House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  The bird made a cackling sound, almost as if it were taunting her.

  “Bugger off,” she said, then laughed in astonishment that such a rude phrase had passed her lips. What would her mother have thought?

  The wooziness faded; the bookshelves stilled.

  The tapestry, however, still fluttered just a bit, at the bottom. It continued to do so as Catherine slowly approached it, hoping it meant what she thought it did. “Please,” she whispered as she pulled it aside, revealing another, much smaller chamber.

  The bird flew past her into the little room, where it lit on a windowlike gap in the cave wall above a narrow iron bed.

  “Yes! Oh yes!” Charlotte cried as she stepped into the little bedchamber. The irregular opening really did resemble a window, flanked as it was by a pair of green-painted wooden shutters standing wide open. Through it, she saw, in the purplish twilight, the branches of trees, their leaves trembling in the cool evening breeze. She wouldn’t even have to squeeze through the window, she realized when she noticed the door next to it—an actual wooden door, also painted green and fashioned to fit the irregular opening. She turned the doorknob. It was locked, but a key hung by a leather cord from a nail next to it. The shutters were likewise fitted out with a latch hook lock.

  Content in the knowledge that she could leave any time she wanted to, Catherine took a moment to look around. The chamber felt remarkably cozy and homelike, with a threadbare Persian rug underfoot and a quilt draping the bed. Against one wall were a pair of shelves attached to two magnificent, tangled formations that she realized were petrified tree roots. The top shelf supported yet more books between a pair of iron candlesticks, the bottom a collection of items—jars, vials, a small scale, a mortar and pestle—that looked as if they belonged in an apothecary.

  Lighting the two candles with her lantern, Catherine turned her attention to the books. She slid out the first one, almost dropping it when the little bluebird on the windowsill let out a fiercely strident scream.

  “Do go away,” she muttered as she opened the cover of worn brown leather stamped SHAKESPEARE in gold on the spine. The rumpled, discolored title page featured a large etching of the likeness of the Bard below the title:

  Mr. WILLIAM

  SHAKESPEARS

  COMEDIES,

  HISTORIES &

  TRAGEDIES

  Published According to the True Originall Copies

  At the bottom of the page were the words:

  LONDON

  Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount, 1623.

  Catherine’s eyes widened. 1623? This was one of the few copies in the world of the coveted first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works. She’d seen this very same book at the British Library just last week, except that it had been a third folio, published in 1664; they kept the priceless first folio under lock and key.

  Slipping the book back into its space, she lifted the second, which was an exquisitely illuminated Book of Hours on silky vellum. Written on the flyleaf in an archaic hand, the ink rusty with age, was the inscription Pour Darius, l’hermite qui aime des livres. Guillaume, Décembre 1505.

  Catherine worked her way down the row of books, growing ever more impressed, as the little bird continued to hector her. They were all first editions, some quite rare and valuable, the type of book one normally saw only in museums. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses had also been inscribed to “Darius” in October of 1782. A different Darius, perhaps? A many-times great-grandson of the Darius who had been gifted with the Book of Hours in the sixteenth century? What other logical explanation could there be?

  She slid out a slim volume bound in oxblood leather, checked the date of publication—1524—and thumbed through its pages, finding it to be an illustrated book of verse in Italian. Her mouth dropped open as she realized that the engravings were all of naked men and women copulating. Their bodies—the females’ as well as the males’—were meaty and lush, their positions…inventive. The only similar depictions of the sex act she’d ever seen were the statues of satyrs and nymphs in the bathhouse, and even they didn’t seem as boldly lewd as these etchings, possibly because the white marble imparted an aura of cool classicism.

  Catherine had seen cats and dogs mating, the male mounting the female from behind, and until recently, she’d assumed that was the standard position for human coition. But then she’d been assured by her cousin Abbie, who liked to natter on about such things in a salacious whisper, that people conducted the act face-to-face with the woman lying supine beneath the man. Other positions, Abbie had assured her, were a crime against God and nature.

  “Nature doesn’t judge,” Catherine had archly replied. And if there were such a thing as God, she’d thought at the time, she couldn’t imagine Him judging such things, either, but she’d kept that blasphemous observation to herself.

  “Well, the state judges,” Abbie had said. “People can get arrested for doing it the wrong way. And once they’re dead, they’ll go straight to heck. Even thinking about that sort of thing is a sin.”

  If that was true, Catherine thought, then she would roast in heck for eternity, because to her, the pictures in this book were among the most fascinating she’d ever seen. They pointed up all too vividly the gaps in her knowledge of those matters one couldn’t learn about in college courses and science books. Ten minutes ago, she’d had no notion of the extent of her ignorance about what men and women did together in bed. Now, that ignorance appalled her. She, a scientist who prided herself on being informed and making logical decisions, had resigned herself to lifelong virginity without the slightest knowledge of what she’d be giving up. It took a book three and a half centuries old to make her curious.

  Very curious.

  The little bird, as if fed up with being ignored, lifted off from the windowsill and flew around the room, screeching.

  “Stop it!” Catherine yelled as it circled her, forcing her to swerve this way and that. The room shifted jerkily, as did the bird. She’d think it was in front of her, then realize it was behind her. She whirled and spun, raising her walking stick to fend it off as it flew perilously close to her head.

  “Go away!” She swung the stick, hoping to scare it off, but she hadn’t counted on the bird’s erratic movements and her own current lack of spatial judgment. The stick struck the bird with a sickening thump.

  It dropped like a brick.

  “Oh!” Catherine pressed a hand to her mouth as she stood over the little creature, lying utterly still on the Persian rug next to the book she’d been looking at. “Oh, no. Oh, you poor little thing. I didn’t mean to…Damn.”

  She grabbed her lantern and crouched down for a closer look, hoping to see a flutter of movement, to hear a weak little peep, anything. But it just lay there, immobile and probably lifeless, its eyes fixed and glazed.

  She touched its little chest very softly with her fingertips, but there wasn’t the slightest hint of movement. “I’m sorry, little fellow.”

  This close to the bird, and with the light from the candles and lantern, she could see that it wasn’t a bluebird at all, but a blue rock thrush—a male, judging from the beautiful grayish-blue plumage.

  Catherine rose to her feet, wondering what to do with it. Leaving a dead bird on the carpet of someone’s home seemed like the height of rudeness. She should put it outside. In fact, sentimental though the notion was, she thought perhaps she should bury it. It had gotten pretty dark, she saw as she glanced out the window, but she did have her lantern, and perhaps she could find something to use as a shovel.

  When she looked back down at the bird, it was gone.

  Catherine stared at the empty expanse of carpet, as if waiting for it to magically reappear. Had it just been stunned? Perhaps, but she would have noticed, wouldn’t she, if it had gotten up and flown off? How could she have missed it? Dead or living, birds didn’t just vanish.

  Then again, this wasn’t the first strange experience she’d had since entering this
cave. It was as if she’d become lost in a dream world where the physical rules didn’t apply anymore. Not that that was possible. There was a logical explanation, there always was; there had to be. As her physics professor used to say, “There is a reason for everything. Just because you don’t know the answer doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  A soft noise drew her attention to the bookshelf, where she watched the volumes she’d replaced shifting one by one in order to line up more neatly in the row. The candles extinguished themselves with a little puff of smoke, first one, then the other.

  There is a reason for everything, she told herself. She was tired. She was thirsty—hungry, too. She’d spent a stressful afternoon. Little wonder she was seeing things.

  Catherine picked up the book from the carpet, and was about to replace it on the shelf when she had second thoughts. She’d barely glanced at it; when again would she have access to these kinds of revelatory images? Why not take a closer look while there was no one around to rip this font of information out of her hands and condemn her as a filthy-minded wanton on account of her very natural curiosity?

  There being no chair in the room, Catherine set her lantern on the nightstand and reclined on the bed, propped on an elbow with the book open next to her. She perused it from beginning to end, studying each engraving as if it were an illustration in a biology textbook. One picture showed the couple in a luxuriously canopied bed, the woman astride the man as he inserted his erect penis into her vaginal opening. In another, the woman was again on top, but facing away from her lover, one hand gripping his erection so as to aim it between her legs. In two, the man stood while the woman reclined on a bed; in one, they coupled as animals did, he taking her from behind.

  Several of the positions involved a good deal of lifting and twisting, with limbs entwined and heads thrown back in presumed ecstasy—the women included. Although Catherine had never taken Italian, it was close enough to Latin for her to make out parts of the verses, in one of which the woman was rhapsodizing about the “extraordinary pleasure” it gave her to feel the thrusting of her bedmate’s penis inside her. In almost every illustration, the reproductive anatomy was depicted in frank and astounding detail—vulvas, labia, bulging scrota, rigid penises with their helmetlike tips…

  In the picture to which she kept returning, a bearded man knelt with his lover’s legs thrown over his shoulders, pressing his erection into her. Catherine had known, of course, that sexual intercourse involved the insertion of the male member into the female, but knowing about it and actually seeing it were two very different things. The sight of a distended penis half-buried in a woman’s body was oddly exciting in a way that Catherine wouldn’t have predicted. Her face and throat grew warm as she imagined the pushing and straining that must accompany the act; her breathing quickened.

  How must it feel, she wondered, to be penetrated like that by a man, to be taken in an act of animal passion? She’d always assumed it must be rather distasteful, but the more she looked at the picture, the more she doubted that assumption.

  Catherine closed her eyes and lay on her back, envisioning the couple in the picture, not as a black-and-white engraving, but as real, flesh-and-blood lovers sharing their bodies in the ultimate act of intimacy. The image was startlingly real, as if she were watching a stage play, albeit an extremely bawdy one, from the front row. She imagined how it would feel to open herself up like that, physically, to a man, to be made love to, to experience that kind of pleasure.

  Extraordinary pleasure.

  Catherine felt the most curious sensation of heat and swelling between her legs, and dampness, too, although she wasn’t perspiring elsewhere. She hesitated, then pressed a hand to the juncture of her thighs, through her skirt and underpinnings. She rubbed her fingers back and forth slightly, which both relieved and exacerbated the feeling, as when one scratched an itch, only to find that the scratching itself heightened the irritation. She’d never touched herself like this, though she suspected men did occasionally, or at least some men. Abbie had once whispered of walking in on her brother when he was fondling himself “there.”

  A hand stroked her breast.

  She jolted upright, every nerve on end. For a split second, she thought she saw a shadowy form looming over her in the semidarkness, but the illusion evaporated as she looked around, heart drumming.

  No one was there. Of course no one was there. She was alone here. What she’d felt, or thought she’d felt, was a delusion, like the others she’d been experiencing these past few hours.

  She lay back down again, an arm thrown over her face. It isn’t real, she told herself. It’s a figment of my imagination. From her reading, she knew that hallucinations could be brought on by many factors other than those, such as intoxication or lunacy, which she could discount out of hand in her particular case. Fatigue, dehydration, and stress, all of which she’d been suffering from this afternoon, could make one experience things that weren’t really happening.

  And then there was the magnetic vortex that had, at the very least, disabled her compass and watch. If it could affect inanimate objects that way, perhaps it could also affect the human mind.

  She felt a kind of ticklish heat on both breasts through her shirtwaist and camisole, as of fingertips trailing over them very, very softly. Her heart raced; her lungs pumped. Then came a breathless warmth as the hands caressed her more firmly, but still with a mesmerizing gentleness.

  It isn’t real, she told herself, even as she luxuriated in the soft friction, her breasts seeming almost to swell, her nipples tightening into stiff little nubs. None of this was real. It was her mind playing tricks on her, giving her that which she most desired—the pleasure she must deny herself in reality, but about which she was wildly curious.

  The hands moved downward to her skirt, gathering up the heavy brown wool and the linen petticoat beneath. She felt them on her stockinged legs, and then her bare thighs, which they parted. Feeling starved for breath, Catherine folded both arms over her face, her eyes tightly shut, whispering, “This isn’t real. It isn’t happening.”

  There came a little creak of bedropes as the mattress dipped between her outspread legs, almost as if someone had lowered himself there. She felt the brushing of fingers through her linen underdrawers and a little plucking sensation as one of the buttons securing the slit in the drawers popped from its buttonhole. Or seemed to.

  A second button slid free, and a third, and a forth, with maddening slowness, the fingertips grazing her very lightly along her most sensitive flesh. When at last the slit was unbuttoned, she felt the fabric being spread open, exposing that part of her that even she had never really seen, never touched except to bathe. The cool air was a shock on her hotly aroused sex, magnifying her sense of exposure.

  She should have been appalled. She should have bolted off this bed and fled from this strange place, this dark and delicious phantasm. Instead, she lay still and trembling as the unseen hands parted, caressed…A soft moan escaped her as the touch turned rhythmic, but still teasingly light, compelling her to lift her hips to meet it.

  Her lungs stilled when she felt hot gusts of breath on her inflamed sex, and the tickle of what could only be hair brushing her legs. No, surely not, she thought as something soft and wet glided between her labia, sending shivers of arousal throughout her body. She clutched the quilt in her fists, thinking, He can’t be…He wouldn’t…

  The tongue—for that was what it was, or what she imagined it to be—lapped and flicked and explored until she was writhing and moaning as if maddened by fever. She felt a prickly scraping on her inner thighs, as of several days’ growth of beard. The contrast of the sharp bristles with the hot, wet, wonderfully curious tongue only served to stoke her escalating arousal.

  She caught her breath as a finger slid into her, moving slowly, thoughtfully, as if investigating the snug, ultrasensitive passage. It could enter only to the first knuckle and no farther. Still, the sensation of being caressed from within was so grati
fying that she strained her hips upward, wanting more, wanting him.

  The finger withdrew. He shifted position, settling his naked hips between her thighs. His hand moved between them, and then came a different kind of pressure as something much more broad and rigid pressed into her. She realized what it was and whispered, “Yes. Yes…”

  But then the pressure became a burning ache as he pushed against her hymen. Alarmed, for it hurt, hallucination or no, she opened her eyes and tried to sit up.

  A hand took hers; she felt warm lips against her palm. “Shh, it’s all right,” whispered her imaginary lover in a deep, vaguely accented voice. He eased her back down and lowered himself onto her, scooping both hands beneath her hips to lift her. When she closed her eyes again, he seemed as real as if he were actually there, warm and weighty and masculine. She wrapped her arms around him, feeling the hard-packed, straining muscles of his back and shoulders.

  “It’s all right,” he repeated as he pushed, just slightly, and again, and again. She felt impossibly stretched, but that sensation was overwhelmed by the primal thrill of being penetrated, possessed. He inched into her gradually, breaching her maidenhead by increments until he was completely inside her, a thick, solid presence that seemed to fill her up so completely, she could scarcely breathe.

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her, and then he began moving again, slowly and shallowly at first, then more deeply and with mounting urgency. His breathing grew harsh; every muscle in his body was as taut as a bowstring.

  The lingering pain of defloration dissipated, replaced by the same pleasure she’d felt when he’d been stroking and licking her, only more intense because he was inside her. She met his thrusts with increasing fervor, driven by a wild and primitive hunger she’d never felt before. The pleasure seemed to expand inside her until it felt, suddenly, as if she were teetering on the edge of some heart-pounding abyss over which she had no control. Bewildered and apprehensive, she tried to hold still in the hope of staving off whatever was about to happen.