A couple of minutes later Helen and I left the party. As we walked down the two flights of stairs to the street, Helen observed with that rippling laugh of hers: “Poor darling, having so many women after you. How do you bear up under it?”
“Easily, sweet. I think of you and then they appear like hags before my eyes. This Tala Mag—that’s her name—was so obviously wanton that she was funny.”
And both of us laughed quietly, intimately, as if only we could understand the grand joke we shared.
Then suddenly our laughter died in our throats. We had turned the landing and there, with her back against the wall, stood Tala Mag. It was impossible for her not to have overheard us.
She said nothing but her expression told us plenty. I think that if she had had a weapon in her hand she would have killed us both on the spot. She drew her cape tighter about her. We passed quickly.
In the street Helen shuddered. “Did you see the way she looked at us?”
“Forget it, darling,” I said. “There’s nothing she can do about it.”
By the time we had reached home, we had dismissed her from our minds.
The following morning there was a gold-tinted envelope in my mail, sent special delivery. It contained two notes. One, from Portia Teele, read:
Dear Les:
I’ve never before asked you to do me a personal favor. Tala Mag told me what occurred last night and feels that it was a misunderstanding on both your parts. She had no opportunity to tell you that she is a writer and would desire your assistance. I have read her manuscripts; she has a great deal of talent. Please see her for my sake.
PORTIA.
The second note was heavily scented. It contained but a single line:
Dear Mr. Marlin:
Please come to my apartment at four this afternoon.
TALA MAG.
I was in something of a spot. I couldn’t afford to antagonize Portia Teele who was my best client, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with this Tala Mag. And why insist that I come to her apartment? The proper procedure was for her to come to my office.
By the afternoon I had made up my mind to go, solely, I assured myself, because Portia Teele had asked me to. Yet in back of my mind was a vagrant desire to see this exotic Tala Mag again. Anyway, what had I to be afraid of? I’d never had much trouble putting a demanding woman in her place.
I arrived there twenty after four, deliberately, to show her that I wasn’t in the least anxious. She lived thirty stories above Park Avenue in a penthouse. Well, one thing was certain: she certainly wasn’t an impoverished struggling writer.
The biggest man I had ever seen admitted me. Not the tallest, although he must have been a least six-six, and not fat either, but simply built in a huge, powerful mold. He was, in addition, ugly as sin, with hardly anything in the way of a brow or a chin. I’m of average size and build, but he made me feel like a pigmy as he stepped aside to let me by.
* * * *
Tala Mag came forward to receive me in the foyer, and she was wearing a spider-web blue negligee and a pair of blue mules and not another thing. A pleasing combination—blue against the rich gold of her skin, and there was plenty of skin showing, and the rest of it, voluptuously curved, shimmered under the negligee.
So! She was taking up where she had left off yesterday. As I followed her into the library, I determined to get out as soon as I could.
She said nothing about last night and made no attempt to come near me. She took a sheaf of typewritten pages from the desk and nodded toward a comfortable leather chair. I sat down and started to read. She retreated to the other end of the room and mixed highballs. She handed one to me and then offered me a cigarette. As she applied a match to my cigarette, she leaned over and her negligee fell away from her throat and there was no covering over her breasts. They were golden and rose-tipped and dangling with the bending of her torso. I dropped my eyes quickly to the manuscript.
A sensation of mingled horror and revulsion crept over me as I read. How can I describe the story she had written? It wasn’t quite pornographic and yet it was more than that. There was not a sentence or a paragraph which standing alone, could be called obscene, yet the effect of the whole was incredibly vile. It concerned unholy lust and unspeakable orgies and hideous tortures, but it was chiefly the point of view that shocked my hard-boiled soul. She reveled in evilness, extolled it, until virtue was to be despised and vileness all that made living tolerable.
I went to the desk and tossed the papers down and turned to her. She was looking at me expectantly, with mouth half-open.
“You like it?”
I shrugged. “Put it this way: no publisher would touch it.”
“But if you, with your reputation, took it to a publisher?”
“That won’t help either,” I said. “Sorry.” I started to go.
She came to meet me, and somehow her negligee had fallen open and was trailing behind her. No doubt that she was startlingly attractive, but the only effect of her nudity on me was one of anger.
She caught my arm as I tried to pass her. “Mr. Marlin—Lester—you know that you are devilishly handsome.”
I said tightly: “You’re wasting your time.” And I jerked my arm roughly away from her.
She ran around me so that she was in front of me again and threw her arms about my neck. I admit that as I tried to pull her off, pulses pounded in my veins. The memory of Helen blurred with the furious agitation of her torso and thighs against me. But not sufficiently to make me succumb to her. Violently I tore her arms away from about my neck and, with an exclamation of rage, threw her to the floor.
She sat up, glaring up at me, her bared breasts rising and falling. When I was a step from the door, she called out: “Emil!” And a split-second later her servant’s enormous body filled the doorway.
I was too angry to be afraid. I said in a voice that quivered: “Let me pass.”
He stood there as solidly as a rock. And as if she were telling a dog to fetch something, she ordered: “Get him, Emil.”
I stepped backward as he came at me with his great arms apart. Realizing that my only chance was an attack, I threw myself forward, plunging my right fist into his midriff. My knuckles felt as if they had struck corrugated iron.
And then his arms were around me, and I knew that I was through. I thrashed in his grip, but I might as well have tried to struggle in a steel vise. Slowly his arms tightened, constricting my ribs, my lungs. Breath choked up in me. The motion of my kicking legs grew feebler, then stopped altogether as, my face pressed against his massive sweaty chest, I sank into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER II
THE ROOM OF TORMENT
When I opened my eyes, I found that iron chains, dangling from the ceiling, were fastened about each of my wrists. My feet just about touched the floor, so that I had to stand erect. My clothes had been taken from me; they lay neatly piled on a chair nearby.
For dazed moments I thought that this must be a nightmare; that Tala Mag’s huge servant must be a figment of my imagination; that perhaps even Tala Mag was only a dream of dark desire. And then I saw that I was still in the library where I had read her curiously vile manuscript. Furniture had been pushed from the center of the floor where I hung from the chains.
This was ridiculous, of course—to have something like this happen in a modern apartment house in the heart of the city. I took a deep breath and called for help at the top of my lungs.
Behind me somebody laughed. Twisting my head over my shoulder, I saw Tala Mag, still clad in that diaphanous blue negligee, coming toward me.
“It may interest you to know that this room is soundproof,” she said.
My voice broke off. I was staring with bulging eyes at the murderous whip she held in her hand. Part of its black length wriggled like a live snake on the floor behind her.
“What are you going to do?” I demanded harshly.
“Teach you respect for Tala Mag,” she said. “And break your stubborn
spirit until you grovel at my feet.”
I cursed her then, hoarsely, steadily, and I tore hopelessly at the chains, while she stood off a little way and watched me with a half-smile on her red lips and hellish lights dancing in her gray-and-gold eyes. Then she stepped toward me and ran a hand over my chest, letting her fingers drag so that the nails pierced and ripped skin.
“You are a handsome man, Lester Marlin,” she said. “There is much that we can do together, you and I—startling ecstasies which we may attain. Forget that prosaic woman who is your wife. Say the word and I will have Emil remove the chains from you, and then you and I—”
The rest of her words were cut off by her agonized grunt as I brought my knee up into her stomach. She fell away from me and her face became a hideous mask. She straightened up and stepped around me and I tensed for the bite of the lash. When it came, curling around my back and cutting through skin and into flesh, it felt like a band of living fire encircling me. A cry of pain rose to my lips, but I choked it back, determined not to give her the satisfaction of hearing me scream.
I swung around from my wrists and kicked out at her again. But she was prepared now and jumped out of the way, and again the cruel lash snapped against my body.
I went through a queer frantic dance as I tried to get at her with my feet, but she was nimble and always just out of reach, moving slowly around me, her arm swinging back and forth as the agonizing leather thong kept curling about me. And so I ceased all effort to kick her because my gyrations added to her diabolical enjoyment and I hung there from the chains as the whip formed a mantle of anguish about me.
“Scream!” she panted.
But I would not give her that added pleasure. Blood trickled down from where my teeth sank into my lower lip.
“Scream!” And the whip cracked.
Her negligee fell open in front. Sweat glistened on her golden skin, trickled down between her heaving breasts, soaked through the material. Encumbered by the negligee, she savagely ripped it off and, naked, continued to apply the lash.
I must have hated her more than any man hated anybody to have the strength not to give voice to the agony which was trying to force screams past my lips.
Suddenly the lashing stopped. Through a mist of pain I saw her standing before me, her flesh twitching and quivering with terrific emotional exertion. But the fury had gone out of her face and her eyes were suddenly soft.
She dropped the whip and came at me, throwing her arms about me and mashing herself against my anguish-torn body.
“You are the man for me,” she whispered. “You have the proud, stubborn spirit. Love me and I will bathe your wounds and make you whole again and teach you such passion as you never dreamed existed.”
It would have been simple then to submit, to possess this exotic creature and have done with unendurable anguish. But I knew that I could not. It had gone beyond mere physical faithfulness to Helen. It was a relentless struggle between good and evil; for my immortal soul, if you care to put it that way. If I gave in to her, I would always thereafter consider myself less than a man. Better to die of torture than to let her triumph over me.
Through swollen, bloody lips I said: “Go to hell!”
“You stubborn fool! Do you prefer to be cut to pieces?”
I tried to jab my knee into her again, but she was too close to me and I was too weak. She clung to me, digging her teeth into the side of my neck, and the whole weight of her body pulled down on my strained arm muscles. Then she slid away from me and picked up the whip.
“I won’t kill you,” she said in a voice that shook with fury. “Not yet. I would not accept you now if you came crawling to me. Before I am through with you, I shall make you suffer infinitely more than any whip can make you suffer.”
And again I felt the hellish sting of the whip. She danced around me, applying the lash wherever the skin was still whole; and as through a shimmering veil of torment I saw her magnificent breasts bobbing and sweat form a sheen over her golden skin. After a while the mist grew thicker until I could no longer see her or the room or anything at all. But I could feel. Every quivering nerve throbbed under the whip which had become a white-hot rod of flame.
And yet I kept my voice locked within my throat. It was no longer physical effort which kept me from shrieking, for I had none of that left. It must have been something rooted deep in my subconscious which deprived her of her final triumph.
And then I sank into a world in which nothing existed but pain.…
Dawn was painting the city sky a dull gray above the East River when I awoke. I was propped up against a warehouse on South Street. Several men, going early to work, passed without so much as glancing at me, thinking, no doubt, that I was a drunken bum. I was again fully dressed. She had spared my face with her lash, and save for dried blood on my chin I looked more or less presentable.
When I tried to rise, bands of agony held me. I clenched my teeth and clawed myself erect along the side of the building. Each step was anguish. Finally I made my way to the curb and hung onto a lamppost until a taxi cab passed. I hailed it and flopped into the back seat and muttered my address on Washington Square.
* * * *
When I reached my home, I told the taxi driver that I was sick and tipped him generously and he helped me up to my apartment. After considerable ringing, Helen came to the door in her sleeping pajamas. She took one look at my greenish, pain-twisted face and screamed and ran to me.
“Darling, what happened to you? I went to bed early, thinking that you were out late on business, and not until the bell rang just now did I realize that you hadn’t come home. Darling, you’re sick!”
She led me into the bedroom where I dropped down on the bed. I did not tell her the truth; I had resolved not to tell anybody, especially not the police. This was strictly between Tala Mag and myself. And if any of this came out, the newspapers and the gossip columnists would have a field-day.
I said that I had been walking along a dark street last night when I had been waylaid by a couple of men whose faces I had not been able to see, and they had beaten me. I didn’t know why, I said; perhaps I had inadvertently injured somebody and this was his or her revenge.
Gently Helen removed my clothes. And when she saw what the whip had done to my flesh, she cried out and went into a semi-hysterical fit of weeping. But she maintained enough self-control to call a doctor and bathe my wounds until he arrived.
For a week I lay in bed. I made Helen and the doctor promise to tell nobody, saying that I did not want the newspapers to get the story. And under Helen’s tender care, I was soon as good as new save for certain parts where the lash had struck too many times and where I would forever have ridges on my skin.
When I had recovered, I obtained a permit to purchase a pistol, and then I went to pay a visit to Tala Mag. The pistol was for the huge servant Emil; Tala Mag I could handle with my bare hands.
From the building superintendent I learned that she had moved the day after my beating. She had left no forwarding address; he had no idea where she might have gone. I looked up Portia Teele, but she was out of town. Not even Sam Spaulding, her publisher, knew where Portia Teele could be found.
So there was nothing for me to do but bide my time. I was convinced that I had not seen the last of her. She had told me, in the fury of her hatred at my refusal to submit, that she had a worse fate in store for me than the whipping. Well, this time I would be prepared for her.
CHAPTER III
INVITATION TO DEATH
One morning I received a letter from Roland Cuyler, the author:
Dear Les:
A friend of mine, who has gone on a journey, has been good enough to allow me the use of his charming upstate place until he returns. I’ve been staying here with Clara and working my head off. I’ve completed my novel, and rather than send it down to you, how about you and Helen driving up here to spend a weekend or longer with us?
It’s an ideal place—swimming and tennis, and only a thre
e hour drive from the city. Don’t bother to reply. I’m assuming that you and Helen will arrive some time Saturday.
It sounded good. The city was in the grip of one of those heat waves which made New York unbearable. When I told Helen about it, she was enthusiastic.
So that Saturday afternoon we started out in my car. After three hours we found ourselves in a rather wild and isolated valley. Following the directions which Cuyler had enclosed, we turned off to a dirt road which ran through a deep woods and was only wide enough for one car. Seven miles of bumping over ruts brought us there.
Frankly, the place surprised us. We had expected a fairly sumptuous cottage at the most, but this looked like a vast estate in the heart of the woods. A seven-foot fieldstone fence enclosed it entirely.
I drove up to the twin massive solid iron doors and got out of the car. There was a telephone on the wall. I lifted the receiver and spoke into the mouthpiece.
“Your name, please?” a man’s voice asked.
I told him, then returned to the car. The two doors swung open.
“Pretty swanky,” Helen commented as I drove through. The doors closed behind us. And thirty feet ahead of us, to our astonishment, was another stone wall, this one at least four feet higher than the first and rimmed for a couple of feet more with barbed-wire. A second pair of doors swung open at our approach.
Helen frowned uneasily. “This place looks like a fortress.”
“Millionaires go in for this sort of thing,” I said. “Probably there are armed guards about the place also. The rich are always afraid of kidnappings and intrusions on their privacy. The Cuylers certainly fell into something soft.”
The second pair of doors also shut behind us. As we drove along the gravel road toward the large stone house, I noticed that the grounds had been allowed to run pretty much to seed. The lawns which must once have been velvet smooth, were overgrown and the flower gardens were a chaos. We passed a tennis court which evidently hadn’t been cared for in years and then a swimming pool which was absolutely dry.
Queer. Was this what Cuyler had raved about? And where was everybody? No sign of guards or servants. Both doors had been opened by unseen electrical control.
The Pulp Fiction Megapack Page 5