‘Open it,’ hissed Delgado: the seductive voice of the serpent in Eden urging Eve to that first, irrevocable loss of innocence.
Bereft of the willpower to resist his command, Mara raised the lid and looked inside. Her eyes met a dazzling jumble of bright colours, gleaming precious metal and sparkling stones. The beauty of the necklace fascinated her, broke down her resistance, and she reached out and picked it up.
It was an Egyptian pectoral, exquisitely wrought and obviously very ancient, yet still perfect as she held it up to the lamplight and watched the changing colours dance hypnotically before her eyes. Precious stones and gold, wrought together into a heavy yet delicate profusion – a pattern of ibises and antelope, and at the very centre, placed exactly where it would hang between a woman’s breasts, was a huge white crystal, carved into a multitude of glittering facets.
‘Put it on,’ ordered Delgado, mounting excitement in his voice. And, as she was slow to respond, he seized the necklace from her hands and hung it around her neck and shoulders himself, fastening it at the nape of her neck with a jewelled scarab clasp.
The moment the pectoral touched Mara’s skin, an immense change surged through her. A terrible pain wracked her body, tore through her mind like a hurricane, and she cried out in an agony of fear as she witnessed, once again, the fate of the young Egyptian woman, screaming and screaming as they nailed down the lid of the coffin and spoke the incantation which would leave her hovering between life and death for all eternity.
But the scene changed. The pain ebbed away, and was replaced with a sudden calm, followed by a feeling of immense exhilaration. She felt the dark life-force of the undead priestess surging out of its place of captivity, flowing into her through the crystal, entering her through every pore of her skin, filling her up and banishing all traces of the woman who had been Mara Fleming.
Delgado felt the cold hand clutch at his heart, and knew that the Master had summoned the strength to overwhelm him once again. And he surrendered all consciousness of his own being as the Master took complete possession of his body.
Sedet glorified in the vitality of the young girl’s body and gave a laugh of triumph: a laugh that echoed through the chill room as the raven’s cry cuts through the air of the forgotten tomb.
‘You have returned to me at last,’ breathed the Master, cursing the imperfection of Delgado’s body that caused him to be displayed so poorly to the eyes of his long-lost Queen.
‘You abandoned me,’ replied the Queen. ‘Why did you abandon me, my one true Master?’
‘I could not find out where you were . . . I could not contact you, though I used all my powers. The sorcery that veiled you from my eyes was too guileful, too strong. I have spent thousands of years searching for you and now you see me in this spent husk of a body – and even this poor body is not my own to possess. My body lies helpless and enchanted within this chamber. I can but steal brief moments of life before my strength is spent and I am driven back to my captivity. But soon I shall be free . . .’
‘Take me!’ cried the Queen, drawing close and laying soft hands upon the Master’s shoulders. ‘Take me now, for already I feel the power dragging me back to my death that is worse than death, my life that is less than life. Take me, fuck me, use my body as you used it that night in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings . . .’
The Master remembered that night, so long ago, when he had summoned Sedet to the dark valley with its many hidden tombs; and they had entered the tomb of the Pharaoh and had committed the vilest and most magnificent act of sacrilege: he had fucked his Queen on the very lid of the Pharaoh’s sarcophagus, in their act of gleeful desecration defying the gateway of death through which all mortal men must pass.
He seized the girl roughly and pressed his lips to hers savagely, then grabbed handfuls of her flimsy garment and tore the fabric from her body, maddened by the hunger of millenia, the need to pull apart her cuntlips and have her, thrust his manhood deep into her soft belly and join his immortal, evil soul to hers for the first time in so many thousand years.
There was no gentleness in his touch, nor did she crave any: only the maddened greed of the famished, the urgency of the starving prick. He bit hungrily into her flesh, biting her nipples so greedily that she moaned with pain and yet urged him on:
‘Harder, harder! Bite my tits until they bleed . . .’
But already he was moving down her body and biting into the soft flesh of her pubis, thrusting his tongue deep into her pubic bush and onward towards her already-throbbing clitoris. She tasted sharp, strong, intoxicating on his tongue. And she was clutching at him with her red-tipped talons, tearing at his hair and crying out her frenzy:
‘Take me, take me! Give it to me, show me no mercy! Oh, use me, use my body . . .’
She began to rake sharp-nailed fingers across his back, tearing off his robe, pulling it down over his shoulders; and, impatient to have her, he unfastened the belt and threw the tattered garment to the floor. His manhood thrust impatiently out of the dark curls at the base of his belly, and his testicles felt unbearably heavy and bursting with their overload of hot, foaming spunk.
The Master caught sight of an upturned carved chair, lying in the dusty corner of the room. He set it upright and sat down on it. Immediately, Sedet flung herself to her knees between his parted thighs and began to lick the sensitive flesh of his groin, between the tops of his legs and his balls.
‘Squeeze them, squeeze my balls,’ he groaned; and she obeyed eagerly, clasping small brown hands around his bursting globes until his head began to spin and he feared he would shoot his load without possessing her.
He pulled her to her feet and made her turn round, so that her back was to him, backside thrust out slightly, and very invitingly, for his inspection and delectation. It was a wonderful backside: tanned and silky-smooth, rounded and downy like some huge juicy peach ripe for the eating.
Using a little of her copious cunt-juice, the Master began to lubricate the wrinkled brown arsehole which Sedet was so shamelessly presenting to him. She moaned with delight as he tickled her perineum, torturing her with half-forgotten sensations, gradually easing the tip of his finger inside her until at last he was able to thrust the whole fìnger into her arse. How she sang with pleasure as he moved his finger in and out, widening her forbidden pathway and pressing against the thin wall between arse and cunt.
He used his other hand to feel her cunt: it was ripe and juicy, overflowing with the nectar whose honey-sweet taste he so vividly recalled. He scooped up a little with his index finger and ran his tongue along it. Delgado’s tongue, now pressed into his service, lending him the senses which had so long been lost to him.
Then he grabbed hold of Sedet’s waist and forced her backwards and down, in one savage thrust impaling her doubly on prick and finger, filling cunt and arse to overflowing. His fat prick distended her cunt deliriously, and she danced on him like a music-box ballerina pirouetting on two spindles: one up her cunt and one stretching her arse.
Their souls met and mingled, and in their minds they were no longer in borrowed bodies, feeling borrowed sensations for a brief, stolen moment. They were once again in the dank darkness of the tomb, fucking shamelessly by the light of a single clay lamp, amid the dancing shadows. Fucking on the lid of mighty Pharaoh’s tomb, the new gods for whom the puny gods of the underworld held no more terrors.
She rose and fell more quickly now, engulfing his penis and then levering herself up as far as she could go without losing its glistening tip; now falling suddenly, swallowing him up, until at last she cried out and the sudden delicious spasms of her cunt brought him, too, to a massive, crashing orgasm.
Sedet lay slumped forward, still impaled on his prick and panting heavily. As the last waves of pleasure ebbed away, a terrible cold began to steal over her and she cried out:
‘No, no! I cannot go back, I cannot . . .!’
But it was too late. The Master could feel it, too. The union of their souls through incarnatio
n in these two borrowed bodies had drained all their strength. And the power of sorcery which had held them fast for so long was once again clawing at them, dragging their souls back into captivity.
With a terrible cry of rage and despair, the Queen’s soul fled its unwitting host, leaving Mara to slump forwards on to the floor, semen flooding out of her abused cunt. And Delgado found the power draining out of him again, leaving him once more a mortal and imperfect man, impatient to return to the dark immortality he had tasted.
Full of rancour, Delgado got wearily to his feet and looked down contemptuously at the prostrate form of the unconscious girl. He opened the door and called for two of his trusted henchmen:
‘Give her to the guards,’ he sneered. ‘They’ll have a few good ideas about what to do with her. Just make sure they don’t kill her: we’ll be needing her later on.’
As the Master’s spirit returned, protesting but exhausted, to its place of imprisonment, he consoled himself with the knowledge that in Mara Fleming he had found the source of salvation, not only for himself, but perhaps also for his long-lost Queen.
17: The Quest
The heavy granite lid of the sarcophagus lay cold and unmoving. Dust sat thick upon its mirror-smooth surface. All around, the air hung foetid with the reek of death and decay. But within the unforgiving stone prison, his body frozen in the useless immortality of the crystal block like a fly suspended in amber, the Master’s spirit raged and would not be still.
Although his body would not obey him, his spirit was gaining in strength by the hour. Already he had regained the power to see far beyond the confines of his prison and project his thoughts and wishes into the minds of mortals. Already he had drawn the white witch Mara to this house of ill fame; and, entering the body of Delgado, had been able through her to enjoy coition with his lost Queen. He lusted still as he recalled the sweetness of her living flesh and the delicious surge of sexual energy which had flooded from her youthful body into his restless spirit. Soon, very soon, he would feast upon her soul.
Nothing must stand in his way. The journalist, Hunt, was proving to be dangerously curious. He must be deluded, diverted from the trail that led to Winterbourne Hall. And if by chance or determination he should find his way here, then he must pay the ultimate price.
Above, in the mortal world, the sun had passed behind a cloud and a sudden darkness presaged rain. The Master could feel neither sun nor wind nor rain; only the unstoppable dark force of his own desires, and the exhilarating anticipation of the games which he was about to play. He sincerely hoped that in Hunt he had chosen a worthy prey, a victim who would prove to be worth the trouble.
The Master’s soul exulted, and the sky grew still darker. He could almost feel a new life beginning to surge through his frozen veins, the blood of immortality envigorating his lifeless penis.
It was late in the morning when Hunt awoke, dry-mouthed and with a throbbing headache. The whisky bottle lay empty on the bed beside him, and he realised with disgust that he must have drunk the whole lot. He winced as he hauled himself to his feet and staggered bleary-eyed to the bathroom, emptying his bursting bladder with a sense of relief marred only by the pain from his equally bursting head. He looked in the mirror and did not like what he saw. Unshaven, still wearing yesterday’s shirt and crumpled trousers, red-eyed and blotchy-faced, this was not the image of the keen, clean-cut reporter which Hunt had spent the last few years working hard to achieve. He looked more like a stand-up comedian’s impression of a drunken old hack.
Memories flooded into his brain, sobering him with the ice-cold truth the whisky had failed to erase. Mara was gone. She had left no note; taken no clothes with her: even her purse lay untouched on the beside table. To all intents and purposes, she had simply walked out into the night.
The police seemed less than interested: just the unpredictable sort of thing a woman like that would do, they had implied. White witch? Psychic? You couldn’t expect these New Age crazies to behave like normal people, could you? But Hunt knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t have left him like that of her own accord. He had to find her.
He couldn’t have imagined that he would miss her so much. As he stared listlessly into a cup of black coffee, he recalled that last night of lovemaking: passionate, frenzied, almost frightening in its intensity – as though she had known that this was the last time, the ultimate time, the once and forever and nevermore time.
The evening had begun ordinarily enough. A visit to the theatre; dinner in their favourite French restaurant – funny how Mara had lost her taste for her usual vegetarian dishes, and ordered only meat, craving the taste of warm flesh: red meat, so rare that the blood still oozed out of it and it had almost turned Hunt’s stomach to see her tear into it with those pretty white teeth.
Afterwards, they went back to the flat and shared another litre of red wine. The room had started to spin and Hunt suspected that he was too tired, too drunk for sex. Perhaps he would just let himself drift off to sleep . . . But Mara had other plans for him. He remembered lying slumped on the settee, gazing up at her enchanted as she began to undress, slowly and provocatively. First she slipped off her elbow-length white gloves, tossing them teasingly across his face. Then she hitched up her skirt to reveal the tops of seamed black stockings, so fine that they were like a black mist kissing her shapely limbs. Deftly, she unfastened them from the black suspender belt and slid them down from her tanned thighs to her slender ankles, stepping out of them daintily and somehow reverentially, as though each detail of the ritual was essential if her magic spell was not to be broken.
‘A charm to bind, a charm to bind,’ she murmured playfully, turning slow circles and taking the silver combs from her dark, glossy hair so that it tumbled down over her generous breasts.
Hers was a special rite; a special magic which never failed to work its charms on Hunt. She was the sexiest woman he had ever known: Monroe and Cleopatra and Delilah with, that night, just a touch of Jezebel. His prick began to rear its joyful head as he watched her reach behind her and slide down the zip on her tight black cocktail dress. It peeled away from her golden back like the skin from a ripe, juicy fruit just begging to be eaten. As she pulled the dress down over her shoulders, her opulent breasts sprang free, unfettered by any bra and as firm and soft as any man could ever dream of in his wildest fantasies.
Now she stood naked before him, save for the many-faceted crystal which she had recently taken to wearing on a chain about her neck. It spun round on its golden chain, hanging heavy in the deep cleft between her breasts. Hunt groaned with pleasure as she leant over him and let his face nestle between her heavy globes, safe within the dark curtain of her hair. Unable to reach her nipples, he took the crystal momentarily into his mouth, accepting its mystical coolness on his tongue like the Host of some unholy rite, imbued with a sophisticated and sensual and terrifying power.
It was as though Mara had suddenly been transformed at that instant: as though the communion of flesh and crystal had allowed some other, wilder spirit to enter her body as the spirit guide enters the body of the medium during a seance. Her violet eyes flashed fire. Hunt began to pant with desire and tried to sit up, pull Mara towards him. But she pinned his arms to the settee, staring into his eyes with a greedy desire which would accept no challenges to its mastery. He answered her gaze, but did not recognise what he saw there. All was masked by a dark flame of lust which terrified, consumed and excited him.
All at once she fell upon him as a wolverine falls upon its prey – tearing off his clothes and laughing, screaming with laughter like a madwoman. He lay transfixed, between fear and ecstasy, as she worked upon his thrusting penis with her skilful fingers. The night air was full of the heady scent of her sex, and clear, sweet fluid was trickling out of her swollen cunt. He had never known her so aroused, so . . . ferocious . . . in her desire, At last she had taken his straining manhood into her cunt and pumped away at him with all the savagery of a wild beast in heat. And his ecstasy had mingled w
ith the pain of her long red fingernails, digging deep into the flesh of his back.
Afterwards, she had seemed to return to her normal self again, and they had fallen asleep entwined in each other’s arms like sentimental young lovers.
And when he awoke, she was gone.
A quiet thud announced the arrival of the morning post. Wearily, Hunt hoisted himself to his feet and shuffled into the hallway. Nothing much. Just a couple of bills, plus a handwritten white envelope. He didn’t recognise the writing. Tearing open the envelope, he read:
‘FORGET HER, HUNT. FAR BETTER TO BE ALONE THAN DEAD. NEVER FORGET: YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE ALL-SEEING EYE.’
It didn’t make sense. Was this something to do with Mara’s disappearance, or had one of his in-depth exposés finally driven someone to make threats against his life? All Hunt’s professional instincts told him to put it out of his mind, throw the damn thing in the bin and forget about it. But – perhaps it was his imagination – he could feel a sudden coldness gathering around his heart.
He felt sick, dizzy, disorientated. At first he thought it was just the hangover, but that surely could not account for the blurred images forming across his field of vision. He blinked, trying to focus on the words; but a persistent fog clouded his eyes and he had to close them briefly, to combat the terrible feeling of falling, falling, into an icy darkness.
When he opened them again, the shapes were still there – but this time, they were vivid and sharp, frighteningly lifelike. Images floated around him. Images of naked men and women, the men with huge distended penises and the women with bulging breasts and dripping cunts. They were locked in an unholy orgy of coupling. Here, two men were using one woman simultaneously and, although the entire scene passed before his eyes silently, Hunt saw the woman’s mouth open in a scream of exultation or pain – he could not tell which – as her cunt and arse were ravaged by her rampant suitors. One man was being held down by four dark-haired women who were laughing savagely as a fifth woman masturbated him violently whilst sinking her teeth into his thigh. His expression was one of mystical ecstasy, as though he had seen a vision of divinity. Everywhere men and women were copulating frenetically, as if this was their destiny and to fail it was to negate their very existence. None of them seemed aware of Hunt.
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