Slave Wife

by Frances Gaines Bennett

  It was Karen, Ward knew, who caused the slightest turn of heads and the smallest exchange of quizzical looks when the couple passed – eye-popping scrutiny in this milieu. He was, himself, astonished by the transformation Michael had effected.

  Though still voluptuous, her body had become lithe and refined. Her features, her wide almond eyes, narrow patrician nose and full clear red lips, exhibited their perfect regularity in her newly narrowed face and her long pale brown hair shimmered like softest mink in the muted light. With an extraordinary but strangely burdensome grace she glided through the room, her simple Geoffrey Beene dress, coloured identically to her hair, flowing flawlessly over supple limbs. And with an engineer’s discrimination, Ward examined her. Yes, she was certainly shorter.

  In his vision’s periphery Ward inventoried the diners’ meticulously discreet but uneasy responses. He smiled cruelly.

  As they approached, Ward stood, pleasantly noting the small tremor that ran through her when she saw him. “How are you, Karen, my dear?” He covered her cold delicate fingers with his warm strong ones, squeezing a little too hard, and kissed her cheek. Of its own volition his index finger found the point at the thumb’s joint and pressed.

  Her features compressed into a silent twitch of pain. She forced a smile, pallid and barely perceptible. “I am well, Sir.”

  Ward realized what he’d done. He examined his almost overwhelming impulse to hurt her. She was Michael’s property not one of his “girls”. Instantly he removed his hand and looked toward Michael. It was not the fear of an employee stepping out of line with his boss that motivated his quick withdrawal. Actually, Ward had no doubt of the security his utility – and friendship – entailed. He simply avoided rudeness at all cost.

  Her husband’s expression did not shift – still bore the stamp of loving (obsessed?) solicitude – yet Ward knew he’d seen. Michael helped her tenderly to her chair.

  Unexpectedly Ward’s regard was jerked across Michael’s broad bent back to the dark man. The man observed him with complete comprehension and sympathy. Kinship inexplicably welled in Ward’s breast. Again he nodded. This person definitely bore further investigation … later.

  One of the multitude of fanatically trained straight backed waiters approached. “Would you care for wine?”

  Michael glanced at Ward. “Non, merci. Seulement de l’eau minérale non gazeuse,” to Ward, “No bubbles? … S’il vous plaît. The gentleman and I will have Le Carre D'agneau au Poivre Vert.” Authoritatively he closed the tall menu. “And please bring my wife a small Salade Niçoise with very little dressing.” The waiter gave a modest bow. “Thank you.”

  Michael smiled at Ward. “They do a wonderful peppered rack of lamb but it’s for two. I’m glad of the opportunity to order it.” He patted Karen’s hand and a spot of pink appeared on each cheek below her lowered lashes. “It’s of course much too much food for Karen.”

  The waiter returned almost immediately with a large bottle of mineral water, filled glasses leaving a second full bottle near Michael and, once again, disappeared into the refined hubbub.

  Ward allowed his consideration to linger abstractly on Karen, his subtle cognitive modes observing and accumulating information. “Michael,” he exclaimed to cover his appraisal, “I’m astonished by the transformation!” As he said it, he wondered, “Is she truly submissive or has he broken her?”

  Under her husband’s concerned gaze, Karen carefully, intently raised her water glass to her lips. “Isn’t she magnificent!” Michael glowed with achievement. “I knew she could be from the moment I first saw her.” The flush spread across Karen’s face and her head dipped lower.

  “I’ve been contemplating where to go from here.” A vertical crease formed in Michael’s noble brow. “Is it possible to create an apparatus that operates remotely under water?”

  Ward raised his glass and pensively examined the clear liquid. “Water is a poor conductor of electricity though other impulses can move through it unhindered.” Ward paused deliberately, “I could probably come up with something workable. What do you have in mind?”

  “Karen began swimming as part of her post-surgical therapy. I’ve had her continue because it’s excellent exercise and I can keep,” Michael’s face was consumed with passionate devotion as he patted Karen’s hand, “my dearest wife close to me.”

  His own burst of shock surprised Ward for the few seconds before it shifted to macabre respect for the breadth of Michael’s obsession. Of course! He’d had her surgically altered.

  “I think it’s made a major contribution to her grace,” Michael smiled warmly, “and I’ve been enjoying watching her so much I’ve created a glass-walled office next to the pool. I’d like to be able to give her encouragement,” the statement was devoid of irony, “while she’s swimming. I was thinking of something more minimalist than your suit. I’m also finding her breasts a distraction.”

  Michael noticed Ward’s quizzical glance. “Yes, she’s required to swim naked for maximum neurological effect.” He continued, “So, do you think you can create something both utilitarian and constrictive for her breasts?”

  The image of Karen swimming laps – endless laps, Ward had no doubt – while Michael intermittently added to her torture with neural stimulation rendered Ward’s cock rock hard under the damask tablecloth. He glanced at Karen, whose pale face had reddened. “I’ll give it some thought.”

  Monsieur Paul arrived, a small plate in his hand. Several waiters followed carrying a covered silver tray, serving table and implements. “Madame.” With a flourish he set the diminutive niçoise still-life in front of Karen. The waiters arranged the serving table then hovered while Monsieur separated the lamb’s ribcage into individual chops and served onto two of the restaurant’s golden lion embossed plates along with choux de Bruxelles sautés. “Bon appétits,” he intoned and shooed away his flock.

  “So, I hear you’ve made the Feds very happy. Right?” Michael cut one of the delectably browned Brussels sprouts with a large chunk of dripping lamb and popped them enthusiastically between his sensual lips.

  “It’s nice having access to a large country’s resources.” Ward smiled humorously across the table. “Not that you’ve deprived me,” he smiled again, this time including Karen with a slight nod, “particularly for your special projects.”

  Ward decided to test the waters. “Give me a month. Shall I come and visit Karen or would you like to bring her here?”

  Again Michael patted Karen’s hand. “Why don’t you come to Berkeley,” he beamed proudly, “then you can see first hand how well she’s doing.”

  Karen stared fixedly at her plate but otherwise did not move.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He stood on the little church’s small porch and watched the cranes lower the diminutive cottage onto the new block foundation. He’d really wanted stone but, aside from the outrageous expense, it was the rare stonemason who built foundations in this day and age.

  Evers had definitely come through though. The fanciful early Victorian farmhouse was a wedding present to a neighbour’s great great aunt by her father. After a few too-fecund generations it was abandoned to disrepair and decay.

  LaVeau chose a top New York designer to restore it and she was eager to plunge in. It was odd, he mused, that financial New York, though much closer in miles, was so much farther outside the virulent DC political gossip mill (and his personal business) than, say, heavily Republican Dallas.

  Off in the distance, at the spot the track from Evers’ farm emerged from the thick trees, a small lone figure half in shadow caught LaVeau’s attention, interrupting his musings. The sun was overhead and he shielded his eyes against its fresh spring brilliance. The person stood stone still like a piece of statuary or a woodland creature frozen in time the instant before taking flight.

  With scripted precision, a cloud darkened the sun. Absent the glare, the figure stood out startling brilliant against the deep green. She wore a short dark skirt and a long slee
ved white blouse whose edges blended with her skin’s remarkable pallor. Her small white heart of a face was circumscribed by a living cascade that rippled and hovered in the wind in a fiery halo.

  “No! No! No!” he inaudibly expostulated. A wave of anxiety and annoyance jostled his pleasure. The girl’s unpredictable spying would create intolerable problems.

  “C’est rien. It’s nothing.” His aunt’s lilting seductive voice murmured in his ear. “Don’t worry. She won’t bother us. I’ll take care of it.” Her warm sweet breath caressed his earlobe. “I promise.” As if in verification, the girl disappeared back down the road.

  Languorous calm damped his disquiet. LaVeau had no doubt she could do it. His attention returned to the cranes. Yes, the cottage was charming and he was going to enjoy it. He turned on his heel. But what he’d really wanted was the church.

  As he’d told Elaine, it was quite a story. A young preacher, new to the town, had taken over when the old preacher died. The cleric gave impassioned sermons that roused his old-fashioned flock. During one such exhortation, the high ceiling directly above the pulpit gave way and crashed down on the preacher’s head, breaking one arm and one leg and covering him with urine soaked plaster and an angry and bloody family of racoons. While the preacher recovered, it was discovered that the racoons had taken up residence in the enclosed loft, continuously performing all their natural functions to the detriment of the building’s structure.

  The preacher returned and once again gave an impassioned diatribe. After the service, the disturbed son of a parishioner, outraged by something never determined, broke into the preacher’s home, stabbing the poor man repeatedly and his wife once while his three infants lay sleeping upstairs. The man ran off, leaving the preacher’s kitchen drenched with blood and the preacher unwilling to ever return. He moved his family out of state the minute he was released from the hospital.

  The church stood empty while the congregation searched, with great difficulty, for a replacement. During an unusually strong windstorm the cross was ripped off the steeple and blown into the top of a tall tree, later to be rescued by a local fireman. When the church was opened to reattach the cross, the carpenter and a prominent parishioner found the walls covered with hundreds of symmetrical blotches of blood.

  Contentedly LaVeau’s eyes swept the white wall’s russet stigmata. Actually the marks were stains seeping from rusted nailheads. Why had they appeared when they did? No one had bothered to find out, guilelessly assuming the church was cursed. And now no one ever would.

  He’d finally found a local woman willing to enter the church to clean. “Never after dark,” she admonished.

  “Of course,” he soothed her while silently applauding. He needn’t make a bit of effort to keep the locals away at night.

  Then she asked repeatedly if he didn’t want the walls painted and was scandalized when he said he’d leave them as a piece of history – even more so when he told her he’d not even touch up the pale mark where Jesus on the Cross once hung.

  LaVeau ran his hand along the warm backs of the few remaining pews as he strode toward the altar. The dark altar, pulpit and pews, obviously lovingly handcrafted by long dead woodworkers, shone deep into their harmonious grain with a glow only found in old oft-polished wood. He stood behind the communion table and looked out over the muted space. “Ready?” he asked his aunt.

  “Certainment,” she replied with a toss of her long raven tresses.

  Blood. The white cloth draped diagonally across the communion table ran with syrupy blood.

  Initially, he’d thought slitting the rabbits’ throats would disturb him. In fact, the sensation was fabulous, even orgasmic of sorts. The effortless movement of the razor-sharp knife through the pink flesh. The clean edges of the gaping wound exposing large deep arteries, squirting sanguine with each throb. The splashes of blood onto his skin – even his erect phallus – left bare by the open monastic robe.

  As life pulsed away from the creature and into his hands, into him, the dead rose up around him, called irresistibly by his power. A small cemetery had been on the property. He saw it clearly under the field’s harrows.

  The Evers’ – or rather the wife’s, whatever her surname was – ancestors were among them. He recognized the pale skin, the flaming hair and the delicate features. No blue eyes. The blue was long gone, replaced by black death. He saw a face in their midst – the exquisite image of the girl but older, more fully womanly – and he called her to him. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “My name is Catherine. I am the girl’s grandmother three times removed.” She lifted an ethereal arm draped in a faded sleeve toward his aunt. “As old as she.”

  “Come to me,” he told her. Even in death she feared him and he inhaled the emotion like an intoxicating drug. But she could not resist.

  His aunt, Marie, stood at his side, vibrant and engaged as always. The blackness was a cloak at their backs but uninterested. It wanted living fodder. The dead, though they had their uses, it nebulously opined, mostly took, not contributed, sustenance. Only Marie’s insistence managed to gain its acquiescence to this desire. LaVeau recognized that truth but didn’t understand how or why. At this moment he was too flush with power to worry.

  With a thought he disrobed the woman, exposing the sensuously female shape. He commanded her onto the vividly coloured tabletop and she went, her translucent outlines quavering with the candles’ flames. Her fine body lay below him, a strange optical chimera. LaVeau could see through her thickness, white and fleeting as hoarfrost, to the lovely lines of her back and buttocks, which stood out pink and fully formed merely by contact with his gruesome labours. Indeed her backside had sucked the tabletop clean and become substantial as a result.

  He stretched his arm and touched the radiant corona surrounding her from head to waist. The titian hair was fine-spun like its living counterpart, in fact became softer as his power fondled it. He touched her colourless nipples and they flared pink between his fingers. He observed detached but with great exhilaration as life flowed wherever his fingers touched. He knew it was a state of short duration. What would be the price to truly bring back the dead?

  But her mound was warm and trembling with a fear and also loathing that ruffled his power as he laid his flattened hand upon it … and he was going to use it. He wanted to feel hot life flood her cunt as he entered her. The monk’s robe fell to the floor behind him and he stood tall and narrow, his soaring penis abounding with potentiality that surged into his every cell.

  Small scratching and rustling sounded outside, stopping him and twisting him physically and mentally toward it. But he saw nothing and immediately his aunt’s voice was in his ear, soothing. “C’est rien. Only the wind in the trees. Continue, please.” Though his inner turbulence did not entirely still, he turned back to the woman.

  LaVeau only had to stretch his long legs to be atop her. Her cold skin warmed as his connected to it, her breasts softening beneath him. And he entered her. The transition was spasmodic, a burst of life into her tissues far more thrilling than a normal orgasm. Vibrant power, male at once emitting and devouring her female, epicureously consuming her awful aversion. The sensations did not localize in his genitals, only thrillingly centred there as her vaginal walls stroked him. It was power and it was everywhere, swelling and subsiding, rolling through his body and beyond, sparking the very air around him.

  He lifted off her and sat back, raising her insubstantial hips and pulling her pelvis tight against his. Her cervical dome came alive as he beat himself against it. His long arm extended toward her breast and he squeezed, her pain adding to his pleasure. Then he sank his hand deeper into her chest. The long skeletal hand wrapped around her heart, feeling it gain strength in his grasp. He smiled down into her terrified black eyes and squeezed again.

  The seminal ejaculation was far more thrilling than anything ever before. His animus ignited her flesh with a jolt so instantaneously enervating to him as to simulate the ecstasy of death.
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br />   Chapter Fourteen

  Five and a half years in the past.

  The girl stood on the corner of Rues Bourbon and Bienville chatting with New Orleans’ politicians as they made their pilgrimage into the mouldering and rather non-descript old two story building. She was not a stiffly sprayed blond of the 1980s or 90s, the cameraman mused as he peered at her through the video display, but one of the interchangeable pretty young naturals of the new millennium that NBC garnered from its local affiliates and groomed for the Today Show, exhibiting all-American good health and soft, shoulder length tawny brown or chestnut locks.

  The live feed’s location was carefully chosen not only for the historic background provided by the French Quarter. For eighty years, Arnaud’s Restaurant and jazz club had provided the discreet petit dejeuners that greased the city’s political machine. And what more enticing spot to discuss the effects of looming Y2K on one of the US’s most colourful, jaded and insular cities?

  As luck would have it, on this day the august body was joined by the state’s tall, dark, handsome and very photogenic Democratic US Senator. The girl coyly engaged him in a fortuitous national photo op. The cameraman watched her not so subtle flirtation, noted how her fresh femininity quickened as the Senator engulfed her from above with his masculinity and luscious Louisiana accent.

  Breathlessly – her titillation was conspicuous even via the camera – she stepped closer and placed a hand on the elegantly grey clad arm … and suddenly she dropped screaming to the filthy, uneven sidewalk, her hands clutching the wispy chiffon skirt that seconds before had floated tantalizingly in the gentle breeze.

  Like a spectator to a train wreck the cameraman let the video run, first catching the Senator’s then the passers-by’s scandalized expressions. For twenty seconds the scene was suspended in human time. Except the cameraman. By mechanical rote born of long experience he zoomed in and he too froze.