“Add to my list some larger flasks of the latter,” said Clairwil, “they will be helpful to me in my dealings with lots of men.”
“We now come to the poisons,” said Durand; “if it is sometimes pleasant to labor at propagating the human species, it is more often delicious to hinder its progress.”
“These actions should not be mentioned in the same breath,” I protested, “the one is horrible, the other divine; our aim in buying these philters is not to promote the population, it is to increase our lubricity; and that progeniture which we detest, ’tis for the delectable destruction thereof we intend to buy the rest.”
“Kiss me,” said Durand. “Ah, here are two women of the stripe I adore. The better we come to know one another, the better, I am convinced of it, we shall get on.”
These poisons were in very great number, each classified according to its category. In the first we examined, Durand drew our attention to a powder where the basic ingredient was vert toad; what she related of its effects was so exciting to hear that we besought Durand to make trial of it there and then.
“Gladly,” said she, “designate the victim.” And after having detached the girl we pointed to, she wondered whether we fancied having her fucked by a man, and poisoning her meanwhile; we rejoiced in this suggestion. Wherewith Durand rang, and in answer to her call appeared a tall individual, lank, pale, and nervous, some fifty years of age and in a very neglected state.
“There,” I whispered to my companion, “he’s the one who sported with us a little while ago, I’m certain of it.”
Clairwil nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“Alzamor,” said Durand, “this maid must be devirginated while these ladies disorganize her with a powder…. Are you stiff?”
“Turn the child over to me,” said Alzamor, mournfully, “I shall do what I can.”
“Madame, what manner of man be this?” I demanded.
“He is an old sylph,” Durand replied, “by pronouncing a formula I can cause him to disappear. Would you care to see it done?”
“Yes.”
Durand uttered two barbarous words which I was unable to retain; where Alzamor had been there was now only smoke.
“Now make the sylph return,” said Clairwil.
Another outlandish phrase and a second cloud brought him back; this time the sylph had an erection, and it was prick atower he caught hold of the child. This personage proceeded to give evidence of prodigious vigor, in two minutes he had perforated the girl’s maidenhead and spattered blood all about the room. ’Twas then Clairwil administered the dose: it was dissolved in a cup of broth, the poor little soul quaffed it off. Her convulsions began promptly; when they were at their height Alzamor adjusted her for embuggering; her writhings, her screams increased; it was hideous to behold; six minutes later she collapsed and the sylph withheld his discharge until she was completely lifeless. Her death throes were noisy beyond belief; her violator, too, loosed unearthly sounds, and it was the violence of that ecstasy which made us finally conclude that, indeed, this was the man who had tupped us earlier on. The uncouth words were pronounced again, Alzamor vanished, and the victim vanished with him.
Durand resumed the displaying of her goods and, after having indicated the features of the second category of poisons, said, “Here is burnt engri flesh, the engri is a variety of Ethiopian tiger; its effect is subtle, awful, and deserves to be witnessed by ladies as curious as yourselves.”
“Then let us try some out,” Clairwil said, “but upon a young man.”
“Of what age precisely?”
“Of eighteen or twenty.”
In a trice stood a youth, comely, prettily made, superbly membered, but showing such signs of privation as to leave us in no doubt of the class from which our sorceress chose her victims.
“Will you amuse yourselves with him?” Durand wanted to know.
“Yes,” said I, “but will you not join us? He looks capable of fucking the three of us.”
“What’s this? You are of a mind to see me fuck?”
“We most decidedly are.”
“I’m beastly, you will be appalled.”
“Fie, slut,” said Clairwil, clasping her in her arms, “do your damnable worst—we expect it of you, for you are a woman after our own sort and we are burning to see you in action.”
And without further ado Clairwil shoots toward the young man and begins to arouse him; and I, having brought Durand’s charms into view, with eyes, hands, and tongue begin to devour every part of her splendid body. Here were symmetry and luxuriant abundance in perfection, never was flesh so firm, so fair, so responsive to the touch; never were buttocks and breasts so smooth, so round, so full; and this clitoris! ah, this clitoris, never had we in all our days seen one so long nor so straight-standing. I own that, catching sight of this last-named wonder, I was overslept by an invincible partiality for this woman and I had already mouthed her member when Clairwil, leading up the youth by the end of his prick, brushed me aside and made ready to bury that prick in the enchantress’ cunt: but she voiced her opposition in a terrible cry.
“Why would you require this horror of me?” she demanded. “Cunt-fucking is not to my liking, neither is it within my capacity, do you take me for an ordinary woman?”
And driving the youth back with a powerful blow of her fist, she spun about and presented him her ass. Clairwil conducted the device which, all unprepared for this, sank its full length into this anus just as easily as it would have disappeared into the hugest cunt. The whore then began to wriggle and cavort in the most lubricious manner, Clairwil and I furnished fuel to her ecstasy by palpating her, by fingering her, by tonguing and sucking and pumping her, by polluting and kissing and caressing her with all the means at our command, physical and moral. There is no conceiving the ardor of that woman’s imagination, the foulness of her talk, the originality of her lewd ideas, and the wildness of their incoherence; in fine, the disorder which, established by the incredible heat of her passions, reigned throughout her entire person. Nearing her crisis, she clutched at our asses, kissed them; and the whore, after tonguing and spitting in our vents, fucked them as a man should have done.
“Poison him, poison him!” she screamed as delirium invaded her senses and mounted into her brain.
“No, by God!” said Clairwil, “the wight shall bugger-fuck us both before we have any of that.”
At which Durand emitted dreadful screams, howls, all her limbs twitching, thrashing, she succumbed to a nervous fit, and loosed fuck in such vast quantity that my mouth, for I was sucking her then, was filled to overflowing.
“He is yet intact,” she told us, expelling the youth, “prevent him from discharging in order that he fuck you the better.”
My ass chancing to be the first snapped into position, therein the fucker deposited the seed which Durand’s convulsing bowels had so well readied for ejaculation. I continued, while being embuggered, to gobble the jets of fuck still spouting from Durand’s vagina, whose anus Clairwil was tonguing; my friend soon changed places with me and it was while the young man was in the midst of sodomizing her that the necromancer had him swallow the venomous brew. He was seized by cramps before he had time to withdraw from my friend’s ass, so that he perished embuggering her, which hurled Clairwil into transports of joy so intense I thought she too was in danger of dying.
“By God,” the buggeress declared, “I do believe I got his soul and his fuck in the same spasm; you have no idea how the rascal’s prick dilated while the poison was having its effect, neither can you conceive the pleasure which such an operation procures.”
Oh, voluptuous women! the time to poison your fuckers is while they are even in your asses or your cunts, you’ll see what one gains thereby…. We did indeed have no end of trouble dislodging the murdered youth’s member from my companion’s rectum, and when at last we had it pried loose, we noted that his death agonies had not prevented him from discharging.
“Aye, that was my impressi
on,” said Clairwil, “did I not tell you he gave up the ghost and his sperm all in one throw?”
The corpse is whisked away and pots of poison from the third category are disposed on the counter before us.
Among others it includes the poison royal, the same which in the days of Louis XV brought about the deaths of so many members of his family; poisoned darts and hatpins; the poisons compounded of snake venoms and known under the names of cucurucu, kokob, and Aimorrhoües; polpoch poison, so called after the reptile that inhabits a northwestern zone in faraway Jupatan.
“I mix it with a digestive or cordial,” Durand explained; “diluted in the proportion of one drop to a pint it remains absolutely fatal; in all my experience I have never known it to fail; would you like to see what it can do?”
“By all means yes,” I replied, “rest assured that such proposals are of a kind we are never apt to reject.”
“And what would you prefer in the way of a victim?”
“An attractive young man,” Clairwil volunteered.
Durand rang a little bell and there before us appeared a boy of eighteen, fairer than the previous one, and in the same state of dejection and misery.
“Will you have Alzamor embugger him?”
“Gladly!”
Another puff of smoke, and out of it steps the sylph.
“Fuck this boy,” Durand instructs him. “Mesdames wish to try some polpoch brandy on him.”
“Wait,” Clairwil interrupted, “he must embugger me in the meantime.”
“And what are we to do, Madame Durand and I?”
“You may tongue Alzamor’s asshole, Juliette; and our hostess, upon whom I shall recline, will encunt me with her clitoris; my fuckeress, otherwise unoccupied, will, when she sees the boy about to discharge in my bum, be able to hand him a little glass of the poison whose effects we are eager to study.”
Everything proceeds in accordance to Clairwil’s plan until the moment when the young man absorbs the drink: he is shaken so powerfully by the poison in his vitals that postures are disturbed and the group must disperse; we relinquish the middle of the room to the patient; Alzamor frigs Clairwil, I spring into Durand’s arms, who tickles me exquisitely, she possesses the ultimate in art and experience, all the coigns and concavities of pleasure are explored with equal thoroughness by the libertine fingers of that ravishing personage, whose lips cover me with fervent kisses. The hard-pressed victim is by now staggering like a drunkard and while we look on, gradually sinks into a terrifying vertigo; the venom’s impact upon his brain was so fierce, that, in shrieks, he complained of having his head full of boiling oil; this phase was followed by a generalized tumefaction that spared no part of his body, his face became livid, his eyes bulged from their sockets, and flailing his arms like one drowning in the sea, the wretch fell to the floor and writhed and struggled there in the oddest possible manner, while to left and to right the four of us sprayed torrents of the impurest and the most abundant fuck.
“For me,” said Clairwil, “that is the most divine of all passions, the one I shall never be able to resist. I am resolved to indulge in it every chance I get in the future.”
“And you may do so without fear,” said Durand, “murder by poison is certain and it is safe. Witnesses? There need be none. Clues, telltale traces left behind whereby you may be found out? Let the most learned physician hunt for them, his art will avail him not; the effects of poison are indistinguishable from the causes of a natural ailment in the bowels; they accuse you nonetheless? Deny the charge, and be firm. Let the crime be gratuitous. So long as they can assign to you no motive for having committed it, you will always be under cover.”
“Go on, temptress, go on,” Clairwil said to her; “if you were to convince me I do believe I’d depopulate the whole of Paris tonight.”
Durand pronounced the arcane formula; the sylph disappeared.
“Come with me to the garden,” she said, and then added, a note of apology in her voice: “you may have whatever you like there. And I am afraid there is not very much: the frosts were so severe last winter that most of my plants died.”
This garden, an extremely somber place, bore a strong resemblance to a burial ground: save where some rare plants were growing, sinister and grayish, it lay in the shade of tall trees. Our curiosity drew us toward a remote corner where we espied newly turned soil.
“It’s the spot where you conceal your crimes, Durand, isn’t it?” Clairwil asked.
“Come along,” the sorceress replied, guiding us in another direction, “it were better I show you that with which one kills rather than what has been killed.”
She explained the properties of this plant, she explained those of another; at length, unable to curb my impatience, “Listen to me,” I said, “the sight of that cemetery just ten yards away is driving me quite out of my mind. Conjure up a little girl of fourteen or fifteen, give her a dose of whatever occasions the most agonizing possible gripes in a human being’s guts; we shall dig a ditch first, it will be there waiting for her; we shall let Nature take its course, and when the victim’s convulsions roll her into the pit, we’ll cover her over with earth, and discharge.”
“I am determined to be of service to you,” Durand replied to this; “observe: I foresaw your request, there is the girl you want. And glance again at the cemetery: to the east there, do you see the pit? It is ready.”
Indeed, behind a wild Cayenne fig tree, there stood a very pretty child, naked as the day she was born; but the pit … we strained our eyes, then saw it open up in the earth, by what magic we could not guess….
“Ha!” exulted the sorceress, gazing at us as we, petrified, watched these prodigies, “are you afraid of me?”
“Afraid? No; but we do not understand you.”
“All Nature is at my orders,” Durand answered, “as she always submits herself to the will of whoever will probe her deep: with chemistry and physics nothing is beyond one’s power. Archimedes lacked only a place to rest his lever, else he would have moved the earth; and I now need but a plant in order to destroy it in five minutes….”
“Delicious creature,” Clairwil said, hugging her to her breast; “how happy I am to have met somebody whose methods so nicely correspond to my aims.”
Shutting a gate, we enclosed ourselves inside the cemetery with the little girl; her contortions began as soon as she had downed the poison.
“Let us sit ourselves here,” I said, “where ground seems to have been broken very recently—”
“I believe I read your thoughts,” said the sorceress.
From her pocket she pulls out a box, opens it, sprinkles some powder upon the soil; and the plot beneath our feet suddenly becomes strewn with cadavers.
“Oh, fuck me, what a sight!” cries Clairwil, wallowing amidst these heaps of dead bodies; “quick, let’s all three frig one another while we watch that little bitch suffer.”
“Let us take off our clothes,” Durand proposes, “with naked flesh we must roll upon this carrion, the sensation is voluptuous.”
“It occurs to me,” said I, “that these bones, shaped as they are, might serve in the stead of pricks.”
And Clairwil, finding the idea greatly to her taste, snatched up a femur and stowed it in her cunt.
“Well done,” I remarked to my companion; “but we should be sitting on skulls, pointed nosebones should be prickling our assholes—see how I place myself….”
“Move a trifle to the left,” said Durand, “there’s the head, perhaps still warm, at any rate fresh, of the last boy you immolated: hold still a moment, Juliette, I have one of his hands, let me frig you with it….”
What now shall I say, my friends? Delirium and extravagance were at their height, we invented, we enacted a hundred things more infamous, more morbid yet; and the victim expired before our eyes, racked by execrable convulsions: the final ones having flopped and pitched her to the brink of her grave, she slithered into it, I discharged in the embrace of my two consorts who themse
lves smeared their fuck over me while the one sucked my nipples and the other drank my saliva; we donned our clothes again, and resumed our tour, just as cool as a trio of fools after having performed an exceptionally meritorious good deed. Concluding our visit of the garden, we re-entered Durand’s abode.
“The pair of infants you see in this cradle,” the sorceress now said, “are the material I shall use in composing the costliest and most potent poison I sell. Do you wish to enjoy the spectacle?”
“Certainly,” we replied.
“I am not surprised,” said Durand, “in you I recognize woman philosophers who view the disorganization of matter as a merely chemical operation; and the compelling importance of the results outweighs, in your consideration, the so-called crime lesser minds notice in this action. … I am going to begin.”
Madame Durand plucks the babes out of their cradle, one after the other she hangs them by their feet from the ceiling, like hams, and lashes them mercilessly; in time a foam bubbles from the mouths of the dilapidated infants, the sorceress carefully gathers this pink froth and sells us the little bottle for a hundred louis, certifying that of all the poisons she confections, this is the most virulent, and it was true. The children, to whom Durand gave no further heed, expired on their hooks. Ah, who any longer doubts that for greatest delectation it is casually, phlegmatically, crime wants to be committed?
“Yes, my dear friend,” said Clairwil, pondering over all the things we had seen that day, “those are awful secrets you possess.”
“I have a good many more, Mesdames,” Durand declared. “I hold the lives of multitudes in my hands: I can send the plague roaring abroad, poison streams and wells, propagate epidemics, contaminate the air of provinces, clap blight on houses, fields, vineyards, murrain on flocks; into deadly poison transform the flesh of cattle, I cause villages to burn, make suddenly perish he who inhales the scent of a flower or who unseals a letter; in a word, I am a woman without peer in my kind, nay, I am unique in it.”
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