other did so not with the natural frenziedness of lust, but in a kind of stupor, like lewd sleepwalkers who, upon colliding with each other in a darkened hall, engage in mating more from habit than desire and without ever being aroused sufficiently to waken fully.

As the afternoon wore on toward dusk, she became aware of moving shadows, skeletal denizens of the City creeping out to find each other, meeting and merging with scarcely so much as a cry before interlocking lips and loins. Yet even then there was less a sense of passion than of a famished mutual feeding upon each other. Sometimes the wraith-lovers interrupted their mating to follow Val a pace or two, but they were slow and clumsy, their unsavory caresses easy to elude. More than once, she gingerly intruded on an embrace to ask about Majeed, but the inhabitants of the City seemed to understand no language but the one of touch and offered her no answers but their own slicked cocks and cum-soaked thighs and parted, pungent vulvas.

The streets grew steeper, narrower. She peered inside a courtyard and discovered a tannery where animal skins were soaked in stinking vats before being transferred to a row of dark, dank rooms. Here silent figures pulled the fur with ghoulish zeal, then stretched and beat the skin while others took the opportunity to yank their own hard meat, so that the smell of cum commingled with that of the tanning juices. The very repugnance of the place was sickeningly seductive. Val didn’t linger long.

A short way beyond the reeking tanneries, she came upon a marketplace little different in outer appearance from those she had encountered in Moroccan cities of a more conventional nature. Only the wares displayed were a departure from the usual – on one blanket, a treasury of dildos in every size and shape, on the next, a sadist’s spree of whips and clamps and restraints, across the way a man who sprawled supine, mouth plugged with a gigantic dildo which he offered up, beckoning to passersby to sit upon his face and take their pleasure there. He didn’t lack for business; a line had formed and both sexes took their turn lowering themselves upon his phallus-mouth.

A few blocks beyond the souks, Val was almost sideswiped by a nude and legless man, a repulsive lummox propelling himself along on gorilla-muscled arms, penis swelling up obscenely to bob against a convex bud of navel. He was obese and hideously mutilated, his chest and shoulders stitched with scars as though some mad graffiti artist had used his flesh for scrawling.

Val felt a deep, internal shiver. Dismayed by her reaction, she tried to look away but the man was staring at her with a gaze of open invitation. His strangely luminous eyes compelled respect, each blink a blatant proposition that weakened her with want. Appalled by her own desire, she approached the vulgar wretch and squatted over him. She took in all his ugliness, the cock in full and virile jut between the stumps, the corded arms, the scabbed and scarified chest. Obscene he was – and bloated, gross – and yet his very repugnance increased her lust.

He urged her on in Arabic. She spread her legs and lowered herself, letting her skirt flare out as she set her weight, impaled herself. The lemon-emerald eyes half closed. He sighed and thrust. She reached back and clutched his stumps. The scars were odd, not flat or smooth but intricately textured, whorled, and ridged. The motif was familiar now; it brought to mind the ridged stone of the incense burner, of doorways wildly arabesqued, of hennaed hands, of . . .

“You!”

She pulled back, even as the man impaling her began a seamless transformation: Broad hirsute chest reshaping into nubile breasts, slabbed cheekbones and simian forehead refining into the almond eyes and heart-shaped face of the Berber child-magician. At the appalled look on Val’s face, the little girl pealed forth bright laughter. She held up those gorgeous, hennaed hands so that – for an instant only – Val could stare transfixed at the lurid dazzle of the moving patterns on her palms.

The child leaned forward, touched her lips to Val’s. Her kiss seared.

Val let her lips part. The Berber girl’s tongue tasted of mint and honey.

“Majeed?” the girl asked. “You want?”

Val nodded and replied in French, “Where is he?”

Like the keeper of some wondrous secret, the child smiled slyly. She led Val through more winding streets to a stone stairway that descended between red mud walls. After the first few steps, the darkness was impenetrable, the air tainted with a sewer stench that made Val’s stomach roil.

They reached a landing, where the Berber girl produced a flashlight from her trouser pocket and proceeded down yet another, steeper flight of stairs. She moved with such sureness and fluidity that Val had to struggle to keep up. Occasionally she paused to catch her breath and heard, emerging from below, the most distressing sounds, plaintive wails and frenzied keening, the staccato yap of tongues convulsed by insanity or pain.

At the deepest point of their descent, they stood before a bleak and narrow corridor of ancient prison cells.
A dungeon
, thought Val. The girl pointed ahead and indicated Val should proceed, that she’d come as far as she intended to go. Val hesitated.

“Majeed!” the child said, scowling.

Val peered into the gloom. “I can’t.”

The girl relinquished her light to Val and motioned for her to continue, repeating Majeed’s name. The noise level, at the entrance to the corridor, had by this time intensified to a din. Sounds of suffering and, perhaps more disturbingly, low moans and sighs that either pain or passion might be father to. Holding the light ahead of her, Val continued on her own.

A few paces farther on, the narrowing staircase petered out entirely at a hole in the wall where a stone had been removed. It was from the other side that the sounds of suffering were emanating. Val crouched, holding her candle out before her, and slithered through the opening.

She found herself in another corridor, this one even grimmer than the one she’d just traversed. On either side were narrow cells, each one containing an isolated occupant. Ripe with youth or withered with age, the effeminate and virile, the bestial and the lovely, each endured his or her own ordeal – some hooded, with clamps attached to swollen genitals and nipples, others forced to sit upon huge dildos that stretched anuses and vaginas to the ripping point. Still others suffered cock rings of heated metal and brutally snug corsets, bindings so unnaturally tight the flesh popped between the ropes like risen bread. One man, a contortionist, was positioned on his back with legs behind his head. His cock came within a millimeter of his mouth but so cunningly was he secured that not even his most ardent struggling allowed his tongue to reach his engorged head.

Val wandered on, appalled and mesmerized by this symphony of frustrated arousal. The floor became increasingly wet. She heard a soft sloshing and, rounding a bend in the torturous hallway, saw a shallow pool just large enough to accommodate a body. In it, nude and bound, leeched utterly of color, floated face down an emaciated angel, dead to all appearances but with a breathing tube resembling a small flute extending from its mouth. Given its pallor and stillness, Val was highly doubtful the thing was capable of breath at all.

She ran the flashlight beam along the creature’s body and gasped with recognition. No ethereal being this, but quite the opposite – Majeed. But in what condition! Fetuslike, he floated in his swollen sac of womb. Naked, touching nothing, ensconced in darkness and silence.

Val reached into the pool and floated Majeed over toward her until she could untie his hands and flip him on his back. Dead, she thought. Pale and, to all appearances, devoid of life, his clammy flesh seemed formed from tallow and slimed with ashen mucus. Yet Val had already witnessed sufficient wonders in the place not to concede Majeed’s lifelessness too soon.

She lifted Majeed’s head out of the pool, removed the tube from his mouth and shook him hard. His head lolled back and forth, his eyewhites gleamed. He didn’t seem to breathe, but, with a hand between his breasts, Val felt the ticking of his heart, its pace so slow that her own heart beat a dozen times to Majeed’s one.

“Majeed!”

She slapped his head from side to side, then bit him on the ear until blood flowed. His eyes came slowly into focus, squinting into the painful glare of the flashlight. His skin and hair, always fair, were alabaster. He looked, Val thought, like an albino eel raised in some subterranean cavern, its translucent flesh never touched by sunlight.

“Majeed, it’s Val. What have they done to you?”

Majeed began to shake and then to sob. With Val’s help, he managed to drag himself up over the side of the pool where he collapsed shivering, his nerves capering in mad jigs beneath the skin, tics working at his face and muscle twitches making his limbs flail.

Val realized then the nature of his peculiar torture. In a world where even the rustling of leaves produced erotic shivers, Majeed had been deprived of even the most meager stimulation – even his beloved opium had been denied him.

Val’s hands were covered with the liquid from the pool. She became aware now of the coolness and viscosity of what at first she’d taken to be water. Not water, though, she realized now, but cold and clotted semen.

“Majeed? Answer me. Come on, get up.”

She hoisted Majeed to a sitting position and struck him in the back. He took a gasping breath of air, then another. His eyelids fluttered open and he gazed at her, as mindless as an idiot child before leaning over and vomiting into the pool.

“How did you . . .?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Val said. “Right now, we’ve got to hurry and get out.”

She led Majeed back along the corridor with its rows of cells and naked captives, through the opening in the wall where she had first gained access. Far ahead, a wan light filtered down.

“Who put you there?” Val said.

“Filakis, of course.”

“But why?”

“To punish me for not killing you that night in Fez. But mostly to amuse himself. He’s not like the others here . . . he can’t enjoy real pleasure. He has to get it watching others or torturing them.”

They’d reached the lower landing of the staircase. Majeed suddenly stopped and grabbed Val’s hand.

“Wait. I need . . . it’s been so long without . . .”

“Your drugs, you mean?”

“My drug of choice,” Majeed said. He grabbed Val’s hand and pressed her fingers to his groin. His penis felt achingly erect, his vulva dripping juices. Something new had been added to Majeed’s anatomy since his captivity, a set of gold rings penetrated labia and scrotum, made a bell-like tinging as he maneuvered Val against the wall and tried to lift her skirt.

“There isn’t time!”

But terror, as Val had long known, was the most potent of aphrodisiacs, and sex within the City’s walls was sex magnified a hundredfold, each orgasm an intoxicant that bewitched the mind for days. Majeed’s hunger called to hers, and soon her legs were open, allowing him to rut his fill.

“Turn around.”

She braced herself against the stones and shut her eyes. Majeed thrust inside her, his motion making the vulval rings clink and ping together. He gave a moan that Val thought to be his climax. But there came an instant when he lost contact with her entirely, when her inner muscles clenched on emptiness, and Majeed’s vulval bells were stilled too suddenly.

“Majeed?”

She tried to turn around, but her wrists were clasped and manacled behind her. From the corner of her vision, Val saw Majeed slump to the floor. Behind her, she smelled an unspeakable aroma, a perfumed breath, rich with death and strawberries.

She managed to twist around. Filakis stood before her, lean and dour as a medieval saint. His hennaed fingers, long, El Grecoesque, roved her face as though its contours held the meaning of some mystery. His lips, drawn tight in monkish gloom, bestowed a cold kiss on her forehead, but Val’s attention was distracted by his nudity and by a nakedness far worse, the almost total absence of any genitalia. His testicles were absent altogether; his penis, what remained of it, had been reduced to a limp and useless teat.

He noted the direction of her gaze and smiled almost apologetically. “Ah, I see you’ve noticed my . . . deformity. Well, let me say, I wasn’t born like this. It was my choice. A eunuch savors pleasure vicariously, you see, and I’m particularly skilled at that. It pleases me to think that, while others soil themselves in a thousand nauseating ways, I stay untouched. Pure, if you will. My pleasure comes from taking sex in any form except my own. Let others wallow in dung, their filth never touches me.”

“I only came to get Majeed,” Val said. “You’ve punished him enough. Now let us leave.”

“Majeed? Oh, you mean
her,
” said Filakis. “The creature pretends to be a male, but she’s a cunt and nothing else.”

“More reason not to need her then.”

Filakis smiled. “Your haste to leave verges on insulting. I thought you wanted pleasure. That’s why you went to so much trouble coming here. I can’t let you go away disappointed.” He smiled. “But maybe I was wrong. Maybe you’re like so many others and what you secretly desire and pine for is what you most deeply dread.”