“Is anyone hungry?” she asked, unwrapping a linen napkin from what looked like a large, golden brown onion tart.
“First things first,” said Inigo as he uncorked a bottle of wine—one of four local vintages tucked into the hamper.
“No more—please,” Elijah said in a drowsy slur a couple of hours later, as Inigo, reclining next to him on the blanket, tilted a bottle over his half-empty glass. “I haven’t drunk this much since I was in college. I won’t be able to keep my eyes open.”
“You needn’t keep them open on our account.” Lili, sitting behind him, lifted the glass from his hand and pressed down gently on his shoulder until he was lying with his head in her lap.
He should have refused—the only woman he’d ever had that kind of physical contact with was Julia—but dreamily contented as he was, with his belly full of wine and wonderful food, and in the company of such agreeable companions, he couldn’t bring himself to protest.
“Go ahead,” she murmured as she stroked his face very lightly, her fingertips soft, cool, hypnotic. “Close your eyes.” She whispered a singsongy phrase over and over again in a language he’d never heard before—like Aramaic, but not quite—as she continued to caress his brow and cheeks and chin. The intoxicating scent of jasmine enveloped him. Warm breezes ruffled his hair, or perhaps it was her breath.
Inigo, sounding oddly distant, started saying something in an entirely different, but equally unfamiliar language. Except that it didn’t really sound like Inigo. It was another voice, that of a much older man.
Elijah opened his eyes, thinking how unseemly it would be for strangers to happen upon him lying there with his head in Lili’s lap. He expected to see her face smiling down on him. Instead, all he saw was the sun glittering through the canopy of oak leaves overhead.
He turned his head toward the old man’s voice and discovered, to his bewilderment, that there was no soft leg beneath him, no blanket either, just the cool, prickly grass. Lili and Inigo were nowhere to be seen, but under one of the old oaks at the edge of the clearing there sat two men, one young and one quite elderly. The old fellow, bearded and wizened, sat on a squarish boulder against the tree, the clean-shaven, blond-haired young man a few feet away on a tree stump, leaning over a plank of wood balanced across his lap. A large, powerfully built dog—a mastiff, or something like it—slept between them with its broad-skulled head resting on the old man’s feet.
The younger man was writing, Elijah realized, with a reed pen on a length of paper—or was it parchment?—as the old man droned on. He paused and asked the speaker something, addressing him as Brantigern; upon receiving an answer, he nodded and continued writing, as if he were taking dictation. There was an Italic quality to many of the words and phrases that Brantigern spoke, but Elijah was at a loss to translate them.
Their clothing was exceedingly odd. They both wore woolen tunics—the older man’s saffron, the younger, a rusty brown—and trousers that had stripes woven into the fabric. More curious still was their hair, which was as long as Elic’s; but instead of tying it back in a queue, as Elic did, they’d plaited it into multiple braids that hung down past their shoulders.
There were isolated pockets of peasant folks all over Europe who still wore their ancestral garb and spoke nearly extinct dialects. Elijah hadn’t been aware of such indigenous folks in Auvergne, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. Clearly, they did.
Elijah stood up, feeling surprisingly sober, and walked toward them. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”
They ignored him entirely, perhaps because he’d unthinkingly greeted them in English. “Bonjour, messieurs,” he said.
Were they deaf?
Although only a few yards away from them now, he raised his voice and waved an arm. “Bonjour!”
There was no response from the two men beneath the oak, but from the woods to the south, toward the chateau, a boy’s voice yelled, “Brantigern! Sedanias!”
The two men and the dog all looked up sharply as the boy, also in traditional clothing, but with his red hair flying loose, burst into the clearing from the path in the woods, yelling something breathlessly as he pointed in the direction from which he’d come.
The young man, Sedanias, bolted to his feet, hurriedly rolling the scroll around a stick. He wrapped it in a length of leather as he sprinted toward the altar, which looked different than it had earlier, during the picnic—newer, less timeworn. One of the circular corner designs, that depicting Lugus and the raven, was missing, leaving a hole where it should have been. Sedanias shoved the leather-wrapped scroll vertically into the hole, then lifted a stone disc from the grass and fitted it into place, positioning it just so.
Brantigern, meanwhile, tucked the wooden plank between the tree and the boulder on which he sat, then gathered up the younger man’s reed pen, ink pot, and pen knife, and stowed them in a knothole.
The boy darted back into a different section of the woods as hoofbeats approached along the path.
A man around thirty years of age with dark, neatly shorn hair rode into the clearing, reins in one hand, a club in the other. Elijah gaped in astonishment at the horseman’s appearance, for he was clad in a belted, Roman-style tunica—white with a wide purple stripe from right shoulder to hem—and red boots secured by leather thongs. The iron ring he wore, in conjunction with the tunica laticlavia and the red boots, identified him as a patrician male of ancient Rome. The horse was draped with a long scarlet saddlecloth trimmed in gold braid, on which the rider sat directly, without benefit of saddle. Like the two peasants and the boy, he seemed entirely, perplexingly, unaware of Elijah’s presence.
Reining in his mount, he pointed his club at Sedanias and barked out, “You, there!” in Latin—not quite the classical form with which Elijah was most familiar, but still reasonably understandable. “What do you think you’re doing here, Sedanias? You’re supposed to be cutting marble down by the cave. Are you that eager for a beating?”
“It’s my fault,” said the old man as he struggled to his feet with the help of a tall, age-burnished oak staff that was peculiarly twisty and knotted toward the top. Elijah hadn’t noticed before that he had only one hand, the left. His right arm ended in a stump above the wrist.
“Brantigern Avitus.” The horseman bent his head in respectful greeting, which struck Elijah as odd, as did his use of the cognomen Avitus, which suggested something akin to a grandfatherly relationship. “I didn’t see you there.”
“I heard of the death of the great Augustus,” Brantigern said, “so I asked my grandson to bring me here, to our sacred place, to beseech the gods to welcome the Emperor as one of their own. Forgive me, Quintus Vetus—and forgive Sedanias, too, I beg you. He was only indulging a trying old man.”
“Yes. Well,” said Quintus, clearly at something of a loss. “Praying for the late Emperor…It’s a most commendable gesture, but I hope you understand that I can’t have slaves just walking away from their assigned tasks without asking my leave.” To Sedanias, he said, “Return to your work. But first, see your grandfather back safely to his hut. If anything happens to him, it’s I who’ll take a beating, at the hands of my father. You know how he depends on the old man’s soothsaying.” He turned his horse around and left.
Sedanius and Brantigern shared a conspiratorial little smile. “Come, Yannig,” said Brantigern, and then the two men and the dog disappeared down the path, the dog staying close by the old man’s side as he shuffled along with halting steps, leaning on his staff.
Was he going mad? Elijah wondered. This didn’t feel like a delusion, and he’d never once, in the past, experienced any form of mental derangement. Why, then, had he just seen what he’d seen?
He saw a hint of movement and looked up to see a gray cat walking along a branch of the oak tree beneath which the pair had been sitting. It jumped down, looked directly at Elijah, and mewed.
“Well, at least I’m not invisible to you,” Elijah said.
The cat strolled through the cle
aring to the edge of the path and sat, staring at Elijah, who walked over to it. When he was about a yard away, it got up and padded down the path.
Elijah took one last look around the clearing, wondering what the devil had become of Lili and Inigo—never mind his sanity—and then he followed the cat along the path toward the chateau.
Only, when he emerged from the woods, the chateau, which should have been tucked into the lowest part of the valley about two hundred yards away, wasn’t there. In its place, he saw a sprawling white house with red-tiled roofs surrounded by formal, colonnaded gardens.
“A villa,” he whispered, for it looked precisely like the country homes built by wealthy Roman citizens, both in Rome and in their provinces. With every blink, he expected it to disappear, but there it stood, like a drawing in a history book.
He recalled what he’d said last night, about Julia telling him he’d never be satisfied unless he could travel back in time and witness historical events for himself. Was it possible this was all a dream in which his desire to know more about Grotte Cachée’s enigmatic past was being subconsciously fulfilled? A tempting theory, except that this didn’t feel remotely like a dream; it was far, far too real.
So if he wasn’t dreaming, and he wasn’t mad, what on earth was happening here?
There had been times, many times, in his studies of occult phenomena and his sojourns among peoples who believed in such things, that he’d found himself weighing the possibility that certain forms of “magic” might fall within the realm of reality. There were, after all, many unanswered questions in the universe, and physical scientists had barely scratched the surface in terms of what they knew about space, time, and matter. That given, was it entirely impossible that the things he was seeing had actually existed some two millennia before? The best course of action, Elijah decided, would be to relax, observe, and remember.
Oh, and figure out how to exit this new reality and return to that in which he’d been living his life for the past forty-six years.
Elijah heard a repetitive thunk, thunk, thunk from the direction of the bathhouse—or where the bathhouse should be, at the entrance of the cave in the extinct volcano on the eastern edge of the valley. He made his way through a small woods that didn’t exist in his own time, at the edge of which a team of axe-wielding men dressed like Sedanias and Brantigern—slaves, he presumed—were felling trees in order to enlarge an already sizeable clearing. Not one of them turned to look as he walked past.
In the clearing, other slaves, shirtless and sweating in the harsh afternoon sun, were cutting slabs of white marble into smaller blocks with hammers and chisels. An enormous white linen tent stood against the base of the mountain, concealing the mouth of the cave. From within it, Elijah heard a man saying, in Latin, “Not much longer now, my darling Inigo. Just mind you stay good and hard till I’m done with you.”
Inigo?
“Tita, keep those legs spread. What do you think you’re getting paid for?”
Elijah found an opening in the tent and slipped through. Inside, bathed in a haze of filtered sunlight and marble dust, he found the bathhouse, or a partial version thereof. There were no walls and no roof, just the marble floor, the pool itself—devoid of water and with the mosaic half-finished—and the four columns, each with a massive chunk of white marble appended to it.
A muscular fellow in a dusty blue tunica stood chiseling away at one of the blocks, which was well on its way to being a finished sculpture, while his models—Inigo and a voluptuous raven-haired beauty, both naked—posed for him. The young woman, Tita presumably, was bent over with her legs widespread, hugging a thick tree trunk stripped of its bark—a standin, obviously, for the column—while Inigo stood behind her with his hands around her waist, his back slightly bowed and his hips tucked.
The first remarkable thing Elijah noticed about Inigo was his erect penis. About as thick around as a woman’s forearm, it was actually penetrating Tita, with about five or six inches showing. Never in his life, even among primitive tribespeople who weren’t terribly shy about such matters, had Elijah witnessed an act of coition taking place right in front of him. Not that this was sex in the usual sense. Inigo and this woman, although physically joined, weren’t even moving; they were posing. It made sense, now that Elijah thought about it, that such accomplished sculptures would have required live models. Silently chiding himself for his priggish reaction, he strove to take an intellectually detached view of the situation. He was a scholar of human beliefs and practices, not some judgmental Philistine. And what was happening here was, after all, an artistic endeavor.
“Stop thrusting, Inigo,” the sculptor ordered. “I’m doing the crack of your ass.”
“You wish you were doing the crack of my ass,” Inigo retorted with a snort.
Tita chuckled. The sculptor cast his gaze wearily to the heavens, but Elijah could see that he was fighting back a smile. “Don’t get a big head over it, darling. It’s not you that gets my heart beating like a bird’s. You’re an overgrown child, and I loathe children. It’s that truncheon of yours. I swear, it’s the most lickable thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve licked a few in my day.”
With a snicker, Inigo said, “Curious thing, Marcus, how you always manage to bring the conversation around to that particular subject.”
“People enjoy talking about their areas of expertise,” Marcus said as he blew a puff of dust off the statue’s marble buttocks.
“That good, are you?”
“I’ve been assured there are none better.”
“All right, then.” Withdrawing from Tita—by God, that thing was huge—Inigo turned and strode toward Marcus, his fist wrapped around the proffered organ. “Prove it.”
That was when Elijah noticed the second remarkable thing about Inigo, which was that he had a tail that swung back and forth as he walked. Beyond shock at this point, Elijah just stared, wondering what was next.
Marcus recoiled from Inigo’s outthrust, glistening erection. “Not after it’s been in that,” he said, pointing to Tita’s exposed sex with his hammer. “Tonight, after we’re done here, I’ll meet you—”
“You had your chance,” taunted Inigo as he returned to Tita, grabbed her hips, and pushed himself back in, causing her to purr delightedly.
“Bitch,” Marcus said as he returned to his work.
The third remarkable thing Elijah noticed about Inigo—and at this point, it was a mere footnote to the rest, a mild curiosity—was that his ears were pointed and he had a pair of small, bony horns poking through the cap of black curlicues on his head.
“Will you stop that damned thrusting?” Marcus demanded.
“You want me to stay hard, don’t you?”
“Think arousing thoughts.”
“I’ve been thinking about you licking me. It isn’t doing the job.”
“I like it when he thrusts,” said Tita, squirming with pleasure.
Reaching around to touch her between her legs, Inigo said, “So you do.” Tita moaned as Inigo caressed her. He thrust harder, more purposefully.
“Stop that!” Marcus snapped, but the command fell on deaf ears. “Oh, hell,” he muttered. “Will you at least be quick about it this time?”
“Oh…” Tita sighed, clutching at the tree trunk, her breasts and hair swaying with every thrust. “Oh, yes…yes…yes…”
Without pausing in what he was doing, Inigo turned and looked directly at Elijah. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” he said in Julia’s voice.
Elijah opened his eyes to find himself back in the clearing, lying on the blanket. A woman was crouching over him to unbutton his trousers, her face obscured by a swath of rippling, golden-brown hair. The gauzy morning dress she wore, apple green with tiny white dots, had always been his favorite.
“Julia?” he said incredulously.
She turned and smiled at him, the breeze lifting her hair. He breathed in the Roger & Gallet eau de cologne he gave her for Christmas every year, tears stinging his eyes.
&
nbsp; “Oh, my God.” Elijah reached out with a trembling hand to touch her hair, her face, his arm oddly heavy, as if he were underwater. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Julia. How can this…? How can you…?”
“I can’t stay long,” she said as she caressed him. “I just want to feel you inside me again. Just let me…”
“Yes,” he whispered. “Oh, God, yes.” How long had it been since he’d made love to her? Since well before he’d lost her, because she’d been so ill for so long. He moaned her name as she stroked him, reveling in her cool, soft fingertips, her familiar touch.
Tucking her skirts up, she knelt astride him, easing him into her, and it was so sweet and warm and perfect, just like it used to be. She kissed him as she moved, rocking slowly and gently at first, then deeper, faster…
They climaxed together, as they often used to, she coloring hotly as she always did, breathy little moans issuing from her. They lay together quietly as he softened inside her, their hearts beating next to each other, their lungs slowing in unison.
“I’ve missed this,” he said, his breath ruffling her hair as she lay atop him with her head nestled heavily in the crook of his neck. The feel of her body conforming itself to his, the warmth of her skin, the knowledge that there was one person in the world who lived for him as he lived for her…God, he’d missed it so much.
“You can have it again,” she said.
“But…you said you couldn’t stay.”
Rising up a bit so that she could meet his gaze, she said, “After I leave here, you’ll never see me again. But there are other women…”
House of Dark Delights Page 23