Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  Tom had to listen intently. She spoke fast, and her flailing hands embellished and conjured up the scenes as she babbled her account. He realised that people in the pub were staring at them. He realised too that he was neglecting his glamour.

  He focused. His scars faded. He listened:

  ‘But what could I do? He was a man, he had a sword and a dagger, I was a woman, a poor helpless woman, and all I had was a knife, no more than this long.’ She mimed it; about four inches. ‘Fine for slashing faces but for duels?’ She made a face; forget it. ‘And he had men as well, don’t forget. They were armed with swords - his bravi, his gang. He was untouchable. If I’d so much as scolded him he’d have had me gang-fucked and thrown in the Tiber. And that’s a fact. I’ve lost friends like that, I’m not so stupid as to go the same way. So what did I do? I was clever, I found another weapon with which to fight. I told my friend - my best friend - Michel Agnolo Merisi da Caravaggio about what had happened, all about my humiliation and shame.’ She smiled, wickedly. ‘And of course I embellished a little for effect. About the size of the knife, and about the language Ranuccio uttered to me, and about what he did to me and how often. And especially, about how upset I was afterwards. I may even have cried a bit, in my darling’s arms, as I told the tale. So yeah, I lied somewhat. But in fact I truly was. Upset I mean. Shamed. Angry. Is that so hard to believe, that a whore like me could care so much about having a man’s cock in her cunt?’ Rage flashed from her eyes, as she defended her right to have emotions and be treated as a human being.

  ‘And so Michel Agnolo Cerisi da Caravaggio challenged the bastard. For me. He did it for me! And they fought in the street, and I watched them, a gang of us watched, and I cheered my beautiful boy on, and Ranuccio’s lads cheered on their champion. And after the swords had clashed for long enough, Michel finished Ranuccio with a sword thrust through the groin. That was no accident, he was trying to cut the bastard’s cock off, or at least slice off a bit of it. That was the apt punishment for his crime, you see. We didn’t think he’d bleed to death though.’

  ‘I never knew that. I knew Caravaggio killed a man, but I didn’t know it was for you,’ Tom said.

  ‘Well he did. And who can blame him? He did it for love of me.’ Fillide smiled again.

  ‘You miss him?’

  She shrugged. Sullen. Reluctant to show any more emotion.

  ‘He died many years before I did. Exile, then death. I made other friends. You do. That’s how life is.’

  ‘You loved him though.’

  Fillide hesitated.

  ‘I loved him,’ she conceded.

  ‘Then why didn’t you –’

  ‘I was,’ said Fillide kindly, ‘a whore. His kind mixed with our kind. They came to taverns where we drank and they wined us and dined us and fucked us. And talked to us. Because these bravi never talked to their fucking wives, not real talking, nothing but boring chit-chat or well phrased courteous nonsense. But with us – they could be lyrical, exaggerative, expansive, poetic! They could brag and tell lies and we would tell grand lies back at them. But at the end of the evening.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s how it was. I wouldn’t change it. A man like Michel Agnolo Merisi of Caravaggio would kill for the love of a whore; but he would never marry one.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  The inadequate bathos of Tom’s words overwhelmed him.

  He was silent a moment.

  ‘So, you want to fuck me?’ Fillide asked casually.

  Tom was shocked. So shocked that he lied. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  He thought about it. ‘I’ve been told not to,’ he said.

  ‘By who?’

  ‘Gina.’

  Fillide made a face of scorn.

  ‘That bitch.’

  ‘She’s my senior officer.’

  ‘Senior bitch.’

  ‘She thinks it would be –’

  ‘You’re scared of that bitch?’

  Tom considered the question dispassionately. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you want me, don’t you?’

  He shook his head vehemently. But she reached over and patted his hand. He gasped. His cock swelled, like a piston.

  ‘I think you do want me,’ Fillide said. ‘We women, we have secret ways of knowing these things.’ Her eyes twinkled with amusement.

  Tom was so embarrassed he wanted to die.

  ‘Are you a virgin, Tom?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  ‘I’m not. Technically, I’m not.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means – I’m not saying.’

  ‘If you wank every night, you’re still a virgin.’

  ‘I don’t wank every night.’

  She laughed. ‘You do it in the mornings then. In the shower.’

  He went bright red, even with the glamour.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ said Fillide. ‘But I like you. I really do.’ She patted his hand again. ‘You know how to treat a woman.’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea how to treat a woman,’ said Tom, with heartfelt intensity.

  She laughed. The sullen Fillide had vanished. A woman full of life-affirming joy had replaced her.

  ‘Not to worry. I really like you, Tom.’ She patted his hand one more time, then squeezed it.

  He wanted her so very badly it made him want to weep.

  They caught a taxi from the pub. Fillide asked the cabbie to take them to Brown’s Hotel in Albermarle Street.

  Fillide, Tom realised, was a rich woman. She paid for the hotel’s most luxurious suite - the Kipling - cash in advance. The receptionist was blonde and beautifully coiffured and hailed from somewhere up North, and didn’t comment on the fact the two of them had no luggage. They went into the bar and Fillide bought a bottle of the best champagne - again with cash - and carried it away together with two flute glasses.

  They travelled up in the lift with an elderly dowager who looked disapprovingly at Tom’s shocking dress sense.

  Then they left the lift, and Fillide led Tom to their suite while he followed holding the glasses and the bottle. She opened the door of the room and entered and he went in after her. He put the bottle and glasses down on a table, and she put the side lights on to create a moody ambience. Tom looked around, trying to appear man of the worldish.

  The sitting room of the Kipling suite was large and beautifully appointed, with floor to wall windows and a balcony outside. There was a teal green sofa, an abstract drawing in a frame on the wall, and numerous carefully arranged ornaments. Not so much a hotel room, more a home from home,

  ‘Open the wine,’ she said.

  He opened it. He poured two glasses and put the bottle carefully back down on the glass table. Some foam spilled on the carpet. He didn’t care.

  ‘I have to tell you something,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘About me. And Roy. And my life. Sit. Be patient. And listen.’

  He sat, on the teal green sofa.

  And she told him her story.

  It took a while. She told him about the day Hell’s gate opened, and how she escaped from the endless ennui of the state known as “after-life”. She told him how she was resurrected by a white-robed man who at first she had truly loved. And who had, eventually, treated her with terrible violence and contempt. And that man was Roy Hall.

  She told him too about the nature of her spell-binding. What she could and couldn’t do, and how she could not hurt her master not even to protect herself or an innocent child. But she could, when instructed to do so, murder designated human beings at his behest.

  She talked also about her failed escape attempt when she drove to the Ghetto of the Damned. And her betrayal by the man she thought a friend. By the time she had finished, tears were rolling down Tom’s cheeks. His ears were dizzy from the cumulative hypnotic beauty of her Italian intonations.

  ‘Now you understand me,’ she said.

  ‘Now I understand you,
’ he said.

  He was appalled and heart-broken at what she had told him. Yet he could not take his eyes off her, or cease desiring her. Her beauty was a drug inflaming him.

  ‘And now we can fuck,’ she announced calmly.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Yes, well. If you’d like to.’

  She stood up and did a slow striptease for him.

  When she had revealed the entirety of her naked body to his eyes, Tom thought he would have another heart attack.

  Stark naked and moist, Fillide straddled him, and their lips joined and their bodies touched and they kissed. As they kissed, his breathing got faster. Passion deranged him. The touch of her skin exhilarated him. But he was afraid he would come too soon. In his panic, his glamour began to wane, then fell away. And now he too was naked before her. Still clothed but with no trace of concealing magic.

  Fillide looked at Tom, and saw that his face was a mass of ugly scars around a ripped-off nose. But she didn’t flinch. Instead, she gently brushed her lips against the patchwork skin of his face. She kissed his mouth, his cheeks, his brow, the pit where once he’d had a nostril. Her salty tongue made the warped flesh sting. Then she carefully stripped his clothes off him until his entire terrible body was laid bare. Scars traversed his torso in thick ridges. His belly was puckered and black. She made him stand up and walk around and she could see the bite marks on his neck and buttocks and the backs of his legs. Gaping unhealed wounds oozing black pus, surrounded by scar tissue as thick as rhino hide.

  He stood before her, ashamed.

  ‘I’m a monster,’ he told her.

  ‘I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Leper colony.’

  She giggled. He didn’t see the joke.

  ‘Show me your glass eye.’

  He pointed; it was his right eye.

  ‘No show me. Let me hold it.’

  He took out his eye, with a gentle pop.

  It wasn’t glass, in fact, it was an ocular prosthetic made of acrylic - like a huge contact lens with a staring eye in the middle.

  She held the false eye in her palm. It stared at her; she stared at it. She bounced it lightly on her palm, amused. Tom felt vulnerable, looking at his own eye in a woman’s palm.

  ‘It’s pretty gross, I suppose,’ he suggested.

  ‘Fuck yes,’ she growled.

  ‘And I guess I’m pretty ugly, aren’t I?’ said Tom self pityingly.

  ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself, it’s pathetic.’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Yeah it’s true. You’re ugly as sin. Uglier! But hey, you should see the real me,’ Fillide told him.

  She put the eyeball on the bedside cabinet.

  Slowly, Fillide kissed Tom’s scars. All of them, one at a time, starting with the ones on his face then along his torso and down to his ripped and sore thighs, then kissed the rips on his back, even the ones that were oozing black slime.

  So many scars! They made him look like a doll torn apart by a child, then sewn back up again by a maladroit parent. But she didn’t care.

  After she had kissed every damaged part of him, she let him touch her own naked body. After an hour or so, his body was singing a sweet whimpering song. A song with only one word: More.

  And so, for all that long night, on a four poster bed in a luxury hotel in the heart of Mayfair, the gorgeous dead whore ravished the witch called Tom.

  Afterwards, they lay on the bed together until dawn became day.

  Fillide sighed contentedly from time to time, sprawled on her back on top of the sheets. Tom studied her as she lay there drowsily. The swell of her breasts, the pale redness of her nipples, the bushy target of her groin, the firmness of her soft skin. He noticed that she wasn’t breathing; that was even more erotic.

  Fillide was a magnificent nude, without a doubt. Michel Agnolo Merisi da Caravaggio had painted her as Martha and Mary and St Catherine, but never naked; and that was, Tom felt, his greatest ever creative blunder.

  ‘That was my gift to you,’ said Fillide, softly.

  ‘Gift?’

  ‘My passion. It’s passion, not sex. That’s what you’re tasting.’

  She was right; he was feeling her passion itch along every part of his body. He’d never been so happy.

  Then she rolled over, till she was on her knees before him, and she looked deep into his only eye. And she began her pitch.

  ‘Was that good, my sweet?’

  ‘It was wonderful.’

  ‘Do you truly love me, Thomas?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘That’s a tough one.’

  ‘No matter. For I love you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. You’re noble and wise, and your heart is kind. And you are so skilled in the art of love that even I am in awe! You are incomparable, my sweet darling, and I do worship thee with all my heart.’

  For a moment, he believed her every word.

  Then his considerable deductive powers kicked in. Tom began to doubt the credibility of all that just occurred, and all that she was saying. Him, noble and wise? Him, good in bed? Him?

  Why, he asked himself, would a girl like this sleep with a guy like me? Socially retarded? Annoying? Disfigured and monstrous? It made no sense. Unless -

  ‘You can have me any time you want, my beautiful boy,’ Fillide continued, in purring tones that made him even more wary. ‘You are so gorgeous. Just say the word, and I shall be yours.’ Her eyes dazzled him like fish hooks. ‘I can give you pleasure like you never dreamed of. But in return –’

  Tom’s spirits started to slowly ebb.

  ‘This is a trade?’ he asked suspiciously.

  Fillide smiled, lazily.

  ‘A bargain,’ she conceded. ‘I’m a whore. It’s what I do.’

  ‘You want money?’

  ‘I want more than money.’ Fillide’s eyes glittered. ‘I want you to –’ She broke off.

  Tom realised she could not speak. Her lips rolled and yawed, but no words emerged. She was quite literally mute. But her eyes spoke volumes. They implored. They promised. They remembered...

  Tom thought back to what she had told him earlier that evening, about the way she had been treated by her master and spell-binder Roy Hall. The beatings. The torment. The humiliation. The being compelled to fuck other men while Roy watched, mocking her.

  All of that, he realised, was the subtext of the despairing gaze she was giving him. All her pain and hate and frustration and sadness. All that was there in her eyes.

  Tom realised then exactly what she wanted. She’d been putting the clues in place for him all day and night, like a hunter laying a trail of bait. The story of Caravaggio and what he had done for her. Her talk of just revenge. Her long and harrowing accounts of the awful life that she led with Roy, and how she yearned for salvation. It all added up to one thing.

  Fillide wanted freedom from her spellbinder. And she wanted Tom to do what Caravaggio had done for her all those years ago. She wanted him to defend her honour!

  In other words, this long dead courtesan wanted Tom to murder Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Hall, operational head of all the Murder Squads in East London, and thereby set her free.

  ‘Do you really love me?’ he asked her, anxiously.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said, with those same imploring eyes.

  ‘Fuck me again,’ said Tom.

  The decision was made.

  Chapter 3

  Sheila was in Miss Davies’s class, doing sums.

  They were hard sums. Very hard sums indeed. What is x divided by centipede? Now that was hard. And what is 4,339,333 multiplied by Tottenham Hotspur? Tricky or what!

  She wasn’t really paying attention though. She had her mobile phone hidden in her hand and she was trying to alter her status on Facebook. But she couldn’t. Because the mobile phone was made of jelly. So she ate the phone.

  And once she’d eaten the phone, she realised she was a
ble to telephone all her friends in the class. Especially her best friends, Marisa and Jennifer and Sharon and Neil. So she made a conference call to all of them at the same time, and she smiled as their phones started ringing. It was funny because she was telephoning them from her belly. And when they answered their phones she belched, then laughed when they went ‘Aargh!’ Then –

  No that made no sense.

  She decided to start again.

  She was in Miss Davies’s class doing sums and she had a mobile phone in her hand. And Miss Davies saw and called her out in front of the class and she dropped the phone on the floor and trod on it. Smashed it to pieces. Then Sheila began to cry -

  No she didn’t, she never cried –

  This time Sheila was in Miss Davies’s class and there was a knock at the door. And Miss Davies made an angry face and stomped across to the door and opened it and a monster stepped inside. Twice as tall as a normal person and with no clothes and a body as big as a gorilla. And damp flesh, like wet clay, and red staring eyes. Miss Davies screamed.

  ‘Sheila, I need to talk to you,’ said the monster but Sheila screamed too.

  And now Sheila was in Miss Davies’s class doing sums again; and she was getting fed up of this.

  She knew that she was dreaming and she was aware too that normally she didn’t know that she was dreaming when she was dreaming. So something was wrong. And she was only eight years old but that wasn’t right either, she was much older than that in real life. Eleven at least. Or maybe fifteen? Or maybe – no she was confusing herself now. And the monster who came in had –

  There was a knock at the door and Miss Davies answered and there was a monster standing there and Miss Davies screamed.

  Only Miss Davies wasn’t Miss Davies, she was Sheila. Sheila was standing at the door, in her new Miss Davies body, and she reached out with her hand and touched the monster. Its skin was very damp. So damp that bits of it came away in her hand. ITS SKIN CAME AWAY IN HER HAND. That was horrible.